One of the tenets of
militaristic fascism in America is the oft-repeated slogan that “you don’t
have to agree with the wars to honor those who fight them for us.” Something
to this effect is repeated thousands of times during Memorial Day bloviations all across the fruited plain. And
it is all complete nonsense. “Honoring” paid killers for the state for
participating in non-defensive, unjust wars only serves to make it more
likely that there will be even more unjust wars in the future. And it rewards
individuals for engaging in some of the most sinful and reprehensible
behavior known to mankind.
There have been one or
two exceptions in American history, but in general what Americans are
“memorializing” on Memorial Day (which began as “Decoration Day” shortly
after Lincoln’s war) is wars of conquest, imperialism, mass murder of
foreigners and the confiscation of their property, the abolition of civil
liberties at home, the slavery of military conscription, and the debt, taxes,
and inflation that are used to pay for it all. The state orchestrates
never-ending memorials to itself and its wars because war is the health of
the state (and in almost all cases, the deadly enemy of freedom and
prosperity).
The American Revolution
was a just war, as Murray Rothbard explained in his
essay “Just War.” But barely thirty years later, the
American state began its long imperialistic exodus by attempting to
conquer Canada during the
War of 1812. The attempt failed,
and Americans were burdened with a huge war debt, inflation, and the
resurrection of the corrupt Bank of the United States, a precursor of the
Fed. The War of 1812 was “sold” by war hawks like Henry Clay under
various false and absurd pretenses, such as Clay’s insistence that the
British were encouraging Indians to attack Americans. No matter how
absurd the state’s lies are, they have always been an easy and expeditious
way to dupe Boobus Americanus
into supporting its wars.
Thirty years later
President James Polk “justified” an invasion of Mexico by claiming that the
tiny Mexican army posed an “imminent” threat to Americans. It was
thus James Polk, not George W. Bush, who first used the excuse of
“pre-emptive war” to invade and mass murder foreigners who had done no harm
to Americans. Polk’s war enabled the American state to acquire
California and New Mexico at a cost of about 15,000 American lives and an
estimated 25,000 Mexican casualties.
During his only two years
in the U.S. Congress Abraham Lincoln voiced opposition to the Mexican War,
but on his inauguration day (March 4, 1861) he threatened “invasion”
and “bloodshed” in any state that refused to pay the federal tariff tax,
which had been more than doubled two days earlier. He would not back
down to South Carolina’s tariff nullifiers, as President Andrew Jackson had
done three decades earlier. He called his War for Tariff Collection a
war “to save the union” and said repeatedly that that was the one and only
reason why he launched an invasion of his own country in a war that led to
the death of as many as 850,000 Americans according to the latest
research. Of course, Lincoln’s war literally destroyed the voluntary
union of the founding fathers and replaced it with a Soviet-style compulsory
union held together at gunpoint. All other countries of the world,
including all of the Northern states of the U.S., ended slavery
peacefully. Lincoln instead used the slaves as political pawns in a war
that was about finally consolidating all political power in Washington, D.C.,
the pipe dream of the “nationalists” in American politics since the time of
Hamilton, their Machiavellian inspiration.
Northern newspapers at
the time understood that Lincoln sent warships to Fort Sumter in hopes of
duping the South Carolinians into firing on the fort to gin up war fever in
the North. The Jersey City (NJ) American Standard newspaper
wrote of a “madness and ruthlessness” in Lincoln’s behavior of sending
warships to Charleston as “a pretext for letting loose the horrors of war.”
(See Howard Perkins, Northern Editorials on Secession). After
Fort Sumter Lincoln wrote his naval commander, Captain Gustavus Fox, on May
1, 1861 to thank him for his help in duping the South Carolinians. In
the letter he said that “you and I both anticipated that the cause of the
country,” i.e., a war, “would be advanced” by sending the warships, and then
concluded in a celebratory tone that “our anticipation is justified by the
result.” No one was harmed, let alone killed at Fort Sumter, yet
Lincoln responded with a full-scale invasion of all the Southern states,
forcing Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee to reverse their
previous decisions, made at political conventions and in popular votes, and
leave the union after all.
Having conquered the
South and commenced the decade of continued plunder known as
“Reconstruction,” three months after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox,
the U.S. government commenced a twenty-five-year
long war of genocide against the
Plains Indians, “to make way for the [government-subsidized] railroads,” as
General Sherman himself said. The chief engineer of the
government-subsidized transcontinental railroads, Lincoln confidant Grenville
Dodge, asked Congress to make slaves of the Indians and force them to dig the
railroad beds from the Mid-West to California. Congress refused and
funded a war of extermination (also Sherman’s word) instead. Sherman,
who was in charge of the Indian Wars, called his efforts “the final solution
to the Indian problem.”
The Spanish-American War
was yet another exercise in imperialistic conquest, this time using the
mysterious explosion in the battleship Maine as an excuse to wage war on Cuba
for four years in order to take over Cuba’s sugar and tobacco industries for
the benefit of American corporations.
World War I was none of
America’s business, either, but Woodrow Wilson used the excuse of the sinking
of the British pleasure boat, the Lusitania, which carried 100 American
tourists, to enter the war. He knew that the “pleasure boat” was
secretly transporting arms to England, and refused to warn the American
tourists of the danger. One effect of Wilson’s war was to strengthen
the hands of the communists in Russia and the Nazis in Germany, as Jim Powell
persuasively argues in his book, Wilson’s War. Without American
participation in World War I, Powell argues, there may never have even been a
World War II as the Europeans would have eventually settled their own differences
as they had been doing for hundreds of years.
Americans were never
threatened with being forced to speak German or Japanese, or adopt sauerkraut
or sushi as their national foods during the 1940s, either. One can
disagree with Robert Stinnett’s extremely persuasive argument in his book, Day of Deceit, about how FDR manipulated the
Japanese into invading Pearl Harbor, just as Lincoln manipulated the South
Carolinians. But one cannot deny the fact that the end result of World
War II was that Russia’s international socialists (a.k.a. communists),
as opposed to Germany’s national socialists (a.k.a. Nazis), got to
impose totalitarian rule over Central and Eastern Europe for the next
forty-five years, with the U.S. government allying itself with the former
gang of totalitarian socialists for the duration of the war.
Nor were Americans ever
threatened with being forced to speak Korean, Vietnamese, Iraqi, or any other
language. Rothbard was right: The only two just, defensive wars in American
history were the American Revolution and the South’s side during the War to
Prevent Southern Independence. Since there are no longer any “Civil
War” veterans alive today, you would only be making a fool of yourself by
saying “thank you for your service” to any veteran on Memorial Day — or any
other day.
