Ridding your country of a brutal, corrupt puppet dictatorship propped up by said aggressive, invading force?
I think most people would see that as a valid reason to kill and die for. Hell, said aggressive, invading force even convinced their young it was worth to go kill and die to do the invading, should be a piece of cake to convince those being attacked
> Protecting your country, friends and family from an aggressive, invading force?
And on the invaders' side? What exactly were the American soldiers dying and killing for?
> Ridding your country of a brutal, corrupt puppet dictatorship propped up by said aggressive, invading force?
How about just going for the dictators specifically? The Vietnamese people declaring that they will kill any dictator the US installs there might have done the trick, as opposed to dying by the millions fighting the vastly superior American military.
But it's not that simple either. Think of something like North-Korea. Any sane person there sees that what's going on is totally. fucking. fucked. up.
But even if someone thinks freeing people from the insanity there is worth dying for, what if his death didn't actually result in the insanity ending? .. Fear, is sadly what keeps mass-murdering tyrannical regimes in power.
Rich old men back home.
That's what I've been getting at, as you probably gathered.
In other words, ordinary people don't actually have a good reason to die and kill for X in a war, because X is always rulers and wars are always about their personal gain at the expense of countless ordinary people.
The difference now is that there is economic incentive enough not to want that as much.
Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
-- In an interview with Gilbert in Göring's jail cell during the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials (18 April 1946)
As with other wars, the justification was "fight them there, so we won't have to fight them here."
This works, because young military recruits are not often skilled at the skeptical, rational questioning of authority. Many of them literally believe that the invasion and occupation of foreign territory makes the US safer. It isn't until much later, if ever, that they face down the cognitive dissonance and accept that they were just pawns in the game of global politics.
Someone believing the propaganda is as much a reason as someone writing it, or someone ordering that it be written, or someone inventing the casus belli behind it.
It is a fallacy to assert a true root cause in anything, because no event is so cleanly disconnected from the rest of history that you can definitively say that a deciding event is truly independent of all those that came before.
The commenter I originally responded to seemed to suggest that there would be a "good" reason for people to go die or kill people in a war.
But enriching his rulers is not exactly a good reason for an ordinary person to kill or die trying. What's in it for him? Wouldn't he much rather not do it?
Many were drafted into compulsory military service. They were placed into a situation where it was "kill or be killed." If they didn't want to fight or they deserted, then it was federal prison.
That's how wars are maintained, by the way. Ordinary people are told they need to go kill some "enemies", or they will be killed by the um.. not-enemies..