by Justin Raimondo Antiwar.com
Recently by Justin Raimondo: The American Empire, RIP
As the American Empire transforms itself from a constitutional republic into a social democratic monstrosity – where everyone is "equal," and no one is free – egalitarianism is the fuel that runs the engine of imperialism. A perfect example is the recent announcement that the US military is getting with the times and allowing women in combat. What’s pretty disheartening is that not even the woman’s-place-is-in-the-home Neanderthals of the "traditionalist" camp even bothered to oppose this: for them, a more efficient war machine is much more important than any attachment to such "archaic" ideas as the men do the fighting while the women wait at home.
This innovation was followed up pretty quickly by a new proposal: that as long as we allow gays in the military we ought to allow transsexuals in, too. After all, the usual objections to women in combat don’t apply to them: they have the genetic makeup of men, and the sexual equipment of women (or as close as surgical science can conjure) – so why not?
In America, everyone has the "equal right" to kill, torture, maim, and otherwise abuse those who dare defy the wishes of our wise and benevolent rulers. This is what happens when egalitarianism displaces liberty at the core of the American psyche.
Women, gays, transsexuals, and presumably dwarves afflicted with Tourette’s Syndrome – all have an "equal right" to commit mass murder. Did the leftists who brought this Political Correctness down on our heads ever dream of the uses to which it would be put? And now that they’ve "grown up" and made their peace with the Empire, do they even care? Of course they don’t. All they care about is the great god Equality, on whose altar every value they every pretended to hold is being slaughtered.
It isn’t just them, however: militarism is a disease that spreads without effort, once it’s implanted in the body politic. It quite naturally infects the sciences, what with the diversion of scientific and technical talent that might have gone into productive civilian projects, and I’m not just talking about the hard sciences. Witness the co-opting of the "soft" science of anthropology by the same people who brought us the war in Afghanistan and the "COIN" strategy that was supposed to give us victory. These folks have created the so-called Human Terrain System, which seeks to utilize anthropology as a weapon in counterinsurgency warfare. Billions are being poured into "scientific research" on how best to subdue recalcitrant natives out in the colonies: when you’re talking about the military-industrial complex, it isn’t just Lockheed-Martin and Boeing.
The marriage of science and militarism is nothing new, but there are some resistors. As Inside Higher Education reports:
"The eminent University of Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins resigned from the National Academy of Sciences on Friday, citing his objections to its military partnerships and to its electing as a member Napoleon Chagnon, a long-controversial anthropologist who is back in the news thanks to the publication of his new book, Noble Savages." [Hat tip: Jordan Bloom at The American Conservative]
You don’t have to be an anthropologist to get in on the action: yes, you too can access via live webcast the April 3 Pentagon/NAS "workshop," "New Directions in Assessing Individuals and Groups,"and hear the keynote address by Frederick Vollrath, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Readiness and Force Management. I’ll bet those anthropologists are making out like bandits!
