A memorial plaque honoring veterans has become controversial in Monument, Colorado.
Photo courtesy of Military Religious Freedom Foundation
If we weren't so used to it in the (until recently) predominantly Christian West, the arrogance of Christians would be breath-taking. In yet another example of their assumed privileged right to impose their religion on the rest of us, regardless of our own religion, or none, Christian Talibangelicals have erected a memorial in a municipal cemetery, purportedly to honour military veterans, but which is a blatant puff for Christianity and factually and historically wrong.
It reads:
Although enclosed in quotation marks, there is no attribution. Previously, this quote has been falsely attributed to former UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair, in the context of the Iraq invasion, and to General Patton during WWII. In fact, it appears to have been invented out of thin air on the Internet in about 2000."Only two defining forces
have ever offered to die for you:
Jesus Christ and the American Soldier;
one died for your soul, the other died
for your freedom."
We honor those who made freedom a reality
On the subject of Jesus and what he supposedly died for, have you ever tried to get a Christian to explain why a blood sacrifice was necessary to empower an omnipotent god so it could forgive us for a 'sin' it saddled us with in the first place, and why we still supposedly have the sin? How about the morality behind the notion of vicarious redemption through the sacrificial death of an innocent person?
Of course, it appeals to the parochial ignorance of American fundamentalist Christians in that it totally ignores the millions of soldiers from outside the USA who died in WWII fighting against the sort of intolerant bigotry and chauvinistic nationalism displayed on this memorial, including some 20 million Red Army soldiers on the Eastern Front. No doubt millions of Vietnamese would question just whose freedom American soldiers were fighting for in the 1960s, as would Native Americans who lost ancestors in the genocidal Indian Wars.
In addition to its display of religious arrogance and intolerance, the memorial also displays a flagrant disregard for intellectual property rights in that it displays copyrighted logos of the United States armed forces, despite the US Department of Defense instruction 5535.12, which reads:
DoD marks may not be licensed for any purpose intended to promote ideological movements, sociopolitical change, religious beliefs (including non-belief), specific interpretations of morality, or legislative/statutory change.The plaque thus breaks two of the Ten Commandments, in that it bears false witness and is a form of theft. But fundamentalist Christians are never slow to self-licence exemptions from the rules they demand the rest of us comply with.
The plaque was put there by a 15 year-old boy, ostensibly to commemorate his grandfather, paid for by money raised by the Boy Scouts of America, but the issue is not with what the plaque supposedly commemorates, but with the blatant display of arrogant Christian privilege it also puts on public display. This has no place on publicly-owned land in a constitutionally secular society.
Although the plot on which it stands has subsequently been hurriedly 'transferred' to new owners, at the time the memorial was erected it was owned by Monument City, Colorado, and was thus a clear violation of the 1st Amendment prohibition on the promotion of religion by government at any level. It was only sold when the memorial became controversial.
American Talibangelicals just can't accept that this Constitutional prohibition on the promotion of any religion applies to them as well as everyone else, so they continue to behave as though the USA is the Christian theocracy they would love it to be. Not for others the 'freedom' this plaque purports to celebrate! The 'freedom' it celebrates is their self-righteous privileged right to deny freedom of religion and freedom from religion, to others.
One wonders what the reaction would be if Moslems decided to erect a monument on government land in the US, honouring those Moslems who fought and died in, for example, Gallipoli, or the victims of Buddhist intolerance in Myanmar, or the Moslems killed by Hindus during the riots leading up to the partition of India, which included an assertion that Mohammad was the one true prophet of Allah.
The sad truth is that soldiers do not die for their country's cause; willingly or otherwise, they are killed for the enemy's cause. The point of war is to kill as many of your enemy as possible. If dying for your country was a good thing then armies would try to avoid killing and wars would be won by the side that killed the fewest. It is through chauvinistic nationalism, the glorification of war and the conviction that God is on our side that we continue to have these tragic wastes of human life in the first place.
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