Conquest Theory: Conquest Disguised as Liberation by Adam Johnston
This post by Adam Johnston is appearing here with express permission of Conquest Theory
During the opening stages of Operation Iraqi Freedom in March of 2003, American Marines captured Iraq's main port of Umm Qasr. Feeling triumphant after a hard-fought battle, the Marines lowered the Iraqi flag and raised the American Flag over the captured city. This seemingly normal occurrence during war set off a controversy, with both the British defense secretary and U.S. General Tommy Franks stating that raising the American flag undermined Allied claims that they were liberating, not conquering, Iraq.
However, contrary to Western propaganda, the United States' invasion of Iraq amounted to nothing short of conquest. What began with a conventional military defeat of Iraq’s armed forces soon gave way to the ideological and structural "liberation" of Iraq, with the aim of establishing a "liberal democracy” - something Iraq had never been in its entire existence.
Installing a new political order would prove to be much harder than the initial U.S. military campaign, as it would require re-educating Iraq’s people and fundamentally transforming the majority of its existing institutions. But when all was said and done, the people of Iraq, by and large, rejected American aims. Today, Iraq stands as a failed experiment in liberal democracy, showing just how hard it is to transform a society and a culture with only brute military force.
Similarly, beginning in the late 1960s, the United States has faced conquest under the guise of “liberation,” not from an external foreign power but from radical elements within.
The origins of this revolutionary project are explored in great detail within Christopher Rufo’s insightful work, “America’s Cultural Revolution,” when Marxist-Leninist militant groups, such as the Black Panther Party and Weather Underground, sought to violently overthrow America’s foundational institutions in the name of Black liberation.
The militant groups conducted bombings, robberies, prison breaks, and murders - with the ultimate goal of igniting a social and cultural revolution. However, the people did not respond as the radicals had hoped, and there was no uprising. Rather than giving up, they attempted to achieve their cultural conquest through ideological means, as it was determined that the people needed to be primed for revolution.
And so former leftist militants subsequently transformed into academic intellectuals and spread their revolutionary ideology within American higher education, disseminating their radical agenda through writings and lectures, while their adherents dispersed nationwide, fighting for “liberation.” This movement was heavily influenced by a Brazilian Marxist educator and thinker named Paulo Freire, whose work pertaining to “Liberation Pedagogy” quite literally revolutionized the United States education system.
According to this new approach to education, the first goal was for students to attain “critical consciousness,” which refers to the ability of individuals to critically analyze and understand the social, political, and economic forces that shape one's life and the world around them. More importantly, liberation pedagogy involves developing a deep awareness of society's power and oppression structures while understanding how those structures influence individual experiences and opportunities, or the lack thereof.
Once students attain critical consciousness, the emphasis shifts to putting the lessons they’ve learned into practice. They are encouraged to apply their critical understanding of social issues in real-world contexts and engage in action-oriented approaches to bring about social change.
With its emphasis on race, gender, and sexual orientation, Liberation Pedagogy, now commonly referred to as Critical Pedagogy, has become intricately linked to social justice movements by way of the three-headed Cerberus of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Education curriculums across the country, most notably in democratic-controlled states, now integrate DEI as well as other radical ideological theories, such as social and emotional learning, into all facets of education, with devastating effects on social cohesion and traditional test scores.
One such example of this new approach to “education” can be found in New York State through its “Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework,” where the unquestioned virtue of “Diversity” (e.g., race, social class, gender, language, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, and ability) is regarded as an asset for teaching and learning.
Within this framework, the New York State Education Department believes that “education providers throughout the United States have struggled to meet the diverse needs of American children and families” because “a complex system of biases and structural inequities is deeply rooted in our country’s history, culture, and institutions.” and so “this system of inequity must be clearly understood, directly challenged, and fundamentally transformed.”
As such, students are encouraged to identify the power structures that generate inequities within our culture and to directly challenge these institutions to redress historical and contemporary oppression. This allows the student to become both “sociopolitically conscious” and “socioculturally responsive.”
Of course, this ultimately begs the question; “conscious of and responsive to what?”
The answer: “whiteness.”
Exposing and dismantling “whiteness” within the United States lies at the heart of today’s critical approach to education. Identifying the systemic advantages, biases, and norms that supposedly benefit whites as a group - at the expense of “People of Color” - lies at the heart of the neo-Marxist framework that divides groups into categories of oppressor and oppressed.
Once again, Christopher Rufo offers his insight:
“In the American context, the relationship between colonizer and colonized takes on an explicit racial dimension: the social categories of oppressor and oppressed can be neatly transposed onto the racial categories of ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness.’ While white children are directed to dismantle ‘whiteness’ as an internalized psychological phenomenon, black children must dismantle ‘whiteness’ as externalized social structures that imprison, denigrate, and repress their ‘blackness.’”
As such, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives within American education seek to dismantle “whiteness” from the bottom up while the graduates of these indoctrination programs attack “whiteness” from the top down through the legal system, administrative state, corporate governance, and human resource departments.
Despite the recent successful pushback from conservative activists, DEI remains the primary means of leftist indoctrination for America’s children, starting as early as Kindergarten.
With America’s educational transformation well underway, what does the current political and cultural landscape look like as a result? Judging by events like the 2020 George Floyd riots and recent pro-Palestinian protests across elite universities such as Yale, Columbia, and New York University, widespread critical consciousness among students has been attained.
Although organizations like the Weather Underground and the original Black Panther Party are no longer in existence, "social justice" movements such as the Free Palestine movement, Black Lives Matter, and LGBTQ/Pride have emerged as the vanguard of progressive activism, and their symbols of conquest have spread across all spheres of American society, college campuses, and within K-12 classrooms.
These banners of social justice are being raised over Harvard Yard, painted on crosswalks, written across the width of American streets, and even featured prominently at the White House. In stark contrast, the American Flag, once honored and sworn allegiance to, is now seen as a symbol of oppression by a growing number of young Americans, mirroring the sentiments of Iraqis in 2003 as they witnessed the invasion of their country.
As radical ideological movements such as "Critical Pedagogy" persist in reshaping the landscape of American education, and as government and corporate entities prioritize Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives aimed at dismantling "whiteness," the distinction between conquest and social "liberation" becomes indistinguishable.
