Diversity Thursday

There is an underlying purpose to DivThu beyond the rage, humor, and general mocking of the bitter, rent-seeking, and otherwise unemployable members of the Diversity Industry that infest our Navy and its nation; to remind people that the Commissariat support a worldview that is red in tooth and claw evil.

Sure, there are some well-meaning but tragically wrong do-gooders and useful idiots, but the balance are doing this for reasons well set in the lower brain stem or indoctrinated through various socio-political pathologies that continue to hold back progress, peace, and harmony.

No nation that promoted multiculturalism has prospered. No nation that encouraged its citizens to look at themselves as different from each other on the basis of race, creed, color or national origin has survived. Indeed, they usually self-destruct in an orgy of blood and gore.

Over at SmallWarsJournal, Phil W. Reynolds’s well researched and footnoted, The Durability of Ethnicity: Intra-state and Non-state Violence is required reading to understand the deeper purpose for these posts I do most Thursdays.

The ability of language, religion and ancestry to bind people together in turn is a powerful motivator of violence. As marginalized groups tender feelings that the distribution of resources, be they economic or political, is unfair, then violence becomes a way to bypass political stalemate.[5] Hostility and frustration produces insecurity, a feeling that the group’s special identity is under attack. In ethnic wars, the killing is personal, rooted deeply in social contexts in which victims know the killers. Following the impersonal Cold War, this was the shock of the Yugoslav ethnic wars and Rwanda massacres, with “people in rage against each other and people fleeing from the rage."[6] Based on analysis of the values of ethnicity that provide the elastic interconnectivity that powers groups through conflicts, this paper will argue that far from fading, ethnicity and its commitment to social identities have an extraordinary durability and much conflict in the 21st century will evolve it.

When our nation and our Navy actively supports sectarianism, which every diversity event does, this is what it is pushing us towards.

The very existence of an identifiable group means social identification has achieved ‘communal hegemonism.’ [30] The introduction of outsiders into group safe spaces creates conflict. Feelings of cognitive dissonance erupt as individuals attempt to re-order their interactions and create internal consistency vis a vis the other. Political mobilization, and ultimately, physical violence, becomes an easily accessible, simple and cheap method to remove the cause of the inconsistency. Ethnic politics arises to minimize disruptions through collective action on issues like conflict in order to maximize group reward.[31] If the challenge is recurrent, conflict can become a coping mechanism for evolutionary roadblocks.[32] Threats and opportunities generate responses, putting pressure on the group to adapt or disintegrate.

Every effort in our nation and Navy should be towards unity of purpose, culture, and society. This requires work and right now we are actively working against it.

Perceived threats, like the uneven distribution of resources, would cause individuals to identify more strongly with their ethnic group. Individually, conflict makes a person more aware of their mortality and drives them to value established belief systems and identities. This mortality salience produces greater hostility towards critics of a person’s identity and belief system, particularly the sub-structural role of religion, which produces a unique self-validity.[38] Groups then harness religion and idealized identity “to institutionalize violence and the bend the will of individuals and clans to its own.”

Military specialists, particularly in the United States, need to resist the siren song of simple state on state conflicts, which are inarguably on the wane. The bulk of history, and the future, will be small, brutal conflicts driven by ethnicity. States unprepared for wars against materially weak coalitions have paid the price. Arguably, the Soviet Union failed to defeat the largely Pashtun mujahedeen fighters in Afghanistan and the United States have been unable to dominate the same people thirty years later. U.S. led western action has unleashed pent-up sectarianism throughout the Middle East through the removal of stable dictatorships. Even Beijing is sitting on uneasy populations in Xinjiang and Tibet while its attentions are pulled towards intimidating its (non-Han) neighbors in the South China Sea. Disintegration of national states can be observed today in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Syria and Mexico. The Congo is a region in which little state control has taken root in its remotest areas, spawning a conflict that has spread across the continent. The vast majority of literature on future conflict revolves around technological innovations meant to overcome the age-old military tyranny of time and distance: Stealth fighters, autonomous, armed drones, nano-robots that reside in the body and harnessing quantum mechanics to process information.[45] These are methods, and however technologically advanced, are simply tools wielded by the drivers that construct conflict. Deeper analysis reveals deeply embedded biological processes, i.e., conflict is an inevitable condition of human possibility.

If we are destined to expend blood and treasure around the globe to keep the violence of ethnic tension and conflict from spreading, then why would we promote the same in our own nation?