Re: [Salon] The Curious Case of Two Generals Named Flynn

Here is more on the Trumpite Mike Flynn, and the similarity of today with the time of the Freikorps. I can attest that I have never been in a military office, since before 2001, to the best of my recollection, which didn’t have Fox TV on, to especially include intell and operations offices. The top two links below has the “rest of the story” on his “collusion” with Russia, and its purpose:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/01/michael-flynn-israel-lobbying-russia-united-nations

BLUF: "That official admitted that Israel – and reportedly the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, himself – had contacted Trump to seek his assistance in killing the resolution.

"The official – in comments that may come back to haunt the White House – said that Israel had “implored the [Obama] White House not to go ahead and told them that if they did, we would have no choice but to reach out to President-elect Trump”.

“We did reach out to the president-elect,” the official added, “and are deeply appreciative that he weighed in, which was not a simple thing to do.”

But let’s add a $100 billion+ on to the military budget, in perpetuity, as we did, and use this as a pretext for heightenening hostility to Russia, as a response to . . . Netanyahu.

https://theintercept.com/2017/12/05/michael-flynn-jared-kushner-israel-settlements-trump/

"But in the meantime, why aren’t more members of Congress or the media discussing the Trump transition team’s pretty brazen collusion with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to undermine both U.S. government policy and international law? Shouldn’t that be treated as a major scandal?"

Then there is Flynn’s call for “one religion” to unite us, calling for that in John Hagee’s Christian Zionist Church, which has already created an amalgamation of the two religions it represents: Zionism, and American Evanglical Exceptionalism:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/michael-flynn-calls-for-us-to-have-one-religion-sparks-outrage-from-jewish-groups/

https://www.timesofisrael.com/pro-israel-pastor-apologizes-for-event-at-which-mike-flynn-pushed-1-religion-in-us/

Flynn’s error was in calling for something like that in the birthplace of where it had already been created, which could lead people to look beneath the veil and conclude that it had.

But to understand Flynn, his brother, Trump, the National Conservatives, and the Republicans of today, one must understand the “Conservative Revolutionaries” of post-WW I Germany. I can assure you, America’s “Right” does, as Paul Gottfried’s one-time collaborators in the H.L. Mencken Society, who then became the leaders of "Unite the Right” conspiracy in Charlottesville (Gottfried has since apologized for his stupidity, or malevolence, take your pick), a precursor to the misbegotten coup attempt of January 6, do. Richard Spencer and his fellow right-winger, whose name escapes me, as did libertarian Justin Raimondo, as has Gottfried himself, all had/have an infatuation with the interwar, 1920s-1930s political theorists of the “Conservative Revolutionary Movement” of Germany. Which can be correctly said to have grown out of the fascist ideology of the Freikorps, which Flynn, and many other military members paying fealty to Trump would fit in with perfectly.

"Time and again, Weimar’s right-wing radicals reviled political speech as frivolous, empty, feeble, or dishonest; resolute action, by contrast, regardless of the normative foundations
guiding it, promised to clear a path through such prattle. For Carl Schmitt, a leading prophet of this “decisionism,” endless talk was the fatal flaw preventing parliamentary democracy from acting firmly in a time of emergency. “The essence of liberalism,” Schmitt argued, “is negotiation, a cautious half measure, in the hope that the definitive dispute, the decisive bloody battle, can be transformed into a parliamentary debate and permit the decision to be suspended forever in an everlasting discussion.” Yet the age itself also seemed impatient with reasoned dialogue. “A calm and factual debate,” Schmitt wrote in 1926, “might appear impractical, naïve, and anachronistic to most people today … Perhaps the age of discussion is coming to an end.”
For Schmitt, avoiding the “definitive dispute” meant postponing the choice between friends and foes that defined the nation as an existential community— one determined not by talk but by an essential identity in need of defense. In a 1930 essay “On Nationalism and the Jewish Question,” Ernst Jünger connected the dots between loss of faith in public discourse and the nation’s heroic solidarity.
Declaring liberal constitutionalism “too hypocritical, too long-winded, and above all too bothersome for modern taste,” Jünger called for a German nationalism grounded in a non-discursive “morphological thinking, that is as opposed to liberalism as fire to water.” This “new German bearing” would intuit German cultural affinities; its telos would be a “German empire resting on its particularistic roots”; and it would confront the Jew as “an adversary,” who could only “cease to be dangerous to the German” when recognized in his unassimilable separateness. As the
German “will to form” grows, Jünger concluded ominously, so will “the delusion of the Jew that he is a German in Germany become less tenable, until he is faced with his final alternative: either to be a Jew in Germany, or to not be.”

"One should not forget that Zehrer wanted to define what form the German revolution would take. The raison d’être of radical-right publications like The Deed, after all, was giving content to
calls for a “new nationalism” that was supposedly born during World War I, and which would break fundamentally with prewar nationalism and conservatism. As Roger Woods observed, Zehrer had “long envied [communism] for having its ideas clarified.”
The flight from discursive language out of failure to formulate a political program is clearly displayed by the journal Deutsches Volkstum. Highly regarded in Conservative Revolutionary circles, it took as its aim the theorization of a forward-looking nationalist movement based on the “German national character” (the journal’s title). To be sure, its coeditors, Wilhelm Stapel and Albrecht Erich
Günther, were hardly at a loss for airy definitions of the Volk. Already in 1917, Stapel had defined it as “a living entity of people who share a soul,” arising out of the deep past and expressing “a shared culture and shared ideals.” Like other celebrants of organic community, however, Stapel held the nation to be grounded in self-evident customs and a “natural” feeling of belonging, which
resisted conceptual description. The dilemma confronting conservatives was how to speak about the nation imagined in such terms, while at the same time preserving its mystique."

"In an exceptionallyfuzzy piece, he excoriated the democratic revolution of November 1918 for its lack of a determining “idea” and prophesied that Germany’s “true revolution” was yet to
come. What was needed, Jünger proclaimed, was a “dictatorship” that would “replace words with deeds, ink with blood, phrases with sacrifice, the pen with the sword.” The hostility to language in these lines is striking. In a development mirroring the path taken by the editors at Deutsches Volkstum, Jünger’s new political turn did not so much solve the problem of communicating subjectivity and
meaning as opt to avoid it altogether, appealing instead to domains supposedly “deeper” or “higher” than conceptual language. Like Günther’s praise of the nationalist’s “feeling for life,” Jünger’s rhetoric of action and gush of mood-setting signifiers testified to the paradox of a writer who despaired of language while being unable to lay down the pen.
Starting in 1924, Jünger began working out a revolutionary nationalist position in a flurry of essays and memoirs for right-wing publications such as Die Standarte and Arminius. His conversion to ineffable nationalism was clear. The advent of war in 1914, Jünger now wrote, brought the return of a “connection that had gone lost,” a “feeling of community in a grand destiny.”

The party which was most representative of this non-Nazi fascism was the DNVP, described on Wikipedia as: "German National People's Party (German: Deutschnationale Volkspartei, DNVP) was a national-conservative party in Germany during the Weimar Republic.”

Where I differ from the attached article above is in this statement and one or two others where the author claims: "It was not politics, but war which interested

these men. It was not ideology, but activism which characterized their movement.” War, and action, are the essence of fascism, as Mussolini explained. And war is politics, fascist politics, when it is made perpetual as a political doctrine, as the US and Israel now jointly share.

Then there is this:

"Laden with mobile machine guns, flamethrowers, light artillery, hand grenades, semi-automatic carbines and pistols;”

Gee, sounds like the Massie family getting ready to celebrate Christmas :-)

Here is more on Conservative Revolutionaries in an article which aged very well since 2015, especially under Trump: https://mondoweiss.net/2015/04/conservative-revolutionaries-fascism/

"Citing Hannah Arendt, Jeffrey Herf, a professor of modern European history, wrote: “The explicit implications of the primacy of politics in the conservative revolution were totalitarian. From now on there were to be no limits to ideological politics. The utilitarian and humanistic considerations of nineteenth-century liberalism were to be abandoned in order to establish a state of constant dynamism and movement.”

On Dec 10, 2021, at 4:19 PM, Chas Freeman via Salon <salon@listserve.com> wrote:

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/12/10/curious-case-two-generals-named-flynn

Maj. General Michael T. Flynn speaks with his brother Col. Charlie Flynn, aide to General Stanley McChrystal, during a morning meeting in Kabul, Afghanistan in July 2009. (Photo: Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

The Curious Case of Two Generals Named Flynn

An insider says Mike Flynn's brother lied about the Pentagon's response to the Capitol riot.

Mike Lofgren

December 10, 2021
Time flies whether one is having fun or not: it's now almost a year since insurrectionists worked to nullify your vote in a violent storming of the Capitol. Investigations of the attempted overthrow of the government thus far have proceeded with all the urgency of an interagency review of the price structure of cafeterias in federal facilities.

Michael Flynn's brother, involved as he was in the decision to delay mobilizing the National Guard, shortly thereafter received a promotion to head U.S. Army Pacific: a prestigious field command.

Politico now reports that a former District of Columbia National Guard officer, Colonel Earl Matthews, has written a 36-page memo blasting the Pentagon inspector general's review of the Army's response to the January 6th insurrection. Colonel Matthews also suggests that congressional oversight of the incident has been stymied by senior Army officials lying in their testimony.

As for the inspector general's survey of the Capitol riot, the Matthews memo concludes that the survey's deflecting of blame from the Army was "worthy of the best Stalinist or North Korea propagandist." This is not implausible, given the history of inspectors general finding few problems in the agencies they oversee.

The memo's biggest tell is that it brands as "absolute and unmitigated liars" among the Army's congressional witnesses one General Charles Flynn, who at the time of the incident was the service's deputy chief of staff for operations. On January 6, he was stationed at the Pentagon, a couple of miles from the Capitol.

Does that name strike a chord? He is the brother of the ever-charming Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, President Donald Trump's national security adviser, fired and then sentenced for lying to the FBI about unofficial communications with the Russian ambassador during the 2016 presidential transition. He was subsequently pardoned by Trump. Here is Mike in happier days among his congenial Russian hosts.

Flynn's subsequent career has been varied. Throughout the Trump presidency and beyond, he has acted as a tireless spokesman for Trump's interests, publicly advocating martial law to overturn the 2020 presidential election. He has also sworn an oath to QAnon, the bizarre conspiracy cult that has created a whole new form of contagious mass mental illness.

To be sure, Colonel Matthews's memo does not mention Michael Flynn, directly or indirectly. For a military observer like Matthews, who almost certainly had no personal knowledge of the relationship between the two brothers, it would have been improper for him to speculate.

But he has already denounced General Charles Flynn for lying to Congress. If that charge can be substantiated by evidence, one would likely conclude he was covering up an inappropriate response by the Army to the riot. What other rocks might be turned over?

It certainly bears investigation. After all, CNN host Chris Cuomo's assistance of his brother, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, to manage media fallout over accusations that the latter engaged in sexual harassment, was covered up for months. The recent revelation of their collusion was a media sensation.

While that story certainly had legitimate news value, why, for eleven months, has the Flynn fraternal connection virtually lain fallow? Charles Flynn was a key figure in the delay of the response to an attempted overthrow of the United States Government; his brother Michael a beneficiary of Trump's pardon who might have "owed" the president. And Trump, of course, was the one who most of all would derive advantage from a successful coup.

Clearing up this question is not only crucial to a proper investigation of the Capitol riot. Michael Flynn's brother, involved as he was in the decision to delay mobilizing the National Guard, shortly thereafter received a promotion to head U.S. Army Pacific: a prestigious field command. The posting indicates, among other things, the Army's evaluation of his performance in situations where sound judgment is critical.

It also comes at a time when military veterans—and also serving military personnel—are being recruited by extremist groups, Both categories were disproportionately represented in the mob that attacked the Capitol. It is imperative that military and civilian leadership understand the domestic extremist threat and take action against it.

America's two-decade "forever war" in Iraq and Afghanistan resulted in a U.S. military force enduring multiple tour of duty. It has unquestionably left at least some of the force, officers and enlisted alike, cynical and ripe for politicization.

History, of course never repeats itself exactly, but eerie parallels exist. There were masses of German soldiers who returned from World War I embittered and estranged by their pointless sacrifice, and inclined to blame the politicians for losing the war. They were readily recruited into the Freikorps militias, theoretically ad hoc formations to defend Germany's fluid border with a newly-created Polish state.

But they became increasingly involved in attacking the left political opposition in Germany's streets, developing a profound hatred of the democratic institutions of the Weimar Republic. Their activity helped pave the way for the Third Reich.

A correspondent of mine, a Vietnam combat veteran and former Marine, wrote this about the potential recruitment of extremists from the military: "… We have lost the ideal of what we wanted in a military reflecting our society, our right-wing society has captured the military… If you walk the Pentagon halls there will be not ONE TV tuned to anything else but FOX."

If that description even approaches reality, it clearly explains the military's wretchedly miserable intelligence about the war in Afghanistan. It does not require inordinate cynicism, however, to suppose the officer corps knows all about the War on Christmas.

To be certain, there were many people in the military and civilian chain of command on January 6th, and a coincidence of family ties is not proof. But it and everything else connected with the event bear close investigation, both in view of an insider's accusations of perjury, and the knack of inspectors general for minimizing or whitewashing government dysfunction.

I am struck by how few people in our civilian government seem to be aware that it was sheer luck that an overthrow of the government miscarried, and that the danger has not gone away. On the contrary: unaddressed, the peril will only increase. Like the politicians of Weimar, they behave like rabbits mesmerized by a cobra.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Mike Lofgren

Mike Lofgren is a former congressional staff member who served on both the House and Senate budget committees. His books include: "The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government" (2016) and "The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted" (2013).

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