My honest opinion, especially back then, the British commanders were either brilliant or incompetent, there were no in-betweens with them, partially because of their "class system", they pulled their officers from what is called their Gentry or upper-class, and no matter how incompetent, they made sure that unless there was actual cowardice they would cover it up. Cowardice they would not tolerate. I to this day still am flummoxed by the surrender, and to this day the Australians and New Zealanders still are a bit pissy because it was a huge chunk of their menfolks that got marched into captivity by the Japanese and many didn't return.
Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival’s surrender of Singapore to the Japanese in 1942 was the largest surrender of British forces in history and he was therefore bound to come in for a great deal of criticism, not helped by the fact that he was personally not very prepossessing and certainly not the ideal of a General Officer in public opinion.
General Percival
Percival joined the British Army as a private in 1914 and rose to the rank of (temporary) Lieutenant Colonel by the end of the war. In the process he garnered a DSO (with a later second award), a Military Cross and a Croix de Guerre. These are significant medals and so he was obviously no slouch in military matters, especially as he was not a regular soldier. After the war, having taken a regular commission, he attended Staff College and was earmarked for accelerated promotion.
Percival knew Malaya previously, having been posted there as the Chief of Staff to the General Officer Commanding Malaya in the late 1930s. Whilst in this role, Percival correctly assessed the possibility that the Japanese might make an attack on Malaya (and thus Singapore) via Thailand or, contrary to the orthodox view, by landings on the eastern seaboard of the peninsula during the northeast monsoon from October to March.
Funds to rectify the situation were not forthcoming and inter-service rivalry led to the poor placement of RAF airfields in Northern Malaya. This in turn meant that troops had to be dispersed in penny-packets in order to defend them.
In April 1941, Percival was appointed GOC Malaya which meant that he had some seven months to prepare his command before the Japanese attack. He later wrote:
In going to Malaya I realised that there was the double danger either of being left in an inactive command for some years if war did not break out in the East or, if it did, of finding myself involved in a pretty sticky business with the inadequate forces which are usually to be found in the distant parts of our Empire in the early stages of a war.
In this assessment, he was correct. Percival had on hand some 70,000 men (plus 15,000 support troops) with his main force consisting of forty-nine infantry battalions of decidedly mixed quality. The Australian Official Historian later wrote:
Only one of the Indian battalions was up to numerical strength, three had recently arrived in a semi-trained condition, nine had been hastily reorganised with a large intake of raw recruits, and four were being re-formed but were far from being fit for action. Six of the United Kingdom battalions (in the 54th and 55th Brigades of the British 18th Infantry Division) had only just landed in Malaya, and the other seven battalions were under-manned. Of the Australian battalions, three had drawn heavily upon undertrained recruits, new to the theatre. The Malay battalions had not been in action, and the Straits Settlements Volunteers were only sketchily trained.
Partly trained or newly arrived troops contributed to Percival’s problems
He possessed no armour (the Japanese had around 200 tanks) and what tanks and other material were dispatched to Malaya were diverted to Russia or Egypt. Essentially, Malaya was given a low priority and the campaign was over so quickly, a little over two months, that little could be done to redress the situation.
The RAF presence was small and under-equipped with obsolete fighters and the Royal Navy’s Force Z also suffered a catastrophic defeat with the loss of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse.
Obsolete Brewster Buffalo fighters
The premise of the Singapore Strategy was that a strong fleet would be despatched to the Far East, based on Singapore, to deter the Japanese. In the event, Force Z consisted of only two capital ships and lacked any air cover - it’s assigned aircraft carrier having run aground in the Caribbean.
This distinctly second rate response was due to the unexpected fall of France in 1940. The Chiefs of Staff reported:
The security of our imperial interests in the Far East lies ultimately in our ability to control sea communications in the south-western Pacific, for which purpose adequate fleet must be based at Singapore. Since our previous assurances in this respect, however, the whole strategic situation has been radically altered by the French defeat. The result of this has been to alter the whole of the balance of naval strength in home waters. Formerly we were prepared to abandon the Eastern Mediterranean and dispatch a fleet to the Far East, relying on the French fleet in the Western Mediterranean to contain the Italian fleet. Now if we move the Mediterranean fleet to the Far East there is nothing to contain the Italian fleet, which will be free to operate in the Atlantic or reinforce the German fleet in home waters, using bases in north-west France. We must therefore retain in European waters sufficient naval forces to watch both the German and Italian fleets, and we cannot do this and send a fleet to the Far East.
HMS Repulse hit by a Japanese bomb - the failure of the Singapore Strategy
Thus the odds were stacked against Percival even though, on paper, he had a superior force and held the defensive advantage.
However, as was common to all the Allied powers at the start of the war, the British severely misjudged the fighting capabilities of the Japanese. In addition, Percival did not grip his subordinates. His relations with Heath (III Indian Corps) and Bennett (Westforce) were not good, nor was the relationship between these two subordinates. Percival also clashed with his immediate superior, Wavell.
Percival appears to have lacked the required ruthlessness to prevail during a crisis. Although he was neither incompetent nor a coward, he was not suited to this role and the hand he was dealt was poor. Even so, his forces performed very poorly against the Japanese and he must take some responsibility for that. It is interesting to speculate of what Montgomery or Auchinleck or Slim would have made of the task.
I saw this on Quora, I was working a lot of Overtime and went straight from work to a social event with my wife, so I didn't have the time to work on anything big.
All good answers. But it really comes down to this. An M1 Garand weighs 11.6 lbs (5.3 kg) fully loaded. It has a 24 in barrel and overall length of 43.5 in. It has a fixed wooden stock and iron sights.
An M4 carbine weighs 7.5 lbs fully loaded, with a 14in barrel and a length of 33in with the buttstock fully extended. Even with all the stuff we have on it nowadays, it might weigh as much as an M1.
Also, the way we now carry our rifles (at the low-ready) means less time is spent bringing the weapon up into an actionable position. Much of this is because the buttstock of the rifle rests in your shoulder. Also, the muzzle is constantly pointed in a safe direction (in the air, what goes up must come down). With the lighter weight rifles of today, the low ready makes more sense in most situations.
Now the high ready that most the G.I.s used in WW2-vietnam makes more sense for heavier/longer weapons. It means less fatigue on the shooters muscles, and is faster bringing a heavy weapon to action. The buttstock doesn’t naturally rest in your shoulder, but with a long rifle, this makes sense.
WHen I was in the U.S Army in the 1980's and Early 1990's, we carried our rifles the way the Vietnam War Soldier carried them. The "Patrol Ready" I believed it was called, kinda like this,
although when I was just walking around, unless I was explicitly to carrying it slung, I would carry it kinda like this like this guy did with the M-14, but I would carry mine around the end of the handguards and the slipring, for both the A1 version and the A2 version I had. I found it easy to carry it. I never carried it by the "carry handle".
Still working on the 2nd part of my rant, might be a 3rd...depending on how it flows.
I saw this on Quora and it was very good, I knew that the 50's and early 60 was the heyday for the cowboy westerns and nobody embodies it like John Wayne. Even the movie "Toy Story" touched on it when the main character "Woody" was a TV cowboy and was very popular until the Space phenonium took hold with the advent of the Mercury/Gemini/ and the Apollo missions with the race to the moon.
Here is the back story on the Movie "Hondo", I think it is one of his best.
A man walks out of the desert carrying his rifle and saddle, accompanied by a dog.
The man’s name is Hondo Lane, and he was riding dispatch for the US Cavalry when he encountered some hostile Indians and lost his horse.
Now, your average person in the here-and-now would sit down and die of thirst or hunger out there in the desert, if put into the same situation. Hondo, on the other hand—in true rugged individualist fashion—uncinched his saddle from his horse and walked away. It’s not known whether he had a destination in mind when he began walking, or whether he knew he’d happen across a settlement or homestead if he headed in a certain direction. But sitting around waiting to die wasn’t in his wheelhouse. As it happened, he stumbled across a homestead where a lone woman and her son lived, and—though perfectly capable of robbing or requisitioning—he agrees to work for the woman until he earns enough to buy a horse from her. (Dispatches be damned, I guess.)
Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is “self-reliance.” Don’t wait for rescue. Don’t beg or borrow. Use what you’ve got. Put your brains and your legs to work. Earn your keep. Don’t give up and don’t take shortcuts.
I saw this on Quora, while taking a break at work, and I thought it was interesting viewpoint. THe views are that of the Author(Not Me, lol) but it does track with my experiences, and what I have seen of 3rd world armies it does track.
by
Roland Bartetzko
I’ll probably make some enemies with this answer, but who cares?
Let’s start with the worst foreign fighters (and why they perform so poorly):
Colombians. It’s not that they lack experience or knowledge, but every foreigner who comes here needs to learn additional skills their home country's military likely didn’t teach them.
These skills are mostly in the areas of drone and electronic warfare, adaptation to the battlefield environment, and TCCC (Tactical Combat Casualty Care). Even training from “richer” Western armies isn’t enough to survive on the Ukrainian frontlines.
Even if you’been serving in your home country's best army unit before you came to Ukraine, there's some machinery here you haven't learned to operate. (Picture: all rights by the author of this post)
Fortunately, the Armed Forces of Ukraine will teach you most of this—if (and that’s a big “if”) you’re willing to learn.
Unfortunately, with the Colombians (and other South Americans as well), the motivation to train and acquire new skills is rather low. Some might say they’re a bit lazy. As a result, they suffer a high number of casualties.
That said, this problem isn’t limited to South Americans. Some combat veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq came here thinking they were untouchable—that their sh*t didn’t stink and they didn’t need any “stupid” training. They quickly learned otherwise—the hard way.
On the other hand, there are many professional soldiers who recognize their limitations and are eager to learn. These individuals make up the majority of foreign volunteer fighters.
Especially among the Americans (many of them former Marines) and the Brits, the mantra is always: “Training, training, training!”
That’s the right attitude. It doesn’t matter where you’re from—an enemy artillery shell or drone doesn’t care about your passport. If you’re too lazy or too arrogant to learn new things, you’ll quickly perish.
I got this question and Answer of "Quora" and it was pretty good I thought.
A guy named "Jerry Bennett" provided the answer, so he got the props.
Still very busy at work and other things going on, once I get some more information, I will put it on here.
As they say, a picture can be worth a thousand words.
The basic rationale behind the Constitution's requirement that states elect presidents rather than the popular vote was that the framers of the Constitution favored a federation of states rather than a national ‘kingdom’ style of government. State’s rights were a guiding principle. In addition, at the time the Constitution was ratified, holding a popular vote in a timely manner was problematic (think Pony Express). So states were given the choice of how to present ‘electors’ to the election assembly (called the Electoral College) that would, in turn, cast two votes, one each for President and Vice President (no, there is no constitutional requirement that the president and vice president come from the same political party).
In our first 80 years as a nation, most state legislators, governors, and state influencers chose who the electors would be and who they would cast votes for. The number of electoral votes allowed from each state was governed by the number of state representatives in Congress (two senators + House Representatives).
This persisted until the late 1800s by which time most states adopted a ‘popular vote’ system within the state to determine the candidate the state electors would present to the college.
Tallying the popular vote within the entire country has always been a false exercise. The popular vote is only relevant within the state in which it is cast. The news media (press) invented a national popular vote and national polls—neither of which are germane to the presidential election.
In recent times, the Electoral College has been seen as a hedge against big city control of national political will. As can be seen, by the map graphic above, large US cities (predominantly Democratic in the last century) would likely control the administrative office of the federal government (Presidency) if not held in check by the Electoral process.
To go from a Federation of States to a Popular Democracy would mean the elimination of state sovereignty to some extent and a constitutional amendment that no Republican state would ratify. No Democrat has ever won the Presidency without also winning the popular vote. In contrast, Republican presidents lost the popular vote in four separate elections where they won the Presidency.
And it will be this way, I will blog when I can. I have a rant peculating and some things that happened at Casa De Garabaldi. I will try to get a post up on Sunday, or I might sleep in, LOL
Well anyway I saw this on Quora while I was on the throne. As I was taught a long time ago "The bossman gets paid a dollar, I get paid a dime, so I get paid to crap on company time". Well anyway I saw this and thought it was worth "Nicking". Afterwards, I added a post I had done back in 2013.
because a tyrannical government would send drones, A-10s, and tanks to quell any civilian revolts?
AR-15s?
Some of these people don’t have proper shoes. I have seen shoes made out of Kumho tires. And they’re not even U.S. citizens.
The U.S. has employed drones, A-10s, artillery, guided missiles… a whole hell of a lot of resources. Hundreds of billions of dollars.
After nearly 20 years of fighting these “poorly armed” people, we’re about to finally quit. Because there is no [feasible] way to win. We don’t even know what “winning” looks like today.
War is not simply killing the enemy. War is a struggle between two hostile, independent, and irreconcilable wills, each trying to impose itself on the other by force.
You do not win a war by killing the enemy. You win a war by destroying his ability to fight. Killing your enemy is just one tried-and-true method of destroying your enemy’s ability to fight. But it is not the only way. It is not even the most efficient way.
Unless you’re willing to slash and burn, asymmetric warfare is not won by having the biggest or most expensive toys. It’s by using the toys you do have to grind your enemy down in materiel and morale. To undercut his economic and social support. So that even if your enemy has all the toys to fight, you’ve attrited him so badly that he no longer desires to pay the high cost of using them.
So, your military personnel are murdering civilians in mass numbers with expensive toys?
Well, let’s get down to brass tacks. I mean, really basic, gritty uncomfortable stuff about occupying an armed society. At the end of the day those military personnel are greatly outnumbered. And they live in homes and have families and they have to sleep. Right in those angry civilian’s backyards.
Sure, Lieutenant Smith can reach out and touch someone by predator drone. If Ireland taught us anything, one night Smith will go to the local off-base watering hole. And he won’t come home that night. They’ll find him dead in an alley or floating in a river.
Oh, sure. They’re not supposed to talk about what they do. But, it happens. Loose lips. Internal leaks. It’s inevitable—especially close to home. Today, the Air Force has about 900 drone pilots. How many pilots could a tyrannical government afford to lose? How fast can you re-train them?
Sure, you can take increasingly drastic action to control the civilian population. And you’ll only exacerbate the pushback. And where’re your bullets and beans coming from? Who is producing and packaging it? Is it still safe? Those aircraft burn fuel. After several months of these operations, where are you going to get that fuel? Other civilians? Supply chains coming from civilian contractors are vulnerable. And collaborators are just targets. How are you going to operate when over 300 million people can deny you—and all of your supply chain—freedom of movement?
Like I said. This is ugly stuff.
So now, in addition to this murderous government killing civilians, you’ve got to protect your personnel, their homes, their families, food production and processors, private contractors, fuel lines, highways, etc. And that’s before we even consider external threats who might smell opportunity.
So you really have a tyrannical government? The scale of operations you’ll need to contemplate will quickly explode in complexity and resource requirements. Yes, you can have a bit of fun oppressing your civilian population. But the logistics will ultimately sink whatever tyrannical fantasies you have.
Yes, even a poorly trained, armed populace is capable of defending and prevailing against a much larger, better equipped military. Not at any small cost. People die in armed conflict. But they can win. And that is the way things are.
And the fact that this is the way things are, tends to “discourage” ambitious and corrupt men from future actions they might take. Which would lead us down the path where such a tyrannical government would be willing to inflict such heavy casualties on their citizens with impunity.
Petty tyrannies maybe. But, outright tyranny isn’t logistically possible. So long as people have the means to resist you.
People who state this absurd objection are effectively saying, “And that’s why we need to disarm the people. So they can’t fight back at all.”
Something else to think about, I had posted this back in 2013 I believe and it is still pertinent to what is going on,
I ran across this from Here. I remember seeing this posted before right after Sandy Hook. Since then, the government has tried to ban certain ammo for a very popular rifle platform. BATF is just doing the bidding of the petulant boy king. I have commented in the past that there is only one way to enter Valhalla and kneeling before the executioner ain't it. I am adding some points to the below essay. I have this thought going through my mind if the time came and I had to choose to die with honor or live as a coward....
If the decision came, I hope I acquit my self as well as the vikings did in this battle, yes I know that this is a movie, but the Alamo was real as was other places that fought against overwhelming odds. I sincerely hope that it never comes to this and we pull away from the abyss that is looming in front of us. There is a lesson here, if everybody choose to fight, the enforcers will quickly lose heart for we vastly outnumber them.
This is a re-post from a couple of years ago. Matt tells it like it is. If we don't resist, it's just a short boxcar ride to a "re-education" camp. Or a bullet in the back of the head. I have made my stance very clear on more than one occasion. My line in the sand; I would rather be shot by a government thug while standing in the middle of my street than to be shot in the back of the head by a government thug while kneeling next to a pit. by Matt Bracken
If they come to take away your guns by force, they have declared war on the Constitution, and on you. At that point, war is joined, just as it was during another famous gun confiscation raid on April 19, 1775.
If a firearm was legal in 2012, under the 2nd Amendment it’s still legal in 2013 and it will be legal forever, no matter what so-called “executive orders” are handed down or new “laws” are passed by a panicking Congress. Those who say otherwise are liars and traitors and oath breakers and domestic enemies.
Every survivor of every genocide says the same thing: when they come to take your guns, shoot them! Make them take them, and their system of repression will be overwhelmed, because they don’t have millions of jack-booted thugs ready to do armed battles all over the country.
If you give up your arms, you are placing your entire trust in the permanent future benevolence of the U.S. government. This trust is invariably fatal: ask the American Indians about those treaties that were guaranteed forever.
History is clear, with numerous examples, of the danger of gun registration and gun control. The German gun registration laws were enacted during the 1920s Weimar Republic, years before Hitler came to power. German gun registration was mandated in the name of “public safety.” Note that phrase well. I’m sure today’s liberal utopians would agree that they were “common sense” and “reasonable” gun control laws. Don’t we all want “public safety?”
Then Hitler rose to power, and used the gun registration lists to first disarm the Jews, and then to force them into starving, overcrowded ghettos, and finally into mass graves and gas chambers. The Nazi genocide of the Jews was enabled by those “common sense” German gun registration lists.
Millions of Polish Jews were rounded up by German military police battalions. The German military police only needed a 1-10 ratio to their victims. A mere 100 German military police, (4-Fs in their forties, bottom of the barrel conscripts, not rabid SS), would round up and murder a town of a thousand Jews over the course of one day.
The Germans would force them to sit tightly packed together on town plazas or sporting fields under the watch of only a handful of armed guards. The Germans would then march groups of twenty or thirty at a time at gunpoint into the woods for point-blank executions. A 1-10 ratio means the military police were not worried at all about meeting resistance. The victims were all previously disarmed.
During the Armenian Genocide from 1915-23, two million Christian Turks were exterminated by being marched at gun point into burning deserts with no food or water. The Turkish gun registration laws were enacted in 1911, in the name of “public safety.” The genocide began a few years later, after the Armenians’ firearms were confiscated.
Entire divisions of Russian troops hiked home from WW1 in 1917/18, carrying their rifles and swords and other sidearms. Very early on, Lenin decreed that “public safety” required they all be turned in, under penalty of death. And so the Russian war veterans were disarmed—but not the Communist Party members. Then came the Soviet purges, the Great Terror, the Gulags, and tens of millions of disarmed Russians were murdered.
I’m sorry, but I do NOT trust that our federal government won’t turn as brutally tyrannical as the old USSR at some point in the future, perhaps after an economic crash or other major crisis. The Obama regime already perceives that we “Bitter Clingers” are “reactionaries” who are not only standing in the way of social progress, we are actively blocking it.
That makes us pure Evil, since their plan for a socialist utopia is pure Good. And that means they will ultimately come to feel totally justified in seeking a “final solution to the Bitter Clinger problem,” in the same way that the Turks, Soviets and Nazis did. Can anyone guarantee Americans that tyranny will never visit our shores?
If the socialists in power are scapegoating us as national villains now, what will they do when they have no reason to fear us whatsoever? Did the Turks, Soviets or Nazis treat their despised minorities better, or worse, after disarming them? Think!
And once a despot’s enemies (that’s us) are disarmed and helpless…the temptation grows to simply do away with them. Obama mentor and ghost-autobiographer, the Weather Underground bomber Bill Ayers, stated that they would need to murder ten percent of the American population to achieve their socialist nirvana. Thirty million bitter clingers. Guess who that is?
Don’t relearn this bitter lesson the hard way. Learn from history’s many examples. As it was for the Turkish Armenians, German Jews, Russian Kulaks, Chinese, Ugandans, Guatemalans, Cambodians, Cubans, Rwandans, and on and on, history’s lesson is crystal clear:
Stick to your guns–no matter what!
I think this passage says it all. If we resist, what are they really going to do? What happens when the enforcers are afraid to go out and do their jobs?
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!”
I saw this on "Quora" and I thought it was a good explaination. It expounds on what I have said in the past. the post was well written.
The guy name is "Ted Kord"
The question should be, why don’t more self-professed liberals actually fear Critical Theory.
Actually, some are afraid. As Edward Slosser pointed out in a Vox article titled I’m a Liberal Professor and my Liberal Students Terrify me (link below).
Professors, often leftist professors, have every reason to be scared of students who have been indoctrinated on one branch or another of Critical Theory (not just Critical Race Theory.
Consider for a moment what happened at 2015 at Yale University. Highly regarded Educator Erika Christakis had the poor taste to opine that colleges shouldn’t be in the business of telling students what Halloween costumes the students can and cannot wear. Professor Christakis expressed that students should be free to make mistakes and commit faux paus.
“Have we lost faith in young people’s capacity—in your capacity—to exercise self-censure, through social norming, and also in your capacity to ignore or reject things that trouble you? …What does this debate about Halloween costumes say about our view of young adults, of their strength and judgment? Whose business is it to control the forms of costumes of young people? It’s not mine, I know that.”
Her Husband Nicholas, also a professor at Yale, agreed with her. I can understand that as I would never publicly disagree with my wife. But Both professors are advocates for a truly liberal model of a university.
For agreeing with his wife Nicholas Christakis found himself surrounded by an angry mob insulting him and calling for a change in his employment status.
Mind you, Erika and Nicholas Christakis are deeply liberal Democrats, what we used to talk about when referring to “liberal college professors.” The video of Professor Christakis being insulted and berated by students for not publicly disagreeing with his wife. I don’t know about you, but as someone who’s been happily married for quite some time, publicly disagreeing with my wife is something I just don’t do. My wife is a career educator, and if someone came up to me and asked me to denounce something she’s written or said, I’d tell them to perform a sexual act on themselves.
The Christakis video from Yale shocked many, but it was nothing compared to what would happen to another professor with even more left-wing cred.
I present the case of Bret Weinstein, whom I mentioned earlier. Professor Weinstein taught Evolutionary Biology at a crunchy little left-wing college in the Pacific North-West called Evergreen State College. Weinstein is a pretty left-wing guy. He supported Bernie Sanders and Occupy Wall Street. If you go listen to his first interview with Joe Rogan, you can hear him make very well-crafted arguments in favor of abolishing nuclear power and why the capitalist system needs to be replaced.
If you truly listen to his arguments, you will see that by any objective standard Weinstein is a deeply committed progressive wanting America to adopt some, as yet, untried form of socialism.
Despite being of the left, when Evergreen State College asked White faculty and staff to stay away for a civil rights-related day of absence, Weinstein sent this very carefully-worded letter of protest to colleagues and administration.
For sending this very measured e-mail, Weinstein was targetted by his more radical-left colleagues who whipped students into a fury, then sent them out to disrupt his biology class.
The students began with insults and profanity, but progressed to the point where armed students were searching cars (Portland Antifa style) for the professor. The campus police chief called Weinstein and told him not to come on campus because it wasn’t safe, and the college president had ordered the campus police to stand down…that is: the college president ordered the campus police to NOT PROTECT Professor Weinstein.
This illiberal violence directed at Weinstein was stirred up by one of his very colleagues. Naima Lowe, an “art” professor at Evergreen State College who sees activism as the focus of her teaching.
When some of her left-wing colleagues at Evergreen disagreed with her on how to achieve a more egalitarian campus, here’s how she responded. “You are now these motherf***ers that we’re pushing against. You can’t see your way out of your own ass.” She helped instigate verbal assaults on Professor Weinstein.
Weinstein might be “deeply progressive,” as he describes himself, but when he disagreed with Lowe he found his classes being disrupted and his family being threatened by her students.
This socialist educator lost his teaching position because he had become the subject of a witch hunt. One can assume that there were one or two conservatives on the Evergreen staff, but they survived by camouflaging themselves and hiding their opinions. Unable to find real conservatives, the raging SJWs went after the nearest thing to a witch (conservative) and that was a mild-mannered biology professor who had supported Bernie Sanders in the previous election.
Critical Theory is a utopian political ideology that seeks to dismantle the centuries long liberal project that turned western and northern Europe, along with North America, into the destinations of choice 90% of the world’s migrants.
I first became aware of Critical Theory more than a decade ago while earning a graduate degree in Educational Administration. Years earlier I had noticed the general lift-wing bias in graduate Education courses while earning my first credential. But by the time I was working my first masters degree, Marxists like Brazilian Paulo Friere…
…along with 1960s/70s “new-left” terrorist turned “educator” William Ayers were becoming the dominant voices within the field of Education, often displacing older Progressives like John Dewey.
The sudden predominance of Marxists and Neo-Marxists as part of an educational curriculum for aspiring principals and education bureaucrats was part of what is called Critical Pedagogy.
Douglas Kellner, a proponent of the neo-Marxist Critical Theory, describes the evolution of thought from Karl Marx to what I had to learn to get my credential in California 20 years ago in From Classical Marxism to Critical Pedagogy by Douglas Kellner.
“Alongside of the proliferation of neo-Marxian theories of culture and society and globalization of cultural studies, forms of an oppositional critical pedagogy emerged that explicitly criticized schooling in capitalist societies while calling for more emancipatory modes of education. In his now classic The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972), Brazilian educator and activist Paulo Freire criticized the "banking concept of education" while calling for more interactive, dialogical, and participatory forms of pedagogy that are parallel in interesting ways to those of John Dewey. While Dewey wanted education to produce citizens for democracy, however, Freire sought, in the spirit of Marxist revolutionary praxis, to develop a pedagogy of the oppressed that would produce revolutionary subjects, empowered to overthrow oppression and to create a more democratic and just social order.”
Most people would assume that Education graduate programs were left wing. But they would shocked if they learned how one small branch of left-wing politics, a branch so radical that it is at odds with both liberalism and even classical Marxism, has taken over teacher training.
Over he last 2 decades, many branches of humanities and social studies have embraced what is known is Critical theory. So what is critical theory.
In the early 20th Century, Marxism has become a political force. Proponents of Marxism made claims, and among them were:
Communism was scientific and its benefits would be easily measurable.
Those benefits would include a higher standard of living because of the efficiency of state control.
Communist countries would be more humane than capitalist countries.
By the 1960s, data was rolling in and it didn’t turn out exactly how the proponents of Communism had intended. Among the pieces of evidence the intellectuals had to take into account.
The mass starvation of Ukrainians by the Soviet Union.
Forty-five million Chinese peasants being worked, beaten and intentionally starved to death during China’s Great Leap Forward.
The numerous purges through which the likes of Lenin, Staling and Mao killed more communists than all the world’s anti-communists combined.
The final straw for many was the use of Russian tanks to suppress Hungarian student protesters in 1956.
By the 1960s, an honest intellectual could not defend communism either on economic or humanitarian grounds. But as it turned out that there were plenty of intellectuals who thought that something … kinda … sorta … like Marxism was just what west’s culture needed. Intellectuals of the The Frankfurt School created a form of Marxism mostly devoid of economics. Instead of workers vs. capitalists, advocates of Critical Theory saw almost every cultural interaction as an instance where someone was oppressing and someone was being oppressed. It was men vs. women, whites vs. blacks, and homosexuals vs. heterosexuals; in all these interactions someone was being oppressed and someone was doing the oppressing.
I’m oversimplifying to some extent. Professors of education and humanities didn’t just decide to adopt Neo-Marxist Critical Theory as the operating system (so to speak) of academia. First academics embraced the French philosophy of Postmodernism. This radical philosophy was great for dissecting and deconstructing existing institution, but it wasn’t really suitable for building institutions.
Postmodernism went through academia like a tornado through a trailer park, overturning assumptions and dismantling previously reliable ways of knowing.
Now, just to be clear, Postmodernists are not communists. If the Postmodernists had any particular mission, it was the dismantling of all grand narratives whether that narrative was The Scientific Method, Christianity or Communism. But postmodernism created a void that was filled by hard-left authoritarians with a new all purpose ideology, Critical Theory.
Critical Theory is the term that Marxist social critics (sometimes called Neo-Marxists), such as Herbert Marcuse, Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer gave to their particular approach to political and social philosophy.
Critical Theory is basically Marxist ideology as applied to everything outside of economics. Where Marx was obsessed with class differences, Marcuse, Adorno and Horkheimer created a new ideology that focused on power rather than money, and through which the world could be divided into oppressors and oppressed.
Make no mistake, you’re either one or the other.
These three men invented the ideology called Critical Theory. I capitalized the words critical and theory because it is a title, a proper noun. “Critical Theory” is basically the brand name Marcuse, Adorno and Horkheimer gave to their particular brand of Marxism. There are some peculiarities that result from the particular interests of the original authors.
For example, Marcuse was far more obsessed with sexual liberation than Marx ever was. He seemed to think that if humans were freed from capitalist drudgery they could spend all days learning new and better ways to orgasm.
Marcuse was also a big fan of Martin Heidegger, the German collectivist philosopher who’s most famous contribution to history was putting the socialism into German National Socialism.
The ideology devised by Marcuse, Horkheimer and Adorno is sufficiently malleable that it can be applied to other areas of interests.
Critical Race Theory, for example, is merely the application of Neo-Marxist Critical Theory to race.
Gender Theory is Marxist Critical Theory applied to issues of gender.
Critical Legal Theory is simply a Neo-Marxist interpretation of law.
And of course Critical Pedagogy is the application of Marxist Critical Theory to Education.
The important thing to understand is that none of those are “theories” as the term “theory” is understood by science. A theory is a hypothesis that, after being repeatedly challenged through experimentation, is found to be correct.
But the assertions made in the various Critical Theory “disciplines” are immune from being challenged. If an advocate of Critical Race Theory asserts an idea, someone challenging that idea might find themselves treated much the way Bret Weinstein was treated…if not worse.
So not only are the offshoots of Critical Theory free of theories, they are largely free of hypothesis. What Critical Theory has is dogmas. So in all important ways, the branches of Critical Theory are more akin to a religion than to science or social science.
Critical Theories are new secular religions.
These new religions were crafted together based on equal parts mis-understanding of Postmodernism and a piss-poor understanding of Neo-Marxism. While the overriding philosophy is a miss-mash of “postmodernism” and “Neo-Marxism” As it evolved since the turn of the century, the guiding principle became Intersectionality. The idea is that some people are privileged in multiple ways while other people are oppressed in multiple ways.
Look at the diagram above. Everyone will fit into more than one category.
The more of your categories that appear above the horizontal line, the more privileged you are in society.
The more of your categories that appear below the line, the more oppressed you are.
Within this system of understanding, “knowledge” is given credibility based not on whether is is empirically true, it is based on the extent you are privileged or oppressed.
If you mostly fit into categories below the horizontal line, your opinions are given greater weight, and it doesn’t matter whether or not your beliefs are based on reality, because there is no real way of knowing; it’s all about power.
If you mostly fit into categories above the horizontal line, your opinions are given less weight, even if you’ve compiled lots of facts and data to support your believe. The fact that you rely on “factoids” rather than emotion to make your argument means that you just don’t get it.
More so than Postmodernism or Marxism, this is the overriding philosophy at work in American universities. If you have any interest in understanding how these ideas took hold in academia, I would recommend listening to Helen Pluckrose.
Ms. Pluckrose is a left-wing critic of Postmodernism and Critical Theory. Remember earlier where I said that Critical Theory often finds itself in conflict with liberals and old-school Marxists. Much is made of the cultural wars on college campuses, with narratives that seem to pit conservatives against wacky liberals. That is a misrepresentation. Critical Theory is at odds with both conservatives and liberals, and for the moment the world’s newest religion seems to be winning.
Critical Theory, and its many offshoots are undeserving of being taught in public schools because they are a political ideology that has been raised up to the status of secular religion.
We should not be indoctrinating children in politics or religion within our public schools.
