Suicide though, is only one of the detriments of treating our soldiers as commodities instead of people. The families left behind suffer for not knowing how long their loved ones will be gone and whether they will come home, alive. When videos are shown of a little girl or boy running to a soldier, crying, so extremely happy they have returned, we see the pain that had been suffered for their absence. We do not see though, on these media shows glorifying a safe return from war, the grief of those children who have to stand over a coffin, saying goodbye to their mother or father, knowing that they will never see them again. What stress level is to be assigned to this?
Another issue is that of aggression acted out by soldiers who believe they are there, away from their children because of the enemy they are fighting. The level of hate against the "enemy", especially considering the training of our soldiers to suspect any civilian of being a member of Al Qaeda or any other anti-American group, leaves the door open for violence without restraint. After all, the military has made it a policy to carpet bomb enemy targets without conscience, regardless of how many innocent lives are lost. We have done it time and time again and will most assuredly do it again.
We all collectively now stand in condemnation of Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, a soldier facing a life ending sentence for acts perpetrated in the battle field. As the media attempts to cover up the reasons of these actions, many listen and believe the rhetoric only to dismiss their own guilt of supporting an unjust war and the tactics employed by a heartless policy meant only to further a sick, corrupt agenda. His actions though, are not the result of some mental disorder as they will say, but the affectations of a military which prides itself of creating killers for their war games in which we and our soldiers in uniform have become mere pawns and apparently, quite dispensable.
As stated
by John Stuart Mill,
"But war, in a good cause, is not the greatest evil which a nation can suffer. War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice -- a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice -- is often the means of their regeneration.
A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other."
The question I would pose to
Mr. Mill though, is whether what we are doing in the Middle East and the
increasing destruction we are inflicting upon our brave soldiers, their
families and our National standing in the world in our war against
terrorism, is an "ascendancy in the affairs of mankind" or a descent
into the role of terrorists ourselves.
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