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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