Ralph Peters Quotes

We have moved from an age in which government leaders sought to do what was best for the people to one in which the political leadership is convinced it knows what is best for the people, whether they like it or not.

To study what men have done is to see ourselves as we are: History's mirror disintegrates our makeup. With its casualty lists, litany of atrocities, and suggestions that heroism, too, may require violence, history shows us "the skull beneath the skin." And no matter how firmly we shut our eyes, the skull will still be there.

Europeans have enjoyed a comfy ride for the last sixty years–but the very fact that they don't want it to stop increases their rage and sense of being besieged by Muslim minorities they've long refused to assimilate (and which no longer want to assimilate).

We [Americans] choose not to understand the world on terms other than our own.

Muslims are hardly welcome to pick up the trash on Europe's playgrounds. Don't let Europe's current round of playing pacifist dress up fool you: This is the continent that perfected genocide and ethnic cleansing, the happy-go-lucky slice of humanity that brought us such recent hits as the Holocaust and Srebenica.

Faced with opponents who sacrifice the innocent to their god, our generals study atheist guerrillas. To cope with fanatical killers with global ambitions, we turn to courts of law intended for common criminals. Pirates terrorize shipping lanes, while we wring our hands over their legal status. And all parties on the Potomac still insist that stability can be assured by supporting tyrants and that infernally corrupt governments are bound to reform if only we treat them respectfully. We mouth admirable principles for which we won't lift a finger. If we must be hypocrites, we should at least apply some intelligence to the task.

Europeans have just been better organized for genocide... Far from enjoying the prospect of taking over Europe by having babies, Europe’s Muslims are living on borrowed time...

Rud Hayes watched his division dissolve. What little he could see of it, anyway. He had just assured Kitching, an insolent young colonel newly attached, that his men would hold against any Reb assault, when thousands of screaming Johnnies had burst from the fog behind his left flank. Stunned, the one brigade he had managed to get into line buckled, then broke and disintegrated. Now he rode among swirls of air made visible, alternately ordering and begging his men to rally. Of all the brave soldiers he had led through three years of battles, few heeded him now.

We [the U.S.] think nothing…of attempting to inflict upon other peoples forms of government ill-tailored to their needs.

When I mentioned my decision to retire, it surprised everyone. The immediate advice from peers was that I should stay on for at least two years from the date of my promotion, since that was the minimum period of service-in-grade required, with a waiver, to qualify for a lieutenant-colonel's retirement pay. It showed how little they knew me: the notion that I would hang on for an additional year, counting down the days, just to collect a few hundred dollars more each month offended me. For the rest of my life, I'll be paid as a retired major, and I have never wished it otherwise.
The Army was good to me even then, and the chain of command asked what it would take to make me change my mind and stay in uniform. I didn't even consider the offer. Once you make up your mind on so weighty an issue, you stick by your decision. And had I said, "Oh, assign me to X and I'll hang around," it would have seemed as if the whole fuss had been a bit of theater to get whatever I wanted. I had always served with dignity, if sometimes obstreperously, and I intended to leave on my own terms.
Three and a half years later, on the morning of September 11, 2001, I did regret retiring from the Army. But my fate lay elsewhere.

They moved up between black trees, trip-me stumps, and small boulders. Everything in this world seemed disordered, messed up. Crazy people. Who started all this. For what? The nuclear blast hadn't reached his hood in East L.A. But the radiation did. He'd been on Okinawa. His family had been home. Now the Jihadis were going to get their shit handed to them.

Here I must inject a personal note—I never shed blood upon the field of Sidwell Friends, nor did I fight the battles of Yale Law. I am a miner's son, and my father was a self-made man who unmade himself during my youth. Education was not a family legacy, and my kin belonged to the United Mine Workers of America, not to Skull and Bones. My forebears fought this country's wars from the bottom ranks, and I began my own military career as a private. I have felt the full arrogance of those to whom much was given, and personally, wish that I might come to bury the elite, not to praise them. Yet, those who would rise need examples to emulate. It grates on me to write it, but our military needs a return of the nation's elite to the officer corps, to the extent that a traditional elite, with its spotty but essential ideals of service, still exists.

"This is Ladoga Five. I have a special artillery vehicle with me. I can use the long-range set, if necessary." "Good. Get your vehicles on the road. And whatever you do, keep moving. We will all be behind you."
The gravity in his commander's voice, and his simple choice of words, moved Bezarin. He switched over to his battalion radio net, anxious to send out the words that would set them all in motion. He knew that his tanks needed more time to resupply, that the stray vehicles had not been sufficiently integrated into the grouping to do much beyond merely following the vehicle to their immediate front. But he knew that now, with a great hole punched through the last line of the enemy's defense, there time was the dominant factor. He felt simultaneously elated and half-wild with small, cloying frustrations. He worked his radio in a fierce, uncompromising voice that had matured in the space of a morning. Major Bezarin wanted to move.

When Europeans feel sufficiently provoked and threatened–a few serious terrorist attacks could do it–Europe's Muslims will be lucky just to be deported...

In the sour air of his tent, Meade viewed himself with an engineer's cold eye: too dark of thought, too dour, a man alert to the smell of sulfur, but not to Heaven's scent. His wife was a proud, loyal woman, of good family. He could hear Margaret teasing. "George, I know you can smile!" She had got him a brigadier's rank at the start of the war, when his merits had not sufficed. He would have to do his best for her. And for the Union, of course. Major General George Gordon Meade had been happiest building lighthouses.