stephen collins coughlin on william tecumsah sherman ... john jay on popeye: "i fights to the finach, cuz i easts me spinach, i'm popeye the sailorman, toot toot!!"

major stephen collins coughlin, usar intel, quotes william tecumsah sherman to the following effect:

north design to conquer the south, we must begin at kentucky and reconquer the country from there as we did from the indians. it was this conviction then as plainly as now that made men think i was insane. a good many followers now want to make me a prophet. i rather think you now agree with me that this is no common war. you must now see that i was right in not seeking prominence at the outstart. i knew and know yet that the northern people have to unlearn all their experience of the past thirty years and be born again before they will see the truth. though our armies pass across and through the land, the war closes in behind and leaves the same enemy behind. … i don’t see the end or the beginning of the end, but suppose we must prevail and persist or perish. … we cannot change the hearts of the people of the south, but we can make war so terrible that they will realize the fact that however brave and gallant and devoted to their country, still they are mortal and should exhaust.

 

general tecumseh sherman, 1862

upon having his command restored

the civil war: a narrative – fort sumter to perryville

following the chapter “war means fighting …” 800, 801.

though war is hardly unique, the american civil war was unique in several ways.  it was fought between people who were very similar, often splitting families on this or that point, and, it was fought by two armies part of the same military tradition.  these armies fought as armies and not rag tag irregulars or guerillas: at the end of the first year of the war they were well trained, disciplined under fire, and hardened & steeled to battle. they were as technologically advanced in terms of weaponry as any of earth, and they were led by officer corps who had been classmates in the same military academies, who had bonded with joint service, and some who liked and admired each other as much as some hated each other.

the south is credited with having received the superior officer corps upon the split up of the american military.  i don’t think so.  i think that they were as evenly matched as a set of well trained twins in the boxing ring, and in being so, it was a close and bitter fight.

the advantage the south had was continually in defending upon its own soil, lending “lines of interior defense,” as the matter is put, and in having superior intelligence assets as northern armies traveled into its territory.  robert e. lee’s genius disappeared at gettysburg, against union general meade’s deficiencies, when meade was conferred the same advantages generally possessed by southern generals: lee’s cavalry failed in its reconnaissance mission and no amount of valor by george pickett’s men could hold the wall they reached & breeched.

well, i digress.

take one thing away from tecumsah sherman’s remarks set forth above, highlighted in red, and something from from popeye in the title.—

when you are in a fight to the finish, then you’d damn well better be the one who finishes the fight.  else you perish.

in the fight against islam we must persist and prevail, or vanish from the earth, eradicated and our memories erased.  you may think me a little crazy now, as people thought sherman then, but my judgment and that of my like minded fellows will be vindicated.  one way, or the other.  for you see, (or maybe you don’t, as sherman noted of the north when he spoke), we are in a fight to the finish.

we’d damn well better finish it.

john jay @ 01.27.2010

Comments

[dymphna]

I read parts of that paper of Coughlin's you link. His bibliography is particularly useful. This one:

al-Misri, Ahmad ibn Naqib. ‘Umdat al-Salik (Reliance of the Traveller: A Classic Manual of
Islamic Sacred Law). Rev. ed. trans. Nuh Ha Mim Keller. Beltsville: Amana
Publications, 1994.

is a real beaut. Islamic jurisprudence (which is essentially their rules for war, and war is eternal in Islam) is based on the rule of abrogation. Thus, the peaceful surahs in the earlier sections of the Koran are abrogated by the later, more murderous ones. Those sayings carry the real weight of Islamic intentions toward us.