Morality vs. Material Interests - Myths Of Our Time
01 January 2011By Paul Craig Roberts
It is conventional wisdom that it was the draft
that ended the
Vietnam war. According to this explanation,
cowardly college students subject to the draft and
their unpatriotic families, forced an end to the war.
This is Karl Marx's explanation. Material interests,
not empty morality, are said to have brought the war
to an end.
That fact that in those days the US still had an
independent media of sorts that sometimes framed the
war in moral terms is ignored. Are we sure, for
example, that the film of the naked little girl
running in terror down the road burning with napalm
was ineffectual in arousing moral opposition to the
war? Are we certain that it wasn't an aroused moral
conscience that brought about the end of the war but
was college students' fears for their lives and limbs?
If we ascribe ending the war to material interests, it
makes ending the war look as unworthy as the war
itself.
Yet, virtually every conservative columnist,
commentator, newsperson and politician, as well as
today's antiwar protesters and apparently the
Pentagon, believes that a military draft would reduce
Americans' toleration for wars because of body bags
coming home to middle and upper class parents.
Apparently, the lower class doesn't mind its kids
coming back in body bags.
Those in thrall to this explanation, which derives
from Marx's materialist explanation of history, do not
notice that
Vietnam
was our longest war. It apparently took almost forever
for the material interest of students and their
parents to realize itself and stop the war.
Why are we afraid to say that the war stopped because
American troops and the American population got tired,
offended even, from killing women, children and
noncombatants? Vietnam had not attacked the US. The US
had interjected itself into a
civil war in a far off place, as it has done in
Afghanistan.
By invading
Iraq the US started a civil war between Sunni
and Shi'ite. In
Pakistan
the US has started a civil war between the religious
tribal population and the secular US puppet state. In
Palestine the US started a civil war between Fatah and
Hamas.
One continuously reads from those Americans opposed to
America's wars of aggression that the wars are
possible because they don't affect Americans, just
those few who sign up for the voluntary military.
Thus, there are insufficient material interests at
stake to stop the war. This is a common explanation
for the weakness of the antiwar movement.
One could argue instead that it is the triumph of Karl
Marx's materialist thinking that has made moral
protests impotent. What is morality? You can't weigh
it, define it, measure it. It can be dismissed as the
whining of material interests. In contrast, material
interests, such as lives, limbs, and bank accounts are
real.
For whatever the reason, morality has shown itself to
be an impotent force in 21st century America.
Americans show no remorse at over one million dead
Iraqis and four million displaced Iraqis due entirely
to an American invasion based on lies and deception.
The lies and deception are now well proven. Yet, there
has been no apology for the horrors that Americans
inflicted on Iraq.
Afghanistan is another example. Intentional lies
conflated the
Taliban with
al
Qaeda and "terrorists." The diverse peoples in
Afghanistan who were first ravaged by Soviet bombs are
now ravaged by American bombs. Weddings, funerals,
children's soccer games, people waiting for fuel or
food, people asleep in their homes, people attending
Mosques have all been murdered and are murdered
routinely by US and its
NATO
puppets.
Each time civilians are murdered, the US denies it,
only to be contradicted every time by the evidence.
Why is the president of the United States
contemplating sending yet tens of thousands more US
troops to kill people in Afghanistan?
The answer is that the United States is an immoral
country, with an immoral people and an immoral
government. Americans no longer have a moral
conscience. They have gone over to the Dark Side.
Humanity has endeavored for millennia to control evil
with morality. In the American "superpower," this
effort has collapsed and failed.
The United States needs to be censured for its immoral
behavior, not have that behavior rationalized as being
in its material interests.
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