This is a mighty powerful comment made by user ThirtyEightSpecial over on reddit. It spells out the real reason we have a holiday today...its propaganda - Soldier worship is a recruiting tool, first and foremost. The benefit there is obvious; you get impressionable young people to sign up to do something that, objectively, is a horrible idea most of the time. However, its also a social tool. By social tool I mean that its powerful propaganda that instills certain ideas about war in the general citizenry. Roughly, it goes something like this: soldiers are honorable heros = what soldiers do is honorable = the military is honorable = war is honorable = otherwise unforgivable government action is unquestionable. Thats obviously a really simplistic way of saying it, but thats the end result. It creates war apologists. Most discussions about the ills of war will be shouted down as if youre slandering a religion. Anti-war and anti-imperialism were strong sentiments after Vietnam. The government obviously had a problem with that, but with the burgeoning information age, it was difficult to convince people that war was some how ok. Instead, they pick the smallest instrument of war, the soldier, build a hero myth and kick the propaganda into high gear. The result is that they can still make unforgivable wars and people will largely support it at first, the ranks are staffed and in the end there are very few protests. You can even see people mentally grappling with this saying I support the troops, but not the war. An interesting side effect of this is that some young men join the military believing the myth and eventually realize theyre actually doing something horrible. It causes massive depression when its far too late. And so you see soldier suicide rates skyrocket. In the end you just have to look at the VA to see that the government doesnt believe their own myth. reddit/r/TrueReddit/comments/1qb39p/soldier_worship_blinds_us_to_the_grim_reality_of/cdb3g5h
Posted on: Mon, 11 Nov 2013 19:34:25 +0000
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