When men die for nothing

The spice must flow.

He said, “Son, have you seen the world?
Well, what would you say if I said that you could?
Just carry this gun, you'll even get paid”
I said, “That sounds pretty good”

Recently, I learned that in the bastion of progress, liberty, and democracy that is the US, there exists a thing called ‘Veterans Day’ — a public holiday to commemorate the ‘heroic deeds’ of the empire’s countless spent, abused, murderous, and traumatized soldiers and veterans. The imperial center celebrating its bloody instruments, parading them around, pledging their ever-lasting allegiance, indoctrinating the rest of society in the process. Quite fitting. I’m not surprised.

It is a curious circumstance that most veterans now have never seen a ‘righteous’ war, if such a thing exists. (Most of those that fought Nazis are long dead.) Instead, most (former) soldiers alive did their ‘duty to the motherland’ in far-away lands few Americans can point out on a map, with nobody asking for them, spreading the neoliberal agenda, stripping resources, toppling democratically elected governments, killing millions, fighting competing ideology, leaving behind devastation, resentment, and fury, seeds of religious extremism, further entrenching the American-Western hegemony.

The empire must last a thousand years. The spice must flow.

Black leather boots
Spit-shined so bright
They cut off my hair but it looked alright
We marched and we sang
We all became friends
As we learned how to fight

They pick them up from the apathetic, dark alleys that speckle our capitalist dystopia. Young men with nothing to lose, angry men without purpose, frustrated and eager for someone, anyone, to tell them what to do. How fitting, how telling, that they find their path in war, aggression, and killing; in the strictest hierarchies imaginable, in pointless suffering — what they call ‘learning discipline’ — in hyper-masculinity, and camaraderie in inflicting pain and endless generational trauma.

Lured by promises of a free college education — a thing that should be the norm, anyway (as it is in most ‘developed’ nations) — and being taken care of by the government in case of injuries, mutilations, and the inevitable post-traumatic stress disorder that will, deservedly, last a lifetime (except in the case of the non-negligible percentage of true sociopaths.)

One must contemplate this exchange. One must imagine the doublethink necessary in the soldier that just bombed innocents to ‘find himself,’ to receive education, to make his family proud, to fight for his abstract flag, whatever else he tells himself. Coming back from Iraq, returning from a mission to destroy and plunder a land, justified with obvious lies, and then being received a hero. A diseased nation, indeed.

Can we fault those young idealists, those lost souls, propagandized and indoctrinated from childhood, forced in their classrooms to speak the holy words before being able to comprehend them, those who see no other way of finding meaning?

No, it’s not them I condemn; it’s those vultures, those ghouls that prey and feed on them. Endless young fodder to fuel the war machine and the military-industrial complex that rules this forsaken nation. They scour the forums, the 4chans, the Reddits of the internet; endless ads and recruiting budgets, subtle and obvious, bots and legions. The spice must flow.

Self-proclaimed leaders — Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Xi Jinping, it truly does not matter — who blabber endlessly about peace, liberty, democracy and yet fuel every possible war, never letting them end. It’s capitalism, stupid. Duh. Imperialism, colonialism, slavery, exploitation are merely necessary by-products. It’s how we in the West became rich in the first place, and no one will take that away from us, ever. Our military budgets will make sure of that. And there is always enough tinder to burn.

Will we ever realize that every leader, every state, every soldier is the disease? Fuck your symptoms, pull it out by the root!

I kicked in the door
I yelled my commands
The children, they cried
But I got my man
We took him away
A bag over his face
From his family and his friends

I think there is now some feeble resistance to the war machinery. I think something broke after Iraq, and then got solidified by the black-and-white ideology the West demonstrated first with Russia v Ukraine and now with Israel v Palestine. The contradictions and ‘the official’ are ever more difficult to reconcile with reality. The cognitive dissonance ever more cumbersome to maintain, the propaganda and lies more obvious, contradictory information more easily available.

We all remember the torture pictures from Abu Ghraib, we all know what happened in Guantanamo, we all read about the CIA’s war crimes throughout the decades, particularly during the Cold War, we all recognize that we are ruled not by humans but by capital — politicians as much slaves to it as we are, though some slaves are collaborators and do not deserve liberation — and we are increasingly unhappy and depressed with how things turned out. A dying planet, the death of human imagination (what we call capitalist realism), a bleak future.

They took off his clothes
They pissed in his hands
I told them to stop
But then I joined in
We beat him with guns
And batons not just once
But again and again

Does this mean things will get better now? Yes, they will — after they get much worse, first. One day, soon enough, you will find yourself living in a fascist darkness without ever having consciously noticed the process. You will find yourself in ever more wars as floods and droughts kill your neighbors. The last great mammal will die and you will perhaps wonder what the hell happened but then will be distracted by the need to survive, work, and provide for your family and yourself.

You will never notice, except in those rare clear instances when the absurdity comes crashing down on you, unexpected, sudden, dense, so obvious. Yet those moments will also pass, like tears in the rain, and the struggle and everyday monotony, the habitual, will rule once more. At one point, perhaps already past, you will stop reading the news, for they are too depressing, and the powers that be will celebrate your ignorance, for it makes things so much easier.

If we do nothing, if we continue celebrating murderers, if we look away, we have already lost our humanity. People always wonder how the Nazis could rule with widespread public consent and then shy away as soon as they see it happen in real-time. This system is not redeemable, and not reformable. More people are realizing this than ever. Critical mass must be reached at some point. Preferably, before we all wage war over the last drinkable water.

Yet the spice must flow.

Antonio Melonio

She walked through bullets and haze
I asked her to stop
I begged her to stay
But she pressed on
So I lifted my gun
And I fired away

— Rise Against

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