The Generals Gather in Silence

It starts quietly, like so much else in this country now. An order slips across the wires, sudden and absolute: every general, every admiral, every senior commander above a certain rank must be in Virginia. Not a request. A command. Rearrange your missions, reroute your flights, leave your posts. The world will wait.

And they come. Hundreds of them. Veterans of old wars, survivors of deployments that stretched decades, men and women who have buried soldiers under too many flags to count. They leave their units scattered across oceans and deserts and battlefields, and they fly home — not for strategy, not for war, but for a lecture. Less than an hour long. A performance dressed up as command.

The pretext is “ethos.” The language is “warrior.” But no one misses the point. This isn’t instruction. It’s inspection. It’s spectacle. It’s a reminder of who holds the knife.

History has patterns. Once before, entire officer corps were summoned to “hear” their leader. Not to learn, but to see who would nod, who would waver, who would hesitate. A stage built on fear, where silence was read as disloyalty and hesitation as betrayal. Generals became props in a pageant, and one by one, they vanished.

Now here we are again, watching as the stage is rebuilt. Not with torches and parades, but with travel orders and flight manifests. The cost alone runs into the millions — money ripped from real missions, real soldiers. But efficiency was never the point. Fear is the point. Waste is the point. Showing that you can drag the world’s most powerful military to your doorstep for a speech about “ethos” is the point.

And when retired officers draw the comparison, the defense secretary does not deny it. He smirks. “Cool story,” he says. Dismissing the echo, but amplifying it at the same time. Sarcasm where once there was solemn oath.

If you’ve been following, you know where this fits. After the gunfire came the spin. After the clock struck thirteen, the machine turned. After the machine turned, minds were poisoned. And now — now the generals gather in silence. Each chapter, the same story dressed in new clothes. Each time, the circle tightening a little more.

Notice the rhythm. Each shooting becomes propaganda. Each death becomes a justification. Each enemy becomes more abstract, less real, until it is anyone who refuses to mourn in the right tone, salute in the right way, repeat the right words. The machine doesn’t care about motives, or truth, or even coherence. It only cares about usefulness.

And this is useful. To gather them all, to look them in the eye, to remind them who has the power to promote and who has the power to erase. The lesson isn’t in the words of the speech. The lesson is in the silence of the room.

Ask yourself: why summon hundreds of generals when wars still rage overseas, when soldiers still bleed, when missiles still fly? Why strip commands of their leaders for a few minutes of “ethos”? Because the point isn’t war. The point is obedience. The point is reshaping the military into something leaner, more loyal, less questioning.

Once before, the world learned what happens when generals are turned into courtiers, when armies are bent toward personal power rather than public duty. Once before, silence in the face of purges became complicity. And once before, it ended in fire.

We are not there yet. But the patterns are rhyming. The language is changing. The rules are bending. The generals are gathering.

And as always, while the headlines shout about one man’s power, the violence keeps spilling elsewhere. Another shooting. Another body. Another community buried in grief while the cameras fix on spectacle. This is the machine’s genius: it makes obedience feel like patriotism, and distraction feel like duty.

It tells you the enemy is always someone else. It tells you this is normal. It tells you the clock has always struck thirteen.

But you know better.

Look closely. Listen carefully. Ask who benefits. Ask what is being built in silence, while the world looks the other way.

Because when the generals gather, history gathers with them.

This post is part of an ongoing series tracing the collapse of empathy, the erosion of truth, and the machinery of silence we’re all asked to serve. For the full arc—and why it matters now more than ever—start here with the full series overview.

Note: I reject violence in all its forms. Nothing I write here is a call to arms, or a celebration of harm. These posts are warnings, not endorsements—an attempt to trace the patterns of power and propaganda so we might break the cycle, not fuel it. My writing is rooted in grief, in clarity, and in a stubborn refusal to give in to nihilism, cruelty, anger, or resentment. My love is for all people in this world—even those who would wish me harm.