To those who have served or are currently serving...

[tw]

Originally Posted by Pico and ME

My husband was a marine and he seems to think that you couldnt get these guys to follow orders to shoot to kill.

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.

Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are gunning us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?

And with our new economy, the best thing we could have done is privatize Social Security.

And the President can be trusted to go to war only when it is justified.

And Americans don't kidnap and torture because we are the good guys.

A President can be trusted to not corrupt the United States government such as unlimited wiretapping, breaking into Watergate, and attempting to subvert the elected government of Australia.

Even John Lennon was declared an enemy of America because we can always trust the powers that be. How quickly people forget the lessons of history even 30 years later.

Reasoning that soldiers can be trusted assumes corruption does not exist at the highest levels of government. At what point do we forget the lessons of Prof Zimbardo and those Stamford U psychology experiments? We can trust those in power to not abuse that power? Hardly.

Guantanamo demonstrates that Americans must especially ration power selectively. Our society depends on it.

Those who least can be trusted are those who only know what they are told - rarely ask those embarrassing questions. We are expected to learn from Hitler’s Mein Kampf. To subvert German society, he had to disparage the bourgeois and intelligencia. Then tell the 'brown shirts' how to think. That's all it took for Hitler to completely subvert the German government AND earn popular support for "Pearl Harboring" other nation.

Lessons of history (and even psychology) are quite blunt about giving any government and military too much power. Never forget lessons from the song "Ohio". Americans - especially soldiers who never learn to ask why and doubt - are easy enticed by the Dark Side.