The Dark Satire of Pete Hegseth’s Quantico Speech

Maybe Dr. Strangelove– The greatest satire there ever was – comes closest to capturing what happened at Quantico on September 30th. “God wants it,” explains General Jack D. Ripper, the madman responsible for pushing the world into its nuclear demise. “We will prevail in peace and freedom from fear and true health through the purity and essence of our natural fluids. God bless you all.”

This line kept coming back to me as I watched newly minted Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, the Princeton Tory Shock Jock became Gung-ho’s foot soldier turned undressed non-profit turned interchangeable Fox News Dunce and reckless ax thrower turned sexual assault collector turned very serious statesman. Quoting Jesus on the Golden Rule (“Do unto others as you would have done unto yourself”) to a room full of generals during the decline of a decadent empire does not, in itself, constitute dark comedy. He is such a fallen and restless specimen as Pete Brian Hegseth invoking rivals of sacred instruction Stanley Kubrick in his heyday.

Unlike Ripper, Hegseth never spoke about the purity and essence of our natural fluids, but his speech was full of the same self-created fear. Much of the rant centered on the secretary’s obsession with restoring what he called a “male standard of gender-neutral age standard.” For him, that means more tolerance for “Beardos.” That is, Sikhs, Muslims or Jews who were allowed to renounce for religious purposes. As well as Black Americans who have also been canceled due to a medical condition that makes regular shaves unbearable.

At times, the secretary’s prison came across seriously, and I believe he is convinced that part of the reason the United States lost Kabul was because too many troops had facial hair. But it’s impossible not to wonder if he also has more nefarious motives. Just before declaring a military free of “Nordic Pagans”, Hegseth noted without explanation the glaring exception of Special Forces who can continue to lounge in their undisciplined manner. If brutality and military skill are at odds, how can the military’s most skilled soldiers be so hot? Or is the secretary looking to select for traits other than competence? Nor has he explained how his go-to examples for manly fighters, from Spartans to Crusaders, get a pass. They weren’t exactly the clean-shaven types – although they weren’t Sikh, Muslim, Jewish or black American either.

Contradictions abound in the life and times of Pete Hegseth. A disproportionate portion of his harangue focused on fat troops, fat generals and fat admirals. He romantically focused on the return of responsibility, merit and high standards. On the need to reject stupid leaders for qualified, capable leaders: “We just have to be honest. We need to say with our mouths what we see with our eyes, to say it like plain English, to point out the obvious things right in front of us. This is what leaders must do. We can’t go another day without tackling the board directly.

Next, Secretary of Hypocrisy Jesus-Quoting, welcomed Donald J. Trump to the stage.

These contradictions gesture toward something more sinister. And for all their “plain English” talk, men like Hegseth often indulge in euphemism. Amid his putative calls for discipline and restorative standards, our self-anointed redeemer demanded a curious set of relaxations: “No more frivolous complaints. No more anonymous complaints. No more repeat complainers. No more smear reputation. 1948. The same goes for sexual harassment.

Again, it is conceivable that the grooming secretary really enjoys proper grooming and grooming of men. But as someone with a long history of being accused of making bigoted statements and mistreating women, including by close colleagues and family members, it would be nice if Hegseth would – in this case – he’s been getting away with it for years.

Likewise for the secretary’s declaration that the “stupid rules of engagement” are now over. Hegseth was too coy to tell us what specific rules would no longer be enforced, but his recent announcement that injured knee butchers would retain their Medals of Honor speaks for itself. So is convincing Trump to pardon or grant clemency to war criminals Clint Lorance, who ordered his men to shoot unarmed Afghans; Mathew L. Golsteyn, who executed a captive; and Eddie Gallagher, who stabbed a teenage prisoner to death and posed with the body. Or his cheering of Trump’s threat to take a page out of the Taliban playbook and destroy Iran’s heritage sites. Taken together, Hegseth’s plea for discipline collapses into its opposite – a demand for gratuitous violence and chaos.

To the naive listener, Hegseth might come across as a grumpy traditionalist. That’s probably what he’s betting on. In making his case for returning the “Revival Department” to the War Department, he insisted that he was just returning us to the good old days of General George Marshall and Secretary of War Henry Stimson. Trump expressed a related sentiment amid his ramblings when he invoked the legacies of Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant, Dwight Eisenhower, Chester Nimitz and Curtis Lemay. Later, the president summoned the “unyielding power of [Gen. George] Patton, [Gen. Omar] Bradley and the great General Douglas MacArthur. »

None of these men were leftists. Most were a variety of conservatives, and they all ended their careers with enormous blood on their hands. But what is most notable about this list is its disharmony. On the one hand, the majority of these figures despised each other. Racists and outright jingos like Jackson, Patton, MacArthur, and Lemay throw the relative cosmopolitanism of others into stark relief. Grant abhorred the Confederacy and stood in solidarity with radical Republicans and black Reconstructionists. Marshall was at home with New Deal liberals and opposed escalating tensions with China, the founding of Israel (which he warned would turn the Middle East into an intergenerational firestorm), and the Dutch invasion of Indonesia that accompanied the end of World War II. Eisenhower affirmed the New Deal compromise, pursued the cause of civil rights, and railed against what he coined the military-industrial complex. Eisenhower, along with Nimitz, deplored the use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and both became critics of the nuclear arms race. Furthermore, these leaders welcomed the post-war international order – from the United Nations to international law – which the current administration is now set on destroying.

General Omar Bradley once warned: “Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know, more about murder than we know about life.” It is difficult to imagine a more apt description of Hegseth’s worldview. Much has been written about Hegseth’s tattoo which reads “Deus vult”, a Latin phrase which translates to “God wills it.” The phrase functioned as a battle cry during the Crusades, and Christian nationalists took up the call. Hegseth himself wrote a book called American Crusadewhich praises the original item. So maybe he and his colleagues are traditionalists after all. But their tradition goes back to sacred war, to the most emphatic exaltation of violence as virtue. “No one wants war here,” Hegseth told the crowd, “but we love peace – we love peace for our people.” Yet the peace he describes is the peace of conquest, the calm that follows ruin. This is the kind of peace his commander in chief had in mind when he later proposed turning our cities into “training grounds” for the military. Both speak of peace with the same bloody conscience as one of Kubrick’s most demented creations. A strange love indeed.