War Never Changes

Memorial Day and the Lies Americans Were Told

I don’t hate the troops. I grieve for them. I grieve for the young Americans who believed they were defending freedom while powerful institutions pursued profit, resources, geopolitical dominance, fighting “communism” and endless expansion. The soldiers were often sincere. The systems directing them were not.

The psychological damage that occurs when people realize the moral framework they trusted may have been false and manipulated. That applies not only to veterans, but increasingly to civilians waking up to decades of war narratives, as many American’s see that now with the genocide in Gaza, and the war in Ukraine.

• Vietnam

• Iraq

• Afghanistan

  All for -

• fossil fuel empire

• military-industrial economics

  Creating

• ecological destruction

• and the emotional collapse of belief itself.

• Every year we are told the same thing.

  Freedom.
  Sacrifice.
  Honor.

  Bullshit

  The older I get, the harder it becomes to separate the grief from the machinery built around it.

  Because I do not look at the rows of graves and feel hatred toward the dead.
  I feel sorrow.

  I look at photographs of boys in Vietnam, they were boys, really, standing in jungles they could not even locate on a map before they were sent there, and I wonder what they believed in during the final moments of their lives.

  The young people lied into a war of WMD’s that didn’t exist.

  I think many of them truly believed they were protecting something.
  Their country.
  Their families.
  Maybe even each other.

  And that may be the cruelest part of all.

From Vietnam forward, America has drifted deeper and deeper into something it could no longer honestly name.

Wars have become permanent.

If we cannot ask what these wars were truly for, then the dead are reduced to props in a story that never ends. Maybe that is the big question this Memorial Day.

Moral exhaustion. THEY DIED BELIEVING. The disgusting moral framework they trusted- false and manipulated.

RIP