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Could American social progressivism be (in part) an intelligence operation to create “defense-in-depth” against America’s weak points, akin to the cybersecurity or military strategy?
In cybersecurity, valuable assets are hyper-protected with multiple layers of security, so that if any layer fails the others may still hold. The idea being that the assets are so important to defend and attacks could come at any time (and with novel stratagem), so it is reasonable to over-defend it in many different ways. In the military usage, layers of physical defense are established so that one may retreat into another defense upon an assault, ensuring reduced losses and longer periods of defending. Another somewhat ancillary idea is “fencing the Torah” in Judaism. It is so important not to violate a Torah prohibition that “fences” are established to make even the chance violation impossible. Eg, the the rule to not even pick up a tool lest you accidentally use it which would violate the sabbath prohibition.
America’s weak point is clearly potential civic disunity which could result in balkanization along racial, religious, or cultural lines. In order to hyper-defend from that risk, you implement a social operation involving defense-in-depth where the majority constituents must necessarily deny their own identity and engage in ritual ”sacrifices” upon the altar of plurality (from Trayvon to George Floyd). This explains even the whitification of Asians: once they become significant enough to possibly lead to Balkan problems, you enforce the same depotentiation. Notably, it is not enough of a social defense to merely pledge allegiance to plurality, as that hardly changes someone’s psychology. You must actually make it a social ideal so that it is promoted and normalized especially among the young potential rebels, and that is in fact what we see — those most at risk for any potential rebellion are coerced into a Kaczynskian “system’s neatest trick” procedure where their very rebellion helps to solidify state security. Why allow “Antifa” their own zone in Portland? Because when they are doing that they are doing nothing serious. Along the same lines, see how valuable transgenders have been as a layer of defense: millions of conservatives hours are spent arguing against something that has a surprising level of state support, and millions of progressive hours are spent defending something that is historically and intuitively off-putting. Those are hours that are not spent on something actually valuable; transgender stuff is simply the most outer layer of defense against a possible Balkan threat, and if conservatives win there’s nothing valuable lost from a state security perspective.
As outlandish as it seems, I think this is possible. It would be par for the course for how intel agencies behaved historically — well before they had enormous databases of information and AI to help them decide state hyper-protection. We could imagine the team of hundreds of some thousands employed toward this objective at some intel agency: “how do we protect against the most cataclysmic threat for America?” They look at the cost and benefit with history in mind, with WWII’s staggering death toll and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in mind.
If US intelligence was most focused on strengthening America's stability, wouldn't they try to shore up American identity? Wouldn't they want colorblind patriotism, the supporting the troops ethos? You want to smooth over divisions, you don't want to create even controlled conflicts. You'd try to subvert and suppress dangerous groups of course but you wouldn't try to suppress the majority's white identity, you try to annex it into American identity.
Look at what Russia does. Rally around the flag, enemies all around us, we're all Russians regardless of race/creed, sacred duty to the motherland... They suppress the liberal/trans/separatist minority rather than the majority.
Here's an interesting article that perhaps deserves a post of its own. There are many things to say about it ("Gorbachev and Yeltsin ruined ice cream, the cowards.") but you get the sense that the state machinery is trying to keep the country together, promoting unity rather than division: https://harpers.org/archive/2024/01/behind-the-new-iron-curtain/
That's not what the US is doing. They're playing the patronage/suppression game, not the national unity game. 'We need more blacks in the Air Force, quotas everywhere, need to fight white supremacy and racism'. Those Stand Down days in the US military to counter extremism, internal conflict over things like migration and national identity.
Wokeness really isn’t very far from what Russia and China do for their minorities; both practice affirmative action openly or less openly. These countries’ governments are both officially anti-racist. Chinese rightists complain online about privileges granted to non-Han minorities; Russian ones complain online about advantages of Central Asians or Muslims replacing whites in Moscow and so on. Russia has emphasized national unity since the start of the Ukraine War, but it doesn’t seem to me more radical than the unity the US had in support of ‘the troops’ after 9/11. The US military’s internal rationale for affirmative action is domestic social unity, that’s why the Supreme Court gave them an explicit carve-out in the affirmative action ban last year.
Non-Han minorities get certain privileges but if they step out of line they'll be in a world of pain. Imagine if a minority group in China pulled an LA riot or a Floyd in response to police brutality, let alone a CHAZ. They'd be whisked away, never to be seen again. The police would launch an orgy of repression and re-education. China is super into historical grievance narratives, patriotism and Chinese nationalism (as opposed to Han nationalism or multiculturalism). The only times they're allowed to riot is when there's some incident with the US, the Belgrade embassy bombing for instance. Then they have the police put the kid gloves on and subtly stoke the fires, while trying to keep things under control.
Imagine if the top earning film at the US box office was 'Saving Private Ryan' turned up to 11 with an ending caption saying 'the eternal glory of the US Army shall be remembered forever and ever, the brave martyrs live forever in our hearts'. That's the Battle at Lake Changjin, that's real, intense nationalism. The top grossing film in America is Star Wars VII, a woke remaster of the original Star Wars.
If Central Asians desecrate Russian symbols, they and their families are expelled. Russia takes national pride very seriously, to a quasi-religious level. There's a lot of intense patriotism and nationalism, people (Strelkov and co) who'll go volunteer to start a tough war in support of their national beliefs.
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-uzbek-boys-expelled-eternal-flame/32726911.html
Russia and China - civic nationalism. USA and West - multiculturalism and wokeness.
To be fair, I think that Floyd was much more similar to this than you'd first think. It was completely supported by the mainstream media and institutions.
The power balance in the West is different from that of China; there isn't a single Politburo, the media and institutions are power centers in their own right. But there's still a group of people you can more or less draw a circle around and say, these people are the people who actually decide what happens. And those people supported Floyd, even not-so-subtly stoked it, and if they hadn't it would've never happened.
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Non-Han minorities have received privileges that American leftists could never dream of. Imagine if the left restricted white parents to one child while allowing black and brown people to have unlimited children. The CHAZ and Star Wars are nothing compared to that.
Have you watched ‘Masters of the Air’ (2024)? It’s the successor show to Band of Brothers, it’s very patriotic and features a majority white male cast. I don’t think the occasional line about ‘But Black People Were Still Oppressed’ changes that. A rare negative review in Ars Technica said:
Now, you can argue that no Chinese outlet would publish that about Battle at Lake Changjin, but it’s not clear that that’s really something negative about the US in comparison.
China is indeed doing things to minorities that American leftists could never dream of. Even allowing for US propaganda, they are not very tolerant.
Or consider what they've done in Tibet. That is not woke behaviour! They offer the carrot and the stick - if your ethnic group doesn't do what they want, they'll ensure you regret it. You had better be Chinese first, second and third, Tibetan fourth. It's very different to wokeness which is all carrot and no stick, for minorities at least. Wokeness undermines and reinterprets what it means to be American, Christopher Columbus Day or Thanksgiving are 'controversial'. It's thoroughly different to Chinese nationalism.
I'm not saying it's great to be super-nationalist like China but a certain level of nationalism is preferable for stability in a time of uncertainty.
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It's very far. Both Russian and Chinese interpretation of multiculturalism is "better restaurants plus folk song and dance ensembles". Unless you're in one of the few ethnic republics that can get away with that, you won't be discriminated against for being too Russian, and as far as I know, China doesn't allow that at all.
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Do their military contractors have bizarre struggle sessions over Han / Russian privilege? Do their major corporations tell workers to be less Han / Russian?
If not then this is just cope.
Imagine if black people and Muslims in America were allowed to have 4 kids each but white people were only allowed to have 1 child each. That was literally state policy in China until recently. I don’t know how you can say that’s better than the US.
I could imagine it of there was a billion Americans, and it came with none of the self-flagellation. Sorry but there just is no comparison between the two approaches.
I don’t think you really mean that. Would you accept a permanent end to affirmative action, bans on any DEI, guaranteed meritocracy in public and private employment and harsh crackdowns on any racial identitarianism (white or black) in exchange for limits on the number of kids white people could have?
It is simply indisputable that China is more leftist about this kind of thing than the US. The specific flavor of anti-racism in America is largely unique to the Anglosphere, progressivism isn’t.
If the policy was time-limited like in China, sure.
We were talking about wokism, not leftism.
Also note how you completely dropped Russia from your argument.
I discuss it below, but it’s hard to quantify the extent to which Putin tolerates the extreme overrepresentation of various minority groups in organized crime in Russia proper. By contrast the modern FBI went after organized black gangs to the extent that the whole culture fractured and the drugs business is no longer even the main cause of internecine conflict in eg. the South Side.
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Exactly. The Chinese and Russian regimes rather markedly do not normalize ethnomasochism.
Ethnic self flagellation happens because progressives do not view normal whites as part of their tribe, hence denigrating white people and white supremacy does not diminish the interests of white progs. Gutting the promotions of white Royal Air Force and forcing new hires to be uninterested and unqualified blacks stationed in some isolated northern airbase has zero impact on a Ministry of Defense desk jockey in London whose tribe is oxbridge peers in the city. The institutional capture by progressives to advance value negative minorities is to crush the vile bad whites, and at no level do these progressives view themselves as vulnerable because the championed classes can only survive under their stewardship.
This is the big difference between western style progressive championing of minorities and Russian/Chinese style 'wokeness'. The Russians and Chinese have no internal enemy they need to weaponize a minority against, so they can make a pretense of largesse towards compliant minorities. Moreover these are neither market dominant minorities whose presence upends the socioeconomic dynamic nor violent separatists who need to be clamped down on. Let the minorities have their food and costumes so long as they do not cause violence or upend the dominant order; the Hui have always had minimal trouble compared to the Uighur or the Yunnans for the Chinese, as the Buryats have been ignored compared to the Tajiks for Russia.
Pretense? Tuvans and Chechens both seem very favoured, moreso than ethnic russians.
The current 'favored minority' position seems a function of the deft political power employed by Shiogu and the necessity of Kadyrov as a strongman to keep Chechnya in line. Bribes siphoned by Shoigu and paid to Kadyrov are not necessarily indicative of any Muscovite high opinion of those peoples and cultures detached from their political leaders. There has been little wealth flowing downwards to the tuvans or chechens from Moscow, and doubtless the utility of Shoigu and Kadyrov in keeping those populations docile is part of their value proposition to the state.
How about the extreme amounts of organized crime by various non-ethnic-Russians that the Kremlin largely tolerates and which de facto amounts to huge wealth transfers to these minorities? Sure, there aren’t many state handouts (although there are some), but that isn’t the only thing that serves that effect.
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