Providing Cover for Murder

Troop worship provides cover for atrocity

The United States is full of worshippers. And I'm not referring here to the Christian majority. No, I'm referring to the worship of soldiers. The idolization and heroization of these people is alarming to a freethinking libertarian like me, who sees past the facade put up by years of State school indoctrination, propaganda, and media.

Many people do understand, however, that the military leadership and government make mistakes and issue bad orders. The liberal take on the Iraq war is a sure enough example, where they acknowledge the faults in starting it in the first place. Military leaders are grilled, the people who issued the orders in the prison scandals were condemned... but the soldiers themselves are rarely called into question.

Nobody is willing to go against the phrase "support our troops", and they'll often start a controversial opinion by assuring people that they do in fact support the troops. This behavior, however, is extremely harmful.

Much like the moderate Christians is Sam Harris's argumentation, the people that unflaggingly 'support the troops' provide cover for the bad policy decisions and the immoral actions of politicians and soldiers alike. By continuing to support the soldiers who execute the orders of the State, they do nothing to curb the State's appetite for war.

In fact, they only encourage the State to be more reckless. Because funding will never be cut to the troops afar, the State will have a continued means of waging war. It tacitly justifies the actions of the State, because people are going to support the collective soldiers despite the atrocities they commit. It's the same way taxation works to create more bureaucratic deficiency, except with much more death and violence.

By upholding soldiers as virtuous defenders of our rights and freedom, regardless of the actual actions they commit or their absolute subservience to the State, we perpetuate the State's primary means of keeping us as sheep. If we are not allowed to question whether supporting soldiers is a good thing or not, then we're going to see more and more immorality coming from the military, command AND grunts.

Condemning of the command rather than the people that execute it also perpetuates the immorality of the military. It doesn't hold individuals accountable for their actions, because they fall under the cover of the State. To blame the State alone as the reason why we're at war is to deny that the soldiers themselves have allowed the atrocities to take place. Most US soldiers aren't being forced at gunpoint by the State to shoot people. Most volunteered, and most are proud to be soldiers.

It is the choice of every individual soldiers to actually pull the trigger that kills a person. One cannot absolve his responsibility for a person's death simply because he was instructed to do it. To deny this and pin it on a collective is to remove the responsibility of each individual for his actions. The State is used as a similar collective to bypass the consequences of stealing, or forcing a neighbor to behave in a certain way. But again, when used with the military, it has even more violent and deadly results.

Supporting the US soldiers and/or the State as a collective is thus no different from condoning the immoral actions committed by them. To support the troops, even if you feel their only valid use is defense, is to give them carte blanche. If you do not hold individuals responsible for their moral decisions, then you are effectively supporting the soldiers to engage in immoral actions of violence, murder, kidnapping, and theft wherever they find it necessary.