Death Cult

Iraq is gradually becoming not so much a war as a meatgrinder. A war has purposes and objectives. The current campaign, like Vietnam before it, has turned deadlier as our objectives have become more vague and unclear.

The endless and meaningless war has given rise to the glorification of death for its own sake, and we hear a lot of talk now about "the ultimate sacrifice," usually intoned with great solemnity, by someone sounding like James Earl Jones reading the Declaration of Independence, and accompanied by images of a waving flag while martial music plays in the background. This sort of death cult, a by-product of perpetual war, is typical of modern totalitarian governments, and some ancient ones (Sparta) as well.

When Russian POW's were released from German camps at the end of WWII and returned home, Stalin had them arrested and shipped off to the Gulag. In his view, they had shown insufficient courage in allowing themselves to be captured. They should have died for their country, rather than surrendering.

The god of war, bankrollers of capital, and navigators of the ship of state now demand "the ultimate sacrifice" as if our lives and those of our children were actually their property. They will continue to do so until they are faced with effective and universal resistance.

Turn on the network or cable news and you'll see that death under combat is now glorified and romanticized to a degree that betrays a sort of mass psychosis.

George Orwell portrayed this lunacy well in 1984 when he had Winston Smith, under pressure to produce a newspaper story, invent a fictional character for the war news. Smith dreamed up Ogilvie, the ideal citizen of the totalitarian state, who as a child turned his parents in to the authorities for insufficient patriotism, spent his adult life in combat, always as a volunteer, and died sacrificing his life for his unit. That's what it takes to be a "real man" under a totalitarian government.

The United States was originally founded on the notion that a government owes its citizens the freedom to enjoy "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." How things have changed. This current temporary, de facto government instead demands our unquestioning obedience, our lives, and the lives of our children, for whatever purpose they and their Klingon masters at Exxon deem necessary.