In Response to “Support our Troops”

With Memorial Day just past and Independence Day coming up in about a month, the parade of miliaristic emails masked as patriotism is making the rounds. The text of one of these follows (in quotes and in red), interspersed with my comments in reply:

“I HOPE THERE ISN’T ANYONE ON MY E-MAIL LIST THAT WON’T KEEP THIS GOING.”

Veiled threats are unbecoming. To my mind, this translates to: I hope I don’t know anyone who doesn’t agree unquestioningly with the rather broad palette of jingoist sentiment contained herein. The use of all caps here suggests shouting, which reinforces the idea that this is a threat.

I thought I’d go against the grain and offer a critique of this mail instead, pointing out the parts with which I agree and those with which I feel it would be well-nigh criminal to agree and providing my reasons.

“Happy 4th of July!….. ………. …..let’ s get this started now, So it will be out there on the fourth!!!!

“I PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE TO THE FLAG,
OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,
AND TO THE REPUBLIC, FOR WHICH IT STANDS,
ONE NATION UNDER GOD,
INDIVISIBLE, WITH LIBERTY
AND JUSTICE FOR ALL!”

Even when I was still in school, pledging allegiance to the flag rubbed me the wrong way and struck me as a distinctly un-American thing to do.[1] When I first started simply standing, but not pledging, I was often called out for it by my teachers. They were, however, well-aware that that there was no way they could force me to pledge—because we were in America, after all, not a repressive dictatorship—though I’m not sure how much I besmirched my permanent record with my silent protest.

That said, I would have less to disagree with were the pledge to include a devotion to the Constitution and the laws and morals by which we all, as citizens of an ostensibly high-minded democracy, agree to live. I emphatically agree with the final part dispensing “liberty and justice to all” and understand it to mean “all people”, not “all Americans” as the leading intellectual lights of modern American discourse are wont to do.

Think about “liberty and justice for all” the next time you hear about a houseful of Pakistanis sent to meet their maker because we suspected that there were terrorists in their home or a home nearby. Think about those prisoners in Guantánamo who won’t get trials and will spend their whole lives in jail. What they’ve supposedly done to us is nothing compared to what we do to ourselves as a nation if we don’t treat them like human beings. Think about “guilty until proven innocent”; think about “a nation of laws”; think about actually trying people instead of just killing them and screaming wide-eyed that they are the terrorists. Think about what kind of country we’ve become and what kind of country we want to be.[2]

“KEEP IT LIT!! KEEP IT LIT!”

I have no idea what this means, but it sounds important.

“For all of our other military personnel, where ever they may be, please support all of the troops defending our country.”

I wholeheartedly support all troops defending this country. I further propose that we bring all of the troops we have occupying the more than 800 military bases in more than 100 countries around the world back home to defend the country all the better. We’ve been taught to believe that an American soldier, by his or her presence alone, is defending America, when this is ludicrous. American ostensibly consists of the 50 states; that we have bases all over the world that need defending is part of our offense, not our defense. Do not confuse the two.

Troops stationed overseas are not defending our country, they are defending corporate or allied interests – or both – and their mission almost indubitably makes America less safe. It’s common sense: our soldiers are an occupying power and are attacked for it; with their training, they consider the inhabitants of the countries that they have invaded as terrorist, sub-human scum and thus feel very little remorse in mowing down whole truckloads of them in an effort to protect their own lives and those of their compatriots. The resort to aerial bombardment—carpet-bombing or surgical-strike—also results in a tremendous amount of what our dear leaders are happy to euphemize as collateral damage. This incredibly large number of civilian casualties can do nothing but foment more anti-American sentiment, and rightly so.

It is best to avoid using the word “terrorism” for any attack on an American person or possession. 9-11 was terrorism. Citizens of Fallujah fighting Americans in Fallujah is not terrorism. Americans attacking Fallujah with night-and-day bombing runs and reducing the city – and its residents – to rubble, is state terrorism.

To sum up, support the troops, get them out of war zones, stop using them to colonize other countries, stop using them at all. Bring them all home, put them to work rebuilding our infrastructure and mobilize them when we actually have to defend our own soil, rather than our occupied territories. With the British taking of Washington D.C. in 1812, the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the attack on the WTC in 2001, it seems actual attacks on American soil are extremely few and far between and are vastly outweighed by American attacks on foreign soil.

“And God [b]less our [m]ilitary who are protecting our [c]ountry for our [f]reedom.[3]”

See above.

“Thanks [t]o them, and their sacrifices we can celebrate the 4th of July. We must never forget who [g]ets the credit for the freedoms we have, of which we should be [e]ternally grateful.”

We have—or rather had—our freedoms because we are a nation of laws, not a nation of arms. That the military has achieved such power in our society weakens, rather than strengthens, our freedoms. It is the unsung millions that fought, strove and died for mundane things like women’s suffrage, a 40-hour workweek, workman’s compensation, social security, civil rights and so on that “get a large part of the credit” for the freedoms we have.

It is only during the two world wars that one could possibly characterize the U.S. military as defending freedom. However, even then our behavior was less than utterly moral, with the firebombing of large civilian centers like Dresden and Tokyo (and of course, Hiroshima and Nagasaki).[4] Much of the rest of U.S. military history shows it to be a typical colonialist army, fighting wars for U.S. interests—both corporate and governmental—and territorial gain.[5] It is a pity that what are basically honorable people in the military are misused in this way.

The countries that have seen large numbers of the U.S. military see them invariably not as a force for freedom, but as a force for terror.

Next up in the mail is the following poem, which is pasted into the rest of the text seemingly as a non-sequitur.

“I watched the flag Pass by one day,
It fluttered in the breeze.
A young Marine Saluted it,
And then he stood at ease..

“I looked at Him in uniform
So young, so tall, so proud,
With hair cut square And eyes alert
He’d stand out in any crowd.

“I thought how many men Like him
Had fallen through the years.
How many died on foreign Soil
How many mothers’ tears?

“How many pilots’ planes Shot down?
How many died at sea
How many foxholes were soldiers’ Graves ?
No, freedom isn’t free

“I heard the sound of Taps One night,
When everything was still,
I listened to the bugler Play
And felt a sudden chill.

“I wondered just how many times
That Taps had meant ‘Amen,’
When a flag had draped a Coffin.
Of a brother or a friend.

“I thought of all the Children,
Of the mothers and the wives,
Of fathers, sons and Husbands
With interrupted lives..

“I Thought about a graveyard
At the bottom of the sea
Of unmarked graves in Arlington .
No, freedom isn’t free.”

This is a pretty sad poem[6], the point of which is probably lost on most readers: it seems to condemn war more than support it. It’s also interesting that there’s nothing uniquely American about it (except for, perhaps, the word “Marine”) and it could have been written by anyone who’d experienced war. The only thing that makes it nearly uniquely American is that it laments only the loss of soldiers; almost any other nation that has experienced war has done so at home as well and would also lament the loss of civilians instead of treating soldiers as some sort of special, exalted class. The U.S. has been remarkably free of civilian casualties—excepting, of course, 9-11—especially considering its bloody and violent history.

Freedom isn’t free and war isn’t necessary. There’d be a lot fewer dead American soldiers if Americans weren’t so ready to “support” them in whatever hare-brained act of empire our dear leaders thought was best for their bottom line. Before you reply that they “attacked our way of life” and that they declared war first, consider the following:

• The two attacks on American soil—WTC both times—over the last two decades hardly constitutes much of a war on American soil, even in the most gibbering of American fantasies. I would think we Americans were a hardier bunch than to to be shit-our-pants terrified of an enemy that can only take casualties once every couple of decades.
• The other attacks, like the Cole or the base in Beirut, were attacks on military personnel occupying other countries. That the troops in Beirut were at the embassy doesn’t enter into it; ask yourself: does any other country keep troops at their embassies? Are there foreign troops in Washington?
• The degradation in “our way of life” in the last ten years has been entirely home-grown. The Patriot Act revoked rights we’d forgotten we had (which made it all the easier), wire-tapping is now legal, warrantless searches are legal, anyone—including Americans—can be picked up and incarcerated indefinitely with no charges, no right to a lawyer, no trial and no protection from torture and these are all things we’ve done to ourselves, without the help of the howling mass of rabid Muslim warriors we’ve all been told are hovering just over the horizon, waiting to storm American borders and turn us into a caliphate.

“When You receive this, please stop for a moment And Say a Prayer for our servicemen. Of all the gifts you could give A US Soldier, Prayer is the very best One.”

Not to be too snarky, but it’s a good thing that it’s the best gift, ‘cause it’s also pretty cheap. Doesn’t cost you dime, does it? All you have to do is put your fingers in your ears and ask God real loud to make everything right.

Instead of praying (which, considering my atheism, I’m not sure in which PO box they would end up), I instead spend my time thinking of real-world ways of protecting the troops. The only one I’ve hit upon so far is informing myself and trying to inform others so that we can all stop supporting our damned leaders when they want to start yet another war in which both our troops and millions of innocent civilians will surely die.

Granted, filtering the bullhorn of American media is no small task, but it’s an obligation every American has and a job you have to do—because an uninformed populace is not a democracy. And that’s what we have right now, we’ve got one election after another flitting by with no real change coming regardless of who gets elected. That’s because we’ve become happy with marketing rather than substance; as long as we get to stay pretty comfortable, those guys in Washington (and most of them are guys, another problem) can do pretty much do what they like. And what they’re doing is selling our country out from under us and sending the poorest of us off to die in order to get a few percent more wealth for themselves. They don’t even bother to manage their wars well, because it doesn’t really matter in the end; after a few years, Iraq may be a complete disaster but hundreds and hundreds of billions of our tax dollars have flowed into the right pockets and the right offshore bank-accounts.

It’s the same pirates that sank our economy with their wonderful fairy tales of a world without rules that regulates itself. The same pile of jackasses that keep trying to convince us that government-supplied health-care is evil while we all get to take out a second or third mortgage (with those awesome hidden balloon payments waiting on page 112) just to pay our health-care bills. Oh yeah, and tax cuts are awesome, right? How far, exactly, did that $300 or $600 go? Probably not nearly far enough. Too bad we have no money to pay for all of those cool things— ‘cause we’re blowing it all on our awesome military and on saving our economy from the top-down instead of the bottom-up. No money for healthcare, no money for infrastructure, no money for schools, no money for anything but our troops, for blowing stuff up and for helping out crony friends. That doesn’t really sound like the leading light of the world I learned about in school.

So stop re-mailing your platitudes about supporting the troops and think about what’s actually happening to this country and think about what we could achieve if we actually supported something other than only our troops, if we actually thought about what would really benefit us instead of just doing what our TVs and dear leaders tell us to. When did America lose its backbone? We had one once, but it seems we’re happy enough with our pacifiers to keep us quiet while those at the top reap their reward off of our hard work. If you saw the Matrix: the future is now, we’re just not underground in our little pods and living in cyberspace yet.