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The decline of the West’s resolve and its military.

We know that the suffocating agenda of the radical left is encroaching on every aspect and feature of life. It certainly has impacted politics, education, law, and media big time. But it is also doing its best to undermine our armed forces and reduce our ability to defend ourselves almost to zero.

Consider just one recent case in point. I saw the following headline in an online newspaper, but because their articles are behind paywalls, that was as far as I got. The headline said this:

“ADF drops 14 entry criteria to boost recruitment.”

Hmm, given how woke Australia is becoming, I could only imagine what they would be willing to scrap to get new recruits. So, I put together my own list of possible things being dropped:

The need to be a human being

The need to be able to speak English

The need to be older than 7 years old

The need to be loyal to Australia

The need to be willing to use armed force

The need to have a functioning brain

The need to be physically fit

The need to eat and breathe

The need to be aware of who the enemy is

The need to be willing to make sacrifices for your country

The need to be a team player

The need to not be drunk and on drugs all the time

The need to not be a spy for a foreign country

The need to follow orders

Many more such things crossed my mind. However, I did a bit of an online search, and I found another site that also covered this story. It turns out that I was sort of in the ballpark: it seems that some health requirements are being dropped. Hey, I had around four of those on my list! Here is the short piece that Sky News had on this:

ADF to axe 14 health entry requirements to boost number of recruits

The Defence Force has axed 14 health entry requirements in an attempt to boost the number of recruits. It’s understood the restrictions saw around 70 per cent of ADF applicants rejected each year. Braces, acne and some mental health challenges will no longer prevent recruitment. The Australian Defence Force hopes the changes will allow the retention of 80,000 personnel by 2040.

But given how woke and woeful the ADF has become of late – along with so many other formerly great institutions – so that we now have people serving who do not even know if they are a man or a woman, one can only expect things to get worse in the near future. My list may yet be accurate.

Inversion

Indeed, this whole affair tells us a few things. People seem less willing to join the military. This can be for various reasons, but an unwillingness to stand up for your country would be a big part of it. And after all, why would you? We have been drumming into the heads of students and others for years now that Australia is a racist, sexist, militaristic, oppressive and evil country that does not deserve our support.

Decades of anti-Australian and anti-Western rhetoric and ideology from the media, education, most politicians, and our elites have convinced many Australians – perhaps most – that Australia is simply not worth fighting for any longer. Why bother to lift a finger in its defence?

Of course other factors can be mentioned here. Not only is there a war against the West going on, but so too its very values are under assault. Old virtues like bravery, chivalry, courage and self-sacrifice are now seen as indications of toxic masculinity and must be fully rejected. The idea of a knight in shining armour is now seen as taboo.

Who wants to be seen carrying a weapon coming to the aid of the weak and defenceless? That is so old school. Today’s army should be all about love and inclusion. And that means letting men dress up as women and so on. One is reminded of various memes making the rounds about the old TV series M*A*S*H.

The series aired in the ’70s and ’80s, and was about an American military medical team serving overseas during the Korean war. One character was named Klinger who appeared wearing a dress. He had wanted to get out of the army by cross-dressing.

But times have changed, thus all these memes of recent times. One says: “He was crazy, but he still knew which bathroom to use.” Another meme says this: “Why are you dressed like a woman?” It shows two pics of Klinger, one from 1953: “I’m trying to get discharged from the army” and one from 2023: “I’m trying to get a promotion.”

Another shows him with these words: “You mean to tell me they are now fighting to get ‘in’?” Times are certainly changing. And then there are all the worrying realities about the real conflicts and hot spots that still exist around the world. Places like Communist China have large armies where there is no woke PC baloney going on. They are preparing for battle – for war if necessary.

One wonders if Western armies would be any sort of match against such forces. Our militaries tend to be obsessed with promoting all the key diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda items: being homosexual or being trans or being nice or rejecting masculinity or ‘making love and not war’ and so on. If any war does break out, it will not look very pretty for our side.

Be Prepared

The whole idea of military preparedness and being willing to go to war is now becoming passé. No wonder we are getting fewer and fewer people to volunteer to join the armed forces. The very idea of standing up for your country and being willing to go to war if necessary is now out of flavour.

I am reminded of another meme about such matters. The top picture shows a bunch of people enjoying a lovely sunny day at the beach and has these words: “Your day at the beach brought to you…” The bottom picture shows young men – many of them just teenagers – leaving their landing craft to hit the beaches of Normandy on D-Day with these words “by their day at the beach.”

That so powerfully encapsulated everything I have been talking about here. There was a time when heroism and sacrifice and love of country meant something. To courageously leave home and be willing to lose your life to defend what you love and those that you love was seen as such an honourable and courageous thing to do.

But no more. Today, we think that if we just have enough peace rallies, disarm the West, and sing “Give peace a chance” a lot, all will be right with the world. But most sensible folks throughout history have known that the willingness to fight is a main way of keeping the peace. As the Roman general Flavius Vegetius Renatus remarked, “If you want peace, prepare for war.”

Marcus Aurelius had put it this way: “You cannot be peaceful unless you’re capable of great violence.” Or as the Japanese philosopher Miyamoto Musashi had said: “It is better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war.” And more modern quotes can also be appealed to.

George Orwell rightly said this: “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” And G. K. Chesterton put it as follows: “While a good peace is better than a good war, even a good war is better than a bad peace.”

Or, as Dennis Prager wrote in Still the Best Hope:

Slogan: “War is not the answer.” ‘War is not the answer’ if the question is, let us say, ‘What is the square root of eleven?’ But if the question is, ‘How do we stop enormous evils in the world?’ the answer is, unfortunately, quite frequently, ‘War.’ Nazi and Japanese racist genocide were ended by soldiers shooting people, and by bombers bombing people, not by people who believed ‘war is not the answer’.

And two quotes from J. R. R. Tolkien are quite fitting here. In The Two Towers, Faramir says this: “War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”

This also from the end of The Two Towers:

Sam: Those were the stories that stayed with you – that meant something even if you were too small to understand why. But I think Mr Frodo that I do understand. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. They kept going because they were holding on to something.
Frodo: What are we holding onto, Sam?
Sam: That there is some good in this world. And it’s worth fighting for.

And no, I am not praising war and militarism as ends in themselves. Both are so often quite appalling. But injustice, tyranny, and the oppression and destruction of the innocent are also quite appalling, and sometimes, we must be willing to fight for that which really matters. The question remains: how much longer will the West be able to defend itself in the days ahead?

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Republished with thanks to CultureWatch. Image courtesy of Pixabay.