The U.S. Military Academy at West Point decided to drop the “Duty, Honour, Country” motto from its mission statement last week in favour of a bland reference to “the Army Values”. The New York Post‘s Paul du Quenoy is not impressed.
“Duty, honour, country: Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be.”
So said Gen. Douglas MacArthur in his famous May 1962 address to West Point cadets.
But those words are no longer hallowed.
West Point last week removed them from its mission statement, substituting a bland reference to “the Army Values”.
West Point’s Superintendent, Lt. Gen. Steve Gilland, defended the change, suggesting in a damage-control letter addressed to “supporters” that it resulted from a year and a half of discussions held “across” the West Point community and in consultation with unidentified “external stakeholders”.
He said the decision was supported by Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, whose last job was director of a centre at the RAND Corp., a research and policy institute that professes to “strive to cultivate a community that embraces diversity, equity, and inclusion as central to our culture”.
Gilland also claimed the approval of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, who previously served as Senior Military Assistant to Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin, whose department requested $86.5 million in fiscal year 2023 for “dedicated diversity and inclusion activities”.
That would pay for a lot of implicit-bias workshops for men and women who should be trained to lead and kill, but the difference in language is neither subtle nor insignificant.
The words “duty, honour, country”, enshrined at West Point since 1898, have precise meanings that have historically bound our officer corps to timeless imperatives vital to the nation’s defence.
They presuppose our country is worth defending, honourably and as a matter of duty.
Proponents of woke ideology reject this notion.
For them, those very concepts — along with such basic values as merit, hard work, rational thought, respect for authority and even punctuality — are undesirable symptoms of a culture supposedly infused with ‘structural racism’ and ‘white supremacy’.
A country built on them is patently not one they would care to defend.
A March 2022 Quinnipiac poll found 52% of Democrats would leave the country rather than stand and fight against a military invasion of the United States.
“Army Values”, in contrast, can mean anything politicians and their diversity, equity and inclusion commissars want them to mean.
Worth reading in full.
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To paraphrase a German politicians whose name I’ve thankfully fortgotten: Merit, hard work, rational thought, respect for authority and [..] punctuality¹ are secondary virtues of people who could as well command extermination camps.
Chicken coming home to roost, it seems. Have fun with it!
¹ It goes without saying that duty, honour, country would be sufficient grounds for an investigation by the German inland secret service if something warranting immediate imprisonment can perhaps be uncovered.
There is no such thing as “historical guilt”, “communal guilt”, “ancestral guilt”, nor “racial guilt”.
These are all variations of the Christian trope of the original sin, probably (if assuming propagandists know what they’re doing) intentionally so.
Rubbish!
No. The idea is always that everbody’s born in a state of irredeemable guilt and has to live a life of penance because of this. The woketurds have only modified this insofar as they don’t promise forgiveness and paradise at the end but so-called pallative care, ie, once you become a real nuisance to us, we’ll drug you to death.
Well, I must admit that you are actually right to say that most Christian denominations have been deceived into adopting the Augustinian concept of “irredeemable guilt”, or “Total Depravity” as mass-murderer Calvin called it, and that infant baptism was necessary because even babies were guilty of the sin of Adam.
That was NOT the belief of the early Christian fathers for the first three centuries AD, nor of the great British theologian Pelagius, a Greek form of the Welsh name “Morgan” (“sea-born”). He was vehemently denounced as a heretic by Augustine for denying original sin, stressing human choice in salvation, the freedom of human will in choosing whether or not to sin, and mankind’s essential good nature.
Pelagius accepted no excuses for sinful behaviour, but taught that it was unjust to punish one person for the sins of another, and that infant baptism was useless, as they are blameless. But adult baptism by full immersion, as John the Baptist taught, was essential for demonstrating true repentance for sins already committed, and beginning a new relationship with God, by doing your best to sin no more.
He taught that “humans were created in the image of God and had been granted conscience and reason to determine right from wrong, and the ability to carry out correct actions.”
“In Pelagius’ view, the doctrine of original sin placed too little emphasis on the human capacity for self-improvement, leading either to despair or to reliance on forgiveness without responsibility. He also argued that many young Christians were comforted with false security about their salvation leading them to relax their Christian practice.”
“Saint” Augustine was determined to wipe out these ideas, and called the Council of Carthage in AD 418, where Pelagius was condemned as a heretic, expelled from Jerusalem and driven into the Egyptian desert, whence he never returned.
Thanks for the information. It’s alway nice to learn something new. But that’s really immaterial to my statement: Original sin is concept everybody in Christian Europe (here including American colonies) will be familiar with. And the woke propagandists have repurposed this, either because it naturally came to them as they’ve also been taught about it. Or – that’s what I suspect – because they considered it a highly useful propaganda tactic.
This has also existed in Germany long before 2010. The so-called special responsibilty of Germany and all Germans is just another form of the concept of the original sin. A past German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, once dared to speak of the mercy of late birth, ie, that there would be some German who were free of nazi-guilt because they simply weren’t alive at that time. He was then pretty much crucified by the antifascist establishment for this. Blameless Germans is something which must not be.
I did say in another post that the concept of ancestral guilt or racial guilt had been used against the German people, Japanese people, American people, Australian people, etc. to justify the ridiculous demands for “Reparations”.
Some Third World ethnic groups also use the Hindu concept of “karma” to justify their demands for reparations from the West.
‘Values’ another useless component of the endless word salads.
What are values? Nothing but weather vanes and vain platitudes.
Virtues. Honour, Courage, Dignity, Reason, Faith, Family.
National flags were largely red, white and blue, usually bars, to denote, faith, family, country.
No longer. I guess along with rewriting what the Army’s mission is, we might as well redesign all the national flags into various rainbow patterns.
Ten to one Trump will have those reinstated.
Drumpf the AntiChrist has deceived American patriots into trusting him yet again as their “Saviour”.
May their eyes be opened soon.
Cannot be any worse than Obiden !!..
No government Military Academy in any country should have “External Stakeholders” dictating policy. That includes Japanese companies like Fujitsu controlling highly classified military information in the UK.
I believe the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst changed its motto some time ago so that it was more in tune with the careerism of its senior officers in peacetime Whitehall.
‘Serve to lead’ became ‘Swerve to lead’
What exactly are “Army Values”? Unless explicitly stated, which “Duty, Honour, Country” expressed very succinctly, they are nothing.
Cultural Marxism and entryism gone mad.