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Support No Troops

By blueness

"Zarqawi felt my son's breath on his hand as held the knife against his throat. Zarqawi had to look in his eyes when he did it. George Bush sits there glassy-eyed in his office with pieces of paper and condemns people to death."
                                                                                                      --Michael Berg

Those who oppose the War On Terra but who nonetheless feel compelled to express "support" for "our troops" might reflect that, without those troops, there would be no war.

Simply put, if today's troops would behave only as George II did during his own military service--that is, go AWOL--there would be no one available to prosecute his wars.
Press-ganged troops, like any prisoners, deserve support.

But none of these troops have been press-ganged. This is not Vietnam. There is no draft. Anyone now in the American armed forces is there because s/he volunteered.

True, many of these volunteers have been in some way coerced. But, because they are volunteers, they should be afforded the opportunity to at any time volunteer to opt out.

Those volunteers who remain are advancing what the French journal Liberation has correctly identified as George II's "theocracy and pathocracy": "a worldview that is intrinsically paranoid, imbued with visions of the most regressive Crusades, drenched in a frightening symbolism that sees any external opposition as evidence of crime and in which every decision and every action bear the seal of a vengeful divinity."

The metaphysician G. I. Gurdjieff, asked during WWI what soldiers might do if they were to become truly "awake," replied: "They would drop their rifles and go home to their families."

These--those leaving, those refusing to go--are those who truly deserve our "support," who are truly "our troops."

Harsh? Sure.

Harsh is the circle of hell to which you are condemned, once you go.

Leo Tolstoy, artillery officer, Crimean War:

Military service always corrupts a man, placing him in conditions of complete idleness, that is, absence of all intelligent and useful work, and liberating him from the common obligations of humanity, for which it substitutes conventional considerations like the honour of the regiment, the uniform and the flag, and, on the one hand, investing him with unlimited power over other men, and, on the other, demanding slavish subjection to superior officers . . . .

James Jones, grunt, South Pacific, WWII:

Jim's face was set like a slab, his expression murky and aggrieved, as we stood on the marble reading the Gettysburg Address engraved against one lofty wall, slowly scanning those words of supreme magnanimity and conciliation and brotherhood dreamed by the fellow Illinoisian whom Jim had venerated, as almost everyone does, for transcendetal reasons that needed not to be analyzed or explained in such a sacred hall. I suppose I was expecting the conventional response from Jim, the pious hum. But his reaction, soft-spoken, was loaded with savage bitterness, and for an instant it was hard to absorb. "It's just beautiful bullshit," he blurted. "They all died in vain. They all died in vain. And they always will!"

Jack McCloskey, Vietnam medic, relating years-after nightmare:

I'm in combat. I reach in my medic bag to pull out a battle dressing. And as I open the battle dressing, it starts to turn into a body bag.

From my father, from a WWII South Pacific notebook:

Everybody dead on the beach. They say I'm okay.

Right.

Wilfred Owen, British officer, killed one week before the cessation of WWI:

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Kenneth Patchen, human being:

Have you ever looked at a man?
There is something helpless and majestic about a man.
If you believed in anything, you could not kill a man.

A man has two legs. He'll build a house--from cellar to rooftop, with his own hands. He'll put seeds in the ground. He'll watch the sun and the rain at work. He'll take a woman to bed. He'll find enough tenderness and love to get him through the day. You'd think that man deserved a little something. You'd think that man was worthy of a jot or two of sympathy and consideration. You'd think that maybe someone would say, Let's just let him alone for a while, and see what he can do.

This house. Do you see this house?
It is a house where human beings live.
They deserve more than bloody kicks in the ass.
There is a strange dignity about them.
They are looking at you as I talk.
I want you to leave them alone.

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on October 07, 2008 (boomark / email).