Obama lays it on thick for the youth that do the fighting for them.

Young lives are destroyed by the war profiteers

It was sickening watching CNN today having to listen to Obama talking to young military men and women about the war in Afghanistan and their role.  Obama is not alone of course, it is the role of all these corporate politicians, these representatives of the capitalist class to lie and deceive young people in to thinking the wars they send them to are just and necessary conflicts for the good of mankind.  Bush did the same but he's an idiot, Obama is a slick, consummate representative of the bourgeois.

I watched the faces of these young people as Obama spoke and wondered what they must be thinking.  Growing up near a US air base in England I remember meeting young Americans, some of them on their way to or way back from Vietnam.  Many of them were from small towns, rural people who had not great knowledge of the world.  I met some who had gone AWOL and had enough of Vietnam and war.

I wasn't simply put off by it all, but angry as well as it is my people, working class people that are the victims, those that go and those that they are sent to kill. "Within a worldview of pre-emptive war and wars of choice, the altruism and good intentions of young people become one more sentiment to be manipulated and exploited in order to further the aims of a small group of policymakers." writes Jorge Mariscal, a Vietnam Veteran who now teaches at UC San Diego.

Rambo is propaganda, Stillone never went to Vietnam

I couldn't have put it better, and that's for those genuine young people who signed up to defend what they believed was a declaration of war on the US and were there to defend us.  They were convinced by the corporate mass media that Iraqis flew planes in to the World Trade Center on 911 though we know that was a lie.  These youngsters have been conned. When he spoke to the troops today Obama said he knows that many of them joined up "because you had seen fellow Americans suffer at the hands of Osama Bin Laden"  He will never forget their sacrifice and what they do he told them, "for love of country and love of each other" powerful words if they were being spoken in earnest and not part of a propaganda campaign.

"You keep us safe each and every day"  he went on.   But he left the word "profits" out. It is "profits" that must be kept safe.  "Your Commander in Chief has your back" he told them. What difference is he from the imbecile Bush? If he cared about their backs their backs would not be in Afghanistan or Iraq.

I blogged about this hypocrisy before talking about another warmonger and ex Bechtel CEO, Casper Weinberger. He too boasted about the patriotism of workers, what great heroes American workers are, only his argument for why there were a higher percentage of minorities volunteering was that they were more patriotic than white folks.  The politicians of the billionaires have to praise the patriotism and heroism of working people to justify the fact that their kids won't be doing the fighting and dying, they'll just benefit from the profits of war.  But those that volunteer out of a sense of duty to sacrifice, to defend the country from invaders, are a minority.  Jorge Mariscal points to an Associated Press analysis showing that, “nearly three-fourths of [U.S. troops] killed in Iraq came from towns where the per capita income was below the national average. More than half came from towns where the percentage of people living in poverty topped the national average.”

This does not mean that there aren't families with military tradition whose children will follow their fathers, mothers, uncles and aunts in to the military.  Pat Tillman, the principled young man who gave up a promising football career to join the military came from such a family.  He died in Afghanistan, assassinated by US government operatives I am convinced of it. * My father spent three years and nine months in a Japanese prison camp and was an army man but sensible enough to tell me to keep clear of it. And the point is that we all defend what we have, our homes, our rights, our freedoms that working people have won.  Workers don't have to be bribed to defend what is right.  That is why these wars will never be won and why the Vietnamese won that war at great sacrifice, because their way of life, their desire to control their own destiny as a nation was at stake; they were not the invaders. The Mau Mau drove the British out under the same impetus.

But what we have is an economic draft.  The destruction of public education, putting it out of reach of so many working  class youth, as well as the destruction of decent jobs with Union rates of pay and conditions will give the warmongers a larger pool of young cannon fodder. The flag waving, the pomp and ceremony, being lauded as heroes and patriots is for the journey out. No matter what country you are from, it is workers that die and fight.  The return trip is not as glorious as jobs, medical care, benefits and rights due you are not so generous as you might hope.

Even before the present attacks on education, many youth joined the military as a means of getting an eduction.  And as Jorge Mariscal points out, "For communities often marked as “foreign,” such as Latinos and Asians, there is pressure to serve in order to prove that one is “American.”
But no word of this from Obama, no mention of the way recruiters target schools in the inner cities or poor rural areas. No mention of the militarization of our children and the military's role in developing the video games they play that are full of violence; of course, he can't, he's in on it.  Like other representatives of his class they all parrot the same old lies.  How this war or that is about freedom and democracy and justice not about oil and trade and profits. And how brave and heroic the young worker is that sees the military as the only opportunity to a better life in the land of the free. They know that someone with a decent job with a decent future is not likely to give that up; they need people with limited options, and as they control the option market they can ensure they find them.

They are truly a disgusting bunch.

* See the movie The Tillman Story