{"id":295987,"date":"2025-05-26T12:00:10","date_gmt":"2025-05-26T11:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=295987"},"modified":"2025-05-24T07:00:02","modified_gmt":"2025-05-24T06:00:02","slug":"us-memorial-day-its-not-about-the-dead-soldiers-but-about-glorifying-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/05\/us-memorial-day-its-not-about-the-dead-soldiers-but-about-glorifying-war\/","title":{"rendered":"US Memorial Day: It\u2019s Not about the Dead Soldiers but about Glorifying War"},"content":{"rendered":"

23 May 2025\u00a0<\/em>–\u00a0Although Memorial Day in the United Sates is ostensibly a day for honoring soldiers killed in wars, it is, rather, a day for promoting war. If it were to honor the dead, all its pageantry would be in opposition to war. Rather than being haunted by the ghosts of war, many Americans are very proud of all its soldiers killed while killing foreigners for the military industrial complex and the super-rich who own the country.<\/p>\n

For the U.S.A. is a warfare state; it has been waging imperialistic overseas wars for a long, long time, and using its soldiers as cannon fodder. Most families of dead soldiers find it impossible to admit that their loved ones died in vain, even if courageously.<\/p>\n

Without waging wars, the U.S. economy, as presently constituted, would collapse. Business goes on as usual.<\/p>\n

Remembering all the war dead is like drifting on a ghost ship in a still sea of burning water. Haunted by the eerie silence of their absent presence, if we listen closely enough, we can hear such victims calling to us: Remember me, Remember me, why did it have to be?<\/p>\n

\u201cAll warfare is ghostly,\u201d writes the classical scholar Norman O. Brown, \u201cevery army an exercitus feralis <\/em>(a funereal exercise), every soldier a living corpse.\u201d<\/p>\n

The world is littered with the corpses of wars\u2019 victims, those of the killers and the killed, soldiers of every nation \u2013 but the vast majority are innocent civilians who never picked up a gun. The earth is so saturated with all their blood that one would expect the rivers to run red as a reminder. But that only happens in poems, as with Federico Garcia Lorca: \u201cBeneath all the totals, a river of warm blood.\u201d<\/p>\n

But what do poets know that the potentates, politicians, and mad generals don\u2019t? These killers are experts at shedding innocent blood to satisfy their blood lust and then erecting monuments to the killers. They are necrophiliacs, while all the poets do is to remind us that we will all die and that we should affirm life and love each other before we do \u2013 that war is an evil lie, as Wilfred Owen told us about World War I in Dulce et Decorum Est:<\/em><\/p>\n

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
\nBehind the wagon that we flung him in,
\nAnd watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
\nHis hanging face, like a devil\u2019s sick of sin;
\nIf you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
\nCome gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
\nObscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
\nOf vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,\u2014
\nMy friend, you would not tell with such high zest
\nTo children ardent for some desperate glory,
\nThe old Lie: Dulce et decorum est<\/em>
\nPro patria <\/em>mori.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But that was long ago. War\u2019s victims still fall everywhere, every day they are stilled in deserts, mountains, jungles, cities, houses, hospitals, schools, on the open roads, in bedrooms, in woods, in alleyways, crouched\u00a0 in basements, killed from the sky, the ground, directly, remotely, by their own desperate hands, slowly in despair. Why count the ways, why count the victims \u2013 the truth is countless?<\/p>\n

But we must count, not to wave a flag and march down Main Steet to the sound of a marching band behind a fire engine with little kids on bikes and old men with rifles on their shoulders, but to galvanize ourselves to stand and oppose the warmongers who run the government.<\/p>\n

Who can not weep and scream in opposition as the U.S.\/Israel commits genocide against the Palestinians? Savage slaughter for all to see but ignore.<\/p>\n

Who is so blind as not to see the wars waged from administration to administration as smoothly as the change of seasons?<\/p>\n

Once the warmongers shot down the U.S.\u2019s great antiwar leaders. Now they suck the population in with Memorial Day sales and dreams of cookouts.<\/p>\n

But business goes on as usual, as the great Roberta Flack sang so mournfully, \u201cexcept that my brother is dead.\u201d George M. Cohan was right: \u201cThe Yanks are coming.\u201d <\/a>They are always coming, but he was wrong to think it is ever over. It\u2019s not supposed to be ever over.<\/p>\n

And \u201cover there,\u201d Maha Khalil, a one year old Iraqi girl, was killed in the first few months of America\u2019s criminal war against Iraq.<\/p>\n

Mrs. Ngugen Thi Tau was slaughtered by U. S. soldiers at My Lai, Vietnam.<\/p>\n

Mohammed Nidal Hisham Attallah, Ahmad Shadi Talal Al-Haddad, and Masa Mohammed Youssef Nasr are a few of at least 16,500 Palestinian children killed by Israel\/U.S. in Gaza since October 7, 2023.<\/p>\n

Who knows all the dead in Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, Libya, East Timor, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, El Salvador, Chile, throughout Africa, and all the other countries where the American military and the CIA have been dispatched? Who can grasp it? Their names mean nothing to those who didn\u2019t know them, just as the endless names of the U.S. military dead (most drafted into a war they didn\u2019t want or understand) that line the Vietnam Veterans Memorial are a sad blur to those who come to look but didn\u2019t know the fallen. The same is even truer for anyone who views the Holocaust memorial in Boston where all one sees are rows and rows of concentration camp numbers; for every number a real person, each one reduced by the Nazis to six-digits tattooed on arms.<\/p>\n

When we try to name and count wars\u2019 victims, we are overwhelmed and stunned. Yet the wars persist. Like the pawns conscripted to fight them, the anonymous ghosts of all the victims murmur in our ears: Why?<\/p>\n

Dylan sings:<\/p>\n

Oh my name it is nothin\u2019<\/em>
\nMy age it means less<\/em>
\nThe country I come from<\/em>
\nIs called the Midwest<\/em>
\nI\u2019s taught and brought up there<\/em>
\nThe laws to abide<\/em>
\nAnd the land that I live in<\/em>
\nHas God on its side.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But not all of the wars\u2019 victim\u2019s die. Vast numbers become \u201cliving corpses,\u201d also mostly anonymous and forsaken. Across the world and here at home wherever the American war machine has set its sights, the lame and crippled struggle on, victims of bombs and bullets, napalm and white phosphorous, nuclear radiation, torture, biological weapons \u2013 all the grotesque weapons the ghouls of the weapons\u2019 industries have conjured up from hell for their paymasters. Countless living victims, yes, but the weapons industries carefully count their bloody profits, as do those who invest in these companies while turning a blind eye to their own complicity.<\/p>\n

Many of the wounds of war are psychological and spiritual. And so many of the victims suffer silently. Wars\u2019 terrors follow them everywhere down their nights and down their days, and they can often find no escape from the nightmare images that populate their minds, flashing in and out. It\u2019s beyond imagining the living hell of children worldwide reliving the sight of the bloodied mangled bodies of their parents at their feet, victims of bombs or death squads or perhaps \u201ccollateral damage,\u201d as if any words or reasons could undue their everlasting trauma or cover up the radical evil of those who killed them<\/p>\n

We owe it the wounded, dead, and tormented war victims everywhere to memorialize them with the words:<\/p>\n

War is a lie, and only truth will free us.<\/strong><\/p>\n

And to stop marching with the drums drumming and the flags flying as if we are proud of the U.S. killing machine.<\/p>\n