The Day After Memorial Day

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

With all due respect to those who serve in the armed forces, we owe it to them to ask hard questions about the sacrifices demanded of them and their families.

It’s fine and good and perfectly appropriate for us to honor our dead, but if we allow ourselves to be whipped into a patriotic frenzy every time some yahoo waves a flag it can serve to legitimize the military enterprise – and that is the point I wish to make.  The military enterprise is not legitimate.

I was born into a military family.  I’ve allied myself with anyone who supports veterans and service folk in any way such as testvet, jimstaro, Brad Friedman, Ilona Meagher, avila, ilyana, lao hong han, GreyHawk, possum, truong son traveler, FireCrow, the IGTNT bloggers and many others.

I have reviled the repubs for hiding behind the slogan, ‘Support the troops’, while in actuality screwing the troops in every possible way at every possible opportunity.

I have affection for the military because my father was career Army and because I both grew up with, and did time in the Alabama prison system with a surprising number of Vietnam vets.  Many of my current friends are Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq war vets, most of them active in the peace movement.

I am always for the little guy and in the military world the troops are the little guys – and it’s a crying shame how they get jerked around.

So there is no question as to where my sympathies lie.  I’m for the troops, specifically the grunts, the rank and file, those who do the heavy lifting.  They can only do what they are told.  I do however hold them accountable for their actions.  Just following orders doesn’t work anymore.

But more to the point, I want to question the way we think about the military and military service.  My purpose in doing this is to assist in however small a way in what I hope will be the ultimate rejection of militarism in our country and around the world.  I know this will not be easy, but I believe with all my heart that it is something we absolutely must do to survive.  Military insanity will kill us all if we don’t step up and put an end to it.

I think it would be a great start if we could get enough people to dispassionately question the way they have been conditioned to think about certain things.  Things like honorable service.  Is military service honorable?  Certainly the impulse to protect our country is honorable, but does everyone who enlists join for that pure and illustrious reason?  Certainly many do but probably not everyone.  It seems likely that there are various motives for joining the military – economic pressures, lack of opportunity and such as that – probably others as well.  So maybe some service is more honorable than others.

Another thing that anyone with military experience can attest to is that some really rotten SOBs excel in the military…sometimes it is the real assholes who get rewarded.  So if we send some asshole to Iraq in our names and he does horrible things, or maybe just mildly nasty things, is that noble service?

I do believe that most of our guys are decent guys, but not all of them.  There is also the fact that war is hell on decent guys, and they don’t all remain decent forever.  War damages people in terrible ways, not all of them visible.  Few come through the experience unscathed.

We justify our super militarism by invoking the many threats against us, commies, terrorists, Islamo-fascists, enemies-of-the-state, or the boogeyman du jour.

This past Saturday, at the 40th Anniversary bash for Atlanta’s underground newspaper, the Great Speckled Bird, I heard Amy Goodman of Democracy Now relate a story about her brother David who hastily jumped into a cab at some airport on the west coast and ended up sharing it with a well-connected armaments dealer from London.  David asked him what he thought about the ‘war on terror’.  The self-admitted merchant of death said, “It’s all rubbish…but we [the armaments industry] are doing very well.”    

It’s all rubbish.  That sums it up for me.

It is all too easy to stir up people’s fears, but the truth is that the threats against us are far less than they are made out to be and are for the most part self-created.  We all wanted somebody to pay after 9/11, but far too few of us wanted to carefully consider all of the facts, including the history that preceded the attacks.  The question on everybody’s tongues was who will pay, not why has this happened.  Our well-conditioned instinct was to turn to the military, not the State Department.  The sober reality is that not even al Qaeda is much of a threat to us.  We should have mounted a massive diplomatic push (along with a criminal investigation), but even if we had just ignored them we’d be better off today.

The hard cold fact is that WE are the huge military threat in this world.

In fact we outspend all the other nations in the world combined on our military.

I repeat, we outspend all the other nations in the world combined on our military.

That is a very telling statistic, especially when you consider that we are also the leading arms merchant in the world.  

This whole arms race insanity was our idea.

U.S. Arms Merchants To NATO Newcomers: Accessorize!

By Jeremy Kahn

June 22, 1998

(FORTUNE Magazine) – If you think Eisenhower’s notion of a military-industrial complex has become outdated, you need only look to the expansion of NATO to see it come alive again, 1990s style. American defense contractors are fawning over the former Warsaw Pact nations, vying for the right to replace aging Soviet-era gear with more contemporary fashions.

And the U.S. government is doing its utmost to ensure that designers and clients alike get everything their hearts desire.

FORTUNE Magazine

As I read the opening to this article I almost began to think they were warning us, but alas it soon becomes clear that, true to form, they are just crowing about it.  Their blatant invocation of Eisenhower’s warning regarding the Military Industrial Complex is just them thumbing their noses at anyone silly enough to oppose it.

No they were not allying themselves with Eisenhower and doing the right thing for their country, they were just being their usual snotty, elitist, militaristic selves.  A few more excerpts from the FORTUNE article to make my point:

(SNIP)

But nothing says “We’ve arrived” like a fleet of advanced fighter aircraft. Here the market may top $10 billion, and that’s not counting the long-term contracts for service and parts. The American supermodels in this category are Lockheed Martin’s F-16, going for $25 million to $30 million, and Boeing’s F-18, at $32 million to $37 million a pop. No matter if Eastern European governments can’t afford these jets–the U.S. taxpayer is standing by with an amazing credit offer: Foreign governments can lease F-16s and F-18s free from the Pentagon, and, when they’re finally ready to buy, tap a $15 billion pool of loan guarantees, courtesy of Congress.

(SNIP)

The Romanians and other aspiring NATO nations can rest assured that no one is more eager to see these smashing new weapons exported than their American designers and the people who represent them in Congress. The money will be found. And while the estimated cost of NATO expansion swings from $1.5 billion to $125 billion, one thing is certain: The profits are to die for.

The profits are to die for.  How casually they mock those who will be made dead by these evil machinations.  How can money mean that much to anyone?

No thought is given to who will die or why.  Who cares?  The profits are to die for…as long as the bombs fall on somebody else’s babies – as long as it’s somebody else doing the dying.

By continuing to put up with this kind of thinking, we are opening the floodgates to hell on earth.  Why would we do that to ourselves?  Why?

There is one other notion I’d like to question, that of noble sacrifice.  Is the death of a soldier inherently noble?  If so, what makes it so?

I fully accept the nobility of dying to protect one’s country, or in actual defense of lofty principles such as justice, liberty, etc.  But is it truthful to say that every military death is an example of defending such great causes?  What if it happens in the middle of a made-up bogus war being fought solely for the enrichment of arms dealers, war profiteers, oil thieves – and their backers?  Does it all still count?  Is it a noble thing to get yourself killed to enrich a bunch of war profiteers and oil bandits?

I am reminded of the wingnut who screamed at me on the Capitol steps that his son was in Iraq fighting for my right to criticize the government and the war.  Why anyone had to go to Iraq to defend my freedom of speech he did not explain.  When will we relinquish such wrongheaded notions?

Certainly you can’t fault the soldiers for mistakes made by their leadership – military or civilian.  But it is still reasonable to expect our soldiers to do the right thing under all circumstances to the best of their ability, is it not?  At what point is it appropriate for soldiers in the field to say ‘fuck this’?  I don’t claim to know the answer but I think it’s fair to say that such times do come.  I would suggest that that time has come and gone in Iraq.

I don’t want to take anything away from anyone who ever served, honorably or not.  I just want us to question such things and not blindly worship militarism simply because we care so much about the people swept up in it.  

Our blind allegiance to militarism has brought us nuclear weapons, white phosphorus, napalm, cluster bombs, a world-wide proliferation of land mines, Depleted Uranium munitions, institutionalized torture and thousands upon thousands of other implements and methodologies of death, destruction and torture.  

We must quit worshipping militarism, and we must stop allowing the military-minded among us (most of whom are certified chickenhawks these days anyway) to manipulate us by jerking our fear chains.  These evil black-hearted bastards are the ones to be feared.

Whatever else war may be, it is the ultimate distraction.  It’s hard to pour trillions of dollars and the blood of our nation’s youth into the unforgiving black hole of war and also pay proper attention to, and place appropriate emphasis on, the very real and pressing problems we all face such as global warming, the energy crisis, the food and water crises, etcetera.  Each of these things is a far greater threat than all the al Qaedas in the world.

If we are to survive as a species we must change.  We must dismantle/repurpose the Military Industrial Complex to serve the causes of peace and planetary survival.

I hope we can begin to see militarism as the enemy…and NOT as our salvation.  

Unless we are very lucky and ultimately successful, America’s sick military fetish will bring all of humanity to an inglorious end.