What Are We Shoving Into The ‘DEI’ Memory Hole Today? Navajo Code Talkers!
Control-F-ing white supremacists strike again.
Rewriting history, culturicide, is always part of the authoritarian plan. Diversity being an asset is dangerous WRONGTHINK for people who believe that only their kind has a mandate from heaven to be in charge of everybody else.
Back in the first Nazi days, Nazis had to literally burn books if they had ideas that were un-German. But now history can be conveniently deleted with just the push of a button. (Though history may be archived!) And button-pushing is what the Trump administration has been frantically doing all over, banning anything that remotely smells like “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” — they mean civil rights — as undermining “our national unity, as they deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement in favor of an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system.”
As opposed to the spoils system where friends of Trump and unqualified Fox News hosts get all of the jobs.
The latest move, deleting at least 10 military web pages dedicated to Native Americans, including the “Code Talker” units that used codes based on Navajo to transmit secret messages, who have been credited with the Marines being able to take Iwo Jima. The deletions were apparently in response to a Feb. 26 memo from Sean Parnell, assistant to the Secretary of Defense, demanding that the military branches remove news, feature articles, photos, and videos that “promote DEI.” Which is Trump-administration code for “anybody not a white cis man who Donald Trump thinks would have worshipped Donald Trump, if Donald Trump had been alive at that point in history.”
Also removed, a page celebrating Ira Hayes, a member of the Gila River Indian Community and one of the Marines iconically pictured raising the American flag at Iwo Jima in 1945.
Trump himself even honored the code talkers during an event in his first term, telling veterans, “You are really incredible people. And from the heart, from the absolute heart, we appreciate what you’ve done, how you’ve done it, the bravery that you displayed, and the love that you have for your country.” Maybe they did not SAY THANK YOU to him enthusiastically enough, or crack a smile when he called Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas.” Yeah, that really happened.
World War II, of course, happened long before “DEI” was a thing. And the war was one of the Civil Rights movement’s most powerful arguments! Hey look, the National Park Service page about that has not been deleted yet! Long story short, Harry Truman recognized America looked like quite the dicks fighting Nazis abroad while at the same time racially segregating its own military units and public facilities. Soldiers like Ira Hayes came back and fought for their rights.
And America looked at the Nazis and was like, so that’s the end point of where racism leads, hm, maybe we ought to turn this car around. And, it turned out that hetero cis white men were not the only people who could do their part to destroy fascism, in fact they could not do it all by themselves, and in a crisis, everybody’s got to work together.
Also removed over the weekend by President Bone Spurs’ administration, a page in honor of Black Medal of Honor recipient and Vietnam War veteran Maj. Gen. Charles C. Rogers, which on Saturday generated a “404” error message. The URL was also changed, with the word “medal” changed to “deimedal.” The page was later restored. Also removed then restored after backlash, a page on the Japanese-American “Go-for-Broke” regiment.
Restored or not, the message is still clear: Some people just don't count in history, and Trump et al. will decide who does.
And, Arlington National Cemetery reportedly scrubbed its website of various pages on grave sites and classroom lesson plans highlighting the work of Black, Hispanic, and female service members buried at the grounds.
Hey, remember that time Trump stepped all over graves there to film a commercial? Talk about foreshadowing.
These latest deletions are on top of the at least 26,000 images that the Pentagon has flagged for removal after seemingly doing a control-F for any terms offensive to white supremacists, including pages on the Tuskegee Airmen, the Enola Gay, and a war hero whose last name just happened to be “Gay.” (The pages on the airmen were restored, again, after an outcry.)
When asked about the missing pages, Pentagon Press Secretary John Ullyot was proud of it: “As Secretary [Pete] Hegseth has said, DEI is dead at the Defense Department. […] We are pleased by the rapid compliance across the Department with the directive removing DEI content from all platforms.”
AND FOR GOOD MEASURE the federal government no longer explicitly prohibits contractors from having segregated restaurants, waiting rooms, and drinking fountains, WHAAT?! These things are still prohibited by state and local discrimination laws, but the fact that the government went to the trouble of removing that clause from its collection of regulations that it uses for contracts is quite something. And that they did it quietly, without any public notice or comment period, is a strong statement that the public may pay our bills but is not the boss of us any more.
Never in the field of human conflict has so much been deleted by so few, so fast.
FYI. The Code Talkers we hear about were Navajos in the Pacific. In Europe, the Army employed Northern Woodland Indians as Code Talkers.
The code talkers should be revered in this country and putting "DEI" in Major General Rogers's URL was cruel and disrespectful. I'd like to ask whatever lickspittle who tried to delete these people from history: What the fuck have YOU done with your life in comparison to these people?