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This whole debate between Elon and the rest of the right hinges upon what people understand the purpose of a state to be.
Is it an ideological organization like the Comintern, the Ummah or Christendom (or e/acc aerospace/digital foom)? Is it a commercial area, devoted to making the green line go up? Alternately, is the state a suit of political power-armour for a nation, devoted to advancing their national, ethnic interests?
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1871978282289082585
Elon is in with the neocons, the fundamentalists and the woke on this one, he lacks a national concept for the state.
At the end of the day, I believe in the nation-state as the fundamental unit. Blood is thicker than ideology, you can see Chinese recruitment officers (who somehow got into the US military) say on Tiktok 'obviously I'm not going to fight against China' - maybe some other wars. Relying on foreign talent leaves you wide open to treachery and manipulation as the US has experienced and is experiencing. And it corrodes the necessary spirit of sacrifice. People are happy fighting wars to defend their nation, they are not so keen fighting for abstract causes. If migrants make a logical decision to migrate to a richer, more lucrative economic zone, they'll likely make the logical decision to leave when the going gets tough. On a collective level, logical individual decisions are no good. It makes more sense to evade duty and responsibility - but then you end up living in a poor, unsafe and weak state, you're worse off than before.
The US has mostly avoided these problems because the going never got tough. They were bigger and better than everyone in their region and enjoyed allies who did most of the hard fighting in the big wars. Even then, there have been significant political problems in America due to a lack of ethnic homogeneity. There can't be any race riots if there's only one race present.
Nobody wants to join the British Army today. Despite constant fearmongering and war propaganda it's actively shrinking. Turning a nation-state into an economic zone corrodes its integrity.
Could I have a screenshot of this, or an article about it?
There's nothing in particular that comes to the mind from the last decade or so of western military reporting, so nothing systemic at least, though I am also interested if anything is provided. (Edit: Provided information did not demonstrate any systemic pattern, and was a single alleged ethnic-Chinese NCO claiming he wouldn't fight for US against China or vice versa. Motives appear to have been familial rather than ethnic, and amounted to neutrality on claimed terms.)
However, this is more likely to be an extension / reflection / TikTok propaganda perpetuation of the ethnic 'Chinese story' approach of China's diaspora policy, which seeks to utilize / cooperate / encourage ethnic Chinese in other countries to adopt pro-PRC narratives.
PRC ethnic-chinese diaspora policy has multiple roles. Part of this is to maximize the benefit to the PRC from ethnic chinese out in the world, but another part is to encourage / cultivate the perception-conflation that (ethnic) Chinese = China = PRC = CCP. What's less obvious is that this doesn't just work in so much that it convinces ethnic chinese in the diaspora (so that they believe that there is some duty owed to the PRC), but that it also works when it convinces the non-ethnic-chinese of other states.
Ethnic chinese are encouraged to be distinct, rather than assimilate, and the flip side of this is that the PRC benefits from a 'don't try to assimilate them' suspicion / caution in other parties. It's not so much that they want there to be an actual significant amount of anti-Chinese hostility, but certain amounts of distrust and hostility lets the CCP present itself as the guardian of the ethnic chinese diaspora, garnering local influence and letting them set up proxy influencers, even as it can use those ethnic chinese influence groups to lobby / try to influence the local state.
Going back to this tiktok- the claimed ethnic chinese officer claiming they wouldn't fight China (...note that they are allegedly in a recruiting position, not a combat arms branch), is almost certainly not representative, if they even exist. But encouraging the perception that ethnic Chinese military members can't be trusted would be a exceptionally beneficial propaganda line to signal boost if there was even just 1 example (or invent if there was not).
Note, also, that this is a pretty banal sort of ethnic-solidarity / national diaspora propaganda that you can find in any general ethnonationalist / conflict-adjacent context. In the 20th century, the German diaspora was not only a factor in the WW2 pro-Nazi sympathies in places like Argentina, but even earlier when before WW1 German enclaves / business interests in Africa were used as pretexts for the (late) German colonies in Africa. In WW2, it's far more remembered how few ethnic Japanese in the US tried to support Imperial Japan, but that wasn't for a lack of trying on pre-war Imperial Japanese efforts to mobilize ethnic japanese across the Pacific. Etc. etc. etc.
I'm Australian; that the PRC's been trying to co-opt the diaspora is common knowledge here. Interesting point regarding playing off "infiltrator" instincts, though.
Am I correct in thinking that that guy, assuming he really is a US Army recruiter, will probably get in trouble for that? One would assume that this would be in flagrant violation of recruiter codes of conduct, and possibly implicate him in violations of base security protocols.
[Insert ad hominem fallacy on an account of foreigner category]/Joking.png
You could be correct, but you could be incorrect. It depends on more information than we have.
One of the weird things about the initial claim is that the Pentagon banned tiktok from government computers in 2023 barely a year and a half ago. In fact, there was an Army recruiting scandal in 2021 about use of TikTok when not supposed to. If an American recruiter is doing recruitment on TikTok, he is either doing something very wrong regardless of message/loyalty concern (violating policy), or may actually be operating within approved scopes (is operating within special exceptions).
If it's the later, there may be no violation at all. It may, in fact, even be the point.
More on that later, but it's not like the militaries lacks people who garner contempt for wanting to sit out specific conflicts. Kamalla Harris's vice president pick during the recent US election had the baggage that he tried to present himself as a service veteran despite possibly having arranged to get out of his reserve unit's overseas deployment. It's not exactly hard to find dissent within an institution over 2.8 million strong (standing military, reserves, support civilians), with some people shaping (or ending) their careers to not be associated with some conflict / etc. In past unpopular wars, it wasn't unknown for people to join entire other services (such as joining the Navy to avoid being drafted into the Army in Vietnam), or to unceremoniously retire to avoid deployments (in the Iraq War era there was a surge of American reserve / national guard retirements by people who were content to be in the reserves during the 90s when it was considered low/no risk).
Ultimately Ranger's argument relies on assumptions of a separate topic (presentation of loyalties, as opposed to policy adherence) where there's a perception of what sort of loyalty people think is required (members must be willing to fight all enemies and say so!) that is less absolute in practice.
It's less absolute because manpower is not only limited (there has never been an endless supply of ideal candidates), but manpower is often both fungible (one person here can free up another person to go there) and mutually exclusive (person trained for expertise A can't be used in occupation B anyway). Full-throated concurrence with all wars wasn't a requirement in the conscription era (where conscientious objectors / pacifists could sometimes be shunted to support roles, or just put in risk and expected to save themselves), nor is it typically demanded in a volunteer-service model (where service members have some significant influence over their careers as they reach higher ranks, and thus can choose areas where they're not likely to do what they really don't want to do).
There are certainly cases / issues when an expeditionary military says 'go' and the person says 'I don't want to,' but these are both very rare at the level of the recruiter in question, and, uh, wouldn't be present for someone who is a recruiter.
///
Now to return to the point passed earlier, where it could be a context of approved message. (Emphasis on could.)
Ranger's argument works from a perspective of how this is terrible because lack of loyalty and inherent untrustworthiness and mercenaries bad and yada. Ranger is also very clearly not thinking like a manpower-capability developer (i.e. recruitment at scale), but operating from a basis of purity politic demands. Purity politics is bad force generation policy. Even governments obsessed with ideological compliance, such as the Soviets, used a purity-cadre model (political officers) as opposed to a purity rank-and-file model.
Starting from the most obvious, monetary incentives are absolutely a basis of building and retaining talent. This isn't an issue of 'mercenary' pejoratives, it's a point that that in a volunteer service model the military is an employer, and as an employer they are competing with all other employers to recruit and retain. Fundamental disconnect there, and also woefully ignorant of why so many of the common US incentives include post-service benefits, like paying for college (i.e. investing in domestic talent development after getting your military use out of them). This is why in modern history the American military has been often seen approvingly as a 'way up' for underclass Americans- it provides substantial training / more structured environments / post-service education that people may not otherwise be able to afford. It's not a guarantee, but it's a powerful incentive. Someone who serves 4 years and than leaves to enjoy college is not a failure, it's a success story of how you got someone to successfully serve 4 years at the lowest runs of the military and then improved their national value potential.
Part of any recruitment pitch, in turn, comes with conveying the perception of costs for taking the job. If a recruiter says 'you may never go see your family abroad,' then that is a lot of people who might be willing to serve but not if it means they can't serve abroad. Similarly, if a recruiter says 'you must be willing to fight the Chinese state, no matter if the PRC attempts to use your family as hostages,' then again, you are winnowing the field. The US military is designed to fight on 2 different continents at any time, with at least Europe and Korea providing non-Chinese fronts.
Further, a recruiting pitch that can appeal to both hard-core joiners (the people who would be more gung-ho than the recruiter) and the wavering (ethnic Chinese who would share the sentiment of not wanting to join a war against China, but would also not want to fight the US) isn't inviting a trojan horse with the later category, it's getting an asset.
The chinese language is, in a word, hard, and there is generally a shortage in any non-Chinese government of people who can speak and/or read it. As a result, there is a demand that far exceeds the supply in people who can (a) read / speak Chinese, and (b) are willing to do it for the government. Someone who is (c) willing to do it at an enlisted soldier's pay (low) at (d) enlisted soldiers hours (no overtime pay) and in (e) enlisted soldier's living standards (non-affluent) and at a (f) enlisted soldier's 'can be moved across the world to where most conveneient (incredibly high) is incredibly good value-for-money.
There is, in other words, a great many useful / desirable roles that a government wants a Chinese-speaker for, many of them that do not require taking up arms against the PRC even in the course of a war against the PRC. Many of them require no access to sensitive material / networks / resources either.
The role of any human resources / recruiting institution is to try to match potential incoming talent to desired needs, not to refuse to accept valuable talents because it is unsuited for any particular need. 'Speaks Chinese, but is not willing to fight the Chinese state' is not a the most desirable recruit package, but it's a very useful one. The questions / investigations of loyalty / questions of what they are willing to do are real considerations, but they are more questions on how to direct talent to the best cost/benefit position after they joined, not whether to encourage them to join.
They are also, critically, questions that go on well beyond the initial recruiter pitch. As such, a recruiter who is authorized to make such a pitch agreeable to such people, may be doing nothing wrong.
I mean, let's be fair here, I'd refuse to fight
the Motherland or FatherlandBritain or Germany unless something had gone drastically wrong in those countries requiring liberation. But if something hadn't gone drastically wrong in those countries, the only reason I'd be being asked to do so is if something had gone drastically wrong here.Then again, I'm not in the Army (I'd kinda like to be in the Reserve, but I don't think they'd take me).
(Also, yeah, I know Chinese is hard to learn; I spent 3.5 years learning it in school.)
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