This overwhealming philosophy sure sounds nice, until you take into account that our culture is not actually the sum of all cultures on earth. It is increasingly Liberal American Culture. It is not what you really would get if everyone joined together and mixed their cultures in honest.
It IS what you'd get if some fundamental deists got together, agreed on ideas, set up a sound framework, then imported a bunch of slaves. Then the slaves were freed, and the former slave's fight for equal rights turns into a backlash against traditional deist values, which eventually snowballs (due to an influx of eastern cultures) with eastern religion into a relativist-agnostic viewpoint which values all people as basically good as long as they aren't fundamentalists, which the nation was founded by.
I think what you'd really get if you tried to mix all the cultures together would be a muslim state, because muslims don't mix, they just conquer. Some examples of this: Egypt and Denmark. Pakistan would probably be up there on the list too. Here is Islam coming against different cultures and they manage (through the value of children, polygamy, and perseverance) to take over cultures, via war and/or peaceful means.
Now's the part where I tell you that we need to crush the infadels, right? Wrong! I'm not muslim. I'm Christian. But I'm also American. I have a triumvirate of citizenry: I'm a citizen of Heaven, the Bible is clear on that. I'm also a citizen of humanity, this one, unlike the others listed, is not optional. I must abide by human nature, some of these things are the basics like I need food and water, others of these things are difficult to grasp concepts, like the basic human needs for competition, and desire for sin. Finally, I am fortunate enough to be a citizen of America.
As a citizen of heaven, I actually have a high tolerance for injustice done to myself and my kin. I'm on earth, this is not my primary citizenship, I don't expect the natives to be friendly. It is not my job to make everything just and right here on earth, particularly when we are talking about religious issues. I ought not be suprised when, as a Christian, I am persecuted or even killed for my beliefs.
As a citizen of humanity, I also have equal right to live on this little blue ball we call home. This includes rights to defend myself from those intending to harm me, for their personal gain, aside from my philosophies. A right to have and defend a family, and raise them in the way I deem best. I also have equal right to pursue those things that I need, my food my water, and my shelter, and to secure ways to provide those things for me. This in and of itself often causes need for wars of any scale. Check out the repeated genocides we find across the African continent, the Jews in WW II, and the Kurds in northern Iraq. These are people fighting merely to exist, which as humans, they have equal rights to, just not equal strength to hold onto those rights. (remember that thought It will be important later)
Finally I'm a citizen of America, a free, soverign nation which (thankfully) lets me believe what I do, and practise it. The group of rights that my country grants me is an incredible blessing and something I would fight to the death to keep. Things like, I can speak out against my motherland if she grieves me, I can protest against her laws, I can carry my Bible with me in public, and no one can legally kill me just for my philosophy. The government can't even take my stuff without giving me some kind of "just and fair payment" for them. I even get to tell my government what to do by voting!
This sounds so cool until you realize not everyone is an american or a Christain. People of other faiths may actually (shock and awe for the liberals) have a philosophy that mandates the destruction of all others ON THIS EARTH! that is to say, they are to convert or destroy them, startrek borg style. Sadly, the relativistic-agnostic philosophy that is popular today is one of these styles. Because the statement of "All beliefs point to the same place" and "There is no absolute truth" are exclusive to everything but it's own belief, and refuses to consider the idea that, well, maybe some beliefs actually do send people to hell, or even that there might be an absolute place like hell.
I couple that with the tragedies of genocides, that is, people who HAVE THE RIGHT to exist as equals, but NOT THE STRENGTH to hold on to those rights (believe it or not, there are philosophies that say they don't have the right because they lack the strength) and I wind up with the need for a military. I love my Christianity, and I have the ultimate cavalry of angels and Jesus himself, who will show up someday and liberate this world from darkness, there we are talking ultimate power to protect rights, so if I forfeit some of them here, it's not a big deal to me. I love my humanity, hence I eat and breathe and drink. I hate some aspects of it, but all in all, the unfallen part of my humanity is peachy, so yah, I'd die defending my, or those I love's right to exist equally as a human being. and finally, as an American, I treasure these rights that really ought to be included as being human, but unfortuantely, not all beliefs work that way, so I will die defending MY american rights, because there are many out there who think I ought not have them.
So to defend our rights, we need the strength. This is where the military comes in. It was once said "Armies are like lawyers, the only reasons you have them is to take something that isn't yours, or to keep someone from taking something that is" I find this to be an honest ultimate mission statement of both lawyers and armies, it's just the battlefield is different.
A lawyer fights on the landscape of the legal system, an army fights on the landscape of the human system. An army takes the fight for the survival of certain rights, or all rights, depending on the particular fight, and makes it a literal fight for survival.
At the end of the fight, ideally, you either take what you intended to take, or keep what you wanted to keep, be it rights to ideaologies, rights to land, or just the right to go on living.
And contrary to our liberalized philosophies today, there are some enemies that can only be defeated in war. I'm not saying all war is right or just, but I AM saying that we can't judge wars based on casualties, monetary cost, survival rates, or post traumatic stress inflicted. The only way to correctly judge a war is by its cause, if the cause is just, then it is worth fighting to the last human being who truly believes in the cause.
For example, I actually applaud the southerners in the civil war, because their fight was for the right to have equal say in their economic situation, wether that be through ownership of slaves, or waivers on tariffs for their goods. Slavery was actually secondary in the mind of most southerners, because many didn't even own slaves, lots of them were upset enough about the fact that their raw materials were dually taxed going north, and then they would pay premiums on the untaxed finished products running south. Owning no slaves, they couldn't continue to make ends meet. Their pursuit of hapiness was imposed upon and the government ignored their complaints. For many of them this would mean complete poverty at the hand of an unsympathetic government, so they turned to war. The war ultimately wound up impoverishing many of the wealthy that managed to survive the earlier harsh economic climate, but it united the states, and accomplished what the poorer man was hoping to get done: A united nation that did not favor industry over agriculture.
So as you can see, war is therefore as much a war of the philosophy as it is about killing people, a war that does not start up the propaganda machine is a war doomed to failure, because the other side will certainly start theirs. And this is the only way to run a war if you don't want to kill every last person on the other side.
In my estimation this is why our wars against terrorists are so dismally failures. The terrorist propaganda tells the media and us, that it's a numbers game. They kill x people, we kill x people, and when we start losing more than x people, it's time to pull out. this demorallizes the American public who ignore, or don't see any propaganda of our side. I love how people love to demonize some positive war reports as propaganda, when propaganda is a positive element in fighting wars. Those on the other side who buy the propaganda don't have to take a bullet, they will surrender! And by many people's definition of propaganda, well, all it takes to make propaganda is an opinion different from the opinion of the person hearing the report.
When there was the intelligence of possible WMDs in Iraq, people were all balls to go in there shooting, when we didnt' find any, everyone wanted to pull out at once, ignoring all of the effects that a war has. The appropriate response from a warrior point of view would have been to demonize the saddam regime, particularly by pointing out that we put him in power and how he was behaving like a child when his father is not home. Make him out to be immature, corrupt and power hungry, and make it our right to save the iraqi people from a dictator that kills their children and rapes their economy for his personal gain. There is a certain truth to all of this, and we might have actually been more effective, because this propaganda also would have a demoralizing effect on the enemy, but the route we did take was to allow our own media to slit our throats by publicizing negative critizism constantly against the effort that couldn't be averted, now that we'd gone in and shot the place up. Basically we failed because we did not perform the work-in stage of propagandizing, that is, we didn't spend a decade prior to the war pointing out to our people that the other side deserves to be stripped of its rights and power.
At the end of the day, we need a military that blows things up and kills people, because there are some true believers out there, ones who believe very destructive, dangerous philosophies, and they can't be reasoned into a peaceful compromise. And if they are especially cunning, comprommise will actually wind up with the total loss of our freedoms, because those who say "War is good for nothing" will trade their freedoms, and basic rights for a semblance of peace. I won't so I say, lets blow stuff up and kill the people who need blowing up and killing, because war is not a civil action, it is a national action, and must be judged by the merits of it's cause, not the losses it entails. A war without losses, after all, is not a war, it is a slaughter. And a war without propaganda, is a cause that is lost.
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