|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
[Make sure to read Daniel Greenfield’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]
The motto of the United States Military Academy at West Point is “Duty, Honor, Country.” Or at least that was the motto until DEI took a red pencil to it and replaced it with three other words.
Instead of “Duty, Honor, Country”, West Point now has “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.”
In the summer of the devastating Black Lives Matter race riots, West Point, like many other parts of the military, unveiled a DEI agenda.
The DEI components included creating a DEI Fellow and a Diversity and Inclusion Studies Minor. Connecting the DEI minor to the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership elevated it beyond an ethnic studies category and made it a strong expectation for cadets looking to understand how to lead men, women and assorted ‘other’ gender identities.
Creating a DEI minor at West Point was the latest move by a woke military brass to define leadership in terms of the willingness of officers to embrace woke leftist politics. From West Point cadets to serving officers, the message is that leaders cannot lead unless they understand the different perspectives of the intersectional rainbow of race, gender and sexuality, and that they will not understand it unless they view those around them purely in terms of identity politics.
Simply, without DEI, it is impossible to be a leader and to accomplish any assigned mission.
According to West Point’s defense of its DEI minor, “first, the ability to lead in today’s Army requires an understanding of the diverse nature of American and coalition soldiers and civilians as well as the complexity of issues associated with different groups, races, ethnicities, cultures, religions, and social classes, among many other demographic factors associated with diversity.”
Is an understanding of identity politics really the first requirement of Army leadership? It is now.
Beyond the usual divisive tenets of identity politics, what does DEI in the military really mean? As West Point’s DEI minor shows, it’s impossible to be loyal to both DEI and America.
The DEI minor includes a variety of courses, among them SS392: ‘Politics-Race, Gender, Sexuality’. The course sounds typical of the political indoctrination that has come to litter college and high school courses except that this one will “consider how the contemporary issues that relate to race, gender, and sexuality apply to the Army and how they impact the Army officer.”
It’s a seminar that introduces “the concepts of race, gender, and sexuality in the American political system”, but warns that “emphasis will be placed on the inherent inequalities found within the structures, rules, and processes of the American political system.”
The course doesn’t just emphasize “inequalities”, but “inherent inequalities” that are a defining part of the structure of the nation. Potential examples would include the myth of “systemic racism” and similar conspiracy theories suggesting that America is rigged against minorities. The difference between “inequalities” and “inherent inequalities” is the difference between liberalism and Marxism, as well as the difference between equality and equity.
If America’s political system is indeed suffering from “inherent inequalities”, then the only remedy is to transform that system. That is to remake the Constitution. That treasonous proposition clashes with the Army’s oath of enlistment, which is to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic”.
Which one is West Point training its graduates to defend: the Constitution or DEI?
What does it mean to defend the Constitution and what does “Duty, Honor, Country” mean if America is defined by, as a course in the DEI minor argues, inherently unequal systems?
And what does it mean when the Army asks its future leaders to define leadership in terms that are fundamentally opposed to the Constitution and the country? Whom are Army officers meant to be loyal to, the terms of their oath or the woke politics that they are being indoctrinated with?
Gen. Mark Milley, who had come up through the Army, famously replied to a congressional question about teaching critical race theory at West Point, by arguing that, “I’ve read Mao Tse-tung. I’ve read — I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist.”
American military leaders, unlike Russian or Chinese ones, could read Marx and Lenin, but they didn’t have to accept their propositions, like the “inherent inequalities” in capitalist societies, as true. The fundamental difference with wokeness is that the military’s future leaders are obligated to at least outwardly accept treasonous leftist ideas like America’s inherent inequalities as not only true, but as the basis for their entire philosophy of leadership rooted in DEI concepts.
And those concepts are fundamentally hostile to the concept of America.
At the heart of the debate is the question of what does military leadership really look like? There are two visions of leadership: the traditional one that is grounded in personal character and the military sciences, and the other which is indistinguishable from a college bureaucrat, a social worker or an urban politician. If military leadership first means understanding every possible issue involving “races, ethnicities, cultures, religions”, then how does it even differ from them?
The Army has specific missions and objectives, but DEI is a self-licking ice cream cone. Its only mission is that of most belief systems which is to convince people to adopt them. Like self-help programs and motivational speakers, DEI embeds itself in institutions by claiming that it helps them to better accomplish their goals, but, as a recent lawsuit against West Point’s racially discriminatory admissions practices contends, there’s no evidence that it actually works.
DEI does not help institutions accomplish goals, it makes itself into the institution’s goal and precludes all other goals and the ability to accomplish them. Like a virus, DEI infects an institution and transforms its mission into DEI indoctrination. But to do that, DEI first has to convince the institution that its old objectives, like “Duty, Honor, Country” or to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” are wrong because they violate its beliefs. That is what is happening to the United States military.
That’s why “emphasis will be placed on the inherent inequalities found within the structures, rules, and processes of the American political system” in the DEI minor.
DEI is a foreign and alien creed. Its basic views and principles are hostile to those of the United States. Any institution that adopts it as a qualification for leadership is betraying the country.
When the United States Military Academy adopts it, it’s also betraying its motto and purpose.
You can either have “Duty, Honor, Country” or Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Not both. West Point has chosen DEI and by doing so its leaders have abandoned duty, honor and country.
A little over forty years ago, I was young, stupid, Airmen. One evening, drunk and stoned, as usual, I wondered about the all black barracks across the grounds, so I decided to, walk down the hallway, and have a look. I’m from a tiny poor white (98%) trash town. I’ll never forget look of hate on those peoples faces.
I guess it’s guaranteed to get worse.
Just in time for the drug riddled services from RVN. I know/knew Army officers who would not enter their own barracks for fear for personal safety.
A West Pointer ahead his time.
If you were in the military fifty years ago, you would have known better than to “have a look” at the “all black barracks…”
Whine whine whine Just go back to your Commune Soy Boy
“ If America’s political system is indeed suffering from “inherent inequalities”, then the only remedy is to transform that system”
The only way the government officials can solve it is affirmative action, think about it.
Dump equality for equity. The latter requires government sight over every aspect of life.
We’ve been living under some version of that authoritarian civil rights system since the New Deal.
On a different topic. Perhaps you can tell me the difference between tearing down statues, erasing history and the burning of books in Nazi Germany?
You forgot to include the burning of German history books by the Allies during the “Occupation”.
Good Point and government forces private companies to also take DIE action or else they withdraw contracts. We’ve been doing that in the UK for a long while now also there was a guest on Dennis Prager who said it’s one of the origins of woke. Richard Hanania Is the guy.
“I’ve read Mao Tse-tung. I’ve read — I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist.”
There’s a point. Without the capacity for critical thinking, for dissecting the logic, it may very well turn a weak-minded person into a communist.
I wish more folks didn’t have to taste every poison to understand it’s designed to kill.
About 30 years ago, a friend had to study Marx for his law degree( in uk, don’t ask why) neither of us could make any sense out of Das Kapital, we were laughing helplessly over it. No realising it was creeping up on us….
That’s a good point. I read Das Kapital once, and afterwards, I couldn’t remember most anything in it that made sense.
Then please explain the rest of his intellectual madness? When I was stationed in then West Germany in the early ’70’s I read as much as I could stand of “Mein Kampf” because I wanted to try to understand HOW Schicklgruber had bamboozled the German people into the lockstep madness which ensued. No, that didn’t make me a Nazi-lover but Milley has infused himself with that which is destroying the military and infecting West Point with this insanity.
Even in the early 1980s when I attended USMA – the BSLDepartment was called “Bull Sh!t and Lies” – obviously, nothing has changed. . . . Except now you can “major” in it.
“Leading from behind” is an example of Obama’s stringing three words together that mean nothing without adding the word what.
Leading from behind what?
Behind Biden, yes, dictating foreign and domestic policies to divide and weaken, not unite and strengthen us.
Before that, behind a shadow government at home and especially abroad during the Trump presidency.
Before that, before fame, on the campaign trail, plotting with Iran and co-conspirators behind our backs and behind all the young voters’ social media screen propaganda.
Most alarming to me was Obama’s proclaiming, “I’m the president. I can do whatever I want.”
That’s his definition of leadership. He is, HE, is Government, not with a small “g”, but with a big “G”.
Concerning his, aka Biden’s, plan for the military, the strategy ‘behind’ it seems to be to ensure defeat.
To ensure defeat, to actualize defeat of the “United” States of America, because actual defeat is the goal, an actual war must take place. US policy seems to be actively trying to bring and perpetuate devastating war on several fronts to America and to the world.
The only thing holding back the success of all this
‘behind‘-the-scenes agenda is Americans’ natural resistance to tyranny, if you believe that this resistance is somehow ingrained in the DNA of Americans.
I sure hope so. That is what makes America great.
Who doesn’t smell a rat?
The evils of Europe and Jihad have embedded themselves ‘behind’ a phoney exterior of perverted justice and sham righteousness in the government.
Americans – unlike the foreign lovers of habitual wars, invasion and never ending terror – spell government with a small “g”.
The only big “G” is in God, as in, “In God we trust”.
Thanks for a great comment & to Daniel for a great article.
I have something vulgar to say about Obama’s 3 word statement but I’ll keep it to myself
Government of, by and for the people is / was confined to the U.S. The rest of the world has lived uniformly under authoritarian rule. Attempts to mimic the U.S. always fail without the protestant Christianity that made it possible.
You and I both hope that American resistance to tyranny is still in our DNA. There are very few of us left by design. Our open border is nothing other than an invasion designed to diminish and destroy us.
Yeah, I was just reading about that last night. In ancient times authoritarian rule was the norm. At least in some places or cultures.
Without constitutional limitations, we have philosopher kings, dictators of virtue signaling an cults of personality.
We no longer have a government of the people, but a people who belong to the state.
The only question then becomes to whom the state belongs, which variety of tyranny we get and who has a front row seat to the burning of the Constitution
Well said. A concise description of the difference between a citizen and a subject.
Pathetic, considering the institution was founded to provide America with military engineers. Offering courses devoid of objective truth and chocked full of ideological pablum is disgusting.
Tragic. But also what’s happening to so many institutions founded to build America, now being retooled to destroy it.
DEI creates the racism that is required to sustain the Racism industry. Not only is its curricula racist in effect, but the reactions against it tend to reracialize people in their attitudes.
People treating people according to group traits means giving in to presumptions of racial stereotypes and characteristics..
Exactly. The only way to ensure the crisis that the radicals and racists use to seize power is to keep promoting racism.
Eric Hoffer wrote, “An active mass movement rejects the present and concentrates on the future.” The present is the Constitution, the truths of over 2 centuries of American honor, duty and country. The future is DEI, the utopian dream that following Obama and Biden promises. That is what mobilizes voters to vote for Biden. It is what leads Biden to try to tear down America with uncontrolled mass illegal immigration, destroy our energy industry, get in bed with communist, totalitarian movements that seek to destroy America as we know it, wreewck the economy, weaponize the judicial system, corrupt trusted institutions like the FBI,. The old, the present must give way to the shining utopia of DEI.
The other night, I heard a radio guest talking about the lack of military preparedness in the USA. Our warhead arsenal is something like 30 years old, almost all of our critical electronics parts come from China, even our ammunition is produced somewhere else and our supplies are low. Coupling this with the DEI nonsense and transgender fighting “men”, not to mention the insanity of open borders, gives me pause. As in, is someone deliberately trying to cancel our republic? IMO, this is how you do it.
An insidious ideology is now installed into military minds. This is after all the objective of propaganda, to plant self-destructive beliefs to undermine the enemy from within. America’s naivety is taking it all in, ‘hook, line and sinker.’
Diversity means anti-white racism. Equity means communism. Inclusion means incompetence.
“As an American military fighting force, we may be incompetent, but at least we’re nice about it.”
BTW, when I was at the Academy, our name for the BS & L Department was BS & Lies. I’m not surprised. Just all part of the precipitous decline.
Anyone who thinks America is Unfair should spend a year in some socialists nation and see what its really like
“To better accomplish their gpals” is a split infinitive.
It is perfect time to make some plans for the future and it’s time to be happy. I have read this post and if I could I want to suggest you some interesting things or advice. Perhaps you could write next articles referring to this article. I wish to read more things about it!