There is a long-standing myth that “soldiers fight for our freedom.” The fraudulent nature of this claim is found, repeatedly, in examples that confirm that soldiers do not even fight for their own freedom, much less that of the rest of us. One finds current evidence for this in the California National Guard having offered reenlistment bonuses up to $15,000 to each of some ten thousand soldiers then serving in the Iraq/Afghanistan war. The soldiers and California Guard contractually agreed to this, but the federal government, some ten years later, is now intervening to demand that the soldiers return such bonuses, on the grounds that the California National Guard did not have the authority to enter into such contracts. Many of the ex-soldiers are now being threatened with foreclosure on the liens the government had put on their homes, lawsuits, or with garnishment of wages, and other remedies sought by the federal government.
Who are these soldiers to complain? Don’t they know that respect for the inviolability of contracts applies only to “persons” (i.e., to human beings) and that they, along with the rest of us, have been redefined as government “assets,” not self-owning persons? When Tony Snow – then White House press secretary under President George W. Bush – dismissed the deaths of some 2,500 American soldiers as “it’s a number,” and when earlier Secretary of State Madeleine Albright declared that the boycott-incurred deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children was acceptable to her, the state was telling us of our status as no more than resources for its ends.
Readers familiar with Jacques Ellul’s critiques of the “technological imperative,” will see how this dehumanizing premise gets played out, not only on battlefields, but even in more peaceful settings. At a time when the institutional order boasts of the computerized, driverless trucks and cars it is now introducing to American highways, we witness yet another step in the process of helping us turn ourselves into mindless robots, programmed by our Frankenstein masters. Robots have no independent will or sense of being to be respected by arrogant established authorities. Like the aforementioned soldiers, the relationship between ourselves and the corporate-state is no more to be thought of as contractually-based than is our relationship to a family dog or cat
1:09 pm on October 26, 2016
