Bully Nation
Yale Magrass and Charles Derber

America anointed itself the “land of the free.” This is what makes America exceptional; what makes America great.  America has a mission, assigned by some higher force, perhaps divine, to bring freedom to the rest of the world, at the point of a gun if necessary. Liberty is something to kill and die for. 

By becoming an American, you acquire freedom, but there is seldom a real discussion of what freedom means. When Magrass asks his students what is freedom, almost none can answer. Virtually all American presidents and commanders-in-chief present themselves as defenders of freedom, as does the American military which demands unquestioning obedience from soldiers. America is the world police force, the guardian of freedom.

The words freedom or liberty can be used to mean different things. Carved on the wall in a courthouse in Worcester, Massachusetts is the sentence: “Obedience to Law is Liberty.” The Christian New Testament charges: “Live as people who are free… living as servants of God… Fear God. Honor the emperor.”

Forged in iron on the gate of the Auschwitz death concentration was the slogan “Arbeit Macht Frei; Work will set you free.” A free nation does not necessarily have free citizens. Rather, its leader can be free to rule without restraint without fear of being forced to account to another master, except perhaps a god who has chosen his nation and is superior to all other gods. 

As he reminisced about feudalism, Joseph De Maistre, writing soon after the French Revolution declared that it too valued liberty. “Liberty has always been the gift of kings, for all free nations were established by kings”           

The lower classes are usually told they are part of a nation and as such, share in its bounty, honor
and security, along with their leaders, with whom they rise or fall. The enemy of the nation is the
enemy of all of its people--rich or poor; anyone who threatens their rulers threatens them. Their
nation must dominate others or at least be free of outside oppression. A free people can be beheaded by their own king. By submitting, one not only achieves freedom, but honor and valor.

Honor and valor elude rational definitions. If you have to have them explained to you, you don’t understand them. Traditionally, honor can be valued above life itself. As late as World War I, Prussian officers, usually with Junker aristocratic backgrounds, would duel over some minor insult. Dueling is something that has virtually died out in the modern world, but in American history, rural hero Andrew Jackson was famous for his duels. Even early members of the New York elite Andrew Hamilton and Aaron Burr dueled to the death. They fought in New Jersey because by 1804, dueling was already illegal in New York.

Movies romanticizing the nineteenth century's untamed rural West are full of duels. Often, there was a woman pleading to the men that it was stupid. In the 1952 Western movie High Noon, the bride (Grace Kelly) of retiring Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) threatens to leave him if he insists upon trying to capture or kill a freed outlaw, whom he had previously arrested. In the Western movie, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a restaurant owner (Vera Mills) begs a lawyer from the East whom she loves (Jimmy Stewart) who barely knows how to fire a gun, not to fight--for she knows “When two men go out to face each other, only one returns.”

Soldiers who ride into the “shadow of death” without “reasoning why” give up their individual identities. They may believe they have merged with some higher force, perhaps the nation, to which their life is secondary. If they do not reason why, will they ask who or what the nation really is? Whom does it serve? Who benefits from a population forgoing its rational interests and blindly obeying? The submissive achieve greatness through dying for God, country King, or commander.