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The Article they didn’t want you to see – Why Soldiers Aren’t Heroes

As posted on MenziesHouse but now mysteriously deleted due to concerns about its 'appropriateness'

I was initially compelled to write this in response to the utterly histrionic outrage about opening hours during ANZAC Day. All over the news blogs and Twitter I saw a veritable smorgasbord of  borderline psychotic, self-involved dullards neighing and braying that it was a ‘sacred day’ and that we must ‘respect the heroes’ etc. These individuals had not cared to look into the reality of war and of being a soldier past the cultural obsession we have with the ideal of the ‘soldier as icon’. I understand this is a sacred concept, and I further understand why some people see soldiers as individuals taking up the ultimate goal, to potentially sacrifice themselves for the gains of whatever they’re told is the cause they’re fighting for.

This kind of unthinking patriotic jingoism is steeped heavily in the same thoughtless tradition that much of the conservative right appears to value. We seem to look at things in an almost cursory fashion and then generate motivations and incentives based on an ideal of how we perceive the situation to be, regardless of the reality. Every person that takes up arms against another ‘aggressor’ or those who ‘wish us harm’ is someone taking upon their shoulders the burdens and the safety of our entire nation state.

Remember, peaceniks sleep soundly in their beds because rough men blah blah blah. It’s an absolutely ludicrous concept and an idiotic false dichotomy. The nature of war stems from the concept that if a man murders another man of his own free will he is a monster, but if he does it under the banner of some greater force he is a hero. You can throw all degrees of arguments on non-aggression and defending ourselves and our allies and all of that pabulum but you still return to the same point, which is that through war we glorify that most inhuman of traits, murder.

To call people who are systematically trained over a course of several months to reduce the humanity of their opponents ‘heroes’ is to devalue the entire meaning of that word. A hero is an individual who goes above and beyond their own requirements to help those around them. A soldier is an individual who either willingly or compelled by force is placed into a situation demanding that they harm and kill other human beings. This is not to say that violence and murder do not have their place, of course they have because we are flawed as a race, but to honour it in such a way and to treat it as a cultural icon free of criticism is beyond the pale. A great deal of it is social and cultural programming, and that’s how the military engenders itself as a valid part of our culture and a valuable cultural institution.

The process by which a civilian is transformed into a soldier is a process that strips them of their humanity (for a good insight to this, watch “Any Son Will Do”). ANZAC Day exists to glorify and continue the traditions that the military sees as beneficial for themselves and the government which they serve. What kind of a rational human being would charge a machine gun whilst invading Turkish land? None would. The only human being who would do so is one who has had their own individual will stripped from them in a solidly dehumanising process. Yet we would denigrate those who said ‘fuck that for a lark’ when ordered by a commander to charge Turkish machine guns as a coward. Are we that manipulated?

As much as we have been made to believe otherwise through the narrative of wars we’ve been sold, ‘our side’ in all of the major wars we have fought has committed inhuman actions also. We’ve desecrated the corpses of Japanese, burned the civilians of Dresden alive, tortured prisoners of war. We’ve committed vast atrocities. Of course these do pale in comparison to those of the Third Reich and the Empire of Japan, but the point still remains that the true evil in this situation is the machinations of the nation state as a whole. What we enable through this cultural reverence is an unconscious degree of dehumanisation of our past ‘foes’.

Just because our side of the war were the ‘winners’ compared to other nations does not mean we should revel in our wartime actions. To somehow think that our ‘team’ killing more people than their ‘team’ is something to honour and respect seems ardently sociopathic. Yet those who question the degree to which our society upholds this are at best rabble rousers and at worst cowards? What disingenuous bullshit.

Of course it is a false conclusion for me to have implied that those who revere the ANZACs in any way support war, but based on the nature of the rhetoric sprayed far and wide regarding this issue it is not a conclusion I come to lightly. Regardless of the claims of ‘jus ad bellum’ in these instances, I think it is only fair to see the men and women who have been so callously manipulated and used by the state for their own ends as victims of the system we must always question.

There is a reason people of a certain age are more susceptible to these ideas and most welcomed by recruiters, it’s because they’re not intellectually developed enough yet to question what they are told. Sure there are outliers, but it is the nature of our evolutionary development that we have an adolescent period that lasts until our mid-twenties. The military is more than well aware of this and takes advantage of it to a disgusting degree. Whether it is a product of our society or of our pathetic education system, there is a certain pernicious degree to which the virus of nationalism entrenches itself in the minds of youth.

We emerge from an education system roughly finished but with no real achievements and the military sets upon this. Their entire advertising campaign is about ‘being a man’ or a ‘citizen’, showing your self-worth and being a part of something bigger than yourself. If you’re someone whose potential next job is being paid a few more dollars an hour at Subway, that sounds downright admirable. We’re supposed to be intelligent enough as a society to look past the nationalistic sound bites of the military industry, but we can’t because for some strange reason we’re stuck with this gestalt of national identity and value despite the fact that such things are at best completely undefinable and at worst non-existent and utterly meaningless.

Reverence for militarism opens up a very dangerous channel through which collectivism gains a veneer of respectability and this consequently undermines the liberties and values that we’ve attempted to build up as a force for good within the intellectual right. I therefore implore those of you who read this and feel in some way that I’ve made a valid criticism of how we hold ANZAC Day and soldiers in unimpeachable esteem that you look past the façade of jingoism and nationalism being perpetuated when you pass by those parades and that you don’t see those young men and the old men in uniform as heroes.

You need to see them as victims. More importantly, though, you need to notice the thousands not marching beside them on these days. These are the unspoken victims, the well-intentioned youth manipulated by a grandiose marketing campaign to be fed into the grinder by a callous, unthinking state who sees them only as fodder. Look at the wasted potential, the wasted ideas and the wasted youth of these people marching down the streets. For goodness’ sake, though, don’t think of them as heroes. There but for the grace of statistical chance wander several generations that we thought were undeserving of the trappings of our society, yet easily manipulated into thinking they were defending it.

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