Today, May 26, 2025, is Memorial Day here in the United States. People nearly always get what this day is supposed to be about wrong. They say it is for commemorating everyone who serves or has served in the American military. That's not what it is. There are other days for that. Memorial Day is for remembering and honoring all of the American soldiers killed in battle or perhaps otherwise killed while in the military. Now, what I'm going to say here won't be exactly popular with most Americans, as it so rarely is these days. So let me say this first. I mean no disrespect toward American service personnel who lost their lives in combat. I do not deny, in fact, I emphasize the tragedy of those deaths. Please don't get me wrong about that.
And yet. There is something that happens not just on this day but always in my country. We don't say military personnel died in battle much less that they were killed in battle. We say they are "fallen." We say they "gave their lives." We call them "sacrifices." The truth is that each and every one of those ways of referring to military deaths is a euphemism. They are ways of avoiding the stark truth of military action. No soldier or sailor who died in battle is "fallen." They didn't fall down. They were killed. They didn't "give their lives." Their lives were stolen from them. They weren't "sacrifices," or at least most of them weren't. They didn't die as a sacrifice to some god. They didn't die voluntarily, with the possible exception of a few winners of the Congressional Medal of Honor. None of those things is what happened. What happened is that the lives of mostly decent Americans were cut short, take from them, robbed from them by military action.
Why do we use all those euphemisms? We do it because we have to brainwash the American public into believing that military service is noble, never mind that hardly anyone in the military ever does anything truly noble. And never mind that mass killing, which is what the military exists for, is never noble. We have to convince people that all American service personnel are great patriots willingly putting their lives at risk when many if not most of them these days join the military for entirely different purposes. Some of them join the military because they come from military families, and being a soldier is essentially the family business. Many young American women and men join the American military because they see it as a way out of poverty. Or they see it as a job they can get when they can't get any other. Or because they want the financial benefits we offer to military veterans. All of those reasons for joining the American military may be perfectly understandably, but they aren't particularly noble. They are men and women trying to make their way in life as best they can. Are these men and women noble? No, they aren't any more noble than the rest of us are, which is to say, not much.
And there is one other euphemism we use when we talk about our country's military. We say our military exists "to defend our freedom." That statement is nothing but pure bullshit. We haven't used our military to defend any American's freedom since the Civil War well over a century and a half ago. In our past we used our military to oppress, displace, and kill American Indians. We used it for imperialist expansion of our country. We used it for imperial purposes against Mexico and Spain. We used it to take Hawaii from native Hawaiians whose people had lived on those islands for centuries at least. We used it take the Philippines from Spain. We used it to bail out allies in both World Wars. Our enemies in those two wars were hardly any threat to American freedom at all. Yes, they were horrific threats to other people's freedoms, but neither Germany nor Japan ever had any reasonable possibility of invading the US. Hell, Hitler couldn't even invade Great Britain, and the Battle of Midway proved that Japan couldn't remotely invade the United States except for the Aleutian Islands, which were never important for American freedom. No, the American military has never, or at least hardly ever, had anything to do with defending American freedom.
Now, we aren't using our military these days to conquer and take other people's lands like we did so often in the past, but that doesn't mean we don't use it for imperial purposes. The United States is today's world empire. We're a new kind of empire. We have a few colonies--Puerto Rico, Guam, and others--but we don't have colonies on anything like the scale of the British Empire, or the Spanish, or the Portuguese, or the French empires once did. No, what we have is economic interests and claimed political interests all over the world that we think we need to defend. We pride ourselves on being today's dominant world power, and dominant world powers always use their military to defend and to project their power. That's what we use the American military for, to project and defend American power the world round not to defend American freedom.
So how are we to understand the American military? It isn't what we always say it is. It doesn't do what we always say it does. So is there any reason for its existence at all? No. Not really. They only way actually to justify its existence is to say that it is a tragic necessity at best. The world is a dangerous place. There are people and perhaps even countries in the world who wish to do us harm. That doesn't mean they are actually capable of doing us much harm, but some of them would if they could. Terrorists have done it in the past though, as tragic as what they did was, they have never been a real threat to our freedom. It may be, though it isn't certain, that Russia and China, countries that don't like us much and that have significant nuclear arsenals, would try to conquer us if they thought they could (though all they would probably do is displace us as the major world power, which is hardly the same thing). In an ideal world, that is, in the Kingdom of God, no one would have a military. That's why if our military is necessary at all, which I'm not quite prepared to concede, it is only a tragic necessity.
So let's knock it off with the euphemisms about what happens to soldiers. Let's knock it off with the lies about what we use our military for. Let's stop making something that exists to kill and maim human beings and destroy their property noble. It isn't noble. It's brutal. It's about death and destruction, and, though we may use military personnel for humanitarian purposes on occasion, death and destruction are its reason for existing. The powers of the world convince most of the rest of us that the military is an honorable, noble thing. It isn't. The world would be a much better place if we'd stop letting the powers get away with it.
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