'Memorial Day should be not a paean to war but a solemn occasion to value peace.'
On Memorial Day, the United States is not in a significant shooting war. It seems to me that the best way to honor our more than 1.1 million war dead is to work to keep it that way. Memorial Day should be not a paean to war but a solemn occasion to value peace.
As all those dead bodies attest, war is always a failure. It is a failure of imagination, a failure of vision, a failure of politics, a failure of diplomacy. There are times, as with the Confederate plot to secede so as to keep human beings enslaved in perpetuity or the Nazi regime’s murderous rampage through Europe, when war landed on our doorstep and was unavoidable, at least from our side.
I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-12 . I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916.
We are not in a conventional shooting war, but we are behaving as though we don’t care if we fall into one. Our men and women in uniform deserve better. They deserve better politics and diplomacy. Because as Major General Smedley Butler, USMC, correctly said, we can only legitimately ask them to make the supreme sacrifice to protect the coasts of the United States of America. The geopolitical gamesmanship of the national security state may be important.
War is always a failure. It is a failure of imagination, a failure of vision, a failure of politics, a failure of diplomacy. I wouldn’t go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket. There isn’t a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to.
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