Although I don’t typically find a lot I can agree with at Reason Magazine, left libertarian Sheldon Richman’s piece there, highlighting Drumpf’s cynical exploitation of the grief of the widow of Fallen Seal Team member Ryan Owens, had me nodding in agreement throughout.
“As Donald Trump demonstrated in his first address to Congress, no matter how loathsome a ruler may be, he can bring an assembly of politicians to its feet and disarm some critics simply by invoking the quasi-secular faith—Americanism—and eulogizing the latest uniformed war-state employee to sacrifice his life for it. Trump has indeed shown he can fill the job expected of any president: supreme head of what Andrew Bacevich calls the Church of America the Redeemer.
Horace's declaration "Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori"—"It is sweet and proper to die for one's country"—is just what poet Wilfred Owen called it: "The old Lie." Screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky extended Owen's point when he had his protagonist in The Americanization of Emily tell a war widow, "We perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifices." How many times must people fall for this ploy before they realize they have been cruelly scammed? (The American Church is sustained by a coalition of profiteers and true believers or what economist Bruce Yandle generically dubbed "bootleggers and Baptists.")”
Richman asserts that killing for an ideology, even one and imminently defensible and cherished as Liberal Democracy, is no better than killing for a religion and that there is little real difference between the two in any case.
He also illustrates that the folk of a sleeping village, awakened by a pre-dawn raid on their home, will consult neither religion or ideology but merely grab their guns….
"Yemeni and tribal officials described a chaotic scene that followed [the raid], saying that tribal leaders, even those without an affiliation with AQAP, took up arms out of loyalty to Dhahab and a desire to protect their village. 'Any person who has dignity and honor would not stand by and watch his neighbors and relatives and tribesmen being attacked and do nothing,'said Saleh Hussein al-Aameri, a tribal leader who was close enough to hear the gunfire."