 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
A Response to Ted Rall by Michael Uhl I found Ted Rall’s article, "We’re Looking For A Few Good Refuseniks,"a manifesto of conscience addressed to movement activists and those in uniform alike, not only sociologically indefensible, but politically elitist. The article contains factual inaccuracies as well, but I want to focus initially on the author’s astoundingly one-dimensional social reality. [Rall’s article for those who’ve not seen it is posted below]. Essentially, it is Rall’s premise that abstract ideals like "individual accountability," and "individual responsibility" can be applied directly and universally to all human choices involving military service and participation in warfare, independently of restrictive or external conditions or circumstances. Rall expresses the belief that for soldiers, certainly as "volunteers," ‘free-will’ alone is sufficient to guide their actions correctly in any potentially ambiguous or compromising situation. Basically Rall argues that there is a moral duty for people to refuse to serve in the military, and in particular to refuse to participate in what he and I would both agree to be the criminal war in Iraq. Ralls moral fervor leads to dizzying heights of naivete as when he explains that the Bush administration "couldn’t have invaded Iraq without a compliant and complicit United States military." Why not extend this line of reasoning to all workers in weapons or munitions production, or to every form of criminal action? Criminals could just ‘say no.’ There’s no limit to the absurd scenarios one could invent for this panacea of thoughtless moralizing. Clearly the author has never served in the military. Or, if he has, he now suffers from amnesia. No veteran, and especially no war veteran, active in the peace movement should ever alienate him or herself from that person they were, however briefly, when in uniform or at war. When such a veteran wants to know why folks serve, and how it is that they end up in war, she or he may simply recall their own experiences. However far a given veteran has traveled politically or spiritually from that time, he or she may yet harbor an empathic thought for those in the ranks of the military today. Veterans above all know, however they express it politically, that the only real question when it comes to military service is the one that Ralls with his one-size-fits-all moral litmus test apparently can not grasp. That question is: who serves and who doesn’t? It’s a question of class, stupid! The military ranks are essentially made up of the urban and rural working classes, and disproportionately, from the underclass and racial or national minorities. 80 % of those who served in Vietnam were from the working class or the working poor. Those demographics have not changed much with the All Volunteer Force; if anything, today’s military is even more small town and blue collar than the conscripted army of thirty years ago. It may come as a surprise to Ted Rall, but there is no level playing field of opportunity in these United States. Upward mobility is no myth in America, but it advances only a small percentage of the population in any given economic cycle. Even middle brow studies now show that ‘class matters’ in the U.S., and that most people die in the class they were born to. People’s consciousness is formed substantially, give or take individual anomalies and variations, by their lives and circumstances. You could say that consciousness is as much a product of necessity as an innate range of choices or possibilities. I know from my own experience with Vietnam that events and circumstances can lead, not only to a change - but to the very awakening - of consciousness. With my brand-name education, how could I have been so ill-informed, so uncurious about history and world events, I have often had cause to wonder? It was easy, when you consider the explanation Noam Chomsky offers: "The function of education is to serve power and privilege. One of the central tasks of a successful education is to endow its victims with the capacity to observe, but not to see..." Clearly Chomsky is talking about a form of indoctrination that substitutes for real education, the very opposite of acquiring the critical faculty one needs to think for oneself, or in the case of those Chomsky calls "intellectuals" - to occupy the privileged positions of being able to learn the truth and, therefore, have the moral empowerment and obligation to take "responsibility." Neither my conservative Catholic education, nor my managerial middle class background one step from my family’s blue collar roots, had supported me to acquire a more enlightened view of either history or current events before I was dragooned into the military. I grew up in a world where there was a singular and dominant narrative about American goodness and intentions. It took the Vietnam War, and later, the antiwar movement, to teach me what my education had not. Many Iraq war veterans, undoubtedly, are currently undergoing a similar transformation. Given the obstacles of class and social indoctrination set before a typical military recruit, whose primary motivation for service in the overwhelming majority of cases is economic, not martial, the contention that the average soldier possesses either the clarity of mind or self-possession to distinguish in every instance a legal order from an illegal one, much less raise a serious challenge, is a virtual parody of class elitism. Certainly in a combat zone such distinctions are full of ambiguities, and subject to instantaneous life or death decisions. Soldiers are trained to follow orders, not challenge them, even if today’s training might include a block of lucid instruction on the Laws of Land Warfare, which, you will pardon me if I seriously doubt. The war zone itself, as war trauma expert Dr. Robert Jay Lifton has written about Vietnam, can create an "atrocity producing" environment where soldiers are generally the unwilling executioners of policies and actions they neither create nor control. Rall writes that "antiwar groups praise the soldiers fighting wars they abhor," suggesting that the slogan ‘Support the Troops’ for the antiwar movement is a moral quagmire. True enough, when it stands alone. But when the ambiguities of that phrase are joined inseparably to the demand Bring Them Home Now, our message can not be confused with alternatives that either support the war, or are soft on issues of withdrawal, occupation, future military bases, and so on. The debate about ‘support the troops’ is essentially mindless, when stripped of its political content. At some point the antiwar movement will need to amplify its demand to fund the rebuilding of Iraq without a U.S. agenda of domination. Before that we need to get the troops home now, and as Veterans For Peace stresses, take care of them when they get here. On certain questions of fact, Rall is also weakly informed, take the Nuremberg Trials following World War Two. He writes that soldiers could not save themselves from prosecution with the defense that they were "just following orders." In fact, no soldiers were prosecuted at either Nuremberg or the Tokyo trials, only the highest and most culpable civilian and military leadership the Americans and their allies could get their hands on. Even some of the most vicious and high ranking SS officers of the Eastern Front were pardoned by the allied occupation command in the course of the so-called ‘de-nazification’ of German society. Rall is likewise in error concerning attitudes toward soldiers in some quarters of the Vietnam antiwar movement. Some student activists in the SDS (Students For a Democratic Society) milieu had a great deal of difficulty at first seeing past the soldiers to the war they were fighting. The spat-upon-vet is most certainly an urban myth. But, as Carol Brightman, founder in 1965 of the antiwar magazine Viet-Report, reminded me recently, the term "baby killers" was, perhaps not widely, but still persistently, present among opponents of the Vietnam War, and cause for internal discussion and political "struggle." The G.I. Coffeehouse movement, begun in 1967, was a political response to this misconception that soldiers, even workers, were the adversaries, much less the responsible agents, along with the war’s architects and managers. In my class (I just finished teaching a course on the Vietnam War and the Movement That Opposed It at the University of Maine), Ted Rall’s paper get’s a ‘D.’ His research is shoddy and superficial, and he has failed to think through even the most obvious absurdities of his politics and pseudo-philosophizing. ———
Michael Uhl, Ph.D., a writer and college teacher, is a co-founder of Citizen Soldier and a charter member of Veterans For Peace. He is also a member of the Disabled America Veterans. He led a combat intelligence team in Vietnam with the 11th Infantry. Were looking for a few good refuseniks Do our government's poorly paid contract killers deserve our "support" for blindly following orders? By Ted Rall 12/10/09 "ICH" — NEW YORK — "Support the Troops, Oppose Their Actions," reads the oxymoronic headline of an April 2005 essay at antiwar.com. In a column titled "Support Our Troops, Not Our President," liberal columnist Richard Reeves worries about Iraq war vets: "They will come home to be called 'torturers,' as Vietnam vets were called 'baby killers.'" To avoid repeating the supposed excesses of the '60s peace movement, today's antiwar groups praise the soldiers fighting the wars they abhor. "What if they gave a war," a poster of the Vietnam era asked, "and nobody came?" If we are, as Jean-Paul Sartre posited, defined by our actions, most of the blame for the murder of more than 100,000 Iraqis belongs to our top government officials. But Bush's armchair warriors couldn't have invaded Iraq without a compliant and complicit United States military--one that, it should be noted, is all volunteer. These individuals, who enjoy free will, fire the guns and drop the bombs. If personal responsibility is to have any meaning, the men and women of our armed forces have to be held individually accountable for the carnage. "Supporting our troops while opposing their actions may seem contradictory," argues Joshua Frank in the antiwar.com article. "The duties of U.S. soldiers in Iraq are wrong and many may be committing horrible crimes against humanity. True. But soldiers are mostly not bad people (though, of course, some are)." How is a person who voluntarily commits "horrible crimes against humanity" not a "bad person"? Even if U.S. forces were not violating the rules of war in Iraq--torturing, maiming and murdering POWs, robbing and subjecting civilians to collective punishment, dropping white phosphorus and depleted uranium bombs on civilian targets--the war itself, based on false pretenses and opposed by the United Nations, would remain a gross violation of American and international law. Soldiers, they say, must obey orders. However, "just following orders" wasn't an acceptable excuse at the Nuremberg trials, where the charges included waging a war of aggression. Do our government's poorly paid contract killers deserve our "support" for blindly following orders? Not according to the military itself. The U.S. Army's "Law of Land Warfare," taught in basic training, says that U.S. troops must always refuse an unlawful order--one that violates the Constitution or other U.S. laws, is not reasonably linked to military necessity or is issued by someone without the proper authority. Even passivity in the face of wrongdoing breaks military law. "If you are responsible for what's going on around you, and it is going unlawfully, and you know that [and] do nothing about it, I'm going to prosecute you," says Bill Eckhardt, a retired army colonel and professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law who prosecuted most of the perpetrators of the My Lai massacre. "So basically, you've gotta be a whistleblower." Congress never declared war against Iraq. As an unelected imposter, George W. Bush did not enjoy authority under the War Powers Act to commit American forces abroad. Concentration camps at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere violate the Geneva Conventions, which as treaty obligations are binding under U.S. law. Iraq did not threaten the United States. Iraq is not the subject of a U.N.-led international police action. Thus, by several measures, the war is illegal. Every order to deploy a soldier, aviator or sailor to fight in Iraq is by definition an unlawful order, one that he or she is legally and morally bound to refuse. What are members of the military to do? They should certainly refuse to applaud when Bush uses them as backdrops to his logo-ridden pro-death pep rallies. Moreover, just as Muslim leaders were pressured to speak out against Islamist extremists after 9/11, soldiers ought to step forward to condemn the atrocities at Bagram, Fallujah and Guantánamo in letters to newspapers and other public venues. The military used to be an honorable calling. Not under Bush. Ethical Americans considering a military career should seek a civilian job until a lawful, elected government has been restored in Washington and we have withdrawn our forces from occupied Afghanistan and Iraq. Those who are already enlisted should refuse to reenlist. Soldiers trapped by "stop loss" orders should apply for conscientious objector status (which is difficult to obtain) or refuse deployment based on the unlawful order principle. And if all else fails, there's always desertion. "They set up a roadblock with a sign in Arabic that says 'Stop or you'll be shot,'" 22-year-old Darrell Anderson told PBS' "NewsHour" about his seven-month tour of duty in Iraq. "This is a third world country. How many people can read? And I was in that situation: The family didn't stop, stopped in front of me. I was ordered to fire. I refused and said, 'The window's rolled down.' And I said, 'Look, there's children in the back.' There's a family. I did the right thing. They said, 'No you didn't. Next time you will open fire or you'll be punished.' Should I go to prison because I can't kill women and children?" Anderson fled to Canada, which is considering extraditing him back to the United States. Even if he ends up in a military prison, Anderson will have made the correct choice. Rather than running around shouting that they "support the troops," opponents of the Iraq war ought to tell soldiers that fighting an illegal war is wrong. Rather than feeding their guilt for the supposed sins of the '60s antiwar movement by wallowing in phony jingoism, they ought to encourage members of the military to make the same difficult decision as the 5500 soldiers who have deserted or gone AWOL under Bush and the more than 250 who have applied for C.O. status. By the way, as Jerry Lembcke found in his book "The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam" (1998), there's no reason for antiwar types to feel guilty over the treatment of Vietnam vets--there's no evidence of any kind that anyone ever spat on a Vietnam veteran or called one a "baby killer." Those stories only began appearing after the 1982 release of "Rambo: First Blood:" "It wasn't my war--you asked me, I didn't ask you...and I did what I had to do to win," says Sylvester Stallone's character. "Then I came back to the world and I see all those maggots at the airport, protesting me, spitting on me, calling me a baby-killer." Pure fiction. Chris Clarke (full disclosure: Clarke served as editor for a defunct publication that ran my cartoons) recalls a different reality: "In the 1960s and '70s, antiwar activists opened coffeehouses near military bases to provide soldiers with troubled consciences places to spend a few off-duty hours in like-minded company. We harbored deserters and AWOLs. We wrote letters to GIs, sent them care packages, grieved over them when they joined the damnable body counts announced on the Five O'Clock Follies." OK, lefties? You can drop the "support the troops" shtick now. Ted Rall, America's hardest-hitting editorial cartoonist for Universal Press Syndicate, is an award-winning commentator who also works as an illustrator, columnist, and radio commentator. Copyright Ted Rall |
Address: |