White Fight
Pete Hegseth and Identity Wars in the US Military
With a name like “Before We Were White”, it is to be expected that this blog and podcast gets noticed by “white” supremacists and “white” Christian nationalist ideologues.
Once they discern the true nature of the project (perhaps feeling they have been sneakily lured into some Leftist honeytrap) they tend to offer some parting shots before they swiftly exit.
I often find myself conflicted when trying to decide whether the people commenting from this ideological position should be ignored, muted, or simply blocked.
Ignoring no longer seems to be an option, when so many of the MAGA persuasion are now open apologists for “White Christian Nationalism”.
From the Protestant evangelical Project 2025 to the quasi-fascist, Opus Dei inflected conservative Catholicism of J. D. Vance (with two-thirds of the US Supreme Court now conservative Catholics), we are becoming encircled by a cultural movement which perceives Christianity not as simply a religion with a set of moral precepts.
American Christianity is being repurposed as a symbol for a fetishized and largely imaginary white nationalist past - a fake past which can be used to indoctrinate the present.
The childish or undeveloped mind tends to view the world through a Manichean lens, in which all is light or dark, good or evil, truth or lies, man or woman, strength or weakness, win or lose, black or white.
People who frame the world in such terms are attracted to historical narratives and epic tales of cataclysmic conflicts ending in victory, dominance and submission.
Every aspect of the self-identity of such people is coded to align with dominance or superiority.
“Christianity” must equal “God’s dominion”. “His” trampling of non-believers under “His” feet.
“Nation” must equal “earthly dominion”. The richest country. The most powerful military.
“White” must equal “racial” superiority. “Whites” must be seen as civilizationally more advanced and innately more intelligent than other “races”.
This is a mindset which loves clear hierarchies in terms of social position and gender roles.
The European Middle Ages represent a Golden Era in the minds of such people.
The “white”, northern European Christian warlord crusader stands thus as the ultimate symbol of empowered masculinity.
The right gender.
The right “race”.
The right religion.
The right social structure.
Hierarchical, authoritarian, “white” male dominance.
*****
Look closely at certain members of the police and armed forces in the USA today.
Look at the type of men lining-up to join ICE.
Look at various militia and “patriot” groups.
Look at men like current Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.
Nordic runes and other Nordic/Germanic/Crusader tattoos and symbols are everywhere.
Of course many will deny that such iconography and symbolism automatically relates to “white” Christian supremacy or any other sketchy ideology.
Maybe people who use physical force on other human beings as part of their job description simply like to identify with what they perceive as the ultimate “warrior cultures”?
Hegseth has been rather more explicit on the matter.
He has written a book called “The War on Warriors”.
While studying at Princeton, Hegseth became publisher of a conservative paper called The Princeton Tory, announcing that “As the publisher of the ‘Tory,’ I strive to defend the pillars of Western civilization against the distractions of diversity.”
By “diversity”, Hegseth has regularly made clear that this means anyone not “white”, straight, Christian, and male.
In a world where wars are being waged more and more by AI target acquisition, drones, and missiles, Pete thinks the military has become too “fey”, too “woke”, too fat, and too “girlie”.
Hegseth’s recent firing of Army Chief of Staff Randy George is said to have followed upon George’s refusal to remove a number of Black female officers from an army promotion list of new one star generals.
Leaving Hegseth aside for now, what about the many others who pretend that Northern European iconography is unrelated to racism or “white” male supremacy”?
Even if this were true in the majority of cases (which this writer doubts based on his own time in the army), it is still clearly associated with an equally creepy need to assert “white pride”.
At this point, I can imagine many of these men asking:
“And what’s wrong with ‘white pride’?
“Aren’t Black people always talking-up ‘Black pride’?”.
That question has been put to me so many times over the past decades, that I probably have scar tissue on the brain from replying.
“White” is not an ethnicity.
Black is not an ethnicity.
These are simply skin colors.
Black people have felt the need to assert pride in their skin color (not any specific ethnicity!) because for centuries, people of light skin have told them their blackness was a mark of inferiority.
I’m sure Black Americans would love nothing better than to live in a country where their achievements were taken on their own merits, without being viewed through the lens of race politics and accusations of DEI preferment.
The need to defend “Black achievement” has been forced upon them by historical exigencies.
No one of broadly European ancestry was ever systematically enslaved, lynched, belittled, disenfranchised from voting, refused a mortgage, or simply degraded due to their “whiteness”.
“White” people were sometimes enslaved as war captives.
“White” people were sometimes enslaved as “infidel Christians” by Muslim Arabs.
“White” people were transported to colonies as involuntary indentured servants.
Not for being “white”, though.
For being Scottish or Irish or a common criminal or a political enemy.
Whiteness itself has never been under attack, not once, in USA history.
It is only the weaponization of whiteness which has been attacked.
Whiteness and the weaponization thereof are patently not the same thing.
So putting it bluntly, the need to proclaim “white pride” is a bit ridiculous.
You may as well get tattoos proclaiming your deep pride in having bushy eyebrows.
“White” isn’t an ethnicity, just as red hair and freckles isn’t an ethnicity.
Even the terms “German”, “Saxon”, or “Viking” do not denote actual ethnic groups.
That’s a complicated story for another day...
*****
It is beyond laughable that anyone with deep roots in colonial-era America would use iconography associated with medieval Germanic Europe as part of their “identity” or cultural inheritance.
Scandinavian runes, Viking imagery, tattoos of St. George crosses or pathetic muscle-bound weightlifter-inflected fantasy artwork depicting Frankish crusaders, Saxon warlords, and Norman knights have precisely nothing to do with the centuries-long intermixing of hundreds of ethnicities in America.
Unless of course the intent is to equivalate Manifest Destiny with Crusader violence?
The National Socialists (Nazis) of 1920s and 1930s Germany loved this sort of thing, with composers like Richard Wagner being much admired for offering an artistic pseudo-history of ancient Germania and Scandinavia peopled by “pure”, but utterly imaginary ancient folk heroes.
Explaining the difference between the fake concept of “race”, and population groups, nationality, ethnicity, tribalism, and culture is so complicated that I started this blog and podcast.
In order to claim an “ethnicity”, surely a person should be able to demonstrate one or more things:
- immersion within a specific ethnic community’s culture, or (at the very least),
- a majority of ancestors from that claimed ethnic group
THIS WILL ALMOST NEVER BE POSSIBLE FOR LONG-TIME AMERICANS, BECAUSE THEY ARE A PROFOUNDLY MIXED PEOPLE.
I’ve shared a table below showing the number of ancestors all of us have, as we travel back through the generations.
Can any American seriously claim that half, or even a quarter, of their 8,192 eleventh great-grandparents came from one single culture or ethnic community?
“Before We Were White” offers this public challenge to any self-identified American “White Christian Nationalist” who believes they are ethnically or “racially” pure:
If at least half of your family has been in America since colonial times (pre-Revolution), prove that none of those ancestors were people of color.
You will not be able to do it.
We are almost never who we think we are, and white supremacists are almost never who they wish they were.
And when we push things back to the Middle Ages, almost no one can claim primary descent from a single ethnic group. Even if we could prove we carry a meaningful fraction of such ancestry - Norse or Norman or Saxon - it would be meaningless, because we are the product of our current culture.
There are no Franks or Vikings in Cleveland, Ohio.
There ARE Americans with serious masculinity, educational and cultural issues.
Which brings us back to the current “Secretary of War”, aka “Pete Kegsbreath“ or “The Secretary of War Crimes”, as he is called by people both inside and outside military circles.
You see, Pete Hegseth is that rare thing in America.
He really IS descended from mostly one single ethnic group.
How is this possible in The Great Melting Pot?
It’s the Johnny-Come-Lately Effect.
Virtually every single one of Hegseth’s ancestors arrived in the USA from Norway during the mid to late 19th century, mostly to escape famine there, or as simple economic migrants.
Now personally speaking, because the USA has always been a settler-colonialist project, I don’t really care if someone’s family arrived in America 400 years ago or 4 years ago.
We’re all camping on someone else’s land.
The idea today is that any and every immigrant agrees to sign onto a set of principles when seeking US citizenship.
Whether those principles are truly upheld in practice and law is another argument...
What matters is the aspiration of belonging to a nation in which certain rights are supposedly embedded in the foundational documents of that nation - a document which has been updated and amended again and again in line with the changing wishes of US citizens.
Those evolving rights are intended to apply to everyone.
EVERYONE.
At least half of my own family has been in America since the 1600s.
I have European ancestors. Indigenous ancestors. Brown ancestors. Black African ancestors.
Atheist, Muslim, Deist, Jewish, and Christian ancestors.
Pete Hegseth doesn’t get to stomp around a stage, shouting his creepy personal ethos in front of the world’s cameras as if his white nationalist vision of America applies to me, or anybody else who rejects his narrow, spooky, sub-apocalyptic worldview.
And when Hegseth tries to remove “diversity” from the armed forces, he is flying in the face of centuries of history which took place long before his Norwegian family ever set foot on American soil.
Hegseth isn’t the first white supremacist (nor will he be the last), who attempts to minimize or ignore the real people who have bled and died in America’s interminable wars.
*****
Hegseth and Trump, both racist, seem to have gravely underestimated the “warrior ethos” of Iran, a nation of 93 million mostly brown people.
Whether we are in Asia, Africa, or America, though, when states, nations, governments, insurgencies or revolutionaries are victorious in war, they invariably portray their “war heroes” in the image they want to see in the mirror.
This has always been the case in America, going right back to the very beginning of European colonization there.
Go online, and try to find any painting or writing depicting the soldiers of the Seven Years War (aka the French and Indian War in the USA).
Then try the Revolutionary War.
Judging by most written accounts and artistic renderings, it would be normal to assume both wars were fought by, well, “white folks” only.
But when governments conscript men for war, the cooks, supply workers, common infantry, etc. are invariably drawn from the underclasses.
In America, the underclasses have always been the groups most likely to include people of non-European or mixed ethnicity, and people of color.
And when conscripts actually were “white”, they too tended to be drawn from the lower social and economic classes.
As the great Steve Earle once put it so succinctly in his song Copperhead Road (about Vietnam and Appalachia) back in 1988:
“I volunteered for the army on my birthday,
they draft the white trash first around here, anyway.”
I have often pondered all of this while sitting at my keyboard these past few years.
I imagine the hapless soldiers sent by Putin to do his dirty work in Ukraine - “Russian” soldiers from a country which has “absorbed” nearly 200 ethnic groups over the centuries, in their own version of Manifest Destiny.
Buryats, Tuvans, and Dagestanis were among the first to be conscripted into service for the Russian invasion of Ukraine - the first of many minority groups drafted from within the Russian Federation.
“In Sakha Republic, there are small communities who live in rural villages. If you need medical treatment, you need to call a helicopter. They would never receive help because they are too far away. But with this mobilisation, the government flew to these villages to get men drafted.”
But back to America.
The document scan below gives a tiny indication of what we find when we read actual historical documents, instead of accepting the populist - or white supremacist - narrative.
It appears that over a century before his family immigrated to Iowa and Minnesota, the US military was a little more “diverse” than Pete Kegsbreath might realize.
Note: “King George’s War” was part of what Americans call “The French and Indian Wars”, and what the French call the “Intercolonial Wars”.
It was essentially part of a wider European conflict, the part waged on North American soil from 1740 to 1748 in Massachusetts, New York, New Hampshire, and Nova Scotia.
*****
And one final word for Hegseth and his white supremacist, Christian nationalist ilk.
Those who still insist on romanticizing the Vikings would do well to read books like “The Viking Way” by Professor Neil Price.
The nature of Scandinavian magic and religious practice during the Middle Ages is far too gruesome and depraved to include here in detail.
Widow and child sacrifice, ritual gang rape of slaves, infanticide of mostly females (leading to a male-skewed population and all the problems which come with that)…
To those inclined to say we should not measure past societies by today’s standards?
Fair enough.
But when even contemporary Arab travellers among the Vikings were utterly horrified by the things they saw in a society undergoing Christianization at the time, it might be worth wondering why...
White Christian Islamophobes who believe themselves the inheritors of a “white” Northern European medieval “bloodline” (and pathetically fetishize it) would do well to remember that during a time of savagery and yes, depravity, in the far north of Europe, the caliphates in Iberia (modern Spain and Portugal) were the main center of science and learning in wider Europe at the time.
And “White” Christian nationalists who see themselves as the inheritors of the slightly later Frankish Christian crusader class and culture - a culture which would later give its name to France?
“White” Christian US nationalists are living in cuckoo land.
Frankish warlords who formed the basis of later central European royalty are almost never the class of people whose descendants ended-up on ships to America.
The origins of far, far many more Americans are to be found among various peasants, religious extremists, indentured servants, kidnapped street urchins, mixed-ethnic coastal and river smugglers and pirates, ruthless speculators, and transported criminals (including beggars, vagrants, and prostitutes).
And almost all of these mostly underclass people intermixed at some stage with African and Indigenous American peoples, not to mention Jews, Romani Gypsies, South Asians, and a hundred other ethnic groups never mentioned under America’s racial caste categories...
These are the people highlighted on the military roster shared above.
Over the centuries, the USA could have done what every other place in the world has eventually done at one time or another.
It could have truly embraced its own special mix of people who have come together to form a brand new “ethnicity in the making”.
But no.
The artificial constructs of “race” and “racial castes” are so powerful that instead of accepting who they truly are, many Americans - especially MAGA Americans - choose to continue constructing fake identities, harking back to fake ancestry and fake history.
White supremacy is not only wicked.
It’s downright ill-informed and stupid.