Commentary
The psychological-warfare attack—its script straight from the Antifa/Black Lives Matter version of the Cold War’s Marxist playbook—began in January when the predictable chorus of hard-left hacks in academia, media, and government vilified the American military with toxic allegations calculated to demoralize military personnel, sow destructive institutional suspicion, and undermine command authority with the goal of weakening U.S. national security.
The propaganda ploy the hard left’s commissars, fuhrers, and utopian messiahs use in their psychological assault first targets individuals. See, right-wing extremists and white supremacists fill the military ranks, and they represent an armed threat, because the military has weapons.
Then the ploy targets organizations: White supremacists dominate military institutions. Moreover, the Army and the rest of the Department of Defense suffer from systemic racism, a damning expletive in the crypto-Marxist academia humbug called critical race theory, or CRT.
Never mind the fact that, day in, day out, deployed or in garrison, the U.S. military is the most ethnically integrated organization in America, and likely the world. The U.S. Army deserves particular kudos.
But facts don’t matter to the hard left’s commissars, fuhrers, and utopian messiahs. Like their Cold War communist ancestors who damned America for not being perfect, they claim enlightenment and call themselves The Woke.
They aren’t. They are the angry offspring of Vietnam-era America haters who spit on uniformed American servicemen and servicewomen. In 2020, the thugs demanded cities defund the police. Now, to the delight of communist China, they intend to “cancel” the military.
American police and military personnel both defend peace and freedom. They are bulwarks against chaos. The thugs, however, crave chaos, as the 1960s Weatherman-style anarchy in Portland, Seattle, and Minneapolis by Antifa, BLM, and their allies demonstrates.
Now they demand the Pentagon add CRT propaganda sessions to its training schedules. Ugly fact: CRT rejects colorblindness in America, Dr. Martin Luther King’s goal. CRT “theorists” are racists themselves, who see everything in America through the lens of race. Some even agitate for segregation; others expound on “the behaviors of white people.” Like Stalinist truth, CRT is whatever the commissars say it is at the moment. It is a weapon of psychological and political manipulation.
No wonder former President Donald Trump issued an executive order that banned the federal government from using CRT in employee training. Trump’s order has been reversed.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) is a veteran Army infantryman who served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He knows the U.S. military has strengths and weaknesses—all institutions do—but it is a vital institution, especially in an era of increasing confrontation with an expanding power like China.
Cotton also knows an America-hating psy-war gambit when he sees one, especially one that benefits our foreign adversaries.
So Cotton has introduced a bill premised on several obvious truths. Here are two of them: (1) To successfully carry out its defense mission, “the Armed Forces must train leaders who love the United States.” (2) “Anti-American and racist theories” like CRT teach “students to distrust and even hate their country and fellow citizens.”
Cotton’s bill advocates exposing soldiers, sailors, and Marines to America’s founding principles, such as ‘‘all men are created equal’’ in the Declaration of Independence. The U.S. “commitment to the equal dignity and natural rights of all mankind is the strongest possible defense against racism and oppression of all kinds.”
The bill has elements of a classic high school civics class, but it is more than that, for it connects the knowledge to military duty and ultimately effective military operations. Call it patriotism for thinking individuals who know the United States is an experiment in freedom that actually works by adjusting and adapting within the framework of its Constitution.
Sen. Cotton’s legislation is a constructive counterattack. If American soldiers know what they fight for, the hard left’s destructive psychological assault will fail miserably.
Will the Democratic-controlled Senate pass the bill? The national Democratic Party has coddled hard-left groups like BLM. Democratic media operatives push “systemic racist” accusations.
Cotton’s bill will force some Democratic senators to make a difficult choice.
Austin Bay is a colonel (ret.) in the U.S. Army Reserve, author, syndicated columnist, and teacher of strategy and strategic theory at the University of Texas–Austin. His latest book is “Cocktails from Hell: Five Wars Shaping the 21st Century.”
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
