Support the fallacy

Amongst the small group of war supporters that gathered in Washington last Sunday were the predictable signboards with “Freedom isn’t Free” and “Arrest the Traitors.”

I’m struggling to think about how many wars of the last century had anything to do with preserving constitutionally guaranteed freedoms in the United States. Certainly backing a corrupt puppet government in Viet Nam had little to do with promoting freedom of speech in the US – in fact the need to preserve that war was a major setback to personal liberty as is this one. The fact that we failed and that today our former “enemies” have a peaceful country rapidly embracing a free market economy while we move toward increased government intrusion into private lives seems to be a lost lesson.  Yet the need to believe that whatever military adventure is promoted by the Executive branch is substantially about preserving freedom is still a major bulwark of the fortress of fallacy the dwindling group of defenders still live in.


The need to believe in our Government’s various crusades produces the inevitable “Arrest the Traitors” contradiction we remember from the 60’s and 70’s which somehow makes the freedom we’re allegedly fighting for into treason. That such slogans directly contradict the notion that we are fighting for anything but fighting’s sake is always lost on the Rabid Right,

Indeed blindness to contradiction seems to be the definition of right wing politics. CNN quotes one warmonger as saying "Our troops are over there fighting for our rights, and if she [Sheehan] was in one of those countries she would not be able to do that."  Funny that she would not be able to do that in the countries we call allies and staunch supporters either and in light of her arrest, perhaps she really can’t do that here.

True enough that there is little freedom of speech in many countries, like Saudi Arabia, yet a great many countries have civil rights as great as or greater than ours and they don’t seem to have so much trouble trying to preserve them by conquest.  There is hardly reason to stifle it here while conducting a war that you’re trying to promote as saving that right.

And then there is the “Support the Troops” argument which seems to be saying that we need to pretend that they must be fighting for something worthwhile because if they aren’t, they will be demoralized.  War then, exists mostly to make the Army feel useful.  That argument of course would support any horror at all and makes any military action self-legitimizing. Can we conclude that to its supporters, this war is anything but a war on truth and reason? We, I predict, will continue to pretend that it’s about freedom abroad while making freedom the enemy at home and this war and the next war will go on forever.