Author Topic: Why Can't Americans Accept Casualties?  (Read 2679 times)

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_JS

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Why Can't Americans Accept Casualties?
« on: November 15, 2006, 11:53:29 AM »
I've pondered this recently as many people have made some fairly nasty assumptions about Americans in general. I've read that we have a collective "ADHD", that we are "weak-willed", that we have lost our "manliness" due to feminism, and all sorts of mostly unverified and quite frankly odd theories that tend to attempt to lay more blame than try to find the root of the issue itself.

Clearly this wasn't always the case. We can look back to the American Civil War and see the bloodiest conflict in American history. There were roughly 600,000+ Americans who died in that conflict. The Battle of Shiloh itself was remarkable in the shock that it brought the nation. By itself Shiloh saw more dead than the American Revolution, The War of 1812, and the Mexican-American War combined. It was later topped by other Civil War battles, especially notable is Antietam (which remains the bloodiest single day - 17 September 1862 - in American military history).

Still, the American Civil War could be a notable exception. In fairness it was a true war of brother against brother and divided loyalties. The Great War and World War II would set much different examples as would Korea and Vietnam.

Korea would see 54,000 Americans killed and Vietnam would see another 58,000.

So the question is invariably asked, why do many Americans scoff at the nearly 2900 dead American soldiers in Iraq?

One potential answer, in my opinion, may lie in something that has changed very much on most political parts of the spectrum since the days of Vietnam. Americans, as a general rule, hold individualism in far higher esteem than any concept of the greater good.

Now, before I'm severely attacked, I'm not making a judgement about that statement, I'm just stating it as an observation which I believe to be true and which I believe gives most Americans a strong distaste for war casualties. Historically, if we look at the Vietnam era, there are many ways of viewing that war and its consequences both from a right-wing, centrist, and leftist perspective. Yet, very few of those perspectives defend the antics of the Johnson and Nixon administration to cover up specific details of the war that were released through the Pentagon Papers, My Lai reports, and latter documents.

Moreover, there aren't many people from those perspectives who vehemently defend Richard Nixon's involvement in the Watergate affair. When Reagan came and won office it was with the idea that in many ways "Government was the enemy." Yes, have patriotism and a love for America, but the idea of a sense of allegiance to the state is a pseudo-socialist concept. Bill Clinton came in and offered much the same idea of a limited Federal Government. Plus, leftists in general are wary of nationalism as it occasionally has been used to historically excuse excesses of the state into depriving individual rights.

To be more precise there has recently existed a distaste for the idea of dulce et decorum est pro patria mori even when certain groups rally around the flag and call for support of our troops abroad. The United States general population does not have that sense of Hegelian support of the state above the individual. Moreover, the United States population does not have a sense of the rights of others, non-Americans, above the rights of individual Americans. So with Bosnia and Kosovo, neither popular wars in their own right, they proved succesful by their low casualty figures. With Iraq, the problem is that the casualty figures exist and the war has not been sold to Americans as one of the rights of individual Americans. Americans don't seem to have a pressing concern for the rights of individual Iraqis, or if they do it is not considered a concern of which the American military needs to resolve the issue.
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Xavier_Onassis

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Re: Why Can't Americans Accept Casualties?
« Reply #1 on: November 15, 2006, 03:19:16 PM »
I don't think that casualties are something that are accepted or rejected. But what happens is if they seem excessive, then people get upset and began to campaign to end the conflict.

I see this as a result of advertising and people's reaction to it. Advertising pervades US culture. On one hand, therer is the patriotic message, on the other the message that people are dying, dying, dying as a result of the war.

All that advertising makes us cynical of the claims about the benefit of the war: an evil dictator is removed, dangerous weapons will no longer threaten us, evil Ba'athists will be punished, glorious democracy will be visitied upon the long-suffering peoples of the Middle East. Jews will be made safer in Israel, perhaps the Third Temple will be rebuilt and finally Jesus will return and peace will reign evermore.

Anyone could be cynical about at least one, if not all of these claims. The benefits of the war are fleeting and perhaps minor, but that dead soldier and all his comrades,  will remain dead, and that maimed soldier will remain maimed for life. And their families will glut the talk shows, because we have a morbid fascination with their stories. This poor woman lost her only son: who the Hell did Babs and Pappy Bush lose?

War sucks. How many nasty upclose and personal wars did it take for Europeans to learn this?

The Civil War resulted in the US staying out of wars for forty years, until it became necessary to fight the evil Spaniards in Cuba. Apparently WWII was not upclose and personal enough for Americans to learn their bloody lesson.

Were it not for the extreme slant that the US government has always shown for Israel and the interventions on behalf of Big Oil, the US would not have provoked all those fanatical Arabs to vent their anger upon our country, which is, face it, a really long ways from Mecca.
 
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Lanya

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Re: Why Can't Americans Accept Casualties?
« Reply #2 on: November 15, 2006, 07:46:25 PM »
We can. We are wary of another Viet Nam.  We try to learn from mistakes, horrible bloody mistakes.  People have judged this to be the same kind of mistake, and we are not willing to die for it.  Otherwise people would be signing up. 
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sirs

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Re: Why Can't Americans Accept Casualties?
« Reply #3 on: November 15, 2006, 07:56:30 PM »
I've pondered this recently as many people have made some fairly nasty assumptions about Americans in general. I've read that we have a collective "ADHD", that we are "weak-willed", that we have lost our "manliness" due to feminism, and all sorts of mostly unverified and quite frankly odd theories that tend to attempt to lay more blame than try to find the root of the issue itself.

If you're going to use the term ADHD, please use it appropriately.  I thank you in advance.  You believe that if CNN were around during the Battle of the Bulge, Okinawa, heck Normandy, being broadcast day after day after day after day of not just the hundreds, but thousands upon thousands of our soldiers we were losing, not to mention the tens if not hundreds of thousands civilians that were killed, the country would have been keen to stay in WWII?  Seriously, you'd believe that?
« Last Edit: November 15, 2006, 10:32:33 PM by sirs »
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Xavier_Onassis

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Re: Why Can't Americans Accept Casualties?
« Reply #4 on: November 15, 2006, 09:16:14 PM »
If the actual safety of the nation or the people who live within its borders were threatened, citizens would accept the casualties. But it isn't and they aren't, so they don't.

Iraq is an optional war. The war isn't defending any Americans.

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sirs

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Re: Why Can't Americans Accept Casualties?
« Reply #5 on: November 15, 2006, 10:08:41 PM »
If the actual safety of the nation or the people who live within its borders were threatened, citizens would accept the casualties. But it isn't and they aren't, so they don't.  Iraq is an optional war. The war isn't defending any Americans.

So says you.  Obviously, you're wrong
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Michael Tee

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Re: Why Can't Americans Accept Casualties?
« Reply #6 on: November 15, 2006, 10:28:41 PM »
I think sirs had a point about WWII and the press.  The fact is that the WWII press was very cautious about showing photos of dead and injured Americans.  In fact, there's a photo in LIFE's Picture History of WWII that was notable for being the first published picture of American war dead - - it was three partially submerged GIs face down in the sands of a beach.  Buna Beach, somewhere in the Pacific.  The text made the point that such published photos were extremely rare.  Nevertheless, casualty figures were duly reported, mothers who lost a son were duly honoured - - people did understand that big battles were taking place and large casualties were necessarily being incurred.

The reality is that there is and always was a large reflexively isolationist bloc of Americans who need a lot of convincing that America has business in other parts of the world that would  necessitate dying in battle for.  Even in a cause as clear-cut as WWII, isolationist sentiment would have been strong enough to keep the U.S. out of the fighting were it not for the attack on Pearl Harbor.  FDR ran on a peace platform in 1940, vowing to keep America out of the war.  He didn't dare depart from that public stance.

The historic roots of American isolationism run deep and are well-known.  Casualty aversion is a combination of native isolationism and a shrewd popular appreciation of the real merits of the cause.  WWII was at least a good cause.  Korea - - whatever its actual merits - - was perceived at the time almost universally as a case of naked aggression, North against South, the very thing that the UN had been created to ban forever.  From then on, in terms of causes, it was almost always downhill for the U.S.A. - - and the willingness of the public to take casualties in dubious causes continues to shrink.