Some troops have drawn equivalencies between the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol and last year’s protests for racial justice during recent stand-downs to address extremism, worrying the military’s top enlisted leader.
In a Thursday briefing with reporters at the Pentagon, Ramón “CZ” Colón-López, the senior enlisted adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that some troops have asked, when the Jan. 6 riot is brought up, “How come you’re not looking at the situation that was going on in Seattle prior to that?”
There is a nuanced distinction between a mob storming the Capitol to prevent the counting of the electoral college votes and thus regime change, and “mostly peaceful” protests which morph into violence where United States Courthouse come under siege, but only at night. But not everyone sees the nuance as a sufficient line in the sand to explain why one is bad and the other is Seattle.
Colón-López said the confusion some younger troops have expressed shows why the training sessions on extremism are needed.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered the stand-down Feb. 5 and gave units across the military 60 days to discuss extremism in the ranks with troops.
The military’s policies are clear, he said: Troops are not to advocate for, or participate in, supremacist, extremist or criminal gang doctrine, ideology or causes.
There can be no doubt that the military must be apolitical, and certainly “extremism” is bad because it’s “extreme.” But then, it’s a bit vague, so what is this extremism, this “ideology or causes” in which troops are not to advocate or participate in?
And he drew a distinction between those who lawfully exercised their First Amendment rights to protest during last summer’s protests in support of racial justice and the Black Lives Matter movement, and those who “latched on” to the protests to loot, destroy property and commit other crimes.
But sometimes, he said, younger troops see messages on TV that blur the lines between the two, and “we needed to educate them” on the difference.
“No, that’s not what that meant,” Colón-López said. “There were people advocating [against] social injustice, racial injustice and everything else, and it is the right of citizens.”
As Colón-López expressly noted, the military was “called to respond after the Capitol attacks, but was not called up to support law enforcement during the Seattle protests.” So if the military is ordered to respond, then it’s bad, but if it’s not ordered to respond, then it’s good?
“What I am committed to is to make sure that our people understand right from wrong,” he said. “That our people … are well-educated to be able to carry on, in an honorable fashion. And if they hear somebody saying the wrong things, that they’re quick to go ahead and correct them … without being confrontational.”
What exactly differentiates people “saying the wrong things” such that soldiers are under a duty to be “quick to go ahead and correct them…without being confrontational”?
Teaching people the difference between exercising their constitutional right to peacefully protest as opposed to engaging in violence is surely a worthwhile endeavor, but maintaining an apolitical military requires more than empty platitudes. Is “right from wrong” a matter of respecting people’s rights, which in itself is a somewhat controversial endeavor these days, or picking which ideology is the good one and training them to “correct” people who say “the wrong things.”
What are those wrong things of which Colón-López speaks? What business is it of the military to decide who is saying the wrong things and who is not? It could well mean that the military should be intolerant of racism in its ranks, which is certainly a good thing even if it implicates questions about whether racism is determined by a rational person or an Ivy League sociology professor.
What is the message here? Does it work? Is the military telling its troops to be apolitical or the right political? Is this a comprehensible message for soldiers? For anyone?
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