Flailing at Panzers or Surrender? A Conservative Path to Victory?

The re-election of Barrack Hussein Obama has solidified the notion that our government is now openly hostile to Christianity and the principles of freedom. The culture war must now be fought as an insurgency. It is guerrilla warfare. If we meet the enemy in the open field we will be cut down like the Zulu’s at the battle of Rorke’s drift. Founded as a Christian nation with a secular government, America is now a humanist nation with a government that is aggressively antagonistic to our founding principles. – The Parson

The profoundest truth of war is that the issue of battle is usually decided in the minds of the opposing commanders, not in the bodies of their men. – Sir Basil H. Liddell Hart

On September 2, 1939 an Italian reporter arrived at a battlefield just outside the Tuchola Forest. Indro Montanelli sent home an article describing the scene as he saw it – a field strewn with the dead horses and men of the 18th Pomeranian Uhlans and across from them a row of German Panzers.

The article helped create the myth that the Polish Cavalry, when confronted by the vastly superior German forces, drew their sabers and charged the tanks. The myth was encouraged by the Nazi’s, to maximize the German war propaganda that the Poles were stupid. A few armored vehicles were all it took to cut down over a third of the Polish unit but the reality that it was just a couple of vehicles armed with MG34’s, went unreported.

Whether or not the men on those horses were stupid or brave, it is a virtual certainty that the Polish General Staff had not prepared their armies for modern warfare. It’s been said that “Generals are always prepared to fight the last war” and while this was certainly the case at the Battle of Tuchola Forest it need not be in the battle for the soul of America.

As you read this, good people with sincere motives are shining their sabers and mounting their horses for the last charge of the Light Brigade. On the behalf of a righteous cause, brave men and women will ride out with orders and arms from the last war, and the wicked salivate in anticipation.

Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart – What the father of modern military strategy can teach today’s culture warriors:

The father of the “lightning war” was not named Rommel or Guderian, he wasn’t even a German. It may surprise you that the doctrines that led to “Blitzkrieg” were first refined in the early 1920’s by British Captain, B.H. Liddell Hart. A prophet without honor in his own country, Captain Hart, ignored by the British command, was followed closely by the German General Staff and an American named Patton.

Those that ignored Hart’s prescription for mobility, mechanized warfare and the “indirect approach” would do so at their own peril as the armies of Poland, France, Denmark, Belgium, and the Netherlands were devastated in under a year.

Hart’s strategy, the “indirect approach,” was to avoid at all costs the direct attack upon an entrenched enemy and to use tactics that would upset the stability of the enemy before the main attack was to begin – “In strategy the longest way round is often the shortest way there; a direct approach to the object exhausts the attacker and hardens the resistance by compression, whereas an indirect approach loosens the defender’s hold by upsetting his balance.”

America is different now than it was prior to November 6th, 2012. If Mitt Romney was naming the next two to three Supreme Court justices there would still be a chance that Roe vs. Wade would be undone. Instead, 62 million Americans offer their vote to celebrate Roe’s 40 birthday singing “and may you have 40 more,” as the presidents of NOW, NARAL, PLANNED PARENTHOOD AND THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA blow out the candles and get their wish – a pro-abortion majority in the court. With an Obama second term, death has won a reprieve and Roe will be enshrined for at least another generation if not longer.

So, should the Republican Party follow the advice of Neil Boortz and others who believe that there is no winning path for Republicans without abandoning social conservatism? Should we put the fight for the unborn and Biblical marriage in our Hope Chest? Would we see millions of women, Hispanics and homosexuals abandon the Democrats and flock to the Republican banner if we were to alter our message and become more Libertarian?

Rush Limbaugh is right to suggest that these groups who have bought into progressive permissiveness are not going to try the new store solely on the basis of a sudden, desperate capitulation. So which is it, a wholesale change in strategy or an adaptation of battlefield tactics?

Morphing into the unprincipled pastels of the Republican chattering class is a recipe for disaster – the playbook of the Whig Party; not suitable to our traditions or values as Republicans. Pandering to illegals and transmuting into Stuart Smalley to appeal to would be Republican Sandra Flukes is not a recipe for victory, it’s not even a retreat – it’s a conditional surrender. The ranting of Rove, Boortz and Noonan, sending Grover Norquist to the hotbox and treating Romney like a leper, only prove the maxim that “friendly fire … isn’t.”

Yet, America has changed. Victories that were within reach just a few weeks ago are now scarred, battle torn wastelands. To act as if nothing happened and to retain the tactics of the last war will be just as disastrous as those who would have us surrender the field. How will Conservatives combat darkness in the fight for the unborn and in the defense of marriage on this new battlefield?

The forces of evil and their short term success should never blunt the enthusiasm of the patriot or the devotion of the freedom lover to defend the honorable. Our circumstances may be daunting, but they don’t determine the faithfulness or lack thereof to the higher path. As Hart would have it, “The most effective indirect approach is one that lures or startles the opponent into a false move — so that, as in ju-jitsu, his own effort is turned into the lever of his overthrow.” The new Conservative approach needs to be more “Gracie” than graceful; else we risk permanent minority status in the museum of incompetence.

The results of the Obama victory have placed us on a new battlefield and the deck is stacked against us. Our attitude toward it should be that of Chesty Puller – “They are in front of us, behind us, and we are flanked on both sides by an enemy that outnumbers us 29:1. They can’t get away from us now! …Great. Now we can shoot at those bastards from every direction.”