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TreasonousBastard

(43,049 posts)
Tue Nov 12, 2013, 02:20 AM Nov 2013

Veteran's Day is part of the scam...

not just selling stuff, like Christmas, but a more chilling scam.

As much as a pacifist as I may be, I do understand the need for some sort of defense because, well, not everyone is a pacifist. While we don't have much fear of Canadian or Mexican armies walking across an undefended border it would still be foolish to leave ourselves completely defenseless. Many other countries do have real fears of their neighbors invading.

The problem is getting these armies, and keeping them after they've seen war. What teenage kid, with his whole life in front of him, wants to be ripped from his family, his girlfriend, and dreams of the future to go off and live in a barracks, eat lousy food, get paid little, if anything, and face death at the hands of the country next door?

So, there must be incentives. The possibility of looting was one, better pay another rarely used one, and the draft guaranteed a ready supply of new blood, although not what anyone would really call an incentive.

In comes propaganda to the rescue. Patriotism, freedom, and all that good shit appeals to the idealism of the young. Giving pretend honors, with banners and ribbons and medals feeds into that. The Romans knew all about this, and they learned it from the Greeks, who learned it from the Egyptians and Assyrians who learned it from who knows where...

I was drafted, but never went to Viet Nam. For that I am grateful, but I had friends who went there and never came back the same-- if they came back at all. And for that I feel a little guilty. I get this phony thanks, and a whole day dedicated to whatever it was that I did, but there are guys I see at the VA hospital with no feet or metal plates in their skulls. And I got a few medals, too. Never the Combat Infantry Badge with the wreath, or a star of any color, or Purple Heart, so the ones I got were teasers, setting me up for wanting more fruit salad on my uniform. The big on was, of course, the Medal of Honor, but the trick was in the 70's you had to die to get that. But, your mother got a flag and a nice box to put the thing in. Your girlfriend got to see what an Army issue coffin looks like.

At least we have a VA. Most wars you might get a few bucks, but you're on your own. No matter what you've heard about the VA, it's been seriously upgraded and treatment and services might not be the best but they are damn good. There are problems with disability classifications, but I know of no vets not getting needed medical attention. No Bonus Soldiers Marches coming any time soon.

But this day? Really, you can shove it up your ass. They're selling the military like they sold us Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Halloween, too. And Mother's Day. There's a buck to be made and more cannon fodder to feed the death mills.

Did you know it's unspoken policy that we need a war, even a small one, every 10 years or so because we need a cadre that's actually seen a war? Something about blooding the troops and it's a real fear that if we send in raw recruits led by noncoms and officers who have never been under fire and it will be a rout. Like at the Battle of the Bulge.

I think it was the NY Times magazine that did an issue a while ago on WWII vets telling the stories they could never tell their families who hadn't seen action. The guy who made me put it down and wipe a tear told the story about how he was alone on this hill in the Pacific and a Japanese soldier suddenly appeared. The "enemy" put his hand in his jacket and since it looked like he was going for a weapon, our guy shot him dead. He went to see what the "weapon" was and it was a picture of the guy's wife and kids.

So, yeah, take Veterans Day and shove it up your ass. It doesn't come close to what some of us did.

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L0oniX

(31,493 posts)
13. Try my "patriotism is for fools" meme.
Tue Nov 12, 2013, 12:16 PM
Nov 2013

I always thought it was stupid to die for a piece of dirt because you were born on it. Here's my list:

Never was a patriot yet, but was a fool.

– John Dryden

A patriot is a fool in ev’ry age.

– Alexander Pope.

Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

– Samuel Johnson

In Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary, patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer, I beg to submit that it is the first.

– Ambrose Bierce

Patriotism is as fierce as a fever, pitiless as the grave, blind as a stone, and irrational as a headless hen.

– Ambrose Bierce

That pernicious sentiment, “Our country, right or wrong.”

– James Russell Lowell

“My country right or wrong” is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, “My mother drunk or sober.”

– G. K. Chesterton

Patriotism which has the quality of intoxication is a danger not only to its native land but to the world, and “My country never wrong” is an even more dangerous maxim than “My country, right or wrong.”

– Bertrand Russell

Patrioism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.

– George Bernard Shaw

Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.

– George Bernard Shaw

You’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

– George Bernard Shaw

Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.

– George Bernard Shaw

Patriotism is an ephemeral motive that scarcely ever outlasts the particular threat to society that aroused it.

– Denis Diderot

To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.

– George Santayana

The Athenian democracy suffered much from that narrowness of patriotism which is the ruin of all nations.

– H.G. Wells

Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. “Patriotism” is its cult. . . . Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one’s country which is not part of one’s love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.

– Erich Fromm

One of the great attractions of patriotism–it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat, Bully and cheat, what’s more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.

– Aldous Huxley

Many studies have discovered a close link between prejudice and “patriotism” . . . Extreme bigots are almost always super-patriots.

– Gordon Allport

It seems like the less a statesman amounts to, the more he loves the flag.

– Elbert Hubband

Patriotism varies, from a noble devotion to a moral lunacy.

– William Inge

Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts, as a last resource, pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and glad to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.

– Arthur Schopenhauer

Patriotism is the passion of fools and the most foolish of passions.

– Arthur Schopenhauer

Patriotism corrupts history.

– Goethe

Into the cultural and technological system of the modern world, the patriotic spirit fits like dust in the eyes and sand in the bearings. Its net contribution to the outcome is obscuration, distrust, and retardation at every point where it touches the fortunes of modern mankind.

– Thorstein Veblen

The standardization of mass-production carries with it a tendency to standardize a mass-mind, producing a willing conformity, not merely to common ways of living, but to common ways of thinking and common valuations. The worst defect of patriotism is its tendency to foster and impose this common mind, and so to stifle the innumerable germs of liberty.

– J.A. Hobson

2. Patriotism and War:

At the bottom of all patriotism is war: that is why I am no patriot.

– Jules Renard

No other factor in history, not even religion, has produced so many wars as has the clash of national egotisms sanctified by the name of patriotism.

– Preserved Smith

Naturally the common people don’t want war . . . Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders . . . All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism.

– Hermann Goering.

That worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor . . . This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism–how passionately I hate them!

– Albert Einstein

3. Patriotism and Religion:

Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched.

– Guy de Maupassant

God and Country are an unbeatable team; they break all records for oppression and bloodshed.

– Luis Buñuel

To be patriotic, hate all nations but you own; to be religious, all sects but your own; to be moral, all pretenses but your own.

– Lionel Strachey

When a dog barks at the moon, then it is religion; but when he barks at strangers, it is patriotism!

– David Starr Jordan

4. The American Syndrome:

If you have a weak candidate and a weak platform, wrap yourself up in the American flag and talk about the Constitution.

– Matt Quay

How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be “American” before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, & having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries? It is really too easy a disguise for our shortcomings to dress them up as a form of patriotism.

– Edith Wharton

The 100 percent American is 99 percent an idiot.

– George Bernard Shaw

Treason is in the air around us everywhere. It goes by the name of patriotism.

– Thomas Corwin

5. Three relatively positive assessments of patriotism:

A patriot is somebody who protects his country from his government. Or better yet: who has the guts to protect his country from its government.

– Piotyr Dirk

Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.

– George Washington

Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.

– Thomas Jefferson

 

Whisp

(24,096 posts)
2. ...
Tue Nov 12, 2013, 02:48 AM
Nov 2013

yah, hard to accept that these human beings with human lives were mostly just cannon fodder for the rich.

But you can't really say that out loud.

TreasonousBastard

(43,049 posts)
5. And I didn't get to the AP photographers who were killed in Nam...
Tue Nov 12, 2013, 02:59 AM
Nov 2013

or all the relief and aid workers, International Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders...

Do we have a day for the people heading for the Philippines today?

Response to TreasonousBastard (Original post)

TreasonousBastard

(43,049 posts)
7. "Better men than me" because they...
Tue Nov 12, 2013, 11:40 AM
Nov 2013

won a very bad lottery and got levied?

I know I slid through a few years in Germany while others were dying, and said as much. Now you are going to preach to me because you did what you were told and that somehow makes you special?

I never denigrated the individual soldier, just the scam to keep the war machine going.



 

ConcernedCanuk

(13,509 posts)
9. Costa Rica permanently abolished their armed forces in 1949
Tue Nov 12, 2013, 12:04 PM
Nov 2013

.
.
.

No one has attacked them

They have Universal Healthcare, and a longer life expectancy than USAmericans.

Imagine that.



CC

Aristus

(66,096 posts)
10. I'm a veteran of the Gulf War in 1991, and I agree with you TB.
Tue Nov 12, 2013, 12:09 PM
Nov 2013

I see the howls of righteous outrage have begun already.

But I'm not joining in. War is a scam. And I'm getting tired of good decent Americans falling for it.

We're not "protecting our freedoms" anymore. We're shouldering aside countries that don't spend trillions on defense in a rush to grab as many of the profitable resources and commodities that drive the world's economy as we can. And that's it. Iraq was nothing but a grab for oil. How did we turn into the Nazis, anyway?

We keep going into these shitpot little regional conflicts hoping against hope that this time, we'll "win it", although no one ever explains what a win is. And that's because we no longer fight fights that need to be fought. We keep picking on countries that we think won't fight back. And then we get outraged when they do.

Misplaced outrage is one of the things that keeps driving America's militarism at the grass roots. To this day, I hear veterans of Vietnam screeching about Jane Fonda, who admittedly, expressed her opposition to the war in an inappropriate and inflammatory way. But veterans (and even right-wing stay-at-home, armchair warriors) direct their venom toward her, even 40 years later, and never toward the people who sold them a ridiculous war, and sent them over there to fight it.

There are a number of studies out there that postulate that the Internet, and world-wide social networking sites, are bringing us closer together, and reducing the level of violent conflict throughout the world. I hope that is true. I'm happy that there is a day set aside to honor our veterans; but I, for one, will be happy when we stop making more of them...

sibelian

(7,804 posts)
14. How America's "freedom" has ever seriously been threatened is a mystery to me.
Tue Nov 12, 2013, 12:17 PM
Nov 2013

I'm sure there are some who can enlighten me.

Douglas Carpenter

(20,226 posts)
15. well I am Veteran - but arguably - other than World War II and the American Civil War
Tue Nov 12, 2013, 12:21 PM
Nov 2013

I cannot see how the vast majority of our other adventures contributed to the freedom of the American people

Dreamer Tatum

(10,926 posts)
17. Better yet: shove it up YOUR ass.
Tue Nov 12, 2013, 01:22 PM
Nov 2013

You can stay home and brood all you like, but while you're reflecting on this, the worst of all possible worlds for tender souls like yourself, turn on the TV and tip a glance at the stories about veterans who gather to greet each other, catch up, share memories, introduce family, pay respects to fallen friends, and reflect on their service. Consider that it's a day for families to honor the memories of loved ones who died in battle.

If you don't like it, fine. Don't expect the world to wait for your approval to mourn, celebrate, and remember.
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