“Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”
~ Major General Smedley Butler, USMC (1933)
For those of us unfortunate enough to have been exposed to the modern phenomenon of the 24-hour instantaneous news feeding tube, it is impossible to watch or listen for more than a few moments without being bombarded with the admonition that no matter what your stand on the war in Iraq, we need to support the troops who are bravely defending our freedom all over the globe. While the issue of silencing dissent upon the commencement of combat has been ably dealt with elsewhere, it’s worthwhile to ask, are our armed services – despite the good intentions of the individual servicemembers – truly defending liberty at home? Have they been doing this at all for the last hundred years?
If we strip away all the yellow ribbons and stars and stripes, and look honestly at our military activity since the turn of the 20th century, it’s next to impossible to find any time when our homeland was truly in danger of being overrun, or our freedoms trampled by a foreign tyrant. Why then are most Americans, even many of our comrades on the left, of the opinion that our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines have been giving their lives for our freedom? In a real stretch, you might be able to say that they’ve died for others’ freedom or liberation, but that is entirely different.
Much of this disconnect is due to a split between people’s ideals and the dirty, sweaty, ugly-cousin reality of every-day true existence. Just as Rousseau championed the freedom and dignity and love for all mankind, but put every one of the children he fathered in orphanages, we Americans especially love to talk about the noble conquests of our brave protectors in uniform, while turning an unquestioning eye away from the truth that is as ugly as a Pontiac Aztek: The individual servicemembers’ good intentions and personal heroism has more often than not been at the service of an interventionist agenda dressed as defense.
It’s also understandable how this has become so prevalent. The ironic, but almost inevitable by-product of a broadening divide between civilian and military culture (excellently chronicled in Thomas Ricks’ Making the Corps) is the worship of the warrior ideal. The less common it is for civilians to have served in the military, the more unfamiliar we become with the unpleasant realities of war and combat, the easier it is to idolize those “warrior rulers” who stand watch over us. Samuel warned the Israelites of their idolatry in desiring a king to rule over them when they were dissatisfied with the true King:
This will be the behavior of the king who will reign over you: He will take your sons and appoint them for his own chariots and to be his horsemen, and some will run before his chariots . . . . He will take a tenth of your grain and your vintage, and give it to his officers and servants . . . . And you will be his servants. (I Samuel 8:11-17)
And what was the Israelites’ response? “No, but we will have a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles.” (I Samuel 8:19b-20) Give us that “Right Man”!
We have become such good gnostics in America that we make every soldier an Achilles, and every Marine a Sergeant Slaughter (now I’ve dated myself). Those who have gone through “the training” are now looked on as super-citizens, on a higher plane than ordinary civilians, who of course owe their very lives to the stoic, implacable Defender Of The Nation.
How different than the attitude of our founders, who saw large standing armies as a danger to free society. The well-armed individual, taking all possible responsibility for his and his own family’s safety, was seen as the backbone of liberty. While rebuilding the wall around Jerusalem, Nehemiah admonished the workers to defend their city: “Therefore I positioned men behind the lower parts of the wall, at the openings; and I set the people according to their families, with their swords, their spears, and their bows. And I looked, and arose and said to the nobles, to the leaders, and to the rest of the people, ‘Do not be afraid of them. Remember the Lord, great and awesome, and fight for your brethren, your sons, your daughters, your wives, and your houses.” (Nehemiah 4:13-14).
Most of the young people in our armed forces believe they’re doing the right thing, and protecting us here at home. Most of them act heroically and nobly in combat, as we’ve seen in some instances in Iraq; what they and the majority of Americans don’t realize is that they’ve been snookered. Just like gargantuan social engineering programs and federal bureaucracies that were opposed at their founding but now are unquestioned and immovable, the huge, permanent expeditionary military we have today is in no way a tool of defense – just an especially dangerous means of being a worldwide busybody. You can only dress that up with red, white and blue bumper stickers and empty words like “freedom” and “liberty” for so long. The problem is, as human beings, we like to have our ears tickled; it’s just too much to have our American glory robbed of us by history.
May 10, 2003
