The Great Draft Dodge, James Kitfield, National Journal, December 13, 2014
During the Vietnam War, an average of 950,000 men annually had entered the military through conscription, according to a report by the nonprofit Human Resources Research Organization. The Nixon administration’s decision to turn off that spigot at a moment of defeat and vulnerability for the military was seen by uniformed leaders as a betrayal and as a purely political maneuver, designed to quell antiwar protests that had begun on college campuses with the burning of draft cards, and had spread throughout the country. If that was the plan, it worked: By eliminating the duty to serve, the shift to an all-volunteer force succeeded so spectacularly in pacifying antiwar sentiment that few observers at the time worried at what cost.
Critics of American Sniper Chris Kyle Threatened with Violence and Rape Fantasies, Hrafnkell Haraldsson, PoliticusUSA, January 4th, 2015
A great deal of controversy has arisen as a result of the release of American Sniper, and the behavior of Ex-Navy SEAL and sniper Chris Kyle, whose service in Iraq is portrayed in the film. Here, Clint Eastwood portrays Kyle as a hero in a heroic cause in a film that might come straight out of the Fox News echo chamber.
It is certainly rousing propaganda, putting white and black hats on the adversaries in what was, in truth, a rather murky affair on moral grounds. For Kyle, and thus, for the audience, the Iraqis are bad guys and the Americans are good guys. Kyle doesn’t seem to have thought much beyond this, nor Eastwood. Inexplicably, though Kyle killed, he bragged, some 250 Iraqis, Kyle is the victim.
It seems never to have occurred to Kyle – and probably not to Eastwood – that Kyle was, being the invader who killed indiscriminately, the bad guy in this particular moral tale. It has occurred to others, however, and for conservatives, who as a matter of course seem to embrace that black/white dichotomy, to attack the film is to attack the essence of America itself.
Beyond the foreign policy lies: Our compliant media and the truth about American exceptionalism, Patrick L. Smith, Salon, January 1, 2015
Anyone who thinks of America and its place in the world clearly and honestly understands, with no shred of doubt after the destructive year gone by, that this nation is now well into its late-imperial phase. As history instructs us, two signs of an imperial power’s decline at this point in its story are blindness and deafness: It gives up all capacity to see the world as it is and takes no interest in what those dwelling in it have to say. Clear sight and open ears are unbearable, for both bring news that history’s wheel is turning and an era of primacy is passing into the past.
This is where we are as 2014 ends. It is not, I add instantly, where we have to be, only where we happen to be, where we have been led and find ourselves as we look to the year ahead.
