The Exploitation of Soldiers

[MellowOne]

The Exploitation of Soldiers
http://www.lewrockwell.com/shaffer/shaffer94.html
by Butler Shaffer
by Butlerhttp://www.lewrockwell.com/shaffer/shaffer94.html Shaffer


Grow like savages – as soldiers will,
That nothing do but meditate on blood.

~ William Shakespeare, King Henry V

Those who defend warfare tend to see it only as an abstraction, a game pitting strategists from opposing collectives against one another in furtherance of contrived objectives. The ugly details of orchestrated butchery and torture are to be suppressed, lest persons of humane sensitivities become upset and demand a cessation of the game. But facts have ways of insinuating themselves into the most carefully devised schemes, causing the sordid nature of warfare to move from the abstract to the concrete. When this occurs – as it did in the My Lai massacre or, more recently, at Abu Ghraib – the political establishment is quick to look for scapegoats or explanations that do not implicate war itself. To the state, the professed ends of any given war are both irrelevant and fungible: it is the war system that requires protection.

One thing I found annoying during the Vietnam War years was the hostility directed by some anti-war activists to individual soldiers. I was opposed to that war – as I am to all wars – but I thought there was something cowardly about those who focused their anger on the soldiers rather than upon the politicians and the political establishment that manipulated the atrocities of warfare. Clearly, many war critics did direct their attentions to the system itself, but too many chose to concentrate their animosities upon the veterans rather than the architects of such villainy.

One sees this same moral cowardice in those Republican politicians who are calling for the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld over his flippant remarks to a soldier in Iraq, who complained about a lack of adequate equipment for their protection. In the face of increasing hostility to the war from both American civilians and soldiers, three Republicans – Trent Lott, Susan Collins, and Chuck Hagel – decided it was time to offer up Rumsfeld as a token sacrifice, rather than proposing the impeachment of President Bush for his pattern of lies, forgeries, and other deceptions that fomented the war. That Lott and Hagel – who voted "guilty" in Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial for lying about his relations with Monica Lewinsky – could don moral blinders for the more sinister lies of George Bush, reflects the cravenness of people who take a stand on "principle" only when it is safe to do so. Such people are akin to the "animal rights" advocates who berate Beverly Hills matrons for wearing fur coats, instead of confronting "Hells Angels" motorcyclists for wearing leather jackets.

The "pecking order" of an institution works in both an "up" and "down" direction. A sergeant will be sacrificed for the good of a general, a general for the benefit of a secretary of defense, and the latter for the sake of a president. If the initial level of scapegoating is not sufficient to end the criticism, one proceeds upward to successive levels in the hierarchy until it is perceived that the wrong has been rectified.