Editor's Note: As expected for a topic inherently loaded with a great deal of partisan emotionalism, The Saker's brave discussion of what has become an unchallenged cultural norm, thanking vets "for their service" (supposedly for keeping us and the US homeland safe and free, etc.) generated a fair amount of commentary, with some of it of very high caliber. In total we received approximately 87 comments. Unfortunately, as we have explained elsewhere, comments by unregistered parties cannot be published due to the risk they represent in terms of attacks on the site, something which happens with tedious regularity and which can be extremely costly to us in terms of time wasted, and the frequent need to contract expensive techs to rectify the damage. Below, we reproduce the commentary on this post by David William Pear, who also happens to be a senior contributing editor with The Greanville Post.—PG
David William Pear comments on
Thanking vets for their “service” – why?
[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s a Vietnam war criminal I never know what to say when someone thanks me for my service. Sometimes I ask "What service". Now I think I will just say "Why"---and look at the expression on their face and listen for their response.
[I use the Veterans Heathcare Administration (VA or VHA). THEY ARE THE BEST HEALTHCARE SYSTEM IN THE US, and every study shows that they have the best outcomes at the lowest cost. I can testify that I have never had any of the problems that the propaganda machine and Trump are spewing out. Nor do I know anybody else that has. They always treat me with the utmost respect and courtesy that should be a model for all healthcare.]They never fail to call me "sir" and they always thank me for my service. Not being one to bite the hand that heals me, I respond politely, but inside I know that I did not perform any service worthy of thanks.
While I am a war criminal and deserve to be hung, there were a lot of people smarter than me that got fooled by the Cold War propaganda too, e.g., watch The Real News Network series about Daniel Elsberg's new book "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner":
https://therealnews.com/sto...
I joined Special Forces which was then being expanded by JFK as the new military approach to defeating communism. JFK's ideology of "winning the hearts and minds" through a new kind of soldier was taken from the book "The Ugly American". The idea was that by training soldiers to know the culture, language, and customs of the people, the US could win them over to capitalism instead of communism.
The idea was that Special Forces was to be an "extension of the peace corps, only we carried guns" (my description) and conducted counter-insurgency as well as digging wells, improving sanitation and bringing medical care to remote backward villages. SF worshiped Kennedy and even named their training facilities at Fort Bragg after him: The John F. Kennedy Center for Special Warfare. It was all very naive.
The book The Ugly American was a sensation when it came out. Kennedy even sent a copy to every US ambassador and it was required reading for foreign service officers. I have since re-read the book recently, now that the scales have fallen from my eyes.
It is a horrible chauvinistic book, which portrays indigenous people as backward, ignorant, inept and in need of the Westerner to bring them knowledge, understanding, and modernization at a pace that they can absorb. It is a paternalistic racist book, dripping with the virtues of capitalism and the evil of communism. It assumes that given an intelligent choice that post colonial countries would choose capitalism and welcome Americans with loving open arms. This is the propaganda that many of us grew up with and that many Americans believed. [Most still do.]
Even Daniel Elsberg admits that he came to believe that Joseph Stalin was as evil as Hitler (sic), and that the US, Europe and the rest of the world were in a life and death struggle against communism.
It seems that the media was less corrupt then, but now we know that it was deeply infiltrated by the CIA, and even the trusted Walter Cronkite was tainted by Operation Mockingbird. The mainstream media was for the Vietnam war before it was against it.
"And that's the way it is", is how Cronkite signed off every evening and we believed him.
Maybe this sounds like I am just making excuses for myself. Usually I do not discuss my military experience, although I do put it on my bio. It is part of who I am. I suspect that even now without the draft (I was not drafted) there are people who join the military because they have been brainwashed that they are joining an honorable profession to do an honorable service. The military changes people and they are never the same again.
—David W. Pear
Appendix
A sample of the standard propaganda, Thank You for Your Service movieclip.
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It takes a lot of courage and self-awareness to own up to being a war criminal. But it there’s any virtue that’s capable of conferring redemption, it’s honesty. More than ever, having read this short essay, I admire David for his incisiveness and candor.
Victims can to varying degrees participate in and be complicit with their victimization. You’ve made a hard-and-fast judgment here that allows every individual who participates in war to absolve themselves from any responsibility for their actions. This is an invitation to moral nihilism. But thanks for being so empathic. Perpetuation and promotion of war needs as much praise and support as we can muster. Hundreds of millions of corpses is but a fragment of the carnage we as humans should be capable of. Let’s put on our thinking caps and fire up the machines of murder and mayhem and see… Read more »
Actually what I brought up has nothing to do with the Stockholm Syndrome. I’m talking about ethical issues, not psychological ones. Ownership and assignment of responsibility is distinct from assigning or inviting feelings of guilt, shame, embrace of one’s captors, patriotic hysteria or revulsion, or any of the other psychological responses you cite, whether healthy and justifiable or self-sabotaging and pathological. I respect your analysis and description of the phenomena by which we are manipulated or oppressed but you’re having a different conversation than the one I initiated.
Please don’t waste your empathy on me. Every participant in any illegal war of aggression is by definition a war criminal. I do agree with you though that in most cases the soldiers (sic) are victims of propaganda, brainwashing, careerism and let’s be honest adventurism. However none of those absolve the fact that unlike “early European wars”, there are international laws that govern civilized warfare…..now there is an oxymoron if there ever was one. While being a victim may be grounds for leniency, even compassion and medical treatment, it does not erase the fact that “just following orders, being brainwashed,… Read more »
Actually, I think we agree much, much more than we disagree. I have no desire to punish any of the victims of US wars of aggression, including the grunts in the military or veterans. Nor do I really feel that I deserve to be hung myself. I never committed what one would call an atrocity. But neither do I like being thanked for my “service”, and I am not alone. And I agree that the financial remuneration in the military have become quite attractive to young people.; purposely so. In truth if I were 18 years old now, the military… Read more »