No Coercion

I recently discovered a facebook group called Soldiers Are Not Heroes. I ran across it a few days ago when a friend joined it, and, glancing at it briefly I figured I probably pretty much agreed with it. But I didn’t bother joining it until I saw people start joining a petition to demand that facebook remove the group. Upon closer inspection, it seems to have a bit of a pacifist bent to it (which I reject), but I stand 100% behind its mission “to question the perpetrated illusion that a man becomes a hero by wearing a uniform.”

Soldiers (by which they clearly mean not just soldiers but troops from all branches of the military) don’t get a free pass to hero-land just because they happen to think they’re doing something good and noble. Psychopaths and cult leaders often sincerely believe they’re doing something good by murdering or subjugating people, but we don’t call them heroes. Maybe not a perfect analogy, but you get the point.

There are several reasons to reject the blind honoring of military personnel:

1. Troops are paid out of funds taken by force from the people they claim to be protecting (same as the Mafia).

2. The military is a part of compulsory nation-state governments, which violently suppress competing defense agencies (same as the Mafia).

3. Unless troops are literally defending a country’s borders (or the territory inside those borders) from a current or impending attack, they are not engaging in legitimate defense but rather illegitimate aggression.

4. Troops engaging in aggression in other countries under the justification that they’re protecting our rights are terribly mistaken since military engagement is always one of the chief rationales for the expansion of government at home and infringement of rights.

5. Troops claiming that it’s necessary to fight overseas in order to keep us safe are again sorely mistaken since their actions are well known to actually increase anger against their country and create more extremists intent on killing the troops and the troops’ fellow countrymen.

To be clear, I sympathize with the troops and their families since I fully understand that most of them have the absolute best of intentions and have never really thought through the implications of what they’re doing, and they may indeed act heroically in specific instances and in other areas of their lives, but there is nothing heroic about giving yourself over to do the State’s bidding in military matters.

And the fact that there’s a huge movement on facebook to ban “Soldiers Are Not Heroes” betrays a sad epidemic of unthinking rally-round-the-flag nationalism (which these same people rightly ridicule when they see it happening in other countries). As Murray Rothbard says in For a New Liberty,

 War is the great excuse for mobilizing all the energies and resources of the nation, in the name of patriotic rhetoric, under the aegis and dictation of the State apparatus. It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society. Society becomes a herd, seeking to kill its alleged enemies, rooting out and suppressing all dissent from the official war effort, happily betraying truth for the supposed public interest. Society becomes an armed camp, with the values and the morals—as the libertarian Albert Jay Nock once phrased it—of an “army on the march.”

     It is particularly ironic that war always enables the State to rally the energies of its citizens under the slogan of helping it to defend the country against some bestial outside menace. For the root myth that enables the State to wax fat off war is the canard that war is a defense by the State of its subjects. The facts, however, are precisely the reverse. For if war is the health of the State, it is also its greatest danger. A State can only “die” by defeat in war or by revolution. In war, therefore, the State frantically mobilizes its subjects to fight for it against another State, under the pretext that it is fighting to defend them.

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