Memorial Day

America has become amnesiac - a country in which forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but celebrated. The United States has degenerated into a social order that is awash in public stupidity and views critical thought as both a liability and a threat. Not only is this obvious in the presence of a celebrity culture that embraces the banal and idiotic, but also in the prevailing discourses and policies of a range of politicians and anti-public intellectuals who believe that the legacy of the Enlightenment needs to be reversed...Under a neoliberal regime, the language of authority, power and command is divorced from ethics, social responsibility, critical analysis and social costs.   

- Henry A. Giroux, 'The Violence of Organized Forgetting'

It's Memorial Day, 2015, and once again I am drowning in a sea of willful ignorance, blind stupidity, and sickening hypocrisy: #MemorialDay is trending on Facebook; Major League baseball brings out its custom-made army fatigue jerseys; college students put on their red, white, and blue bathing suits and get shit-faced drunk; the President wipes the blood from his hands and makes a speech to honor the fallen.

Like zombies - drunk off our love of war - we salute the stars and stripes, thank the soldiers, and give praise to those who have died. Like zombies we do not question the deaths of these men and women. We listen when our president tells us their sacrifices were good and just, that their deaths were necessary in order to keep us safe. But by not questioning war, we glorify imperialism and proliferate violence. How quickly we choose to forget. How quickly we forget that the war on terror - conflicts of aggression and greed (and thus war crimes under international law) that have killed over 1.5 million people - were started on the basis of lies and deceit. How quickly we forget the U.S. invasion of Vietnam and the My Lai Massacre, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and the incentive that slavery played in pushing the US to invade Mexico in 1846. How quickly we forget the wars of extermination that killed so many Native Americans.

There is nothing wrong about grieving the loss of life. Perhaps we would be more critical of war if human life truly meant anything to us. But to grieve the loss of life in war without questioning death itself - without questioning the legitimacy of war and denouncing the pundits, politicians, presidents, and corporations that push for invasion - is to be willfully ignorant and remain a blind follower of the leaders of war.