Why should people support the military? This is a simple question, but at the same time, its implications are almost blasphemous. No good citizen would ever ask such a question of themself or of another. Society expects that each and every person support the military no matter what. The military exists to protect the people of the state and so, of course, everything it does to fulfill that purpose is justified, and, in turn, it is only right and noble that the people should support the armed soldiers in every way possible.
But this hasn’t always been the case. For instance, when the soldiers came home from Vietnam, they were called “baby killers” and greeted with boos and protests. Nobody wanted the American occupation of Vietnam and nobody was going to support the troops who were over there. Whether or not, they truly were baby killers, there is no doubt that what America did there went too far. Dropping napalm over the jungle and The CIA’s use of torture and horrific interrogation methods on captured soldiers cannot be justified no matter how much how the CIA and the American government and military wish to.
Today, however, while the American soldiers are still engaging in the torture of captured soldiers all over the world, people have stopped their complaints. Complacently, they’ve begun to simply accept that they are to support the military no matter what evils it commits. The OWNI states that over 116,000 innocent civilians have been killed since 2001 in the War on Terror. And more recently, drone warfare has begun. In Vietnam, the military dropped napalm and now they use unmanned aircraft to bomb villages so that maybe one or two terrorists will die. If a hundred or a thousand innocent men, women, and children die along with them, so what? CNN, Fox News, and the others which offer American propaganda 24/7 will just tell the people that that’s the cost of war. They fail to tell the people that that terrorists probably posed no threat to America at all. In fact they’ll exagerate the threat. A suicide bomber in Beirut suddenly becomes America’s worst nightmare. That vest on his chest is now somehow a long range missle aimed for the head of every child in every elementary school from sea to shining sea. And by stopping it from exploding, America is saved from this magical, mystical threat of Islam. The only reason people support the military is because of twisted facts and obvious propaganda. Lie enough and people will believe the lie. And it seems they already do.
But let’s look at this in another way. Al-Quada attacked America on September 11, 2001 and since then we’ve been waging war not against Al-Quada, though Bill O’Riley and his propaganda would say otherwise, but against Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and soon maybe even Iran. We’ve removed governments and replaced them with anarchy that has evolved into new tyrannies worse than the ones we destroyed. We helped dispose of Hosni Mubarak only so that the Muslim Brotherhood could take his place. There’s no spreading of American democracy and freedom, there’s only death, tyranny, and more death at the end of the American soldier’s rifle. And the truth is, America attacked first. We’re chasing terrorists in the desert by bombing nations with our drones and then when those nations want to retaliate, we laugh and call them evil.
Now enough about the present; let’s go back in time for a minute. The invasion of Iraq, even when it was discovered that there were no Al-Quada ties and no weapons of mass destruction, was justified because the American military had displaced the evil and ruthless Saddam Hussein. However, in the 1960’s the CIA supported the Ba’ath party which would later take over Iraq with Saddam Hussein at the front of the coup and then in 1979 when the Shah of Iran was ousted from power, America sold weapons to Saddam Hussein including anthrax and other biological weapons to equip him for the Iraq-Iran War. Worse, the Shah was placed in power in Iran in the 1950’s. And then in the 2000’s, America is justified for disposing of Hussein. So what really happened is that America gave weapons to Saddam Hussein in order to fight against Iran when the Shah America placed in power there was disposed and then in the 2000’s, America began the War on Terror which led to Hussein’s downfall. For the American government, this seems to be just a giant game of chess in which the pieces have become the members of the American military.
The military is directed by the United States government which as seen in both Iraq and Iran orchestrates the creation and collapse of governments as well as wars between nations for its own benefit. Never mind the loss of lives or the destabalizing of entire socities, it really doesn’t matter in the eyes of Uncle Sam. Truthfully there is no reason for the citizens to support the American military. The military is not protecting the people; it is waging unjustified wars and directing the powers of the world to rise and fall as far as the Commander in Chief desires purely for purposes of power, greed, and selfishness.
Maybe yelling “baby killer” is too much, but its time stop living in a fairy tale. The American military is not leading these attacked and invaded countries along a path of gold to a mystical land of unicorns and lollipops; it’s simply leading other nations along a path of death and daminantion into the deepest pits of Hell under the guise of lies told daily to the American citizens. The soldiers are not angels for they are not being directed by God; they are demons because they are being directed by Satan. And that is why it is not blasphemous to admit that I do not and will not support the American military and the evils it commits on a daily basis. And hopefully, others can learn to do the same.
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