Before the advent of militant monotheism cut down all the holy groves of Hellas and the dark fire caverns of Persia, the world was dotted with sanctified ground upon which no combat could take place and sanctuaries where no arrest could be made. These no longer exist, of course, for who could imagine an American police officer pausing at the steps of a church. Or an American soldier stopping at the threshold of a mosque. To be sure, the Puritans who are present on the left as on the right insist on discipline, decorum and rigid restrictive norms, but there will always be those who resist the imposed limitations.
Now comes before us IGTNT, the society of holy mourners, and demands that its comments section be reserved solely to Amen! Let's then examine their case in light on the ancient authorities and modern moralities, the reality of an Empire at war and of millions of volunteers to assist the Empire in that war.
It has always good rhetoric to come to "bury Caesar, not to praise him." But can there an Empire without the loyal legions, and those who extol their bravery? And is it safe to separate the two in our minds, to grant one complete immunity for all criticism?
IGTNT is an acronym that stands for I Got the News Today (not, as some have conjectured, I Got TNT!) which on DailyKos has come to represent a long running diary series devoted to honoring and respecting those Americans who die as a result of their participation in American military operations abroad. Maybe the death of a soldier at his barracks deep in the primeval forests of South Carolina would also qualify, I don’t know, I am not one of them, their standards of unassailable journalistic objectivity are foreign to me. That is the parameter, and the profiles are not of people who were carefully chosen for their personal greatness and lifetime contribution to society, but simply of people in uniforms. Not even blue police uniforms, only khaki ones. Say what you want about policemen, and God knows I do, but at least their professed goal is to help people, to protect them from harm. The purpose of soldiers is to destroy things, to blow up buildings that took others their lives to create, to decimate country sides, to kill or capture anybody whose name showed up on an intelligence agency hit list. Those who seek to glorify the military and encourage service argue that the overall result of their activities is to crate peace and save lives, but this is merely another ancient rhetorical trump, the "Peace through War" argument, that is the argument of butchers through the ages, that has been rejected countless times in the eras of Enlightenment, but which quickly reemerges once the Age of Empire follows.
IGTNT now seeks to redefine itself from simply a long running and often rec listed diary series, which is nice, to "sacred space." They seek to equate themselves to a funeral, and those who would speak out against that definition, and the rules for comments which flow from it, as morally equivalent to Fred Phelps. But this is not a funeral. There is no body. There is no weeping widow, though her theoretical presence and posited senstitivities are clumsily used to justify the restrictions. No es banda, as an artist once remarked. This is not a funeral, it is a public memorial, the statues of the soldiers are on display, the eulogies have been spoken, the priest has blessed the bier and the most laudatory praise elicited from loved ones cornered by TV cameras has just been read to the public passing through the public square.
But there are those in the public square that object to having this ceremony here, perhaps simply because they possess taste enough not to make personal tragedies into Teutonic ceremonies. Or maybe because they find that such ceremonies are dangerous, because they normalize the choice to join the military and appear to celebrate these tragic deaths. Throughout history the fallen soldiers were mourned as new recruits were gathered, it is a tradition that goes back to Homer, and is vividly rendered by Thucydides in his description of Pericles’ Funeral Oration. And these people then step forward to criticize the proceedings, each in their way.
That is what is being now condemned and hide rated by the IGTNT collective. No individual soldier is being criticized by these hated IGTNT violators, but the idea that it is virtuous to serve the society by going abroad with a gun, to try to coercive some targeted population to our will. The voluntary choice to give your body to the state to be pointed at whatever enemy the Commander in Chief decides, in any corner of the world, without ever refusing or condemning a mission is wrong. Therefore the deaths brought upon by this mistaken choice are not to be praised, but tragedies to be mourned, and others urged to avoid these mistakes.
In fairness, some have told me that IGTNT was originally supposed to be a mournful tribute to lives wasted in the service of a misguided cause. This was probably true during the Iraq War, but during Obama's much expanded Afghan adventure, the tone has changed, it has become Teutonic, it speaks glowingly about our greatest, or most heroic, our best being over there. And this must be opposed as soon as it is uttered, because it sends a morally reinforcing message to all of the visitors of DailyKos who might still be in the target recruiting range. Young Americans are regularly targeted by a relentless patriotic fervor combined with active recruitment to enlist in some branch of the Armed Forces. To have DailyKos join in this stream cannot be tolerated silently. I have spoken against this previously and others have done so even more eloquently.
The message being sent to the IGTNT diarists, and not all of them, but only during the most egregious instances of militaristic pathos, is that if you do not want criticism in IGTNT, make it sound less like an ad for the valor of military service. Maybe, just maybe you can overcome the Stalinist urges bubbling in your left brain and consider responding to the criticism with rational concessions instead of repression. And is this not also the goal of any one who can call themselves a leftist, to discourage the choice of a military career, to bemoan their deaths as well as their deeds as a tragedy? If not, and you truly believe that a career in the military is as noble as of its very opposite, of a profession whose goal it is to save, rather than take, lives?
How about making the number of an anti-recruitment information organization a part of the regular IGTNT verbiage? I think that would go a long way to diffusing the bile many of us feel when we read your saccharine eulogies. And please don’t’ motivate your refusal by the supposition that it would not be respectful to the possibly present widows and the potentially visiting Countess d’Este. The restrictions you place on criticism in your works are purely of your own choosing, which is fine, but then you demand that others adhere to them on pain of banning even. Have you considered where your once possibly pure motives have taken you? Can we stop the purges and allow discussion?