There is remarkable agreement across the U.S. political spectrum and mainstream media that law officers and members of the military deserve praise for their courage. Although the former president referred to members of the military as “suckers” because they were willing to sacrifice for something other than personal gain, I suspect that most Americans would disagree. Soldiering and policing are difficult jobs, involving great stress that can be hard to overcome and sometimes leads to depression, substance abuse, and even suicide. Regrettably, when their service ends, the country that soldiers have fought for often seems to abandon them to deal with these problems on their own, sometimes culminating in the tragic cramming of aging veterans into deathtrap institutions like the one in Holyoke.
But courage cannot be assessed in a vacuum, or else we would also have to praise those who flew planes into the World Trade Center: they were willing to sacrifice their own lives for something they believed. Law officers and soldiers defending authoritarian regimes can also display courage. Hitler’s police and soldiers believed they were restoring justice to a country that had been mistreated at the end of World War I. To seal the commitment of Germans to the Thousand-Year Reich, Hitler told them they were members of an Arian master race. Police rounding up Jews, Gypsies, communists and other non-Arian ubermenschen (sub-humans) for work camps or death camps thought they were purifying their homeland of insidious outsiders. So if courage can serve both justice and injustice, it should hardly be applauded without asking: courage in defense of what? And if in the U.S. those authorized by the state to use violence are defending law and order and U.S. goals overseas, we must also ask about the justice of that order and those goals.
March 7 was the 56th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” when nonviolent protesters were clubbed, whipped, and tear-gassed by Alabama State Troopers. Marchers were contesting a race-based system that, in Dallas County where Selma is located, and where African Americans made up more than half of the population, they counted for just 2 percent of registered voters. Jim Crowe was a system designed to keep Black people “in their place.” The nation was so appalled at footage of the police brutality that Congress soon passed the Voting Rights Act eliminating poll taxes, tests, and some other — but not all —impediments to voting. Apart from the question of how much courage it took to charge unarmed nonviolent protesters, we have to ask: what were these police defending? The problem is not primarily with the guilt of individual troopers, but with the inherently unjust system they were defending. Certainly this kind of courage is not compatible with the American ideal of equality. The worth of law and order that protects the status quo depends on the justice of that status quo. Unfortunately, many Americans equate any questioning of the status quo with an attack on ideals like “liberty and justice for all” when often the questioners are the ones pursuing those ideals and sometimes displaying even greater courage.
When law officers or members of the military kill innocent people, the problem is not so much with the actions of individuals but with a larger system — in the Selma case, Jim Crowe — that requires violence, or the threat of it, to maintain or extend its power. We must also ask questions about U.S. actions overseas. In the wake of the 9/11 attack, President Bush began a war against the oil-rich country of Iraq on the claim that it had weapons of mass destruction. None were ever found, and U.S. troops are still there. Why does President Biden go easy on Saudi Prince MBS when his regime allows no freedom of religion, no gender equality, was the home of most of the 9/11 attackers, recently murdered a U.S.-based journalist, and leads the world in beheadings? The U.S. has 800 military bases around the world: what are they defending? Is the current global status quo just? Supporting that status quo, while glorifying members of our military, are matters of consensus in the U.S.
Problems, it seems, are always caused by a few bad apples. But instead of blaming individuals for problems that are systematic, we might ask some brave questions: Who actually has the power to create and maintain systems of injustice? Who calls the shots? Who defends their agenda? How can such entrenched systems be challenged and changed? How can courage be wedded to justice?
Patrick McGreevy is a resident of Greenfield.