A Day To Honor A Senseless Loss Of Life

By James Donahue

May 31, 2005

Yesterday was Memorial Day. It was a time when some of the people in the United States took time to decorate the gravesites of fallen heroes in battle. Outside of a few important battles for independence and for the preservation of the homeland, most of the premature deaths, marked by headstones and flags all over the landscape, should never have happened.

The United States, as have imperial nations before us, rose to be a world power because of the prowess of our soldiers. We have shown an ability to go to war and defeat our enemies. This has made us strong.

It also has made the people within its borders to be slaves of the big business corporations that manipulate our minds, and turn young men into uniformed heroes for a cause. When the cause is fighting wars on foreign soil, big business profits. There is much money to be made during times of war.

The Civil War may have been the last great fight that was necessary. Some even today disagree with that. Many will say our involvement in World War II also was needed. Indeed, the defeat of Nazi Germany needed our help. Our war with Japan, conducted at the same time, was a set-up and anybody that has studied history knows it.

So was the Spanish-American War after the unexplained explosion that destroyed the Battleship Maine in Havana harbor.

So was American involvement in World War I. The propaganda highlighted by the sinking of the liner Lusitania by a German U-boat was carefully orchestrated to gain the support of the American people and throw our “boys” into that wretched conflict. England and Germany were locked in a stalemate in European trenches. Neither side was winning. Once we joined the English, the scale was tipped. Germany lost. And that launched the rise of the Nazi regime, thus forcing us back into battle with Germany one second time.

It was all unnecessary. All a farce. So many young men did not have to die in those great conflicts.

Korea was another fiasco. This manufactured war was never finished. The war was just stopped for a while at the thirty-eighth parallel. The two armies still glare at one another over gun sights at that point.

Vietnam? Did anybody win it? Big business interests got rich. We might say they were winners of sorts. A lot of young men died. Many others came home physically and mentally sick.

Now the Gulf Wars. All a lie. The killing of innocent people goes on and on and on. And we dare to call it acts of defense of the homeland. We invaded Iraq and everybody knows it. We want a control of the oil in that region.

Someday there will really be a need to defend the homeland. That war will be much different than anything we think we have seen. That will be the day when even the old ones will find it necessary to pick up guns and fight, or die where they stand.

That will be the day when we once more learn the real meaning of war in America. That war doesn't have to happen either, but the way the world is moving, it looks almost inevitable.