What I'm trying to call attention to is that there are soldiers on both sides of every war, and that the war of liberation, viewed from one direction, is a war of oppression when viewed from the other. For example, the reason it was such a bloody ordeal to end slavery in this country was that there were countless brave young men willing to line up to kill and die on behalf of the Confederacy, in its attempts to preserve the right of white people to own black people. Many other countries had slavery, but in most cases it was resolved fairly peacefully, because there weren't enough people willing to kill and die on behalf of those who wished to preserve it.
>If there is no will to fight, tyranny will prevail every time.
Again, remember there are two sides to that story, every single time. It is the will to fight ON BEHALF OF TYRANTS that is the problem in the first place. If there were no will to fight, tyranny could NEVER prevail. It is only the will to fight on one side that makes the will to fight on the other side necessary.
>You seem to have a low opinion of those who preserve your freedom.
Absolutely not. I'm a huge fan of the ACLU. I just don't picture soldiers as inherently a force for preserving my freedom. They're a force for imposing the political will of others. In some cases, that means taking away freedom. In other cases, it means resisting those who would take freedom away.
I have nothing but respect for those who would die for a worthy cause, but history suggests that the greatest share of soldiers are people who, if they fight for a worthy cause, do so by accident of circumstance, not deep moral reasoning. The soldiering mindset doesn't vary hugely from one country to the next, one era to the next, because soldiers are not, for the most part, recruited by the justice of their cause. Just watch a military recruitment ad. Seldom do they focus on the rights or wrongs of a particular conflict into which the soldiers will be thrown. Instead, they focus on the manliness of soldiering, and the generic prejudice in favor of one's own nation... whatever nation that happens to be. The specific cause is almost beside the point. The military ethos, itself, is the attraction.
I'd love to live in a world where evil men find it very hard to create armies, because most soldiers are only willing to kill and die when the cause is truly just. But that's not the world we live in. Human nature is such that even for terrible causes, vast armies can be created, full of brave young men willing to give up their lives and to take the lives of others, for the nation.... whatever nation it happens to be. That courage was amply evident in the Soviet Union and in Nazi Germany. One of the bravest acts of recent warfare was the willingness of the 9/11 hijackers to choose certain death on behalf of a weak force attacking the strongest nation in history.
Those things had nothing to do with preserving freedom. They were driven by primal brain structures that turn people of a certain age into easy tools of violence for group leaders -- the same impulse that drives bloodshed between neighoring troops of chimpanzees, or gang wars in Compton, or petty tribal raids in the jungles of Borneo, or the land grabs of the colonial age. When the group leaders have noble goals, as has sometimes been the case in American history, the outcome can be good. But for every time violence is needed to acheive some worthy goal, remember that there are equally brave young men being used as tools of violence in the opposite direction.
That's why I value those who fight for what's right --peacefully if at all possible-- rather than ascribing some special virtue to soldiering. And it's why I focus on the political, intellectual, and moral leadership that's at work, rather than the omnipresent military mindset that makes a substantial portion of EVERY population willing tools of destruction. That mindset is commonplace in every culture at every time, and can just as easily be put to use for ill as for good, so there's nothing special about it.
Right now there's some young boy playing ball out in the heartland somewhere, whose brain is hard-wired to want to be part of an army when he grows up. Whether that ultimately makes him a tool for liberation or conquest, good or evil, nation-building or gang warfare, has little to do with how brave and selfless he's willing to be, and everything to do with how wise and moral the leadership is of the group he falls in with. Of course, there are exceptions -- people guided by moral principles, rather than reflexive group loyalties and machismo. These are the kind of people who, in a nation gripped by war fever, push the other way -- like the White Rose in WWII Germany. But looking at the amassed armies of history, balanced against the tiny handful of each culture willing to take moral stands against national war efforts, I don't think the evidence supports a notion that most soldiers are driven to violence by moral considerations. In fact, I'd wager that human nature is such that for every American soldier who'd be resisting the war effort if it were less just, there are a hundred of his comrades for whom the justice or injustice of the cause is a non-issue.... people who, if they were in a different time and place, would be just as proud to kill and die for the Fuehrer and the Vaterland or for Stalin and the Motherland.
