by Dr. William L. Pierce (pictured)
The Meaning of Loyalty
AN OFTEN MADE comment by students of human behavior is that soldiers in combat do not fight for their general or their country or their god or any other impersonal entity; they fight for each other, for those with whom they are in immediate, daily contact. This comment certainly is correct for most, though not all, soldiers. Their mental horizon, normally very limited, becomes even smaller in the face of death. All abstract principles fall away, and only the most primitive instincts remain. When fear of imminent death looms large, all impersonal loyalties lose their meaning, and the individual is controlled only by his bond to his immediate fellows in the same situation. He may risk his life to protect one of his fellows, but not to comply with an order from headquarters. He would rather take a bullet in the gut than be seen as a coward or a shirker by those immediately around him, but he doesn’t really care what headquarters thinks.
All successful armies are organized with this facet of human nature in mind. The structure of the army must be such that headquarters can count on the individual soldier doing what headquarters wants him to do rather than what he is inclined to do by his instincts. That is accomplished by training and by having a well designed chain of command. The army’s noncoms are a cut above the rank and file; they have somewhat more distant horizons. They are close enough to the men in their squad or platoon to bond with them and demand loyalty from them, but they also are able to identify their interests with those of the lieutenant and the captain. And the officers must be a cut above the noncoms, with even more distant horizons. And so it goes, all the way up to headquarters.
This behavior undoubtedly is something we have inherited from our ancestors who belonged to hunting bands a million years ago. Success and survival depended on a strong bonding among the dozen or so members of the band. Because this behavior is natural, we cannot deplore it -- but, like any army, we must understand it and take it into account in planning for any objective bigger than bringing down the next wooly mammoth we encounter.
We don’t have some of the advantages that an army has. Our members are much more widely dispersed, and our organization is much less developed than any army’s, with a much more tenuous chain of command: relatively few of our members out in foxholes have any noncom to whom they can bond. Furthermore, we cannot throw people in the brig or put them up against a wall when they don’t behave the way I want them to.
