50: Cold War Replay

In September 2022, General Michael Minihan, head of the Air Mobility Command, told a military conference that the U.S. Air Force was responsible for more enemy deaths than any of the other U.S. military organizations. Three months later he predicted that China would invade Taiwan where Pawley's friend Chiang Kai-Shek and thousands of nationalists made their home after communists had seized the mainland seven decades earlier. In anticipation, the U.S. Air Force increased its presence in the Philippines.

General Minihan also shared with conference attendees a personal orgasmic pleasure— with the killing of “‘your enemy, every part of your life is better. Your food tastes better. Your marriage is stronger.’”1 

I disagree as I have since when I wrote this a decade after the Kennedy assassination.

I am the madness

That makes men want to kill. 

I am the taste of blood

That gives them the thrill.

I am the feeling

That drives a mother wild, 

Until she beats to death

Her helpless baby child.

I am the fist

Raised in anger.

I am the cry

Let’s gang bang her!

I am the daggers

Seen in many eyes.

I am the voices

Of a thousand million lies.

I am the crowd 

Full of faces 

Chanting names 

At other races.

I am the soul of hypocrisy 

Making a shambles

Of this democracy.

I have razed civilizations,

Destroyed powerful men, 

Ruined the lives of many, 

And I’ll do it once again. 

For I am fear and trouble, 

Terror and death at my best, 

And if I get a hold of you

I will never, never ever let you rest.

For I am insanity.

And there’s a little bit of me,

To a moral-less degree,

In all humanity.

I am in humanity.

~ Inhumanity. Lyrics & Music: David Price Cannon (1973)

On January 30, 2023, Spencer Ackerman, a 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winning national security journalist, wrote about General Minihan and concluded “anyone who's read Stanley Karnow's excellent book In Our Image will recognize as a retread of both Cold War and pre-Cold War imperial form ... Trump is Truman, Biden is Eisenhower, Mattis is Forrestal, McMaster is Acheson, Campbell is, I guess, John Foster Dulles, and this guy Minihan seems to think he’s Curtis LeMay.”2

FOOTNOTES:

1 “U.S. general warns troops that war with China is possible in two years.” By Dan Lamothe. The Washington Post, January 27, 2023.

2 “Saying The Quiet Part Out Loud About War With China.” By Spencer Ackerman. Forever Wars (substack), January 30, 2023.