Flying the Skull and Cross Bones

Two Articles on Military Psychology

Article 1

The Skull and Cross Bones Order ( Prescott Bush and Geronimo)

When I was thirteen I joined the Royal Navy's Sea Cadets and attended a shabby club called "TS Invicta" in Folkestone in Kent. It still exists - I noticed on a recent visit to Folkestone - and still needs some paint and a repair job. I am glad that was a career direction I never followed through on. According to a recent article written by John Pilger

http://argument.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=398722&host=6&dir=140

"....the submarine HMS Turbulent returned to Plymouth, flying the Jolly Roger, the pirates' emblem. How appropriate. This nuclear-powered machine fired some 30 American Tomahawk cruise missiles at Iraq. Each missile cost 700,000: a total of 21m. That alone would provide desperate Basra with food, water and medicines. Imagine: what did Commander Andrew McKendrick's 30 missiles hit?How many people did they kill or maim in a population nearly half of which are children? Maybe, Commander, you targeted a palace with gold taps in the bathroom, or a "command and control facility", as the Americans and Geoffrey Hoon like to lie. Or perhaps each of your missiles had a sensory device that could distinguish George Bush's "evil-doers'' from toddlers. What is certain is that your targets did not include the Ministry of Oil."

One wonders if the commander of the submarine knew quite how appropriate the flag was however - because there is a little known connection between the Bush dynasty and the Skull and Cross Bones flag. This story tells us a lot about how power in in British and American society is exercised, as well as how powerful people get away with murder - over generations.

The grandfather of George Bush, Prescott Bush was part of a network that he joined while at Yale - the Skull and Cross Bones Order - an organisation founded among the leaders of the WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) elite in America in 1832. Of course, the function of these kinds of groups, is not only jolly college japes, but to consolidate that well connectedness behind the scenes, that facilitates the business and political deals and the string pulling characteristic of the power elite. (In Britain that is what a public school education and an Oxbridge education has always been about. It sets you up for life....)

Interestingly enough there is also a little known a historical fact in the annals of the Skull and Bones Order. Apparently Grandfather Prescott Bush, who was initiated in 1917, stole one of the most important trophies for it - the skull of Apache leader, Geronimo.

Later Prescott became the chief business executive of the Union Banking Corporation and the Hamburg America Shipping Line - and one of the most important financiers and supporters of the Nazi regime.....

So Commander McKendrick, well done. You have served your masters well. Will you be decorated now we wonder? Perhaps a Commander of the British Empire would be appropriate. Or will there be a new medal for war criminals and pirates like yourself- Commander of the American Empire?

Here are some links so that those who wish can do their own research on Prescott Bush.

www.parascope.com/articles/0997/whitepaper.htm

www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/5/robbins.htm

www.freedomdomain.com/secretsocieties/skull02.html

(Ordinary Seaman)Brian Davey
 

Article 2

Skull and Bones - and Military Psychology

In the above article I pointed out that the British submarine commander who flew the skull and cross bones perhaps did not know that the grandfather of George W. was a prominent member of the Skull and Bones Order, one of the private clubs for the well connected among the American WASP elite. Prescott had considerable business interests in Germany and Central Europe and was also a prominent financial supporter of the Nazi Party too. Later a friend reminded me too that

" the skull and crossbones, the TOTENKOPF was the emblem of the SS. They were conceived as an order of Teutonic knights, hence the two runes. They wore the TOTENKOPF on their hats and the runes on their collars and sometimes flew the Jolly Roger on their tanks. I wonder if that submarine commander knew about this connection."

Yes indeed, did he know? I'm forwarding these e mails to a building called HMS Sherwood In Nottingham. Perhaps they can forward them to Commader McKendrick and ask on our behalf....

My guess is that Commander McKendrick just thought it was a jolly joke - seeing it as a light hearted reference to the children's TV character Captain Pugwash perhaps. As there was never any chance at all that he would be depth charged by the Iraqi navy he probably followed orders without giving a second thought to the horror of what he was doing, nor about the consequences for Iraq, the Middle East and the rest of the world. Such light heartedness about the death of others says an awful lot about the military mind set - which is pre-occupied by technical tasks, instructions and orders and not by consequences, ethics or feelings and therefore cannot tell an utterly sick joke from a funny one.

As a former sea cadet, who can remember my mind state at the age of 13 and I remember being fascinated by the technologies of destruction - both by their power and also by their precision. What was so fascinating was all those dials and display panels - and the idea that if one mastered all those things precisely one got a precisely destructive result (that hurt or killed someone else). Machismo and male identity merged into an identification with a machine, of which one became a living part. It avoided any messy uncertainty and insecurities of the type involved thinking about girls - although one could fantasise that a uniform would be all that would be needed to impress and get what you wanted from them.

In this regard it is worth remembering my experience of the Royal Navy's Sea Cadet's not as ever being a source of any useful information about nautical or seafaring matters - it was above all a place where one learned parade yard drill, which was about learning to immediately obey orders and acting, machine like, in a common drill.

The individual as a machine part, drilled to act precisely according to orders is true for all armed forces. Here, for example, is a passage that I have taken from a German study of fascist military psychology. It is a description of a passing out parade of military cadets:

"The Colonel raised his hand to his helmet. Instantaneously the regiment stepped forward, four thousand legs raised themselves straight out in a column and smashed down on the ground again, the first company marched away at speed, the legs as if tied together by a single marionette's string, forwards and backwards on earth and grass with an exact 80 centimetre distance from foot to foot -approaching the flag...

The sword raised in salute, flashed and sank again to the ground, the earth raised in dust by hundreds of steps, the earth resounding, groaning as two hundred and fifty men go by, flagbearer at the for, two hundred rifles on shoulders, an exact line of them, held to an exact line of helmets, shoulders, backpacks, two hundred and fifty hands swinging forward and two hundred and fifty hands swinging backwards, two hundred and fifty pairs of legs in a terrible unstoppable rythmn pull along the bodies forward."

(translated from - Elias Canetti "Masse und Macht" Hamburg 1960 quoted in Klaus Theweleit: "Male Fantasies Volume 2 - the Male Body - towards a psychonalysis of the White Terror" - translated title).

As Klaus Theweleit points out "The individual limbs of the soldiers are as if separated from their own bodies and brought together again in a new unity. The legs of each person function connected with the legs of those marching next to them more than with their own backsides, on which they sit. In this way new body units are formed, that are no longer identical with the bodies of the individual soldiers."

A machine is created - a machine that functions as part of the yet bigger military machine - so that the individuals and the units they belong to are enmeshed as functioning units with the technological systems of weaponry, transport and communications carrying them. If one wants to know what soldiers and sailors think then one can forget entirely any matter relating to ethics or human feelings because they are entirely pre-occupied with technique learned in training. Their full attention is devoted to what they have been drilled to do. In essence when they are living their combat roles they are not humans they are machine parts.

Nonetheless, at times their humanity creeps back. It creeps back as fear in combat when there is nothing to be done and one is waiting. (e.g. in silence as depth charges drop). It creeps back when they are off duty, it creeps back above all when the armed forces have no more use for them, when they have been demobbed so that the support, and identification, with other parts of the machine is no longer there all the time. Then the horror can no longer be held out of consciousness - the distractions of following orders, of devoting all one's attention to technical tasks, is no longer there - and all those other things, blocked out of consciousness, begin to creep and then flood back in to the mind. Such things creep back too when the toxicity of the weapons systems that they have used becomes evident in their own bodies and the military system that sustained them as killers now reveals its true face - as it denies any more responsibilities to them as human beings and citizens.

It is at such times that there is only one treatment - trying to find out what one has done, understanding what one has done and then entering a dialogue with those of the former enemy who have survived - and working to prevent it happening again.

A recent radio programme about a Falklands Island RAF pilot who became deeply depressed and withdrawn after the war - and who then met an Argentinian pilot and became friends with him showed this clearly. But there is more to it than this - It is not an accident that soldiers often go back - and seek out those with whom they fought. The psychology has perhaps some similarity to that being used now in Restorative Justice Schemes - in which offenders talk with those who they have mugged or assaulted. This is not a soft or easy thing to do for muggers. Research shows that it is tough for them to accept how much hurt they have caused - tougher than staying in prison . How much harder is it then for those who have launched much more destructive weapons. However, it is perhaps the only way they can find personal peace, when they find out what they have done and then deeply immerse themselves in trying to do something about it.

Brian Davey

May 2003
 

 

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