Start Date: May 29, 2023

It is Memorial Day 2023. Of all the secular holidays I believe it is the most sacred. 

The Fourth of July is festive and very important. I hail from a suburb of Philadelphia. We had a big part in the story of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Philadelphian Betsy Ross made our first flag to symbolize the new nation. Thanksgiving has historical elements and then became a national day of gratitude. If ever anything was in short supply these days it is gratitude. All the other Monday holidays seem to have become just days off from school disguised as honoring various historical figures. Given our failing education system it might seem better to keep kids in school and teach them to read about the person or event.

But Memorial Day is a national funeral or, as is more the fashion these days, a celebration of life. Of thousands of lives. I believe over a million have died wearing the uniform at this point in our history. Barefoot patriots in the freezing winter of Valley Forge. Brothers fighting each other in Civil War battles that consumed more lives than most other wars.  Then came the foreign deployments. Two world wars in Europe and the Pacific. Then unending war in southeast Asia and conflicts with unclear objectives in the Middle East. I once saw an interview with a military officer. He made it clear: “We defend democracy. We don’t practice it”.  There is no show of hands as to whether the unit should advance or retreat, what maneuvers to execute, when to launch. Much like a priesthood, all have taken a vow to submit to a higher order.

Veterans say they are taught to commit everything to the person on your left and the person on your right.  Each one to the other.  Bonds are formed between people of such diverse backgrounds they would meet nowhere else. Yet now they trust each other with their lives.  In chapter 15, verse 13 of the gospel of John in the Christian bible, Jesus states “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”  But what of the person who lays down their life for strangers? For people who will never know of their sacrifice. For people who wouldn’t acknowledge him/her if alive. For someone who would object to their values and disrespect their choices. They know that going in and yet they go anyway.  

Traditionally what we do as a basic nod of respect to those who gave their lives for ours is to fly the flag they carried into battle. It does’t have to be stadium sized. They aren’t expensive. It doesn’t take any time to put a small one by the driveway. It won’t interfere with the BBQ, getting to the beach, going on a picnic. So what is it? 

Where is your flag? 

What is the problem? Oh, America isn’t perfect. Bad people did bad things.

And yet, in addition to the million or so immigrants who come to America legally every year, we have seen another 5,6, 7 million or so wander in illegally over the last few years. I have observed that those who are ambiguous or negative about the flag are often among those who want open borders. Why? Is it some kind of punishment? Lure people to abandon their homes and families, pay smugglers all of their savings, and risk their lives to come to a place you don’t respect. That’s pretty cold. The truth is your know it is a better deal.  For no other reason would someone risk so much.

But somehow you feel it wouldn’t be cool to be waving the flag. Well, a nation is different than a neighborhood or a state. It is a statement. In a sense, you just have to pick a team. So who will it be who has sufficiently clean hands?

Consider the alternatives.

Britain: There is Britain, a country which colonized so extensively that it was once said that “the sun never sets on the British Empire.” From India to Egypt they conquered the world.  They also had a heavy hand in facilitating African slaves coming to America. They eventually banned it but made a fortune along the way. 

France: The French were essential in helping our founding fathers attain victory over the British. So they must be considered as enablers if you hate our country.  Inspired by our success they took a turn at having their own revolution. It didn’t end well. The Jacobins claimed to want democracy but instead let loose a reign of terror that arrested approximately 300,000 and sent more than 10,000 to be beheaded via the guillotine. Even Robespierre, one of the principal leaders of the revolution, himself died at the guillotine. Anarchy is like a wildfire. Be wary of fanning the flames as you can never know which way the winds will turn.

Oh, and they ended up with Napoleon before getting to their eventual democracy.

Then there is also the French colonialism. 

Remember Vietnam. The elites were French Catholics because it was a French colony. They left chaos and civil war, which the United States inherited.  In the Caribbean Haiti was a French colony.  After independence they were forced to pay former French colonists.  The French-descended Duvaliers were brutal dictators for decades. Haiti now suffers extreme poverty.  
Lebanon was also once a French colony.  The elite were generally French speaking Christians. The poor were Muslims. Various clashes led to civil war.  For decades it has become a hotbed of multiple terrorist groups and assassins, with most of the population living in poverty. In North Africa, France systematically made use of torture against the Algerians during their fight for independence

Spain: The English colonists came to the new continent to live, to work, and to stay. Many didn’t treat the indigenous people well. But Spanish conquistadores came for conquest. They came for gold and silver. They pillaged and raped and converted to the faith at the tip of the sword. They also had a brutal and nasty inquisition against heresy. in 1492 they expelled hundreds of thousands of Jews who had communities in the region going back centuries.

Portugal/Netherlands: Both were heavily involved in slavery. Portugal brought African slaves to their colony in Brazil a century before the Mayflower.  The Dutch also began bringing slaves to the Caribbean before America’s existence. Portugal, like Spain, also ordered the expulsion of its Jewish community.

Germany: Hitler. The real one. The Holocaust.

China: Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” killed millions.  They are presently involved in a modern genocide of Uighurs and other Muslims. They round up communities to send people to camps. Victims have been subjected to rape, forced abortion, force labor, forced sterilization. Prisoners are executed and subjected to harvesting of body organs for transplant. 

Vietnam: After the the fall of Saigon the communists from the north imprisoned hundreds of thousands from the south who had worked with the Americans. They were placed in “re-education” camps where they were beaten and sometimes killed.

Japan: Treated enemy fighters and non-Japans civilians alike with brutal savagery during WWII. The death march to Bataan killed thousands of POWs on a brutal 65 mile march. 

In 1837 when at war with China, the “rape of Nanking” involved soldiers raping between 20,000 and 80,000 Chinese girls. The emperor feared for the image of Japan and STDs so they built “comfort stations”, i.e. brothels, for Japanese soldiers to have sex with an isolated group of prostitutes. However the so-called “prostitutes” were often young Korean and Chinese girls who had been kidnapped or bought from their parents and were being systematically raped.

While impossible to precisely confirm, the estimates for numbers of civilians killed by Japan in the WWII run from several 100’s of thousands to as high as 10’s of millions.

Russia: Stalin’s purge killed millions. Forced labor, deportation. Political prisoners continue to be victims of dictators. It seems fair to suggest that Russia has never had anything resembling a free society in its history. They are presently involved in a gruesome war with Ukraine.

Turkey: Ask the Armenians about the genocide of WWI.

(The former) Yugoslavia: What was once the proud nation of Yugoslavia dissolved into Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Slovenia, and Kosovo in a series of civil wars in the 1990’s that killed masses of people, saw rape as an act of war, and left mass graves of civilian victims.

Italy: Great food but they had Mussolini and fought with Hitler

Iran: I recently read an article about an Iranian born model protesting oppression and executions in Iran. The article claimed they had executed 90 people in the last 18 days. DAYS. Maybe that is an overestimate, but they do typically rank second to China in absolute numbers of annual executions despite China having more than 15 times the population, and rank number one in execution of juveniles. They are presently suspected in the poisoning of girls in certain schools 

Scandinavia: The Vikings enjoyed a good war as well. They even buried warriors with their weapons.

Indigenous peoples. We tell ourselves that our continent was filled with innocents living peacefully off the land.  But then there are the human sacrifices that the Maya and Inca practiced. The North American indigenous people engaged in wars amongst themselves before the era of Columbus and colonization. It is what humans do.

Africa: I won’t go through each culture, and they are no more the same than are white European cultures. But if you have heard of Rwanda it is because of the genocide. In the midst of a civil war nearly a million black Rwandans were murdered, in roughly 100 days. They were killed  by other black Rwandans for being the wrong kind of black Rwandans. It was roughly 10%-20% of their population. Let that set in. Consider a group in the United States killing 50 million or more of their fellow citizens in 3 months. I don’t think that even Hitler annihilated humanity with such efficiency.

Also slavery in west Africa was facilitated by African rulers and merchants who used pre-existing methods and networks to kidnap and sell members of different ethnic groups. If you can kill millions of your own countrymen in the 1990s it is no stretch to think that rulers would sell millions from other groups in the middle of the last millennium. 

Throughout history the Hebrews, Egyptians, Hittites, Greeks, Romans, etc. and now the Chinese and Latin American human traffickers have all participated in the enslavement of fellow humans. We may as well accept that ”man’s inhumanity to man” is an equal opportunity sport.  

But years ago, when Albania celebrated the visit of a then not so popular American president, a reporter spoke with one Albanian man who was fully decked out in red, white, and blue. The man expressed his confusion about our nation’s endless self judgment. He pointed out that America had liberated more people on Earth than any nation in history. You could almost see him thinking. What is wrong with you people? Get over yourselves.  I sometimes wonder if it is our largely Anglo-Saxon heritage. In Martin Luther’s days as a Catholic monk he was obsessed with confession. He would go everyday and confess for as much as hours until the priests were exhausted. He couldn’t seem to get passed his obsession with sin. 

So if you are holding out for moral purity you will never find a culture deserving your allegiance. Yet most nations set aside a time to acknowledge those among them who gave up their lives in uniform. If anything, our debt of gratitude is perhaps greater because our military were, and are, willing to die defending the American Constitution whose preamble declared intent to strive for a “more perfect union” when unity was barely holding and perfection unattainable.  Both are still true. Yet in the words of Lincoln at the Gettysburg address, they still gave “the last full measure of devotion”. 

So where is your flag?