Yet more allegations of U.S. military abuse against the poor people of the world have surfaced, this time via the hard, dedicatory work of Afghan-based human-rights organizations. According to the Washington Post, an Afghan human rights commission claimed last Saturday (4/14/07) that a platoon of U.S. Marines “open[ed] fire on pedestrians and civilian vehicles along a 10-mile stretch of road and kill[ed] 12 people--including a 4-year-old girl, a 1-year-old boy and three elderly villagers.” Imagine if any of these victims were your brother, sister, mother or father; would you continue to allow such flagrant abuses of a civilian population go unanswered (or send their killers trinkets?)
But in the U.S. we are cultured to mythologize the military, deify “the commander-in-chief,” and in what can best be described as Durkhiemian delusional hysteria, support the base enforcer of U.S. imperial aggression, the grunt U.S. soldier--regardless of any pain and suffering innocent populations must consequentially endure. Unlike those in the U.S. military, the Afghani and Iraqi civilian killed, maimed and/or otherwise abused by the forceful and violent actions of U.S. soldiers had no choice in their circumstance. They didn’t enlist for their suffering. They don’t receive lucrative pay, college loans and discounted tuition, or find a place in which they can “be all that [they] can be” in these testosterone-driven epics. Their rewards are dead relatives--killed violently, or (at best) unending stress and hardships. Let us be very clear on one simple fact: the U.S. missions in Iraq and Afghanistan are violent ones, the scale to which is lost on the apologists of these exploits.
Therefore the question for you and I is very simple, do we support those who knowingly engage in conduct that is wrong, despite what sad, soppy narratives these offenders might use to attenuate their offenses? Should we support (in even the most seemingly trivial methods) those who are used as instruments of terror on a distant and historically abused people? The best way to illustrate this question while avoiding the reactionary, knee-jerk biased defense such a question arouses is to use a like example (which might have its own set of countervailing cultural biases.) Would it have been acceptable, for example, for a hypothetical Berliner to demonstrate sympathy for the basic grunt soldier serving in the Nazi Wehrmacht that was used to siege Leningrad for 29 months during WWII, a siege that resulted in the death of 800,000 civilians? I’m sure times were tough for the poor German farm boy suddenly caught-up in the zeitgeist of the then frenzied, fascist state—and a number of sympathetic excuses could be imagined for his defense, but the fact that he contributed to the unnecessary and quite excruciating deaths of innocent civilians who bore no malfeasance against him was a morally inexcusable act. What’s more, those who sympathetically (and hypothetically) sent him well wishes (such as tobacco-based products) rather than disapproval and protest are also culpable to his crimes. Accordingly, using elementary ethical guidelines, we may ask if S.O.U.L.S’ “troop drive” is morally defendable regardless of whatever loose, lofty rhetoric its acronym echoes?
If the U.S. military occupies Iraq and Afghanistan and causes needless destruction to life there, are we to, as Mr. Eng suggests, ignore this fact and send cheap gifts to these criminals anyway? Would we feel as comfortable to a canned food drive for al-Qaida, whose members also must spend months apart from their families? Would we unquestionably assume an apolitical stance for an “officer-drive” to benefit the Los Angeles Police Department after the Rodney King beatings? There is a greater moral question to the organizations we unassumingly choose to support (even in nonessential ways) or whose very existence we are indifferent to.
A canned-food drive therefore can be interpreted as a demonstration of support for the mission of the troops. All one has to do is fill-in the natural syntax of the ideological underpinning for their actions, i.e., “support our troops”…(kill Iraqis? maim civilians? occupy a foreign country under false pretexts?) What are we asked to support? There continued endangerment of innocent civilians? What did the urbane Berliner support when he or she sent their sons to slaughter Eastern Europe? What did the citizens of Tokyo, Japan support in 1937 when they sent their sons to butcher Chinese in Nanjing? What did the Bostonian of 1864 support when the U.S. military annihilated Cheyenne and Arapaho women and children encamped along the Sand Creek in Southern Colorado? Even indifference bears a collective guilt--at least that’s what the U.S. military told the residence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in late-1945 and the people of Dresden earlier that year.
We assume guilt by the actions or our governments, especially when those governments are democratic regimes, regardless of who we did or didn’t vote for. It is our civic duty, therefore, to question and protest the use of the U.S. military—not to endorse its actions through canned-food drives. “War is hell,” as William Tecumseh Sherman clearly put it while burning down Georgia on his “march to the sea;” it is a violent, collective act of barbarism committed by disillusioned, aggressive youth trained to kill and destroy other human beings. We need to demonstrate more responsibility and forethought with the way in which we relate with organizations (e.g., the U.S. military) and their composing elements (e.g., the U.S. soldier) that reap so much destruction and unnecessary suffering on those least deserving of it, and we can begin by not supporting these criminals on our campus through canned-food drives.
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Is S.O.U.L.S a mercenary support front?
(Published in the Suffolk Journal)
S.O.U.L.S’ recent “troop drive” is an attestation to the quasi-fascism perpetuated in the culture of the U.S. mainstream, and is a disgusting legitimization on our campus of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. It sustains the narrative of U.S. soldiers as the primary sufferers of illegal U.S. aggression and is, ultimately, a waste of time and resources for both Suffolk students and organizers. If action is to be taken for the benefit of a needy people, surely S.O.U.L.S could find a more unfortunate population than the tools of U.S. imperialism (like the Iraqi people) toward which to dedicate their efforts.
The notion of soldiers in the U.S. military as victims in this framework is particularly noxious, as it’s through their efforts, collectively and individually, that the worst atrocities of U.S. violence are realized. The U.S. armed forces have a genocidal legacy and are the only military organization in history to use a nuclear device in any context (and against defenseless civilians nonetheless.) But in today’s politically bifurcated culture, the men and women enlisted in the U.S. armed forces are either lauded as “defenders of freedom” or mourned as martyrs for empire. Even for those who have acknowledged that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was/is done under false pretenses and with dubious justifications, the base component of the U.S. military, the romanticized grunt soldier, remains beyond criticism. What about his or her actions? Is joining the U.S. military justified (or even excusable) given the hideous history of this organization and the extralegal way in which it parades itself today?
Defenses for the conduct of the U.S. military are myriad and amorphous as a result of the disparate contexts for which they attempt to redress. For example, when U.S. Marines slaughtered 24 Iraqi civilians in Hadetha, including “children and the women who were trying to shield them,” pundits from the right argued that such actions were perfectly acceptable given the U.S.’s hyped “threat of terror” and current “state of war.” (Bill O’Reilly, went as far as to defend their actions by comparing—maybe appropriately—military actions in Hadetha to the execution of surrendered U.S. forces by Nazis in France during WWII.) It is claimed that the stress soldiers endure somehow justify their transgressions against innocent civilians. Those who make this claim however don’t apply similar standards to the equally perturbed populations who commit malfeasance against the U.S. For example, no measurements are made of the possible mental stress the 9/11 hijackers may had suffered prior to flying planes into buildings. Exploring the reasoning for some of the hatred against the U.S. (and Western Culture in general) felt by people in the Global South seems unfathomable in mainstream culture. Maybe such a reflection would reveal too much about the U.S.’s perennial involvement in systems of oppression there.
From the left, defense for U.S. soldiers is premised on the hackneyed narrative of these fighting men and women as poor working-class people with limited opportunities aside from military service. Their socio-economic circumstances are used as a form of apology for their actions. It is argued, therefore, that because the majority of the military (an all volunteer force) are from poor, underserved communities with little chance of personal fruition in their humble quests for personal betterment, their actions should be overlooked or mitigated and prosecution should be made only against those in positions of power who had casually sent them into conflict in the first place. But this logic excuses the responsibility we all as human beings have for our actions. The basic U.S. soldier, when he or she enlists into the military is making an ethical/moral decision. They are sacrificing their personal judgment to be an enforcer of aggression in a third-world context. The history of the U.S. armed forces is not absent from them—there exists every opportunity to investigate the record/historical utility of the U.S. military. They either: a) choose not to investigate, b) allow themselves to be deluded through cheap, fairy tale-like advertisements (e.g., “be all that you can be”) or c) justify their service by flaunting their lack of opportunities. Regardless of their reasoning two facts remain unchanged: 1) soldiers in the U.S. military are not forced to join this organization (there is no draft today) and 2) their actions put into direct mortal danger even more abused, underserved communities around the world. Each time a U.S. soldier patrols through Iraqi neighborhoods with loaded, automatic weaponry, the lives of Iraqi men, women and children are endangered. The U.S. soldier deserves as much sympathy for their perilous condition as a police officer who patrols and subsequently abuses residents of urban, racially segregated ghettos.
Therefore, an organization like S.O.U.L.S should not attempt to lift the spirits of criminals through an aggregation of cheap, disposable commodities (and some questionable items like tobacco-based products.) With all the misery in the world (a lot of which is a direct consequence of Western-imperialism) tenacious, young volunteers should dedicate their actions to causes of better caliber than a “troop drive.” They should not serve the function as cheerleaders for mercenaries.
S.O.U.L.S’ recent “troop drive” is an attestation to the quasi-fascism perpetuated in the culture of the U.S. mainstream, and is a disgusting legitimization on our campus of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. It sustains the narrative of U.S. soldiers as the primary sufferers of illegal U.S. aggression and is, ultimately, a waste of time and resources for both Suffolk students and organizers. If action is to be taken for the benefit of a needy people, surely S.O.U.L.S could find a more unfortunate population than the tools of U.S. imperialism (like the Iraqi people) toward which to dedicate their efforts.
The notion of soldiers in the U.S. military as victims in this framework is particularly noxious, as it’s through their efforts, collectively and individually, that the worst atrocities of U.S. violence are realized. The U.S. armed forces have a genocidal legacy and are the only military organization in history to use a nuclear device in any context (and against defenseless civilians nonetheless.) But in today’s politically bifurcated culture, the men and women enlisted in the U.S. armed forces are either lauded as “defenders of freedom” or mourned as martyrs for empire. Even for those who have acknowledged that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was/is done under false pretenses and with dubious justifications, the base component of the U.S. military, the romanticized grunt soldier, remains beyond criticism. What about his or her actions? Is joining the U.S. military justified (or even excusable) given the hideous history of this organization and the extralegal way in which it parades itself today?
Defenses for the conduct of the U.S. military are myriad and amorphous as a result of the disparate contexts for which they attempt to redress. For example, when U.S. Marines slaughtered 24 Iraqi civilians in Hadetha, including “children and the women who were trying to shield them,” pundits from the right argued that such actions were perfectly acceptable given the U.S.’s hyped “threat of terror” and current “state of war.” (Bill O’Reilly, went as far as to defend their actions by comparing—maybe appropriately—military actions in Hadetha to the execution of surrendered U.S. forces by Nazis in France during WWII.) It is claimed that the stress soldiers endure somehow justify their transgressions against innocent civilians. Those who make this claim however don’t apply similar standards to the equally perturbed populations who commit malfeasance against the U.S. For example, no measurements are made of the possible mental stress the 9/11 hijackers may had suffered prior to flying planes into buildings. Exploring the reasoning for some of the hatred against the U.S. (and Western Culture in general) felt by people in the Global South seems unfathomable in mainstream culture. Maybe such a reflection would reveal too much about the U.S.’s perennial involvement in systems of oppression there.
From the left, defense for U.S. soldiers is premised on the hackneyed narrative of these fighting men and women as poor working-class people with limited opportunities aside from military service. Their socio-economic circumstances are used as a form of apology for their actions. It is argued, therefore, that because the majority of the military (an all volunteer force) are from poor, underserved communities with little chance of personal fruition in their humble quests for personal betterment, their actions should be overlooked or mitigated and prosecution should be made only against those in positions of power who had casually sent them into conflict in the first place. But this logic excuses the responsibility we all as human beings have for our actions. The basic U.S. soldier, when he or she enlists into the military is making an ethical/moral decision. They are sacrificing their personal judgment to be an enforcer of aggression in a third-world context. The history of the U.S. armed forces is not absent from them—there exists every opportunity to investigate the record/historical utility of the U.S. military. They either: a) choose not to investigate, b) allow themselves to be deluded through cheap, fairy tale-like advertisements (e.g., “be all that you can be”) or c) justify their service by flaunting their lack of opportunities. Regardless of their reasoning two facts remain unchanged: 1) soldiers in the U.S. military are not forced to join this organization (there is no draft today) and 2) their actions put into direct mortal danger even more abused, underserved communities around the world. Each time a U.S. soldier patrols through Iraqi neighborhoods with loaded, automatic weaponry, the lives of Iraqi men, women and children are endangered. The U.S. soldier deserves as much sympathy for their perilous condition as a police officer who patrols and subsequently abuses residents of urban, racially segregated ghettos.
Therefore, an organization like S.O.U.L.S should not attempt to lift the spirits of criminals through an aggregation of cheap, disposable commodities (and some questionable items like tobacco-based products.) With all the misery in the world (a lot of which is a direct consequence of Western-imperialism) tenacious, young volunteers should dedicate their actions to causes of better caliber than a “troop drive.” They should not serve the function as cheerleaders for mercenaries.
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