A doctorate certificate. At home we sentence people to death and and life in prison for murder. Killing children is seen as especially heinous and child killers can't even make it in prison amongst the most evil criminals. But when soldiers go to third world countries and kill civilians including pregnant women and children we give them medals and call them heros.
The vast majority of all war casualties are civilians, not combatants. I have a high enough respect for those who serve in the military, believe me, no matter what their reason for joining is.
But it has become a reason for the way many alt-rights act. The military shouldn't be worshipped like a cult, they fight for our country, but praising them for everyone they fight against promotes the idea that Muslim bans and "the wall" are all just, as they are "against" our country.
By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Google Search. Post Your Opinion. Create New Poll. Sign In Sign Up. Add a New Topic. Should serving in the military be as glorified as it is? United States , Jesus , military , God. We are defending our country.
Report Post. Like Reply. Maximum words. This article was intended to spur men into battle by frightening them. The author implores the men of North Carolina to serve, warning them of the consequences of inaction. See Item for another example of scare tactics being used to encourage enlistment. Item Other articles read more as advertisements.
To be sure, the glorification of war after took many forms. The most visible and emotionally most potent was the commemoration of fallen soldiers. Significantly, even when such public symbols of mourning expressed implicit or, less frequently, explicit criticism of the war, they simultaneously strove to endow the death of the soldiers with a higher meaning and thereby ended up obscuring that the war had largely been an affair of senseless slaughter.
Sacrifice was thus glorified while its context was refashioned in a manner that would enhance the nobility of its victims. Since commemoration is more about instilling the past with sense and purpose than with simply remembering it, the official remembrance of millions of fallen young men could not help but provide the war, in which their lives were squandered, with a retrospective meaning for the benefit of the living. The investment of death in war with meaning can be accomplished by both generalizing and individualizing it.
In giving war a unique moral significance, the fallen soldier can be presented as having sacrificed himself for a greater cause: death is glorified by the context in which it occurred, abstract principles and entities are valued higher than individual lives. Hence mourning will focus on the service rendered by the dead for the nation's historical mission and future; rather than being deprived of its sons, the nation is enriched by those who die for it.
Conversely, by concentrating on individual devotion, suffering, and sacrifice, the fallen glorify the cause and endow it with deeper meaning because they had given their lives for it. Here mourning will focus on individual qualities as an example to be followed by others. Put differently, in the former case the soldier is an extension of the nation, in the latter the nation is an extension of the soldier who embodies its very best essence.
Rhetorically, one might either say that great nations produce heroic sons or that heroic soldiers deserve a nation fit for their sacrifice. In the wake of World War I, both modes of mourning and ascribing meaning to death were common features of the vast and unprecedented wave of commemoration that swept through Europe, although the balance between the two varied from one nation to the next. Yet even while public commemoration naturally tended to emphasize collective sacrifice for the national cause, it seemed to be increasingly informed by a quest for a new type of individual heroism.
This synthesis between the collective and the particular was directly related to the emergence of mass society, vast conscript armies, and total war, a context in which there was no more room for the traditional hero, whose ultimate sacrifice was inscribed on his fate and inherent to his existence. World War I ushered in the glorification of the rank and file, expressed in such countries as Britain and France in the erection of national memorials for the unknown soldier.
Here was a figure that represented both the individual and the mass: glorified by the nation, he also stood for the multitudes sent out to die and quickly forgotten. He thus gave a face to anonymity, personifying and glorifying precisely those masses that had no place in public memory; in other words, in being remembered, the unknown soldier legitimized forgetting.
The figure of the unknown soldier thus made possible a shift from the inflated and largely discredited rhetoric of the abstract nation to the individual, yet presented the individual as a soldier who by definition had no specific traits and features, and who consequently embodied the nation after all.
For all that was known about this "unknown" figure was his status as soldier, his gender, and his nationality or "race". Through him the nation could represent itself as a site of resurrection, returning from the Valley of Death thanks to the sacrifice of its sons. It was this identification of the living nation with its anonymous but glorified fallen soldiers that provided a means to come to terms with the trauma of war, and normalized the haunting images of the dead returning from the endless cemeteries in which they now resided, because the longing for the return of the fallen was mixed with a good deal of shame and trepidation.
At the end of the war, people wanted to return to normality as soon as possible, to bury the dead and then to go on with life. Yet the presence of so much death and mourning also gave rise to a wave of mysticism, spiritualism, and occultism. The unknown soldier fulfilled the requirement of both focusing on the suffering and sacrifice of the individual, for which a powerful need existed, and of distancing oneself from any particular fallen member of family or community.
The final death of the soldier was thus acknowledged through this familiar yet unknown figure safely and irrevocably locked in a national sepulcher. Significantly, Germany did not erect a tomb for the unknown soldier; unlike France and Britain, Germany could not come to terms with the trauma of war through a symbol of final and irredeemable death.
Rather, many Germans hoped to overcome defeat by continuing the struggle; for this purpose, the dead could not be locked away, since they still had a role to play in urging the living to win back victory.
In France and Britain, the glory of the unknown soldier, confined as he was to his tomb, was a matter of the past, and thereby helped the rest of the nation to get on with the present. In Germany, the unburied unknown soldier continued to roam the old battlefields and to march in the cities, reminding those who might have forgotten that his mission must still be accomplished.
In France and Britain, especially the former, the specter of the fallen served as a warning that such slaughter should never be allowed again.
In his farewell address, President Eisenhower warned America about the dangers of the military-industrial complex, but his wisdom, it seems, has fallen on deaf ears. As a result of this, the military has ceased to be a force for defense and security and has instead become a political tool for conquest and suppression.
I must draw a distinction. Whatever the cause for a war, the sacrifices of individual soldiers and their families are immeasurable, and they are worthy of our respect and support. In movie theaters, we see ads glorifying combat and imploring young people to join the armed forces.
Ultra-realistic military simulators can be found in malls across America. But the problems extend beyond these forms of veiled propaganda. Second, even the thought that our military involvement abroad may be unjustified or that the military itself is put on too high a pedestal is considered an un-American sentiment.
When did informed dissent become un-American? Was it not informed dissent that caused the founding fathers to see the need to draft the Declaration of Independence that founded this nation of ours? Third, once our brave men and women have put down their rifles and attempt to return to civilian life, they are shafted by an underfunded Veterans Administration and an apathetic populace.
My point is simple: we do not have to worship the military, glorify violence or accuse each other of sedition to respect our servicemen. If we are going to send our troops anywhere to fight for any reason, we as a nation must live up to the true meaning of patriotism, which not only means being proud of our country, but caring for our own who have endured the physical and emotional ordeals of war. Our support of the troops must extend beyond bumper stickers, benefit concerts and having the biggest American flag on the block.
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