Veterans for Liberty? Maybe not.
This is a combination of two earlier posts on Steemit. They created considerable uproar from veterans who were outraged that I would dare imply even the slightest possibility that veterans fought for freedom. So what am I doing here? Doubling down by editing the two columns together and reposting it somewhere else, of course!
Most military veterans claim to have "fought for my freedom." Many claim to still stand ready to defend it today, and the current (2019/2020) dispute over firearm freedom in Virginia includes a lot of veterans who say they're ready to fight for freedom there.
However, I must question their sincerity. In my experience, most former soldiers still revere political authority and chains of command. They believe in following orders first, and thinking about them never. This is what military basic training in boot camp is for, after all. Boot camp isolates the recruit, imposes a harsh schedule, and explicitly seeks to break down the individual psychologically through verbal abuse and arbitrary disciplinary actions. He wakes up on command, stands in formation, sings a hymn, and recites a prayer to his sacred emblem. He marches to chow, and then eats a communal meal on someone else's arbitrary, short schedule, or starve. Then drill. Individual failure means group punishment. Horizontal enforcement is encouraged. Obedience is rewarded sometimes, and failure, dissent, or disobedience is punished harshly, sometimes when it hasn't been committed in the first place.
The recruit is trained to worship the rank structure. More bars and rockers? Obey. Shiny metal bits? Obey harder. Shut up and do as you're told without question. Or else. He learns a jargon that is gibberish to the uninitiated. Of course, most specialized fields have jargon, technical terms, and slang, but the military adds to this a symbolism and mythology. Like a secret society, you're jumping through hoops in order to be granted the honor of joining at the lowest official rank instead of being a mere prospect or aspirant. This is classic cult conditioning. "But it's to prepare troops for the battlefield chaos," you say? Bullshit. It's to ensure the conscience can't kick in under any circumstances whatsoever when they receive their orders. They're trained to live their lives on someone else's schedule, follow someone else's rules, obey someone else's orders, and just shut up and do as told.
Veterans, do you really believe we mundane civilians take our liberty for granted, or that you deserve respect just because you wore a uniform? You presume anyone who was not in the military is inferior, undisciplined and weak, right? How does your obedience to superiors and willingness to inflict violence on command demonstrate virtue? Sure, the military has codes of conduct, military law, and rules of engagement. But orders come from the brass, and the brass gets their orders from the politicians, and the politicians are undeniably corrupt bastards who lie, steal, and cheat their way into power. There hasn't even been a nod toward a congressional declaration of war since World War II, and yet we have been subjected to the Korean war, the Vietnam War, Gulf Wars I & II, and innumerable other military interventions around the world. What happened to your oath to uphold and defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic? No, you obey the domestic enemies, make excuses when they break the rules that are supposed to restrain them, and cheer when they punish innocent people for not following orders, because that is who pays you.
Sure, they're more likely than not to be decent on the subject of firearms, but liberty as a whole is foreign to military culture. While there are individual exceptions, I cannot support the conservative instinct to trust the troops as allies. I hear soldiers and veterans praising prohibition and militarized national borders. As tax feeders past and present, soldiers do not question the legitimacy of taxation. They fought for the greatest threat to freedom in history: state monopoly. It isn't freedom the veterans espouse, it's a slightly expanded list of permissions.