meta questions --- when he was terrorizing black people, as such white bastards tend to do, and blocking civil rights, what was going through his head beyond just following orders? was he only doing what he was told, or did he actually BELIEVE in what he was doing? was he indifferent to white supremacy, or did he actively agree with it? does he look back on that period as wrong, or does he still defend it? would you ever write a piece of him reflecting on his actions, other than like what we see in the show where everything is a JOKE, as such is typical of white writers?
@sistrsage
when he was terrorizing black people, blocking civil rights, what was going through his head beyond just following orders? was he only doing what he was told, or did he actually BELIEVE in what he was doing? was he indifferent to white supremacy, or did he actively agree with it?
he wasn’t sitting there parsing ideology in an academic sense, and he wasn’t some empty vessel either. what he had was a fully internalized hierarchy that he never questioned, because everything in his life rewarded him for staying inside it.
the story of his family being italian assimilationists is relevant because it's the social current he was molded by it: groups that weren’t originally treated as fully “white” earned their place by leaning into the existing order. proximity to power came from proving you belonged on the right side of that line. ben grows up inside that finished product, a wealthy "white" boy that never knew a day of struggle in poverty. by the time he’s active, “american” already means a very specific thing—patriotic, anti-communist, obedient to u.s. authority (pre-military enlistment and imprisonment, because he was an active member of the PATRIARCA mafia), and comfortable with racial separation as the baseline of society. it was a normalized function of american society. he didn't know any other society but america, so to him, it was simply how the world worked.
so when he’s deployed against civil rights protestors, he doesn't recognize them as civilians with a legitimate claim. social norms and the militarization of his psyche engineered him into an actualized 'apparatus' for the will of empire: that depends on seeing civilian protesters as disruptors, their presence a weed for instability—something that needs to be cut out before it spreads. the state doesn’t have to convince him very hard, because his entire identity is already tied to being the one who restores order. give a man like soldier boy a target, and he fills in the justification himself.
abroad, that conditioning gets reinforced. every operation runs on the same logic—there is an american interest, there is a threat to it, and your job is to remove that threat by any means necessary. it doesn’t matter if that’s a village, a protest, or a political movement. the setting changes, the mission doesn't. by the time he’s back on domestic soil, there’s no real distinction left between “enemy combatant” and “people in the street.” he process it all through the same lens: are they aligned with the system he's supposed to represent or not.
that said, there's a difference in how he experiences those assignments. abroad, there's a sense of scale of the magnitude of what's he purposed to carrying out, because he know wherever he's being deployed matters. domestically, this narrows, as it becomes repetitive and less like war, and more like meatless law enforcement, snorkeling whatever hogshit they assigned him.
it didn't help that black-americans had often depicted him as a eagle-pig hybrid in their newspapers—thanks to renowned artists like emory douglas—in the 60s when the black panthers were active. those publications had readership across large cities within the united states and international waters. despite the government's and vought's attempts, the circulation of those newspapers continued until the violent dissolution of the party of the 1980s. illustrations of him as a natural antagonist of the people didn't sit right with him—not because he questions the morality of it, but because it added to the sentiment of him feeling smaller than what he thinks he’s built for. he doesn’t articulate his grievances. he doesn’t even consciously frame it that way. but it shows up in how he carries himself over time.
that’s where the drinking, the drugs, the constant indulgence start to make more sense because we know as time progressed he worsened and became a volatile product. he’s not or wasn't coping in a reflective way; he was dulling the gap between what he believes he is and what he’s actually being used for. the more that gap widens, the more unbearable he becomes to be around. the abuse, the volatility, the need to assert himself with any and everybody he comes across. it's tied to the work. he's a man who believes he should stand above everything, increasingly used in ways that feel like dull maintenance instead of dominance as a super being.
the criticism gets under his skin for the same reason. t interferes with the image he has of himself. mother’s milk’s family is the best example of what happens when that pressure point gets antagonized. when marvin's father starts exposing vought's operations, including soldier boy’s involvement, to ben, it's not about the truth coming to light. it's about direct threats being slung to the version of himself vought designed for him and protected for decades. the order to eliminate him isn’t complicated for ben. there's no moral quandary. he accepts it without hesitation, because removing the problem restores the image. the escalation to wiping out the family follows that same line of thinking. no loose ends. the u.s. wartime logic isn’t a new application to him; it’s the same methodologies applied everywhere else he had been deployd (e.g. africa, vietnam, nicaragua, cuba, brazil, dominican republic, etc). the milk family didn't become targets because they were black, but because they made themselves out to be.
author's note: during COINTELPRO operations black people—not "black extremists" but the community itself—was under hyper surveillance as they were considered a threat to national security. mom & dad black bookstores, black programs, black college groups, any and everybody. FBI agents dedicated time and resources illustrated intense racialized thought when investigating local papers, looking for any kind of racial incidents, and immediately putting it under investigation, if found. former special agent robert wall in the washington, d.c. recounted that " the appalling racism of the FBI on every level became glaringly apparent to me. it seemed as if every dissident black man was a candidate for investigation. " the history domestic counterintelligence practices shows us that the men of the milk family—a black harlem family that were active dissidents during a tumultuous time when there were great tensions with black political "terrorists" at the time, i.e. the black liberation army—would come find themselves primary targets for lethal forms of suppression.
soldier boy's narcissism locks it in. once he understands himself as the standard—america’s shield, america’s will made indestructible flesh—then anyone opposing him automatically falls into the wrong category automatically. he doesn’t need a fully articulated belief in white supremacy to act in ways that uphold it. he already believes he stands at the top of the order, and that the order itself is correct. that belief produces the same outcomes. the violence doesn’t come from any notion that might cause confusion; it comes from being self-assured and standing in his purpose.
does he look back on that period as wrong, or does he still defend it? would you ever write a piece of him reflecting on his actions?
he doesn’t revisit any of this later, either. he doesn’t go back and ask whether those people were right, or whether he misrepresented himself. the fact that he acted no better than an agent of nazism, zionism, or americanism [ author's note: america is inherently anti-black. it's no more appalling as the aforementioned ] and aligned with systems built on racial domination doesn't weigh heavily in his consciousness, because he wasn't raised to question the ground he stood on. his thinking was shaped early and reinforced constantly—through family, through vought, through the military—and it never required him to look inward. so his mind could never had gravitated there for proper self-interrogation. he doesn’t and hadn't re-evaluated the premise of the objectives he was given, and wouldn't even know the first step to approaching philosophical tenets that could break him from the mold he was raised to work with or taught to follow.
instead, he goes with the narrative vought constructed time and time again to protect him and blames the people who stepped out of line. the betrayal from payback shows that he has a tracked history of this: he doesn’t rethink who they were to him. as far as he was concerned they were defective as supes, as people, and as a team, and moves on to punishment.
if you asked him about that period now, you wouldn’t get remorse. you’d get the simplest form of justification: they were causing problems, and he stopped them. if he’s pressed and cornered, maybe he shrugs it off as politics he doesn’t care about, as it's never been his wheelhouse, but the core of the problem doesn’t change. he still sees himself as the one who handled what needed handling.
the answer to this is that he followed orders because those orders matched what he already believed about the world he was raised in. the difference is that over time, being used in that way—especially at home—wore at him in ways he never examined, and instead of confronting that, he buried it under everything else.
resources
SPYING ON AMERICA: THE FBI'S DOMESTIC COUNTERINGELLIGENCE PROGRAM BY JAMES KIRKPATRICK DAVIS
