It's unfortunate, but true, that poor befuddled Bennett has a point. Wingnut culture is a loser's culture. They have yet to win a single war. They can't even destroy a country, left all wrecked and vulnerable for them, and install a functional puppet government. The grown up wingnuts tried to salvage something for the mass of squalling infants, but they're going to be stuck with another dreary dolchstosslegende. Bennett himself should stick to the slots. He'd still be a cultural loser, but fewer people would get hurt.

"Nothing in history is clearer than this. Take World War II: the Germans surrendered only when their liberal media successfully confused and demoralized the populace. Likewise, Japan surrendered following an intense effort by left-wing academics to befuddle Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

And let's not forget the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan which was aided in large part by the rise of the famous Russian hippie counterculture and an explosion of mass protests that not only sapped the morale of the Russian military but also emboldened the Afghan resistance who, needless to say, would have otherwise given up (as dedicated, fanatical resistance are known to do). This doesn't even include the backstabbing from half the members of the Politburo and the noise of nonstop, unfounded criticism of the Soviet government's policies from the likes of TASS and Pravda.

The only way imperialistic countries fail in such counterinsurgency campaigns is through the domestic undermining of the nations' spirit and moral fiber, because guerrilla wars are usually very simple to win.

ALL governments, cultures, civilizations, fall from their OWN corruption. (when it heart the heart or brain) just like ANY other organism.

Could possibly mean hits.

Jawohl. Reading letters from Paulus's army surrounded in Stalingrad reveals befuddled soldiers, ready to surrender to cultural Untermenschen even though they were not, not ever running out of food, ammo and freezing their asses off and overwhelmed by the fresh Soviet troops and all that other non-cultural crap that never, ever enters the dining rooms inside Beltway homes in Georgetown or Bethesda.

Reality only gives guests inside those houses indigestion. Or, worse.
May they live on Spam for the rest of their lives!

"... and befuddlement just comes outta nowhere, man. you're sittin' there with a plan in your hand and the keys to victory in your pocket and then, wham, it's like, 'what was i just about to do? whose keys are these?' you know what i'm sayin'? the world is a complicated place. you're better off saying the same thing over and over and cashing in those two times a day your clock's got the right time."

They might have been low on supplies, donescobar, but it was the befuddlement that did them in. Lord knows I'm befuddled often enough and I've never managed to conquer any major portion of any large Eurasian country. So there you are.

I thought they lost because they put too many of their chips on beating Moscow and wouldn't call on the Dunkirk hand, to put it in Bennett's terms.

Sure, but when did dread befuddlement set in? Not during the glorious Blitzkrieg in Poland, for sure.
So, we must always be alert for early signs of befuddlement, on the lookout for agents of befuddlement and by all means available prevent our befuddlement superiority.
Keep America fuddled. Or, are we already, give or take spelling felicities?

“Japan surrendered following an intense effort by left-wing academics to befuddle Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

Actually the Japanese were trying to surrender before the atomic bombs were dropped on them by the U.S. -- Truman was well aware of this fact but decided to use the atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima despite the fact Japan was ready to surrender.

http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/files/pdfs/migrated/MultimediaFiles/Live/FullReport/7147.pdf

In recent years historians have been able to access declassified documents from the period. The result has been a series of books which challenge the claim that it was militarily necessary to drop the atomic bomb. They have shown that the Japanese government was already seeking to find a way to surrender and that, through the decoding of intelligence material, President Harry Truman, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, and Secretary of State James F. Byrnes were aware of this.

What has emerged is that Truman, Byrnes, and Stimson came to see America’s atomic monopoly as giving it the power to dictate how Soviet Russia should behave in Europe and East Asia. This led to a shift in US policy. At Yalta, Roosevelt believed he needed Soviet co-operation in the European and Pacific wars and would also need it in the years ahead to ensure that there was no re-emergence of the German threat.

Truman now envisaged a post war world in which America would use her atomic monopoly to lead the liberal capitalist world and to relegate the Soviet Union to a secondary status in world affairs. For this reason Truman delayed the Potsdam meeting with Churchill and Stalin until the bomb could be tested. “If it explodes as I think it will,” Truman said to aide Jonathan Daniels on the eve of the conference, “I’ll certainly have a hammer on those boys.”

Re Hiroshima and Nagasaki: well Oppy was both left-wing and an academic, IIRC.

rob payne: And we see that foreign policy worked out well.

Mike Meyer,

You got that right, and how happy it made the world.

I've got to agree with Bennett, sort of.

When you're trying to colonize the world with a volunteer army (which, AFAIK, has never been done) then domestic dissent (which counts in Bennett's mind as "befuddlement") can have a significant impact on your ability to continue to fight.

Domestic dissent leads to lower enlistments, which leads to greater demands being made on those still in the army (e.g. stop-loss and longer tours) which leads to lower morale and increasing dissent within the army, which eventually leads to defeat.

Sure, they've got Blackwater as a fallback, but the contractual obligations on a Blackwater employee are much less than those on a regular U.S. soldier (the army can threaten to shoot you for deserting, and Blackwater can't), so the collapse will come that much quicker if the "plan" is to rely on mercenaries.

"...but the contractual obligations on a Blackwater employee are much less than those on a regular U.S. soldier (the army can threaten to shoot you for deserting, and Blackwater can't)"

Your AEI\Cato types would simply argue that the death penalty for desertion is simply a technical matter of contract negotiation.

I'm currently reading David Halberstam's The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War in which the author points out how the beatnik movement in China,
along with Dr. Benjamin Spock's influence on Kim Il Sung's childhood, played an major role in bringing
the Communists to the negotiating table.

bobbyp: In that case, it's probably a really good idea to read the fine print BEFORE you sign.

"Cultural surrender" is an absolutely meaningless phrase, perfectly suited to Bennet, I'll bet.

Well, mebbe so, mebbe not.
Our thought mentors the Germans* use "kulturelle Kapitulation" as surrender to the lowest common denominator in a culture. Of course, we Amerikaner wouldn't know about anything like that.

*See anything by Henry Kissinger (German to some, Jew to others, play it as you see him), preferably pre-translation into something pretending to be English.)