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Chris Hedges: The Lie of Patriotism
BALTIMORE—When Rory Fanning, a burly veteran who served in the 2nd Army Ranger Battalion and was deployed in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2004, appeared at the Donald Trump rally in Chicago last month he was wearing the top half of his combat fatigues. As he moved through the crowd, dozens of Trump supporters shouted greetings such as “Welcome home, brother” and “Thank you for your service.” Then came the protest that shut down the rally. Fanning, one of the demonstrators, pulled out a flag that read “Vets Against Racism, War and Empire.”
“Immediately someone threw a drink on me,” he said when I interviewed him on my teleSUR show, “Days of Revolt.” “I got hit from behind in the head three or four times. It was quite the switch, quite the pivot on me. Questioning the narrative, questioning Donald Trump’s narrative, and I was suddenly out of their good graces.”
Nationalists do not venerate veterans. They venerate veterans who read from the approved patriotic script. America is the greatest and most powerful country on earth. Those we fight are depraved barbarians. Our enemies deserve death. God is on our side. Victory is assured. Our soldiers and Marines are heroes. Deviate from this cant, no matter how many military tours you may have served, and you become despicable. The vaunted patriotism of the right wing is about self-worship. It is a raw lust for violence. It is blind subservience to the state. And it works to censor the reality of war[….]
War, up close, bears no relation to the myth. It is depraved and cruel. It has nothing to do with noble ends or justice. Killing is a dirty, ugly business. There is a vast disparity between war’s reality and the myth peddled by the press, the entertainment industry, politicians and churches.
“What I didn’t know as I entered [Afghanistan] with the 2nd Army Ranger Battalion was that the Taliban had essentially surrendered after the initial assault by the Air Force and the special forces,” Fanning said of his first tour, which started in late 2001. “Our job was essentially to draw the Taliban back into the fight. Surrender wasn’t good enough for politicians after 9/11. We wanted blood. We wanted a head count. It really didn’t matter who it was. So we’d walk up to people, people who had been occupied … , involved in civil war before that, with tons of money at our disposal. We’d said, ‘Hey, we will give you this amount of money if you point out a member of the Taliban.’ An Afghan would say, ‘Sure, absolutely. There’s a member right there.’ So we go next door. We’d land in their neighbor’s front yard, put a bag over every military-aged person’s head, whether they were a member of the Taliban or not, give the person who identified that person money. Then that person would also get that neighbor’s property. In a country with as much desperation and poverty as Afghanistan you’d do anything to put money or food on your family’s table. Essentially that’s what we were doing. But we were also bringing people who had absolutely no stake in the fight into the war. We were creating enemies.
“I signed up after 9/11 to prevent another 9/11 from happening,” he went on. “But soon after arriving in Afghanistan I realized I was only creating the conditions for more terrorist attacks. It was a hard pill to swallow. We were essentially bullies.” [read complete article]
Here’s a video of Rory Fanning being ejected from a Donald Trump rally. During the incident he was doused with a drink and struck:
Email subscribers can access the video by clicking on the title of this article.
Supporters of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, left, face off with protesters after a rally on the campus of the University of Illinois-Chicago was cancelled due to security concerns Friday, March 11, 2016, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)
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Copyright 2016 Chris Hedges. First published in TruthDig.
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