An accusation frequently hurled at the Terrorists is that they use the religion of Islam to justify their violent, thoroughly anti-Islamic actions. The right wing militarists suggest that this is no accident, because Islam is actually a religion of violence. But the left wing militarists who dominate the Democratic Party, this site and write the cloying IGTNT odes, do not see it that way. They simply regret that this religion of peace has been perverted to condone violence. And not only to condone violence, but to pretend that those who fall in the jihad will be blessed for their actions by a God who finds their violence pleasing and just. We all find it appalling that anyone who think that any God would bless the terrible actions and deaths of the jihadists.
In fact, we all know that God is actually blessing the actions and deaths of the American and allied soldiers who are fighting on the other side. God cannot bless both sides, obviously, much as He might love the war being waged. If this statement strikes you as absurd, I encourage you to check out the latest IGTNT diary, in which a person whose sig line is "Blessed are the peacemakers" heaps one blessing after another upon the latest batch of America’s warriors, fallen in the theaters of occupation.
As usual, an IGTNT diary was on the rec list today, with countless comments praying the Lord to bless our troops. Of course, no other comments are permitted in the IGTNT diaries, because of the possibility that "these diaries are read by friends and family of the service members mentioned here." I don't know how much truth there is to that statement, but the mere allegation is sufficient to silence all tongues except those singing the hosannas. Although the series is officially intended to "honor, respect, and remind us of the sacrifice of our US troops," it is also a great opportunity to express our nation's firm belief that what these soldiers are doing is God's Work, and that they are blessed for volunteering to fight anyone against whom they might be directed. Christ the war god smiles upon them in American Valhalla, we are assured. A brief review of the comments will show that the majority contain some sort of "blessing" or other invocation of the divine to reward the deeds of the valorous dead. Of course, since no other comments are permitted in these diaries, it is not possible to express any other perspective. Unless you write your own, venom filled diary and post it to be flamed.
These diaries are one of the prides of the DailyKos, demonstrating to any right winger that the progressive community cares about our troops as much as they do. In fact, since the number of troops engaged in occupation duty and counterinsurgency operations abroad has significantly expanded under the new Democratic President, one might argue that the progressives care about the troops more, since they provide even more of them with the opportunity to achieve the greatest glory of a solider – death on the battlefield. And while we tear up with pride at these celebrations of the lives and achievements of America’s fallen warriors, we retain the capacity to be shocked and outraged by the jihadi martyr videos, the death shrines set up to the shaheeds fallen in battle, from the suicide bombers in Israel to those assassinated by American drones. It sickens us to see the mothers of the dead suicide attackers in the videos praise their actions and express a confidence that their sons are now in paradise, enjoying the reward their actions merited from their God. If only they posted it on DailyKos instead, and if only their sons had been Americans!
Of course when we see the IGTNT diary, and the myriad other militaristic mourning pageants that abound in our society, we feel no recognition at all that here are the American martyr videos, complete with quotes from the relatives of the fallen American militants, praising their lives of violence. There is simply no parallel between our heroes and their villains. Our soldiers die for freedom and all that is good, and those of us who believe in a God are apparently fully confident that It is hugging these dead fighters to Its Bosom, relishing the smell of gunpowder and killing that still clings to their charred fingers. Not only are the Americans of conscience not sickened, but that hurry to post their own identically worded blessing, to add their voice to the chorus of those who know that God is smiling down on the righteous fallen warrior. As people starve in the Third World, the most high profile fund drive on the DailyKos remains Nteroots for the Troops, the campaign to send lovely care packages to our brave warriors overseas, suffering in their air conditioned tents as they eat Pizza Hut pizza and wait for their laundry to be done by some obedient Third Country Nationals indentured servant.
I do not want to begin debating whether just war is permitted by the Christian or any other religion. St. Augustine, trying to stiffen the defense of his homeland against barbarian invaders, elaborated it most articulately. However, we are not living in the Dark Ages, as he was. The barbarians are not at the gates. They are in fact so far from the gates that it takes all of the efforts of a multimillion man, multi trillion military machine simply to find them sufficiently to engage them in combat. Americans volunteer to go thousands of miles into lands they cannot even find on a map in order to find the enemy and fight him. Hundreds of robotic drones and satellites prowl the skies day and night seeking some moving target that can be considered sufficiently hostile to justify the extermination of itself and anyone around it.
These millions of volunteers are equipped, trained, paid, healed, pensioned, at great expense to the rest of their fellow citizens, who complain incessantly about the enormous expenditures of their government and the crippling debt crated by the same, but support wholeheartedly the constant increase in the military budget. This is the only point in American politics on which there is full agreement -- the Pentagon budget must increase, the soldiers' benefits must expand, year after year, even as every other program gets cut, even as everybody else's benefits are slashed. Obama's defense budget, passed at a time of unprecedented deficits, will be a mutli billion dollar increase over the Bush era budget. Obama will expand the size of the Army. Obama will recruit more Special Forces hunter killers, deploy more drones, more spies, the war will be fought harder, with more casualties on both sides.
Nobody knows the realities of war better than the soldiers themselves. Only a minority of the troops on the front lines of America's current round of wars are on their first tour. The majority are combat veterans, who had seen the realties of combat and decided to re-up for another tour, and another, and another. And, if they were able to pass the tests, they tried to get into a more lethal, more elite unit, like the Rangers, and their achievements of getting to that next step in the killer pantheon were praised uniformly by their family members, by those in their community, by their leaders, by schoolchildren who were instructed to write them letters, by the whole society. They anxiously awaited their chance to deploy to an active theater, to show what they could do and to accelerate their climb on the promotions ladder, which is always best greased by the blood of the enemy. And when they die on those distant battlefields that they spent so much energy trying to get to, we will be effusive in our praise, we will build them shrines and write about them, how they were the best among us, the strongest, the bravest, the greatest.
In order to pursue their goal of meeting and defeating any enemy against which their superiors direct them, these volunteers leave behind their families, time and again, abandoning sons, daughters, wives, husbands, parents. They leave behind the civilian world in which there is not enough room for the heroic valor they carry inside them and are transported into a world of violence, a world in which they are lords of countless countries, astride the world with their fantastic weapons, served by servants who are brought in mostly from previously conquered lands to wait upon their conquerors, so that they might have more time to defeat their present enemies without having to do their own laundry. They also leave behind the morals of the civilian world, whether the ones which forbid the killing of others, the mistreatment of those weaker than oneself, or those which might prevent one in the civilian world from working for an employer who openly excludes anyone suspected of being a homosexual.
We are supposed to find this voluntary abandonment of common morality, and of all those whom the soldier holds dear to be another heroic aspect of the glorious sacrifice being made. The soldier consigns not only his or her own body to the heightened risk of death or catastrophic injury, and their soul to the inevitable destructive effects of the repeated commission of brutal violence against other humans, but also makes the choice on behalf of their loved ones that they will face the heightened risk of being orphaned, widowed, or will be responsible for providing care for the debilitated soldiers upon their return. Now the entire family are heroes, all of them undertaking to suffer for the collective profit. And as their soldier tries as hard as he or she can to qualify for ever more dangerous duty, as the soldier volunteers for one tour after another knowing the true nature of the conflict being waged on some desolate Third World landscape, turned barren and poisonous by American weapons, the family has only one socially acceptable alternative - to enthusiastically applaud this person for working so hard to abandon them in order to once again give themselves over to war. And, upon receiving the grim news, to praise their decision as loudly as their sobbing will permit. Rest assured, they will be asked by the local media if no one else, to share their pride with the rest of us, so that we may know just how overjoyed they remain that their son or husband chose to go and kill and die in a distant land rather than remain with his family.
I have spent many years studying the history of war. Throughout the ages, war has been an addiction of the socials, and of human society as a whole. The soldiers give their lives to it, while the rest contribute money, emotion, time, portions of the soul. The rest of the people submit to a coarsening of their culture, to a militarization of their values, to the brainwashing and marching away of their children, in order to maintain the war effort that they deem necessary for the greatness of their state and their own material comfort. Today, every faction within the "non-loon" American political spectrum competes with the others to show just how much of themselves they would like to sacrifice, sending money, visiting the troops, encouraging their children to join. During the last Presidential election we had the pleasure of seeing not one but both Vice Presidential Candidates joyfully sending their sons off to the Afghan occupation. And of course one of the Presidential candidates was largely in that position because of his distinguished service in the Vietnam War.
John McCain's status as a war hero is instructive of contemporary American militarism. A scion of a hereditary officer clan, he volunteered for the most lethal of the American military branches, and the one that killed the most civilians throughout that war and to this day - he was an American pilot. The actions of himself and his fellow pilots resulted in the intended deaths of hundreds of thousands of North Vietnamese civilians. Terror bombing was their objective, to force the North to the negotiating table. The Vietnam War is now conceded to have been an enormous mistake and a war of aggression by the majority of Americans. The fact that the war was lost with no discernable deterioration in America’s national security belies any claims that the war was one of defense. It is impossible therefore to deny that McCain is a man who voluntarily participated in a wrongful war, and spent a lot of energy to attain the most deadly role available to an American during that conflict. And yet he is to this day loudly acclaimed, by both sides of the political spectrum, as a true American hero. The only reproach cast upon him is that he was not a good enough killer, that he did not carry out enough successful missions before being captured, that he did not end the lives of enough Vietnamese women and children in a war that we all now acknowledge as unnecessary and wrong. And also that he cracked under interrogation and admitted that the US might have committed many crimes during the war, which is now a well accepted fact. But how loud and unanimous was the praise of John McCain's warrior past during the last camp gain. How effusively Barack Obama thanked him for his service. What a national treasure was this cold blooded killer who competed with his Air Force Academy classmates to see how many neighborhoods of Hanoi he could obliterate.
But Vietnam is over. Iraq too is winding down, depending on the ability of the US to hand over control to a pliable and efficient dictator. Though these were wrong, unnecessary, aggressive wars, condemned as such by millions of contemporaries, we must have nothing but admiration for those who volunteered to take part and make the slaughter possible, for those who signed up for tour after tour in the killing fields. While the Vietnam War also involved conscripts, who were victims of the terrible war machine, the Iraq War was fought by hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic volunteers, who received their illegal orders to invade a country which had never harmed them, and said "Hurrah, this is my chance to show just how efficient a killing machine I can be!" And now we have Afghanistan, the longest war now in US history, the Good War, the war we need to be fighting, and those who die in that war are truly blessed. I do not think we are far from the beginning of production of the video wills which can be broadcast to the nation upon their demise, to stoke our fighting spirit. Hamas has some film makers who can help get this program organized for fairly cheap, just a few more billion in the defense budget.
On this particular site, it has gotten to the point that we are positively obligated to stay silent as Christian blessings are heaped upon a new generation of volunteer killers for their heroic sacrifice on the distant field of battle. If not for their war of aggression, the aggression might come to us. If not for their war crimes, war crimes might be visited upon us. And who would dare tell their families that the man or woman who keeps leaving them, time and again, without regard for the feelings of those left behind that these are not the acts of a loving caring person, but of one who is either entirely selfish as to not consider the impact their actions have on their loved ones, or of one so enthralled by the layers of propaganda heaped upon them from childhood as to not even realize the harm that they are choosing to do. No, we must never hint at this. Instead, the families must be showered with praise and support, told that they too are heroes for associating themselves with this psychopathic behavior. And when the warrior dies, we put on a lovely pageant so that the next generation of warriors does not hesitate to step into the bloody boots left behind by the previous wave.
Well, I will not stay silent. I don't give a shit if this diary is "read by friends and family of the service members mentioned here." I’m pretty sure anyone connected to the military is aware that there have been in human history some concerns about just how righteous a career of killing other human beings really is. I am much more concerned about the young men and women who read this blog thinking it is the voice of left wing radicalism, and who are fed the same diet of pro-military propaganda as they would get on RedState. I would say to the friend and family, your loved one is on a terrible, immoral path that will lead to the deaths of many, and possibly his or her own demise, and if you do not act with all your might to stop them from again shipping out for the killing fields, then you should prepare to receive the terrible news that their voluntary actions, which you condoned and enabled with your tacit or full on support, have led to their logical outcome. And when you do receive The News, don’t give the media what they want to hear. Tell everybody how you feel that a piece of your life has been taken from you by smiling butchers who hide behind patriotism and even religion to get their hooks in millions of young Americans, to use them as cannon fodder in neverending wars of choice and aggression.
Whatever the propaganda tells us, there is only one immutable law of war: those who live by the sword perish by the sword. And for those who are Christian, I hope that you know enough of your Bible to understand that, contrary to what the obsequious propagandists might tell you, it is the peace makers who are blessed, while the war makers are damned. You worship a God who told you to turn the other cheek while enthusiastically supporting the hunting of human beings all over Central Asia by human and robotic killers. So if you want to post your blessings for the souls of the warriors, at least change your sig from quoting Jesus to quoting Odin or Mars, or some other war god, because that is the real object of your worship.