In the US, right from schools to the military, Marxist theories are being taught, despite the fact that they have been thoroughly discredited all over the world.
Those whom the gods wish to destroy, it is said, they first make mad. And those whom intellectuals want to destroy, they first make guilt-ridden. It has happened in the past; it is happening now, most spectacularly in America. Leftist ideologues have successfully manipulated the US military top brass into acquiescing to let the soldiers become acquainted with the Marxist pornography called the critical race theory (CRT). The essence of the theory is insidiously anti-America: that the nation was born with the original sin of racism, a sin that is not just eternal but also the defining feature of the nation.
Encyclopaedia Britannica defines CRT as an “intellectual movement and loosely organized framework of legal analysis based on the premise that race is not a natural, biologically grounded feature of physically distinct subgroups of human beings but a socially constructed (culturally invented) category that is used to oppress and exploit people of color. Critical race theorists hold that the law and legal institutions in the United States are inherently racist insofar as they function to create and maintain social, economic, and political inequalities between whites and nonwhites, especially African Americans.”
A newspaper article is not the appropriate place to critique an “intellectual movement,” but the postulates and dogmas of CRT are so transparently stupid and evidently false that it would not be difficult to dismiss it in a few sentences. First, race is not biological. A person can’t choose the colour of their skin and eyes. Nor can the physical appearance be socially constructed or culturally invented.
Empirical evidence too proves that America is the least racist nation in the world. This is the reason that people of all races want to go to America.
Further, a black man became its President. Can a Tibetan or Uyghur Muslim become the President of China? Or a Hindu Pakistan’s Prime Minister?
Logic, basic facts, and common sense trash CRT. Yet, General Mark Milley, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently defended the trash. Unfortunately, he is not the only top military leader legitimizing CRT and race baiting. Adm. Michael Gilday, Chief of Naval Operations, last month defended the recommendation to sailors to read a book that is blatantly anti-American.
Supporting the US military’s decision to prescribe CRT for study to soldiers, Milley said, “I’ve read Mao Tse-tung. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist.”
Reading something is different from prescribing or recommending it, General. I don’t become a pornographer by reading a pornographic novel, but I do countenance an author if I, as an academic at an educational institute, recommend his writings to students. Similarly, if the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff recommends something, his approval is implicit in it. In effect, he is approving the perverse doctrine of systemic racism in America to the men and women who are supposed to fight for it—lay down their lives, if need be, for it.
But which soldier would die for their country if they knew that it is inveterately and irredeemably racist, vile, and iniquitous?
This is not a hypothetical situation I am talking about; false and dangerous ideas result in calamities. The collapse of France in six weeks in the Second World War is a case in point.
It is a well-known fact that France was a great imperial power in the 1930s. Its quick and unexpected fall in 1940 was mainly because of pacifism and “moral disarmament” that prevailed in the country particular and in Europe in general. Prominent intellectuals, including French writer Romain Rolland and British authors H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell, signed a famous petition in 1926 which called for “some definite step toward complete disarmament and the demilitarizing of the mind of civilized nations.” Weapon manufacturers were demonized as “merchants of death”; Rolland termed them as “profiteers of massacre.”
It was not just idealistic writers who were pacifists. Even Aristide Briand, France’s foreign minister and a Nobel Peace Prize winner, said, “Away with rifles, machine guns, and cannon.” This at a time when Hitler was gaining influence in Germany.
American scholar Thomas Sowell wrote in Intellectuals and Society, “A key role in the spread of pacifism in France was played by the schools—more specifically, by the French teachers’ unions, which began campaigns in the 1920s, objecting to postwar textbooks favorably depicting French soldiers who had defended their country against German invaders in the First World War. Such textbooks were called ‘bellicose’.” In fact, history was rewritten to instil the virtues of “moral disarmament” in the minds of children.
Something similar happened in the US: right from schools to the military, Marxist theories are being taught, despite the fact that they have been thoroughly discredited all over the world. Radical Left, which has managed to earn the support of the liberal establishment, is determined to drill guilt into the hearts and minds of every American, be it a child or a soldier. This is how it plans to conquer the US. This is how America may fall—not by an invasion but by subversion.
Ravi Shanker Kapoor is a freelance journalist