Support our Troops?

Where I live you see a lot of people with the yellow ribbons on the back of there cars that read, Support our Troops. I've always understood this statement as Support our War. And most of the time, whenever I see a car sporting the yellow ribbon, I can't help but think about how horrible war really is. I always wonder if the person that stuck the ribbon on their car is thinking about this too. Things like: torture, bombings, rapes, Post Traumatice Stress Syndrome, death, murder, prison camps, and so on. It's just crazy.

Back to the yellow ribbons. Yesterday I ran across a really good explanation of why statements like Support our Troops are so deceptive. They're meaningless.

"The point of public relations slogans like 'Support our troops' is that they don't mean anything. That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. Its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you support our policy? That's the one you're not allowed to talk about." - Noam Chomsky -