For the last two years, The Progressive has been located in the same building as the Wisconsin Veterans Museum, across the street from the state capitol. It is a free public museum packed into a ground-level space, with dioramas and other exhibits arrayed against the walls. There are guns, uniforms, and other artifacts from Wisconsin veterans, a tank and jeep from World War II, even a Huey helicopter that flew missions during the Vietnam War, dangling from the ceiling.
“Every veteran is a story,” the museum proclaims, and its focus is on the men and women who fought. One exhibit tells the story of Arthur Cantwell of Shawano, Wisconsin. At age eighteen, fresh out of high school, he enlisted in the Wisconsin National Guard, less than two weeks after the United States entered World War I. He wrote in a letter home: “Remember, Mother, if I fail to come back, I only did my duty, and someone has got to pay the price. I was a volunteer, as I thought it was my duty to go . . . .”
We should all admire such sacrifice. Those who have served in this country’s military deserve our respect, and our ongoing support.
Yet too often, support for veterans has come to mean support for the engagements to which they are deployed, and support for the institutions that send them to war.
How many times have we heard our soldiers thanked for “being over there to keep us safe”? It’s a phony claim. Remember where over there is: Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Yemen, Niger, Somalia, Syria. These are not wars of necessity. These are not noble causes. The people who kill and die in these foreign lands may be enormously brave but are not automatically heroes. We are being conned into affirming the wars as well as the warriors—which puts those who serve at greater peril.
We are being conned into affirming the wars as well as the warriors—which puts those who serve at greater peril.
In fact, some soldiers are not admirable at all. The conservative writer David French, a former Army major who fought in Iraq, argued as much in a recent column for the National Review. It ran under the headline, “Military-Worship Is Bad for the Military.” Here’s a taste:
“Though I’ve seen heroism in the military, I’ve also seen craven corruption, cynical exploitation of the public, and grotesque incompetence. If there is an iron law of human nature it’s this: Absent accountability and oversight, all human institutions grow increasingly corrupt and incompetent . . . . Our more corrupt service members know how they’re viewed and exploit that goodwill relentlessly.”
French goes on to suggest that “too many citizens, politicians, and pundits have resorted to military-worship as a form of patriotism on the cheap. They didn’t serve themselves, but by golly no one can love the troops more than they do. No one’s going to salute the flag with more enthusiasm, cheer the vet-of-the-week at a football game with more vigor, or outbid them in lavishing love and resources on men and women in uniform.
“It’s far more patriotic, of course, to hold every branch of government and every government employee accountable to the law, the Constitution, and their responsibilities than it is to revere any branch or person. Respect—and especially reverence—is earned, not given freely.”
“Respect—and especially reverence—is earned, not given freely.”
As President Donald “Bigger Button” Trump jacks up military spending by tens of billions of dollars, intensifies the nation’s involvements in intractable foreign conflicts, and actively courts international tension to distract attention from his own incompetence and corruption, we need more than ever to be discerning in our assessment of the military. Our lives—and certainly theirs—may depend on it.
Robert M. La Follette, the founder of this magazine, stood virtually alone in his opposition to the war for which Arthur Cantwell risked his life. As a result, La Follette was widely branded a traitor and nearly expelled from the U.S. Senate. Erwin Knoll, the editor of The Progressive from 1973 to 1994, took a stand against all war, writing in a seminal essay in 1991:
“I believe in ingenious, nonviolent struggle for justice and against oppression,” wrote Knoll, who lost family members in the Holocaust. “So I won’t support our troops—not in the Persian Gulf or anywhere else. And I won’t support anyone else’s troops when they go about their murderous business. And I’ll say, regretfully, to the fallen black soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts, and the guys dead on the beaches of Normandy, and the young people who threw stones at Brezhnev’s tanks in the streets of Czechoslovakia, that they died in vain perpetuating a cycle of human violence that must be stopped, because there’s no such thing as a just war. Never was. Never will be.”
In February 1918, Cantwell’s troopship, Tuscania, was torpedoed by a German U-boat en route to England; more than 200 of his fellow soldiers died. He survived. He served on the front line in France, subjected to a torrent of bombs, but lived to joke in a letter home that “I almost lost my jaw—it was on the verge of rattling off.”
“There’s no such thing as a just war. Never was. Never will be.”
Millions of American service people have endured similar ordeals. The Wisconsin Veterans Museum lists their engagements, war by war: “The Civil War, 1861-1865,” “World War I, 1914-1918,” “The Vietnam War, 1959-1975,” “The Cold War, 1947-1989.” It is immediately apparent that the United States has been at war for most of its existence—93 percent of the years since 1776, according to an oft-cited tabulation. The latest listed at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum is “The War on Terror, 1990 to present.”
Into this category Trump is adding fresh casualties from among the troops he claims to care about. In fact, as David Cay Johnston notes in his new book on Trump, It’s Even Worse Than You Think, a chapter of which is excerpted elsewhere in this issue, the Trump Administration has been a huge disappointment for veterans.
After making his usual gush of empty promises as a candidate (“We will get our veterans the care they need wherever and whenever they need it”), the draft-dodger-in-chief has continued to underfund the Veterans Administration, and in his first budget called for freezing spending on veteran-directed mental health care and homeless assistance, and cutting a benefit geared toward disabled vets.
The Trump budget even proposed reverting to a pre-Obama policy of rounding down veteran benefit checks to the nearest dollar, which would save about $20 million in 2018, out of a $82.1 billion VA budget. Notes Johnston, “The administration proposed to nickel-and-dime disabled veterans—literally.”
Brian Trautman, treasurer of the national activist group Veterans For Peace, hears it all the time: “Thank you for your service.” Like many veterans he knows, the phrase makes him uncomfortable.
“The public feels an obligation to use that rhetoric,” says Trautman, who served four years in the Army in the mid-1990s. Rather than be thanked, he and other vets would like the chance to talk about what their service entailed and what they would like in return: “We seek justice for veterans.”
Veterans For Peace has condemned Trump’s decisions to vastly hike military spending and to provide military equipment, including grenade launchers and tanks, to local police forces. And it has praised Colin Kaepernick’s apparentcareer-ending decision to not stand for the national anthem—which Trump and others have falsely portrayed as an attack on veterans, showing the depths to which they will sink to use soldiers for political ends.
“He exploits veterans to advance his own agenda,” Trautman says of Trump.
David Swanson, who heads the group World Beyond War and serves on the advisory board of Veterans For Peace, agrees there’s a problem with conveying to people that “if you’re in the military, you’re doing a good thing.” He believes true heroism requires “courage for a good purpose,” like trying to stop wars from being fought.
True heroism requires “courage for a good purpose,” like trying to stop wars from being fought.
“A lot of my veteran friends say, ‘Please don’t do that. Don’t thank me for my service. Thank me for my work for peace.’ ” He believes an appropriate response to being thanked for one’s service is to ask, “What service?”
The United States, Swanson notes, spends far more on its military than any other nation—actually more than the next eight largest spenders combined. And what do we get in return?
“The U.S. military is the top destroyer of our natural environment,” Swanson says. “It’s the top contributor to climate change. The top justification for eroding our civil liberties. The top reason for the militarization of our police.”
Need he go on?
Swanson says the wars that Trump has inherited and intensified, and those he may start, are not making Americans safer: “They are endangering us rather than protecting us.” And they sure as heck aren’t good for the people charged with fighting them.
The Wisconsin Veterans Museum’s online biography reveals that, after the War to End All Wars, Arthur Cantwell returned to Shawano, became a medical doctor, and lived until 1970. The exhibit about him was added to the museum in 2017.
Now every inch of exhibit space seems taken. It is difficult to see how the museum could accommodate any new conflicts. If enough people of true courage take up the fight for peace, against Trump’s clamors for war, perhaps it won’t have to.