[Peace-discuss] An “Army of One” to Heal and Educate, Build and Fix

[David Green]

This relevant, 12-page collection of responses to Francis Fukuyama in 1999,
in *Foreign Affairs *of all places, begins with one from the estimable
Barbara Ehrenreich, based on her research for the 1997 book *Blood Rites:
Origins and History of the Passions of War.*

http://users.metu.edu.tr/utuba/Ehrenreich%20etal.pdf

On Fri, Apr 17, 2020 at 7:34 AM Robert Naiman via Peace-discuss <
peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:

>
> https://www.facebook.com/robert.naiman/posts/10159407472617656
>
> An “Army of One” to Heal and Educate, Build and Fix
>
> Reflecting again on how Harold Diamond “tricked” me into going to graduate
> school by giving me a Special Problem to solve opened up a flood of other
> memories: times in my life when a male teacher or other male authority
> figure - always a man - helped me by giving me a Special Assignment to
> complete. When I look at my younger self now through the eyes of these men,
> I see an angry young man sporting a particular scar that these men
> recognized. “Ah, yes. Yet another angry young man sporting THAT scar. Come
> here now, angry young man. I have a Special Assignment for you to complete.
> This Special Assignment is only for you. When you have completed the
> Special Assignment, come back and receive my praise.” When I think now
> about how these men helped me, the word “grateful” doesn’t begin to cut it.
> I’m 100% sure that I would be dead or in prison if I had never received
> this aid. So to say that I’m grateful for that aid would give new meaning
> to the word “understatement.”
>
> But here’s what makes me angry. I’m quite certain that in every generation
> there are a whole bunch of angry young men in America sporting this
> particular scar. And I’m quite certain that a bunch of these young men are
> actively recruited to join the U.S. military, because they’re looking for a
> do-over, a male authority figure that they can trust, unlike the first one
> they had. It’s the Abuse Victim Draft. I considered joining it myself, many
> times, even though I was against U.S. wars and against U.S. imperialism.
> That’s how desperate I felt to escape from the abusive authority of my
> father. When I see a flag-draped casket at Dover Air Force Base, I think:
> that could easily have been me. Sometimes when the U.S. military wants to
> offload responsibility for PTSD among veterans, it says: some of these
> people had these psychological problems before they joined the U.S.
> military. Good job, Brownie. Like you didn’t know you were actively
> targeting this vulnerable population in your recruitment efforts.
>
> This dynamic wouldn’t bother me at all if it were the job of the U.S.
> military to heal and educate people and build and fix things. If that were
> so, I would think that it was great. Collect all the angry young men of
> America into an Army to heal and educate, build and fix. Fantastic. Sign.
> Me. Up. Draft me and enlist me now for that project. But the job of the
> U.S. military is to kill people and blow things up. Including in wars that
> are not justifiable based on the interests of the American people, still
> less based on the interests of the brown and black people who live in the
> countries where the wars takes place. Some of these young men are killed in
> these wars, some of them are physically maimed, and some of them are
> psychologically maimed. And I’m quite certain that some of the
> psychologically maiming happens when some of these young men realize in
> horror how they’ve been abused a second time in the place where they sought
> refuge from the first abuse.
>
> When I think about how the U.S. military is taking advantage of these
> vulnerable young men — all of my brothers — “an army of one,” “the toughest
> job you’ll ever love” — with the enabling of the democratically elected
> United States Congress, the universe can’t hold my howl. I waited my whole
> life to feel strong enough to sit fully with this howl.
>
> When John Lennon wrote “Imagine,” he sang about the “brotherhood of man.”
> When Lee Hays of the Weavers wrote “If I Had a Hammer,” he pledged he would
> hammer out love between all of his brothers, if only he had the hammer to
> do so. We don’t talk like this now because this language is not considered
> politically correct, because it doesn’t explicitly include women. But
> canceling the phrase “brotherhood of man” cancels a key idea. Our sisters
> didn’t start the war. Our brothers started the war. Our brothers can stop
> the war. If rape is a men’s problem, then war is a men’s problem. We need
> to hammer out love between all of our brothers so our brothers will stop
> the war.
>
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