It’s Open Season

In Carnifex, Tom Kratman continues the Terra Novan saga of Patricio Carrera and the Legiones del Cid begun in A Desert Called Peace. At the novel's beginning, operations in Sumer are developing positively. Salafi terrorists in Sumer have been dealt blow after terrible blow by the Legion and their Sumeri allies under the command of Gen. Adnan Sada (who is subsequently elected president of the new Sumeri republic).

Meanwhile, weariness in the Federated States of America over the ongoing war against the Salafists has resulted in the election of the leftist Progressive party to power over the conservative Federalists. Newly-elected President Karl Schumann and his Secretary of Defense, James K. Malcolm are determined to terminate the FSA's contract with Carrera, and do so in a ham-handed manner by dispatching a low-level flunkie named Kenneth O'Meara-Temeroso (who, along with another character named Micah Fen, bears an uncanny physical resemblance to the traitorous filmmaker Michael Moore) to deliver the message to Carrera. Unfortunately for the Federated States, as the situation in Sumer is stabilizing, that in Pashtia (home base for the Salafists) is growing more and more chaotic along with increasing piracy along the Xamar Coast and the Straits of Nicobar.

Back in the Legion's home country of Balboa, Carrera's friend and ally Raul Parilla is planning to challenge incumbent President Manuel Rocaberti in the upcoming elections, but the presence of Tauran Union "peacekeepers" in the country could pose a potential problem. And all the while, High Admiral Martin Robinson of the decaying Peace Fleet of the United Earth government is trying to figure out how he can undercut the FSA and its allies and preserve the hold that the Consensus has over Old Earth, lest such independence-minded Terra Novans one day return to their ancestral home and restore liberty and independence long lost.

During the course of the novel, Carrera's policy of no quarter toward the Salafists grows ever more intense, with rather creative interrogation methods being applied to gain useful information from the worst offenders. With the experience of having dealt successfully with insurgents in Sumer, Carrera has perfected counter-insurgency warfare to an art by the time that the Legiones del Cid are inevitably re-hired by the Progressive leaders of the Federated States to reverse the growing chaos in Pashtia.

Throughout the story this song kept running through my mind:

The song is called "Open Season," coming off of the album Southern Born Killers by rap-metal band Stuck Mojo. I first came across this video at Bane's blog last year. Now while rap-metal is not the type of music I typically listen to, I was very impressed with both this song and the album (which I later purchased).

As with A Desert Called Peace, what I also liked about Carnifex was the richness of the characters and the allegorical references one could draw from some of them. Kratman uses one character in particular to refer to Rudyard Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King. Which character? You'll have to read the novel to find out.

As with all of Kratman's novels, the reader of Carnifex is treated to an author's afterword, where Kratman expounds on the themes of the preceding story. Of particular interest are Kratman's thoughts on the proposition – much loved by Tranzis – that nationalism and patriotism are "arbitrary" and therefore "illegitimate." Just two days before Independence Day, Americans were treated to this heap of lefty asininity from Matthew Rothschild of The Progressive. Of patriotism, Rothschild concludes:

Admit it. We don't have a lot to brag about today. It is time, it is long past time, to get over the American superiority complex. It is time, it is long past time, to put patriotism back on the shelf—out of the reach of children and madmen.

I disagree. I say it is long past time that we Americans got over the guilt-ridden inferiority complex of Mathew Rothschild, Barack Hussein Obama, and their brethren. The true children and madmen are those who proclaim the existence of a "Family of Man" that has never existed in the entirety of human history. Children and madmen of the leftist type that blogger Noel of Sharp Knife nailed down cold:

Groups, to paraphrase Orwell, of nudists, sex-maniacs, 'Nature Cure' quacks, youthful snob-Bolsheviks, secret teetotallers with vegetarian leanings, food-cranks, pistachio shirt-wearers, professional Communists, astute young social-literary climbers, dock labourers, street hawkers, derelict people, beggars, criminals, tramps, prostitutes, Nonconformists, complete asses, literary intelligentsia, social outcasts, pickpockets, the croyant et pratiquant Socialist, fallen women, fallen animals, the thin-skinned, tear-in-the-eye, pre-war humanitarians, typical left-winger anti-imperialists, drunken fish-porters, the life and soul of cocktail parties, kissing the bums of verminous little lions, card-cheats, Beaujolais-sippers, hygiene-obsessed Utopians, Men-Like-Gods, Etruscan, Pelasgian, Aztec &, Sumerian-romancers, Marxist prigs, vegetarians with wilting beards, Bolshevik commissars (half gangster, half bullhorn), earnest ladies in sandals, shock-headed Marxists chewing polysyllables, escaped Quakers, birth-control freaks, Democrat Party backstairs-crawlers, half-baked antinomians, Pacifist Internationalists, feminist fem-phibians, free-love lizards, divorce-reformers, atheists, overweight hunger-marchers, Daily Worker-readers, high-minded Socialist slum-visitors, bare-bodied pornographers, the foaming denouncers of the bourgeoisie, reformers and 'all that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of 'progress' like blueflies to a dead cat'.

As mentioned in my entry of June 28, 2008, ancient Greek scholars like Plato and Thucydides understood that what motivates mankind is not "tolerance," peace-at-all-costs, universal harmony, or any such concepts revered by Tranzis the world over. Rather Plato and Thucydides correctly understood that the basic motivations of men revolve around phobos, kerdos, and doxa: fear, self-interest, and honor. Patriotism embodies this understanding, producing social order that can restrain the worst aspects of human nature.

Throughout history, the nation-state is in fact the only human construct that has demonstrated a proven capability to overcome concentric social circles like race, class, and religion. Kratman notes that nations (and especially powerful ones like the United States) have such unifying traits as a common language, culture, body of laws, and social mores. All of which the "Family of Man" lacks. The point is that when it comes to arbitrariness, the "Family of Man" is far more so than any nation-state. Nations have existed for the duration of history and have provided the social stability necessary for mankind's intellectual, technological, and moral development. By contrast, the morally and culturally anarchic "Family of Man" never has existed, and God willing, never will.