Memorial Day is a Fraud: The True Meaning is Worse by Bill Buppert

“War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”

– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

Publisher’s Note:  I published variation of this before last November and it certainly rings true for yet another holiday during the year when we celebrate the use of war and violence to advance the agenda of the American Federal government around the globe.  We are asked to bow our heads in honor of the dead and wounded who gave their service for freedom.  Call me a skeptic.  Individual citizens have never been in graver danger of being fined, kidnapped, caged, maimed and killed by their own government for the most banal of violations or infractions against the imperial power that has wrapped its tentacles around every living soul in the land of the free.  The export of extraterritorial violence does not make a country free, it puts every inhabitant in the hazard as the entire planet has factions enraged, women and children savaged and murdered and entire religious sects chosen for special military attention.

Full disclosure: I am a retired Army officer so I have been there and done that at neo-imperialist shit-pits around the globe.

In this day in 1937, ten innocents Americans were gunned down in cold blood by badged and costumed Orcs in Chicago. Same as it ever was.

Since 1775, there have been approximately 1.35 million deaths and total US casualties of approximately 2.8 million. The deaths could fill a lake with about 1.7 million gallons of blood which could fill a city swimming pool that was 30 feet deep and 275 feet at each side. The deaths on the other side in the belligerent camp are exponentially larger by any standard when once examines the history.

In essence not only are we asked to memorialize conflicts that always manages to strengthen the government’s power on the other side, we are exposed to a constant drumbeat of protecting “our” freedom yet no existential threat to the USSA has existed since the cessation of hostilities with the UK in 1814.

The celebration of Memorial Day should not be about the soldiery, it should be a mass wake and reflection on the untold millions of innocents detained, kidnapped, injured, napalmed, fire-bombed, incinerated, shot, mutilated, tortured and murdered by the barbaric and naked grasping of the American central government for ever-increasing power and control at home and abroad.

Those acres of tombstones are also a fitting symbol to the state of liberty over time in America as a result of the obedient slaves marching to the drumbeat of expanding government…forever. War is nothing more than a dispute between plantation owners who quizzically and cleverly get the Helots to spill their blood to build heavier chains and more effective manacle systems.

A discomforting thought: Many people on this day insist that we should honor the dead and maimed because they thought the crusade they were on was righteous. This is precisely the attitude of many people when it comes to the tsunami of cops abuses on US soil; the badged political social workers are simply doing what they think is right.

There are many heroes in these conflicts like the young helicopter pilot, Hugh Thompson Jr., who positioned his bird between unarmed Vietnamese villagers and an American patrol to protect the innocents from further bloodshed at My Lai.

The only just war is one fought on your soil to defend your own soil. -BB

“Happy Veterans Day and thank you for your service” or “thanks for protecting our freedom.”

What!  I hear this familiar refrain again and again every November.  I am appalled whenever this unthinking salutation is proffered.

I am a retired career Army officer and like USMC General Smedley Butler before me, I find these sentiments to be hogwash.

The only service rendered was to the American political power structure in the dishonorable hands of the Democrats or Republicans; the former, despite their protestations to peace, have gotten America involved in WWI, WWII, Korea and Vietnam. Starting with the shameful expropriation of the Mexican territory from 1846-48 to the War of Northern Aggression from 1860-65; the United States went into hyper-colonial overdrive in 1893 in the Hawaiian Islands and has not stopped since. The entire history of American arms on Earth has been a shameful and expansionist enterprise culminating in the first ever post-WWII (the Japanese attack on American territories in the Aleutians during the War to Save Josef Stalin and the minor coastal skirmishes in Oregon) attack on American state soil in 2001.  I am frankly astonished at the length of time it took for a substantive attack of any kind to be initiated on American soil with the breadth, ferocity and long sordid history of American mischief and mayhem abroad.

The sheer number of military expeditions the US has embarked on over time is breathtaking.  One worthy notes there have been 234 military expeditions from 1798-1993.  Another posits 159 instances of the use of United States armed forces abroad from October 1945 through December 2006.

“This list does not include covert actions and numerous instances of US forces stationed abroad since World War II, in occupation forces, or for participation in mutual security organizations, base agreements, and routine military assistance or training operations.”

Good God, if I were a Martian who landed on Earth ten years ago and found myself attending government schools, to include college, and watching television for any additional cultural education,  I would not be aware of any of this.  The constant drumbeat emanating from the State is the Orwellian chorus about America making the world safe for freedom and liberty and never using force abroad except in self-defense.  The history proves otherwise.

America, next to Rome in the Western world, ranks as one of the world’s most aggressive nation states when one examines the evidence.  A country sheltered from the tempestuous and constant warring on the European continent by one ocean and the turbulence in Asia by another ocean yet it simply cannot mind its own business nor resist the temptation to maim and murder abroad for expansion of political power and control whether for mercantile or colonial aspirations.

One can even see that the brutality practiced by American soldiers abroad is not recent but a long-standing tradition.

Afghanistan, now:

All told, five soldiers were charged with killing civilians in three separate episodes early last year. Soldiers repeatedly described Sergeant Gibbs as devising “scenarios” in which the unit would fake combat situations by detonating grenades or planting weapons near their victims. They said he even supplied “drop weapons” and grenades to make the victims appear armed. Some soldiers took pictures posing with the dead and took body parts as trophies. Sergeant Gibbs is accused of snipping fingers from victims and later using them to intimidate another soldier.

He also pulled a tooth from one man, saying in court that he had “disassociated” the bodies from being human, that taking the fingers and tooth was like removing antlers from a deer.

Sergeant Gibbs said he that was ashamed of taking the body parts, that he was “trying to be hard, a hard individual.” But he insisted that the people he took them from had posed genuine threats to him and his unit.”

Philippines, then:

“Like many of their officers, American troops also showed incredible callousness toward the Philippine civilian population.  A man named Clarence Clowe described the situation as follows in a letter he wrote to Senator Hoar.  The methods employed by American troops against civilians in an effort to find insurgent “arms and ammunition” include torture, beating, and outright killing.

At any time I am liable to be called upon to go out and bind and gag helpless prisoners, to strike them in the face, to knock them down when so bound, to bear them away from wife and children, at their very door, who are shrieking pitifully the while, or kneeling and kissing the hands of our officers, imploring mercy from those who seem not to know what it is, and then, with a crowd of soldiers, hold our helpless victim head downward in a tub of water in his own yard, or bind him hand and foot, attaching ropes to head and feet, and then lowering him into the depths of a well of water till life is well-nigh choked out, and the bitterness of a death is tasted, and our poor, gasping victims ask us for the poor boon of being finished off, in mercy to themselves.

All these things have been done at one time or another by our men, generally in cases of trying to obtain information as to the location of arms and ammunition.

Nor can it be said that there is any general repulsion on the part of the enlisted men to taking part in these doings. I regret to have to say that, on the contrary, the majority of soldiers take a keen delight in them, and rush with joy to the making of this latest development of a Roman holiday.

Another soldier, L. F. Adams, with the Washington regiment, described what he saw after the Battle of Manila on February 4-5, 1899:

In the path of the Washington Regiment and Battery D of the Sixth Artillery there were 1,008 dead niggers, and a great many wounded. We burned all their houses. I don’t know how many men, women, and children the Tennessee boys did kill. They would not take any prisoners.

Similarly, Sergeant Howard McFarland of the 43rd Infantry, wrote to the Fairfield Journal of Maine:

I am now stationed in a small town in charge of twenty-five men, and have a territory of twenty miles to patrol…. At the best, this is a very rich country; and we want it. My way of getting it would be to put a regiment into a skirmish line, and blow every nigger into a nigger heaven. On Thursday, March 29, eighteen of my company killed seventy-five nigger bolo men and ten of the nigger gunners. When we find one that is not dead, we have bayonets.

These methods were condoned by some back at home in the U.S., as exemplified by the statement of a Republican Congressman in 1909:

You never hear of any disturbances in Northern Luzon; and the secret of its pacification is, in my opinion, the secret of pacification of the archipelago.  They never rebel in northern Luzon because there isn’t anybody there to rebel.  The country was marched over and cleaned in a most resolute manner.  The good Lord in heaven only knows the number of Filipinos that were put under ground.  Our soldiers took no prisoners, they kept no records; they simply swept the country, and wherever or whenever they could get hold of a Filipino they killed him.  The women and children were spared, and may now be noticed in disproportionate numbers in that part of the island.

And countless incidents small and large in between from the only nation state in the Western world that not only endorses the use of torture but makes it an official means of projecting power abroad.

I have often remarked that cops are the only reason freedom and liberty is and has been in the hazard in America, and unfortunately, the same standard applies for military power abroad.

The only just war is one fought to defend one’s own soil from invasion.  There is no other.  Every other conflict reeks of statist opportunism and yen to expand tax jurisdictions and the power to rob others of their wealth and resources.  Some may mistake this for a pretense of the Left.  Not only do the progressives and the collectivists in America have a rich history of cheer-leading wars such as WWI and WWII but they also wish to employ military-style violence domestically to achieve their government supremacist dreams.

The notion that foreign wars and entanglements are wrong still emanates from a sparsely populated philosophical quarter that has no majority presence in the academy or the government–media complex.  It is a true voice in the wilderness.  That voice has one signature message:  you cannot thank a veteran for your freedom because they have actively done nothing more than endanger its very existence.  In fact, American military power abroad (and increasingly, at home) has made civilians more unsafe than they have ever been.  The threat not only emerges from aggrieved victims of American brutality abroad but a government desperate in bad times to ensure that not one dollar of military expenditures is reduced.  America is now a national security garrison state.  Think about that the next time you take a flight.

Veterans don’t need gratitude but a self-realization on their part that the machine they worked for was never an engine for liberty but a device whose single purpose was aggrandizement of American political power at home and abroad.  And that political hammer always extinguishes liberty and never expands it.

“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?”

– Gandhi

25 thoughts on “Memorial Day is a Fraud: The True Meaning is Worse by Bill Buppert”

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  2. I joined the military for adventure, to test myself. Even back in my empty-headed youth I knew I was not fighting for the flag of freedom, but the flag of whomever controlled the purse strings. I went to work for the Feds after that. Same thing. I left that to work as a tradesmen, Now I happen to work with people who did not serve in any way.However, they are the most patriotic people in the world. “We need to nuke their ass and take their gas”, they say.

    The .gov propaganda machine is working well…………….

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  4. My FB page is adorned today with memes reinforcing the NeoCon viewpoint about this day: “Your day at the beach (picture of crowded U.S. beach) is brought to you by their day at the beach (picture of U.S. invasion of some Pacific island beach)” or, “Honor them today and everyday.” The lib-progs post feel good quotes from Gandhi and pop artist figures about “peace, love, and harmony.” Between the two, virtually no one can parse the reality Bill has artfully presented in this piece.

    I reached the conclusion long ago that this inability to think independently, coupled with the negative power of “democracy,” (it shunts any potential ambition to reject government to ground on either side, paying all wins to big G) meant that the situation is completely and utterly hopeless, and that the best any man can do is to try to carve a small, separate space for himself and his family.

    Days like this just reinforce the wisdom of that course of action, and essays likes Bill’s remind us that true virtue is its own reward, and one’s mind is, in the end, all one has.

  5. Oh, the Logic! “Let’s not fight unless it’s here where we can see our homes and loved ones destroyed.” More propaganda from our enemies abroad. Putin could well have written this screed. Man up.

    1. John,

      Indeed, foreign meddling has worked so well so far and one’s masculinity should be directly connected to invading other people’s land for political purposes because that never has unintended consequences.

      I am always amazed at folks who conclude that invasion, empire and perpetual war make for a “hothouse for individual liberty” from the Romans to the Byzantines to the Persians to the British and everything in between. All empires collapse on their own contradictions
      over time. Exhibit A is the UK where human liberty is all but extinguished. A singular reason is that whatever empires practice abroad in warfare and conquest always comes home no matter how many times you click your ruby slippers.

      Hence the institutionalization of torture, police militarization, electronic surveillance and all the other benefits that accrue to the imperial construct.

      I look forward to checking out your Stardrive series. Thanks coldwarvet…

      Bill

      1. “Man up.” was inappropriate and pointless. My frustration with the recent uptick in “the evils of American Imperialism” meme that I see on many websites purporting to support freedom and individual rights. I provided no more support for my opinion than you have for yours. I keep forgetting that we have passed the point in this country for rational discussion (not that I was being any more rational or discussing – just stating an opinion). Not speaking out to resist these malicious ideas is part of how we’ve arrived at our current state. But speaking out now is too little too late. Pointless. Will the meek (and peaceful) inherit the earth? I guess we’ll find out. The stage is certainly set for one version of a “stateless society” – one where it is all against all as unprepared people struggle to survive.

    2. Cycle of history of state violence is always circular, because while the state has many motivations for violence and uses of it as a tool to obtain power and enrich its regimes wherever and whenever profitable at little risk to its oligarchy outside its borders, it’s greatest and only existential threat is the native indigenous people who constitute its subject state population inside it’s borders. It can not exist without that natural born population, it can not survive without the blessings of a plurality of that population, tacit or otherwise. We have already experienced that circular inward bent of the use of force and violence, once on a scale of violence at least equal in comparison to any external expeditionary subjugation into foreign lands.

      The state always turns on its own, all states do, without fail.

      For they are nothing if they are not by nature human extinctionists. And this go around this state is gearing up for what looks like a real doozy. I believe this go around is this states last. It will not survive its own rancid illegitimacy, it barely holds on now, for all it is is an inept collection of varying political, ideological and moneyed mandarins in bed with each other as convenient to its power and suits it’s wealth and various corporate interests. The loyalist Tories never left, they just transformed into marxists of one stripe or another, and destruction of rights of men has been an unending underlying statist motive, a slow long march of trying to eradicate every vestige of the components of liberty. It has achieved it’s nadir of corruption after these last couple of century’s, and is ready to collapse because of and in spite of itself, but before it does, it will turn inward and like a wounded beast will lash out at what threatens its survival, the burgeoning withdrawal of consent within its own borders.

      These sonofabitches running things, for all their arrogance and hubris, all their assumed and usurped power, all their riches, all their motives, need one thing which it can never force others to give up, they can’t coerce it, threaten it, shoot it, steal it, import it or fabricate it…Consent. Withdrawal of consent is the root of the most legitimate and powerful motive force on Earth. Withdrawal of consent is the most powerful weapon ever devised. Once enough people withdraw their consent, there is no stopping the motive power of it, you can only kill those who withdraw it, and you have to kill a lot of people in this country. You have to kill the memory of this penultimate of rights of men also. You have to kill those who become manifest in withdrawal of their consent, not just those who will take up arms in defense of their rights as men. That is a lot of dirt people. Liberty is a many faceted dangerous idea, it is dangerous to those who cherish it, and in particular existentially dangerous to those who fear it. Because the idea of liberty, it’s existence on the scale as we are so fortunate to be blessed with here, is relatively new, in both its scope and its form, being it is rather new born it is something that is in it’s early stages of life, and is evolving.

      For if Liberty is only one thing, it is evolutionary, its idea is a mind-spring, it is a legacy idea, it can never be put back into its bottle, and for all of our fits and starts, our hiatus’s from liberty, the ebbs and flows of the tides of freedom, our foibles as dirt people, our warts and our virtues, Liberty always seeks the highest ground, it is the opposite of the human lowest common denominator, it is the statist opposite. Liberty was born out of the reformation, from the great age of reason, it was forged in that same statist fire of use of force and violence as war as means. We are looking now at the verge of a war of wars.

      Liberty has evolved into it’s next stage, it cannot be stopped, it can not be dissuaded, it is force all its own, it is provincial, grass roots, it is nebulous, but it creates its own plurality naturally, there is no organization or underground, no insurgency, but it is in no uncertain terms insurgent and has gone underground. It begins with each of us and no other way, it is the iron clad law of choice, you choose to be free, or you do not, there is no middle ground. Choice is the seed of the motive power of liberty.

      Choice is the dignity of liberty and liberty’s fulcrum.

        1. He sure has a way of doing that. There’s nothing quite like it. That was something alright, everything socially relevant about human nature in a single comment.

          Me, I can’t get over that Work’s “Man up” means PRECISELY, “Don’t man up.” Not almost, but precisely. It’s a mad, mad, mad world.

        2. Hey Bill,

          Hope you and everyone is doing well and are freer today than yesterday.

          I have a thought for you.

          Wanna know why the state really hates secession?

          It doesn’t want the competition.

          Think about that.

          The state is a collection of bag men, who collectively have more power than the oligarchy, who each in their own right collect a cut from the proceeds of administrative extortion. The oligarchy at the top of the upside down pyramid, are very happy with their praetorians doing the heavy lifting of administrative tyranny.
          Here’s the kicker, and it can be argued the technical differences of what secession and abolition is, because in the final calculation secession is as individual a personal thing as any action. I understand in the general context of liberty what secession represents, there isn’t any doubt here is there? It still is a personal thing, and as Jim says, it all begins with each of us. Well that is true of a lot of things, a double edged sword, and that is true of liberty also, it is a very dangerous thing that liberty. But that is what makes it so exciting and worthy of freemen. And why so many fear and loath it. Ya gotta be responsible for everything you do. It definitely isn’t for everyone as we see every day.

          But back to the state and secession. Here is my premise, The State as we know it the last two century’s, it is an entity of people who have incrementally seceded from the mores and traditions of Christian Judea Western Civilization, and have dragged the rest of western civilization kicking and screaming with it. What’s Gramsci, Lenin, Marx if they where not people who formulated an alternative assumptive reality designed specifically to usurp the power of the rights of men, and seceded from the origins and birth of Liberty, Liberty the results of use of and application of reason, the natural evolution of the reformation, the release from anarcho tyranny of the Roman Empire, the renaissance, the explosion of art and science, of thought and invention out of the dark ages and thru the middle ages, the founding of the new world which was essentially an exodus from anarcho tyranny and slavery of the state which had itself seceded from the liberty and freedoms of the old world?

          Maybe two things here are like the theory Schrodinger’s Cat, (and Einstein had a couple of his pithy thoughts on the circular self destructive nature and thinking of the human extinction movement that is a constant in the human race regarding Schrodinger’s observations on reality), where we are looking at it all wrong Bill, and everyone here too listen up, the only secession and abolition here is the purview of the state, that it is the state and its actors who abolish and secede from humanity, that liberty is never abolition or secession, that it always has been the natural state of being, and until we all begin to look at it in the light of being first among firsts it is essentially legitimacy we are talking about here, abolition of the anarcho tyranny state and it’s bag men, aren’t going anywhere.

          So which reality is the reality here.

          The state and its secession from the basic primal rights of men?

          How can you secede from the state to begin with when the state is illegitimate as an entity to begin with? See what I’m getting at here? It is that “I Won’t!” thing.

          I’m not saying any of this to argue if the idea of abolition as we talk about it here is concerned is valid or not, because it is absolutely valid in every sense. But I’m trying to make an argument, and I hope a reasoned compelling one, that we all have been looking at the problem and the solutions from a position where we are putting ourselves at a great disadvantage, and giving the state far far too much due and subsequently ourselves at a great disservice.

          See, the skepticism so many express regarding secession and abolition, I suspect is warranted, not because of some commission by the secession movement, but omission of it’s absolute legitimacy, which is the first thing, and that for winning hearts and minds, it must be an unequivocal matter of faith, that the only abolition taking place is the sonofabitches who make up the anarcho state. Because for all it’s organized administrative tyranny, the state at it’s heart, is a out of control anarchy of greedy crazy motherfuckers who are all vying for power and a spot at the public feed trough, screw the idea of laws or principles, each with their own fiefdom or potentate within a larger oligarchy. How much more anarchy and secession from civilized western culture can you get? Can any entity of men’s actions be more out of control and still hold together than the modern anarcho state?

          It is a hard thing to define here Bill. I think it requires a leap in faith in something. I suspect I’m not much wrong about my premise, in general at least.

          What came first, the chicken or the egg… the anarcho state or rights of men, and just who is abolishing what here?

  6. While the “facts” are always in the hands of the victors, the truth is never an absolute.

    Americans of Southern descent, who can even bother with history, are aware of being on the receiving of the Feral Government’s “largess”. Indigenous Americans, aka Indians, also…….but the truth is always a conundrum of imperfection because it reflects imperfect people at best and evil people at worst.

    What is indisputable is the American Empire, and the ongoing implosion of that empire, for better or worse. The karma of the incessant, increasing domestic tyranny is for the worse, but you reap what you sow……….nationally as well as individually.

    Life is a Game of Riddles, and Unbearable; if we weren’t all Immortals playing tricks on ourselves for our own infinite entertainment.

    Otherwise, I have no explanation.

    1. “The government ruling us draws its authority not from the principles of the Declaration of Independence, or even from the delegate powers listed in the U.S. Constitution, but rather from the war to re-conquer the independent South. That conflict, usually referred to by the artfully misleading title “Civil War,” established the fact that the government in Washington is willing to kill Americans in whatever quantity it deems necessary in order to enforce its edicts, and then sanctify the slaughter in the name of some suitably “progressive” social objective.”

  7. Cliché Guevara

    You almost had me until you dropped that Ghandi quote on the caboose. Ghandi was obsessed with enemas and pooping. And little girls.

    1. Cliché Guevara

      I didn’t spell it wrong, you chimpanzee, I typoed it for neocon cred. Also Gandhi said Hitler wasn’t a bad man so I guess he really was full of shit in more ways than one.

      1. Please supply the quote per Hitler, the British were so bad to the Irish, they were afraid they’d go over to the Germans during WWII.

        I highly recommend the dual bio on Churchill and Gandhi: https://www.amazon.com/Gandhi-Churchill-Rivalry-Destroyed-Empire/dp/0553383760/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1464699495&sr=8-1&keywords=churchill+gandhi

        Nothing saintly about Gandhi, he was a politician but even the loathsome statist Churchill is worthy of quoting on occasion when he accidentally veers into the truth.

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  9. We cannot claim to “Support our troops” unless we listen to them. Otherwise we are only supporting the propaganda of militaristic imperial lust. LISTEN to our troops! What are they saying? Great article.

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