Memorial day essay from my friend Dave Benner #ThinkDifferently
https://mises.org/profile/dave-benner
For Memorial Day, I posted this from the national Libertarian Party Twitter this morning. I spent considerable time on it in attempt to strike the proper tone, and it's something I'm proud of writing.
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On this Memorial Day, we honor fallen US soldiers, and mourn their losses. Many of them were our relatives, friends, and colleagues, and we miss them dearly.
Politicians and the corporate press will tell you they all died for your freedom, but the sad fact is that isn't so.
More often than not, the ruling class in Washington exploited their genuine patriotism for its own wicked purposes, and waged wars for the sake of empire instead of protection.
In addition to causing so many needless deaths, regime hawks used war as an excuse to subsidize the military industrial complex, violate your civil liberties, and destroy your money through inflation.
It doesn't have to be so, and fallen US soldiers and their families deserve far better.
That's why we're so dedicated to putting a stop to the conditions that led to their deaths, no matter how much war propaganda stands in our way.
It means bringing ALL the troops home, closing down ALL overseas military bases, and opposing ALL wars overseas.
It means viewing war as a last resort for protection, rather than a first resort for conquest.
It means peace negotiations instead of proxy wars.
It means ending all economic sanctions on foreign countries.
It means supporting Defend the Guard, a legislative plan to restrict local governments from committing reserve units to undeclared and immoral wars.
It means rejecting US war propaganda, and recognizing that our enemies aren't overseas, they're in Washington, DC.
It means ending the Selective Service System for good, abolishing the CIA, and prosecuting war criminals in government for their atrocities.
Memorial Day doesn't have to be a day of mourning, and nothing more, it can be a rallying cry to save lives, preserve our liberty, and rollback the American empire. We owe that much to the fallen.
