”People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
Those “rough men” are, of course, the cops and soldiers, the guys with guns and muscles who sometimes have to risk their lives to protect our freedom, lives, and properties. In fact, it could easily be argued that high civilization itself—literature, the fine arts, science—can exist only fitfully without the rough men who prop it up.
I’m reminded of Thomas Hobbes’ comment that without external restraints to keep men in check, life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
You’re playing with fire when you undermine the legitimacy and effectiveness of these rough men. You become, in effect, the supporter of chaos over order, barbarism over civilization.
That’s why it’s so important that the violent young men of Antifa and Black Lives Matter—and especially all their scribbling enablers—be called out for the corrosive influences they are. Kaepernick wears socks with pictures of pigs on them, and his mindless followers kneel to protest police violence. (By the way, violence is what happens when you try to arrest those who resist arrest.) And thus the authority of the cop who walks his beat is undermined and his life is put in jeopardy.
Of course, where the authority of the cops is needed the most (and where the Left pretends to care about the most) is in high crime, predominantly black, areas of our country: southeast LA, large areas of Detroit, the south side of Chicago, and so on. I wonder who a cop hater calls when thugs are breaking into his home? Perhaps he calls a literature professor from the University of Chicago, who will drive over in his Prius and, at a safe distance, squeal, “Stop, you ruffians, Just stop it!”
It was rough men ready to do ultra-violence on our behalf who defeated Hitler and freed the Jews at Buchenwald. (A colleague in the office next to mine was one of those American soldiers who showed up at the gates of Buchenwald in April of 1945.)
Whenever I think of brave and rough men, I think of the young soldiers huddled in a landing craft in 1944, waiting for that front gate to open onto Omaha Beach. “This may be the day I die,” they were no doubt thinking. But when the gates opened, and in the face of their deepest human instinct to survive, the young men left the safety of the landing craft to face withering German machine gun fire. There were over 2,000 US casualities on the beach that day, so for a few on that landing craft, it probably was the day they died. (My uncle was one of those men who died, shot out of the sky over Germany.) Now those were lads rough and brave enough to die or do violence on our behalf.
We have some of those rough men on Ricochet: Doug Watt made his living as a Portland cop, and Boss Mongo was a soldier. Perhaps there are others. So let’s hear it for the rough men who are ready to do violence on our behalf.
Let me end with a couple of stanzas from Kipling’s ode to Tommy, the universal soldier. I think you’ll enjoy it. Who doesn’t like Kipling? Well, now that I think of it, the Left doesn’t like him. They’ve never forgiven him for his support of ordinary soldiers. Here, then, is a section from “Tommy”:
Postscript: The quote that begins this post is usually attributed to George Orwell or Rudyard Kipling, but was actually written by neither. However, I’d rather not spend the time going into its complicated history here.
Another Postscript: I’m sorry I wasn’t able to work Bob the dog into this post. I tried once, but his happy face just didn’t seem appropriate in such a serious post.
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