Is from my wonderfully musty copy of the book, Facts and Comments, by Herbert Spencer, in a short essay entitled, Patriotism:
“Some years ago I gave my expression to my own feeling — anti-patriotic feeling, it will doubtless be called — in a somewhat startling way. It was at , when, in pursuance of what were thought to be “our interests,” we were invading Afghanistan. News had come that some of our troops were in danger. At the Athenæum Club a well-known military man — then a captain but now a general — drew my attention to a telegram containing this news, and read it to me in a manner implying the belief that I should share his anxiety. I astounded him by replying — “When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don’t care if they are shot themselves.””
When I see veterans in public, I don’t look at them with the reverential awe that some feel, I look at them in the same way that I might look at someone who’s survived a tragic natural disaster with their wits barely intact. I give them the benefit of the doubt: their idealism meshed with the propaganda fed to them throughout their lives about the nobility about arming themselves in the defense of the State, thinking they were actually defending their country, their hometown, family, and friends. In reality, they became fodder for various wars of Empire somewhere across the globe. Some realize it too late, once they’ve committed hideous crimes in their government’s name. A government that forgives them of the crimes, but sends them home to be judged by their conscience night and day until they commit suicide or go insane. It’s a grim testament to the stubborn inability of men and women to eliminate their moral compass that soldier suicides routinely outpace combat deaths.
Murdering other people is not natural. In Losing Tim, a book I reviewed a few years ago for Antiwar.com, an intimate portrait is painted of the living hell that one veteran experienced before blowing his brains out at the dinner table.
Soldiers are fed the religion on the State in pure form, right into the vein. The more foreign innocents that are murdered, the more they need that belief in the State religion to prevent them from descending into the mental chaos of “moral injury” and PTSD. Veterans are another class of victims of the State, and more should be done to prevent our government from creating new ones.
