Do you support our troops? Do you honor those who serve? Then you owe them something more. You owe them your intelligence, your critical thinking, and the chance for your dissent. It is not dishonoring a soldier to say he has died in vain not protecting our country and our freedoms. Rather, that is statement about the purpose and effect of military action. Too often I see the claim of “support” for our troops mean something else. Too often I see the claim that they serve and die “defending your freedom”. It is a definition thing; a solider is someone who defends freedom. So when a soldier serves he can only be defending freedom, by definition! The danger of this is that it operates in a very dangerous way. If one says a soldier serves and dies in vain wasting more lives and treasure than are saved and in the process destroying freedom not preserving it, then by definition that must be denigrating the office of the soldier and the soldier themselves because the soldier has become defined as one who defends freedom! But this phrase, this ideology, this definition is dangerous in other ways. Support for our troops means that, since what they do is defend freedom, that their mission must be a noble and good mission, by definition. What we owe to our fellows, our sons and daughters, is to break this definitional relationship, to realize that your son or daughter may have actually fought and died to make us less free, to make us less secure, to make us more enemies. This is not what the soldier intends, but we know that good intentions do not necessarily give good results. We have to come to terms with the idea that they engage in activities that are hallmarks of terrorist organizations by our own government’s standards (see military double tap policy). We owe our soldiers our dissent, we owe them our ability to see their service and deaths as counterproductive, as wastes. If we can’t bring ourselves to think outside this definitional relationship between soldier and mission then we are doomed to be sheep willing to send our sons and daughters blood and out treasure to be spilled in foreign lands for the slightest of pretenses given by the sociopaths who we elect to office.
Posted on: Fri, 21 Jun 2013 16:51:39 +0000
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