“Before I offer my critique of the Support Our Troops slogan, I wish to state that I admire the courage and dedication of our combat troops serving in Afghanistan and, yes, Iraq too (…) But they are not there to protect us from the Taliban. If the Canadian government was so offended by the activities of the Taliban, why didn’t it send in the airborne regiment 20 years ago? The Taliban were engaged in precisely the same activities in the early ’80s. Our troops are there because Afghanistan has great geopolitical importance to the dominant nations of the West, full stop. The excellent humanitarian efforts of our soldiers are commendable but have been arranged as a public relations exercise to distract attention from the main mission: pacifying Afghanistan. Soldiers don’t create public policy. If they did, the Canadian Armed Forces might be active in other locations of less geopolitical importance like Burma.
That being said, the Support Our Troops slogan is a classic example of the manufacture of consent, a concept created by the father of the U.S. public relations industry, Walter Lippmann, and later popularized by Noam Chomsky. According to Lippmann, in a liberal democracy ruled by an elite oligarchy, the state must control the ‘‘bewildered herd’’ but can’t be too directly forceful in its means. It must rely on clever and apparently self-evident slogans like the Common Sense Revolution or Support Our Troops. It is based on a fallacy of reasoning, the appeal to emotion, ad populum, and it is the ‘‘device of every propagandist and every demagogue’’ (Copi, Cohen: Introduction to Logic, 1990).”
Morgan Duchesney, Support Our Troops (Shut up and wave flag), XPress