Milo Freeman’s back in town, so to speak. His milblog is a stop I make every day, in the hope that he’s written something new. He had a problem a while back when he wrote something that upset a few delicate sensibilities on the never-right side of our shattered political arena.

After he wrote that bit of sensible outrage some moron claiming to be a retired colonel announced he was going to make it his personal crusade to see that Milo was punished. It’s not clear to me what (maybe) Colonel whats-it could do. Send him to Iraq?

Milo next caught my eye with a piece that brought back vivid memories, as well as the 2.7 pucker factor that still comes alive at 4 AM on some nights.

He’s back again today with some special thoughts for the non-thinker children among us:

I've been thinking about this war, and about the events of the last couple of months. I was kind of put off by the flood of fanatics who suddenly began slandering and threatening me at every available opportunity, and now I see talk that they've done it again, to a blogger writing under the pen name of Scott Thomas.

The people who, in each case, have attacked us most ardently were those who would have presented themselves as being our country's most ardent supporters of "the Troops." And yet, nothing I can find in my old comments section really strikes me as having been all that supportive. Unless in that definition, you include death threats and threats of career repercussions (How Stasi).

The “Stasi” comment is well-chosen because our opposite numbers on the never-right side of the fence really have fashioned themselves after the People’s Commissariat for State Security (NKVD). This organization, (formerly the OGPU until a name change in 1941) placed political commissars at every level of the Red Army with the charge of maintaining the purity of political thought. They held weekly classes in Socialist Thought and Understanding the Evils of Fascism. (It’s important to remember that Communism and Fascism were two different modes of governance.) They organized book readings, round table discussions, and occasionally screened films illustrating their propaganda points.

During combat the NKVD commissars stayed behind the lines. They were charged with supporting Socialist thought by shooting anyone who tried to flee the battle.

There is an amazing parallel between those days and now. Once again we have a group of commissars in charge of enforcing party thought among the troops and the citizenry. In today’s incarnation they are self-appointed, yet no less avid for that. And now, instead of shooting those who deviate from party thought, we find they smear those who break with the group think.

Milo again:

And yet, the ones I hear trumpeting their support the loudest never actually know us. They've never seen us outside of a recruiting office, or a John Wayne movie. They're not supporting us as human beings. They're supporting us, it seems, more as warfighters, as resources to be allocated. They support us only insofar as we support their cultural agenda. They support us as cannon fodder. They cease to support us when we tire of not seeing our familes. They cease to support us when we try to differentiate between the moral high grounds of various wars. These people see us as tools, and idols, and whenever we do something that doesn't fit their highly narrow and simplified worldview, they attack us like rabid dogs.

These days, it seems, "supporting the troops" has become a Pavlovian response. You hear it brought up in conversation, and suddenly you have to trump up your own patriotism, lest you risk isolation from your friends.

I referred to those self-appointed keepers of the flame as “children” and it’s easy to understand that when you view the tantrums, and nearly hysterical ooga-boogaing they go through when they discover a new victim.

Last month it was Milo Freeman. This month it’s Scott Thomas Beauchamp. But always the dissenter must be destroyed, less their tidy little imaginary world of neat and tidy America be threatened.

The people I find supporting us the most passionately--and attacking our dissenters the most venomously--all share common traits. They belong to a cross-section of America whose worldview and moral infrastructure is based on one similar to that held in 1950s America. It's a form of capitalist nationalism, and it's hallmarks rest on the assumption of American economic, military, and religious superiority at all cost. It also, simultaneously, assumes that America is under constant attack from entities who want to see its primacy on the world stage brought to an end. These enemies are supposedly both without and within, and so it's easy to accuse anyone who disagrees with your ideals of being one of them. In the world of psychology--an area where I am admittedly no expert--is this not called paranoia?

Richard Hofstetter was a genius.