Posted by caraher on July 18, 2008, at 23:03:12
In reply to Re: News from the Armed Forces.. » Sigismund, posted by fayeroe on July 18, 2008, at 8:59:46
Once upon a time Americans pretended that we valued the individual. We had "citizen soldiers" who were less efficient because we respected their right to hang on to their humanity even as they were asked to do inhumane things in the name of necessity.
Now "they volunteered" and "we" (no longer "we the people" but the imperial president and his men) now have the right to destroy their minds and turn them into single-purpose machines, then leave them to fend for themselves when we've wrung everything from their minds and bodies. "Supporting" them means slapping a cheap magnet on your car and playing songs about sticking a boot in someone's *ss, and dismissing concerns about the care of returning veterans as political posturing.
If in the 1950s someone had written a description of the contemporary American military, their methods and the ways young men and women are used, expunging the national identity, surely an American reader of that day would consider it a vignette of how the "bad guys" act in a science-fiction dystopia.
poster:caraher
thread:840283
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/poli/20080312/msgs/840644.html