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Armistice Day
It’s Armistice Day. Click here for a Wilfred Owen retrospective. More here.
James Fallows has some observances on the day here.
Originally this was a moment for looking backwards, to honor those who had served in the Great War and mourn those who had died. Its retrospective purpose remains. But for Americans right now it should also be a moment to honor the men and women who continue to serve and sacrifice and be injured and die — and to reflect on the fact that, for the first time in our modern history, they do so with absolutely no shared sacrifice or service from the public at large. Everyone knows this and avoids thinking much about it. Today it’s worth at least remembering.
It’s also worth thinking about how warfare itself has changed. In 1918, several warring nations agreed that the war would stop on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. But it’s unlikely our current military actions will end with an armistice. Wars will just go on, and on, until changing circumstances cause people to lose interest.
For that reason, war can no longer be thought of as an extraordinary event of limited duration that will end on some day future generations will have to memorize for history tests. From now on, we must understand that when we choose to engage in a large military action there may not be an end to it for many years. Certainly, there can be exceptions to this. If a war has a narrow and sharply defined mission — running Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, for example — then a war might still be of limited duration. When the mission is more grandiose and less specific — ending evil, spreading democracy, making the world safe from terrorism — then don’t expect to live long enough to see the end of it. Unless, of course, we just stop fighting it.
And for that reason, “we’re at war” can no longer be an excuse for playing fast and loose with the Constitution. It was controversial enough when Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt assumed extraordinary “war powers” that would be relinquished when the wars ended. When President Bush expands the powers of the presidency, he is in effect changing the way powers are balanced and separated from now on. Because our wars will have no armistice, no formal conclusion dignified with treaties and ceremonies, war powers will not be relinquished unless some future President chooses to do so. Or, unless Congress and the Courts force the President to relinquish them.
On the other hand, without shared sacrifice on the part of civilians, war and the sacrifice of soldiers can too easily be put out of mind. For those not directly involved, perpetual war could become just another part of the constant drone of issues emanating from mass media. And that makes it too easy.
From an editorial in the Lufkin Daily News:
One in four of our nation’s homeless people is a veteran, according to a study released this past week, and soldiers returning from the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are becoming destitute more often and more quickly than veterans of past wars. …
… Part of the problem, a big part, is that war has become so commonplace for our country. The wars we are fighting now have no end in sight, and the daily news has hardly changed since they began: U.S. soldiers are dying at a slow but steady rate. Most the country is against the war, and the absence of a military draft means the people who are serving are doing so by choice. That, unfortunately, makes it easier for us to disregard the sacrifices they are making.
Another issue is that, while local organizations (namely, the Angelina County Veterans Day Committee and local school districts) do a great job of putting together ceremonies to recognize our veterans, it’s like pulling teeth to get members of the public to attend them. Then there are the other 364 days of the year on which we think, and do, very little about veterans’ needs.
Taking care of returning veterans should be a high priority for government, not a job delegated to volunteers or Veterans Day committees. Veterans should not have to ask for charity.
See also Vietnam Memorial Turns 25.
Update: See also John Nichols.
Update 2: Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired), quotes Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions:
I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy…all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.
Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.
Commander Huber continues,
I have this little veterans’ memorial along the edge of my yard. It’s where I put in some new plants early in the fall, so they’d be established when winter came and then bloom when spring rolls around. Puttering around the garage while I was in the middle of this yard project, I found a miniature U.S. flag on a small stick, one of those things you see real estate agents plant a million of in everybody’s yard on the Fourth of July. I’d saved this one from the Fourth, for some reason. Anyway, there it was on a shelf in my garage, and I picked it up and took it out where I’d just put all the new plants and stuck it in the ground, where it has stayed 24/7 ever since.
I think of this little plot as my memorial to everyone I personally knew who died in uniform. None of them died in combat. Most of them died in “training accidents,” mainly aviation related, things like disappearing into the side of a mountain or flying to the bottom of the ocean.
I keep thinking someone who thinks he’s really, really patriotic will come along someday when I’m in the yard playing with my dogs or something and tell me how I’m not treating the flag properly, that I should know better than to leave it outside day and night, rain or shine, what with me being a veteran and all.
I can’t wait to see the look on that person’s face when I say what I have to say in reply to that. It should be pretty comical, the look on the face of that person who thinks he’s so all fired patriotic.
That person might look like he just heard the Voice of God.
Evil
At the Guardian web site, Theo Hobson writes,
I’d like to see Halloween develop a more serious aspect, alongside the kids’ stuff. I’d like more grown-up reflection on the question of evil, and on how art and religion seek to confront and banish it. We should also reflect on the serious danger involved in the artistic representation of evil – that we might start celebrating it for its own sake, rather than in the context of its overcoming. So let’s develop a Halloween for grown-ups too.
If we’re going to contemplate the nature of evil, we ought to come to some agreement as to what it is, or even if it is. There’s an urban legend easily found on the Internets that claims a young Albert Einstein told an atheist professor that just as darkness is the absence of light, evil is the absence of God, and therefore evil does not exist. Albert Einstein didn’t say this, but it’s an interesting story anyway. It argues that because darkness is the absence of light, and cold is the absence of heat, that darkness and cold light and heat do not exist. But I believe — I could be mistaken — that physicists consider darkness and cold to be phenomena, or observable features of matter and energy. Philosophers, it says here, consider phenomena to be anything that can be perceived, and this includes perceptions of the mind. Evil may not have observable matter and energy, but it can be perceived. Therefore, philosophically speaking, it is.
It’s common to objectify evil and think of it as if it had weight, substance and even fixed positions. Evil lurks. It dwells. The ever exasperating David Brooks once said (pretending to be President Bush), “Some liberals have trouble grasping evil, and always think that if we could take care of the handguns or the cruise missiles or the W.M.D., our problems would be ameliorated. But I know the problem lies in the souls of our enemies.” Some people are just bad, so it’s OK to shoot ’em.
Once you start thinking of evil as a substance or quality or attribute that some people have and others don’t, you’ve just given yourself permission to do terrible things to eliminate the evil ones. As Glenn Greenwald says,
Those who have become convinced that they are waging an epic and all-consuming existential war against Evil cannot, by the very premises of their belief system, accept any limitations — moral, pragmatic, or otherwise — on the methods adopted to triumph in this battle.
Efforts to impose limits on waging war against Evil will themselves be seen as impediments to Good, if not as an attempt to aid and abet Evil. In a Manichean worldview, there is no imperative that can compete with the mission of defeating Evil. The primacy of that mandate is unchallengeable. Hence, there are no valid reasons for declaring off-limits any weapons that can be deployed in service of the war against Evil.
Thus, evil wins again.
I argue that evil is a volitional act with harmful consequences. Evil is as evil does. I argue further that the volitional act is not necessarily a consciously malicious one. In fact, it’s very common for people to persuade themselves that the harm they do is somehow in the service of a greater good.
Los Angeles County officials announced today that the recent California fires were started by a boy playing with matches. The child may not have intended to burn 38,000 acres and destroy 21 homes, but carelessly playing with fire is a volitional act, and it sure as shootin’ had harmful consequences, so the act fits my definition of “evil.” However, I am less interested in casting blame or handing out punishment than in impressing upon people to take care. Not taking care is a volitional act.
I argue that volition is what sets evil apart from other kinds of misfortune and makes it human responsibility. A wildfire started by lightning may be horrific but not evil. On the other hand, if global climate change did play a role in the fire, then willful neglect of the planet by a great many people — arguably, all of us — was responsible.
Theo Hobson mentions artistic representation of evil and worries that we might celebrate evil for its own sake. Artists know — even if David Brooks doesn’t — that evil is seductive. It promises some kind of gratification. In novels and films, “bad” characters often are beautiful, fun, wealthy, glamorous, and powerful. Plots turn on a main character slowly discovering that the seductive Other is evil. At the climax of many a horror movie the attractive villain is unmasked and revealed to be ugly.
We want “good” things to be fresh, sweet, and lovely. We want “bad” things to be decayed, repulsive, and ugly. When Hannah Arendt saw Adolf Eichmann at trial, she observed he was not an utterly loathsome beast but an ordinary man. By describing him as he was Arendt offended readers and even lost friends. But evil has no form, sound, smell, taste, or tactile qualities. It doesn’t “dwell” anywhere, nor is it a a quality anyone possesses. When we objectify evil and identity it as someone that exists in others, we absolve ourselves of evil. And that’s a foolish thing to do, because all of us do or say things that cause harm, even if unintentionally. Yes, there are people who choose to do harmful things, which is why there is a legal system. What someone else does doesn’t relieve us of responsibility for what we do.
I’m not saying we should all go about feeling guilty. The concept of sin comes into play here and complicates matters. Our culture encourages us to think that people who go about doing evil are sinners, and sinners are bad. We speak of people as sinful, as if transgressions exist as matter. And we are supposed to feel guilty about sin. The point is not to feel guilty but to take care, pay attention, and accept responsibility. I don’t like people who talk about other people’s evil but won’t accept responsibility for their own.
WaPo‘s “On Faith” site has some commentaries on Halloween. I like especially the Rev. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite’s post. See also “The Real Meaning of Halloween.”
Labor Day Links
The theme of the past week has been “the road to serfdom.” Most of us would rather not be serfs, I assume, but it seems there are exceptions.
The Associated Press reports today that American workers are the most productive in the world —
American workers stay longer in the office, at the factory or on the farm than their counterparts in Europe and most other rich nations, and they produce more per person over the year.
They also get more done per hour than everyone but the Norwegians, according to a U.N. report released Monday, which said the United States “leads the world in labor productivity.” …
… The U.S. employee put in an average 1,804 hours of work in 2006, the report said. That compared with 1,407.1 hours for the Norwegian worker and 1,564.4 for the French.
Here in America, “a manufacturing employee produced an unprecedented $104,606 of value in 2005,” it says. What the AP doesn’t tell us is since 2005 he was laid off without health care or a pension, his job went overseas, and CEOs grew wealthier.
Even so, you can count on finding a happy rightie blogger: “So, still think everything is gloomy in the US? Really?”
Gary Younge seems a tad gloomy:
There are moments when things really are the way they seem and facts really do speak for themselves. Bad as the facts may appear, attempting to rationalise them only makes matters worse. Trying to convince people otherwise only insults their intelligence.
So it would have seemed last Tuesday when the US census bureau revealed its latest findings on income, poverty and health. The report showed that since George Bush came to power the poverty rate had risen by 9%, the number of people without health insurance had risen by 12%, and real median household income had remained stagnant. On the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina we learned the racial disparity in income and the gap between rich and poor show no sign of abating.
Bush declared himself “pleased” with the results, even if the uninsured presented “a challenge”. He pointed out that over the past year poverty had declined (albeit by a fraction, and from the previous high he had presided over) and median household income had increased (albeit by a fraction and primarily because more people were working longer hours). Maybe he thought Americans would not realise that five years into a “recovery” their wages were stagnant, their homes were being repossessed at a rate not seen since the Depression, and their pension funds were on a roller coaster.
Having beckoned ordinary Americans with the lure of cheap credit and stock market gains, the invisible hand of the market has now grabbed them by the scruff of the neck and is shaking them mercilessly.
Steven Thomma reports for McClatchy Newspapers that Americans generally are a tad gloomy:
A year before they choose a new government for the post-Bush era, Americans are desperate to change the country’s course.
According to opinion polls and interviews with political experts and voters, the U.S. population is more liberal than at any time in a generation, hungering to end the Iraq war, turn inward and use the federal government to solve problems at home. …
… The surveys point to one thing almost all Americans tend to agree on: They’re deeply unhappy with the way things are going in the United States and eager to move on. There’s virtually no appetite to extend the Bush era, as there was at the end of Ronald Reagan’s presidency in 1988 or Bill Clinton’s in 2000.
Just 1 in 5 Americans think the country is going in the right direction, the worst outlook since the Reagan-Bush era ended in 1992. Less than one-third of Americans like the way the current President Bush is handling his job, among the lowest ratings in half a century. The people had similarly dismal opinions just before they ended the Jimmy Carter era in 1980, the Kennedy-Johnson years in 1968 and the Roosevelt-Truman era in 1952. The ranks of people who want the government to help the poor have risen sharply since the early 1990s — dramatically among independents, but even among Republicans.
Daniel Gross writes at Newsweek about how the mortgage bubble burst is dragging the rest of the economy down with it. (BTW, Paul Krugman predicted this more than two years ago.) See also Hale Stewart, who thinks the next few months will be very dicey for the markets.
Let’s go back to Gary Younge:
In 1991 Clinton’s chief strategist pinned a note on the wall of his campaign headquarters to remind the team of its core message: “the economy, stupid”.
A similar focus may once again be necessary, although translating that maxim into votes is not straightforward. Paradoxically, the states with the highest levels of poverty and lowest incomes are staunchly Republican. Poor people tend not to vote, and candidates tend neither to appeal nor refer to them. However, economically they are a glaring and shameful fact of American life; socially and culturally they dominate the centre of almost every moral panic – but politically they do not exist.
The poor aren’t the only invisible Americans:
Most Americans identify themselves as “middle class” – but in the middle of what is not clear. Anything that would identify working people as a group with a collective set of interests that are different from and at times antagonistic to the interests of corporations has pretty much been erased from public discourse. People will refer to “blue collar workers”, “working families”, “the poor”, the “working poor”. But the working class simply does not exist.
Anything that would identify working people as a group with a collective set of interests that are different from and at times antagonistic to the interests of corporations has pretty much been erased from public discourse. And we know who controls public discourse.
None the less, class does play a role. It is most often used by the right to cast liberals as cultural “elites”. The price of Edwards’s haircut, John Kerry’s windsurfing, Al Gore’s earth tones – all are exploited as illustrations of the effete mannerisms of those who claim to speak for the common man and woman. Class is not elevated to politics but reduced to performance: that is how the fact that Bush has made so little of his elite upbringing has become an asset.
The conservative columnist Cal Thomas said of Edwards: “His populist jargon is nothing but class warfare.” If only. Long ago the wealthy declared war on the poor in this country. The poor have yet to fight back.
Yet there is a ray of hope.
None the less, in recent years the conditions associated with poverty have spread far beyond the poor. Almost two-thirds of those who lost their health insurance last year earn $75,000 or more. Homeowners are also not so easy to write off, not least because those hardest hit happen to be in politically sensitive areas. Of the 10 states that have suffered the most from foreclosures, six – Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, Florida, Ohio and Michigan – are swing states.
Will the middle class surrender to serfdom, or will it fight back? The 2008 elections may provide a clue.
Elsewhere — For some interesting historical perspective on Labor Day, see “The labor day that wasn’t” in the Boston Globe and a retrospective at the Los Angeles Times.
And let us not forget what Theodore Roosevelt said in 1910:
We cannot afford weakly to blind ourselves to the actual conflict which faces us to-day. The issue is joined, and we must fight or fail.
In every wise struggle for human betterment one of the main objects, and often the only object, has been to achieve in large measure equality of opportunity. In the struggle for this great end, nations rise from barbarism to civilization, and through it people press forward from one stage of enlightenment to the next. One of the chief factors in progress is the destruction of special privilege. The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been, and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows. …
… At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will. At every stage, and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth.
Of course, if some Democrat were to say the same thing today, every rightie pundit and blogger in the Hemisphere would scream about class warfare.
Independence Day Spectacular
Merry Christmas
I’m guest posting at Crooks and Liars today, so go there for the annual Christmas sermonette.
The Warm Fuzzy Post
Happy Thanksgiving
They’re bigger turkeys now than they were last Thanksgiving.
Enjoy your day!
Update: For your reading enjoyment:
Molly Ivins: Thanks—No, Seriously (and don’t miss the cartoon)
John Nichols: “Freedom, Brotherhood, and Justice…â€
Update update: I notice Pajamas Media is linking to Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” speech, delivered on January 6, 1941. PJM of Seattle excerpted the parts about God and national defense. Here’s another part that I have quoted in the past:
For there is nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy. The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are simple. They are:
Equality of opportunity for youth and for others.
Jobs for those who can work.
Security for those who need it.
The ending of special privilege for the few.
The preservation of civil liberties for all.The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.
These are the simple, basic things that must never be lost sight of in the turmoil and unbelievable complexity of our modern world. The inner and abiding strength of our economic and political systems is dependent upon the degree to which they fulfill these expectations.
And these are, without exception, things at which the Bush Administration has failed, utterly. In some cases the White House has not just failed, but acted aggressively to set us all back.
FDR continued,
Many subjects connected with our social economy call for immediate improvement.
As examples:We should bring more citizens under the coverage of old-age pensions and unemployment insurance.
We should widen the opportunities for adequate medical care.
We should plan a better system by which persons deserving or needing gainful employment may obtain it.
I have called for personal sacrifice. I am assured of the willingness of almost all Americans to respond to that call.
A part of the sacrifice means the payment of more money in taxes. In my Budget Message I shall recommend that a greater portion of this great defense program be paid for from taxation than we are paying today. No person should try, or be allowed, to get rich out of this program; and the principle of tax payments in accordance with ability to pay should be constantly before our eyes to guide our legislation.
If the Congress maintains these principles, the voters, putting patriotism ahead of pocketbooks, will give you their applause.
In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression–everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way–everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want–which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants-everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear–which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor–anywhere in the world.
That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.
To that new order we oppose the greater conception–the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear.
Again, consider how much of what FDR hoped for, and accomplished, has been lost by right-wing extremism. FDR’s corpse would do a better job running the government than the creature in the Oval Office now.
Sorry, I wasn’t going to rant today. It’s just that there’s something obscene about using the “Four Freedoms” speech to prop up imperialism, which seems to me is what PJM is trying to do.
Armistice Day
Dan Froomkin’s Friday column is mostly an excerpt from the book Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families. May they all come home safely, and soon.
This bit is by Sgt. Sharon D. Allen:
The camp is under red-lens light discipline, which means we can’t use an unfiltered flashlight. It severely lessens our evening entertainment options. So, soon after we arrived, we began our strange nightly gatherings. You won’t find it on any schedule, but you can set your watch by it. As the sun nudges the horizon and the gravel cools, some of us give up our battle with the ambient light and surrender our reading until the morning. Others collect up their poker winnings or grumble about their losses. And we all drag our chairs and cigarettes and joylessly warm water out to the gravel and talk. We call it “the circle.” In the Army there is an incredibly varied cross section of society, and we are a diverse group. We have a couple kids straight out of high school, who’d either joined to get a little excitement out of life or to get a leg up on it so that they could go to college. We have older guys, who’ve already put in their time. They tend to be either jaded or genial, both in reaction to the accumulated bullshit slung at most soldiers who’ve been in the service for years. We have everyone from idealists to realists to fatalists, more than a few who began at one end of the spectrum and eventually meandered their way to the other.
I always find it amusing when people talk about “the military” vote, perspective, or whatever. My company has 170-some soldiers, and 170-some opinions. We might have more invested in foreign policy than people back home, but that doesn’t mean we all agree on exactly what those policies should be. Two of the guys, Jeff and Sam, are brothers serving together here but in different platoons. They are both slightly to the left of extremely conservative, yet also very anti-Iraq war. Their father threatened to cut off his own head and send it in to Al-jazeera if his sons aren’t returned home soon.
Be sure to read the whole excerpt. The soldiers are asking the same questions about the war that we are (or should be).
There are some on both the Left and the Right — I think the Right is worse, actually — who speak of “the troops” as if they were an army of identical clones. For example, last week rightie bloggers declared that the Gannett-owned military Times newspapers don’t speak for “the troops,” as if they and they alone were authorized to declare who speaks for whom in the military. Just after the Tuesday election, I caught a couple of rightie posts (can’t find them now, sorry) declaring that “the troops” in Iraq were upset by the results because they didn’t want to come home before “the job” was done.
What a pile of manure. “The troops” are individuals who come to their own conclusions. Some want to continue military operations in Iraq, and some don’t. Some think the invasion was necessary, and some don’t.
You know I think the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. But speaking of war generally, I say — if you’re going to have a war, have a war. If the situation is so dire that a war must be fought, then the strength and resources of the entire country should be marshaled to fight the war and get the bleeping thing over with as quickly as possible. Every single day, every citizen should be reminded that our soldiers are fighting for us, and should be asked to give something to the effort. If recruitment goals fall short, then crank up the draft. There should be bond drives and oil rationing. There should be cookie baking and sock knitting, and children should donate their lemonade stand money for the troops.
And if the situation isn’t dire enough to go to that amount of trouble, then maybe we shouldn’t be fighting the bleeping war to begin with.
Suggestion: Donate to the USO.
From the archives: Wilfred Owen.
Patriot Blog
Celebrate while still you can.
Reg Henry, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
… as a journalist — likely definition: “A writer who is accused of bias by people who are themselves hopelessly biased” — I feel compelled to say something on behalf of those of us patriotic folks who support the troops but do not support the war in Iraq. As polls suggest, there are many of us now in these disunited United States.
The idea that a patriotic American can simultaneously support the troops and oppose the war drives people on the right nuts. “How does that work?” they ask incredulously.
I will tell them in a minute, but first let me say that the simple pleasure of being irritating is surely reason and incentive enough for waverers on this point to adopt the sane position of pro-troops, anti-war.
There is an important distinction to be observed here, and unfortunately Americans are notoriously hopeless at making distinctions. …
… the troops are good people (I know, I was a soldier once myself) but the war in Iraq is bad. Worse, it is stupid, serving as an incubator of terrorism undertaken in the name of defeating terrorism. …
… Yes, we support the troops — when can their glory fade? — but we also know that someone has blundered, in fact a whole party of someones. Happy Independence Day anyway. Our unburned flags will be flying.
Howard Zinn, Alternet, “Patriotism and the 4th of July”
In celebration of the Fourth of July there will be many speeches about the young people who “died for their country.” But those who gave their lives did not, as they were led to believe, die for their country; they died for their government. The distinction between country and government is at the heart of the Declaration of Independence, which will be referred to again and again on July 4, but without attention to its meaning.
The Declaration of Independence is the fundamental document of democracy. It says governments are artificial creations, established by the people, “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” and charged by the people to ensure the equal right of all to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Furthermore, as the Declaration says, “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.” It is the country that is primary–the people, the ideals of the sanctity of human life and the promotion of liberty.
When a government recklessly expends the lives of its young for crass motives of profit and power, while claiming that its motives are pure and moral, (“Operation Just Cause” was the invasion of Panama and “Operation Iraqi Freedom” in the present instance), it is violating its promise to the country. War is almost always a breaking of that promise. It does not enable the pursuit of happiness but brings despair and grief.
Mark Twain, having been called a “traitor” for criticizing the U.S. invasion of the Philippines, derided what he called “monarchical patriotism.” He said: “The gospel of the monarchical patriotism is: ‘The King can do no wrong.’ We have adopted it with all its servility, with an unimportant change in the wording: ‘Our country, right or wrong!’ We have thrown away the most valuable asset we had — the individual’s right to oppose both flag and country when he believed them to be in the wrong. We have thrown it away; and with it, all that was really respectable about that grotesque and laughable word, Patriotism.”
See also:
George Lakoff, Boston Globe, “Understanding the Meaning of Freedom”
E.J. Dionne, Washington Post, “A Dissident’s Holiday”
Susan Madrak, Huffington Post, “Of Thee I Sing”
Brent Budowsky, “A July Fourth call to arms”