On Memorial Day, Americans honor the soldiers who have died in the defense of our country. There is one big problem though: Those soldiers didn’t die in the defense of our country. Instead, they died in the defense of empire and hegemony.
For obvious reasons, U.S. officials, as well as many of the family members of the deceased, can’t bring themselves to admit that and so they settle for just mindlessly repeating the mantra, “They died defending our country,”
Consider the Spanish American War in 1898. Did Spain ever attack and invade the United States? Nope. The U.S. government intervened in a war of independence that was being waged between the Spanish Empire and its colonial possessions, including Cuba and the Philippines. Thus, U.S. soldiers clearly didn’t die in the defense of our country in that war. This is especially true with respect to those U.S. soldiers who died in the Philippines in a war designed to replace Spanish rule with U.S. rule.
World War I. No one attacked and invaded in the United States in that war either. U.S. soldiers died to make the world safe for democracy and to finally bring an end to war itself. The outbreak of World War II proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the soldiers who died in WWI died for nothing.
World War II. Yes, I know, it’s called the “good war” because Japanese forces engaged in a sneak attack at Pearl Harbor. But the fact is that President Franklin Roosevelt wanted Japan to attack the United States. Should we really just ignore that? That was the purpose of the oil embargo that FDR imposed on Japan — to cause Japan to attack the U.S. Pacific fleet in an attempt to break free of FDR’s oil embargo and to get the oil they desperately needed for their war on China. FDR knew that if he could squeeze Japan into “firing the first shot,” he could say “We’re innocent! We’ve been attacked!” and use that as a “back door” to the war in Europe against Nazi Germany, which the American people overwhelmingly were opposed to getting involved with.