THE ORIGINS OF U.S. 'MEMORIAL DAY' AND ITS BROADER SIGNIFICANCE

Most interesting and revealing national holiday for a country that has been at war more years than at peace in its entire history, not only recently but ever since the first northwestern Europeans (Dutch, French, English) began to explore and settle in North America warring with each other.

United States' militarism is deeply entrenched, etched into its seasonal calendar, suffused in its motion pictures, games, and of course, forever humming in the vast military industrial complex - the largest, by far, in the world.

Blacks, as this article below shows, have been there from the beginning of Memorial Day (previously "Decoration Day"), as the originators of the custom to yearly honor the Northern soldiers that died in the Civil War.

The notion that both sides of the Civil War had fought for a noble cause was rejected early on by Frederick Douglass, who said at Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day in 1871: “We must never forget that victory to the rebellion meant death to the republic. We must never forget that the loyal soldiers who rest beneath this sod flung themselves between the nation and the nation’s destroyers.” But, as we all know, that did not last long.

After Reconstruction, North-South reconciliation erased the distinction and brought back the "Lost Cause" myth in the South in full force. "Heritage" is how today's Trumpists defend it, as they not just honor the Confederate dead soldiers but attack the institutions of American democracy...

Furthermore, as the need to honor new generations of U.S. soldiers who died in the subsequent U.S. wars grew, Memorial Day became a national holiday accompanying the proliferation of military cemeteries. The same thing happened to Veterans' Day, meant now to honor all those who served in the U.S. armed forces, dead or alive.

Though these two holidays have over the recent decades extended recognition to American soldiers previously ignored, such as women, Native Americans, Latinos and Asian American, there has never been any desire or effort to include those people - soldiers & civilians - who died at the hands of the U.S. armed forces - Confederate soldiers excepted, with or without Douglass's caveat.

No monument or remembrance day for these victims of U.S. wars exist. The names of these untold millions of lives lost in the U.S.'s many wars are never inscribed - individually or in the aggregate - on any U.S. monument.

We as a nation honor OUR war dead, OUR war veterans. Everyone sees this as fitting and proper. Other nations do the same, though they may not practice or culturally exhibit the same level of militarism. Each nation honors "their" war dead. This may include soldiers and civilians, as in Russia, but not those from the "enemy."

This peculiarity of our modern world vividly shows the nature and potency of nationalism, the engrained sense of "we-ness v. them-ness", the project to forge peoplehood and express loyalty and solidarity to one “sovereign“ nation-state.

In Europe, where they have embarked, after tearing each other to pieces in the XX Century, in a bold experiment to transcend their previously robust and combative single-state nationalism, embrace a multi-state political economy and forge a novel sense of continental peoplehood, they still hold a variety of remembrance days for "their" war dead, but not yet for their combined dead.

It is customary in Europe now for its leaders to exchange wreaths on each others' war memorial monuments, and participate in each others' national holidays, even if they were previously bitter enemies - including visiting their respective "Tomb of the Unknown Soldier", where the only thing known for certain about the anonymous soldier buried in each tomb is his nationality.

The Russians, who remain deliberately excluded from the European Union and Nato, have occasionally tried to participate, and Europeans reciprocated, with very mixed results. Today, with the brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine, all memorial diplomacy has ceased. But the Ukrainians have a huge memorial wall erected already in Kiev. Not yet the Russians, because it would not serve Putin's purposes to show how many young Russian lives he's spending pursuing empire.

Today's "memorials" for the 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, brutally killed by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, are prominent not just in Israel but around the world, with pictures of the 120 or so remaining hostages still in captivity.

On the other hand, the "memorials" for the over 35,000 dead Palestinians in Gaza over the past 7 months can be seen in the over 200 college campus encampments throughout the United States, and hundreds more around the world.

Humanity cries out for stopping these wars, even overwhelmingly passing formal declarations at the United Nations, but they just keep going on. The world is in disarray, there is no world order guided by a set of principles of governance. The previous world order - the Cold War bipolar "order" of detente and mutually-assured destruction between the two superpowers that emerged from WW II - has long passed.

Even the "post-Cold War era" of American unipolar hegemony after the USSR dissolved quickly passed, buried in the ashes of the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks in U.S. soil, followed by the disastrous "forever wars" in Asia that raged during 4 U.S. administrations.

The U.S. military fatal casualties of recent wars -- 7K killed in Iraq and 2.5K in Afghanistan - are comparatively smaller than, say, the war in Southeast Asia (58K) or the Korean War (36K) - not to mention WW II (400K) and WW I (116K). Still, we honor them today just as much as those who died "serving the country" in previous wars.

But consider the non-American fatalities in the U.S-Afghan War: For Afghans, the statistics are 70K Afghan military and police deaths, 46K "recorded" Afghan civilians (although that is likely a significant underestimation) and some 53K other "opposition fighters" killed. Almost 67K other people were killed in Pakistan in relation to the Afghan war. Together, they add to over 236K dead. The non-American war dead from the Korean and Vietnam Wars number in the millions - mostly civilians.

Though memorials exist for those casualties in those Asian countries, where are the memorials for them anywhere in the United States?

Just posing the question may be seen by many who champion the role of the United States in the world, even when it makes "mistakes," as irreverent, disrespectful, disloyal, and even treasonous. Part of the psychology of this involves the deeply ingrained, "American exceptionalist" belief that we are "the good guys." This is not exclusively an American trait - all major world powers have it ingrained in their citizens as well.

Even those defeated and condemned for war crimes, such as the Germans and Japanese in the two world wars, have experienced difficulties apologizing to their victims. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, did apologize for the disastrous Afghan war (1979-89). But the French, the British, and other imperialists - including foremost the United States - have never apologized for their war crimes.

So the compartmentalized war memorials and nationalist Memorial Days continue with little overlap in honoring the dead of other nations deemed "enemies" in one war or another.

I end on a personal note, as a Mexican and U.S. citizen. The U.S., to the best of my knowledge, has never placed a wreath on the "Monumento de los Niños Heroes" in Chapultepec, Mexico City, honoring the young cadets that died defending Mexico City from the invading U.S. military forces in 1847. It never apologized for that war, period, or all subsequent military interventions and cou d'etat (Madero's).

President AMLO recently asked the King of Spain and the Pope to apologize for their many heinous crimes against Indigenous peoples over centuries in what is today Mexico. His own government apologized for those crimes, too. Pope Francis obliged him, the entire Spanish monarchy and political class, in sharp contrast, rejected the request as an affront. Mexico is choke full of Indigenous monuments, but very few of Spanish or gringo or French imperial occupiers.

Only two groups of foreigners are honored every year in Mexico: the "Martyrs of Chicago" - labor leaders who died fighting for the 8-hour work day, on every May Day - and "Los San Patricios," the brigade of 200 or so Irish Americans who switch sides in the Mexican American War of 1846-48, on St Patrick's Day.

It seems the Spanish political class is still unified fighting, symbolically, the Latin American wars of independence; the U.S. political class, too, and despite still fighting its own Civil War,  is still unified in its glorification of its superpower militarism - notwithstanding growing fissures with the Maga isolationists in Trump's Republican party.

BTW, the language of xenophobia today is all militaristic: immigration is supposedly a "national security" issue; the border needs to be "secured" against potential terrorists threats; the flows of immigrants constitute an "invasion" and we are "in an existential war" for the future of America -- all these terms according to the fearmongering mainstream media, the Maga Republicans and many Dems who are now caving to this narrative (Biden), the governors of Texas & Florida, etc.

Militarism is everywhere - we have declared "war on crime," "war on drugs," and now "war on wokeness." We are engaged in two proxy wars causing huge civilian casualties and human suffering: in Ukraine and in Gaza. We may soon be involved in other shooting wars directly.

Martin Luther King rejected U.S. militarism in 1967 - as he did racism and greed - as one of the three evils in America. He declared he was going to "study war no more." He called for the United States to join the "world revolution in values", to build a better world.

We are far from reaching these goals - in fact, we have been dramatically moving away from them in recent decades. Trumpism represents the revamped, resurrected ideologies of white nationalism, systemic racism, merchantilist "America First-ism," and unrestrained plutocratic power. Not a recipe for peace - domestically or internationally.

Whether or not this resurgence of the extreme right in American politics will lead to war - not just international but domestic - depends on whether international relations and domestic relations become so destabilized by it as to rupture the social and global orders into open violent conflicts. Nobody seems willing or able to stop this runaway freight train.

Either way, whether as a nation-state/global empire in crisis, or a world order in systemic crisis, we may soon find ourselves debating, as Fredrick Douglass once did, which side of our tragic descent into fratricidal warfare was right and merits honoring by those that survive it… which, in our nuclear age, might be a moot question.

So today, yes, let's remember and honor all those who gave their lives fighting in any of the past wars, not just here but anywhere on this long-suffering Earth, as well as honoring their victims, whether military or civilian. And we can honor them all by pledging "we will study war no more," by pledging we will devote ourselves to only building a more peaceful and just world - a "world where all the worlds belong," as the Zapatistas insist we should aim to build:

A world with no borders, no flags, and no reason to go to war for.

Imagine.

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ARTICLE: The Tangled Roots of Memorial Day and Why It’s Celebrated