Memorial Day is here. It is a day to commemorate those who died in America’s wars and to assuage America’s guilt for sending these citizens out to die. We are constantly told that these men were heroes who died to protect our freedom. But how often was this the case? 

The Revolutionary War, War of 1812, the Civil War, and WWII can be said to have been fought to protect our freedom. However, I don’t think our freedom was at risk in ongoing genocidal Indian Wars, or the great landgrab of the Mexican War. The Spanish American War was the beginning of the American Empire, and the ensuing Philippine-America War was a colonial war to tighten our hold on the Philippines by doing away with native government and culture. High Wilsonian ideals were the propaganda for WWI, but the war is more likely to have been fought to stabilize Britain and France so that they could repay, with interest, funds borrowed from American bankers. Of the modern conflicts, the Korean War and the Vietnamese War were fought to maintain American zones of influence in far off Asia. Desert Storm was about oil. We don’t really know who we’ve been fighting in Lasting Freedom and the invasion of Afghanistan, but it is a real stretch to say they’ve been fought to protect American freedom.

In saying this, I maintain the highest respect for those who died in these wars, but their patriotism lay not so much in protecting freedom as in their obedience to the call of a country that exploited them to “protect American interests,” interests that had little to do with freedom and a lot to do with American capital.