A fellow named Pat Tillman was killed in action with the imperial Rangers in Afghanistan. Tillman, as has been well publicized, is a former professional footballer for a team called the Arizona Cardinals. As an unrestricted free agent in 2002, he turned down a three-year, $3.6 million contract offer from the Cardinals in order to go to work for Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and the other criminals.
Tillman was been celebrated as a hero by all the courtiers and regime-dupes. Nowadays the System has to confect its heroes out of unlikely material; really all you have to do is get killed, banged up, or captured, so long as you are serving the Empire when it happens. But in fact Tillman was no hero; he was a sucker.
A man who defends his country is not a sucker. He may well be a hero -- a real hero of the old-fashioned sort. But Tillman was not defending his country. He was promoting imperialism and criminal war. He had turned his fate over to evil men embarked on an evil enterprise. He threw his life away, but not for nothing. He threw it away for worse than nothing. He threw it away in the cause of imperialism and criminal war.
It would have been far better, far wiser, and far more honorable for footballer Tillman to stay home and play games all his life. Far better to let people heedlessly shower millions of dollars upon him for playing those games than to heedlessly sacrifice himself to Moloch.
Hard words. Hard truth. But until we recognize such hard truths, the human wolves who rule us will be able to sucker hundreds and thousands of other young Americans into throwing their lives away for worse than nothing.
--Nick Strakon
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