Is There A Military Double Standard For Whites?

I have been receiving e-mails occasionally from readers in the armed services who are concerned about the increasing influence of wokeness on military culture. This one arrived this week, and is typical:

I am a [age] white man with [number] kids and an Active Duty [service branch] Officer stationed in [base].  The bombardment against White America has been relentless since 2008.  My wife, family and friends, who are white, all express the same frustrations of racial libel when none of us are racist.  I would even add my coworkers, who are black and conservative-leaning, recognize the hypocrisy as well.  If the double standard was bad in 2018 when the article was written, it has taken on gargantuan proportions in 2020/2021.I recently attended a mandatory “Diversity, Inclusion, and Extremism” training and was struck by the timing of the order to receive this training.  While the world watched BLM burn down our cities and make attempts to erase our history, the DOD was essentially silent.  In fact, we received correspondence addressing the need to be even more tolerant, accepting, and inclusive. No “extremism” training was mandated at that time.Following the riots at the Capital building, the DOD apparently had deemed that occasion sufficiently “extreme” as to direct training and further indoctrination.  For the record, I do not, in any way, condone the breach of the Capital.  But it paled in comparison to the loss of life and property perpetuated by the BLM and ANTIFA mobs.During that training, we were asked to express our thoughts about inclusiveness and I remained silent, fearful that any comment I made about how I feel as a white person would be perceived as me being “out of touch,” “suffering from white privilege,” or worse “racist.”We were assured it was a “safe place” but I remained silent, believing there is no safe place for a white man to express his views about the disgusting double standard I must constantly swallow, or how I am to address this double standard with my children in order to prepare them for the work they are entering.Because I am Active Duty, I ask that my name not be included in any correspondence or writings you do in the future.  Anonymity is a new normal I fear I must get used to for the foreseeable future.

This story from Task & Purpose is about the military deciding that it needs to crack down on white supremacy and other forms of radical right extremism in the ranks. If the military is finding things like this among its personnel, then of course it has to fight them, no doubt about it. But how? To what extent is the military’s training using Critical Race Theory and adjacent categories? I completely understand this officer’s unwillingness to say anything in this training. I’ve been through these sorts of things in corporate America, and you would have to be a fool to say what you really think, no matter how benign, if it in any way contradicts the official narrative.If the armed forces become racially conscious in the same way institutions in civilian society are becoming, what does that do to cohesion? If white service members believe that the US Armed Forces considers them all to be racist by virtue of their skin color, and/or in need to being held to a double standard because of their race, why would they want to stay in the service? Why would any white person want to join?Last December, I published in this space a letter from a reader talking about this issue. Here it is again:

A few weeks ago, you mentioned a Twitter contrasting the styles of a Chinese military propaganda video and a U.S. Army recruiting advertisement.

Well, Tucker Carlson addressed the elephant in the room. His entire monologue is worth watching, but below are the key points:

What are the consequences of this kind of thinking? Over time, identity politics will destroy our country. No nation can remain unified for long if people are encouraged to think of themselves as members of competing ethnic groups first and citizens second. Countries need a reason to hang together; unity doesn’t happen by accident. The fixation on race that has seized our leadership class guarantees permanent disunity. It’s terrifying if you think about it, but it could be much worse.

The hatred for Tucker Carlson is mystifying. Is it because he’s really a spiteful demagogue? Or is it, I think, because he’s willing to point out distressing, yet blatantly obvious truths about our world? The fact is, America’s already at the stage described by Carlson, it’s just that most people are in denial. I love what he said about needing reason to hang together, because it’s so true. This country can remain a nation only so long as the number of people who think it’s worth fighting for and, if necessary, dying or killing for, outnumber those who either don’t care one way or the other or seek to dismantle and “transform” it.

[Carlson:] The U.S. military, for the record, has a very long history of treating everyone with respect and dignity because it was a meritocracy and a meritocracy is designed to treat people with respect and dignity on the basis of how they behave, not on the basis of how they look.

I’ll push back on this slightly, because the military is far from a perfect institution. It didn’t always treat everyone with respect and dignity and it still fails to do so today. However, it’s probably done as good a job as any institution out there could’ve done. This is beyond the scope of what we’re talking about here, but the U.S. military is somewhat unusual in its development compared to the professional militaries of say, Europe. But, I can attest from personal experience, that the military is by-and-large a meritocracy and that veterans themselves are largely proud of their service and say that it’s given them a leg up on life.

Part of the reason why the U.S. military is imperfect, however, is that it’s increasingly become a battlefield for the culture wars. Conventional wisdom holds that the U.S. military is often at the forefront of social change in this country and, in many ways, it’s true – Blacks and other racial minorities achieved equality in the services long before they achieved true equality in society. Unfortunately, this has translated into more radically-inclined forces into using the military almost exclusively as a vehicle for social change. I say exclusively, because they’re not in the least bit willing to entertain any other points of view or consider that the military may not be the best place for such practices. Unfortunately, many of these radicals serve in uniform or in a civilian capacity in national security. Perhaps they target the military because, unlike the rest of us, the military can’t really say, “no.”

In an essay for the Army War College in 1992, an Air Force lawyer named Charles Dunlap (you can read his blog here) wrote a controversial paper in which he described America 20 years from then as under the control of a military junta, but the military, ironically, “can’t fight,” in his words. This wasn’t a prediction on his part, but merely a crafty way of arguing against diverting the armed forces from its primary area of competency, which is warfighting, towards civilian functions better suited for non-martial institutions.

If only Charles Dunlap knew then that Wokeness, not civilian duties, would be what ailed the military over two decades down the road. While I don’t want to go as far as to say the military has lost all capability to fulfill its primary task (I have no way of knowing that), I can’t imagine that it’d be an effective fighting force if the same level of demoralization which ails American society afflicted the armed services also. Not only would the military be unable to fight, it’d be incapable of even enforcing a military dictatorship! Like the militaries of the ex-Communist countries, it’d collapse like a house of cards.

The conspiracy theorist in me says this is exactly what’s intended – weaken the institutions that defend and legitimize the country and make it easier to take down the country. But the more likely answer is that the Woke are merely doing what they feel to be justice. Once they take down the military or take over it, there isn’t much left for them to go after, except maybe religious institutions.

This is from the Tucker monologue the reader referenced:

This summer, the U.S. Army’s so-called Operation Inclusion instructed soldiers that the phrase “Make America Great Again” was a form of socially acceptable “covert White supremacy.” According to the Army, a presidential campaign slogan was White supremacy. No one did anything about that.

Now, according to the Army’s Equity and Inclusion Agency (yes, they have one), the phrase, “all lives matter”, American exceptionalism, and the celebration of Columbus Day are racist. Over the summer, the now-retired head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Army Lt. Gen. Robert Ashley, encouraged his employees to read the lunatic tract “White Fragility” by Robin DiAngelo, a book that is both inherently bigoted and very stupid. Over the summer, Kaleth Wright, then the Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force, proclaimed on Twitter that his greatest fear was that one of his airmen might be killed by a racist cop. Not killed by the Chinese military, but by American racism.

I would like to hear from readers of this blog who are in the military, or who have recently been in the military, to get your perspectives on this issue. I won’t use your name unless you specifically ask me to. As you know, I have strong views about the “Diversity, Inclusion, Equity” ideology, and I am confident that those views color the way I regard strategies for awakening the military. Am I wrong? Tell me about it. Am I right? Half-right? I want to know that too. Please answer in the comments, or write me at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com. Note well: All e-mails will be considered publishable unless you specifically say this is only on background. 

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