Common Dreams: Keep our Slaves Safe

Published on Friday, May 28, 2004 by the Denver Post

by Reggie Rivers

Our military is one of the last bastions of slavery in the United States. At the moment, our slaves are stuck in a combat zone, getting killed and maimed, and there's nothing they can do about it except hunker down and pray.

Yes, our slaves signed up of their own free will, but most of them were as misled about their job as the rest of us were about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

And I don't think "slave" is too strong a word to describe someone who is not permitted to quit his job no matter how dangerous it becomes or how much he hates it. For most of us, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery and guaranteed that we have the right to withhold our labor. It doesn't protect soldiers.

Our armed forces recruiters are quite adept at making military service appear beneficial (it mostly is) and safe (it's not). The threat of war is minimized, because few rational people actually want to fight.

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http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0528-11.htm

On this Memorial Day, let's really honor our nation's dead, especially those that have died in service to this country. In honor of soldiers everywhere, let's forcibly remove rummie, fieth, wolfshit and all the rest of the neocon incompetents from their pentagon hiding places and try them all as war criminals.