Support Our Fucking Troops!

y'know, I'm getting REALLY tired of being yelled at by Conservatives and Liberals alike that I -must- at all costs, Support Our Troops. This is a mindless slogan designed to Propagandize our citizenry into supporting The Military, supporting the underlying Military-Industrial Complex and supporting societal Militarism.

Guess what? I don't believe that the institution of Militarism as it exists in this country today is worthy of respect OR support. The Pentagon is a giant money-sponge sucking up every available dollar to increase its own growth. Our short-sighted commitment to Military Keynesianism has set America on a path to destruction and I can't celebrate that.

That said, the "troops" or the individual soldiers in uniform who carry out the orders of the Military-Industrial Complex (aka, the cogs in the War Machine) are generally free of blame for this war. I don't blame them for either being born poor and having limited options in life, nor do I dislike those who join the service out of a sense of altruism and wanting to help other people, and I genuinely admire the guts that all of these groups show in the face of hostile forces who want to kill them.

I don't, however, subscribe to the notion that "the military keeps us free" or we only have our freedoms because soldiers are in Iraq defending them for us. Saddam never once threatened our freedom, and America's militaristic response to the 9/11 attacks has harmed our individual liberties far more than Osama Bin Laden ever dreamed of. If and when the orders come down to impose Martial Law, I'm sure that all these troops that I'm supposed to support will willingly shoot me dead in the street after curfew. Post-Katrina New Orleans proved that.

Either way, I do, for the most part, support the men and women in uniform. The good ones, anyway. Then, occasionally, I come across an Abu Ghraib/Haditha/Rape-And-Murder-Of-A-14-Year-Old-Iraqi-Girl type story which drives home just how FUCKED it is to blindly support anything, much less "our troops" who are, in the final equation, just people subject to the same pressures and failings that the rest of us are. Here's just one such story about troops whom I have no fucking intention of ever supporting.

FBI: Military Recruiters Ran Cocaine

A Midtown strip mall that should have housed the best of the best served as Corruption Central in Tucson. Two military recruiting stations sit side-by-side there, one run by the Army, the other by the Marines. Between them, a total of seven recruiters were on the take, secretly accepting bribes to transport cocaine, even as most spent their days visiting local high schools. They had help from several more recruiters at an Army National Guard office, where one recruiter was said to be selling cocaine from the trunk of his recruiting vehicle.

The big difference is that when civilians commit crimes, they don't expect blind patriotism to wallpaper over it.