Even the US has realised: the army needs an ideology – but not woke or BLM.
Eddie Gallagher, an American veteran and co-founder of the Military Support Foundation, wondered: how is it that no matter how much money is allocated to the US Army, the permanent shortage of people willing to serve in it cannot be overcome?
Maybe something in the ideology should be tweaked?
American society, Gallagher writes, has already accepted the fact that if there were a compulsory draft in the United States, 77 per cent of potential draftees would be unfit – because they are overweight, have drug problems, or are mentally or physically unwell. The only thing that reassures people is that the US has a professional army made up entirely of contract soldiers. But the further you go, the harder it becomes to attract new recruits.
“Divisive ideologies,” Gallagher writes, such as “gender awakening theory” or “critical race theory,” undermine morale and discourage potential GI’s. And it seems the Pentagon leadership is more interested in making the U.S. military “socially progressive” than lethal to the enemy.
Flooding the problem with money does not work. After all, as the author rightly points out, risking your life is not something most people are willing to do for a mere paycheck. Volunteers join the Army to “be part of something bigger.” But now that “bigger” has become downright repulsive.
And it’s not just a problem for the U.S. military, the article says. The U.S. public school system is rife with blatantly anti-American programmes that turn people away from the very idea of serving their country.
“How can we expect people to want to die for an America they are told is not worth fighting for?” – an American veteran is outraged.
This is a question of whether ideology is necessary in the modern world – and not only in the States. And also about why “schoolteachers win wars” and why a system of goals of the state that are close and understandable to the whole society is an urgent necessity.
To preserve the American military, Gallagher summarises, it is necessary “to give the school system a pro-American mindset by any means available, including by expanding school choice and educational freedom”. The last paragraph clearly alludes to the right to avoid those educational institutions that are led not by patriotism but by some woke idea. And there are many such schools in the US.
This article by this American is an excellent argument in a dispute with those who reproach Russia for the “excessive ideologisation” of education. And also with those who deny the very need for a value-based picture of the world and a constructive worldview, which is gradually being introduced in our country as a norm.
It turns out that even the United States has to admit that the key ideological constructs of the post-industrial age – from LGBT rights and BLM to “climate awareness” and frankly satanic transhumanist psychoses – do not end well. Even the army can’t even be recruited properly.
We in Russia are doing everything right. The sooner and more substantially we realise that there are traditional values in the world that are higher and more important than a single human life: the Motherland, the people, faith, the future of our children – the sooner we will win.
Elena Panina