In your article Elite American Political Leadership you mention Eisenhower's nickname "The Swedish Jew". I am interested to know how he got that nickname. To my knowledge Eisenhower did not have anything to do with Sweden.
Best Regards -- Mr. J. -- Northern Europa
PS! I am an avid FAEM-reader and have been for the last two years. I have read almost everything posted on the site.
Dear Mr. J.,
Eisenhower was nicknamed "The Swedish Jew" as a cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point. In Ike's time USMA cadets were required to be 100% white and non-negroid, or as close to that as medical doctors and geneological research could then ascertain. Serious official questions arose about Ike's obvious part non-white genetic heritage. These appeared to be negroid in origin. "Ike" explained this away as being due to a Jewish ancestor from Sweden, hence the nickname "The Swedish Jew".
Military Academy cadets and other officer candidates get to know each other extremely well during their schooling, provided it's conducted on an intensive basis as U.S. officer schooling formerly was. Everyone is at close quarters running 24/7. There's no place to hide character traits in those conditions. Cadet nicknames are usually extremely descriptive. And when they're keyed to obvious non-white themes it's a warning signal to look deeper. Here's another example. The U.S. Pacific Fleet commander who allowed himself to be surprised at Pearl Harbor, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, was nicknamed "Mustapha" as a midshipmen at the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. Other "Mustaphas" in Egypt and Syria allowed this to happen to themselves in 1967.
The academy and officer training schools (used?) to take official advantage of that close quarters peer knowledge through an anonymous peer rating mechanism. I knew this as "Top Five/Bottom Five" and it meant what it said. Officer candidates rated their platoon fellows on leadership in rank order from Top One to Bottom x. People who accumulated too many "Bottom Five" rankings were automatically scheduled for periodic official leadership review boards for enquiry into whether they should be dismissed without commission. The presumption of such boards used to be such individuals should be dismissed unless they could prove they were worthy of commission. Very, very few survived such review boards.
Judeo-Marxist Academics like the military scribbler Weigley and the Jew military 'sociologist' Moscowitz are generally extremely hostile to processes like peer rating and also to troop election of officers at regimental level and below. The admixture of females has added feminist hostility to the opposition to such processes. The long-term result is a corps of military leaders who possess less and less confidence where it really counts. That's among their soldiers. This has gone so far that the average U.S. ground combat unit is unusable for its designed purpose.
After long military experience and study the wisdom of both peer ratings and also electing regimental officers in militia and citizen-soldier units seems more and more profound to me. I think the only safeguard needed is a veto power for general officers to remove obvious misfits. You can conduct all the bureaucratic schooling processes you want. But if an officer does not possess the confidence of his troops they will not follow him in combat, obey his orders or stay the course in difficult times. Consequently years of academic training simply go to waste. Electing first and schooling second is probably the best way.
P.S. The leadership qualities required from military leaders and from political leaders are not identical. Some individuals combine these two attribute sets. Hitler did not combine these qualities, at least at the lower infantry unit level. This is proven by the fact he entered the Bavarian Army as a private and emerged after four years of war as a corporal. Despite this many fellow war veterans from his former battalion willingly followed him as a political leader, including his former battalion sergeant-major and some officers.
Nineteenth Century America managed to select many men for high office who did combine both leadership sets in fairly large numbers. This more than anything explains the rapid conquest of the continent. It was not 'luck'. The old American Republic (long since vanished) actually conformed very closely in practice to the ideals of the old Roman Republic in both military process and results. The Roman Republic constitutionally required that political leaders prove themselves as leaders in war. This was an ideal for early Americans but not a definite legal requirement. Had the Founding Fathers mandated this in the Constitution our history would have turned out very differently. Certainly Canada, Mexico and Cuba would not exist as independent states. Whether this would have prevented subsequent miscegenation or the Civil War is another question.
And results (output) are the real measure of military efficiency (or any other efficiency). The military stature and efficiency of a state is not measured by the numbers of troops raised or the percentage of the budget applied to 'military' appropriations; i.e. inputs. The Neo-con pseudo-patriots of the Judeo-Republican Party (non-veterans to a womandman) do think in these Communist terms of inputs. If this measurement were valid then Italy would be one of the military success stories of the 20th Century rather than one of the premier failures. When judged by this standard of results 19th Century America was a resounding success as a military state. Twentieth Century America was a military failure to the point that political loss of territory is now occuring in the Southwest.
P.P.S. Note to the former student of Russell F. Weigley who wrote in to defend him.
In my 1984 edition of Weigley's "History of the United States Army" he devotes about 40 pages to the War of 1812. He dedicates nearly all of this to harping on the relatively small Congressional size authorization and even lower actual personnel fill (about 20,000) of the "Regular Army". In this section Weigley glosses over the militia contribution in the sentence "this number was exclusive of those men from the volunteer and common militias who served for short periods against British raids and invasions in their own districts and who may have numbered in the hundreds of thousands."
Then Weigley reverts back to beating to death obscurities like poor Regular Army horse recruitment and rotten contractor commissary stores. The obscure "Battle of Lundy's Lane" (actually a minor skirmish around Niagara) receives an extensive autopsy. The Battles of Put-in Bay, New Orleans and General Harrison's campaign to reconquer the Northwest are ignored. These large-scale decisive events were commanded by regular officers leading Weigley's ignored militia.
And New Orleans was decisive despite being fought after 'peace' was signed. Anyone who thinks the extermination of Britain's best veteran regiments at the hands of frontier militia didn't exercise a subsequent deterrent effect on British decision-making doesn't understand how governments arrive at war and peace decisions. The British decision to negotiate over "Fifty-four Forty or Fight!" in the 1840s was undoubtedly influenced by that memory.
If Weigley had ever marched even once 20 miles with a 100 pound pack in 100 degree heat he would have understood something. Even 100,000 perfectly trained regulars alone would have resulted in American defeat. In the early 19th Century transport proceeded by foot, by horse or by sea. Since the British had overall naval superiority moving troops by sea convoy was not possible. This left marching on land. The factors of force/space/time applied to North America dictated that the early Republic had to rely on 'militia'. This was especially true when fighting an enemy possessing command of the sea and the choice of where and when to strike with large amphibious raiding parties. There was no possibility of a timely counter-concentration of a central reserve at the tactical level, especially on defense. This comes back to Nathan Bedford Forrest's "he who gets theah fustest with mostest." Overall numbers are irrelevant in such conditions unless you create a 'nation in arms' as was done by the Militia Act of 1792.
Like I said, Weigley's book is worthless garbage that should be collected up and pulped.