Situational morality and its consequences

Huffpo has a long article on the "moral injury" suffered by combat troops.

It is what experts are coming to identify as a moral injury: the pain that results from damage to a person’s moral foundation. In contrast to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which springs from fear, moral injury is a violation of what each of us considers right or wrong. The diagnosis of PTSD has been defined and officially endorsed since 1980 by the mental health community, and those suffering from it have earned broad public sympathy and understanding. Moral injury is not officially recognized by the Defense Department. But it is moral injury, not PTSD, that is increasingly acknowledged as the signature wound of this generation of veterans: a bruise on the soul, akin to grief or sorrow, with lasting impact on the individuals and on their families. Moral injury raises uncomfortable questions about what happens in war, the dark experiences that many veterans have always been reluctant to talk about. Are the young Americans who volunteer for military service prepared for the ethical ambiguity that lies ahead? Can they be hardened against moral injury? Should they be?
I'm still trying to sort this out. I'm tempted to engage in a lot of finger pointing--American society happily celebrates warmongering--just try to think of a holiday where we don't stir in the idea of a soldier fighting or a soldier coming home from battle. We see and hear war images and sounds at many public events, especially sports events. On the other hand, though they are young when they sign up to join the war machine, members of the military are not children. To some extent, they know or should know what they are getting into. They know that they are willing to accept money in order to kill or to support killing on behalf of the United States. Some of them go because they will get to wield weapons and kill. Those people are getting exactly what they want. Those members of the military who don't actually shoot the weapons are complicit. Those of us who are civilians who fail to speak out are also complicit. Perhaps we should be said to be suffering moral injury too, but that's a hard argument to make, because most of us don't give a shit that our soldiers are overseas invading other lands and killing people who are typically poor and brown-skinned. Most of us don't call this kind of killing, where soldiers kill, "murder." After all, there are self-defense murders, and in some cases military actions, including some large-scale military actions do seem like acts of defense. The military PR machine has tapped into this idea by renaming the war machine the "Department of Defense," even those most U.S wars are wars of choice, acts of strategic aggression to suit the needs of banks and businesses. To get us reoriented, we should rename the Defense Department. As stated at Common Dreams,
America's discerning have long recognized that the country can never live without war. It is a country made for war. Small detail: Up until 1947, the Defense Department was called Department of War.
I do think we ought to reframe what it means to kill in uniform. That means that we should stop glorifying the act of killing in uniform unless the reason for the war itself is edifying. We should rename the act of killing in uniform as "situational murder." The analogy is situational homosexuality. Killing in war is a brutal act of ending lives that we are working hard to see in a special context. Akin to money laundering, we could call such killing "murder laundering." It's a matter of killing where innocent lives are blithely written of as collateral damage, something that is really hard to sell back home when police kill innocent people. I am keenly aware of the consequences posed by determinism. Embraced fully, it is an excuse for any action, because we were not really "free" to make our choices. This sets up a monumental paradox, because to keep order and sanity we are forced to assume that we are "free." It is in this crazy context that I resent the attempt to turn non-medical problems into medical problems. "Moral injury" is the suffering one experiences for making choices that are often bad choices. Why did you sign up for the military? Yes, it seemed like the right thing to do at the time, but only on the battle field did you realize that you were engaged in (I'm speaking of all of America's recent wars of choice) gussied up murder. Back when you signed up, you failed to think things through. The banality of evil was at play--Hannah Arendt's notion that the failure to think causes much more damage than intentional wrongdoing. "Moral injury" is not a medical problem. It is coming to grips with one's choices. It is usually a good thing that one focuses in on one's moral compass, even when the result is self-condemnation. Perhaps the occurrence of moral injury is to be applauded as an awakening of conscience, a terrible lesson learned, and a chance to take public positions warning others to say no to the seduction of wars of choice.

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Pentagon waste should be a top headline every day

Everyone knows that a lot of money is wasted by the Pentagon, but the amount of this waste is staggering, making most of the fraud reported by the media paltry by comparison. Scot Paltrow puts things in perspective: The DOD has amassed a backlog of more than $500 billion in unaudited contracts with outside vendors. How much of that money paid for actual goods and services delivered isn’t known. Over the past 10 years the DOD has signed contracts for provisions of more than $3 trillion in goods and services. How much of that money is wasted in overpayments to contractors, or was never spent and never remitted to the Treasury is a mystery. The Pentagon uses a standard operating procedure to enter false numbers, or “plugs,” to cover lost or missing information in their accounting in order to submit a balanced budget to the Treasury. In 2012, the Pentagon reported $9.22 billion in these reconciling amounts. That was up from $7.41 billion the year before.

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Shocking Video: Afghan villagers attack defenseless U.S. drone

I can't say it any better than Lee Camp: Why do we do these things? it's the same reason the NSA is out of control, and corporate spending on politicians. it's because we CAN.  That's a sorry excuse for doing anything at all. In the case of our drone that are "defending our freedom," it's warmongering run amok. Shame on us, and it's hurting us in the long run, despite the momentary excitement that our military must feel when they blow some to bits from their control board back in Las Vegas. All in a day's work, as is the job of trying to justify why that man (or that wedding party) was a danger to America.

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What happens when everything is a commodity

Chris Hedges discusses America's warmongering, the war that the military is waging on journalism, the rise of hyper-masculinity, the fact that most problems are now seen as invitations to apply violence, and the fact that most things have become valuable only insofar as they are commodities. Hedges is not a defeatist, though. He states, "You can't talk about hope if you don't resist. Once we give up, we're finished. . . . We have a moral duty to fight against forces of evil even if it seems certain that those forces will triumph."

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Chris Hedges highlights the menace of the military mind

The military has won an ideological battle in the United States. We see many of our most pervasive problems in terms of war. Once we do that, the solution is violence. Now it's eating up all of us, based on the "culture wars." Watching TV for any amount of time will demonstrate that Hollywood struggles to be creative, and has descended to the lowest common denominator: violence. It's something we all understand and it captivates us because we fear it, just as we fear spiders and snakes. And listen to our modern language. We are constantly speaking in metaphors of violence. We always have, but it seems worse to my ears. Mark Johnson and George Lakoff pointed out (in Metaphors we Live By) that we employ the war as a conceptual metaphor: ARGUMENT IS WAR Your claims are indefensible. He attacked every weak point in my argument. His criticisms were right on target. I demolished his argument.I've never won an argument with him. You disagree? Okay, shoot! If you use that strategy, he'll wipe you out. He shot down all of my arguments. But it now seems worse, whenever I'm listening to those engaged in dispute (we almost always dispute rather than discuss). We Americans destroy the opposition, we kill ideas, we employ shock and awe, we look for smoking guns, we come out with guns blazing. Mary Hamer has categorized many types of speech that draw on violence in an essay called "Violent Language That Kills The Human Spirit." It's a long painful list. Here is her thesis:

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