Memorial Day: Honoring the dead, deconstructing the wars

On Monday the United States celebrated Memorial Day. The holiday is supposed to be a solemn day of remembrance of all those who died while serving in the country’s armed forces. Honoring those who have fallen in the service of the country is a decent, indeed irreproachable act.

Many people, however, are critical about the way the holiday has evolved. Although events reflecting the original spirit of Memorial Day still are held all over the country, overall Memorial Day has become more about revelry than collective mourning. It’s a long weekend. It’s a beach, beer and hot dog day. It’s the start of summer, the season for vacations. For years in some parts of the country, especially Miami Beach, it even became an occasion for a wild bacchanal (although so far this year the celebration on South Beach has been tamer as a result of massive police presence and control.)

I basically agree with this criticism. But it’s the kind of thing that is, in a society like ours, almost inevitable and easy to explain. Partying is more fun than visiting graveyards, and you can’t ban hedonism, even on Memorial Day.

Lacking an interest in tilting at windmills, my thoughts on this Memorial Day have focused on a different question. How many wars has this country been involved in since its founding? What has been the nature of these wars? What has been their toll in death and injury, not only for the sons and daughters of this nation but also on our adversaries, combatants and civilians? How many of these fatalities might have been avoided with a different national outlook and policy?

An Internet search revealed a startling fact. This country has been involved in a total of 97 wars. When you consider that some of these wars lasted for years, you might say that the United States has been involved in one armed conflict or another for most of its history.

Not all wars are the same in cause, scale, justification, and legality. In the 19th Century the vast majority of U.S. wars were mostly about one thing, taking other people’s land–Native Americans’ and Mexicans’–to fulfill the country’s self-proclaimed Manifest Destiny of ruling from sea to sea.

Although the American soldiers involved in these wars may have been brave and patriotic and their deaths worthy of being memorialized, the wars themselves were ignoble and hardly worth celebrating. The United States waged three wars against the Seminoles alone. The administration of President Tyler concocted a pretext to wage war on Mexico and steal almost half their country. And so on and on.

The great exception would seem to be the Civil War, the second bloodiest in U.S. history. Lincoln was certainly right in fighting to preserve the Union and in freeing enslaved Blacks. But that is only half the story. Some Southerners to this day argue that they fought legitimately to preserve their way of life. The fallacy in their argument is that their way of life was inextricably rooted in the institution of slavery. Thus the cause of the Confederacy was an ignoble one too, and the terrible carnage provoked to defend the “right” to enslave was abominable.

In the 20th Century, the biggest war the United States has ever fought, World War II, was neither ignoble nor avoidable. The country was savagely attacked by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. Germany almost immediately declared war on this country. The cause of stopping Nazism, Fascism, and Japanese imperialism was legally and morally unimpeachable.

However, some of the tactics used by the Allies are troubling. Was the firebombing of German and Japanese cities inhabited largely by civilians really necessary? Most questionable of all was the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs. Recent research suggests the Japanese were ready to surrender under a single condition, that the Emperor not be punished or humiliated, while the United States had always insisted on unconditional surrender.

Personally, I don’t believe Hiroshima and Nagasaki can ever be justified. I realize the issue is controversial and most Americans disagree with me. Most troubling of all, if true, is the contention of at least one author that the real function of the atomic bombings was not to save American lives that would have been lost in an invasion of Japan but to serve as a shot across the bow at the Soviets in order to establish the absolute dominance of the United States after the war.

The history of other U.S. wars in the 20th and 21th Centuries is difficult to summarize in a brief article. For instance, some have been legal under international law (Korea, the Gulf War) while others have been clearly illegal (Iraq).

But there is a similarity linking the majority (although not the bloodiest) of U.S. wars of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Most were waged against vastly less powerful peoples (numerous native American tribes) or nations (Cuba, Dominican Republic, Panama, Grenada, Nicaragua). But a few of those kinds of nations have given the United States some rather rude surprises (Vietnam, Cuba).

The conversion of Memorial Day into just another three day weekend is a minor outrage. The much bigger outrage is that we wouldn’t have so many war dead to memorialize if it were not for such national delusions as Manifest Destiny, the Monroe Doctrine, slaveholding as an honorable way of life, the Global War on Terror, and Shock and Awe.