Sympathy for soldiers should not entail a concomitant endorsement of war. No matter how brave and selfless they may be, no matter how highly you value their individual sacrifice do not allow such reactions to be manipulated into supporting war.
Individual soldiers are as much victims as the other human collateral of state aggression. The entirely natural human reaction of empathy for their suffering should never be impressed into support, endorsement or legitimisation of the evil they are sent into.
The only way to support soldiers as individual people is to be completely opposed to sending them to war in the first place. Furthermore reducing funding for the military, one hopes, may reduce the number of individuals that can be tempted.
The current propaganda paradigm is that heart strings be tugged for 'our brave boys' to build support for aggression, militarism and war. 'Feel sorry for the amputees? Then vote for military funding'.
A shark will only eat your friend if you push him into the sea. If you both keep out of the water you'll keep your limbs. In the same way, a soldier can only become a casualty of war if you send him to war.
Wednesday 24 August 2011
What is it good for?
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I hate the term "hero" it gets used far too often and far too widely.
ReplyDeleteI liken it unto carpet bombing, sometimes the intended target gets it, mostly it falls upon the undeserving. I could cite Abu Grahib and the sick fucks that worked there or the penchant of some of our heroes for collecting body parts of their victims - but I won't.
absolutely. if truth be told, the above piece is about as charitable an effort as I can muster toward 'our' state forces.
ReplyDeletemy attitude may seem ludicrously mean spirited to some but the military is not a scam. the horrors of war have been fairly well depicted in popular culture for several hundred years. when you sign up thats what you should expect. there is the 'impossbility of death in the mind of someone living' as i believe damien hirst puts it. i reckon this explains the irrational 'it wont happen to me' tendencies of most people including soldiers. however when you take the kings shilling...
and just to reinforce the 'evil libertarian' image i would like to say that i have a problem with 'help for heroes'. this meme is what i was getting at in this post. the general feeling from the charity has already clearly bled into social attitudes to war. politics capitalises on the empathy and piggybacks emotionally manipulative calls for greater military funding on such attitudes. it is very difficult for most people to separate their feelings for an individual from the massive camouflaged collective he is a part of.
the mindless hero worship and patriotism we are beginning to see on this crummy island has taken the US to complete fascist state militarism. ANY form of criticism is met with a hail of emotive bullshit about how us anti-war types are kicking amputees while their down or some other illogical bollocks.
i didnt send the poor bastards to sweat and die in the shitholes of the world. i dont support it, endorse it or legitimise it. i dont even want to pay for it.
in fact to be forced to pay for it by the state the first time round and then have the effects of what i never wanted in the first place pushed in my face in order to get me to pay for it a second time round by a charity does annoy me. yes a charity annoys me but if we didnt have this insane belief in coercion the that charity would be unnecessary.
and amongst all the bizarre expeditions the propaganda casualties are sent on for the sake of the state media machine, whilst we all focus on these brave white boys trekking across the north pole or running a marathon everyone forgets the poor fuckers in the sandy shitholes who were maimed or killed that we never offered a voluntary choice of whether to enter a war zone. because we sent our voluntary aggressors into their homeland from which they could not escape.
there's no help for afghanis is there? no chuggers down sainsburies rattling a bucketful of coppers in front of a poster of a filth covered street urchin in mosul or kabul.
war. the whole thing is disgusting. it is the health of the state. war and the state are symbiotic evils. its nigh on impossible to have either one without the other. fuck em both and the poor fools who cant work out they aint right
Amen. It's hard to tell a young man (in these days even a woman) whose legs were blown off that he lost them in vain. On charity, if these wounded servicemen need facilities/equipment or personal help - it should be provided by the bastards that sent them into harms way.
ReplyDeleteIn Libya our "heroes" are bombing (from a safe height) the very civilians they were mandated, by the UN, to protect.
Not in my name.