Soldiers prepared for attack. Photo courtesy Pexels/Asim Alnamat.
After the last few years of increasing progressive radicalism, Americans are finally seeing pushback from Congress over the wokeness permeating too much of the US military under the Biden Administration. For decades, the military had been perceived by the American people as the epitome of successful racial integration in the nation’s ultimate meritocracy. It had the highest levels of trust in society, but now seeing that trust plummet.
I saw the good times growing up in a military family in successfully integrated military communities in the 1970s and 80s. When I was commissioned in the Army in 1990, the highest-ranking military officer was African-American General Colin Powell. Nobody within the military gave Colin Powell’s promotion to Chairman much thought, as he had clearly earned it and his race didn’t matter. Yet despite the decades of success, Progressives decided to push divisive woke concepts on the troops. Ironically, the reaction of the Left in the pushback has been to hypocritically claim conservatives were driving a “wedge” issue. The truth is that the woke movement, using DEI as a tool, is attempting to “fix” a perceived injustice with its “virtuous” vengeful injustice to utter failure.
First, it is important to note that the ideas of the woke movement are quite distinct from that of the traditional and successful Civil Rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The following is what Dr. King thought about the importance of the Christian ideal of forgiveness and the vision of unity within a color blind society which runs counter to modern DEI: “He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power of love… We can never say, ‘I will forgive you, but I won’t have anything further to do with you.’ Forgiveness means reconciliation, and coming together again.”
King’s famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” used the Book of Daniel to justify the use of non-violent civil disobedience as the tactic of the Civil Rights movement and yet still stressed the vision of coming to unity under a color blind society. Ironically, King’s dream of his children being judged on the content of their character, rather than the color of their skin, is derided by the woke movement who deem “colorblindness” to be a term of the oppressor and something only racists advocate.
Nigerian writer and journalist Ola Oyenuga has provided prescient observations of the woke movement from a non-Western perspective. He makes the point that when cutting through all the confusing and contradictory gnostic-like language, it comes down to simple revenge: “the philosophies/principles of “equity”… promoted within this movement (including but not limited to Critical Race Theory) are often empirically and morally incoherent, involving unproductive and/or paradoxical practices such as discrimination of individuals based on skin color, the judgement of individuals for the sins of their predecessors, and partial application of law and policy based on racial identity. Essentially, attempting to fix injustice with injustice.”
Equity in a civil law means fairness and justice to individuals based on present wrongs being rectified. Equity in the context of the woke movement means group outcome, including a group outcome making up for “historic” disproportionate outcomes. The revenge of Injustice to correct injustice.
It is not coincidence that as Christianity (and the Christian ethics used by King) has declined, it is being replaced by the poor woke substitute which discards Christianity’s emphasis on the individual and forgiveness. Professor Alan Jacobs has written insightfully about the correlation of the decline and Christianity in the West and the rise of the woke movement as an unforgiving moralistic replacement: “When a society rejects the Christian account of who we are, it doesn’t become less moralistic but far more so, because it retains an inchoate sense of justice but has no means of offering and receiving forgiveness. The great moral crisis of our time is not, as many of my fellow Christians believe, sexual licentiousness, but rather vindictiveness. Social media serve as crack for moralists: there’s no high like the high you get from punishing malefactors. But like every addiction, this one suffers from the inexorable law of diminishing returns. The mania for punishment will therefore get worse before it gets better.”
Author and Marxist critic James Lindsay has described the extent of vindictiveness and moral superiority of the woke movement as replacement religion, and explains how it marginalizes the other side into virtual sub human status: “the Critical Social Justice view sees (the other side as) utterly morally reprehensible…. They are ‘literal’ Nazis”… (its) views are not even to be tolerated.
The woke movement must be purged from the military. It is doomed to failure with its emphasis on division and revenge. It destroys the environment so many of us cherished when men like Colin Powell rose to the top within the respected colorblind meritocracy. Progressives brought this “wedge” of wokism to the armed forces, and it’s time to purge it and get back to what works.
Bill Connor is an Orangeburg, S.C. attorney, Army Infantry Colonel and author of the book “Articles from War.” The Standard newspaper is available in print and online. You may find videos available on at TheStandardSC on Rumble. The bulk of TheStandardSC video media channel has been censored by dominant social media groups like YouTube. YouTube, owed by Alphabet (Google), removed and destroyed almost all of our video work without permission or remuneration. That has stopped all potential donations from our many supporters on that venue. If you want to continue to see independent thought and reports please “like”, comment, share with a friend, and donate to support The Standard on this page to assure the continued availability of news that is ignored too often by the dominant media.
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