Lew: The Marines’ treatment of this – and other dissenters – is but a reminder of the collectivist thinking implicit not only in the war system, but in politics generally. Young recruits are conditioned to think of themselves as only fungible, dispensable units in a giant machine for whose purposes – not their own – they are expected to subordinate their very existence. The soldier who thinks his own thoughts and asks his own questions has always been anathema to a system that depends upon the denial of the individual. The requirement that one wear uniform clothing and have head and facial hair cut to prescribed standards reinforces the collectivist mindset that is the state.
As the attached news report informs us, some military bases have gone so far as to abandon individualized memorial services for soldiers who have been killed in battle. Now, only a monthly service for all who have died will be employed! The obvious purpose – as with restrictions on photographs and videotapes of caskets being brought back to America – is to reduce a public awareness of the individual costs of warfare. What next? Individual grave-sites with individual – albeit uniform – gravestones dramatically quantify the personal costs of war (see, e.g., the closing scene in the great anti-war film “Oh! What a Lovely War”). Perhaps the military’s plans to further deindividualize the soldier include abandoning this traditional practice, and burying all soldiers in a common grave!
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2007/05/army_memorial_070531w/
In response to my articles critical of the war system, I often get angry e-mails from veterans of previous wars who snort: “I fought so that you would be free to write your kind of tripe.” I answer: “then you should be pleased to know that your efforts were not in vain.”
11:43 am on June 1, 2007
