The Nation Owes a Debt to the Vietnam Veterans Against the War: Camillo Macbeca

Thanks, Tim McGraw. 

The Nation Owes a Debt to the Vietnam Veterans Against the War: Camillo Macbeca

“Everyday living in a war zone is a netherworld of horror and insanity in which law and morality become a liability, and atrocity—moral transgression—a matter of perspective. Life amid the violence, death, horror, trauma, anxiety, and fatigue of war erodes moral being, undoes character, and reduces decent men and women to savages capable of incredible cruelty that would never have been thinkable before being conditioned to kill and sacrificed to war. Moral transgressions in such an environment are commonplace and not isolated aberrant occurrences prosecuted by a few deviant individuals, as militarists would have us believe. Rather, they are intrinsic to the nature and the reality of wars, what psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton appropriately described as “atrocity producing situations,” the inevitable consequence of first being conditioned to kill and then enduring the prolonged, life-threatening, and morally untenable conditions of the battlefield.”

The Best of Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.