What I’m Reading, February 16, 2015

Posted on February 16, 2015 by wellsdc

The Tragedy of the American Military, James Fallows, The Atlantic, January/February 2015

This has become the way we assume the American military will be discussed by politicians and in the press: Overblown, limitless praise, absent the caveats or public skepticism we would apply to other American institutions, especially ones that run on taxpayer money. A somber moment to reflect on sacrifice. Then everyone except the few people in uniform getting on with their workaday concerns.

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This reverent but disengaged attitude toward the military—we love the troops, but we’d rather not think about them—has become so familiar that we assume it is the American norm. But it is not. When Dwight D. Eisenhower, as a five-star general and the supreme commander, led what may have in fact been the finest fighting force in the history of the world, he did not describe it in that puffed-up way. On the eve of the D-Day invasion, he warned his troops, “Your task will not be an easy one,” because “your enemy is well-trained, well-equipped, and battle-hardened.” As president, Eisenhower’s most famous statement about the military was his warning in his farewell address of what could happen if its political influence grew unchecked.

At the end of World War II, nearly 10 percent of the entire U.S. population was on active military duty—which meant most able-bodied men of a certain age (plus the small number of women allowed to serve). Through the decade after World War II, when so many American families had at least one member in uniform, political and journalistic references were admiring but not awestruck. Most Americans were familiar enough with the military to respect it while being sharply aware of its shortcomings, as they were with the school system, their religion, and other important and fallible institutions.

Now the American military is exotic territory to most of the American public. As a comparison: A handful of Americans live on farms, but there are many more of them than serve in all branches of the military. (Well over 4 million people live on the country’s 2.1 million farms. The U.S. military has about 1.4 million people on active duty and another 850,000 in the reserves.) The other 310 million–plus Americans “honor” their stalwart farmers, but generally don’t know them. So too with the military. Many more young Americans will study abroad this year than will enlist in the military—nearly 300,000 students overseas, versus well under 200,000 new recruits. As a country, America has been at war nonstop for the past 13 years. As a public, it has not. A total of about 2.5 million Americans, roughly three-quarters of 1 percent, served in Iraq or Afghanistan at any point in the post-9/11 years, many of them more than once.

The Surprising Thing People Who Resist Authority Have in Common, Krystnell Storr, Science.Mic, January 14, 2015 Continue reading →

Heroes

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Posted on January 26, 2015 by wellsdc

We are not Spartans.

We are not Romans.

We are not Nazis.

We are not some military society who worships war and glorifies battle as some great heroic ideal and spawns generations of warriors. In America, mothers don’t tell their sons and husbands to come home with their shields or carried upon them. Or a least they damned well shouldn’t.

We are a free people, we are Americans. For us there should be nothing glorious about war.

We should honor the soldier, certainly, but we should honor the peacemakers to a far greater degree.

As I’ve said here and elsewhere more times than I can count: war is a dirty horrible business and make no mistake about it. War should be the last resort, when all else has failed and the very safety of liberty is endangered.

War is hell. War is violent and terrible and immoral. Certainly there may be acts of heroism and valor in war, but there are also endless acts of craven cowardice and ignorant stupidity and wanton violence and vicious cruelty – just as in any other human endeavor. War should always be a last resort, embarked upon only under the most dire of necessity and not some goddamned glorious spectacle.

We go to war because we have to, and for no other reason.

While it’s certainly true that, as Orwell and Churchill both said, the nation sleeps snug in its bed only because rough men stand ready to do violence on its behalf, to paint us all as generic “heroes” leaches the word of meaning and power and diminishes those acts that truly are heroic and worthy of great respect.

But it’s much, much worse than that.

To paint all veterans as heroes, superior above other citizens, worthy of worship and compulsory respect, gives lie to the equality of democracy and makes such status enviable.

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[T]his national hero worship compels the dull-witted and the small and mean to join up for all the wrong reasons.

There is little worse in the ranks, and nothing worse – absolutely nothing – in the officer corps, than those who want to be heroes.

We’ve all encountered them, those of us who served. The commanders and the lieutenants and the majors who practice their Medal of Honor acceptance speech in front of the shaving mirror each morning, the one that begins, “Thank you Mr. President, I’m sorry all my men were killed, but I’m grateful to accept this award on their behalf…” We’ve all served under the senior NCO who dreamed of a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart and the tales of glory he would tell to the doe-eyed girls back home who would then coo over his manly scars and jump ready and eager into bed with a hero.

Those are the kind of people who get other soldiers killed.

They’re not there to defend the country, the oath means nothing to them, they crave only glory and the admiration of a grateful nation.

Worst of all, writ large, this idea makes war itself desirable, for only in such a crucible can heroism be forged.

And then war becomes the norm instead of the exception.

– Jim Wright, “How The Heroes Die”

What I’m Reading, September 11, 2014

Posted on September 11, 2014 by wellsdc

Satire and fake news stories, Mano Singham, Freethought Blogs, September 2, 2014

I enjoy satirical websites like the The Onion that take current political events and trends and then twist them around and manufacture a ‘story’ to illustrate some point about it or to highlight some absurdity. It is not uncommon for people who are not aware that these are satirical sites to take them at face value, even though it should be fairly clear that they are meant as humor.

But there has emerged a new kind of website whose purpose seems to be to write stories that are not clever satire but are written as straightforward supposedly news items, just with fake ‘facts’. The point of these sites seems to be to dupe readers and even news organizations into reporting on them as if they are true stories.

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Admittedly, drawing a clear line between ‘real’ satire and ‘fake’ satire is not easy because it can come down to intent. The idea of the The Onion seems to be to make people laugh while that of sites like National Report seems to be to fool them into thinking it is real. Some of the latter’s stories are so extreme that it is hard to imagine anyone taking them seriously but clearly some people do.

Islamic State is a threat, so let the neighbors deal with it, kos, Daily Kos, August 27, 2014 Continue reading →

The Drones of West Africa

Posted on September 9, 2014 by wellsdc

Atrios asks a question about the U.S. military’s planned expansion of drone use in Niger that is so sensible, it probably hasn’t occurred to most of the warmongers in our government and our pundit class:

There’s this weird country on the other side of the world that flies killing machines over your city on a regular basis. Does no one consider how one might grow up in that environment?

By U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt. Brian FergusonMarsRover at en.wikipedia [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons

When Nigeriens start to hate the United States as much as people in certain other countries, we will not get to act surprised or perplexed.

Photo credit: By U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt. Brian FergusonMarsRover at en.wikipedia [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons.

America at War

Posted on February 24, 2014 by wellsdc

By Lordkinbote at en.wikipedia [Public domain or Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons Wikipedia has a page showing all (or at least many) of America’s military engagements at home and abroad in two timelines, 1770 to 1900 and 1900 to present (h/t Juan Cole).

The first thing you might note is that we have gone to war a lot. Most of the 19th-century campaigns were against this or that Indian nation—manifest destiny stuff, mostly—but there are also lesser-known foreign engagements like the Philippine-American War (1898-1902), which resulted in more than 4,000 American deaths, mostly from disease, and as many as 1.5 million Filipino civilian deaths. We also seemed to like to do some occupying back in the day, including Nicaragua (1912-33), Haiti (1915-34), the Dominican Republic (i.e. the other half of the island with Haiti) (1916-24), and the Dominican Republic again (1965-66).

The timelines color-code each war or conflict to indicate whether the conflict is ongoing or whether the U.S. was the winner, loser, or neither. It identifies seven “ongoing” conflicts: Continue reading →

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