RIGHT WING SYMBOLISM
Here, I’d like to take a break from commenting on the activities and ideas of the Left and look into some of the visual and symbolic culture we see in the Right-Wing protesters, from counter-protesters who come out to heckle and antagonize marchers to those that initiate their own actions, like storming a State capitol. The term “Right-Wing” is so stuffed with types, from regular racist-uncle Trump goons, to trolls and clout-chasers, to actual Nazi death-squads members (popular up here in the PNW, from WAR to the Atomwaffen), it’s nearly bursting, but I think it is possible to look at them as a whole, make some observations about some motifs the reappear again and again and, from that, extract some insight into the way these people think. To do that I’d like to hone in on 2 phenomena. The first is the ubiquity and ideology of the Punisher skull and Thin Blue Line flag. The second is the more nebulous but still noticeable and concerning turn towards a “Special Forces” style dress and outlook.
I don’t think I need to harp too long on how popular the Punisher skull has become. You can see it everywhere, from obvious stuff like stickers and t-shirts and the like, to more elaborate displays like large truck-murals or tattoos. I remember being in high-school, during the early days of the endless Iraq war, back when it was on the news, noticing that an awful lot of our soldiers had punisher logos, in the form of stickers on their gun stocks or tattoos or whatever, visible. It’s hard not to see our soldiers wearing skull insignias and not think of the Mitchel and West, “Are We The Baddies?” sketch. Nowadays, the logo has morphed into a sort of template one can affix with secondary superimpositions or additions. There’s a goofy version with Trump’s hair, there is, of course, the Thin Blue Line colorway, there are Confederate versions, there are versions for all of the armed services branch, and a slightly modified version serves as one of the logos for the III% movement, a violent right-wing militia/paramilitary squad active in both the US and Canada.
It almost isn’t worth mentioning that Gary Conway, the man who created the comic, is vehemently against the appropriation of the logo generally, and by law enforcement especially, going as far as publishing a comic where Frank Castle, aka The Punisher, lecture some cops wearing Punisher stuff about how about how they shouldn’t look up to him and how their admiration makes them bad cops. Conway has sold Punisher skulls with a BLM motif superimposed over it and donated the money to BLM-related charities. Of course, the people engaged in this self-branding are not interested in reading the comics (or reading, generally) or the character or whatever, they like it because the skull is badass the the Punisher does what they think law enforcement, if they were allowed to practice it as they wish, is supposed to do. He punishes.
Let’s take another symbol that is meant to say the same thing. The Blue Lives Matter flag, unlike the Punisher skull, is recent and, as you can tell from the name, a direct response to Black Lives Matter. In 2014, a YT college student named Andrew Jacob decided, after seeing some of the uprisings resulting from Michael Brown’s murder, to create a flag to represent the ideology of the police and their supporters. It’s important to keep in mind that Jacob wasn’t/isn’t a cop, nor is he from a family of cops, but he was still able to graphically distill their philosophy. There was already a tradition of placing a black stripe across the flag to honor a KIA officer. Jacob took this symbolism, which that still practiced (at least here in Seattle) and allows police officers to obscure their badge numbers with those black sashes, and added some melodrama. I’m sure you’ve seen what he came up with, it’s a black and white version of American flag with a blue stripe in place of the middle white stripe. Part of it is, of course, a visual version of the phrase, “the thin blue line,” an idea very popular with this set. Despite calling to mind the much more real “Blue Wall of Silence” the “Thin Blue Line” mindset tells us that Hobbes was right and the world is mostly violent chaos and only strong, violent men can stand against this chaos and protect our civilization. In Jacob’s words, “The black above represents citizens, and the black below represents criminals.” And the above and below aspect of this is important to keep in mind, the police have nothing to do with the citizens, their relationship is only one of the citizens thanking and honoring the police, they (the citizens) are not themselves policed since they aren’t, by definition, criminals. I’m hoping you don’t need too much prompting to consider how America’s racial hierarchy might map itself onto notions of criminality. The police don’t police citizens, they hold the line against, and punish, the criminals.
This is the resolution to that leftist critique about the seeming hypocrisy of the same people who go on and on about government oppression and tyranny and whatnot are, seemingly hypocritically, the first to bootlick and espouse that the police have the right to execute those who don’t immediately obey them. Think of that satirical remake of the Gadsden Flag where the snake is wearing a BDSM ball-gag and the text is “tread on me daddy.” It does seem like a contradiction but you have to understand that, to them, this is easily resolved because the cops, again, are not policing citizens, who are sometimes referred to as “patriots'' when they’re trying to make it even more clear. Obviously citizens would not stand to be treated the way cops treat criminals, but these citizens trust cops can know the difference and would never assume them to be in the under-class.
So when they demand state violence against BLM protesters while demanding that armed, anti-mask activist who occupy (to use a left term) State capitals remain unmolested, the contradiction isn’t in what sorts of tactics can be used, it is rather a deeper division between the actions of citizens and those of criminals. It explains the silence of the Right generally, and the NRA specifically, around Philando Castille’s murder. On the one hand, here’s someone being killed for having a legal, constitutionally protected gun, surely the same people who constantly underline the need for an armed citizenry (there’s that word again) to keep the government in check will lose their minds and demand justice. Of course they didn’t. We can look back to the 60’s and see how even some as revered as Reagan was quick to jettison supposedly sacrosanct 2nd amendment rights when the Black Panthers decided that amendment applied to them too. Part of this is, of course, due to the fact that the Right-Wing is just generally smarter and better about protecting it’s fringe (look at how mainstream republicans talk about violent anti-abortion activists vs how mainstream democrats treated Occupy) and brutally cracking down on the Left’s, but another piece is that this dangerous, stupid worldview is becoming more and more mainstream. We need only to look at their flags and stickers to see what they want since these two major motifs connect and reinforce one another. They see criminals as an a priori category, kept below, and most importantly separate from the citizens. The criminals themselves, since criminality is their nature, cannot be reformed or made into citizens, one cannot cross the Blue Line (“Hold The Line” is a popular slogan among pro-police types, at least here in Seattle) so what is left is punishing.
The other trend I’ve noticed and am interested in is actually more wide-spread than the Punisher/Blue Lives flag and points to something much larger and sinister about our culture. On the street level, I’m talking about the prevalence of the “Special Forces” look among the protesters. This is actually a phenomena, unlike the Punisher, that is visible on the Left and the Right. The John Brown Gun Club as well as the CHOP Sentinels also have this look, but it is much more common on the Right. On the surface level, this trend mostly presents as comedy. The pasty hentai-nazi (or elderly uncle) keyboard warriors, now out in public with 3xl “tactical” vests, Gap cargo shorts, a nervous look and an enormous gun. You see these types a lot at Right-Wing rallies here and they are laughable; the gap between their masculine aspirations and what they’re actually able to manifest would almost be touching in a sad way if they weren’t so odious otherwise. It is important to keep in mind these people are still dangerous in spite, and perhaps because, of their naïveté. Kyle Rittenhouse pops to mind. But this isn’t about a group of men LARPing to work out a perceived cultural emasculation. Almost all of the major movies about the War on Terror wars, from Black Hawk Down (admittedly, a precursor, set in 90’s Somalia) to Zero Dark Thirty to The Hurt Locker to Lone Survivor to to American Sniper to 12 Strong, even to romances like Dear John feature Special forces soldiers, not the “regular” grunts we see in Vietnam or WWII movies. Outside of art, Chris Kyle, the famous liar and Special Forces sniper, is easily the most famous soldier since, at least, Vietnam and he has the added benefit of embodying not only the Special Forces ethos but the Punisher skull/Blue Lives one as well when he publicly insisted he’d driven to New Orleans during Katrina to use his sniping prowess to kill criminals. An incredibly telling lie. Pat Tillman, who also joined a Special Forces unit, is probably the only other contender for “most famous solider of our era.” Beyond that, there are diffuse examples like certain islamophobic coffee companies and books claiming teach you how to eat/train/lead like a Navy Seal. The idea that our wars are now fought by a small elite group of ultimate warriors is prevalent, seductive and seems to have replaced the regular grunt soldier as the archetypical armed forces figure in the popular imagination. It is not only just a negative trend in the sense that they’re killing people (they being both the actual Special Forces, who in many senses are death-squads, as well as their Rittenhouse-style fanclub), the rise of the Special Forces Operator as a cultural figure both obscures awful things that are happening now and suggests a really dark future.
Before we get into what this popularity means” and where it’s headed, it’s important to highlight the difference between a regular soldier and a Special Forces Operator and for this we can look at how they are dressed. What to me, separates the “Special Ops'' look, and reflects the underlying difference in mindset between them and traditional soldiers, is a mixture between cutting-edge military gear and “civilian” clothing and signifiers. The Special Ops guy is the quintessential War on Terror soldier, for reasons that I’ll get into in a moment, so it’s fitting that our introduction to this style came in the early days of the Afghanistan war, when we were crushing the Taliban in a heroic lighting-war. We’d pushed these terrorist masterminds back to Tora Bora, where special forces, the famous “Horse Soldiers” they’ve gone on to make at least 3 movies about (Delta Force this time, the SEALs didn’t steal their thunder as top Ops until the Bin Laden thing) were going to hunt them down and kill them in these cave-pocketed mountains. In the pictures we saw, they were dressed as some sort of hybrid between an Afghani citizen and a super-soldier. They wore the beards forbidden since WWI to our regular soldiers, they wore the Pakol hats, which have been an Afghani symbol of resistance since at least the Soviet invasion, some of them even, as their name would imply, rode horses like the locals, something you don’t see a lot of regular enlisted men do these days. But, they also carried cutting-edge armaments and technology resulting from the literal billions we spend on “defense.” And, like almost all the groups under the “Special Forces” umbrella, they were almost certainly involved in a massacre, in this case in the Dasht-i-Leili massacre desert. The Special Forces visual aesthetic, of combining the highest grade weaponry you can get your hands on, with local costumes in order to blur the solider/civilian line, has reached its current peak with the Boogaloo Boys, a new accelerationist Right-Wing militia/terrorist group who’s calling card is the guns and vests and whatnot of a traditional militia guy, paired with a Hawaiian shirt, a joke both about how much fun they intend to have in the upcoming civil war they’re trying to hurry along, but also about how blending in with Americans would involve a dumb, loud shirt.
But if we zoom out, I think the cultural rise of the Special Forces Operator is being encouraged because it’s very useful in 2 specific areas. First, it provides a much more comforting way to think about our forever wars and secondly, it tries to solve a contradiction between the types of people we’re encouraged to be and our apparent need to have an enormous standing army.
On the first point, during the time period in which this cultural shift towards the Special Forces guy happens there’s an actual shift in the nature of the way the US fights wars and it’s towards unmanned drones. The US government has used unmanned drones for surveillance since, at least, the first Gulf War and they started putting missiles on Predator drones around 2001-2002. The first recorded drone strike took place on October 7, 2001, less than a month after 9/11, a turnaround speed that tells you they were predicting warfare would move in this direction for some time before the attacks. One of the reasons this type of warfare is so desirable to those in power has to do with how many fewer people have to be involved and thus how much easier it is to keep control of information. As such, it’s quite hard to know how many people have been killed across the world in this manner since that date but the Bureau of Investigative Journalism puts the number dead between 9k-17k and the total casualties in the 10-20k range. Obviously, the number of people the various Special Ops groups have killed during this same time period is much, much lower but they take up almost all of the cultural space (where are the romances about hunky but troubled drone pilots working outside of Las Vegas?) and the reason seems pretty clear. There’s something uncomfortable and icky about the idea of drones that belies a more basic sense of fairness and even courage and masculinity in war. There’s been debates about what constitutes a “fair-fight” for as long as people have been fighting and you can certainly see these issues in something like an arrow, but the idea of bombing someone from abroad, so far removed that you are not even flying the plane (and thus couldn’t be shot down or crash by accident) does not seem to comport with what we traditionally think of when we think of war or a fight. During a more traditional war that involved heavy bombing, like WWII or Vietnam, the bombing was part of a campaign that did involve boots on the ground and this a more “fair” venue for our opponents to strike back. When you compare this to the situation in places like Yemen, where our bombs have killed thousands (tens of thousands if you count bombs we sold to the Saudis to drop), and where there has never been a formal declaration of war, there are no American troops in the country and most Americans are unaware of the situation. This isn’t a formula for feeling like the good guy. This is where the Special Forces come in. If they get all the cultural attention the bombings should be getting, the general public can find these endless, boundary-less wars more palpable. The idea that our nation is brutally bombing some of the poorest places on earth constantly and for no clear reason makes us seem like murderers. The idea that an elite cadre of brave men will go to whatever lengths to track-down and kill the most dangerous people in the world is much more agreeable so it’s what we’ve been given. The reality that most of these “most dangerous people in the world” super-terrorist types that act as the foil to these Special Forces figures are actually 15 year-olds who grew up without electricity is easy to ignore and the narrative helps clean up a number of nagging concerns with these endless wars.
First, because we’re talking about such an elite, high-level group of course the actual facts of what they’re doing and why it’s necessary to do it must remain vague at best. Do you think the average American, or anyone really, can explain why we’re bombing villages in Niger? Or Somalia? But if you were to, say, pitch it mostly as “Special Forces Missions” in Africa it’s very vagueness and shadowy implications become proof that it’s vital, high-level and important. It also helps overcome the American public’s reluctance to have it’s children die in battle. During the more traditional beginning of the Iraq War, before they fully switched to this Special Forces messaging, the American casualties became a huge issue. America, correctly, didn’t seem totally convinced that it made sense for our young people to die terribly in a place that didn’t really seem to have much effect on our lives. It bears constant repeating that when it comes to the children of other countries we couldn’t care less. There are now about 4500 US soldier deaths total in Iraq and during the worst parts of the war there were about that many Iraqi civilian deaths in a month. This set of affairs makes sense when you think of our soldiers as regular people, neighbors, relatives and average folks. When you think of our soldiers as all Special Ops guys the math gets different. These sorts of people didn’t die needlessly. It wasn’t the case that they needed college money then got cut in-half by an IED a month later, these are people who devoted their whole lives to this, warriors who know exactly what they’re getting into and are presumably in some Red White and Blue Valhalla now. This also explains Trump’s rush to forgive war-criminals from both the private (Blackwater) and public (SEALs) sectors for their war crimes. The brutality and unforgiving warrior spirit is exactly what you need these people for and we certainly can’t punish them for it.
The second major contradiction this mindset resolves also centers around how we think of soldiers. Traditionally and for obvious reasons, the soldier is not an individual. The soldier, more than basically anyone else, is part of a larger body and the whole point of being in an Army is that you’ve put your basic instinct for survival on hold to advance the whole. Basically, a soldier is supposed to not hesitate to die for the larger group; it’s this quality, the quintessence of the soldier, that makes them brave and heroic. This doesn’t quite jibe with our current notions of individuality. Over the last 30 years or so this push has gotten even stronger. The army has struggled with this reality for a while now, outside of a few bad economic years the various armed forces have struggled with recruitment my whole life. At one point early in the ongoing War on Terror, they even tried to tackle this contradiction head-on with the paradoxical slogan, “An Army of One.” They eventually choose to drop that silly slogan when they found a better solution in elevating the Special Forces figure. Unlike a traditional soldier, the Special Forces guy is individual. We’ve already talked about how they get to differ in dress, but they often carry non-standard weapons, including, in the case of the Seals, specially made knives and hatches from a NC blacksmith working near Ft. Bragg. They’re assumed to be expert enough to not be in a traditional chain-of-command, they get to make some of their own choices and decisions in a way that a regular soldier is expected not to. It’s easy to see why this archetype has taken the place of the normal soldier in the American Imaginary, the Special Forces guy is much more in-line with our values.
Beyond even its function in the USA, the Special Forces as a type of warfare and soldier is, troublingly, both gaining traction internationally, as well as decoupling from formal governments. From an American perspective, there’s no bigger symbol of this than the Dark Lord himself, Eric Prince. In addition to being the brother of Betsy DeVos, he was, of course, a SEAL. Prince founded the notorious Blackwater, which changed its name first to Xe and then to the now-current Academi, which began operating in Iraq at the beginning of our endless Iraq War and now operates across the globe. When the US needs these sorts of services but doesn’t want to get “our troops'' in trouble, Prince and Academi are the first call. They recently took charge of our on-the-ground efforts in all of Somali, in the hopes of continuing our influence on that nation without getting into another Black Hawk Down Situation. Another shadowy group of former Special Forces Operators, known as Spear Operations Group, was paid by the UEA to carry out assassinations (and who know what else) as part of Saudi Arabia and the UAE genocidal war in Yemen. I see more and more downtown Seattle security run by G4S, a global security firm that helps protect buildings around the globe (they protected a lot of US government buildings in Madagascar), and are accused of committing atrocities to protect oil interests in South Sudan. Local to Seattle, the CHOP days, and specifically a standoff at the Car Tender auto-shop, brought along upstart private security firm Iconic Global who were a continuous armed presence, dressed in the Special Forces style, at CHOP even after the station was retaken by police.
Internationally, the most prominent examples of this contemporary military arrangement probably include things like the Wagner group, which is a Russian Paramilitary group that operates all over the place, most famously in Ukraine, and is owned by a Russian Billionaire named Yevgeny Prigozhin. Erik Prince, who is, of course, also a billionaire, has proposed Academi and The Wagner Group work together in places like Libya. Looking further afield, things like Kenya’s Rapid Response team, the newly reported upon 01 group in Afghanistan and the Mexican Cartel, Los Zetas, seem cut from the same mold. The RRT is a sort of police special forces set up in 2004, tasked with the sorts of raids these Special Forces groups specialize in, who are nominally meant to combat “Islamic Terrorism” in East Africa. They’re, you’ll be shocked to learn, funded and trained by both the CIA and MI6, and, again, shocker, they’re accused of summary executions, torture and posing as aid workers to infiltrate refugee camps. Likewise the 01 Group is an Afghani Special Forces unit that has been credibly accused of raiding Madrasas full of children and murdering them and receives direct CIA support.
Los Zetas are a drug cartel active across Mexico. For what it’s worth, when I lived in Mexico City, circa 2012, the general tabloid consensus was that these guys were the most brutal in a crowded field. A lot of that might be typical notas rojas hyperbole but it was noticeable. Irregardless of their relative brutality, Los Zetas also stand out by virtue of their founders being former-members of Cuerpo de Fuerzas Especiales (GAFE), a Special Forces unit of the Mexican army. Before some of them broke off and formed Los Zetas, GAFE was most famous for murdering and mutilating Zapatistas in Chiapas in the mid-90’s. Would you be shocked to learn that many of the GAFE commandos who went on to be Zetas were trained by US and Israeli special forces members at Fort Bragg in North Carolina? The list goes on and on getting darker and weirder.
I think this is the model for our warfare for the perceivable future, or at least until they can replace the Special Forces guys with kill-bots or until we get into a more conventional war with China (the bots seem inevitable and I guess we’ll see about China). So looking at Right-Wing symbolism on the ground at protests, especially the Punisher stuff, the Blue Lives Matter stuff and the general Special Forces vibe we actually get a pretty coherent and clear articulation of the world they’re proposing. A total bifurcation between citizen and criminal coupled with a healthy dose of punishment for these criminals, at home; a series of elite units (by which we actually, mostly mean drone bombers) we’re allowed to dispatch to kill anyone, anywhere for any reason in total secrecy abroad.
Open Tabs
https://harpers.org/archive/2018/07/a-flag-for-trumps-america/
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2020-08-28-revealed-the-cia-and-mi6s-secret-war-in-kenya/
https://narco.news/the-shadow-war
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/04/g4s-global-security-company
https://taskandpurpose.com/opinion/army-special-forces-back-to-basics-oped/
https://theintercept.com/2020/12/18/afghanistan-cia-militia-01-strike-force/
https://theintercept.com/2020/02/01/navy-seal-collin-retire-green-eddie-gallagher/