Myths of Our Time: The Draft
Myths of Our Time
by Paul Craig Roberts, November 13, 2009
It is conventional wisdom that it was the draft that ended the Vietnam war. According to this explanation, cowardly college students subject to the draft and their unpatriotic families, forced an end to the war. This is Karl Marx’s explanation. Material interests, not empty morality, are said to have brought the war to an end.
The fact that in those days the US still had an independent media of sorts that sometimes framed the war in moral terms is ignored. Are we sure, for example, that the film of the naked little girl running in terror down the road burning with napalm was ineffectual in arousing moral opposition to the war? Are we certain that it wasn’t an aroused moral conscience that brought about the end of the war but was college students’ fears for their lives and limbs?
If we ascribe ending the war to material interests, it makes ending the war look as unworthy as the war itself.
Yet, virtually every conservative columnist, commentator, newsperson and politician, as well as today’s antiwar protesters and apparently the Pentagon, believes that a military draft would reduce Americans’ toleration for wars because of body bags coming home to middle and upper class parents. Apparently, the lower class doesn’t mind its kids coming back in body bags.
Those in thrall to this explanation, which derives from Marx’s materialist explanation of history, do not notice that Vietnam was our longest war. It apparently took almost forever for the material interest of students and their parents to realize itself and stop the war.
Why are we afraid to say that the war stopped because American troops and the American population got tired, offended even, from killing women, children and noncombatants? Vietnam had not attacked the US. The US had interjected itself into a civil war in a far off place, as it has done in Afghanistan.
By invading Iraq the US started a civil war between Sunni and Shi’ite. In Pakistan the US has started a civil war between the religious tribal population and the secular US puppet state. In Palestine the US started a civil war between Fatah and Hamas.
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The majority of the American people are ignorant.
The majority can't name the Vice President. They believe government not because they're stupid, but because they're ignorant. And they're ignorant because they don't care.
Long after the invasion of Iraq the majority of the military believed Saddam had been involved in 9-11,even after President Bush had publicly said Saddam was not part of it.
They put their lives on the line and had no clue why. The elites have contempt for them and no wonder.
What was it Jefferson said about the impossibility of being ignorant and free?
Bump for Peace
"The answer is that the United States is an immoral country, with an immoral people and an immoral government. Americans no longer have a moral conscience. They have gone over to the Dark Side.
Humanity has endeavored for millennia to control evil with morality. In the American "superpower," this effort has collapsed and failed. "
Ron Paul 2012 for Peace
Ron Paul 2012 for Peace