The
Bodies of Those Who Died in Vain Litter our Landscape
29 May 2010By Dave Lindorff
It’s Memorial Day Weekend and I am sick to death of
the glorification of war in America.
And I am even sicker of politicians who wrap
themselves in the bloody flag and try to rub off some
of the stench of death from the bodies of those who
have died, mostly in vain for worthless causes, in
hopes that taking on some of the odor will cause them
to be perceived as admirable patriots themselves.
President George W. Bush, who dodged danger in the
Vietnam War by signing up for the Texas National Guard
and then ducked even that domestic duty, and Vice
President Dick Cheney who used five different excuses
to duck military service, morbidly rubbed themselves
with that flag for eight long years, even as they sent
hundreds of thousands of young men and women into
harm’s for their own personal political advantage.
President Barack Obama (who also avoided military
service), continued this obscene tradition when, in
his weekly PR address to the nation, he urged
Americans to “leave a flower” on the grave of a
soldier who died in one of America’s wars “so the rest
of us might inherit the blessings of this nation.”
Obama is also sending young Americans to kill and die
halfway around the world in a war that has no purpose
other than to demonstrate his political “toughness.”
Yet he disingenuously declares that it was “to
preserve America and advance the ideals we cherish"
that “led patriots in each generation to sacrifice
their own lives to secure the life of our nation, from
the trenches of World War I to the battles of World
War II, from Inchon and Khe Sanh, from Mosul to Marja.”
What utter crap and nonsense!
I’ll grant you that there were noble motivations that
led many Americans to die fighting for this country’s
independence. The same can be said for those soldiers
who fought and died on the Union side in the Civil War
who had the noble goal of ending the crime of slavery.
And indeed it was the decision by a group of freed
slaves in 1866 in South Carolina to disinter the
bodies of Union soldiers who had died in Confederate
captivity and who had been unceremoniously dumped in a
collective grave, and to give them all decent burials,
that established the first Memorial Day.
But to claim that the over 100,000 American soldiers
who died on the front lines in World War I were
defending American freedoms, as Memorial Day speakers
like Obama do year after year, is simply a lie. World
War I was never about a threat to America. It was a
war of empire, fought by the European powers, none of
which was any better or worse than the others, and the
US joined that conflict not for noble reasons or for
defense, but in hopes of picking up some of the
pieces. My own maternal grandfather, a promising
sprinter who had Olympic aspirations, was struck with
mustard gas in the trenches and, unable to run anymore
with his permanently scarred lungs, ended up having to
settle for coaching high school as a career. (My
paternal grandfather won a silver star for heroism as
an ambulance driver on the front, but was so damaged
by what he experienced that he never talked about it
at all, my father says.) Sadly, their sacrifices and
heroism served no noble cause.
World War II, at least in Europe, may have had some
moral justification, though there can be some
legitimate debate as to whether the US and its
freedoms were ever really threatened, and certainly
many of the Americans who died in that war saw their
struggle as worthy, so that we may at least in good
conscience honor their deaths.
But Khe Sanh? Mosul? And for god’s sake, Marjah? Let’s
get real.
Khe Sanh, one of the major battles in the Vietnam War,
was just one little piece of a huge malignant disaster
in a war that was criminal from its inception, and
that had no purpose beyond perpetuating the
neocolonialist control by the US of a long-subjugated
people who were fighting to be free, just as our own
ancestors had done. The over 58,000 Americans who died
in that war, who contributed to the killing of over 2
million Vietnamese, many or most of them civilians,
may have engaged in personal acts of bravery, but they
were not, as a group, heroes. Nor were they over there
fighting for American freedom. Some, like Lt. William
Calley, who did not die, were no doubt murderers.
Most, though, were simply victims--victims of their
own government’s years of lying and deceit.
If we memorialize them, it should be by vowing never
again to allow our government to commit such crimes,
and to send Americans to fight and die for such
criminal policies.
Sadly, we’ve already allowed that to happen, though,
over and over again--in the Panama, in Grenada, in
Iraq, and now in Afghanistan and perhaps, before long,
Iran and/or Pakistan.
Take the president’s mention of Mosul. It is a city in
Iraq, and the Americans who died there and in other
Iraqi cities died because of the criminality of
President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick
Cheney, who manufactured a criminal war of aggression
against Iraq, a country that posed no threat to the
US. They died too because of the cowardice and
venality of the Democrats in Congress who allowed
themselves to be bullied and extorted into supporting
that criminal war. The five thousand Americans who
died, and the hundreds of thousands more who have been
gravely wounded in that war, not to mention the more
than a million who fought there or worked in support
roles for others who fought, were not defending any of
our “cherished ideals.” They were simply helping oil
companies like Exxon/Mobil, Chevron, Shell and yes,
British Petroleum, secure control of the Iraqi
oilfields. They were simply helping Bush and Cheney
win re-election. They were simply helping inflate the
profits of Halliburton, Boeing, Lockheed, Blackwater
and other war profiteers.
Noble deaths indeed.
As for Marjah, its mention at all in the same breath
as the American Revolution or the Civil War is simply
laughable, but it is also truly grotesque. The little
farming communities that the Pentagon PR machine
lyingly described as a small city swarming with
Taliban fighters was nothing but a staged and
carefully managed battle set, designed to make
Americans forget that the US was (and is) bogged down
in an unwinnable war of conquest and occupation in
Afghanistan. The few American soldiers and Marines who
died there died for the sake of White House and
Pentagon propaganda, not for the sake of defending
Americans’ vaunted freedoms. The set has now been torn
down, the klieg lights have been turned off, and
“Marjah” has reverted to Taliban territory again.
This blind worship of US militarism has got to stop!
Never again should Americans be sent to kill and die
for politicians.
If and when America and American freedom are really
threatened, I have no doubt that American men and
women will rise to the occasion and show the kind of
nobility and heroism that was evident in the
Revolution and the Civil War. But in the meantime, we
need to stop glorifying all these wars that were
criminal, or that could have been avoided. Memorial
Day should be a day to demand peace, a day to demand
an end to a military-industrial complex that claims
nearly half of the nation’s general funds, a day to
focus on the real threats to American’s “cherished
ideals,” most of which are purely domestic, and a day
to celebrate what those ideals are: equalty before the
law, freedom of speech and assembly, freedom from
government intrusion in our lives, the right to be
considered innocent until proven guilty by a jury of
our peers, and the right to stand up and say that our
political leaders are, for the most part, crooks,
charlatans and even war criminals.
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