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Opening Arguments

Battle grounds

MSNBC host Chris Hayes created an instant, angry buzz among verterans groups and the blogosphere ( see here, for example, and here) for saying on air that he was "uncomfortable" calling fallen soldiers "heroes" ):

 

I feel comfortable, ah, uncomfortable, about the word because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war. Um, and, I don’t want to obviously desecrate or disrespect memory of anyone that’s fallen, and obviously there are individual circumstances in which there is genuine, tremendous heroism: hail of gunfire, rescuing fellow soldiers and things like that. But it seems to me that we marshal this word in a way that is problematic. But maybe I’m wrong about that.

He's taken so much heat that he's already apologized, including a written statement, so I'm not going to pile on to the criticism from such as the VFW that Mr. Hayes should "enlist, go to war, then come home to what he expects is a grateful nation but encounters the opposite. It’s far too easy to cast stones from inexperience.”

I don't mean to stick up for him, but I think the critics are kind of missing the point he was trying to make. It's not that American's fallen aren't heroes. It's that extolling the fallen contributes to the glorification of war in a way that makes moving civiliaztion away from war more difficult. This was also the point attempted in the move "The Americanization of Emily," though even more incompetently than Mr Hayes' effort. Here's the key speech from Lt. Cmdr. Madison, the James Garner character:

War isn't hell at all. It's man at his best; the highest morality he's capable of. It's not war that's insane, you see. It's the morality of it. It's not greed or ambition that makes war: it's goodness. Wars are always fought for the best of reasons: for liberation or manifest destiny. Always against tyranny and always in the interest of humanity. So far this war, we've managed to butcher some ten million humans in the interest of humanity. Next war it seems we'll have to destroy all of man in order to preserve his damn dignity. It's not war that's unnatural to us, it's virtue. As long as valor remains a virtue, we shall have soldiers. So, I preach cowardice. Through cowardice, we shall all be saved.

The incoherence comes later, when the Julie Andrews character persuades Madison to go on the tour after the war to extol the virtues of the recent campaign, even though that would glorify the war, because it would be the coward's way out instead of the hero's path of using his fame to self-sacrificingly exposing the fraud of war, which would be the logical thing for a professed coward to do. So he cowardly lends his reputation to the perpetuation of war. Get that??? It almost has some kin to Hayes' forced apology, I think.

Anyway, it's an obvious point, isn't it, that making heroes of our fallen soldiers glorifies war? It's the flip side of the equally obvious point that we demonize our enemies. If we don't make our enemies evil and our soldiers heroes, how do we even go to war? And the larger point, made by the movie before it veers off into babble, is that each side in every war does the same thing. When we evaluate warriors, do we use only their loyalty to country and their courage in battle? Or does it matter what ideas or practices they give their loyalty and courage in defense of?

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