It doesn’t seem so long ago that you could say “social justice” bears the same relationship to “justice” as “social worker” does to “worker,” and warn that integrating female soldiers into front-line combat would devastate military effectiveness. Nowadays such things are taboo. But the Canadian military’s recruiting crisis suggests a lingering gap between “social justice warrior” and “warrior.”
Defence is the first duty of government. Without it nothing else matters, not even civil liberties, because of the old rule that there will be an army in your country, so it better be yours. And Canada’s armed forces are far too small.
Historic regiments are mothballed, the reserves starved, our ships rust and catch fire, our fighter planes are geriatric, and we cannot field, well, a force. Which was all fun and games until it turned out the world was still dangerous despite decades of vapid rhetoric about peace, we were neither an energy nor a moral superpower, and Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping were immune to our frown beams.
She concedes “We are without a doubt in an applicant crisis right now.” But she blames a “cultural reckoning” about lack of diversity, those darn uniforms and stuff, before claiming, “I don’t think we’ve got a good answer anywhere.”
Sure you did. You just didn’t like it. As Kevin Myers could write back in 1995, “The IRA is the Irish Republican Army, not a thousand Danish manicurists called Karen.” And in that spirit I’d suggest that our military no longer appeals to its core demographic, brave, devoted manly souls willing to kill and die to defend hearth and home. Instead, Brodie babbles, “suitable candidates are those that first and foremost reflect the values of the Canadian Armed Forces.” A.k.a those of official Ottawa social justice warriors who despise Western civilization as much as they love identity politics.
Ottawa’s senior recruiter Petty Officer Andrew Clark soft-pedalled it: “We’re selling the benefits of being in the Canadian Armed Forces. The pension, the medical, the dental, the education piece, continuing education, as well as a pretty interesting career where you get to travel around the world, potentially, and get paid to do it.” Ah yes. Travel around the world. Visit lovely Juno Beach and, um, Taiwan?
As the National Post added, “Recruiters are given targets to meet, with … minimum targets for female recruits and maximums for men. There is also a high-level push for what the military still refers to as ‘visible minorities’ and Indigenous people. ‘Diversity is what we’re after,’ Clark says.”
As for sexual harassment, those who assumed high-ranking men and subordinate women could cooperate closely for long stressful hours and nothing would happen that cut across normal disciplinary lines were defying biology in ways you’d expect from a culture that insists there are no differences between men and the non-existent women they inherently oppress. But if we again experience full-scale combat of the sort witnessed from World War I through Korea and now Ukraine, with women blown horribly to bits beside male comrades, it will shatter the morale of our small, hapless force.
Still, being conquered by evil regimes is a small price to pay for going down with all virtue-signals flying.
