La grandeur du crime est la seule différence qu’il y ait entre un conquérant et un brigand.
The magnitude of the crime is the only difference there is between a conqueror and a robber.
Jean-Paul Marat
Governments and their hit-men aren’t morally higher than lone gunmen, and they certainly aren’t more morally justified to kill or steal.
Above: Sheldon Richman, who attracted criticism after he compared the American Sniper “hero” Chris Kyle to the infamous Sandy Hook school shooter
In fact, our present governments should be less entitled to get away with either of these atrocities than any random individual from the crowd. Unfortunately, the reality is that our governments have an arrogance born out of their idea that they are legitimate representatives. It is the reason they condemn Edward Snowden’s alleged “arrogance”, for compromising the secrecy of the espionage techniques used against terrorists and thereby supposedly putting our lives at risk. Even if Snowden did cause said threats to our security, and was arrogant, the government argument presupposes the government’s moral right to put our lives at risk where a whistleblower is not. I am pleased for whistleblowers to put all our lives at risk. It is a cost worth paying for the digital liberation and decentralization that our civilization is making in era of drastic individual empowerment by the technium. What I’m not pleased with is that our archaic national governments still presume to risk our lives on their delusional foreign and domestic policy adventures in order to save their dwindling legitimacy and power.
Merely because we voted for them, government figures think they’re allowed to cut our throats and claim it must have been what we wanted. Based on their logic, you would think that voting for someone pre-ordains all the decisions the official later makes, making those decisions “democratic” even if the public was trampled all over to get them done.
Democracy has been cheapened to a idol. It is waved around by our leaders to justify their bad decisions, assume the aforementioned moral arrogance and superiority compared with other regimes, and blame the public itself for the government’s errors. Our shallow form of democracy supplies nothing more than some tactics for our leaders to shirk responsibility for their mistakes in the press, and run away.
The form of democracy that presently exists doesn’t create enough accountability for our rulers, but they pretend it does. They hide behind the reminder “but you voted for us, we’re legitimate”, and the scam that we have the capability to stop future bad policies simply by voting in a different band of liars and business cheats to public office.
I mention the fact that governments aren’t morally higher than lone gunmen because it is an argument made by Sheldon Richman at a controversial post for The Future of Freedom Foundation. He argued that US sharpshooter Chris Kyle, the protagonist of the recent Iraq War movie American Sniper, is no better than the Sandy Hook shooter: a psychopath who helped to invade and slaughter another country based on George W. Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s lies.
I fully support Sheldon’s argument, and I am not surprised by the way that conservatives have hit back, using the old “we fought for your right to say that” argument. I am not so sure US soldiers ever fought a battle for people like Sheldon Richman to criticize the US military and its crimes, and the battle they’re waging by trying to disparage Sheldon or other critics of the US military is exactly the opposite. The reality is that America doesn’t provide any special freedom for people to criticize its military. Sheldon could have been sitting in Cuba or Iran, and no-one would have prevented him from writing his article (it might even have had millions of thumbs-up). In fact, the conservative media establishment and fanatics of US “patriotism” are not fond at all of the freedom of writers like Sheldon Richman to criticize the US military. So this argument is just pure and utter nonsense, and only makes sense to people incapable of critical thought.
“They fought for you to have the freedom to say that!”: this claim is simply empty and false. They died for lies.
US soldiers who lost their lives in Vietnam and Iraq didn’t die for freedom, but for lies.
No matter how hard we close our eyes and try to believe that dead US Army personnel died for our “freedoms”, such a silly fantasy will never be true. They died for nothing. None of them needed to die. They could have still been alive, and here to enjoy their freedoms too. No-one needed to die in Iraq.
As for the reactionary arguments that society is becoming detached from the military and unappreciative of its work, this shows a profound misunderstanding of how politics function. It has never been the civilians’ job to pay homage to the armed forces or adjust their values to match the military. If there is a “disconnect” between the military and the society, the military’s backwardness is to blame. The civilian population are under no obligation to protect the armed forces or make them feel politically comfortable: it’s supposed to be the other way round. Trying to impose military values on the civilian life, reverting life back to the 1950s in order to try and restore glory and reverence to the US military, would be a completely repressive and illegitimate campaign at best and a military coup d’etat at worst.
Nationalism is a religion. Nationalists are like Islamists.
— Sheldon Richman (@SheldonRichman) February 6, 2015
To believe that soldiers needed to die for the empty idols of US democracy and freedom amounts to preaching nonsense, barbarism and depravity that will destroy civilization. It is at the same level as the fanatics who argue about strapping a bomb to their bodies to blow themselves up for their god. There is no sense at all in claiming that a cultural idol such as our alleged democracy or freedom, both of which are actually nonsense and widely disputed, is worthy of spilling millions of people’s blood for in other countries. If you can get people to believe absurdities, you can get them to commit atrocities. Therefore, the people who make the idiotic argument about soldiers fighting for “our freedoms”, are the ones most responsible for atrocities like the My Lai Massacre and Collateral Murder.
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