Some quick thoughts about Veterans Day, or Remembrance Day for my British Commonwealth readers.
Everyone of us is descended from a man who took up to defend his family, his property, his community, and his society against some armed threat. Without him, you wouldn’t be here. Live, dead, known to you or lost to history or prehistory, doesn’t matter. Thank him. Live so that the risk he took was worthwhile.
“You’re A Better Man Than I Am”
Perhaps out of an instinctive recognition of this fact, every boy plays soldier. Or sports. Or chess. Hell, even marching bands have a military origin and most of them aim for military levels of drill and precision. Every boy imagines what it would be like to fight against his people’s enemy. Even after we grow up, we sense that war is the ultimate test and we wonder if we have what it takes to pass that test.
Even those of us who don’t serve when we’re young, who become middle-aged men in office jobs whose biggest risk of injury is RSI from non-ergonomic keyboards… paraphrasing Kipling, we know we can sleep on our memory foam mattresses in our air conditioned houses, drive our plush cars and eat our rich meals, because some young guy is standing watch in the cold, the wet, the heat, the dry, manning a foxhole, a wall, a trench, an observation post, a parapet, a DMZ, a border, the limes of empire, ready to do violence on our behalf. On some level we know he’s a better man than us and we try to come to grips with that. We watch war movies or war stories on the History Channel. We read books about men in combat. Or write them—the Confederated Worlds trilogy came out of me wrestling with these themes, and I have more military sci-fi stories rattling around in my head.
But the boy playing soldier or the middle-aged guy reading military technothrillers doesn’t know what it’s really like. Sherman said “war is hell” but even that doesn’t punch you in the gut with how hellish war truly is. War is the Metallica song “One“. War is the narrator of The Sun Also Rises whose genitals were shot off in World War I. War is the psych wards in VA hospitals. War is 22 veteran suicides per day in the United States.
Then why are wars fought? The boys who play soldier can’t imagine the cruelty and terror? Yes, true, but that’s only part of it. A much greater part is that the normal, healthy, masculine instinct to protect the people and places that matter can be readily exploited by the powers that be. The elites wrap themselves in the flag, or look solemn before the press, and say a few simple words.
- “They hate us for our freedom.”
- “Better to fight them there than here.”
- “We have to make the world safe for democracy.”
- “We have to bring Christianity to the [85% Catholic] Philippines.”
- “Remember the Maine.”
- “54°40′ or fight!”
War Is A Racket
But those are just words. The reality behind them was glimpsed by General Smedley Butler, who rose from a private to major general in the United States Marine Corps, then wrote a tell-all book, War is a Racket.
War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909–1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
In closing, let me compliment all the men throughout human history and prehistory who risked, and those who continue to risk, their lives for the things that matter… and let me hope that we can break the grip of the racketeers on human societies, and that instead of predicting the future, military science fiction will prevent it.