Friday, January 17, 2014 — We weren’t optimistic about having anything fresh to put up here so soon after yesterday’s post. But, lo and behold, today The Guardian has a piece about the NHRebellion from former Navy corpsman Michael McCarthy.
According to The Guardian, McCarthy served in Afghanistan in 2008. As a corpsman, he would have been patching up — or trying to patch up — U.S. Marines blown up or shot up in his immediate vicinity. In certain circles that confers about as much cred as any one man can lift.
From those same circles — at least, since the military draft was abolished — we often hear that “It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press,” &c., &c.
It’s ironic that that homage to the military is so popular in this country, since it’s really just a variation of Chairman Mao’s old saying, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
Military force is authoritarianism, applied to the deliver of violence. It is not inherently virtuous — far from it. In fact, military force can only be good when it is used in the defense of that which is in itself inherently good, and only when that is necessary, and only when used in proportion to the threat.
All the soldier — or Marine — can guarantee us is authoritarianism, and we have enough of that in this country already: one of our two political parties believes in it; the other is afraid to directly confront it.
McCarthy and the NHRebellion are doing that on our behalf.