Zell Miller's Cracker Barrel Philosophy
Is All Wet
adrien rain burke
"For it has been said so truthfully that it is the soldier, not the reporter,
who has given us the freedom of the press. It is the soldier, not the poet,
who has given us freedom of speech.
"It is the soldier, not the agitator, who has given us the freedom to
protest." ~Zell Miller, speaking at the Republican Convention, 2004
That proves it: Zell Miller is definitely a few crackers short of a full
barrel.
Whatever role soldiers may have played in history - in OUR history -
securing freedom of the press and freedom of speech - any of our famous freedoms - has not been one of
their more striking contributions. That has always been the job of "agitators" - with occasional help from reporters.
This is not their fault, really. The training they
are subjected to is especially designed to stifle the persistent voice of
rebellion that, hopefully, lives in all of us. The soldier must obey orders
without question and without hesitation. In fact, they can be shot for
disobeying an order. Should they later be proven right, a court
martial might exonerate them. But if they die for their insubordination,
their heroism will probably go unsung. And what the military code does not
accomplish in supressing their individuality, is often completed by peer
pressure. To speak against an unjust conflict may seem a personal insult to compatriots whose lives are on the line, and whose sacrifices they are in a position to appreciate. And they are routinely constrained by authority from expressing dissenting views
while in uniform. "Theirs not to reason why, . . . ."
So the value of a soldier's contribution to society must always begin with
the question "what have they fought for?" In America, lets assume that,
when they fought on the American side, they fought consciously for American
values, such as freedom of the press and freedom of speech, though they
enjoy little of those freedoms themselves, while in uniform. Still, many
soldiers, in world history and in our own, have fought for noble causes -
slogans, really - that had little or nothing to do with the realpolitik
reasons for which a war was fought. Not long ago, men of my generation
fought communism in Vietnam, so that they wouldn't "have to fight it in San
Diego." They fought peasants living in straw huts who had never heard of
San Diego, much less threatened it. Meanwhile, our own government conducted
a covert war - CoInTelPro - AGAINST freedom of speech and the press here at
home.
I hold the soldiers almost blameless. That is, it is always best to know and
personally support the purpose for which one kills on command, but it is
hard to blame those who made the understandable mistake of believing
government lies. Everything in our educational system and popular culture
tends toward unquestioning patriotism and toward regarding decisions made by rulers as somehow the result of the democratic process. It takes guts to step out of line,
and even more courage to stay out of line - as witness our current campaign
debate on the respective military careers of the two candidates. Whether or
not either of them served "honorably," the question of morality, the
morality of the war itself, is taboo. More taboo now than it was while it
was in progress, before we lost, and tacitly acknowledged the futility of
58,000 American lives lost, and three million Vietnamese killed. The result
is a class of rhetoric insulting to every war resister who worked and
fought, risked their careers and freedom, and yes, their lives, to end that
unjust slaughter.
Agitators - in and out of the military - finally stopped that useless war.
The current ugly bout of belligerent superpatriotism is the revenge of the
snarling right. We have ignored their fury for decades, because for us the war was
over. They,however, have been busy, bitterly rewriting history, justifying militarism, and
villifying the antiwar movement. We who cared so passionately about that
terrible conflict need the courage of our old convictions now, to defend
what we once stood for. All of the waving flags, bragging old warmongers,
and bellicose threats, do not change the fact that those who strove for peace
and freedom in the sixties, did so in good conscience and were proven right
in the end. The war was wrong, and should have ended years before it did.
But Vietnam was unique in that we lost it, so perhaps we should consider
other wars, other soldiers.
We can begin with the Revolutionary War, which was waged to secure our
independence from England. Those soldiers were volunteers and it is fair to
assume they understood the nature of the freedoms they were seeking.
After all, they already had a rebellious press, agitating and advocating for
a democracy. Because so many newspapermen had agitated for the
cause, they had an unusual amount of influence in framing our Bill of
Rights. It was they - the journalists - who insisted on freedom of the
press. Of course they had the backing of such as Thomas Jefferson, who
wrote, "...were it left to me to decide, whether we should have a government
without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate
a moment to prefer the latter." Thomas Jefferson, in turn, was inspired by
that agitator of agitators, Tom Paine, who agitated all of his public life
for freedom of the press, narrowly escaping the guillotine in France and
arrest in England, to come to America, where he agitated tirelessly for
freedom. http://obits.com/painethomas.html
In the war we are now engaged in, American volunteer soldiers are just as
bravely backing an unelected puppet regime that is closing critical news
media, and threatening reporters with death. Previously, American bombers
have targeted media and journalists considered less than friendly to our
invasion of Iraq. As they did in Serbia, under a different administration. These are war crimes, and since the Nuremburg Trials, the excuse that one was following orders no longer relieves the soldier of moral responsibility.
Soldiers engage in these abhorrent activities not because they personally
oppose freedom of speech or of the press, but because, as any drill sergeant
will affirm, "it's not their job to think."
It was not their job to think when they all but eradicated Native Americans,
before the term genocide was coined, or condemned. Certainly no American army
of the Indian Wars era stood fast to protect Indian rights, or lives, or
land, from those who sought to take them. Until quite recently, the
reservations on to which they were forced, were living under a strangely
unamerican kind of theocracy, wherein children were taken forcibly from
their families and "christianized" in authoritarian "schools." On the res,
they were often denied the right to vote - although their services were
always wanted in wars abroad. No platoons or battalions were dispatched to
safeguard THEIR first amendment rights.
Eventually, Native Americans, 20th century survivors of genocide, began to
agitate.
During most of our history, agitators have worked to broaden the freedom
granted by the constitution to the disenfranchised. For over a hundred
years, American women had no voice in their governance. They could not vote
to grant themselves some semblance of equality. They could not practice law
to win their equality in the courts. It was during the antislavery movement
that women realized that, though they were honored in song and story, they
had no legal power against societal evil, when they were forbidden by
religious custom even to speak in public.
They agitated.
For three generaions, feminist agitators made an unholy nuisance of
themselves, winning the vote long after most of the founders of their
movement were dead. No army stood beside them to endorse their right of free
speech, or protect them from riots, egg- and tomato-throwing, and insults of
every kind. No soldier prevented their arrest or stopped them from being
jailed for atempting to vote. For about 75 years they - and the following of
men they won over - agitated against "decent society" to win rights which
even the most conservative GOP member would not dare publicly deny them.
More recently, having long attained the vote, women began agitating against
the laws that still treated them variously as children or incompetents, so
that they could not control their own property, and while married, had only
the "right" to obey. Wives could be beaten with impunity - need I say that
the army was not there to prevent or punish it? The police laughed it off,
popular culture slyly glorified it. And rape was largely unpunished, since
the victim was considered somehow responsible. And the army? Well, of late,
they are fairly busy in Iraq and Okinawa ( to name a couple of places that
have recently made the news) raping women and girls, and abetting the rape
of men and boys - to add a new twist to an old story.
In World War 2, it is fair to say that our military actions helped free
Europe and Asia from the repressive Axis powers. But we have also supported with
armed force, a number of governments which have dealt harshly with
dissent of any sort. Certainly our soldiers did not forward the cause of
freedom in Cuba and in the Philippines in the late 19th and early 20th
century.
The freedom of Black American slaves, on the other hand, was secured in the
end (and opposed just as bravely, don't forget!) by war - and American
warriors. But the lead-up to the Civil War was a political, and not a
military affair. To the extent that the Civil War became a war for
Emancipation (there is much controversy on this point, but I won't argue it
here) , it was the product of decades of agitation. The abolitionists spent
their lives ducking lynch mobs and spitballs, while the abolitionist presses
were subject to repeated, organized destruction. At this point, soldiers
were not called to protect their rights to freedom of speech and of the
press, and apparently, did not volunteer for it.
While the outcome of the war was determined militarily, the cause - abolition of slavery -
was the product of agitation and direct action. Former slaves and white
sympathizers broke the laws that forbade aiding and hiding escaping slaves.
In the twentieth century, agitators finally secured for the descendants of
freed slaves the right to vote (although the 2000 election indicates that
right is not entirely secure). Old men and women, children, students - black
and white, marched and sang, faced attack dogs and beatings, and went to
jail, even died, to accomplish in fact what had once been written into the
Bill of Rights - legal equality. And considering their non-violent
principles, it would be libelous to refer to them as soldiers when they
struggled against injustice and for their freedom.
See, sometimes the soldiers are on one side, and sometimes on the other. It
all depends on whose orders they're following. One may be as courageous in
the service of a lie as of the truth, as self-sacrificing in defending
tyranny as in opposing it. It is vital to separate blind obedience from
individual courage.
When I heard Miller's absurd propositions cheered by people I supposed had
some knowledge of history, I was dismayed. I looked for the outrage I was
sure his remarks would cause. But there hasn't been much, so I wrote this.
I don't care what party Miller cleaves to in the end. He is no asset to
either. But Zell Miller's infantile jingoism must not be allowed to pass
for history, or patriotism, or truth.
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