Re: Fox News baits antiwar protesters

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

At 1:11 AM -0500 3/30/03, cuito61@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>  >"War protester auditions here today ... thanks for coming!" read one
> > message. "Who won your right to show up here today?" another >questioned.
>  >"Protesters or soldiers?"
>
> Is it just me, or is the entire premise wrong?  I mean, isn't this
> whole "soldiers protect/earn/ensure "freedom" thing just flatly
> wrong?  How does anyone actually believe this stuff and say it with
> a straight face?  Isn't it just another way of justifying military
> intervention?  I mean, if we jsut look at US history from the
> beginning to the present, one is hard-pressed to find any example
> where any action taken by the US military ensured or promoted
> anyone's "freedom," either at home or abroad.  The only 2 really
> arguable instances are maybe the civil war and WWII, but these are
> BOTH highly arguable and the true motives/results (not to mention
> behavior of the actual military during these campaigns) reveals
> something other than some altruistic campaign for human freedom.  SO
> what gives?  Is it just America's historical amnesia that allows so
> many people to believe this crap?  One could even make a damn good
> argument that "protestors" and other such agitators have been most
> responsible for earning the degree of "freedom" and rights that most
> Americans and other people have today.  Thoughts?

Historical amnesia, yes, with regard to 99.99% of US military
interventions overseas.  Most Americans have never heard of them.
The ones that they _have_ heard of -- e.g., the Korean War -- they
justify with appeal to the anticommunist ideology.  Aside from
historical amnesia and anticommunism, there may be another reason:
without patriotic justification, a large standing military in
"peacetime" (I put "peacetime" between quotation marks, because the
US government has probably never been truly at peace with all the
nations in the world since it became an empire and certainly not
since it became the world's hegemon) may begin to look like a
gigantic welfare program.
--
Yoshie

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