Columnist Leonard Pitts' Wise Perspective on a Marine Scout Sniper Team's Display of the Nazi "SS" Symbol — and My Own Comment regarding Warrior Symbols and Unfair Criticism of Expressions of the Warrior Mentality

17 February 2012

Ordinarily, I don’t pay much attention to politically correct criticisms of warriors in battle because —

War is brutally ugly and political incorrectness is a minor ethical transgression, even when it rises to the level of a tactical or strategic blunder.

BUT —

One of my favorite columnists, Leonard Pitts (Miami Herald), insightfully jumped outside shallow criticisms of a geopolitically unfortunate incident concerning U.S. Marines in Afghanistan.

Mr. Pitts used the Marine sniper team’s political “incorrectness” to make a much more important and culturally larger point.

Premise and theme

In forgetting even recent history, we forget why we are here.

Therefore, we forget where we intended to go.

And we learn nothing from experience.

The Marine Corps Nazi SS banner incident

The small brouhaha (meaning “uproar”) started with a photograph of a Marine Corps Scout Sniper team.

You can see the picture, here.

Prominent behind the snipers is the American flag and a blue banner bearing an exact replica of the World War II Nazi “SS” symbol. These stylized letters represented the Nazi Party’s militarized political arm, the “Schutzstaffel.”

The frontline combat branch of the Schutzstaffel was called the Waffen SS. Presumably, theirs is the symbol the Marines’ banner was invoking.

Note

Jason Pipes, a historian of the German military from 1918 through 1945, explains:

The SS was in fact not a monolithic "Black Corps" of goose stepping Gestapo men, as is often depicted in popular media and in many third rate historical works.

The SS was in reality a complex political and military organization made up of three separate and distinct branches, all related but equally unique in their functions and goals.

The Allgemeine-SS (General SS) was the main branch of this overwhelmingly complex organization, and it served a politicial and administrative role.

The SS-Totenkopfverbande (SS Deaths Head Organization) and later, the Waffen-SS (Armed SS), were the other two branches that made up the structure of the SS.

The Waffen-SS, formed in 1940, was the true military formation of the larger SS . . . .

The aftermath of the Scout Snipers incident consisted of the usual shallow, “how could this happen,” noises — but columnist Pitts saw something more important

Here are extracts from Leonard Pitts’ comment:

As many as 60 million people worldwide died in the war to rid the world of that flag and all it represents. Over 400,000 of them were Americans.

It is a pungent obscenity to see men who wear the same uniform and salute the same colors posing before a flag symbolizing those who slaughtered their countrymen.

But what do we do if the culprit is simply the ignorance of the undereducated?

[I]t indicts the short-sightedness that led us to believe we could diminish our own history and pay no price for doing so.

Now the price stares out at us: American Marines posing with a Nazi flag.

That should worry us some. To truly comprehend tomorrow, you must first comprehend yesterday.

Adding my own comment — Overlooking the fundamental nature of war makes unethical fools of us all

Mr. Pitts is right about the worrisome nature of ignorance. But his comment can be interpreted as a ethical condemnation of the Sniper Scouts’ position. In that, I think he and others may miss the full point.

I am going to defend these Marines, while still condemning what their SS banner stands for.

My reasoning has to do with warriorship and its basically apolitical nature. This defense takes three parts:

(1) War is generally an immoral undertaking.

Criticizing those we throw into its dehumanizing claws, on grounds that they have become occasionally unappealing under combat conditions, is an intellectual and moral absurdity.

(2) However, distinguishing between (a) criticisms that unfairly attack warriors’ allegedly ethical mistakes and (b) validly censuring their tactical or strategic blunders is valid.

(2) In this case, the motivational symbols of warriorship can be seen as predominantly apolitical.

Part One — embarking on perpetual war, and then criticizing the occasional ethical unattractiveness of the warriors we send into it, is a moral self-contradiction

Instigating perpetual war (as the United States has done) and then criticizing the ethics of the warriors, whom we send into the predictable horrors of battle, is asinine.

The United States has become a militaristic, imperialist state, without recognizing the immorality of its new character.

We conceal the blatantly immoral nature of our seemingly endless war-making by pretending that “politically correct” combat takes the sting out war’s inevitable atrocities.

But, in Reality, there is no such thing as combat without what we self-deceivingly call “collateral damage.” Collateral damage is a euphemism for volumes of death, resentment, rage, and generations-spanning blood feud.

Consequently, criticisms of political incorrectness — as an indicator of individualized immorality — of our warriors is irrationally foolish and ethically unfair.

Part Two — distinguishing between (a) inane criticisms of warriors’ immorality and (b) correctly taken critiques of their tactical or strategic blunders

Certainly, we may fairly criticize troops’ lack of discipline, absence of honor, and failed tactical or strategic direction.

But we may not (fairly and rationally) condemn our troops for doing the kinds of things that warriors occasionally do in the predictable heat of the moment:

Pissing on corpses is hardly in the same class as shooting, kidnapping, cutting or exploding peoples’ heads off.

Displaying a morally condemned flag does not rise even to the boot-soles of the war’s routine atrocity.

The media uproar regarding both instances of alleged Marine Corps misbehavior reflects the usual behind-the-desk, self-righteous bull plop that complacent (metaphorically lazy-fat) Americans engage in to offset their cowardice for sending other people to war.

The Marine Corps certainly should disciple its people for tactically and strategically inappropriate pissing and flag-showing. These mistakes certainly did foreign perceptions of the American Cause no good. But the rest of “us” should keep our complacently self-righteous snouts out of it.

There is a huge difference between tactical and strategic faux pas — which these were — and blatant immorality, which these emphatically were not.

Part Three — (a) the symbols of pure warriorship are often apolitical, and (b) the Warrior Mentality does not care about nuanced niceties

This last argument is more subtle. It is a psychological one.

In essence, it makes the point that symbols that are associated with evil or moral darkness are perceived as having more protective power in combat than those associated with good.

This is the “I’m badder than you” factor. If I really am badder than you, you can’t hurt me.

In a psychological sense, one can understand why evil symbols carry with them an increased sense of potentially self-protecting power. Everyone with sense knows that goodness tends to have to self-sacrifice in order to triumph. Evil, on the other hand, does not care about anything other than itself and can commit its full force to whatever nastiness it is up to.

Hence, the skull and crossbones and the myriad other symbols of dark thinking that we see associated with combat. In kill-or-be-killed situations, the soul’s own darkness comes out to play.

The Warrior Ethos, which the Marine Corps displays as a matter of inculcated principle, is only about efficient killing. Its most fundamental in-combat ethical standard is:

“Fight and kill, together as an ultra-effective unit, to save ourselves and our squad’s buddies.”

Though people like to pretend otherwise, that is about the limit of a warrior’s concern with ethics.

Realistically speaking, combat emotions frequently carry over into the aftermath, where it is easy for human beings to revert back to combat-appropriate primal behavior. There is no way to exist, successfully, in a combat zone, without leaving our morally basest, survival-oriented energy on ready tap.

Symbols play an unconscious role in energizing combat preparedness.

Pertinent to the Marine Scout snipers at issue here, warriors admire historically visible and effective fighting forces. Admiration encourages emulation.

Among these historically fear-inspiring groups was the combat-directed Waffen SS.

For some, the Waffen SS symbol remains a short-hand representation of this historically prominent combat force’s ability to:

(a) inspire figuratively pants-wetting fear in its adversaries

and

(b) encourage a corresponding pride (in itself) as to its own competence.

Not coincidentally, that is what the Marine Corps is all about.

Note — regarding conveniently “edited” history

I have noticed that the elite and often courageous fighting quality of the Waffen SS at mid-War is being erased from historical commentary. At least on the Internet.

It is as if we find it difficult to comprehend that there could have been admirable courage and military competence among some members of, what we more conveniently now see, as a group homogenously evil-believing fanatics.

When I majored in history in the 1960s, this rewriting of World War II was less prevalent. Since then, the world seems to have adopted the view that there was nothing at all occasionally worthy on the side that committed the immense evil of the Holocaust.

By engaging in self-protecting psychological falsities like this, we attempt to escape confronting the evil in our own natures.

That’s a mistake. The point to spiritual development is the recognition that light and dark coexist in our chromosomes.

Rewriting the past to make it black (on one side) and white (on the other) disserves the soul.

If the victims of the Holocaust deserve anything, it is our accurate appraisal of human nature and the historical past that displays its light and darkness at every turn.

The pursuit of full Truth, rather than narrowly honed falsity, should be the absolute standard in all intellectual inquiries.

In the military (survival) mind, just because an adversary stood for everything detestable does not mean that its battlefield courage and fighting skill can or should be disregarded.

It would not surprise me if the Marine Corps Scout sniper team knowingly chose the SS banner to symbolize its military prowess. Especially so, if Leonard Pitts is right and these Marines did not directly connect it with the indescribable evils the SS had done in implementing the Holocaust.

It understandable that combat units might draw on the power of “bad ass” symbols to make themselves feel less vulnerable than we actually are.

Under the stress of warfare, these kinds of symbols motivate. The soul-deadening act of killing other people — and subjecting ourselves to being killed in return — is difficult for most of us to commit to, until we are reprogrammed to do so. Symbols help in the transition.

In regard to SS-banner displaying Marine Scout Snipers, I suspect two things. First, the snipers knew that their flag referred to the Waffen elite. And, second, they prized the symbol because they could transmute the acronym into “Sniper Scouts.”

These Marines transitioned the fear-inspiring competence that the combat arm of the SS had once represented into a modern representation that abandoned Nazi associations and consciously carried with it only the Waffen SS’s connotatively elite warriorship.

In my view, the Marine Corps command is right in correcting the Sniper Scouts’ mistake on strategic grounds. But it will also be correct in leaving moral implications out of its censure of these men.

The moral? — (i) Forgetting history leaves us adrift, and (ii) ethically censuring warriors for being warriors is unfair and self-defeating

The irony of the Marine Scout Snipers’s situation is that criticism of their displayed SS banner drew from History’s facts, but in only partial fashion.

Critics attacked the Nazi associations the SS banner carries with it, but overlooked the United States’ ethically highly questionable presence in Afghanistan.

In essence, the Marine Scout Snipers (and every other troop there) have to cope with an (a) geopolitically unwinnable war (b) in a place where they need all their warrior skills.

Yet, in spite of those realities, this Marine group’s self-righteous critics:

(a) begrudge them their (probably apolitically-selected) motivating symbol of warriorship,

and

(b) simultaneously overlook everything that “we” did to make them need such an emotion-inducing symbol in the first place.

Given the situational nuances, I suspect that the Marine Corps will proportion its censure correctly.

Marine commanders understand that war is horror writ large. The more capable among them also know that asking human beings to become warriors is, in essence, a contradiction in ethical terms. In combat situations, it is impossible to be Saint and Warrior at the same time.

People who do not understand this dichotomy should shut up. Their moral self-righteousness would be better exercised in keeping the United States out of war — rather than whine-dribbling their petty critiques of individual soldiers and Marines into prominence afterward.

PeteFree.com

Columnist Leonard Pitts' Wise Perspective on a Marine Scout Sniper Team's Display of the Nazi "SS" Symbol — and My Own Comment regarding Warrior Symbols and Unfair Criticism of Expressions of the Warrior Mentality