How much of the many cases of veterans’ PTSD results from the moral injury of killing other human beings? From Gary D. Barnett at garydbarnett.substack.com:
“Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.”
~ Percy Bysshe Shelley
In 1931, a quote from an opinion piece by Kurt Tucholsky, under his pseudonym Ignaz Wrobel, in the weekly German magazine Die Weltbühne, stated: “Soldiers are murderers.” This quote is very simple but very true, and although many will cringe at the suggestion, with any critical thought or scrutiny whatsoever, there is no other conclusion that can be reached. Any man who orders another to kill a third party has committed a heinous crime, and should the individual given this charge to kill complete his task, he is guilty of murder. Should this sanity ever become the rule, wars would immediately cease, and peace therefore, would reign.
Before you call for me to be drawn and quartered, or hurl expletives in my direction, allow me to explain my reasoning and expand my thoughts on this subject. First and foremost, I was in the military a few decades ago. I was conscripted by this government, which means I was forced, obviously against my will, into slavery. My very first act when I arrived at the Army inception center in Memphis, was to stand up and say as loudly as I possibly could, that I would never take any order to kill any individual in Vietnam. This caused quite a stir of course, but I was still forced into active duty. My dissent was not tested, as one of my drill sergeants knew of what I was capable of doing, and made sure I stayed stateside for the balance of my two years. The bottom line here of course, is that I refused to kill anyone on orders. If I could do that, any others can as well.
Obeying orders to kill another is never a valid excuse for murder, but soldiers continue to kill knowing that they will be protected by the State. In many cases, this is due to actual fear of state retribution, as most assigned to kill on orders are young and brainwashed, have already been thoroughly indoctrinated since birth to support the nation-state, and due to the lies of which they have been fed, they ‘believe’ in the propagated cause. In other words, the entirety of war and aggression is based on total deception. Regardless of the reasons for this insanity, stupidity, and evil, I agree completely with Herbert Spencer’s view when he said:
“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.”
Will it apply when the CPUSA (D) regains power for the final Fundamental Transformation and there are orders to shoot New Man workers utopia shirkers?
An Egyptian general, twenty-five hundred years ago, identified why young men are chosen to be soldiers. Ninety Nine percent of their life has been as children and they are used to authority, having been governed by their parents, and believe all authority has their best interests in mind with the structure that is the state. Few realize the state’s interests are in conflict with the indvidual. Most people are socialized into believing they need the approval of the majority and fail to realize that they are superior as indviduals. There never was any structure in South Vietnam for the protection of an individual, it was a corrupt government puppet state of the US. The war was not about protecting liberty or the moral right to choose. It was sold as protecting liberty and bringing democracy to a country that didn’t want it. That is what the US soldiers believed. The enemy soldiers that fought against the Americans did so because the Americans were in their country killing them. This was no esoteric fight over what kind of state should exist for most of the combatants, it was survival.
As I have studied history and leaders I have learned that all wars are for the same goals, that of the state controlling and extorting its citizens and expanding its sphere of control over others. I have not found any war that was any different, nor have I found any state that is different. It was my mistake to be there, I depended on authority to direct me, even when I could understand that it was an immoral undertaking, those whom I trusted kept saying that there were others who understood what we were doing to be moral, there was information that I was not privy to that made it moral, I had to trust those in charge. There is no such thing as a necessary evil. If what you are doing is evil, you cannot accomplish good.
~ Chad Chadburn