Memorial Day 2019: a Challenging Perspective

by Lawrence Wines 

It really bothers me that "honoring the service of our veterans" has become a door-opener for lemming-like support of the warconomy.

Memorial Day was devised as a way to support widows and orphans of Union dead from the Civil War. By extension, because we keep having wars and so many people show-up to get killed in them, Memorial Day continued its purpose to honor the fallen of all our wars.

That's not meant to diminish recognition of the necessity of military response to global fascism in the Second World War, when the outcome would determine what kind of world we would have. Nor can we be deluded into believing that valor, bravery, and sacrifice were unique to that war. Those human traits can be found in every generation, and we should recognize how problematic that is: because battlefield sacrifices are made, at terrible cost, in all manner of conflicts that influence nothing greater than which group of rich manipulators will be given the upper hand.

Memorial Day makes no differentiation of "good" and "bad" wars, largely because survivors -- families of the fallen and veterans who bled with them -- would unelect any politician who suggested that. And so Memorial Day goes on honoring those who made the ultimate sacrifice, whether in a war that gave humanity a chance to advance equality and opportunity, or something less noble. It likewise honors those killed following the flag into efforts to expand economic empire for oligarchs and kleptocrats. To do otherwise would sabotage the ability to get yet another generation to respond to patriotic calls, even when they are being exploited by blood-money profiteers.

So we experience a world laden with symbols where psychology is expensively employed to sell soap, celebrities, addictive prescription drugs, beer, pizza, airlines that put your knees in your armpits to crowd-in more seats, fast food that causes high blood pressure and heart disease -- and to sell the ultimate righteous act of national egotism -- war.

As much as it still honors sacrifice for flag and country, or more often, sacrifice made for one's comrades, that's what Memorial Day has become.

While we're clarifying things, Memorial Day was never intended to be synonymous with Veterans Day. And no one has any business exploiting either of these days as a source of patriotic fervor to support the next contrived political "justification" for "regime change" or any other form of playing god in somebody else's country, whether that be in Venezuela, Yemen, a fragile African state, or Iran. (Especially while encouraging our "friends" to kowtow to brutal dictators in the police state of North Korea and the murderous petroligarchic kingdom -- and chief buyer of weapons from the US and the UK -- Saudi Arabia.)

War profiteers were insufficiently prosecuted during the Civil War, and so they became one of America's leading growth industries, into our time -- based, in the ultimate irony, on being merchants of death. 

We also lost a second chance, when President Eisenhower coined a term in his farewell address for the purpose of warning us about their malevolence -- thr "military-industrial complex."

So I see the need to address a Memorial Day message to Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop-Grumman, Fairchild, Browning Firearms, FMC (which stands for "Food Manufacturing Corporation," but has for 40 years built combat tanks and armored vehicles), and every other supplier of missiles, bombs, the combat aircraft or remotely piloted drones that carry them, and every other maker of ordnance or assault weapons for sale to US and foreign military buyers. That message is: If any of you are paying for a Memorial Day fireworks display, or any of those little made-in-China American flags going onto military graves? I don't want to know about your "patriotic contribution" if I learn about it from your crowing. And if any of you are, in any way, claiming tax deductions or seeking recognition for "contributing" to Memorial Day observances, you are committing yet another atrocity in the long litany of war atrocities.

Does it ever occur to the rich and powerful who wantonly manipulate everything for profit that the only way to truly honor war dead is to make sure we don't make any more of them?

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