This image proudly adorns the front page of a US conservative web site — ArmchairWarrior — that claims to be putting an end to thinking everywhere.
Very clever sign, this. It has me questioning my liberal beliefs. All I ever thought about war was wrong. Jeez, I think I’ll just go kill me a foreigner.
No, wait, a slight flashback to reality.
Now, let’s ignore the mixed up lower and upper case in the writing.
War has ended slavery? A war made the US South give up slavery.
Slavery still exists. It is very much an underground business these days, not an institutionalised one as it used to be. All sorts of people all over the world are daily sold into slavery. Read the newspapers. So war hasn’t put an end to that.
War has ended fascism? Where? It thrives on ArmchairWarrior and in lots of places around the world. You’ve got the KKK and dozens of American white supremacy groups. Even liberal, pinko Europe has fascists: the British National Party and the French National Front. So the claim to have put and end to fascism is not a runner.
Nazism? Well, the Nazis were the German National Socialist Party. Yes, war put an end to them. But they were fascists — see above. And there are still plenty of Nazi wannabes around.
Now here’s another big hokey one. War put an end to communism? Where? The Korean war was fought against communism and that one was a draw. Vietnam was a war against communism and the US lost that one. The US tried to invade Cuba with a proxy army at the Bay of Pigs and Cuba won that.
Russia gave up communism. But war didn’t do that. Gorbachev’s reforms did that. China nor Cuba have renounced communism though the former has replaced it with state capitalism: again, nothing to do with war. So war has done nothing to end communism.
My mate Fred is still a communist, and no one has waged war on him at all.
So, er, nice sign. I like the colours. And by the way, you have mixed upper and lower case.
Supplemental, 2023: OK, the site was actually called Protest Warrior and I renamed it Armchair Warrior to wind them up. As it happens, the group quickly disappeared. But I leave this post here because since it was written, many other similar groups and many that are more insidious and more dangerous have emerged. And their creeds and identities and declarations are all characterised by the same incoherence we see here, illustrated by the claims that war ended fascism even while adopting the mantle of that ideology.