Military Service as a Civil Rights Frontier
Like pretty much every decent person I know, I was outraged to find out--via tweet, no less--that our president has decided to ban transgender people from military service. This is one more example of the casual afterthought with which this administration erases civil rights and is an absolute outrage. I also agree with those who commented this morning that simultaneous occurrence of bad things (efforts to deny healthcare to millions of Americans and efforts to marginalize trans people) does not imply that one is a "distraction" from the other. It is pouring bad news, and these are just two of those.
And yet, I always find myself uneasy when our civil rights struggle revolves around military service. My discomfort stems, I imagine, from having grown up in an extremely militarized country, in which two massive fictions govern the idea of service: that everyone must serve (i.e., that the army is moral and ethical and is busy defending a small democracy in a sea of hostile countries) and that everyone can serve (i.e., that the army is a cultural melting pot, providing a supportive environment from people of diverse backgrounds coming together to defend their country.) My dissertation work, which examined the way the Israeli military justice system treats conscientious objectors and deserters, was my effort to exorcise demons from my work as a military defense attorney, and to dispel both of these myths. Conscientious objectors were an effrontery to the idea of ethics; some of them challenged the idea of violent conflict resolution altogether and some limited their objection to the ethics of the Israeli army and its involvement in the occupation of Palestine. Deserters were far less outspoken; for the most part, desertions are prompted by the fact that the pathetic salary of a regular service soldier, while enough for a middle class kid supported by his or her parents, is not nearly enough to realistically allow anyone to self-sustain, let alone help his or her family. These folks were invariably convicted and served prison sentences for what honestly amounts to a criminalization of abject poverty. This allowed, and still allows, the Israeli army to maintain the farce that it was concerned with their social condition and that the fact that 2-3% of all soldiers were always AWOL was the aggregate of sad personal circumstances, rather than the destructive outcome of structural hypocrisy.
For many of the deserters in my study, the big adversarial debate was about the reason for the absence. The defense would try and paint a grim picture of horrible personal circumstances: a big family, unpaid electricity bills, hard physical labor to get the family out of an emergency, and the like. Meanwhile, the prosecution would advance a narrative of manipulation, arguing that the deserter "had decided not to serve in the army." I found this dichotomy impoverished and ridiculous. First, it is absolutely possible, and true for many people in the study, that one might experience both a desire not to serve and horrible personal circumstances. And second--and most importantly--for people who were kicked in the face repeatedly by their country, is it any big surprise that they were not overflowing with motivation to serve it for what was then $50 a month?
My disgust with the expectation of automatic, uncritical patriotism, especially from people who have been disenfranchised and alienated for ages, was born in my law school days, when we learned about the struggle of Alice Miller to be the first woman admitted to the prestigious (and then all-male) aviators' course. Her admission, and the women who followed her, were largely hailed as civil rights heroes and groundbreakers, and to an extent rightly so. The current opposite trend of segregating women in military service for the comfort of religious men is infuriating, also justifiably.
And yet, that the right to serve in the military, and bring about violence and destruction--especially when there is so much well-founded concern about the ethics of warfare in both countries--always makes me wary of making these struggles the forefront of civil rights struggles. In a way, we're fighting for the right to serve in an institution that denies others basic rights, and that seems wrong somehow.
But there are some substantive differences. First, this struggle is responsive to a crisis generated by this administration and framed as a denial of rights. That in itself should be important. But more importantly, in the U.S. army, military service actually is a socioeconomic privilege* that affords people a decent, livable salary, a respectful existence, family support, and access to higher education. Depriving someone of the option to serve is also a substantial deprivation of professional and educational options, and under the circumstances here, classic discrimination.
This has community implications beyond the particular person's case. In his book The Other Army of Israel, Yagil Levy observes that the Israeli army underwent two seemingly contradictory shifts almost simultaneously: demilitarization by the elites, who found other avenues for mobilization, and remilitarization by weaker social groups, who filled the spaces left by the exiting elites and obtained social mobilization via the military structure. To a lesser degree, in the United States military service is also marshaled as evidence of legitimacy, and to be denied that opportunity is to close civil discourse to certain communities.
It is also worthwhile mentioning that critique often comes from folks with different life experiences, and armies that shut out dissent and critique end up doing unethical things. I don't think it's a coincidence that the atrocities in Iraq were brought to our attention by Chelsea Manning, whose unique perspective on life probably made her less likely to unquestionably accept everything we were doing there.
I don't know that I would make this struggle for military service the forefront of all issues we must face these days, but because so many people on the right profess to be patriotic this could be an issue that garners some unity. Or exposes some hypocrisy. Or both. And at the rate at which these aberrations from our administration hit us via tweets, we have got to have enough love in our hearts to fight multiple wars.
_______
*Many people fling the word "privilege" around as a derogatory term, a piece of radical left argot that I find particularly loathsome for reasons I'll explain in a later post. I use the word in here its original meaning.
And yet, I always find myself uneasy when our civil rights struggle revolves around military service. My discomfort stems, I imagine, from having grown up in an extremely militarized country, in which two massive fictions govern the idea of service: that everyone must serve (i.e., that the army is moral and ethical and is busy defending a small democracy in a sea of hostile countries) and that everyone can serve (i.e., that the army is a cultural melting pot, providing a supportive environment from people of diverse backgrounds coming together to defend their country.) My dissertation work, which examined the way the Israeli military justice system treats conscientious objectors and deserters, was my effort to exorcise demons from my work as a military defense attorney, and to dispel both of these myths. Conscientious objectors were an effrontery to the idea of ethics; some of them challenged the idea of violent conflict resolution altogether and some limited their objection to the ethics of the Israeli army and its involvement in the occupation of Palestine. Deserters were far less outspoken; for the most part, desertions are prompted by the fact that the pathetic salary of a regular service soldier, while enough for a middle class kid supported by his or her parents, is not nearly enough to realistically allow anyone to self-sustain, let alone help his or her family. These folks were invariably convicted and served prison sentences for what honestly amounts to a criminalization of abject poverty. This allowed, and still allows, the Israeli army to maintain the farce that it was concerned with their social condition and that the fact that 2-3% of all soldiers were always AWOL was the aggregate of sad personal circumstances, rather than the destructive outcome of structural hypocrisy.
For many of the deserters in my study, the big adversarial debate was about the reason for the absence. The defense would try and paint a grim picture of horrible personal circumstances: a big family, unpaid electricity bills, hard physical labor to get the family out of an emergency, and the like. Meanwhile, the prosecution would advance a narrative of manipulation, arguing that the deserter "had decided not to serve in the army." I found this dichotomy impoverished and ridiculous. First, it is absolutely possible, and true for many people in the study, that one might experience both a desire not to serve and horrible personal circumstances. And second--and most importantly--for people who were kicked in the face repeatedly by their country, is it any big surprise that they were not overflowing with motivation to serve it for what was then $50 a month?
My disgust with the expectation of automatic, uncritical patriotism, especially from people who have been disenfranchised and alienated for ages, was born in my law school days, when we learned about the struggle of Alice Miller to be the first woman admitted to the prestigious (and then all-male) aviators' course. Her admission, and the women who followed her, were largely hailed as civil rights heroes and groundbreakers, and to an extent rightly so. The current opposite trend of segregating women in military service for the comfort of religious men is infuriating, also justifiably.
And yet, that the right to serve in the military, and bring about violence and destruction--especially when there is so much well-founded concern about the ethics of warfare in both countries--always makes me wary of making these struggles the forefront of civil rights struggles. In a way, we're fighting for the right to serve in an institution that denies others basic rights, and that seems wrong somehow.
But there are some substantive differences. First, this struggle is responsive to a crisis generated by this administration and framed as a denial of rights. That in itself should be important. But more importantly, in the U.S. army, military service actually is a socioeconomic privilege* that affords people a decent, livable salary, a respectful existence, family support, and access to higher education. Depriving someone of the option to serve is also a substantial deprivation of professional and educational options, and under the circumstances here, classic discrimination.
This has community implications beyond the particular person's case. In his book The Other Army of Israel, Yagil Levy observes that the Israeli army underwent two seemingly contradictory shifts almost simultaneously: demilitarization by the elites, who found other avenues for mobilization, and remilitarization by weaker social groups, who filled the spaces left by the exiting elites and obtained social mobilization via the military structure. To a lesser degree, in the United States military service is also marshaled as evidence of legitimacy, and to be denied that opportunity is to close civil discourse to certain communities.
It is also worthwhile mentioning that critique often comes from folks with different life experiences, and armies that shut out dissent and critique end up doing unethical things. I don't think it's a coincidence that the atrocities in Iraq were brought to our attention by Chelsea Manning, whose unique perspective on life probably made her less likely to unquestionably accept everything we were doing there.
I don't know that I would make this struggle for military service the forefront of all issues we must face these days, but because so many people on the right profess to be patriotic this could be an issue that garners some unity. Or exposes some hypocrisy. Or both. And at the rate at which these aberrations from our administration hit us via tweets, we have got to have enough love in our hearts to fight multiple wars.
_______
*Many people fling the word "privilege" around as a derogatory term, a piece of radical left argot that I find particularly loathsome for reasons I'll explain in a later post. I use the word in here its original meaning.
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