War is an Ugly Thing

Authored by Michael Pate on April 9th, 2004 at 6:06 PM

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling, which thinks that nothing is worth war, is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertion of better men than himself.

The words above were written by the English philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill. They were included in a letter to his family by a Captain in the Marine Corps who died in Kuwait March 20, 2003.

Well, if you are reading this, then things didn�t do well for me over in Iraq. I�m sorry for the pain that I have caused you because of this. Please do not be upset with the Marine Corps, the military, the government, or the President. It was my choice to go into the military. The President and my higher commanders were just doing what they thought was best. Realize that I died doing something that I truly love, and for a purpose greater than myself. - Ryan S. Beaupre

Now the person behind American Leftist has created an image using the images of those of who gave their lives in the conflict.

‘War President’ is meant to be a satirical commentary, informed by the whole project of using the dead as political props. I’m not making a dime off the image, and never will attempt to do so. Given this lack of financial or other crass motives, other recent instances of the politicization of the dead strike me as more morally questionable: the coffins of the victims of 9/11 showing up in a political advertisement, the continued suppression of images of the funerals of those lost in Iraq from the mainstream American media, and images of the 9/11 disaster in a campaign ad. A certain party stands to benefit greatly from all three of those instances of politicization. - Joe

The motives behind it are not as ugly as war, but they are ugly enough. And to use the images of those who died in a crass satire creates a new low of ‘politicization.’