[CitizensTruth] Memorial Day

[Ragen Gillam]

This is ten years old, but still relevant.

 

Art Hilgart
ahilgart at kzoo.edu

 

Memorial Day

Art Hilgart

If today is typical of Memorial Days past, editors and commentators
throughout the nation (and perhaps elsewhere on this page) are paying
tribute to those who died for our freedom. The only problem in these facile
sentiments is history. On another Memorial Day, a prominent columnist
numbered among those who died for freedom the fallen in the American
Revolution, the Civil War, and our invasion of Viet Nam. 

The point of the American Revolution was not freedom, but whether our
capital was to be in London or (eventually) the District of Columbia. Our
personal liberties, such as they are, are provided by the post-war
afterthought, the Bill of Rights. The Civil War was a similar conflict, this
time over whether the Confederacy would have its seat of government in
Richmond or Washington. Emancipation was another post-war round of
constitutional amendments. The connection of our liberty to our Indochinese
wars is known, if at all, only to those who assert it.

Liberty is a fragile thing that has nothing to do with battlefields. The
Bill of Rights was the work not of generals, but a small group of
intellectuals- liberal intellectuals. The freedom promised by our
Constitution is realized only through the untiring work of the American
Civil Liberties Union and similar organizations acting in the courts on our
behalf. Warriors, on the other hand, seem to have little regard for the
Constitution. Richard Nixon killed in Asia and gave us Watergate; Ronald
Reagan killed in Nicaragua and gave us Iran-Contra. George Bush ran against
the Bill of Rights and invaded Panama. Our ongoing Gulf War is to maintain
the illegal feudal ownership of Kuwait by the Al Sabah family, not for
anybody's freedom. 

And even if our wars were somehow related to our freedoms, there is the
other side of dying for them-- killing for them. Let us say that our right
to vote was somehow contingent on the action at My Lai. In that case, I
would willingly give up my vote to restore those lives. It is one thing to
risk one's own life for a principle and quite another to kill the innocent
for one. If one seeks exemplary death for freedom, look to Martin Luther
King, to the six at Kent State and Jackson State, to Goodman, Schwerner, and
Cheney. 

Those who seek to sanctify our past wars by tying them to liberty are
undoubtedly moved by sympathy with the survivors of the sons and husbands
who died carrying out orders issued from the safety of Washington. The past
is past, they may rationalize. What are a few lies to make people feel good?
What they do, of course, is prepare another generation of sons and husbands
to kill and die in the fantasy that it is all for liberty. Some sympathy.

The name of the holiday is Memorial Day. Let us therefore honor the past by
remembering it and not by inventing it.

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/citizenstruth/attachments/20080526/972cee37/attachment.html>