Pro-War NYTimes Attacks Military Recruiting
The NY Times is the most pro-war paper in the country. Not only strongly boosting the current Ukraine War, but for the Gulf, Iraq and Afghan Wars. It also backed the Vietnam War in its early days; although by the late 1960s the oligarchs it serves had soured on the war, leading to the Pentagon Papers legal case the Times won. That recently was made into a movie, “The Post,” about the Washington Post’s less important role.
Now the Times is attacking military recruiting. Front-page stories in recent days:
Recruited for Navy SEALs, Many Sailors Wind Up Scraping Paint. The high failure rate of the elite force’s selection course shunts hundreds of candidates into low-skilled jobs.
Thousands of Teens Are Being Pushed Into Military’s Junior R.O.T.C. In high schools across the country, students are being placed in military classes without electing them on their own. “The only word I can think of is ‘indoctrination,’” one parent said.
J.R.O.T.C. Textbooks Offer an Alternative View of the World. Descriptions of civic life and some key historical events differ from the way they are taught in typical public school textbooks.
The SEALs article’s author, David Philipps, wrote a recent book on that elite fighting unit. Yet he still doesn’t know how these things work. When you sign up for the military, it’s primarily for the military’s needs, not yours. If there’s a war and you’re a secretary, if they need to they can send you to the front with a rifle.
When I signed up for the U.S. Army in 1977 to become a Russian linguist, and went to basic the next February, it worked for me just as I expected: boot camp, a year of learning Russian in beautiful Monterey, three months learning cryptography using the secret equipment, then 2.5 years in West Germany with a mobile intelligence unit. But they made it clear from the beginning something could land me in a different MOS (Military Occupation Specialty). Specifically, I could flunk Russian or not pass the security background check, in which the FBI interviewed people from my neighborhood, high school and college. Then they could send me to Alaska for four years to pick up cigarette butts in the snow.
The SEALs obviously are an elite force whose training is so hard most flunk. Even though Philipps has written a book on them, he seems to think it’s Tommy’s Holiday Camp, where if you don’t make it, you just muster out and go back to civilian life.
The two anti-ROTC articles take aim at the country’s officer corps. How can you even have a military without officers? As to the parents objecting, they always can take the kids out of the classes. And this controversy is part of the ongoing War of the Schools, in which the NYTimes and its allies push “woke” and other odious ideologies on students. It’s so bad out here in California, a couple of my friends with young children are preparing to leave to more civilized states before their toddlers go to kindergarten.
On the ROTC textbooks, the Times is up in arms because:
One textbook for high school military cadets says girls should wear lipstick when in uniform. Another offers what a history professor described as a “frightening” interpretation of how the Vietnam War was lost. Another blames the death of Kurt Cobain, the Nirvana frontman who fatally shot himself in 1994, on heroin addiction.
Girls wearing lipstick! The horror!
The Times on guns:
One typical civilian classroom textbook in California, dealing with the Second Amendment, informs students that the courts have allowed the government to regulate firearms. A Texas textbook in a similar section on constitutional amendments does not include information about how the courts have interpreted the amendment.
But a textbook used in the Navy’s J.R.O.T.C. program offers a different analysis than either one of them, saying: “This amendment prevents the government from forbidding citizens to own weapons.”
But the textbook is right, especially after the New York Rifle and Pistol Assn. case earlier this year. Of course, the government does “regulate” guns, as it regulates everything, such as for safety. But the textbook is right: except in a few cases, as for felons, the government can’t forbid adults from owning weapons, or even carrying them in public.
The Times also is upset Gen. Robert E. Lee is upheld as an exemplar:
In introducing freshmen students to the idea of leadership, a Marine Corps textbook offers the Confederate general Robert E. Lee as an example to emulate. Lee, the textbook says, “showed, in his attitude and appearance at Appomattox, that he was an officer and a gentleman.”
That part no doubt will be removed. The Times wants to divide America; to end the post-Civil War reconciliation of North and South that was a foundation of the country’s growth, greatness and power. Although the South comprises 30% of the country, about half of military personnel come from there. Yet the city of Richmond just took down its last public Confederate monument, of A.P. Hill. And Fort A.P. Hill in Virginia also will be renamed.
With all that’s going with the abuse of the military, including the insults from the NYTimes, and of Southern heritage, why would any Southerner join? Or anybody?
It should be said these textbooks, like all textbooks, contain some mistakes that should be corrected. But the Times’ aim here is to attack the military – which it expects to fight all the wars it keeps pushing on us!
I’ve always opposed the draft. But in this case I’m making an exception: Draft the entire staff of the NY Times and send them off to Ukraine to fight the Russians.