Critics of White House Chief of Staff John Kelly’s speech Thursday are now taking the fight to illogical extremes.
Kelly’s statements at a White House press briefing on military service members killed in action were disturbingly totalitarian in nature and reminiscent of the language of a military coup, journalist Masha Gessen claimed Friday in a piece in The New Yorker. The author suggested Kelly’s praise of fallen soldiers reflected that of regimes like the Soviet Union that encouraged people to die for their countries on the battlefield.
Kelly called the brave men and women who have given their lives in service of the country “the very best this country produces,” adding that they “volunteer to protect the country,” even though “selfless service” is not required. Kelly often walks among the finest in America at Arlington National Cemetery.
The decision by Kelly, who lost a son in Afghanistan and men under his command, to refer to fallen soldiers as “the best” Americans struck a nerve with Gessen, triggering the following response.
“It is in totalitarian societies, which demand complete mobilization, that dying for one’s country becomes the ultimate badge of honor,” Gessen wrote in her article. “Growing up in the Soviet Union, I learned the names of ordinary soldiers who threw their bodies onto enemy tanks, becoming literal cannon fodder. All of us children had to aspire to the feat of martyrdom.”
There is no indication that Kelly was openly encouraging U.S. service members to die in combat; rather, he appeared to honor those who sacrificed themselves for the U.S., just as countless others — including former President Barack Obama — have done.
“The Americans who rest here and their families represent the best of us,” Obama said at Arlington on Memorial Day last year. “They ask of us today only one thing in return: that we remember them.” The former president’s words are the same as those of Kelly.
The New Yorker article equated the Trump administration’s decision to allow a career military professional to explain to reporters how he consulted the president on a military matter with signs of a military coup. The administration suggested that misleading reports prompted bringing out Kelly to clear up prevailing misconceptions.
Yet somehow, in ways not made abundantly clear in the article, the retired Marine Corps general’s words hinted at what a military coup might look like in America, according to the article.
The author of the piece, an outspoken critic of the president and his administration, provides no solid examples of similar military coups to support her argument.
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