Army Gen. Mark Milley pushed back on claims from Republicans that the military is “woke” and as a result not prepared to take on modern threats, saying he’s “not even sure what that word truly means.”
“What I see is a military that’s exceptionally strong. It’s powerful; it’s ready. In fact, our readiness rates, the way we measure readiness, is better now than they’ve been in years,” Milley said in a CNN interview Sunday.
Republican politicians and candidates have blasted the Pentagon for so-called woke policies, pointing to efforts to recruit a diverse group of military service members and be inclusive to transgender soldiers.
Those claims have also headlined efforts to reduce military spending.
“Woke” could be taken as the opposite of “denialist”.
Wikipedia defines “woke” as “alert to racial prejudice and discrimination”, although today it’s often extended to other prejudices besides racism.
Thus, “anti-woke” can be taken to mean “in denial about racial (etc.) prejudice and discrimination”.
For example, we could say that the Association of German National Jews, the pro-Nazi Jewish group that existed from 1921 to 1935, was an “anti-woke” organization. This group sought to convince German Jews that they could drop their Jewishness and assimilate within a Nazi-dominated Germany.
I would say that to be “anti-woke” isn’t to be in denial but rather to be in favor of racial (etc) prejudice and discrimination. Otherwise, they would feel that there’s nothing to be particularly against. More woke-neutral than anti.
Denialism isn’t that innocent. More than a few Holocaust denialists seem to have the position of “The Nazis didn’t really kill the Jews, but they should have.”
True. I was thinking more about how denialists know that what they’re denying is real, so they’re really anti whatever it is. But it gets framed as denialism rather than support.