[img]7|left|Frédérik Sisa||no_popup[/img] There’s nothing quite like Veterans Day to bring out the politics in everyone. I suppose it’s inevitable given how war and politics are firmly tied to each other. But it is no less distasteful to some extent. Because even as a pacifist I would not question the noble intentions of the men and women in uniform, people who put themselves at risk for the protection of others. The pacifist and the soldier may advocate and employ different means, but the goal is the same.
Of course, most people won’t give pacifists any credit or respect for the nobility of their intentions, let alone recognize the value of non-violent action, if only because pacifism is mistakenly associated (and then some!) with the passivity of lambs at the slaughter. While certain flavours of pacifism may arguably be that limp, the more pragmatic would agree with Gandhi’s preference for violence over cowardice in the absence of brave non-violent resistance. But that’s getting beyond the point. Opposition to war need not be necessarily predicated on pacifism, though, but simply out of a moral recognition that war, if it is at all possible for it to be just, must be a last resort. The death and suffering of war is simply too horrific to inflict with a cavalier comfy-couch attitude. Yet when war veterans are themselves opposed to a war, a double-standard becomes tragically obvious. On the one hand, soldiers and veterans are praised as heroes precisely because they chose military service. Yet, decorated veterans like John Kerry are smeared (“swift-boated”) just as veteran groups like Veterans for Peace are attacked even within the pages of this paper. But did they not serve honourably? Did they not act with bravery while performing their military service, irrespective of? The answer is, of course, yes…but the fact is that a veteran’s service is perceived to have no value if his or her politics aren’t also “correct.” In other words, a veteran who advocates peace might as well not be a veteran at all, given the Swift Boaters’ (and their ilk’s) disgusting attitude that places political alignment above genuine respect for veterans’ service. And the right-wing claims it’s the left that does the spitting!
Citizens, Soldiers
The deeper issue, of course, is the status of soldiers within the broader body politic. Must a soldier be apolitical, confined to following orders and not speaking – especially in defiance – of his/her military and political leaders, even once his/her service has ended? That certainly seems to be the implication of Swift Boat right-wing war machine attacks on veteran peace groups. But this implication presents soldiers as automatons; dehumanized and ideologically stripped of full participatory citizenship. If there’s a war, it’s their duty to support it no matter what.
Even worse, this focus on soldiers falling in political as well as military line comes with the unpleasant consequence that, if a soldier’s duty is merely to obey, then he/she cannot be held responsible for the consequences of actions ordered by their superiors. Goodbye, Nuremberg trials. Hello, “I was just following orders.”
The alternative is to affirm the results of the Nuremberg trials and recognize that if there is anything that trumps the military chain of command, it is not politics but morality. If Nazi soldiers were punished for failing to reject, on moral grounds, the genocidal orders of their superiors, and we agree with this viewpoint, then we have to admit that the soldier is not a mere one-dimensional automaton. The uncomfortable consequence of this view is, of course, the very stuff of the Nuremberg trials; soldiers don’t get a moral pass for ugly acts merely because of their position in the chain ofcommand. On the other hand, recognizing the moral responsibility soldiers hold is also an empowering view, precisely because it emphasizes their citizenship and individuality. It’s all tied together, and the bottom line is that it’s too easy to be cavalier and dismissive of people whose experience most of us will never share.
This is why this incessant need to score political points is particularly unfortunate, because however one may feel about the politics of war, an underlying human issue barely seems to register. I refer, of course, to stories like this one http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/11/13/earlyshow in which a “five-month CBS News probe, based upon a detailed analysis of data obtained from death records from 2004 and 2005, found that veterans were more than twice as likely to commit suicide in 2005 as non-vets.” We hear about the death toll, but not enough about the tens of thousands of injuries and cases of mental illness, not to forget the high incidence of homelessness http://www.huffingtonpost.com/, afflicting the troops. These are wrapped up in the flag and praised as sacrifice, but not accompanied by meaningful action to care for them after their service is done. That is the real outrage.