Did they really die for our freedom or more government lies?
Posted in The Freedom Beam by R Lee Wrights on July 10th, 2008 by Roderick T. Beaman
Artists work in the frontiers of our emotions. It is the province of the writers and poets to explore the world of irony, frustrations, loneliness and hypocrisy. They inhabit what Rod Serling called, The Twilight Zone.
No writer or poet of the twentieth century dealt with them better than John Lennon, the driving creative force at the heart of The Beatles. Possibly bisexual, he was a drug and alcohol abuser, as so many creative people are. Their frustrations and contradictions come out in their work and his did very often. He saw disaster in war.
His song, Working Class Hero rubbed our faces in our delusions. He summed it up with, “And you think you’re so clever and classless and free, But you’re still fuckin’ peasants, as far as I can see.” But he included himself in his contempt with the final line, “If you want to be a hero, Well just follow me.”
Yes, we do think we’re clever and classless and free. We delude ourselves into thinking it. There is no way that we are. We may have once been, but no more. It began to dissolve not long after George Washington took office and it’s been downhill ever since. That is where the politicians come in to help us celebrate our lies.
They’ve conned us from celebrating Armistice Day as the end of the hostilities of the most unprincipled and unnecessary World War I into what we now call Veterans’ Day, essentially a commemoration of all our wars. Every November 11, fewer and fewer from each of our past conflicts show up for their day to bask in the sun of our appreciation, their faces tiring from the years. Do they realize they’ve been had?
Memorial Day is another one. This just passed July 4, we were treated to the usual spectacle of our leaders assembling for their obligatory toasts to the fallen heroes who have made it possible for all of us to enjoy our freedoms.
They’re a field day for our politicians. “Freedom is not free,” is the cry. Sobbing parents appear on cameras. Pictures of the Iraqi War dead in their uniforms adorn billboards across the country, warning us of our need for eternal vigilance against our enemies. But it’s funny, the enemies are always those that our politicians declare, never ourselves and certainly never themselves.
There are almost no American veterans from World War I left, the WWII vets are now all at least 80, Korean War veterans are well into their 70s and the youngest Viet-Namers are at least 50. They should be appreciated for their honor and efforts but they didn’t fight for our freedom. In fact, they fought for just the opposite - eternal war, the opposite of freedom.
“Arbeit Macht Frei,” was the infamous motto above the main entrance to Auschwitz. Literally, it translates roughly as work will make you free or bring freedom, an Orwellian lie. Of course, few were given their freedom at Auschwitz.
How did Saddam Hussein threaten our freedom? How did Ho Chi Minh? Millions of Americans at the time thought that the Korean War was an illegal commitment of American troops by Harry S. Truman, the barbarian who had ordered the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a bloodstain that will remain on this nation’s hands for eternity. He called Korea ‘a police action’ but few today recall the massive opposition it engendered.
Anyone who has even the very slightest more than public school knowledge of World War II, knows that there were just two reasons for our entry into that war. The first was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s desire to help England. The other was the desire of the numerous communists and sympathizers in his administration, including his wife Eleanor, to preserve Soviet Socialism under Josip Stalin. We did everything we could to provoke the Germans and the Japanese. His ‘day of infamy’ speech was a lie. Few today recall the overwhelming national consensus to stay out of ‘Europe’s War’.
World War I as ‘The War to Make the World Safe for Democracy’ was the product of Woodrow Wilson’s Messianism. Kaiser Wilhelm and the Central Powers had no designs on the Western Hemisphere.
We’ve been had. I used to believe this nonsense about ‘protecting our freedom’. I won the Americanism Award when I graduated from grammar school in 1958. It was based upon an essay that everyone in the class wrote and submitted for evaluation. Mine was selected. I think the sponsoring group was The Veterans of Foreign Wars.
I invoked the classic examples of how we had gone to those wars to protect the country. I swallowed it, hook, line and sinker. My father had been an enlisted man aboard The U.S.S. Arkansas in World War I, a brother had enlisted for WWII and another brother had been drafted for Korea. So, I was thrilled to pay tribute to them.
In 1958, almost no Americans were aware of a place called Viet-Nam. We had been aware of a war that France had fought in Indo-China. America had never truly lost a war, even though Korea had been ended with interminable truce talks at the 38th Parallel.
Most of the generation that would become fodder for the Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon war machine was still playing with toy soldiers, indulging their romantic fantastic lies about its true nature. When bullets knock you down, you don’t just get up again. When limbs and genitals get blown off or when eyes get gouged out or faces deformed or bodies burned, there are no banks with spare parts. And so I won that award.
I have no doubt that when George W. Bush gets choked up at these ceremonies that he is truly moved. But does that make this or any war right? Did their work make us any freer? No. H. L Mencken was wrong. The first casualty of war isn’t truth. It’s freedom.
Just look at all those other wars of the twentieth century. Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas were jailed for opposing World War I. Chief Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney almost was by Abraham Lincoln. We interned all those Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor. German and Italian immigrants were not permitted to have two way radios during World War II.
Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who commanded the fleet that attacked Pearl Harbor, had studied in the United States. Then as now, many wrote us off as lazy and immoral but he recognized the internal resolve of the American people. And because so many homes had weapons, he cautioned that unless the Japanese leadership was committed to sailing up the Potomac to accept surrender at the White House, they shouldn’t attack us. He knew any invasion would be disastrous.
If we were truly threatened, we wouldn’t need conscripts and hired professionals to go fight in wars. The theory of our democracy is that the collective judgment of our people will lead us to the right decision. If that’s true, then our people will recognize any true danger to our freedom, they would immediately rally. They wouldn’t have to be forced to or bought off. That’s one reason we have the Second Amendment.
Our wars don’t pass the muster of democracy.
Dr. Roderick T. Beaman is an osteopathic family physician practicing in Jacksonville, Florida. He was born in New York City and attended New York University as an undergraduate. A recipient of a 2003 Ron Paul Liberty in Media Award, he is available for interviews and lectures and may be reached via e-mail through TheFreedomBeam@comcast.net.
