I don’t “support the troops.”
But of course it’s not really the troops we’re constantly pressured to express unconditional, unquestioning – even fawning – support for at nearly every turn.
“The troops” really means, America’s wars; the “defense” establishment and all that profits from it – a conceptual bait and switch worthy of Dr. Goebbels himself. The phrase somehow transforms understandable concern over the fate of some poor kid with a 12th grade education from a trailer park in Coaltown West Virginia – who faced the choice of soldiery or a career at Wal-Mart – into supporting America’s endless bullying of the world.
And of course, the “interests” (read: profits) of its corporate controllers.
The propagandists have thus made it all but impossible to question America’s endless jackbooted stomping of the planet merely by mouthing the magic phrase: Don’t you support the troops?
Might as well tell ’em you’re into having sex with donkeys while dressed as a clown.
Think the Iraq war was a bad idea? Think we have no business in Afghanistan? That we’re stacking up corpses on both sides (mostly theirs) for no morally justifiable reason? Seize him!
He doesn’t support the troops!
Ok,maybe they don’t actually seize you…. yet. But how long will that last? To voice even the mildest criticism of any use of American military power, any thrust into the affairs of other countries and other peoples, is already viewed in many quarters as the moral equivalent of treason. To do so subjects the speaker to vitriolic abuse and near-universal condemnation. Do you suppose the government that already tortures people as official policy, which asserts its right to extrajudicial murder, will brook such “treason” for long?
If you do, I recommend reading (or re-reading) “The Gulag Archipelago” and also “Thirty Days to Power.”
And by the way: When did “troops” come into common currency, replacing “soldiers”?
I noticed it happened right about the time they – that is, our corporate masters – began having their puppets in DC and on TV talk incessantly about the “homeland.”
This is an interesting juxtaposition.
I read a great deal about history, especially about World War II and Nazi Germany.
The Nazis talked a lot about the “troops,” too – and of course, they had the “homeland.”
Americans never used to use those terms. Not until quite recently.
We talked about soldiers and the army; America was our country – not the “homeland.”
Is it not a curious coincidence that as America metastasizes into something ominous and dark, something that more and more smacks of something very much like Nazi Germany – maybe not the jackboots and operatic speeches, but most certainly in terms of the degradation of the individual, of big business in bed with big government; the evisceration of due process and the rule of law; the public cowed into submission (and roused to hatred, but hatred directed toward some external “other”); the pervasive militarism; the easy violence; the shrill politicians with oversized flag pins on who urge veneration of the state … that it has adopted the precise terms once used by the Nazis themselves?
Just 20 years ago, if a politician or public person had uttered the term “homeland” in a speech, he would have been suspected of having a signed copy of Lincoln Rockwell’s picture on his office wall.
It would have raised eyebrows, at the least.
So also this “support the troops” business.
It’s a brutally effective shout-down, no need to even raise your voice. It is like the way a southern belle can cut your legs off with an absolutely vicious comment – but by adding “bless your heart!” at the end of it, conveying nothing but the very best of intentions.
“Support the troops!”
The repetition of this catchphrase not only enables corporate tools such as George W. Bush and Barack Obama to get us into wars of imperial aggression against countries that have done us no violence – where “the troops” are used as casual cannon fodder – it makes it virtually impossible to get them out of the charnel house. A soldier is an individual human being; it is easy to visualize him – and to feel sympathy for him. “The troops”? An abstraction. Do you know a “troop”? It’s a camouflage blob out there… somewhere.
And let’s be honest: No one really gives a damn – outside of the families whose sons and daughters have become “troops.”
If the general public did give a damn, we’d not still be in Afghanistan, ten years on – the body count steadily ratcheting upward.
Soldiers like Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch? Useful props. The Comrade Ogilvies of our time (http://www.servinghistory.com/topics…de_Ogilvy_1984). Their lives matter only insofar as they create sympathy for “the troops” – and, thereby, support for the wars.
What was it Stalin said? A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.
Precisely.
So, although I do I have a great deal of sympathy for the individual soldier, most of whom find themselves in uniform for decent if misguided reasons, or as a result of brutal economic factors – I don’t support “the troops.” Because I do support the individual soldiers. I have no desire to see them killed or maimed. Or have them kill or maim anyone else, either – unless it is made absolutely necessary and justified by an actual invasion or attack upon America by a foreign power.
Since that hasn’t happened since at least the 1940s (and really not since 1812, the last time a foreign power – Britain – sent its “troops” against us) the only reason to “support the troops” is to support the armaments industry and those who feed off it, such as flag-humping politicians of the neoconservative Republican type in particular.
And there’s no way any decent human being could ever support that – or them.
Do I support the “Troops”? Certainly. I support all fellow (wo)men who are or have served our country as a member of the military. However, it’s because of them, and not in spite therefore, that i DO NOT support the warmongering that’s been going on in various forms since the “Chimp’s” Daddy, the late George Herbert Walker Prescott Bush, deployed 641,000 “Muricans” in that ill-fated venture called “Desert Storm”. Sure, MILITARILY, it was an overwhelming success, about as lopsided a defeat and an curb-stomp “battle” as history has ever seen. But it resulted in our perpetual military involvement in the Middle East, with ten years later the invasion of Iraq itself under “Shrub”, something that even Daddy has the sense to not do, with the resulting long guerrilla war that American could never “win”, as well as what’s gone on in Afghanistan, which even the once-might Soviet Army turned, tail between its legs, and ran for home!
I’d rather see our military actually DEFENDING this country instead of being deployed in over 100 countries ABROAD, furthering other factions and/or nations interests, particularly the criminal state called Israel, and being the “Department of…OFFENSE”. Save for going into their North African ports and settling their hash for molesting American merchantmen, the last “foreign” adventure we had any business engaging in was against the Barbary Pirates in the early 19th century (hence “Shores of Tripoli…”). Else, we’ve spend a CENTURY getting into business that we “Muricans” needn’t have involved ourselves in, and our young folk been left home to work and raise their families HERE instead of dying “over there!”.
Hmmmm…..8 years have elapsed. I think it’s safe to say, Eric, that you scared the bitch off! Job well done!
I know you will cringe when I ask if 9/11 does not fit into your definition of “…an actual invasion or attack upon America…”?
Will that question be answered with the conspiracy THEORY that the Bush regime perpetrated the attack?
What response would have been better, assuming the attacks were indeed perpetrated by the Muslims, Bin-Laden, et al? Go to Afghanistan first? Get Michael Moore and move-on-dot-org to investigate so that we could still be dicking around with questions and possible responses today?
Let’s try to put ourselves back in time to the immediate post 9/11 attitude which pervaded our national mentality at the time as exemplified by a close friend of mine who, at the time, lived on the outskirts of D.C. in Northern Virginia.
A well-versed and knowledgeable man this friend is, and always on top of current events: He expressed to me that he really wanted to “get out of Northern Virgina” because of it’s close proximity to the Capital and his residence being somewhat close to Dulles Airport, a location he envisioned as a potential target of one of, now get this: “Saddam Hussein’s (purported) weapons of “mass destruction”.
I would like to be able to get from here to the premise of your article regarding “support the troops” but time will not allow as I have to go to work, so as to pay my taxes, so as to support the military industrial complex.
Well, let’s see…
Did Iraq attack us on 9/11? Afghanistan? Did it even threaten to do so?
Almost all of the 9/11 hijackers were in fact Saudis. Bin Laden is a Saudi prince. But we did not even send the Saudis an angry note. (In fact, The Chimp graciously put all of Bin Laden’s relatives in the US on a plane – the only plane allowed to fly that day, other than military aircraft – and sent ’em safely back home.)
Meanwhile, we are still in Iraq. And Afghanistan, too. Now we’re in Pakistan. And Africa. Plus Korea, Japan, Okinawa; all over Europe. On the order of 170-plus “bases” all over the world. The US spends more on “defense” than all the countries of Western Europe combined.
Soon – if neo-cons like Lindsey Graham and Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck have their way – we’ll be attacking Iran, a country that hasn’t launched a war against another country in modern history and which is certainly no threat to Americans in America.
The fight fer freedom’ it seems, has no end point. And we’re going bankrupt trying to reach it… .
Meanwhile, our actual freedoms are disappearing right before our very eyes. We can’t board an airplane without being subjected to a degrading strip search/pat down; we have to expect that we can be stopped at any time, for no reason, while driving our cars…. the government has asserted the right to read our correspondence without a warrant; to arrest us without charge and hold us indefinitely, if it deems us “terrorists” (as it defines the term). It has even asserted the right to murder us, if we are “terrorists” – again, however the government defines that.
Yes, I know. It’s just the ragheads who need worry. The government would never, ever use the same mechanisms to go after its critics. It would never abuse its power. It is the American government – and so arbitrary police state powers in its hands won’t be abused, because Americans are exceptional and America is immune from the consequences of human nature. …