Americans have killed and died in over 90 wars. How many of them can we name?
Scrap that...How many of the five or so wars that we’re currently waging on the world can we name, if we’re honest, in under 30 seconds, without the assistance of web searches?
We don’t remember most of our wars in large part because they’ve usually had nothing to do with making us safer or freer. Since our revolutionary war, which was fought to protect and expand chattel slavery as well as our genocidal Westward “expansion” through indigenous lands and peoples, there are only two wars which we can reasonably argue had anything at all to do with protecting American safety or liberty – The Civil War, and World War II.
If you’ve got some great argument for how invading Panama or Grenada or the Dominican Republic, or Kenya, or Niger, or how killing 150,000 poor Cambodians protected our lives and liberties, please feel free to write and publish it. For now, however, on these digital pages we’ll proceed with the radical assertion that only in the cases of the Civil War and World War II can we find something approximating legitimate pretense for war, and even in those cases we acted far too late.
On Memorial Day each year, we here in America commemorate our own fallen veterans of war. In all, 646,596 American troops have died in battle since the end of our revolutionary war.
The total number of our empire’s war-victims, however, are incalculable. By 2008 - just five years into our latest illegal war against their nation – we’d already killed over one million Iraqi people.
Thirteen years later, we're still there, killing more. This death toll doesn’t include the estimated additional 500,000 people, mostly children and women, that we killed in the 1990’s with our sanctions on Iraq -themselves acts of war - before we invaded again in 2003.
The 1.5 million or so innocent Iraqis we’ve killed in the past 25 years is just a drop in the ocean of blood U.S. empire has drawn from manufactured foreign enemies throughout our history. So are the over 100,000 Afghans that we’ve killed in just the past 20 years since our illegal invasion of their land.
It would be unfathomably calloused and ignorant to observe a Memorial Day in America without also thinking of the foreign people extinguished by our empire, souls that were never a threat to us or our decrepit “way of life.” The amount of U.S. troops killed is dwarfed by the millions of innocent lives we’ve used them to murder in our name.
Still, I don’t personally have an issue with an American holiday that exclusively commemorates American military deaths, so long as we begin to recognize that they are all also victims of U.S. empire. In addition to the aforementioned 646,596 American troops who were killed in battle since 1783, Another 539,000 American military veterans have died from supposedly non-combat causes since the end of our revolutionary war.
The fact is, they are all victims of our empire, just as are the millions more we sent them to murder. Even those of our troops who survive our wars of aggression pay heavy costs.
They have to cope with psychological damage wreaked by being compelled to commit and witness atrocities. They have to learn to live in civilian society and without the comradeship of the only people who can understand what they have gone through.
Scores of survivors live with brain injuries and maimed limbs.
Yet more have to figure out a way to live with post-traumatic stress disorder and/or depression. For many, it is too much. Approximately 22 U.S. military veterans die by suicide each day.
Twenty percent of veterans with PTSD also suffer from substance addictions. Our military veterans make up a disproportionate amount of the total homeless population, and veteran homelessness was on the rise here in America even before the start of the covid-19 pandemic.
For centuries, we as Americans have sent our young to wage war in order to increase profits for the private interests who hold our government captive. We’ve taken our children, turned them into troops and sent them to kill and to die for nothing but private profit that they and their families will never share in.
We use our military to make the world less safe and less free in order that war-profiteers can gorge themselves on the wreckage, and when those who don’t die return home, we make them contend with squalid conditions while disabled and guilt-ridden. If we were a less sociopathic, self-centered nation our Memorial Day would enshrine the millions upon millions of our foreign civilian victims at least as much as we pretend to do with our own fallen military.
We’re usually the aggressor, in the wrong, and have murdered far more than we’ve lost. Yet, there’s no reason to collectively denigrate or forget our own rank-and-file troops.
In fact, we can honor them best by calling the exploitative system which enlisted them to kill innocent men, women, and children, topple democracies, and endanger the globe what it is – a profit-driven, evil empire – and by finally and truthfully listing them among its victims. The American empire has just as much disregard for our own troops as it does for the millions we send them to terrorize and murder.
No nation that would ceaselessly send its young to wage wars of aggression can ever claim to value them. All who have been killed in American wars have been sacrificed on the same unholy altar of empire.