If there’s one question that has a pretty good chance of getting the one asking it a fat lip or black eye, it’s asking someone in the military or one of its many fans how the military is fighting for freedom or defending democracy. Fists substitute for answers when questions can lead to unwelcome truths. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:
It seems to me the U.S. military – which might more accurately be styled the federal military – is simply the enforcement division of the federal government and the corporations that own and so control it.
Marine Major General Butler elaborated this fact some 100 years go, from the perspective of a top-level enforcer, who came to realize (and regret) his “service.” I suspect there are many such now but more who cannot deal with the fact and so suppress it by convincing themselves they are “fighting for freedom” and “defending democracy.”
But, I ask – and gently: How, exactly, has the federal military fought for our freedom? Yours and mine?
I mean since the War for Independence?
It did fight – or threaten to – after the war was over, to take away the freedom of rural American farmers who objected to being told they must pay taxes in currency they didn’t have, because they lived mostly by barter using the whiskey they distilled from the crops they grew. They did not see that they “owed” taxes to the federal government or anyone else, not having agreed to them.