Richard Spencer

November 08, 2009

It’s difficult to make out exactly what happened in Texas last Thursday in a grisly incident that’s coming to be known as “the Fort Hood massacre.” As things stand, three men besides Nidal Malik Hasan are in custody. The ultimate cause of the shooting, however, should not be in doubt. As Tom Fleming wrote on the morning after, “By his own lights and according to his own religious traditions … Hasan is not mentally disturbed, only a man who has done his religious duty.” That Hasan acted according to his faith—and not because some mean old corporal called him a “raghead” or because he was a principled non-interventionist who just took things too far—must be obvious to everyone whose brains haven’t yet been rotted out by PC.

Which means this fact will go mostly unmentioned in the mainstream media.

Whenever a terrible televised tragedy takes place (the Virginia Tech shootings, the Knoxville murders, last week’s bloodbath) many of the harder-edged neocons, paleos, and immigration restrictionists hope that this will be the last straw—finally people will “wake up” and the establishment will seal the borders and/or halt Muslim immigration and/or cease with the multiculti dreaming.

In a few days from now, all these activists will invariably be chagrined to discover that nothing has changed and that most have instead reached the conclusion “We need Muslims in the military—now more than ever!” It would probably take the hijacking of a nuclear weapon by a enlisted North African Muslim to lead America’s national leaders to surmise that we should probably restrict whom we allow into our country and institutions and that, No, more “diversity training” won’t help the matter. But I’m not sure even this would do it.

It’s being reported that someone named “Nidal Malik Hasan” frequently made webposts praising Islamic suicide bombers; the FBI had picked up on them and certainly the Army should have investigated Hasan more thoroughly. But even damning evidence such this doesn’t really get at a much larger problem with the U.S. military, one that, in my mind, will lead to countless other Nidal Malik Hasan-like disasters in the near future.   

Just last month, the U.S. Navy’s released a new recruitment commercial that’s loaded with the kind Top Gun and Saving Private Ryan images and John Williams-y music you’d expect. It also depicts its current force as mostly non-white and close to half-female. These multiculti midshipmen, the Navy promises, will fight on “until the anguish of those less fortunate has been soothed.”

The Navy’s new slogan, “A Global Force For Good,” is, on one level, a holdover from the evangelical Bush-speak that made us cringe for most of the last decade. It also bespeaks a military complex on the forefront of multiculturalism—in which “defense” has given way to the more expansive “national security” and finally “helping people in need.”

This is the kind of military in which someone named Nidal Malik Hasan could hope to find work as a “Psychiatrist Major.”