Some Corpses Are More Worthy Than Others

 In a macabre exercise in  Orwellian double-think, President Biden has officially declared that a "prayer for peace" be uttered by one and all on this Memorial Day. Even the chattering war-mongers of the weapons manufacturer-sponsored  corporate media followed orders and at least shut up for a hot minute of silence - before drowning out the sacred bell-tolling with the normal discussion of who to bomb next.

And even as Biden and his fellow politicians all bowed their own heads in simulation of prayer for peace, the bombs and ammo were en route with a vengeance to Israel, Ukraine,  and wherever else on the planet that fine war products are sold.

Honoring all the dead American troops for having made the "ultimate sacrifice" for the sake of an "idea"  serves the purpose of our never-ending state of war by separating the dead professional killers (potential if not actual) from the killed. Those who die while waring a uniform and holding a gun are declared to be more respectable, and thereby more  more grievable,  than "official" enemy combatants and unarmed civilians alike.

Putting a halo on dead soldiers also lets the masters of war ignore the fact that war is in its modern essence a capitalistic enterprise, designed to protect and enhance the power and the profits of the few.  So if they use words like "freedom" and "democracy" and "sacred" often enough to justify their mass murder, it is that much easier to separate, demote and dehumanize all those non-uniformed men, women and children. At best these victims  are barely sympathetic "collateral damage." At worst they are the complicit "human shields" of the latest designated enemy.

They are deemed not worthy of grief on this Memorial Day. 

As  Simone  Weil wrote in her brilliant antiwar essay, with the epic antiwar poem  the Iliad as her centerpiece, the victims of war are conveniently transformed into "things."  If If the masters of war can magically transform people into things even before  violently killing them, it naturally follows that they are also mere things after their deaths.

Weil's opening paragraph:

" Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to. For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past, the Iliad could appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, at the very center of human history, the Iliad is the purest and the loveliest of mirrors."

War, she continues, makes a person into a thing by literally turning him or her either into a pre-corpse or an actual one. "Somebody is here, and the next minutes, nobody is here at all."

The occult purpose of Memorial Day, therefore,  is not so much about honoring the designated  war heroes as it is  it is about honoring - and fearing -  the force and the power that they represent. It's a bait and switch holiday that allows "us" to mawkishly bow our heads for a minute before firing up the barbeque for the official start of summer.

And even as they're urging us to join in their maudlin festivities of death, hamburgers and fun in the sun, they're also trying to make us feel guilty that we ourselves have not been elevated to their rarefied ranks of either  potential or actual war dead. 

In both the  United Kingdom and the United States, there are renewed calls from rulers for more lumpen folk to enlist for Permawar - euphemized as patriotic "national service."

"Only one percent of Americans serving in the military is problematic"  scolded Rep. Pat Ryan, Democrat (from my own Hudson Valley district). The military-industrial complex sent him and his GOP partner, Mike Waltz of Florida, to a Sunday talk show in order to gaslight the audience on Memorial Day weekend. The public-private war industry made sure to send bona fide US Army veterans. It simply wouldn't have done to use, for example, the actual commander in chief, who during the Vietnam war enjoyed five separate draft deferments due to a case of chronic asthma from which has since apparently recovered.

Ryan and Waltz were quick to deny that their bipartisan push for enhanced financing for military recruitment in any way presages a return to the draft, (which was more egalitarian in the Vietnam era, when even upper middle class guys couldn't always avoid becoming cannon fodder). Recruitment will still be done according to class and be heavily concentrated in low-income school districts.

Moreover, they are insisting that mandatory national service wouldn't necessarily entail putting on a uniform or carrying a weapon. They do understand that there are still some pacifists out there, especially among the young people protesting their genocide of Palestinians.

Rather, they mask their nationalistic propaganda in the rhetoric of  social service, with Waltz gushing that it "could" include "national parks, inner city tutoring, elderly (sic) care."

And we all know (wink, wink, nod) that not only would this national service be either low paid or voluntary, it would also free up more money for the weapons contractors - money which is now being wasted on the public education of poor Black and Brown kids public schools in those "inner cities" and that all that Medicare money going to nursing care for old people could be going to Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, not to mention their  Wall Street investors.

In other words, they have "things"-both with uniforms and without - all figured out.