Mikhail Tukhachevsky was only 42 years old when Joseph Stalin promoted him to the highest possible military rank in the Soviet Union.
As “Marshall of the Soviet Union”, Tukhachevsky had near supreme authority over all Soviet military forces. And he had been personally tasked by Stalin to modernize the military and prepare for war.
But Tukhachevsky’s new authority didn’t last very long. Shortly after assuming his duties as Marshall, he was quietly reassigned to an unimportant post… and subsequently arrested.
The year was 1936. And Tukhachevsky was suspected of plotting with the Germans to overthrow Stalin and implement a military dictatorship.
Tukhachevsky was brutally beaten while in captivity, and he confessed to being a Nazi spy after two days of relentless torture.
He was branded a traitor and executed.
Tukhachevsky wasn’t the only one, either. This was a period in Soviet history called the Great Terror, in which an extremely paranoid Stalin purged the military of anyone who showed any sign of ideological dissent.
The rest of the officers were quick to show Stalin that they were worthy, loyal comrades. Soldiers routinely ratted each other out and put each other on phony trials where a guilty verdict was a foregone conclusion.
During Tukhachevsky’s trial, one of the judges passionately recounted to the Soviet press how much he loathed traitors who were disloyal to Stalin:
“When I saw those scoundrels in the courtroom, I was shivering. A beast was in me. I didn’t want to judge them, but beat and beat them in a wild frenzy.”
This judge’s name was General Ivan Belov. And even though he tried so desperately to prove that he was a loyal party member by eagerly participating in the purge, Belov knew that the purge would eventually come for him:
“Tomorrow I shall be put in the same place [as Tukhachevsky].”
Belov was himself arrested, tried, and executed within eighteen months.
Over 36,000 Red Army officers were executed, sent to the gulag, or removed from command. This included the vast majority of the upper ranks— people like Tukhachevsky who had designed the modern Red Army, and knew best how to run it.
The end result was that Stalin had severely weakened his own military, which is why the Soviets were totally unprepared when Hitler’s forces invaded a few years later.
In fact Stalin was at such a tactical disadvantage in the early days of World War II that he released many of the purged officers from the Gulag, and forced them back into the military to help fight off the Nazis.
Paranoid authoritarian leaders often fall victim to this impulse to demand ideological purity from their soldiers.
And in a bizarre way, this is what’s happening in the United States now that the Defense Department has ordered its own purge of “extremism” in the ranks.
Last month, the Secretary of Defense issued a memo on “Immediate Actions to Counter Extremism in the Military” and chose a man named Bishop Garrison to head the “Countering Extremism Working Group.”
What does Bishop Garrison consider “extremism”?
In 2019, he Tweeted about “misogynist, extremists, other racists” and said “If you support the President [i.e. Orange Man], you support that. There is no room for nuance with this.”
So according to Garrison’s definition of extremism, at least 74 million Americans are extremists, including about half of the soldiers in the US military.
In a June 2020 article, Garrison wrote that such extremism “must be cut out like the cancer it has been for so long.”
Now it will be Garrison’s responsibility to create a lengthy screening process that all new military recruits must pass, in order to identify “specific information about current or previous extremist behavior.”
A memo from March 2021 outlines the “Extremism and Insider Threat in the DoD [Department of Defense]” and identifies symbols like the ‘OK’ hand gesture as potential signs extremism.
Just recently a brand new Space Force commander named Matthew Lohmeier was reassigned, because he stated that, “diversity, inclusion and equity industry and the trainings we are receiving in the military … is rooted in critical race theory, which is rooted in Marxism.”
Bishop Garrison can now wield supreme authority to cancel anyone in the military who expresses the wrong opinion.
Obviously I’m not suggesting that the US is turning into a Stalinist regime.
But it’s clear that the Defense Department’s priorities have shifted away from maintaining the most effective fighting force in the history of the world.
Now it’s all about Diversity and Inclusion, from Special Operations Command to the Central Intelligence Agency.
This is classic thinking for out-of-touch bureaucrats, most of whom have never been anywhere near a combat zone.
If they had, they’d understand that when the bullets start flying, no soldier in a foxhole gives a damn about the skin color of the guy next to him. All they care about is staying alive, keeping their fellow soldiers alive, and accomplishing the objective.
Yet now, at a time when the Chinese military is rapidly catching up to the West in terms of tactical prowess and weapons technology, and may already be far ahead in terms of cyberwarfare, the top priority in the US military is now social justice… and stamping out ideological dissent from its ranks.
The policy changes are pushing many members of the military to leave voluntarily, something the Center for a New American Security calls a “looming retention crisis.”
According to their report, an alarming number of talented military officers are leaving the service.
Having some bureaucrat accuse you of being an extremist, when all you’ve ever done is put your life on the line in service of your country, probably doesn’t help this retention problem.
It takes decades of careful design and intelligent decision-making for a nation to build an effective military.
But it only takes 5-10 years of lunacy like this to wreck it.
