The comments on the Yin Yang Conspiracy post got me thinking about this:
In 1961, at the age of 17 I took an oath agreeing to be part of a team effort to kill anyone John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and later Lyndon Baines Johnson, thought needed killing.
Everything I’ve learned about those two men during the decades since has caused me to believe both were despicable, incorrigible individuals bent on personal power and self-aggrandizement, first, with the betterment of the US public only a priority to the extent it contributed to those.
But I raised my right hand and took an oath to become the trigger-finger for anything they wanted doing, volunteered to point a rifle and kill whomever these two car salesmen cum rich-boy opportunists found more convenient dead than alive.
My thinking today is that, despite the popularity of the choice I made, despite the fact millions of other men made the same choice to abdicate their ethics, their intelligence, their judgement to those men and others exactly of the same unworthy breed, [still do so today,] it’s not a choice to be admired, praised, encouraged, or rewarded. If anything, it’s a testimony to my own shallowness, stupidity, weakness of character and obliquely, a failure of self-respect.
Today, men and women who openly vilify the President of the US, the US Congress, detest the US military command and officer corps, are nevertheless pointing their weapons at whomever those people they detest tell them to kill. And label doing so a virtue.
Aside from the fact I didn’t know enough when I took my oath to recognize what scum the two presidents I agreed to kill for were, those people serving today are in precisely the same position I was in. They’ve agreed to do whatever the dregs of humanity tell them to do, do it without question.
The main change between 1961, and 2011, is that I agreed to do it for $78 per month, whereas they’re getting paid one hell of a lot more to obey the orders about which unlucky human beings get the downrange surprises.
Think about it. Thousands of young men died, thousands killed because Richard Milhaus Nixon told them to do it. Yet Richard Nixon outranked those politicians of the time in scumhood so conspicuously he was casheered from office by the others of his club. His own peers.
What am I missing here?
Is there something in this worthy of admiration?
Old Jules
