Veterans and Pro-Militarism, Addendum

[charleslb]

Pardon me, conservatives and patriots, for kicking one of your sacred cows in its unction-oozing udders rather than drinking with you of the morally curdled milk of maudlin supportiveness for veterans of unjust wars. But heed my words, you may one day genuinely rue heaping so much honor and hero-worshipful validation on "the troops" and veterans when they're used to beat down the sort of anti-government dissent that many of you like to express online. Yes, today's popularly lionized legionnaires of American liberty and apple pie very well might become tomorrow's jackbooted enforcers of the plutocracy at home, very much the way they often are abroad.

Well, increasingly the military and our para-militarized police are trained and indoctrinated with an orientation that gears them to be readily pressed into service domestically to defend the power structure against their fellow citizens should mass uprisings ever occur. Should such an eventuality ever develop, well, their training will just take over and they'll switch on the amoral automatic pilot of professionalism, inflicting urban "shock and awe" to reinstate "order". Mm-hmm, the next time you see a hero cop interviewed on the news give a critical listen to his explanation of his ability to function fearlessly in the face of danger as being merely a matter of allowing his training to "kick in" (this is what they usually say). That's all well and good when it mentally equips a peace officer to deal with a gun-wielding felon, but police and military personnel who've been conditioned by their training to turn off their humanity and be robotically effective at "crowd control" should scare the bleep out of anyone who values our natural right to rebel against the repressive powers that be.

Of course long before military personnel were drilled to function like inhumanly detached flesh & blood crowd-controlling robocops for the state and the ruling class, they on more than one historical occasion demonstrated a chilling willingness to turn their weapons on their fellow Americans, i.e. the people they were sworn to protect. For instance, during the Great Depression when Hoovervilles began to spring up, ole heartless Herbie Hoover sent in the troops, against tent communities populated by ordinary homeless men and women (and, I might add, largely by WW1 veterans) and they proceeded to brutally disperse the residents, including their former brothers-in-arms (As one war hero commented, "We were heroes in 1917, but we're bums now."; yep, it's one of life's poetic little ironies that today's praised & pedestaled American veterans can find the ole U.S. military-issue jackboot on the back of their own necks tomorrow.). My point, it's happened before and can certainly happen again. Bear that in mind when you're elevating military personnel and veterans up above all reproach.

(And no, don't give me too much credit for keeping this one relatively short, as this was really just an addendum to my previous post, not a new post in its own right.)

 

[charleslb]

A Postscript

PS, Thank you to everyone who has made the conscientious and morally correct choice to not serve in an unjust war to further enrich our already filthy-rich corporate elite. And in all seriousness I say to any heroic "draft dodgers" from the Vietnam era out there, you have my deepest respect for having the genuine moral courage to face the middle-class contempt of your peers & parents, and the threat of incarceration, to hold true to your ethically enlightened principles. Yes, you most certainly are among the true heroes of American history, not the craven moral cowards who allowed themselves to be inducted and turned into killers of the innocent because society told them that it was their duty to set their own conscience aside, à la a Nuremberg defendant, and obey the orders of their Führer in the Oval Office. Many in our society nowadays (the zeitgeist is currently Thou shall support the troops without giving it any critical thought) perhaps don't appreciate the strength of character required to take and follow through with your stance, but I for one do, and I salute you.

 

[charleslb]

We moderns expunge God from our worldview and then quite promptly proceed to replace God with sham secular stand-ins for divinity, such as the nation state! Mm-hmm, we arrogantly apotheosize our country into a sinless perfect entity; a temporal and political not a metaphysical entity, but nonetheless a sinless and perfect one. Thus and so we deny our country's many and various historical sins, and we proclaim that all of its current actions are actually benevolent.

Yes, the deified United States, for instance, is held as a matter of faith to work its transcendently good will in the world in mysterious ways. Well, it's certainly a mystery how, for example, abetting Indonesian imperialism in East Timor was supposed to be for the good. Or how supporting a mass-murdering megalomaniac like Saddam Hussein, once upon a time, was supposed to be morally justifiable and in the interest of all the good things that the U.S. professes to stand for, you know, human rights, democracy, a stable Middle East, etc. (Oh that's right, Saddam must have been a good guy because he liked to kill communists, but then he liked to kill so many of his citizens.) But although it's not always crystal clear how it's the case that the United States is a benign & beneficent world power, it simply must be, because our "civil religion" teaches that it is. Ergo our men and women in uniform must be holy warriors for flag & freedom. Right?

Well, it's certainly the case that plenty of young people drink the propaganda Kool-Aid and sign up for military "service" under the morally grandiose delusion that they're going to be serving something noble. However, even the youngest inductees into the armed forces have reached the age of reason, and should know better. That is, naiveté is no more an excuse than ignorance of the law is a valid defense for committing a crime.

In the West we disdainfully look down upon a country such as Iran, because its self-justifying belief system is a theological religion in which God in heaven endorses its evildoing and blesses its terroristic ways. And the fundamentalist jihadists who are manipulated by mullahs to make the ultimate sacrifice to earn their place in paradise, well, they're contemptuously written off as foolish fanatics or pious villains. But was it really any less contemptibly and culpably gullible to be gung ho to participate in the occupation of Iraq? Were American veterans of that bit of highly-profitable-for-certain-large-corporations global policing any more morally competent and admirable in playing along with their president's patriotic pretext for aggression than the flimflammed followers of Ayatollah Khamenei who are willing to kill & be killed in the name of Islam? Hardly!

Yet we're culturally indoctrinated to pat our military veterans on the back with nary a critical thought given to what we're supposedly patting them on the back for. The post-Vietnam climate of opinion regarding how we should view and treat veterans is such that we suspend our ethical and critical faculties when encountering a member of the military and simply say "Thank you for your service". It's utter rubbish of course, their "service" in actuality did a big fat zero to serve & protect us, but it's what we've been programmed to feel right about saying. It's respectful of the misguided nationalistic faith that we assume our veterans are motivated by. And it affirms that we share their faux faith in the holy righteousness of America. But how, in an objective analysis, is our mentality about this country's military, wars, and veterans any more sane and sophisticated than that of an Iranian Islamist who faithfully supports his country's international criminality?

Oops, let me catch myself here before I go too far, one isn't supposed to pose such provocative questions. Pardon me. Do carry on pseudoreligiously venerating your veterans who've served and fallen at the profane altar of American global ambition, who've fought in the mock-holy crusades for freedom that somehow only achieve the realeconomik objective of further enriching already disgustingly rich corporations. Oh, hold on, I spy through my window someone in uniform passing by my house, I have to stop typing now and dash out to thank him on behalf of Halliburton for his "service".

 

[charleslb]

Okay, here's a not too novel but nevertheless an ethically salient thought. If an individual or a small gang of individuals deprives someone of his/her life, and they take this action arbitrarily or for some mercenary motive such as economic gain, not out of self-defense, well, morally and legally speaking this would of course be considered and called an unjustifiable and criminal homicide – manslaughter or murder, depending on the details of the incident.

Now then, if a nation state and its military engage in mass killing and their true but unacknowledged motive is economic gain, not self-defense, we place their behavior in a different category altogether. Not to be risqué, but it seems that size does matter, i.e. the size of the scale upon which people perpetrate life-taking seems to determine whether we use such harsh terms as "murder". Kill one or a few human beings out of a monetary incentive and you're deemed by decent folk to be a murderous miscreant and a deserving candidate for death row. But if we're talking invasion & war, well, if the material interests of our entitled plutocratic elite ordain it, and the president legally orders it, and our noble military does the death-dealing, then it matters not that we're merely doing in a grander fashion what we incarcerate street gang members for doing in our inner cities. Without missing a beat we continue to self-righteously view ourselves and "the troops" as the morally innocent good guys.

It of course also helps when the human beings who are being violently snuffed are geographically removed from contact with us. That is, where the snuffing out of life takes place plays a very large part in determining how we define the act. Mm-hmm, our moral reasoning in this regard is actually quite Clintonian. For it doesn't seem to matter to us that people are wantonly being put in an early grave, where the putting-in occurs is what makes all the difference to us, very much like ole Slick Willy fellatiously (misspelling intended) rationalizing that only vaginal penetration constitutes "sex", ergo having only put it in miss Monica's oral orifice he "did not have sex with that woman". Yep, in same sophistical vein we reason that if our military isn't killing in our presence, if it isn't scragging citizens of our land, isn't knocking off our neighbors, if it's Iraqis, Afghans, Vietnamese, etc. who are being wasted under the color of presidential authority, then it isn't ethically the same, isn't the M-word (murder). Out of sight, out of the province of normal morality and decency!

But in non-patriotically-airbrushed reality, in ethical reality, there's no significant moral distinction between a dealer, let's say, killing one human person to assert his dominance over lucrative drug turf, and a country killing hundreds of thousands for control of valuable oil fields. It's all murder most foul, and honoring veterans culpably glosses and belies this truth. That is, it makes us moral accessories to a lie, and to mass murder. Let's choose to take a more moral stance.