Originally posted by: freegeeks
Defending my family is worth dying for. Dying for your country is stupid nowadays because in reality you are dying for some politician sitting comfortably 2000 miles behind the front line.
Dying for your country has actually been pretty stupid for a very long time, but I don't mean by that what the right would think.
What I mean is that was has long been waged for 'bad' reasons, creating situations where people are killing one another for bad reasons.
People might serve the militaries of the ages for societal advantage, for lack of opportunity, out of pressure from the government, for weatlh, for adventure, for feeling better about themselves 'proving' something, for reasons of romanticized patriotism, for all kinds of reasons; and their doing so allowed them to be used for injustice against other people, making those other people get killed defending themselves from the injustice an oppression threatened upon them by the rules of the first group.
What's long been needed is a way to systemically inhibit the rulers from choosing bad wars.
While the right pooh-pooh's 'peace studies', out of ignorance, in fact it's an obviously challenging area and one with great benefit and importance.
I've posted the quote before supporting the point above just within the history of the US, from the then-most decorated person in US military history:
"I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."
- Gen. Smedley Butler
I recall the story of the CEO of Pepsi-Cola calling his former corporate lawyer, the new president Richard Nixon, and insisting that the new president of Chile be stopped in his leftist economic policies. Innocent and good men defending Chile from the economic dominance of outsiders were killed for the 'bad war' to install Pinochet and protect American corporate interests.
There have been the occasional 'necessary wars', such as against Hitler (though ironically, the war didn't seem all that necessary to the US or to Hitler when he was merely invading European nations; public opinion was largely against getting into the war, Roosevelt won in 1940 on plans not to get in the war, and Hitler expressed the desire not to go to war with the US, but Pearl Harbor and a mutual war treaty changed all that). But your sentiment that 'dying for your country' is often not too good an idea is sadly the usual situation in history.
Even take perhaps our most cherished war, the Revolutionary war; the people were pretty happy not to fight for independence, for democracy, if the British had not pressed for too much economic advantage for the company owned by the government and royal family, the East India Trading Company. But when they did press too much, a lot of good causes got the war they needed, carried along the coattails of war for economic benefit.
But how needed was it for the British soldiers killed in that war to get killed? It was a 'war for their nation'; but a war needed to protect their nation? Or to protect the rulers' profits?
I'm not saying that it's not needed for people to fight in wars a lot once they are started, that the stakes aren't high, historically speaking. But the reasons the wars start?
In fact, it's worse than I'm saying so far - war has often been used simply to secure the leader's position, the people demanding the leader 'do something' as just having peace makes the leader seem like he's not doing enough, the leader needing to put the nation's people to war lest they become a threat to his own rule.
Madeline Albright once infamously asked the Chairman of the JCS, ?What?s the point of having this superb military you?re always talking about, if we can?t use it?? What more need be said about the ease with which nations can feel pressure to go to war for bad reasons? If you need another, had Vietnam been written as fiction, it'd have been attacked as absurdly unbelievable that the US would so foolishly commit itself to such a 'bad' war for so little reason for so long at such high cost, especially to the Vietnamese. But we did that.
And while my examples use the US mostly, the same and worse can be seen by other nations.
So, it's not just now that your point is appropriate. It's true generally about war.
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