Just because it's woke doesn't mean it isn't propaganda

By Francis

I have a love/hate relationship with propaganda. Poster recreations from WWII are all over my home office because I love the art style and messages. It’s easy for me to enjoy the propaganda of the past because it’s no longer some insidious attempt to shame or radicalize me. It has passed into curious art forms of a bygone era. Curiosities. 

Of course, propaganda still exists, some more obvious than others. But a recent US Army commercial graced my timeline shared by the Army Chief of Staff. Pictures of uniformed soldiers in combat and training scenarios, some with family and friends, while a voice gives a booming speech about how the United States is a place of inculsion. Where it doesn’t matter you race, class, status, ethnicity, gender and whatever else in between. “This is why we fight.” States the tweet from General Mark Milley. 

https://twitter.com/ArmyChiefStaff/status/1061622018435674113  

A saw a lot of people get pumped up by this video, much more than another recent one which had commandos running around a nondescript desert village shooting at unseen enemies. This is not the propaganda we see all the time from the Army, this is part of Woke Propaganda. 

Woke Propaganda is Wells Fargo in the gay pride parade and rainbow Doritos. It’s Raytheon holding classes for girls in STEM. It’s a military operating in over a hundred and fifty sovereign nations, invited or not, touting how good they are at inclusion. Woke Propaganda speaks to those who are tired of seeing guns and battles, and instead reassures you that anyone of any creed or color is welcome to die in Afghanistan in a never ending war that we are, eighteen years on, losing. It sweeps under the rug the rampant sexism of the services, the suicide rates, the veterans who languish in VA Hospitals without proper care. It ignores the problems at the root of the institution because they want you to know they accept YOU. 

The linked video above claims America is a place of inclusion, and that is why the military fights. To keep America a place for all people of any background. It neglects to show pictures of troops on the Mexico border to repel some “horde” of refugees. It doesn’t show veterans being deported after they are out of the military. There are no pictures of interpreters who risked life and limb every day in Iraq and Afghanistan begging to escape the violence of their home countries (at the very hand of the military we so celebrate) 

In the end of the video, there is a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. To be judged by the content of our character, not the color of our skin. It’s nearly as bad as when Ford used an entire speech by the noted freedom fighter and socialist to sell trucks. Of course the military would opt to use his words as well to put a cherry on the top of the propaganda sundae. Never mind he was adamantly against the Vietnam war. I don’t like to put words in the mouths of the dead, but I can only imagine he wouldn’t have kind things to say about Afghanistan. 

This propaganda isn’t new, but it should be guarded against. It speaks directly to the brain of the liberal and progressive who want hugs, not bombs. But all it does in the end is draw a smiley face on the Hellfires it sells to foreign nations to use against civilians.