Shocking and Awful

A few weeks ago, while the Bush administration was fending off death due to another of its thousand cuts, the good soldier, General Peter Pace, made a public comment about homosexuality in general and homosexuals serving in the military in particular.

During an interview, after analogizing homosexuality to adultery (i.e. a sexual act by one who is married with someone other than their spouse) and hence an immoral act (incidentally, adultery is a court martial offense in the U.S. military), Pace said, “from that standpoint saying [that] gays should serve openly in the military, to me, says that, by policy, we'd be condoning what I believe to be immoral activity."

That the U.S. military has hundreds if not thousands of gay members, many serving openly, is neither a secret nor a mystery. As the Bush administration invokes the stop-loss program, increases rotations and cuts requirements for training and time between deployments, generals know they need as many bodies they can muster, what the Latin American press calls carne de canon (meat for the cannons). Many students have told me, they were in units (Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force) where commanders did not care about homosexuality – they cared about job performance. So then why would General Pace make such a political faux pas, a statement that put him in the public eye and ready to take on flak?

Student of Sun Tzu?

Long ago, the great Chinese philosopher and military strategist, Sun Tzu, wrote the treatise, The Art of War. In reviewing this text we see a perfect oracle to explain the folly that is the neo-con invasion and occupation of Iraq. Surely, General Peter Pace knows the following wisdom of Sun Tzu:

In war, then, let your great object be victory, not lengthy campaigns.

When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men’s weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be damped. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength.

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. …

To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting. … and the worst policy of all is to besiege walled cities.

Peter Pace is lauded as man of superior intellect and one who chooses his words carefully. He must know the ideas of Sun Tzu. But Bush and other generals have openly declared that the U.S. will stay in Iraq for 10 to 15 years – with permanent military bases. That occupations of modern and urban nations, like Iraq, inevitably devolve to urban guerrilla warfare which will demoralize the invaders and result in a military loss, was prophesied by Sun Tzu. Is there a better way to see Iraq, a place where her president and the UN Secretary General face bomb plots? Professional accountant and Viceroy, Paul Bremer, disbanded the Iraqi military and fired millions of public sector workers leading to mass hunger (due to unemployment), encouraging the development of sectarian militias and desperation in Iraq. What else can this favored son of empire, Peter Pace, do, but jump off this Led Zeppelin piloted by those who do not heed the advice of Sun Tzu?

So General Pace, who once said that things are going well in Iraq, by which he meant that the permanent military bases are functioning and project occupation and bureaucratic expansion is in place, let slip a comment about gays. Better to be asked for your resignation for failing to show fealty to a policy that protects closeted faggots than to be tried as a war criminal. The student of Sun Tzu is fighting a war he can win, against an enemy he understands. His retirement will be one of ease, where no interviewer will call him the Butcher of Baghdad or Eichmann of the American Empire.

Malinche in Drag

Though I could understand easily what motivated General Pace to air his sexual fetish, to hear the reaction of retired Marine Staff Sgt. Eric Alva, and those organizations that supposedly support rights of homosexuals, I had to reflect.

Service members Legal Defense Network (SLDN) official reaction was the following: “General Pace's comments are outrageous, insensitive and disrespectful to the 65,000 lesbian and gay troops now serving in our armed forces.”

Alva threw out these salvos:

(1) Judging gay men and women in the military for factors unrelated to their fitness to serve, undermines our military's effectiveness. This kind of prejudice is going to continue to have a direct impact on our national security as we allow qualified gay men and women to lose their jobs for no good reason.

(2) [The bigotry of certain leaders] should not be a rational basis for discrimination.

(3) [The ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’] policy, and General Pace's bigotry, is outdated, unnecessary and counter to the same American values [that] our soldiers are giving their lives for each and every day.

If Alva was and other gay military personnel are sincere, I have to accept some frightening facts. Though he claims that he was a Marine who fought and gave a limb to promote “democracy” and freedom for others – including freedom of speech, only an idiot could not help but notice that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has made life far worse for all Iraqis, especially women, children, journalists, and homosexuals.

Though I do not expect a man who lied with a straight face when he enrolled in the machine of empire, to be a scholar of Chomsky, Zinn or Malcolm X, he knew that when he joined the military – it would not be an organ for good, peace and love. It is and was a machine of hatred, death and destruction. It started when he murdered his soul by denying his sexuality – so he could play soldier.

As Alva told the Washington Post, because he joined the Marines in 1990, before "Don't ask, don't tell" was implemented, the application asked him to state his sexual orientation. The reporter asked, “What did you put down?” Alva answered, “I lied, I lied. The lying is what I hated most - why I had to do it, why I had to keep on doing it, the toll it took on me.”

But maybe not too much of a toll. Apparently thirteen years in the closet was not too bad. In a recent interview with NPR, Alva complained that he sacrificed his “right of free speech” by not coming out. In the same interview, however, Alva said that he never had any thought of coming out publicly. He just decided to “live a lie” and even avoided having a personal life.

So what was he doing in his uniform? Alva defines himself as a good soldier, who loved his job – be it Somalia, Bosnia or Iraq. Can he honestly look at the carnage that he and his fellow Marines brought to these “liberated” peoples and say that he spread freedom and democracy? If the greatest trick the Empire ever pulled was to convince the Lumpenproletariat that they mattered, then Malcolm would tell Alva, “you been had, hoodwinked, you been took, you been bamboozled.”

Why would a Gay, Mexican-American, Catholic, join the Marines? Worse still, how can he not see that the military and even social stigma against homosexuality are part of a larger system of class division and social oppression that compels and encourages racism, poverty and gay bashing? But for his injuries, Alva would gladly re-up in the Emperor’s Guard … though alienated from power due to his skin color and paucity of wealth, he identifies with his oppressor, only wishing it would accept his gayness. He is a willing slave to empire … not one who sees injustice upon injustice.

Returning to the Master

In chapter 1 §18, Sun Tzu tells us that “All warfare is based on deception". If tales of the beneficence of the U.S. empire are part of a mass strategy of psychological warfare, we should not be surprised to learn of any current deceptions in the U.S. military.

As reported by Democracy Now and various newpapers, as Janis Karpinsky and many women in the U.S. military tell us, they are being raped and attacked – by American men. They neglect to drink enough water, hoping to avoid late night trips to the latrine – where their male counterparts prey on them like vampires in the night. When these women die of dehydration, the military calls their deaths “non-combat related.”

But these women are trained killers. Why aren’t the women speaking out and striking back? Why have we not heard accounts of more Bobbit episodes? Perhaps they are well trained in obedience and survival at all costs.

Talking about the need to let homosexuals serve proudly in this machine of death, destruction, and rape, Alva said:

“The truth is, something's wrong with this ban. … you're asking men and women to lie about their orientation, … we're losing probably thousands of men and women that are skilled at certain types of jobs, from air traffic controllers to linguists, because of this broken policy.”

Hopefully one day, Alva and millions of others will realize that the war-machine causes us to lose thousands of men, women and children, maims them, poisons their air, soil and water. They will never work as bombardiers, tail gunners, florists, engineers, goat herders, or social workers. There is nothing wrong with the military ban on homosexuality – it is a necessary tool of hatred in an institution of violence. There is something wrong with the venality of the American empire and a nation of millions who are stupefied by delusions about democratic ideals and mythic appreciations of America’s magnificence.

BC Columnist Dr John Calvin Jones, PhD, JD has a law degree and a PhD in Political Science. His Website is virtualcitizens.com. Click here to contact Dr. Jones.