The Long March through the Institutions (LMTTI) has, to give it due credit, been one of the most stunningly successful political movements in modern history. It’s been so successful that it’s conquered nearly every institution of Western civilisation — while almost all of its victims remain completely ignorant of its very existence.
The LMTTI is no Bircher-conspiratorialist’s figment, either. Its progenitors straight-up told us what they planned: infiltration of every institution of capitalist democracy with left-indoctrinated followers, beginning with the universities and working outward. No matter how long it took. Well, within fifty years, its stunning success is attested by the proportion of nearly every profession that professes to be left-wing.
Even the most unlikely institutions, in fact, the left’s bitterest enemies until recently, have quietly succumbed: police, big business and the military. You will no doubt recognise the LMTTI’s better as what is loosely defined as “Wokeism”. Wokeism incorporates two explicitly Marxist ideologies: Queer Theory and Critical Race Theory.
If it seems unlikely that the military would succumb to the LMTTI, then you’re completely ignoring what has happened to the US military, under Obama and especially under Biden. The Biden administration is so brazen in its indoctrination that it actually bragged about subjecting the military, root and branch, to Marxist re-education.
In Australia, the wokenisation of the Australian Defence Force has been enabled, less by outright re-education, than by the white-anting of decades of political gutlessness.
As I wrote for Insight, the SAS was subject to intolerable stress in Afghanistan: deployed on almost-constant rotation, in place of regular Army battalions. Because the political masters were terrified of having body bags coming home. This was not just a gross over-use of the SAS, it was also a blatant insult to the regulars, whom the government apparently don’t want to engage in, or even consider to be capable of, combat.
Regular ADF personnel are readily sent on humanitarian missions, which to their credit they fulfil admirably, but when it comes to their very reason for existing — fighting — decades of governments have got increasingly colder feet.
Since the Vietnam War, Australia has been involved in lots of deployments. But their purpose has been to show the Americans we are good allies, not actually to achieve any military effect, certainly not any strategic effect […]
The way successive governments, starting with the Howard government, used the army in Afghanistan and Iraq was an insult to the army. It was as if Canberra believed the army incapable of combat.
One of the few recent politicians with significant military service, Jim Molan, wanted the ADF to take control of an entire province in Afghanistan.
Jim Molan, a magnificent man and soldier, argued that Australia should take overall responsibility for an entire province in Afghanistan. This would have been a strategic contribution. It would necessarily have involved more units of the army meeting insurgents and terrorists in combat. No government in Canberra would do that because we never wanted to have a strategic effect. Or, rather, we didn’t ever desire to have a military strategic effect. The strategic effect we hoped for was to show the Americans we were good allies. In that case we shouldn’t have been there at all.
Don’t get me wrong. No one could be more in favour of our paying our alliance dues than me. But we should deploy military forces in combat for military, not diplomatic, purposes. This besetting, crippling mentality of learned helplessness blights our military in every dimension right up until today.
Worse, everyone in command, from the government down, is all too eager to see others fall on their swords. So it is that the commander in Afghanistan, Chief of the Defence Force, Angus Campbell, is pushing to strip the ranks of medals earned in Afghanistan. But he’s holding on to his decorations like grim death.
In conjunction with imposing a demeaning mentality of learned helplessness on the ADF, the government is also subjecting it to a barrage of politically-correct nonsense.
It has restored the rainbow morning teas. It rejoices in its membership of LGBTQ lobby groups. Diversity, equity and inclusion are all the rage. Recruitment advertisements make no mention of combat or what a life of service in the army is really all about. I am strongly in favour of diversity in the army and the ADF. But diversity should work this way: you encourage people from widely diverse backgrounds to apply, but then the selection and promotion procedures should be absolutely colourblind and gender-blind.
The Australian
More importantly, the bureaucrats and brass have lost all sense of what the ADF is for. It’s for engaging with and destroying the nation’s enemies, not to be the ideological hobby horse for every Long March Left fantasy. Just how far the politicians and generals have flounced away from the ADF’s core purpose was no better illustrated than by the odious Brereton Report’s complaint that Australian soldiers possessed a “warrior culture”.
Yes: according to the Rainbow-drunk Establishment, the worst thing a soldier could be is to actually be a warrior.