THE WINGNUTS & THE MILITARY

I've noted before that wingnuts LOVE the military as long as they or their sons aren't actively serving. Like the Liberals == Commies meme, this worship goes back decades. This is from Ideas Have Consequences (1948) by Richard Weaver, pp. 31-32:

When the primordial sentiments of a people weaken, there invariably follows a decline of belief in the hero. To see the significance of this, we must realize that the hero can never be a relativist. Consider for a moment the traditional soldier (not one of the automatons that comprise modern armies) as hero. It may at first seem paradoxical to say that he is of all members of the laity farthest removed from pragmatism; yet his is an absolute calling. Give him prudential motives, and he at once turns into a Falstaff. His service is to causes which are formulated as ideals, and these he is taught to hold above both property and life, as ceremonies of military consecration make plain. One sees this truth well exemplified in the extreme formalization of the soldier's conduct, a formalization which is carried into the chaos of battle; a well-drilled army moving into action is an imposition of maximum order upon maximum disorder. Thus the historical soldier is by genus not, the blind unreasoning agent of destruction which some contemporary writers make him out to be. He is rather the defender of the ultimo ratio, the last protector of reason. Any undertaking that entails sacrifice of life has implications of transcend-ence, and the preference of death to other forms of defeat, to the "fate worse than death," is, on the secular level, the highest example of dedication. There seems little doubt that the ancient solidarity of priest and soldier—a solidarity be coming impossible today, now that mechanized mass warfare has removed soldiering from the realm of ethical significance-rests upon this foundation.