Dead soldiers and smug, complacent neo-Cons are on my mind. Ever since Memorial Day, I’ve been having the same argument with my husband, a Jean Monet Professor of International Relations: which is preferable? A civilian army like the one Jefferson and Madison asked for in the Second Amendment or a professional military?
Jefferson and Madison pictured a militia-based military, where ordinary people defended their towns and farms, rather than a standing army that could be sent on imperial missions, supporting the economic privilege of special interests.
I grew up in the era of the draft. As a woman, I was never under threat but I watched young men by the hundreds of thousands forced into the military. They were not sent to defend their homes and families against an invader, but to Vietnam to fight a war that none of us understood. Tens of thousands of these young men died over there. Others came back alive, but crippled both physically and emotionally. I was in college during these years and I saw how some young men avoided the draft legally through student deferments or illegally, by going to Canada. Some even went to prison. It was obvious that America’s soldiers were the ones without privilege; blue collar kids, African-American and Latino boys who were not in college.
Maybe a professional military would be more ethical, I wondered. Today, I am certain it is not.
Quoting the thoughts of super smart, Doug Muder, (The Weekly Sift), a professional military creates conditions that hurt America in two different ways.
“On the one hand, we get chicken hawks: neo-conservative intellectuals or tough-talking radio hosts, who know that neither they nor their sons or daughters will ever be called on to back up their geopolitical theories or their jingoistic rhetoric. If anyone ends up getting shot it, it will be the rural kid whose college fund vanished after Dad lost his factory job, or the ghetto kid who sees no other way out than to sign away a few years of his life and take a chance on losing all of it.”
”On the other hand,” – and here is the important part - ”families who maintain a military tradition without financial necessity may come to see themselves not as representatives of America, but as a breed apart from it -- a better, braver breed that has been forced to deal with violent reality in a way that the rest of us avoid, and who therefore deserve to rule. If a fascist takeover ever succeeds in this country, it will be due not just to some Trump-like clown at the top, but also to warriors up and down the line who no longer respect civilian America.” Thank you, Doug.
Comments please.