Posted on 01/28/2015 6:45:34 AM PST by Citizen Zed
This past weekend, American Sniper sold millions of tickets, and introduced millions of Americans to a novel turn of phrase. In an early scene set at the dinner table, Chris Kyle’s father tells him that there are three kinds of people in the world: “wolves, sheep, and sheepdogs.”
The scene is a canny invention by screenwriter Jason Hall, but he didn’t come up with that analogy. The origins of this sheepdog analogy help explain why the film has resonated with audiences. The sheepdog speech comes from Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman’s book On Combat, published in 2004. (It doesn’t appear in Kyle’s best-selling memoir, although the family and friends running Chris Kyle’s Twitter account did tweet about it in December.) Since then it has spread through military and police circles and the right-wing blogosphere. It’s proved particularly durable with gun rights groups. With the release of American Sniper, it has reached its largest audience yet.
Grossman crafted this analogy in response to 9/11 and the war in Iraq. And it’s not enough to classify the human race into these three simple categories; Grossman—and those who parrot his metaphor—are issuing a call to action to defend yourself against your enemies. In a country where innocent, unarmed, mostly black Americans keep getting killed, it’s a pernicious worldview to hold.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
Leave it to Slate to hijack the metaphor.
Hence, all the anti-America sniping from The Left about American Sniper
The sheepdog speech was standart when I entered the military under Carter. I imagine that it goes back to at least the first World War.
This is from Slate, and the girbilism there is of the Wikipedia variety. Do not ever expect them to actually read books to research anything.
Infantry men were using this analogy in the 1960s. It is not new with Lt. Col. Grossman. Slate is wrong again, surprisingly.
The Left will endlessly try to understand the wolf, sympathize with the wolf, identify and live vicariously through the wolf, and do all they can to protect the wolf. The task of the sheepdogs is very complex. They must not only defeat the wolf but it is necessary to root out their supporters.
These guys need to figure out who the ‘wolves’ are in the black community. The answer is other blacks. The sheepdogs are the police, but Slate & their ilk are dead-set on creating enmity between the sheep & the sheep dogs. To whose benefit? The wolves.
wrong. In a country where innocent black and white citizens are butchered on a daily basis by the feral urban predator class the speech is particularly appropriate.
But as long as the sheep are pacified with their free cell phones, food stamps, x-boxes, etc., they'll gladly suffer the loss of a few fellow sheep.
The problem with liberals as
Sheep dogs is that they have developed a taste for lamb...
This line of reasoning cannot be stopped until we are willing to argue that these radicals want young blacks to die in order to further their own power.
You mistake race baiting for analysis. And there is ample evidence that stupid is heritable since the morons that wrote this crap are brothers.
I was introduced to this analogy in the police academy in 1987.
Leave it to Slate to hijack and mis-represent.
Oh look...the Cummings brothers have formed their own flock of sheep.
I first heard it in 1972.
Not the speech but the analogy
This is a crock of shiite from a pencil-neck, who has likely never been in a schoolyard fight!
This is the constant meme of the left: right-wingers are fearful & paranoid.
There will come a day when we can beat our swords into plowshares; but that day has not yet come...
The sheep cannot tell the sheepdogs from the wolves. Witness the fellow attacked at the Walmart last week when a person simply spotted him carrying a holstered firearm.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.