• The World Will End in Fire

• On Liars that Figure

• It’s the War, Stupid

• Forty & Counting

• The Wind from Somewhere

• Crying Wolf & Becoming the Too Fat Frog

  
  
  
  
  

• Paradise Lost, Hell’s Apples & the CIA

• Downwind from Nuclear
  Holocaust and Wacko

• An Ethic of Life
  An Ethic of Death

• Red State: Blue State

• The Burning Of Earth

• Wahoo Memories & Iranian Democracy

• On Bullying

• War and Debt: The Don Reeves Alternative to a Draft

• Killing the Huddled Masses Yearning to Be Free

  
  
  
  
  

• How to Win in a Gilded Age

• On Fear

• Holy Lands, Unholy Wars

• On Sacrifice

• Education & Tax Justice

On Sacrifice

Paul Olson
UNL Professor Emeritus

“Our military men and women were not called to defend America, but rather to attack Iraq... not to die for America, but rather to kill for [it].” -Rev. Dr. William Sloane Coffin

A few Sundays ago, I was driving down ‘A’ Street to First Lutheran, my “War is not the Answer” bumper sticker prominently displayed. A young man in a large pickup pulled up, signaling for me to open my window. Since he seemed to be seeking directions, I opened. His jaw jutting and his crewcut standing up straight, he shouted, “War is the answer” and roared ahead. When we arrived at a stop sign, he flipped me off and turned the corner.

He was of military age. He was clearly not in Iraq. War was his answer, but a war fought by others. And he is a metaphor for America’s leadership today.

I looked again at his gas-guzzler. What additional answers did this war provide him and how did he get the messages? Who was being asked to kill or be killed for his super-pickup and obscene gesture? War was his answer. War without sacrifice.

Later that weekend, I listened to President Bush read his Memorial Day script praising the sacrifices that our armed men and women are making for freedom. He did not say what freedoms his war supports. Freedom of speech for those forced out of his administration for disagreeing? Valerie Plame’s, and her husband’s, freedom? The habeas corpus rights of the Guantanamo prisoners? The freedom to torture? The right to kill civilians at Haditha? The right to have one’s vote voided in Florida or Ohio?

I thought of my relative’s face shredded by shrapnel. I thought of those 2500 Americans killed and the 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead. For democracy? These were dead for freedom? Or for a lie — a lie to ourselves and to the Iraqis, to our Congress, to our superior officers, to the enlistees: a lie to “the few, the proud, the Marines”? We know from research that the U.S. dead men and women did not purpose their ‘sacrifice’ when they joined. They purposed to find jobs, adventures or money for further education. And they stiffen — dead now — for a lie.

They did not sacrifice themselves. They were sacrificed. Self-sacrifice is done consciously. We do not say of a man who has his car stolen from him, that he has ‘sacrificed’ it. Nor should we say like things of someone who has had his/her life stolen by a car bomb or Improvised Explosive Device (IED). Moreover, sacrifice that one has not modeled oneself cannot meaningfully be asked of others. For nonviolent people, sacrifice is putting one’s body on the line for one’s beliefs: risking abuse, disgrace, loss of job and — in Gandhi’s and Martin Luther King’s cases — death for justice. For just-war people, sacrifice is officers willingly placing themselves in harm’s way before their troops, or Lincoln suffering depression far into the night, as he tries to develop a Civil War strategy to save lives and the nation.

A commentator recently said that the Bush strategy could not be successful because it asks no sacrifice of the American people.

No.

It cannot be successful because it asks no sacrifice from the very people who created the war or from their children. These people invented a war for someone else to fight. The Neo-Conservative elite manipulated selective information for purposes other than those they gave publicly to create a conflict to be fought by other people’s children. Ours is a war manufactured and led by men who avoided the Vietnam draft, got five deferments, went to the National Guard or continued college to avoid Vietnam service. They did not serve. None of their children serves. Where are the Bush daughters in Iraq? Since Hillary believes in this war, where is her daughter? Where are the children of the cabinet? Of the Senate? Of the House? As Nebraska Senator George Norris wrote on the eve of the First World War, “To whom does war bring prosperity? Not to the soldier who for the munificent compensation of $16 per month shoulders his musket and goes into the trench, there to shed his blood and to die if necessary… War brings prosperity… to those who are already in possession of more wealth than can be realized or enjoyed.”

The people that suffer casualties disproportionately in Iraq, according to sociologist Robert Cushing, are whites from small, mostly poor, rural areas. That’s Greater Nebraska. We are sixth among the states in fatalities per capita. Some fatalities come from Omaha, Lincoln and Grand Island, but most from places like Sutton, Merrick, Ogallala, Scottsbluff, Plymouth, Falls City, Hay Springs, Valentine, Gering, La Vista, Albion, and Beatrice — poor, rural and underserved. The people not signing up, according to research and anecdote, are the children of the affluent, the taxless superrich. Better to have a national service draft without exemption than to have the present class-warring system.

And let there be no more blessing of sacrifices that our leaders have not made and are not willing to make. Let there be more and louder singing of Mrs. Mcgrath’s lament for her son, here and in Washington:

All foreign wars I do proclaim
Live on blood and a mother’s pain.
I’d rather have my son,
As he used to be,
Than the King of America
And the whole Navy.

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