September 18, 2019 "Information
Clearing House" -Republican Congressman Dan Crenshaw has a popular
post going around on Twitter at the moment
admonishing Senator Bernie Sanders for saying that
the US government should not go to war if it can’t
afford to take care of its veterans.
“Watching Bernie pander to different groups to get
their vote has always disgusted me, but now it’s
personal,” Crenshaw
tweeted. “I didn’t go to war so that you would
take care of me, Bernie. I went because I wanted to
serve and our country needed it.”
This “look at me, I’m a veteran” song and dance is
par for course with Crenshaw, a former Navy SEAL who
lost an eye to an improvised explosive device on his
third deployment in America’s evil and unjustifiable
Afghanistan occupation. When Crenshaw says “I went
because I wanted to serve and our country needed
it,” he is being delusional, and feeding into his
delusion allows him to continue dominating public
discourse with obnoxiously propagandistic takes like
the notion that the US should continue its forever
war without even so much as ensuring that it can
take care of the people whose lives are
chewed up and spat out by the imperial war
machine.
Watching Bernie pander to different groups to get their vote has always disgusted me, but now it’s personal.
I didn’t go to war so that you would take care of me, Bernie. I went because I wanted to serve and our country needed it. https://t.co/ADhxrvtIA9
Dan Crenshaw did not serve his country. Dan Crenshaw
is not a hero. Dan Crenshaw participated in a
military occupation that after 18 years and counting
has claimed tens of thousands of lives for no
benefit to any ordinary American at all. All he
served during his time in that country was the
geostrategic imperialist agendas of unaccountable
government agencies and the profit margins of war
plutocrats, yet upon returning home he’s been able
to convert his stint as a glorified hired thug into
social collateral which got him elected to the US
House of Representatives and secured him a punditry
platform from which he can
spout war propaganda. All because people agree
to play along with the completely nonsensical
narrative that US war veterans are heroes.
You see this time and time again: a completely
fact-free fairy tale about heroism and fighting for
freedom is treated as unquestionable dogma by a
populace who has agreed to treat US war veterans
with reverence and respect, despite the fact that
they chose to pour their time and energy into what
is literally the most unhelpful and destructive
endeavor that you could possibly devote yourself to.
This unquestioning reverence is then consistently
twisted into leverage for war propagandists to use
in glorifying acts of mass military slaughter which
benefitted no one and made the whole world worse.
Are You Tired Of
The Lies And
Non-Stop Propaganda?
The tightly controlled narrative about American
veterans being heroes is always, always,
always used to advance war
propaganda and never to
accomplish anything that is of service to mankind.
It’s an impulse which serves no one but the
powerful. Of course veterans of US wars should be
taken care of, and taken care of far better than
they currently are, but not because they are heroes.
Rather, they should be cared for because they spent
time in a highly traumatic environment which sends
home many highly traumatized people who will need a
lot of help in order to reintegrate into society in
a healthy way. What they went through was a horrible
tragedy that nobody should ever have to go through,
not a glorious thing that more people should aspire
to enlist into.
The US Army Asked Twitter How Service Has Impacted People. The Answers Were Gut-Wrenching.
A collection of many of the responses to @USArmy, partly to spread awareness and partly in case the thread gets deleted in the interests of "national security". https://t.co/JlYn7Gh6hy
It is more cognitively comfortable for veterans and
their families to maintain the fairy tale that those
who helped facilitate US imperialism are heroes who
did something helpful and meaningful, but the fact
that human minds are
preconditioned to select for cognitive ease is a
glitch in our operating systems which causes
unhelpful cognitive biases; it’s a flaw we need to
overcome, not a virtue to be coddled. By continuing
to coddle it you are facilitating war propaganda,
and war propaganda is
the indispensable foundation of war itself. By
facilitating war propaganda you are participating in
the war machine as surely as someone who takes up
arms and fights in it, only less honest because, as
Representative Crenshaw’s face attests, at least
someone who takes up arms is putting some real skin
in that monstrous game.
It’s like veterans are engaged with us in a bizarre
live action role-playing game, where they
pretend to be the heroes and the rest of us pretend
to be the thankful civilians whose freedoms they
fought for. But continuing to LARP with them in this
way creates nonsense like we see in Crenshaw’s
tweet, and in the ridiculous smears against NFL
players choosing to take a knee during the national
anthem, and in the bleating of “Support our troops!”
as a one-line shutdown of anyone who protested the
Iraq invasion.
Don’t participate in that stupid, war-facilitating,
power-serving LARP. Don’t say “Thank you for your
service” to veterans. Don’t pretend to agree with
them when they claim to have fought for your freedom
and democracy. Openly disagree with people who
promulgate this narrative. Treat Veterans Day and
Memorial Day as days of grieving and truth-telling,
not celebration and glorification. The worshipful
propaganda narratives that have been built up around
veterans are an important cog in the war machine’s
consent factory, and they should be attacked as
unapologetically as war propaganda narratives about
what’s going on in Syria or Iran.
My latest op-ed on Syria. @realDonaldTrump is fighting to protect our borders, and deserves great credit for that. But the world is a small place and chaos spreads easily. We go there so that they don’t come here. https://t.co/Ffry88OXQl
“But Caitlin!” you may say. “What about World War
Two veterans?”
Well, fine, but they’re in their nineties now and
you should probably be telling them whatever they
want to hear anyway. And while we’re on the subject,
do you notice how far back you had to reach in US
history to find a war in which veterans arguably
fought for a just cause? The fact that the last
possible example is on the cusp of living memory
tells you all you need to know about your impulse to
argue with me on this one.
I’m not saying to be mean to veterans, and I’m not
saying veterans are bad people, in fact, one of the
most heinous injustices about these corporate wars
is that they turn many of our finest and bravest
young people toward the very most toxic and
pernicious ends possible. Many of them sincerely
enlisted due to an impulse to help make the world a
better place; it’s the same impulse which led Julian
Assange to set up a leaking outlet to help expose
unaccountable power structures, the only difference
is that Assange saw clearly through the fog of
propaganda and they did not. But the reverence and
fairy tales have got to go.
There are no war heroes. There are only war victims.
It’s time to grow up and stop pretending otherwise.
5th April 2010 10:44 EST WikiLeaks has released a
classified US military video depicting the
indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the
Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad -- including two Reuters
news staff.
We ask that you assist us in
dissemination of the article published by
ICH to your social media accounts and post
links to the article from other websites.
Thank you for your support.
Peace and joy
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.
In accordance
with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational
purposes. Information Clearing House has no
affiliation whatsoever with the originator of
this article nor is Information ClearingHouse
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
