Although I don’t typically find a lot I can agree with at Reason Magazine, left libertarian Sheldon Richman’s piece there, highlighting Drumpf’s cynical exploitation of the grief of the widow of Fallen Seal Team member Ryan Owens, had me nodding in agreement throughout.
“As Donald Trump demonstrated in his first address to Congress, no matter how loathsome a ruler may be, he can bring an assembly of politicians to its feet and disarm some critics simply by invoking the quasi-secular faith—Americanism—and eulogizing the latest uniformed war-state employee to sacrifice his life for it. Trump has indeed shown he can fill the job expected of any president: supreme head of what Andrew Bacevich calls the Church of America the Redeemer.
Horace's declaration "Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori"—"It is sweet and proper to die for one's country"—is just what poet Wilfred Owen called it: "The old Lie." Screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky extended Owen's point when he had his protagonist in The Americanization of Emily tell a war widow, "We perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifices." How many times must people fall for this ploy before they realize they have been cruelly scammed? (The American Church is sustained by a coalition of profiteers and true believers or what economist Bruce Yandle generically dubbed "bootleggers and Baptists.")”
Richman asserts that killing for an ideology, even one and imminently defensible and cherished as Liberal Democracy, is no better than killing for a religion and that there is little real difference between the two in any case.
He also illustrates that the folk of a sleeping village, awakened by a pre-dawn raid on their home, will consult neither religion or ideology but merely grab their guns….
"Yemeni and tribal officials described a chaotic scene that followed [the raid], saying that tribal leaders, even those without an affiliation with AQAP, took up arms out of loyalty to Dhahab and a desire to protect their village. 'Any person who has dignity and honor would not stand by and watch his neighbors and relatives and tribesmen being attacked and do nothing,' said Saleh Hussein al-Aameri, a tribal leader who was close enough to hear the gunfire."
Mr. al-Aameri was presumably fighting for his freedom also...the freedom to sleep in his home unmolested by American death merchants dropped from the sky to confront evil-doers who oppose the hegemony of American Gas and Oil Companies in the region.
In one of my favorite movies, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, the fine actor William Devane utters a timeless truth to the film’s protagonist portrayed by Warren Beatty:
”Until people stop dying for freedom they ain’t really gonna be free.”
This truism should logically hold true for both Ryan and a Yemeni tribesman defending his home and family.
Mr. Richman recognizes this in his conclusion.
“Contrary to the national faith, the "war on terror" is neither defensive and nor effective: there was no AQAP before the U.S. military invaded Afghanistan and Iraq roughly 15 years ago, and it has been bombing Yemen for years. (Bizarrely, it also helps AQAP by enabling Saudi Arabia's war against AQAP's enemy, the Houthis.) The 9/11 attacks, which provide the official excuse for the permanent war state, were acts of revenge — albeit immorally directed largely at noncombatants—after decades of oppressive and lethal U.S. actions against Arab Muslims. The already small terrorist threat to Americans could be further reduced by adopting a non-interventionist foreign policy.
But any suggestion that the American Church does wrong is systematically marginalized and kept from the public by the mainstream media's defenders of the official faith. As long as that's the case, innocents in other lands will continue to be murdered and Americans like Ryan Owens will continue to die in vain.”