The week before Christmas south of the border has been
designated “Thank a Soldier Week.” It may be dubbed as accurately “Thank a
Trained Killer Week.” Retired Lt. Col. David Grossman
indicates that no
institution in America pays more attention to brutalization and
desensitization
of its recruits than the modern US military. “This brutalization is
designed to
break down your existing mores and norms an to accept a new set of
values that
embrace destruction, violence, and death as a way of life. In the end,
you are
desensitized to violence and accept it as a normal and essential
survival skill
in your brutal new world.” In other words, American soldiers are not
“evil.” All kinds of social, economic, and political pressures, not
least ethically dubious recruitment methods, propel thousands to sign
up. They become killers not because they started that way, but because
they are so shaped by the military.
Townhall.com is promoting the national recognition of
soldiers. Majority world opinion believes that American soldiers are killing
for Empire, which, like all empires, is utterly self-serving and brutal
towards it “enemies,” defined as any who oppose American Empire hegemony (like,
for instance, the majority of Canadians). Political scientist Chalmers Johnson
argues in The Sorrows of Empire (2004) that America, in step with all
previous empires, is irreversibly collapsing under its own weight. “I think
four sorrows inevitably accompany our current path. First is endless war… As it
stands right now, since 9/11, Articles 4 and 6 of the Bill of Rights are dead
letters. They are over… Second, imperial overstretch… The third thing is a
tremendous rise in lying and deceit… The difficulty to believe anything that
the government says any longer because they are now systematically lying to us
on almost every issue. The fourth is bankruptcy. Attempting to dominate the
world militarily is a very expensive proposition… The United States, for the
last 15 years, has had trade deficits running at 5 percent every year. We are
on the edge… I do not find it easy at all that any successor to George Bush
would make any difference… That leads me to the conclusion that we are probably
going to reap what we have sown. That is blowback” (quoted in Nimmo, 2004).
Many publications from within America treat of this phenomenon.
Last year, I published an Op. Ed. Piece in The Calgary
Herald entitled, “We Are Mansfield Park.” (This piece is quoted in full in
my article "Two Conundrums and the Kingdom of God.” At the end of the piece, I
wrote: “In the movie adaptation of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, the
central character, Fanny Price, goes to live at her relatives’ fairytale
estate, Mansfield Park, when she is ten years old. Her new life is idyllic and
genteel in every way. But eventually into her adulthood the awful truth emerges,
adumbrated throughout the movie, the ‘civilized’ opulence is underwritten by
the putrid horror of New World slavery that her uncle, Sir Thomas, oversees
business interests in, and (implied) also participates in rape with impunity of
chattel black women and worse.
Grossman, Lt. Col. David (no date). “Trained to Kill,” http://www.skirmisher.com/to-kill4.htm.
Johnson, Chalmers (2004). The Sorrows of Empire:
Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic. New York: Metropolitan
Books/Henry Holt and Company.
Nimmo, Kurt (2004). “Bush’s Endgame: A Review of ‘The
Sorrows of Empire’,” http://www.counterpunch.org/nimmo02172004.html.”