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Tuesday, May 28, 2019

Memorial Day

I know I'm a day late, but maybe that's good, because my thoughts on Memorial Day are somewhat tangled and complicated.  I greatly appreciate those who are willing to sacrifice for their country and serve in the Armed Forces.  I understand the love of country and people and willingness and desire to serve them.  So my complication with regards to Memorial Day does not have anything to do with my respect for those who serve, especially those who have served in combat, or who were willing to serve when the likelihood of combat was high.

No, rather, it has to do with the following two points:

First, what is the job of the military?  To protect the homeland of the people, and, as the Oath of Service says, to defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic.  Neither of those are being done; we have been subject to a ridiculous invasion of bandit hordes who invade our homeland in massive waves, immediately sign up for welfare and other programs, get their kids declared "Americans" and live off of more of our largesse—all of which is another way of saying that they are using our own system to demand, and be paid, tribute.  They are literally bandits preying on Americans, and the Armed Forces does absolutely nothing to stop them.  The H1-B visa system is only marginally better; while not actually illegal, it is designed specifically to allow corporations to act like bandit captains themselves, preying on the American people that were, or should be, their customers and employees both.  Meanwhile, treasonous judges and bureaucrats in Washington (and also at the state and local levels, for that matter) mangle the Constitution on a regular basis, interpreting it to mean the exact opposite of what it says, or just plain ignoring it.  The Armed Forces does absolutely nothing about that either; military arrests and tribunals being necessary.

If the military isn't doing squat all on the only two missions that really justify it's existence, then why do we even have a military?  We'd do better disbanding it and going back to armed civilian militias.  I have a funny feeling that with armed civilian militias we'd get both our government and our population of invasive predatory Fake Americans under control rather quickly.

Which brings up the other point; without a standing military, our Federal government would be obviously unable to utilize it in fruitless wars of Imperialism and plunder.  See, on Memorial Day there's all kinds of talk about Freedom Isn't Free, and stuff like that, but there hasn't been a war fought for Freedom by Americans since the Civil War, and unfortunately, those who stood for freedom lost to those who stood for Imperialism and conquest.  Of course, because they lost, the victors have written a new Narrative, a dishonest Narrative, in which the Civil War was fought on behalf of the slave population.  This Narrative is a bigoted and racist one; it has cemented the hatred of the Puritan Yankee for the southerner and justified it (although dishonestly, if anyone knows very much about the history of the time. Read chapters 7-9 in particular, although honestly, you should read the entire work, even though it's obviously extremely long.)  It created a founding myth about Abraham Lincoln and America 2.0 that's every bit as legendary and fictional as the story of Romulus and Remus being raised by wolves, and it does so by continuing to villainize a portion of our own people into exaggerated caricatures

In reality, and that book is a condemnation exactly matching this point (among other things), there hasn't been a justifiable war fought by the American Armed Forces in well over a century and a half.  The blood of those who we celebrate on Memorial Day will cry out in condemnation against those who sent them to die under false or scurrilous pretenses.  And while that's certainly a cause worth Memorializing, Memorial Day has rather been coopted to try and harden and strengthen our resolve to continue in exactly these unjustifiable wars rather than remember these soldiers who were so casually and senselessly sacrificed by our hostile and malicious government in behalf of goals that do not even benefit the American people in any way whatsoever.  The Babylon Bee, a kind of Christian version of The Onion, aptly satirized this point by suggesting that in Honor of Memorial Day, John Bolton announced seven new unnecessary wars, with "Canada, Mexico, England, France, Russia, India, and California, all in honor of the memory of soldiers who have died in past American wars."  It went on;
"The best way we can remember the fallen is to launch a bunch of new wars and make more fallen," he said solemnly. "Remember the sacrifice of the soldiers who fought in foreign wars, so that we would have the freedom to launch more foreign wars. They died for your freedoms, they died for your sins. They died so we could attack Iran again." 
"Amen."
If you read about Just War theory, and read the Book of Mormon with an eye for understanding Just War theory, it becomes very clear that none of our wars were fought under the auspices of Just War theory in many years.  Even World War II, often called a just war, was not, and as the First Presidency at the time: Heber J. Grant, J. Reuben Clark and David O. McKay said to the US Federal Government on the eve of the war,
However, we do thoroughly believe in building up our home defenses to the maximum extent necessary, but we do not believe that aggression should be carried on in the name and under the false cloak of defense. We therefore look with sorrowing eyes at the present use to which a great part of the funds being raised by taxes and by borrowing is being put. We are much impressed with the views of those military and naval men who say we are not militarily threatened. We believe that our real threat comes from within and not from without, and it comes from that underlying spirit common to Naziism, Fascism, and Communism, namely, the spirit which would array class against class, which would set up a socialistic state of some sort, which would rob the people of the liberties which we possess under the Constitution, and would set up such a reign of terror as exists now in many parts of Europe. We feel that our defenses should be built against this danger even more than the touted danger of foreign military invasion which many responsible military men tell us cannot come. 
(Also read chapters 15-17, but especially 16 from the link above.)  It's true that Freedom Isn't Free.  And we won't be free again until the zeitgeist reaches a point where people are truly willing to sacrifice in order to tear down and root out the corruption in our government, which has stolen our freedom, which even moreso than the land itself, should have been our inheritance from the Founding Fathers.

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