Your son died in the execution of

a dirty, unjust, colonial and rich man's war

for politics, oil and empire and you aided it

You didn't do your job as parents,

which is to protect your child

You didn't inoculate him against

the Bush Regime's lies

we're trying to be an empire on the cheap

To run an empire, you need lots and lots of cannon fodder

Since we stupidly decided to have an all-volunteer Army,

we can't afford too much cannon fodder

If push came to shove, the Chinese could afford

to lose 100 million soldiers and still

have a problem with overpopulation

How many of our soldiers could we lose

before everyone started screaming "stop the war"?

We've lost only a little over 3,500 in Iraq so far,

and pressure is already starting to build

"Our Brave Men & Women in Mesopotamia"

We've all seen the ritual many times by now on the Ten and Eleven O'clock News. Local U.S. Soldier X has been killed by an IED or a sniper in occupied Mesopotamia.

His parents and/or his high school football coach or History or Civics teacher say that everyone is "shocked" by Soldier X's tragic death but "proud" of his courageous "service" to his country.

The typical story line is that Solider X wanted to do what he could to "protect America" and/or "spread freedom" and/or "help others" and/or "help the Iraqis" and/or "be part of something bigger than himself."

In the invasion's earliest years, it was common to learn that Soldier X joined the military after the jetliner attacks of 9/11.

The killing of Soldier X is commonly portrayed as a dastardly and mysterious act against law and order, as if Iraq was a legitimate extension of U.S. soil and most Iraqis aren't legitimately sickened and outraged by the daily presence of North American occupation forces in their illegally invaded land.

Every time I see this repeated local news story, I briefly imagine myself contacting Soldier X's parents to say something along the following lines:

This is nonsense. Your son died in the execution of a dirty, unjust, colonial and rich man's war for politics, oil and empire and you enabled it.

You didn't do your job as parents, which is to protect your child. You didn't inoculate Soldier X against the lies of warmongers like Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowotiz, Rice and the rest.

You bought into all the transparent Iraq War nonsense about 'weapons of mass destruction' (WMD), the equally ridiculous subsequent claims to be exporting 'democracy' and all the rest (Street 2007a).

You foolishly trusted the War Masters and you passed this deadly and dangerous habit of obedience on to your children, setting them up to be cannon fodder for abominable war criminals. Shame on you!"

Soldiers Sacrificed for Oil & Empire

How many parents of fallen occupation troops are going to want to join Cindy Sheehan in saying that their children gave their lives "for nothing" or for the political and imperial ambitions of the Bush administration and its allies and enablers?

This judgment carries an emotional burden too heavy for most to want to carry.

It is contradicted to a certain extent by the fact that many soldiers did in fact enlist in the military in perceived service to good motives and higher ideals ("protecting" their fellow Americans and "helping" others abroad etc.).

When and if confronted by the terrible fact that those motives were exploited by domestic elites – war profiteers, power-mad politicians and sheltered imperialists like Cheney, Bush and the CEOs and leading shareholders of Boeing, Raytheon, Haliburton etc. – most military parents can be expected to respond in accord with the theory of cognitive dissonance.

They will often seek to reduce the uncomfortable tension between two incompatible (dissonant) beliefs -
(1) their child died for a good cause and in accord with their own noble values;

(2) their child died tragically for a bad cause reflecting the vile agenda of rich and powerful rulers – by deepening their commitment to the first belief.

Unpleasant as it is to realize, confrontation with the ugly fact that they lost a child to a dirty, illegal and colonial oil occupation can often be expected to intensify belief in the fraudulent justifications for the invasion of Iraq.

This is because the more you give and the less you get from a terrible policy or practice, the more you need to internalize the stated rationalizations for the policy or practice to overcome the painful dissonance resulting from the conflict between belief and reality.

A rich family that makes money (indirectly through, say, a heavily "defense"-laden stock portfolio) from U.S. militarism and whose son or daughter attends an elite liberal arts college (staffed by liberal and generally antiwar professors, maybe even including a radical or two) as the terrible invasion continues is more free to privately devalue the occupation they initially played along with than is the military family whose son or daughter comes home from Iraq in a box.

The first (privileged) family can privately register an external justification for going along with the war-enabling deceptions: they got richer and suffered no personal loss to themselves or anyone else in their immediate circle of friends and family.

The second family's situation is different. It is consigned to the only (and not just coincidentally disadvantaged) section of the highly stratified U.S. populace that is asked to make actual mortal sacrifice for the execution of a colonial "war" that is opposed by most of the civilian population.

It received no gain and only loss. Consistent with Festinger and Carlsmith's classic observations on the "cognitive consequences of forced compliance," it consequently feels more pressure to internalize the false premises on which the war was sold.


THE PSYCHOLOGICAL WAGE OF EMPIRE

Military families are also particularly susceptible to another form of forced-compliance cognitive response – what might be called the "psychological wage of empire."

As race-class theorists and activists have long observed, racism has long proved perversely attractive for white lower- and working-class struggling with their subordinate status in capitalist America.

By W.E.B. DuBois' account, anti-black racism grants lower and working-class whites a "public and psychological wage"—a false and dysfunctional measure of status and privilege used "to make up for alienating and exploitative class relationships."

White workers in the U.S. have long tended, as David Roediger has noted, to "define and accept their [subordinate] class position by fashioning identities as 'not slaves' and 'not blacks.'

" As Martin Luther King Jr.'s observed in a 1968 speech titled "The Drum Major Instinct," racialized capitalism gave its Caucasian working-class victims the rather pathetic "satisfaction of...thinking you are somebody big because you are white"

There is certainly something similar at work with regard to Empire.

A related "psychological wage of imperialism" that gives working- and lower-class soldiers and military families (including in some cases non-white soldiers and families) the dangerous, pseudo-compensatory "satisfaction of thinking" one is "somebody big" because one and/or one's children are on the right side of the imperial guns of the most powerful military in world history.

Such is the toxic, viciously circular reality of how class and empire intersect with basic psychological processes.

Paul Street @ ZNet