A spectre is haunting America — the spectre of “wokeism.” Seemingly out of nowhere, a mass “woke” hysteria of racial and gender grievance has come not only to dominate, but to define every single major institution in the country. Wokeness is so deeply ingrained in our body politic that even its detractors can easily underestimate the extent and nature of its influence.
In a popular discussion between Glenn Greenwald and Revolver’s Darren Beattie, Beattie suggests that there is an important relationship between wokeness and how the United States projects power internationally. According to this view, wokeness is not merely some extraneous ideological nuisance sitting on top of an otherwise non-woke military and national security apparatus. On the contrary, wokeness is more essentially connected to the specific manner in which the United States exercises its power and influence domestically and overseas:
Wokeness is the official ideology of the American Regime https://t.co/qO6QJCsIij
— Darren J. Beattie 🌐 (@DarrenJBeattie) October 20, 2021
As it so happens, an interesting example of precisely this formula appears in a recently published document discussing the capabilities and practices of Army special operations and psychological warfare units. The document in question is an unclassified white paper for 1st Special Forces Airborne Command (SFAC) titled “A Vision for 2021 and Beyond.” The SFAC motto “First to Observe, First to Influence, First to Compete,” sums up its primary purpose: influencing target populations through psychological operations and infiltrating local populations.
The Army’s special warfare teams boasts of being “masters of the art of resistance” who use a combination of Civil Affairs offices to work with civil society groups to legitimize or delegitimize preferred political groups, along with information warfare to make target populations desire to mobilize for or against the preferred political group.
From the SOC handbook:
As masters of the art of resistance, Army Special Operations Forces work with partners to anticipate, prepare for, and defeat threats ranging from insurgencies to occupying foreign powers. To accomplish this, Civil Affairs, Psychological Operations, and Special Forces conduct activities to support or defeat resistance movements.
The Special Forces Airborne Command is kind enough to present a hypothetical example of what their operations look like in action, in what is surely the most interesting part of the entire white paper.
By Darren Beattie
