[Peace-discuss] Spat on?

[Morton K. Brussel]

Pardon my intemperance, but to say that the soldiers are victims  
ignores what they do, and what they have done, not only in Iraq but  
in Afghanistan, and in their bases threatening war wherever the U.S.  
president decides. They are in effect pawns, but willing pawns ab  
initio, of U.S. policy. They are agents of aggression. They have  
defended nothing except their status. Many have been barbaric in  
their actions. Why welcome anyone back who kills and wounds  or who  
has wreaked havoc for no good reason? It is perverse to say that they  
are victims, save if they were forced to so act. They had no rightful  
business there. In effect, whatever these soldiers signed up for,  
many unwittingly no doubt, they are simply put hired killers (of  
course in defense of democracy and our national interests). In  
peacetime, their duty may be relatively benign, but in the wars we  
create, it's another story. It seems to me that there is a lot  
fawning nonsense going around about our noble troops. They are not  
more noble than anyone else, and I see no special reason to cheer  
them as they return, except as a political--tactical-- gesture.  
Ignorance has no nobility. Should the Germans in WWII have cheered  
the SS when they returned from the front, or from Auchwitz? On a  
moral plane it doesn't make sense.

One has to consider these guys case by case, and I do not know  
anything about their cases.

I am definitely opposed to putting the military on a pedestal. That  
is part of the sickness of society. Too many military heroes!

Of course, they are not all the same. There are good eggs and bad  
eggs. There are those that learned something about the horrors of  
war, and those that disregard them or perpetuate them. The latter  
populate much of our Amercan Legions or VFW's. There are no doubt  
some heros, like the guy who stopped some of the massacre at Mai Lai  
in Vietnam. But there are also those that partook in the blood letting.

These guy were volunteers. That they volunteered for quality of life  
or economic reasons is beside the point. If they can now admit that  
what they were doing was wrong, great, we should welcome them in that  
sense to our fold, but we should not welcome them for simply having  
returned home.

If this note is a little bitter, so be it. Our soldiers are no  
different than any other army's soldiers. It's a tragedy to someone  
that that they die or are wounded, and it's a tragedy that their  
participation continues the tragedy.

Our wars since 1945 have not been good ones from a humanitarian point  
of view. Hiroshima, of the good war, still haunts (some of) us.

--mkb


On Apr 13, 2006, at 2:52 PM, Bob Illyes wrote:

> No one spat on me, nor did I say as much. What I did find was an
> enormous hostility to the military and to anyone associated with it.
>
> There is an unfortunate tendency in the peace movement to see the
> soldier as the problem. More often than not, the soldier is the
> victim of the people who promote war as a way of making a profit.
> The returning veterans are often badly damaged psychologically by
> what they've been through. Blaming the victim is a popular pastime
> among bullies, of course.
>
> Bob
>
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