Well, we have just passed another Memorial Day and there are some things that need to be said.
The day went by with all of the usual devotion and honoring of the men and women who have given their lives in service to our country. I have no problem with that. Indeed, there are many who did not give their lives but gave almost everything else. They are veterans who served and came home --- some of them with terrible traumas that haunt them and others with terrible wounds that will affect their lives forever. All of them performed their service through our military organizations and we owe them our praise and our gratitude.
What I do have a problem with --- and it is a very big problem --- is the real-world context in which all of this service was required. Our society has become quite expert at channeling the ways we think. Hence, we spend a great deal of time being devoted to "patriotism" and "heroism" and very little time thinking about the actual mechanics of war. This was impressed upon me quite profoundly about a decade ago when I spent a week in Washington, D.C. I spent the week walking throughout Washington's numerous monuments. Most of them, interestingly enough, are devoted to wars. All of them display patriotic texts of devotion to freedom, liberty, and the like. None of them suggest the dark side of why wars happen. Nor do any of them acknowledge the enormous losses of property and civilian life. Have you ever actually looked at pictures of Europe after the end of World War II?
What it actually comes down to is the fact that governments declare wars and governments conscript their young to serve in their military forces. But who are these governments? Is our own government functioning as we would wish, right now? Are we ready to serve such a dysfunctional government if it comes to that?
What seems clear is that wealth controls our government --- certainly not "the people" --- so why should the people serve the whims of wealth?
When we think of patriotism, we need to think carefully and clearly about whose interests are really involved in the call to patriotism. There are, of course, the usual slogans of "keeping us free" but what "us" are we really being asked to keep free. More often than not our patriots are dying for the interests of a small minority of billionaires who could actually care less for their "patriots" or the country as a whole. That is the sad truth about war.
In my 77 years, I have know WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the first Iraq War, war in Afganistan, and the Bush Iraq War. Only WWII was a "popular war" in the sense that heroic young people signed up to serve because the freedom of our world had genuinely been threatened by dreadful dictators. The rest have been ideological. Perhaps it is acceptable for people to die in the name of ideologies, but we should definitely check which ideologies are involved first. As we said during the first Iraq War, "if Kuwait 's principal product had been broccoli we would never have gone to war." Why is the whole of the Middle East so "important"? It is oil of course. And what proportion of Americans profit from interests in oil? And in what ways were they connected to the Bush Administration?
We should put as much attention into researching these questions as we put into praising the heroism of our service personnel. In actuality that is a real way of honoring them.
