By Jay Janson
U.S. Memorial Day, originally intended as a solemn day of mourning for families of dead veterans has long become an opportunity for jingoistic war celebration, deceiving politicians and recruiting officers to parade and glorify warfare as a means to entrap young volunteers for future wars.
Instead of solemn mourning, on Memorial Day, war promoting corporate media, having tricked so many Americansinto fighting and dying in unjust, murderous wars based on lies, now hypes our loved ones’ inglorious death as beautiful military service to entice recruits for their continuing wars.
We need a memorial day to commemorate all victims of war, especially the civilians. That way people will become aware of the true effect of war and be more ready to oppose war when politicians call for it.
How many tens of thousands of conscience stricken veterans of US wars in small countries can forget faces of ‘enemy’ dead? – finding smiling photos of beautiful children and wives in the caps or pockets of their clothes? How many American veterans were ashamed to be murdering guys defending their country against our bombing and invasion. Remembering them with love officially on Memorial Day would shake up the war mongers and challenge lies past and present about our wars.
Let’s not limit those Memorial Day moments of silent mourning solely for Americans, who ‘gave’ their lives in far away places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia just to name a few of the nations invaded by Americans.
To honor only US military dead is to glorify the military mindset. Not only that, but all around the world via satellite TV, families still mourning their children’s deaths or maiming, watch clips of Americans publicly honoring US military who fell attacking their countries.
A pretty slick suckering-in, that military use of the word “honor.’ as indiscriminate praise for killing designated enemies of the corporatist governed US, as if they were enemies of the American people. Honoring them as heroes draws a boy in to prove his manhood. Mourning dead military is a turn-off for boys considering enlisting. Mourning is anti-war! Bad for war profits. “Honoring’ is pro-war! War is good for the stock market and the profit margins of U.S. weapons manufacturing corporations, conversantly profitable for the American war investing community suspected of criminal insanity.
The U.S. corporation Lockheed Martin is the world’s largest arms-producing and military services company, with arms sales of nearly $60 billion. Raytheon Technologies, Northrop Grumman Corp., Boeing, and General Dynamics Corp. are the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th largest in the world.[1]
Let’s have U.S. Memorial Day become ‘War Victims Day’ to foster war prevention
Americans should no longer participate in selective mourning only America’s war dead, and instead mourn all victims of war, the millions of civilians, the hundreds of thousands of our designated enemies fallen in their motherlands, and only then, having put others first, as in common humility, will we have the right to mourn the tens of thousands of our very own fellow citizens who sacrificed their lives for, or thinking it was for, the good of our nation.
Mourn Not Honour Americans Who Died in Dishonourable ‘Mistaken’ Wars for GOP, DEMS and Wall Street Deep State.
Humankind is in an ugly period of suffering in the bloody hands of imbecilic investors in war, who own the American government and media and who cannot stop themselves from planning war, even terminal nuclear war, since they know that wars make money. Their funded elected politicians and media praise war on Memorial Day.
Memorial Day! Mourn US Soldiers Killed in Criminally Dishonorable Wars in Other Peoples’ Countries! Imagining What Many GIs Who Lost Their Lives Might Be Saying On Memorial Day If They Could Speak From Their Graves: ‘While our family and friends mourn our absence, conglomerate owned media, after having used our patriotism to have us fight criminally unjust wars based on lies, now hypes our inglorious death as beautiful military service, blacking out our senseless massacres of millions over the last 60 years.’
Knowledgeable, informed, really patriotic Americans Mourn Firstly the Millions Americans Have Slaughtered and Only Then Mourn U.S. Soldiers.
A Veterans For Peace Memorial Day Press Release might say that VFP, or at least many if not all VFP, first mourn the patriots of US invaded countries that fell fighting against overwhelming odds, and their civilian countrymen and children who fell in harms way of those US invading forces. Nothing less than this can dent the Memorial Day adulation for dying for what Martin Luther King called “atrocity wars to maintain predatory investments.”[2]
What Dead GIs Would Say To the World on Memorial Day About Being Praised as Heroes. If they could speak from their graves, GIs who died shamefully killing, maiming and destroying within innocent populations, would appeal to Majority Humanity in the ever targeted and plundered Global South, to effect the same level of solidarity that the racist neocolonial investment banker driven imperialists of the 1st World of mostly Caucasian population display, and bring their five centuries of brutal genocidal Western domination to an end.
A growing number of Americans are now able to include mourning the billions who have suffered under U.S. led permanent war hegemony, and this writer agrees with those peoples historians who understand that America has become weakened by having self-destroyed it’s economic advantage through spending wildly, unintelligently and massively on its military,* and China will come to be in financial position to offer U.S. a deal better than war, and bring about war investors’ military industrial complex failure to keep power in a war weary U.S.A.
- U.S. military spending is more than the next ten countries combined National Priorities Project [3]
Post Scrip:
This encouraging the honouring and remembering all victims of war on Memorial Day is not new idea. Its long been the hope, plan and fervent desire of peace activists.
…as in 2022, the Memorial Day Massachusetts Peace Action Society announced, “Today, Memorial Day, activists will gather to honor and remember all victims of war.”
End Notes
1. The SIPRI Top 100 arms-producing and military services companies in the world, 2022 STOCKHOLM INTERNATIONAL
PEACE RESEARCH INSTITUTEhttps://www.sipri.org/visualizations/2023/sipri-top-100-arms-producing-and-military-services-companies-world-2022
2. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence
Delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm
3. U.S. military spending is more than the next ten countries combined National Priorities Project
https://www.nationalpriorities.org/blog/2023/05/04/us-still-spends-more-its-military-over-144-countries-combined/Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India, in Germany & Sweden Einartysken,and in the US by Greanville Post, Dissident Voice; Global Research; Information Clearing House; Counter Currents; Minority Perspective, UK,and others; now resides in NYC; First effort was a series of articles on deadly cultural pollution endangering seven areas of life emanating from Western corporate owned commercial media published in Hong Kong’s Window Magazine 1993; Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his; Weekly column, South China Morning Post, 1986-87; reviews for Ta Kung Bao; article China Daily, 1989. Is coordinator of the Howard Zinn co-founded King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign, and website historian of the Ramsey Clark co-founded Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign, https://prosecuteuscrimesagainsthumanitynow.blogspot.com/which contains a history of US crimes in 19 nations from 1945 thru 2012.
26 May 2024
Source: countercurrents.org