Standing up for Peace on Memorial Day

Originally published on the author’s Substack

Another annual holiday rant

I’ve written something like this pretty much every Memorial Day since I first joined social media. It’s become a tradition. Consider it an antidote to all the flag-waving, “thank you for your service” platitudes you’ll see everywhere else. I hate war. Period. As the great Jeannette Rankin said, it’s a stupid way to resolve things.

Now I’m no pacifist. If I am personally attacked, or my family is attacked, I will certainly fight back. If I thought aliens exist, I guess I could fight for Earth. But we’re much more likely to get a fake invasion- Project Blue Beam. If somehow there was a foreign bogeyman that was able to invade our shores, like England did in 1812, I’d obviously support defending ourselves. There is no chance of that happening because all the countries of the world are aligned in a mass conspiracy to subvert their own people. If it wasn’t obvious with the yearly Bilderberg and Bohemian Grove confabs, the tyrannical “COVID-19” narrative should have drummed that home.

Peace has never been popular. Especially among those who very publicly express their Christianity, and call Jesus the Prince of Peace. Although admittedly, this is a label that is used a lot less frequently now. People love war- old people, women, and children. The men of fighting age probably don’t support it quite as heartily as they did during the countless wars of the past, but they are still volunteering (albeit in smaller numbers) to work for a now woke Military Industrial Complex. Not sure what the women of fighting age think about it. And, of course, the pivotal transgender fighting age view is largely unknown, but they are sure to strike fear in the hearts of whatever new fake opponent is on the battlefield.

War has always been popular. We celebrate “war heroes,” but never “peace heroes.” There may have been peaceful activists during our Revolutionary War, urging diplomacy, whose names have been erased from history. We know what happened during the Civil War, to untold thousands of northerners who opposed Lincoln’s insane and bloody war. The sane ones who opposed the Spanish-American War in 1898 are not remembered. Eugene Debs and the others who objected to the totally senseless World War I were thrown in prison by benevolent “liberal” Woodrow Wilson. And the Supreme Court upheld Wilson’s right to do this.

By World War II, most Americans had learned their lesson. The America First Committee, which included mostly classical liberals and luminaries like Charles Lindbergh and Joseph P. Kennedy (father of JFK), were relentlessly attacked by the warmongering Roosevelt administration and the compliant mainstream media. Neville Chamberlain became England’s version of Benedict Arnold, by advocating for peace with Germany. Rudolph Hess crash-landed a plane in England, on an unofficial peace mission from Germany. He was sentenced to the harshest life sentence imaginable at the Nuremberg show trials. Poet Ezra Pound made radio broadcasts sympathetic to Mussolini and was thrown into a mental institution for a decade.

Where were the antiwar activists during the ridiculous Korean conflict? It was just as stupid and pointless as the upcoming undeclared war in Vietnam, which did garner the first and only large scale antiwar protests in this nation’s history. There were no large marches against the continuous stream of nation-building invasions of smaller countries, starting with the 1989 Gulf “War,” all of them on behalf of Israeli interests. Curiously, over the past decade or so, the Left has finally awakened to the horrific treatment of the Palestinians, but it has not impacted their consistent support of any of our endless foreign interventions.

Now the Left, and the neocon Right which took over our foreign policy during the Reagan administration, are openly lobbying for World War III. Vladimir Putin is the latest hobgoblin to be trotted out as Public Enemy Number One. The pro-war crowd has become so enabled by the citizenry waving those flags while they instinctively vote them back into office, that they now publicly talk about a “nuclear option.” The same folks who attended the No Nukes rock concerts forty years ago, are now embracing them. Perhaps they can invent a new suitable Idiocracy-style mantra, like Mo Nukes. I’m sure Bruce Springsteen, Bono, and others would be on board.

Despite their undeniable dead Whiteness, George Washington, Andrew Jackson, and others who fought in our nonstop wars are still considered heroes. Even the millions who write them off as “racists,” like all the other White guys, don’t disparage their military service. It’s odd that, given how since the Korean War, every conflict we’ve been involved in has been waged against nonwhite people, the “Woke” forces don’t proclaim those wars to be “racist.” And now that they have the first foreign White bogeyman since Hitler, they are bound to be even more enthusiastic about stopping Putin, who is already portrayed as a “racist.”

I’ve written about the real war records of “heroes” like the bloodthirsty Union generals in the Civil War, led by the utter psychopath William Sherman. Or the rapes and atrocities committed by our own “Greatest Generation” during World War II. I detailed how our lovable troops bulldozed living Iraqis who were attempting to surrender. Then there was the U.S. government assassination program in Vietnam, Operation Phoenix. And starting under our first half-Black president’s administration, the American government began not only supporting assassination, but boasting about it incessantly. We came, he died, and all that.

When we celebrate the memories of those who died in these perpetual conflicts, we ensure that our bloody and disastrous “bipartisan” foreign policy will continue. It’s ironic that, in our culture of victimhood, that these young men who were senselessly slaughtered are not considered victims. No, they are instead heralded as heroes. I mean no disrespect to these hapless souls. Most of them probably thought they were fighting for the noble causes their politicians and media told them they were fighting for. Their families were left understandably grieving. All the young boys from the Civil War to Afghanistan who never came home left voids that can never be filled.

I understand how comforting it must have been, and still is, to have the government that caused their deaths, laud them as courageous and bestow posthumous medals upon them. If they’d died in a car wreck, or from a drive-by shooting, there would be no such honors, by the government or the public. The deaths of all young people are equally tragic, at least to the loved ones left behind. The Military Industrial Complex that thrives on war, and needs a constant replenishment of usually poor human flesh with which to fight them, essentially gets the credit and the praise for the overblown tributes to veterans. Think of it as accepting an Oscar for a deceased winner.

If you “support the troops,” you support the chicken hawks and evil elite who give them their nonsensical and often diabolical assignments. You support the international bankers who finance this culling of the herd. As Smedley Butler noted, war is never about enemies, but about opportunities for profit. I would argue that the eugenicists who fantasize about millions dying have quite a stake in the madness as well. And it is indeed largely the “useless eaters,” the ones who aren’t the “fittest” in their evolutionary doctrine, that fight and die in these conflicts. Few wealthy families have ever had to mourn the loss of a soldier. Which again makes the Kennedys so special, given all they sacrificed to the carnage in World War II.

From Abraham Lincoln writing one of his typically flowery letters to a mother who had lost five sons on Civil War battlefields, congratulating her on such a magnificent sacrifice on “the altar of freedom,” to the Bush administration trying to assuage former NFL player Pat Tillman’s family, despite the fact it was eventually shown he was killed by “friendly fire,” the government has basically bought off the sentiments of grieving family members. With medals, flag-draped coffins, and assurances that their boys were heroes who gave their lives in the cause of “freedom.” Just like the Ukrainians are dying now for the “democracy” their dictator extolls. The kind that locks up dissidents and shuts down the opposition press. Just like Lincoln.

I’d rather remember the only president we’ve ever had who rejected the overtures of war from his masters- John F. Kennedy. In his American University speech in June, 1963, JFK said things no politician had ever said before. He acknowledged that our enemies- at that point the Soviets- were human. That they loved their children. Instead of demonizing the opposition, as politicians have always done, Kennedy empathized with them. He advocated for peace, “for all time.” He signed his death warrant with this speech, which I consider the greatest ever given by any president in American history.

There will be lots of other speeches today, giving you the conventional view of Memorial Day. That we are honoring the dead who died so that we could be free. Except we are less free now than we’ve ever been. But I won’t rain any more on the parades. All that’s missing is an official proclamation that War is Peace. Without attributing it to Orwell. As Jeannette Rankin, the greatest female public figure (who is not on any of our collapsing currency) once said, you can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake. And to quote one of Benjamin Franklin’s least publicized remarks, there is no such thing as a good war, or a bad peace.

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Donald Jeffries is the author of the cult classic novel “The Unreals,” and the best-sellers “Hidden History,” “Survival of the Richest,” “Crimes and Cover-Ups in American Politics: 1776-1963” “Bullyocracy,” and “On Borrowed Fame.”

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