“Ten men who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent.” – Napoleon
“They must face the storm. They will have to encounter every form of unfair attack. Their motives will be misrepresented. … Every kind of attack will be made upon them by many powerful, numerous, and extremely vocal forces in this country. They are going to get it anyway. Why, then, not fight for something that will give us safety?” – Winston Churchill
In the Book of Jeremiah, Pashur, the son of Immer, ordered that the prophet Jeremiah be beaten for speaking out against the leaders of Judah who uprooted the people from the ways of God. They “walk in lies” and “strengthen the hands of evildoers,” said the prophet.
Jeremiah complained to God about being persecuted for speaking the truth. God’s answer? Paraphrasing: “Get ready. Things are about to get worse.”
They did.
And not because God willed it. It was because, morally, the people had become so backward. Affluent, but debased, as Rabbi Joseph Telushkin described it. By simply speaking the truth, Jeremiah was at war with his times.
For speaking up, Jeremiah was attacked as unpatriotic. He was thrown in prison. He was lowered down by ropes into a cistern inside a prison dungeon and plopped into layers of mud for days without food or water. Fake priests and prophets wanted him dead.
“I am in derision daily,” he cried. “Everyone mocks me.”
Things got so bad, Jeremiah cursed his birth and promised never to speak the truth again. He lied.
“His word was in my heart like a burning fire shut up in my bones,” he said. “I am worn out trying to hold it in. I can’t do it!”
So Jeremiah faced every storm and lived to see his predictions come true. While his words and warnings have survived for over two millennia, his tormentors are only remembered as their lives touched his.
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We’re living in Jeremiah-like times. America is upside down. Morally backward. People who speak the truth are increasingly at war with the times. With so much speech-suppressing and “walking in lies,” (i.e., Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee declared, Wednesday, that the border is “sovereign and secure”), we’re starting to feel like Jeremiah – with the truth “shut up in our bones” and it’s wearing us out to hold it in.
That’s what happened to Lt.Col. Stuart Scheller. He’s no prophet. But he’s a man of honor who lacks the skill of “walking in lies.” When Biden and his generals botched the Afghanistan evacuation, the truth of the matter burned in Scheller’s bones. How do we know? Because after being mocked, ridiculed, labeled as unpatriotic, stripped of command, and facing imprisonment – he couldn’t keep quiet.
In backward times, it’s what we all must do.
Life would’ve been simpler if Scheller had remained silent. He could’ve kept his command, his reputation, his retirement, and his freedom. But he traded it all in and decided to keep his soul.
“The system forces us to give small pieces of ourselves so that we can continue playing,” Scheller wrote. “We willingly give up these pieces believing it will lead to a place within the system where we eventually ‘influence real change.’ The problem is that, over time, those small pieces add up to significant moral, spiritual, mental, and physical changes. The system changes people, and they don’t even realize it.”
Scheller struggled with a Faustian bargain. The pullout was a catastrophe. Desperate Afghans descended to their deaths from ascending C-17 aircraft. The debacle led to a suicide attack that killed about 170 people and wounded 150. Taliban butchers called the shots. Biden and Blinken “trusted” them. Americans were left behind.
No one was held accountable.
At every step, high-level military brass whistled alongside their commander-in-chief as, for days, he rushed the pullout to steal a moment of glory on Sept. 11. When it became clear that ending the war wouldn’t bring that glory, Biden crawled down the smoldering rubble, dusted himself off, and shuffled off to look for it elsewhere as if he never noticed the blood on his hands.
We were all enraged. But Scheller, an infantry officer two ranks below general, had lived in the war’s orbit in all but three of its 20 years. The truth of the war was in his bones. This “evacuation” was a catastrophe of biblical proportions. It delegitimized his bosses – unless they owned up to the fiasco.
So he skipped the chain of command and spoke directly to the top brass on social media. An extraordinary act justified by an extraordinary event. This was an emergency.
“Did any of you throw your rank on the table and say, ‘Hey, it’s a bad idea to evacuate Bagram Airfield, a strategic airbase, before we evacuate everyone?’” Scheller asked. “Did anyone do that? … I demand accountability.”
Who can blame him? What if he’d gone by the book?
At Wednesday’s House Armed Services Committee hearing, an exchange between Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and Gen. Kenneth McKenzie gives you an idea.
Gallego: “Servicemembers that have served for decades in and out of Afghanistan … were always telling me something extremely different than I was getting from reports from many of you generals. That the Afghan Army was not ready; that they were not going to be sustainable on their own. How did we miss that? How is it that an 18, 19-year-old … E-5s were predicting this, but yet some of our greatest minds … absolutely missed this?”
McKenzie: “We’ll have to take a look at how we actually, uh, remain connected to the people who are down at the advisory level. … It’s harder to get the truth as you become more senior. We perhaps need to look at ways that they could be conveyed in a more rapid and effective way.”
Well, that’s what Scheller did, and he was fired, given a mental evaluation, thrown in the brig, and according to his mother, “They’re trying to bury our son.”
Scheller is no Jeremiah, but he did make a prediction.
“Everyone is scared that the weight of the system is crashing down on me,” he wrote. “But I know something you don’t … it’s the system that’s going to break. … At the end of the day, if I stand with accountability and integrity, the system can’t beat me.”
In a backwards America where heroes like this can be thrown into jail willy-nilly, but monuments are erected to the George Floyds of the world, may this prediction go from Scheller’s pen to God’s ear.
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