From May 8, 2020--Is The Democratic Party Channeling the Worst General in History?
This is a slightly long Wikipedia entry, but for those of us who sometimes look at the history of military strategy as a way of grappling with political strategy, it is useful and insightful. Field Marshal Douglas Haig, was in my view the most incompetent, negligent, and awful failure in the history of modern warfare, but is literally the unwitting model for those today who represent the so-called "Democratic" opposition to Trump. During WW1, Haig personally caused an unnecessary 400,000 casualties of Soldiers under his own command, in ONE BATTLE, The Somme in the worst act of butchery through stupidity of that War.
He insisted in using 19th Century strategy and tactics, in a War employing modern 20th Century weapons and logistics. Imagine, if you will, a military commander fighting a War employing the strategy of a War fought 50 years before him, in which he is marching regiment after regiment on horseback and on foot, armed with broadswords and bolt action rifles with a magazine capacity of ten rounds, into automatic weapons emplacements, heavily fortified in bunkers and trenches, deploying MG-08 German machine guns, and poison gas. Imagine the sight of 50,000 British, Irish, Scottish, Australian, African, and yes, even Chinese soldiers, strung up dead from hails of machine gun fire on barricades over barbed wire, many of whom who were Colonial British subjects and weren't even allowed firearms, but were sent to the front with daggers. Maybe, the Brits should have developed and deployed the new innovation of Tanks, and put an end to trench warfare, and overrun the enemy lines. But, we all know, that would not be "gentlemanly", would it?
Why was Haig doing this? To gain 5 feet of ground, or even 2 that day, in the most destructive War, with the most useless waste of life in History at that time.
What is the comparison to today? The Democratic Leadership, the Congress, former candidates, the Biden Campaign, are all employing political campaign tactics, electioneering methods, and Parliamentary maneuvering in their opposition to the Trump administration that are as useless, outmoded, outdated, and destructive as Haig's "Trench Warfare" strategy of WWI.
Throw out the stupid Democratic Campaign Playbook right now. Stop playing Ken and Barbie have an Election. Join the real world, because the opposition needs to shift into a completely different mode, to that of an Allied Army under the leadership of a General Patton in WWII, who always was on on the offense, didn't care about protecting his flanks, or keeping a tidy front, like the Brits under Montgomery.
<<[Haig] was a man of supreme egoism and utter lack of scruple – who, to his overweening ambition, sacrificed hundreds of thousands of men. A man who betrayed even his most devoted assistants as well as the Government which he served. A man who gained his ends by trickery of a kind that was not merely immoral but criminal.[266]>>
--- Liddell Hart
--- Liddell Hart
