I Hear “Military Purge” and Recall Stalin
A Trump “warrior board” immediately images the Russian dictator and NKVD’s Great Purge.
In 1937, Russian dictator Joseph Stalin began what became known as The Great Purge – his extended effort to eliminate all opposition to his power.
He left this initiation to the NKVD, a combination of the Soviet interior ministry and secret police. They started with a sweep of the Communist Party and the government itself.
Next, the NKVD moved against the Red Army and Military Maritime Fleet. They began by removing three of five marshals (equivalent to four-star generals), 13 of 15 army commanders (equivalent to three-star generals), and eight of nine admirals.
Joseph Stalin, Donald Trump.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by STR/AFP/Getty Images, Drew Angerer/Getty Images.
Once the onslaught had begun, the bloodletting continued through the ranks: 50 of 57 army corps commanders, 154 out of 186 division commanders, 16 of 16 army commissars, and 25 of 28 army corps commissars.
While this made Stalin feel more secure, believing he was now being served by loyal officers, it also set up a dangerous situation for the country’s military protection: Just over three years later, Adolph Hitler and his Axis allies invaded Russia – Operation Barbarossa -- becoming the Eastern Front of World War II.
Hitler felt the Great Purge weakened the Russian military, making it easy prey. As Roy Medvedev states in his book Let History be the Judge:
Despite the fact that the combined firepower of the Red Army was greater than that of the Germans, the Purges had effectively crippled it by destroying the officer corps. This was the decisive element which persuaded Hitler to attack in 1941. At the Nuremberg trial, Marshal Keitel testified that many German generals had warned Hitler not to attack Russia, arguing that the Red Army was a formidable opponent. Rejecting these Hitler gave Keitel his main reason: “The first-class high-ranking officers were wiped out by Stalin in 1937, and the new generation cannot yet provide the brains they need.”
Historians call Operation Barbarossa the largest and most lethal land offensive in human history: some 10 million combatants were involved, resulting in over 8 million casualties by Barbarossa’s end.
Trump and the Military
In Trump’s first fascist term, he obviously looked toward the military and its former leaders as a power source for his administration. He placed ex-generals in White House executive and cabinet posts.
But once these generals got a taste of Trump’s fascism, they publicly turned on him.
It seemed to start when Trump wanted a Kremlin-style military parade. But former Marine four-star general James Mattis, then Trump’s Secretary of Defense, negated it.
By late in this year’s election, CNN had compiled a long list of former military leaders’ condemnation of Trump:
Going back as far as four years ago, Mattis provided a statement to The Atlantic magazine that “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us.”
Similarly, [retired four-star general and Trump’s former White House Chief of Staff John] Kelly told CNN’s Jake Tapper last year that Trump is “a person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.”
In [retired three-star general and Trump national security adviser H.R.] McMaster’s book, “At War with Ourselves,” a memoir of his time working at the Trump White House, McMaster wrote that in the aftermath of Trump’s 2020 electoral defeat, Trump’s “ego and love of self… drove him to abandon his oath to ‘support and defend the Constitution,’ a president’s highest obligation.”
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who revolutionized Joint Special Operations Command, the unit responsible for killing Osama bin Laden in 2011, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times three weeks ago saying he is voting for Vice President Kamala Harris because of her “character.” Unstated in his op-ed was McChrystal’s assessment of Trump, though in the past, McChrystal has said Trump is “immoral” and “dishonest.”
The leader of the bin Laden operation was Adm. Bill McRaven, who in 2020 wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post about Trump, saying, “when presidential ego and self-preservation are more important than national security — then there is nothing left to stop the triumph of evil.”
In early June 2020, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen wrote in The Atlantic that he was “sickened” to see peaceful protestors who were protesting the recent murder by police of George Floyd “forcibly and violently” removed from around the White House.
These highly negative military views of Trump seemed to have been summarized by former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, who told legendary journalist Bob Woodward in his new book “War” that Trump “is the most dangerous person to this country … A fascist to the core.”
A “Warrior Board”
So, one can see why the ego-maniacal Trump might now feel like Stalin: threatened to have any general around who doesn’t declare loyalty to him rather than the Constitution and country.
So he sees the need to create his own Great Purge in the form of a “warrior board” to review and oust active generals. Even the conservative Wall Street Journal, which has shown support for Trump, rang the alarm, recently reporting:
The Trump transition team is considering a draft executive order that establishes a “warrior board” of retired senior military personnel with the power to review three- and four-star officers and to recommend removals of any deemed unfit for leadership.
The Pentagon, of course, is responding. Military.com, an online daily report of military activities, noted four days ago:
While Pentagon officials are not willing to publicly weigh in on the emerging plans by President-elect Donald Trump to purge the military's ranks of many top officers, the Defense Department's spokeswoman says that removing a slew of admirals and generals would have serious impacts on missions and readiness.
If Congress could call the late Joseph Stalin to testify, he would probably agree. He would probably note that such action would please his successor Vladimir Putin, as well as President Xi Jinping in China, since both those countries have increased their nuclear arsenals to try and keep pace with the American buildup.
This, of course, also recalls Hitler’s point: that a purge of the military empties it of “the brains they need”. And a military in this age of expanding nuclear threats —including possible inclusion of nuclear weapons in space — had better have brains at the ready to react on a moment’s notice with responsible decisions that can save or end civilization.
Operation Barbarossa - Wikipedia
Exclusive | Trump Draft Executive Order Would Create Board to Purge Generals - WSJ
Nukes in space: a bad idea in the 1960s – an even worse one now (theconversation.com)
For more about Trump’s fascism and other vital realities, you can read my book from Parkhurst Brothers Publishers: