The Terminus Of Lies

     Apologies for the dearth of original pieces lately, Gentle Reader. I’ve had a rough few days. I’m still recovering, so bear with me.

     In the middle of my morning news sweep, I was seized by a powerful realization. It’s not entirely new to me. Perhaps it won’t seem new to you, either...but I can’t help thinking it’s as important as any other idea in current circulation.

     It started with this article:

     All Marines are now being forced to undergo training to erase “unconscious bias,” as women start to enter all combat roles for the first time.

     The Marine Corps wants this training to already be underway before the first set of female recruits hits boot camp, in order to clamp down on potential misgivings and ill-will, Military.com reports.

     Teams will spread around the Corps to provide two-day seminars to officers first, and then those officers will in turn instruct those of lower rank under their command to avoid prejudice based on race and especially gender. Seminars will also include a discussion on some practical examples of the obstacles that will present themselves and ways units can overcome them.

     The reason for the training is mostly because male Marines have by and large been totally opposed to allowing women into combat roles.

     First reaction: Nothing surprising about that. Male Marines are as likely to have some knowledge of women as any other class of men -- men in this case referring specifically to male humans. What they know predisposes them against the notion that women as a class can be expected to meet Marine Corps standards or to perform reliably in combat.

     Some will attempt to counter that objection by positing the existence of women who can and will meet Corps standards and would fight as well as the men along side them. There are probably some such women. How many? Your guess is as good as mine...but my guess is that the number who are willing and able to do so is too small to justify a major campaign to include women in combat, even if all other considerations are ignored. Ground combat is physically as trying and exhausting as any known occupation – and it’s getting worse, not better, as technology adds to the burden a ground soldier must shoulder.

     Second reaction: Those male Marines’ knowledge is confirmed by the Corps’ reduction of physical standards, specifically to make it easier for women to become Marines. If women cannot qualify under the previous standards, there are only two possible conclusions:

1. The standards express necessities of ground combat. Therefore, women must not become ground soldiers.
2. The standards are irrelevant to the necessities of ground combat. Therefore, women can become ground soldiers, all other considerations to the side.

     He who chooses conclusion #1 will oppose the Corps’ new policy. He who chooses conclusion #2 is quite all right with the new policy. But that’s not the end of the story.

     The Marine Corps is not an isolated entity. It’s a component of the military arm of a much larger society in which various trends and dynamics are at work. One of those trends is enforced interchangeability between the sexes. That trend is propelled by a political dynamic that seeks to propitiate loud, angry feminists capable of marshaling significant numbers of supporters.

     So far, nothing you didn’t already know, right? But the best is yet to come. Allow me to repeat a bit of the citation above:

     All Marines are now being forced to undergo training to erase “unconscious bias,” as women start to enter all combat roles for the first time.

     Focus on the emphasized words and what they imply:

• No Marine can refuse this course of training.
• There’s force behind it: i.e., accept the new gospel of sexual interchangeability or be punished.
• Training is not education. It doesn’t imbue the “trainee” with new knowledge or help him to develop new powers of reasoning. It seeks a particular result and will not be satisfied with anything else. To train a man to accept some proposition is indoctrination.

     The Left tends to avoid the word “training.” It prefers the term “re-education,” with its implication that the “re-educated’s” previous convictions were simply wrong. At least the Marine Corps is more candid than that: We’ll train all that badthink out of you, by God, or you’ll no longer be a Marine.

     Yet we’re still not done. To put male Marines through compulsory training to eliminate their “bias” embeds the assumption that real-world experience wouldn’t do the job – that is, that male Marines’ real-world experiences of women in combat would contradict the new doctrine. The insertion of women into combat roles without this prior course of “training” would reveal that that “bias” is well founded in reality – that to deploy women as ground-combat soldiers is wrong for entirely practical reasons.

     When reality stands ready to contradict a lie, those who insist upon the lie must impose it by force. As all lies, no matter to what effect, are contradicted by reality, the terminus of a parade of lies will always be a resort to force: Accept this unquestioningly or we’ll punish you.

     The Left, in all its manifestations and components, is aware that the only way their lies can prevail over reality is by force. The Left’s “ground soldiers” – those that do the rioting and demonstrating – might accept the lies unquestioningly, but its strategists and tacticians know better. As popular resistance to the lies has swelled, so also has the recourse to force.

     In our time, every lie being promulgated by any political proponent is backed by force. Sometimes the force is overt, as with riots and attacks on opponents. Sometimes it’s implicit, as with “demonstrations” that disrupt others’ lives and peaceable commerce, threatening private citizens that defy them and daring the authorities to disperse them. Even leftists’ campaigns of slander against particular individuals are force-based: they hope to use the general disapproval of certain attitudes and positions to impose the desired punishment, as we saw in the cases of Memories Pizza and Brendan Eich. In every case, the force is there for those with eyes to see.

     But “you cannot do wrong without suffering wrong.” The reactions are swelling quite as swiftly as the lies and threats behind them. Which will prevail in the near term is open to question, but in the longer term, reality has demonstrated its staying power many times. I wouldn’t bet against it...and neither should the commanders of the United States Marine Corps.