The Magazine for Mercenaries Enters Polite Society | Hacker News Reader

The Magazine for Mercenaries Enters Polite Society

newyorker.com

35 pointsmitchbob24 comments

Article doesn’t have much content, instead here are links to the actual old magazines:

https://archive.org/details/soldieroffortunemagazine

It’s particularly annoying that the article focused on American elections, which basically had nothing to do with SOF magazine. Especially when PMCs have become so widespread in the last few decades, and the modern mercenary’s role in recent conflicts. But I guess the “new” magazine isn’t really intended to cover that industry.

The problem with that is, like the Panama papers, accurate reporting on this kind of thing is personally risky, while pandering to fantasists is harmless (to the author) and taking money from propagandists is extremely lucrative.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne_Caruana_Galizia vs, say, Tim Pool.

The picture on page 23 is.....something. Also it's fascinating to read about the process to apply for work with security forces in Rhodesia, definitely....unique.

That page (25 in the PDF) is quite gruesome, depicting a close up of a body.

Just as a heads-up to anyone sensitive to reading such things, some of the articles in the old SoFs use a lot of slurs and are pretty racist.

It's a web site for wannabees. There are real sites for this industry.[1] Solder of Fortune is not one of them.

[1] https://silentprofessionals.org/job_category/military-contra...

12x IT jobs - Database with clearance, Malware sweeps, etc.

On mainland USofA security guard for cash (Vegas) ~ $50K /annum, Vs personal security guard for "individual" ~ $150K /annum

I confess to having bought a few copies. The politics of change interest me, and SoF had tradecraft and after-action reports. But at some point SoF shifted more into weapon fetishism - no longer interesting.

In the UK this magazine was seen as for losers. It's essentially the precursor to mallninja culture. It's proxy LARPing

'Walts' is the term used in Blighty by our armed forces for a sad case masquerading as a heroic soldier...

Short for Walter Mitty; i.e. a fantasist

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Mitty

https://archive.ph/ZNpVv

We can laugh at the people cosplaying as mercenaries, but Soldier of Fortune pushed a dangerous ideology. There were lots of disaffected American soliders with nothing to do after the Vietnam War ended who went to go fight in Africa for white supremacist states. Soldier of Fortune was at the heart of that.

https://jacobin.com/2018/06/american-soldiers-rhodesia-angol...

Absolutely. Not suggesting there’s anything funny about it, but my point is that the magazine’s allure in areas outside of those Vietnam soldiers was piggybacking a broader popular culture depiction of mercanaries that - however untrue at the time - was itself very different than what one thinks of today when thinking of survivalism.

Sounds like an advertisement for a magazine that’s been removed polite society in the past few decades to me.

Are there still magazines like this? I'm surprised it would be possible to legally publish this.

I find it hilarious that boomers used to hire assassins from a magazine and that was more successful than the "darkweb hitmen" today.

What about it do you think would be illegal, given that, according to the article "The gun-for-hire ads were discontinued in 1986".

These kind of topics always differentiate into two sub-discussions. One about the idealized, democratic, cultured world order on top and how such things shouldn't even exist.

The other about the very real-politics that make it necessary and the other ugly old world things luking out there (land-empires, genocidal cultures etc.) that very much make the existence of special circumstances necessary. Ever since iraq- the idealists have lost ground, as usas influence in the world unravels.

The funny thing is the inter-depedence. As in- when there side looses, the loosing side gets clingy to the other side.

After Oslo has fallen apart, all thats left is some old-men talking really loud to convince themselves and everyone that the world they made is real and permanent, hysterically clinging to falcons and mercenaries.

Well, you could argue the 'necessary'. At least based on wikipedia, it seems like the Soldier of Fortune 'mercenaries' were fairly ineffectual at least in the major conflicts they were involved in (or in some cases were never actually involved at all in).

This.secret service agents, commandos, sof, they all do not make a dent in the final count down of things.ideologies and memes do. The whole idea that they do is a con game spread by conartists.

I had a high school friend whose dad subscribed or collected issues. As a childhood fan of Rambo and Metal Gear Solid, I have to admit there was a certain allure to the idea of a trade rag for mercenaries. I imagined there might actually be a mostly amoral gun for hire whose only peorgative is to get enough cash to pay for his disenfranchised daughters college fund as a way to find his way back into her good graces after a divorce. The guy can rebuild a sniper rifle from scratch but forgot his wife’s birthday. Etc. The movie writes itself.

However the Persian Gulf war and Blackwater demonstrated that the reality of soldiers of fortune is likely more mercantile and corporate than it is mercenary and curmudgeon.

And more recently the reality of so-called soldiers of fortune are Jan 6 Doughnut Militia LARPers.

At least the 80a fictionalized version of the solider of fortune ideal was some kind of curmudgeoningly politic-neutral stasis, with short term cash as the only North Star, which made survivalism a more interesting and inviting idea. Nowaways engagement with the idea of survivalism is a quick red pill deep end dive into the rabbit hole of alt right wacko conspiracy theories.

I don’t have a point except to say that the allure of the illusion of the solider of fortune magazine is way more interesting than the reality. Maybe that was always true, but it seems like getting back to that ideal, such as it was, is a hard turn from politics - and yet everything seems infused with politics these days.

> At least the 80a fictionalized version of the solider of fortune ideal was some kind of curmudgeoningly politic-neutral stasis, with short term cash as the only North Star

I mean, this magazine was never that.

> Brown [founder] worked closely with the chief recruiting officer of the Rhodesian Army, Major Nick Lamprecht, on using Soldier of Fortune to recruit white American men for the Rhodesian Army. Lamprecht wrote in an article in Soldier of Fortune urging white American men to come to fight for Rhodesia, writing that: "Rhodesia has many things to offer. Good Rhodesian beer, a friendly populace, and what I would describe as a free and easy, unhurried way of life, lots of wide open spaces"

Generally, back in the day, they seem to have taken a strong neo-colonial/anti-decolonisation line; no idea what they're at now. But, politically neutral, not so much.

I didn’t capitalize or italicize the phrase so I can understand the confusion, but in that sentence I was referring to the ideal from which the magazine clearly benefited. And in that case, the ideal, not the magazine, I’d argue that the fictionalized ideal was definitely depicted as some kind of apolitical, down on his luck, “good guy.” Essentially an evolution of the lone range cowboy gun for hire.

I haven’t read this yet but the abstract of this article at least seems to also suggest that characterization is correct, though of course totally fictional: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358238712_Mercenari...

It’s that ideal I’d suggest that made reading the magazine rather fun as a kid, the geopolitics lost on me.

> By 1976, Soldier of Fortune was selling 120,000 copies per month, making it into one of the most popular American magazines of the 1970s. Soldier of Fortune was ostensibly intended for mercenaries and "professional adventurers", but Brown admitted that the majority of the readers of Soldier of Fortune were the "Walter Mitty market", referring to weak, insecure men who merely fantasized about being macho mercenaries.

(From the Wikipedia article.)

Yeah, this seems like about what one would expect.

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