Just when we thought we were done hearing Nazi comparisons today, Pat Buchanan is now arguing that the new military policy opening up combat and special unit roles to women is so wrong that even the Nazis wouldn’t have considered it. In his column, “The Pentagon’s Surrender to Feminism,” Buchanan argues that “even the Third Reich in its dying hours did not send women into battle.”
He writes that putting women in combat positions “violate[s] common sense” and “thousands of years” of human civilization, even insisting that “the Pentagon’s salute to feminist ideology” will encourage rape and displace men. He also cites mass murderers and violent criminals to prove his point that “men are bigger, stronger [and] more aggressive” than women.
This decision to put women in combat represents a capitulation of the military brass, a surrender to the spirit of our age, the Pentagon’s salute to feminist ideology.
This is not a decision at which soldiers arrived when they studied after-action reports, but the product of an ideology that contradicts human nature, human experience and human history, and declares as dogma that women are just as good at soldiering as men.
But if this were true, rather than merely asserted, would it have taken mankind the thousands of years from Thermopylae to discover it?
In the history of civilization, men have fought the wars. In civilized societies, attacks on women have always been regarded as contemptible and cowardly. Even the Third Reich in its dying hours did not send women into battle, but old men and boys.
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Sending women into combat on equal terms seems also to violate common sense. When they reach maturity, men are bigger, stronger, more aggressive. Thus they commit many times the number of violent crimes and outnumber women in prisons 10 to 1.
For every Bonnie Parker, there are 10 Clyde Barrows.
Is it a coincidence that every massacre discussed in our gun debate – from the Texas Tower to the Long Island Railroad, from Columbine to Fort Hood, from Virginia Tech to Tucson, from Aurora to Newtown – was the work of a crazed male?
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Undeniably, some women might handle combat as well as some men. But that is true of some 13-, 14- and 15-year-old boys, and some 50- and 60-year old men. Yet we do not draft boys or men that age or send them into combat. Is this invidious discrimination based on age, or ageism?
Carry this feminist-egalitarian ideology to its logical conclusion, and half of those storming the Omaha and Utah beaches should have been girls and women. Is this not an absurdity?
We have had Navy ships become “love boats,” with female sailors returning pregnant. At the Naval Academy, three midshipmen, football players, allegedly raped an intoxicated classmate. For months, she was too ashamed and frightened to report it.
An estimated 26,000 personnel of the armed forces were sexually assaulted in 2011, up from 19,000 in 2010. Obama and the Congress are understandably outraged. Such assaults are appalling. But is not the practice of forcing young men and women together in close quarters a contributory factor here?
Among the primary reasons the Equal Rights Amendment, the ERA, went down to defeat three decades ago was the realization it could mean, in a future war, women could be drafted equally with men and sent in equal numbers into combat.
But what appalled the Reaganites is social progress in the age of Obama. This is another country from the one we grew up in.
