Today is Memorial Day when we are to mourn the U.S. military personnel who died while serving in the armed forces.
We will hear a lot about freedom and preserving our way of life, but what exactly is that today in the US? Why are young men and women from across the country being asked to serve—and die today?
While the propaganda slogans (“fight em over there”) remain largely intact it’s hard to recall a recent time when so little effort was put into concealing the fact that the US military functions to spread freedom for the capital class. And it comes at the same time a particularly crass president is controlled by foreign interests and transnational capital is feasting on US societal collapse. So who is being served this Memorial Day?
Serving the Great American Sellout
Trump: We lost 13 people. In other wars, you lost hundreds of thousands of people. I get a kick when I look at somebody on television and they say, ‘he’s lost 13 people.’ pic.twitter.com/0qGnvpCdTw
— FactPost (@factpostnews) May 20, 2026
While Trump’s comments reveal his thoughts that troop deaths (the numbers are likely much higher and hundreds have also sustained serious injury) are but a number on his ego trip, the argument that the military is protecting America and its way of life doesn’t hold much water when the country’s financial overlords continue to loot the country.
To briefly recap, it was American elites’ greed that caused the American working class to lose 3.7 million decent paying jobs from 2001-2018 – and that’s only from shipping jobs to China. Les Leopold in his book Wall Street’s War on Workers calculates that Wall Street strip mining of the US (including China, NAFTA, stock buybacks, etc.) has led to 30 million laid-off Americans since 1996.
Under MAGA, the great American sell off is accelerating. From Asia Times:
On April 26, 2026, India’s largest pharmaceutical company, Sun Pharma, signed a definitive agreement to acquire New Jersey-based Organon for US$11.75 billion in an all-cash transaction.
It is the largest acquisition by an Indian biopharmaceutical company in history. Sun Pharma will become the world’s seventh-largest biosimilar seller and a top-three player in global women’s health.
In January 2026, Mitsubishi Corporation announced a $7.5 billion acquisition of Aethon Energy’s US natural gas assets, which would be the largest Japanese acquisition ever in America’s energy sector…
The aggregate numbers tell the same story. Total Asia-Pacific M&A activity in 2025 reached $946 billion, up from $687.7 billion in 2024. Japan-related M&A surged to $385.9 billion. Greater China M&A reached $399 billion, up 46% versus 2024. India recorded $113 billion in 2025, up 42% year-on-year.
Foreign capital flowing into the US in 2025 hit $385 billion. The Americas accounted for 60% of global M&A deal values.
Serving a Nation that Will Not Feed Its Own People
In an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity during his trip to Beijing, Trump defended Chinese purchases of U.S. farmland arguing that restricting foreign ownership would hurt American farmers by driving down land values.
China’s total holdings of US agriculture land might be small, but foreign ownership continues to rise. From Investigate Midwest:
Nearly every state in the country has seen an increase in foreign interests owning farmland since 2014, according to USDA data.
Foreign countries and interests own more than 45 million acres of farmland in the country, which accounts for just over 3% of the nation’s private farmland, but the number of agricultural acres owned by foreign interests increased by 67% from 2014 to 2023.
The growing acquisition of farmland by large corporations, investment funds, and institutional investors means that number is likely to grow. If there isn’t much industry to send overseas anymore, why not sell off the land? According to Farm Progress:
…nearly 348 million acres of US farmland were rented out in 2024. Surprisingly, 79% of these acres are owned by non-farming landlords—people who collect rent but don’t work the land themselves.
Will the AI Grow the Food?
Tech companies, too, are increasingly interested in farmland… for their data centers. They are embarking on the largest corporate land acquisition spree since the railroad boom. And while the total agricultural land they occupy might be a small percentage, that doesn’t take into account their effect on water and electricity supplies for farms that produce things humans actually need.
A scandal far larger than data centers or foreign ownership continues to be the fact that the US still produces massive amounts of agricultural commodities, but while much of it is earmarked for exports, working-class communities are targeted with ultra-processed —and ultra-profitable— products, and many still struggle to afford even that. Hunger affects 48 million Americans, including 20 percent of its children.
No matter. Even if the AI can’t make food, or help Americans get clean drinking water, or healthcare, or housing, ungodly amounts of social investment flows towards AI. Four of the main private arms of the US government— Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon— are forecast to drop $650 billion on AI in 2026 alone. So what can it do?
It can reinforce neoliberal structures built by the titans of death:
It threatens to narrow our institutional imagination to the dreams of monopolistic firms and flood the zone with propaganda to reinforce these nightmarish visions, rehabilitate reactionary ideologies that pine for the ancien régime, and serves to enrich some of the least among us: white South Africans who don’t seem to have gotten over the end of apartheid. The concern about the Subprime AI crisis, as Ed Zitron puts it, is that it will not only misallocate resources in a bubble that’ll burst and leave behind immiserated masses, dessicated public institutions, and an increasingly withered capacity for political action not aligned with Wall Street/Silicon Valley’s interests BUT that it’ll empower masters of the universe like Peter Thiel who seem interested in building the worst possible future for all but themselves.
Serving Eugenicist Oligarchs
Ah, yes. Peter Thiel. The co-founder of Palantir, which has been in the news quite a bit recently—and much longer here at Naked Capitalism—for its quest to become the towering global panopticon (and executioner).
Those who serve are serving Thiel, Palantir, and the AI machine.
The Pentagon is now using Palantir for its kill chains and is expanding its use. And like all the equipment and ideology used on the battle fields “over there” it is increasingly coming home to the national Night City:
keep coming back to this quote from “Neuromancer” as of late:
“But he also saw a certain sense in the notion that burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn’t there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself.”
— COSMIC 🖖🏾 SLOP (@afrocosmist) March 2, 2025
What of the ideology being served? One could argue Thiel is now the leader of the tech-based section of the military-industrial complex, and he has for years tutored Vance. Does the latter share Thiel’s vision for “post-democratic” rule? As Thiel has said, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
Are service members serving the United States of America or “The Technological Republic”?
Because we get asked a lot.
The Technological Republic, in brief.
1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.
2. We must rebel…
— Palantir (@PalantirTech) April 18, 2026
That’s a fair question to ask if we consider three points:
- The support for “post-democracy,” which is rampant in the Trump administration.
- Lest we fall into the trap of believing this is only a Trump phenomenon, consider the following from Imperfect Guardians published by California Law Review, which lays out in detail what we already knew about the dominant ruling mindset on the other aisle of the uniparty:
‘…confidence in the comparatively reactionary character of ordinary, working-class, and poor people in the United States is in no way proportional to the evidence. That confidence reflects less a grounded finding, and more ideology or faith in the need for elite rule. To allow these commitments to go untested is particularly dangerous in the face of the authoritarian politics of hyper-concentrated wealth and power that has become a feature of contemporary life. Such discourse diverts attention from the fundamentally undemocratic nature of the U.S. state and allows governing elites to blame “the people” for problems elites have a disproportionate hand in creating.’
3. The immense power of these oligarchs whose lines of thinking are very much out of tune with what people think of when they invoke the defense of “our way of life.”
The billionaire vampire Thiel, for example, spent part of his childhood in South Africa where his father was helping the apartheid regime mine uranium in a secret effort to obtain nuclear weapons. More from the Financial Times:
Southern Africa under apartheid offered an extreme version of some of the main themes of American life today. First, there was tremendous inequality. The mine where Thiel’s father worked was “known for conditions not far removed from indentured servitude”, writes Thiel’s biographer Max Chafkin. “White managers, like the Thiels, had access to a brand-new medical and dental centre in Swakopmund and membership in the company country club.” The mine’s black migrant workers lived in work camps.
To whites of a certain mindset, this inequality wasn’t due to apartheid. They thought it was inscribed in nature. Certain people were equipped to succeed in capitalism, while others weren’t. That was simply the way it was, and it was pointless to try to mess with nature. Two of Thiel’s contemporaries at Stanford in the 1980s recall him telling them that apartheid “works” and was “economically sound”.
Thiel is just one of many reactionary influencers with roots in Southern Africa who found a natural home in Silicon Valley. The eugenist policies pushed by men like Thiel, Musk, and David Sacks have found fertile ground there dating back at least as far as the founding of Stanford University in 1885. Leland Stanford, for example, went from breeding horses in a particularly ruthless way to trying out such practices to weed out the weak on humans.
So while Thiel, Musk, and friends look to correct what they see as failures in South Africa they also continue a long line of Silicon Valley eugenicists who want to gift Stanford’s equine engineering for all of us:
The tech billionaire [Musk] frequently invokes IQ, a flawed and long-debated measure of intelligence. His fever dream of a crumbling civilization can only be salvaged when “smart” people pump out more babies. What constitutes a smart person, he doesn’t make explicit, though in tech-natalist circles they usually mirror the entrepreneurs declaring the mandate. To that end, Musk has personalized his advocacy for pronatalism by challenging himself to help “seed the earth with more human beings of high intelligence”.
How does that play out beyond Musk sowing his seed far and wide? It’s been playing out for a long time through neoliberal social murder, but it’s becoming increasingly brazen:
In case it’s not clear to some people, this is classic eugenicist rhetoric and a core feature of fascist politics. It implies that sick and disabled people are failing ‘the nation’ and are thus a burden to be stigmatized, shamed, and eliminated. pic.twitter.com/esdqmkSClP
— Eric Reinhart (@_Eric_Reinhart) May 12, 2025
On the policy side, Trump-DOGE cuts to Medicaid, Social Security, Housing and Urban Development, SNAP, USAid, etc. can largely be viewed as efforts to cull the herd.
Meanwhile, nepotism bums like Hunter Biden and all the Trump offspring who survive and profit off their connection to government would probably be getting by on the public’s dime in another way if not for their bloodlines. They put the entire eugenicist argument to shame from the likes of the South African apartheid enthusiasts, but serve our military members must in order to preserve the hierarchical falsehood by helping to enrich Hunter in Ukraine and the younger Trumps through their drone business.
Serving for Zionism and Epstein’s Secrets
And now we come to the most obvious, which is increasingly obvious nowadays, although I think focusing solely on Israel lets the above-mentioned forces off the hook. There is overlap, however.
When Trump says “we only lost 13 people” who or what were they serving? This?:
For Miriam Adelson’s dreams?
WOW!
At the Israeli-American Council, Miriam Adelson is asked how she is buying influence over American politicians.
Recognizing that it probably isn’t smart for her to talk openly about this, she hesitates and answers:
“Can you allow me not to answer? … I want to be… pic.twitter.com/gOGXm8xMDR
— Trita Parsi (@tparsi) January 18, 2026
To help keep the Epstein secrets of high-place paedophiles, human traffickers, and other sexual criminals?
Overlapping with the Zionists’ zealotry are the dreams of the windfall from a conquered West Asia. As the Zionist think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies notes, the US is also sacrificing up its service members in pursuit of a “trillion-dollar opportunity”, which shows yet again how “defending US interests” really means spreading freedom for transnational capital:
The energy sector alone could deliver $300 billion in non-ownership revenues through services, reconstruction, equipment, and technology licensing. Upstream drilling tech, midstream pipelines, downstream refining upgrades, and risk-management services would flow to companies like ExxonMobil and Halliburton…additional sectors from water infrastructure and AI networks to biotechnology, healthcare, finance, and entertainment could add $350 billion. U.S. firms in IT, pharmaceuticals, and consumer goods would tap into an educated, 90+ million-strong market eager for American products. Tourism could boom with resorts and hotels, while mining critical minerals would secure supply chains for American tech. Wall Street could be the main driver of many of the deals, which will generate significant fees and other services revenue.
Will that money flow to the strip mined hinterlands of America? Let’s not kid ourselves. And just like all those abandoned towns scattered throughout the imperial interior, those who serve can look forward to one day being abandoned as well.
Pain at Home for Gain Over There?
The number of homeless veterans sits at more than 30,000, and the Trump administration is doing away with one successful policy putting a dent in the numbers: a housing first program targeting those who served.
Is it any wonder the US is facing a military recruitment crisis? From the Georgetown Security Studies Review:
The inability of the military to meet its recruitment goals is well-documented by the Department of Defense (DoD). Nearly all of the DoD Inspector General’s Top Management and Performance Challenges reports from FY2016 to FY2025 raise concerns about “Building the Future Force” and “Increasing Military Readiness,” of which recruitment is a critical part. These challenges have gained the attention of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, garnering over 30 mentions during Secretary Hegseth’s confirmation hearing in January.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Palantir CEO Alex Karp, and others are trying to appeal to a white christian nationalism and the freedom to commit war crimes. And perhaps that appeals to some, although hardly enough to man a global empire.
Ultimately, it comes down to the economy. More from the Georgetown Security Studies Review:
…the recruitment crisis is not a new phenomenon—it is a dilemma as old as the all-volunteer force itself. Historical trends show that ever since the draft was abolished in early 1973, military recruitment has risen and fallen with the economic tide. When the economy is strong, fewer Americans enlist due to higher-paying opportunities in the civilian workforce. By contrast, when military wages compete with civilian jobs, enlistment is more stable. For example, in the 1970s and 1980s, military recruitment benefited from wage stagnation and a poor economy.
Many “serve” because they have precious few other options and are looking for a paycheck, a one-way ticket out of all the death, despair, and dead ends all around them. Oftentimes they’re sad about that. And they’re pissed off and looking for someone to blame. And the violence flows outward. As Joe Bageant wrote in “Deer Hunting with Jesus”:
The tide of our national meanness rises incrementally, one brutalizing experience at a time, inside one person at a time in a chain of working-class Americans stretching back for decades. Back to the terror-filled nineteen-year-old girl from Weirton, West Virginia, who patrols the sweat-smelling halls of one of the empire’s far-flung prisons at midnight. Back to my neighbor’s eighty-year-old father, who remembers getting paid $2 apiece for literally cracking open the heads of union organizers at our textile and sewing mills during the days of Virginia’s Byrd political machine. (It was the Depression and the old man needed the money to support his family.) The brutal way in which America’s hardest-working folks historically were forced to internalize the values of a gangster capitalist class continues to elude the left, which, with few exceptions, understands not a thing about how this political and economic system has hammered the humanity of ordinary working people.
So here’s to this Memorial Day remembering who the real enemies are.
Thanks for remembering Joe Bageant on this Memorial Day, Conor!
I second that! Joe Bageant was the true American hero. On this “3-day weekend” that is the bastard child of LBJ IIRC, let us remember many things that get lost in the shuffle of swimming pool openings and the like.
I’d never heard of him until this entry, to my shame; the excerpt here sent a shiver right up my spine. Very rapidly placed ‘pon the reading list.
It sounds as if Joe Bageant’s writings would lethally shame those of Vance.
Very true, if that ersatz hillbilly were capable of being shamed. The Pride of Winchester VA (IIRC) would eat JD Vance for lunch.
That book is a favourite of mine.
Conor, do you think there may have been a brief period in American history and literature when this dynamic was more clearly understood? I’m thinking of the journalism and short stories of Mark Twain and the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. And all the wonderful mad little newspaper writing of that time.
It’s odd, to me, that the billionaires themselves have such big bullhorns now and that apparently there is quite an audience for their self-promotion. Of course the rich and powerful bought mouthpieces in the past, too, but perhaps they didn’t own the arena so thoroughly.
When the Associated Press published a hit piece mischaracterizing Sam Clemmens as an opportunist over his handling of the publishing of U S Grants Memoirs, he was offered the opportunity of rebuttal…for a fee.
I don’t know if we need to even look back that far. It seemed better understood during the Iraq War—or at least there was more resistance. Even today, though, despite the best efforts of the ruling class it still appears at least partially understood. A major part of Trump’s appeal was his supposed opposition to The Blob and wars. And polls show major opposition to US imperial adventures.
People just want healthcare, food, a house, a job, etc. But I think so many are so thoroughly beaten down economically, scared of becoming homeless, have internalized the everyone-for-themselves mindset sold by our overlords, and /or focus all their efforts on electoral politics that it makes it really difficult to do the organizing necessary to begin to claw back some power.
All throughout these facts were well understood, but kept burried as much as possible and pooh-pooed with energy:
https://squirrelbrain77.substack.com/p/the-lie-at-the-foundation
https://squirrelbrain77.substack.com/p/the-democrats-they-buried
https://squirrelbrain77.substack.com/p/four-hundred-years-of-white-trash
I know a lot of soldiers. A real lot.
Many who join do so for the following reasons:
– Racism. It’s surprising how many are interested in careers that let them kill foreigners. You have to know them a long time before they’ll tell you this.
– A Boy’s Club. The want a world which is structured, predictable and exclusionist.
– Morally Valid Violence. Nearly all the talk of ‘the apolitical soldier’ (aka “The Clean Wehrmacht Myth”) disappears when the conversation shifts to weapons. A large amount of the attraction is the possibility of killing without moral repercussions.
Yes, poverty is a large indicator and I remember clearly back in the 1980s when the government job boards had precisely three jobs available: Army, Navy & Air Force. But those who willingly join often do so for the reasons listed above and any honest soldier will tell you that this is true for many of their colleagues.
It was said in Victorian England that the two biggest recruiters for the British Army were unemployment and Jack Frost.
Point two can be considered more generously. It’s not to dispute your point – but I too have known a soldier or several and a great number find the regimented life inherently agreeable psychologically, an escape from decision paralysis and the weighty, oppressive “succeed or die” liberty of the American experiment. I’m very sympathetic to that sentiment myself.
Absolutely.
One guy I know says the army tells how to brush your teeth, make your bed and put on your clothes. It feeds you, it regulates you and it also tells you how to think. Leaving the army is painful and causes information overload.
Mr. Lawrie, I don’t think that your experience in the military compares with mine, and I’d disagree with the following:
Many who join do so for the following reasons:
Racism: 30% in the US military are minorities. And if you have difficulty serving under minorities, the military is a very poor choice in career options.
A Boy’s Club: 18% are women. Granted, among the lower-ranks barracks are often like frat-houses with all of the boozing, chasing-tail, and goofing-off that you can expect out of young people, civilian or military. At some point, many (but not all) grow out of that phase of life, start families and such.
Morally Valid Violence: The US military– contrary to Hollywood depictions– does a fair job of weeding-out the outright psychopaths because these are individuals who are seen as unpredictable and a possible danger to assignments or missions. You don’t want people whose primary motivation is to kill; you want people who can be relied upon to complete the tasks assigned to them, most of which don’t directly involve killing.
Most people don’t make a career out of the military: they serve their commitment and move on. Those who stick around often do so for various economic reasons (steady pay and benefits, retirement/pension, healthcare, etc.). Others stay because doing so will open-up future career possibilities.
I guess I make these points because I disagree with your characterizations of “many” and the sweeping generalizations that you use to make a tiny minority appear representative of the whole (rather morally-dishonest of you, isn’t it?), which it to say that I disagree with almost the entirety of your comment and believe that you’re spewing your own prejudices out of the wrong end of your digestive system.
(Roll eyes) Neo-nazi infiltration of the US Army as a problem has been talked about since the 90s. And you forgot that while the white grunts might have some good reasons not to be racist to their superiors, they sure can be racist to the natives – as seen from many, many instances recorded during the GWOT.
As for your second point about the army “weeding out the psychopaths”, I encourage you to give the journalist Seth Harp a read. His book “The Fort Bragg Cartel” in particular gives several illuminating examples about how the psychopaths are being given the highest amount of power and protection the army can give them, all in the believe that their psychopathy makes them best at their job. You can say that it’s only a problem with the special forces, but given how much the current US intervention policy relies on the special forces and how much the military-intelligence machine now work to serve the special forces, it’s a still big cancer nevertheless.
You made the argument that James Lawrie was being too generalized, but I see you made the same mistake too. Your argument depends too much on which MOS are you talking about. If you’re talking about REMF, then sure. People like that treat the army as another step on their career ladder, so they’ve an incentive to keep their CV clean. But if you’re applying the same argument to the special force and intelligence guys, then I’ve a big, big reason to doubt you.
And I’m not even touching how freaking corrupt the officer corp is, how they embezzle from military acquisition or how they dedicate a part of the budget for their own slush fund, or how they regularly get away from racial and sexual abuse because the military judicial system are red-taped from doing their job. Just look into the Fat Leonard case and you’ll see what I mean.
Even if you’re a “patriot” who believe in the US Army as an institution and all that, you can’t just close your eyes and not see that the military’s self-regulating function has been severely corroded since the Vietnam War, which had both to do with the centralization of power into the executive branch AND the generals’ belief that they lost Vietnam because their hands were tied.
I am a veteran and am surrounded by veterans. I have met only a few over 3 decades who conform to your statement. The ones I have met are avoided by the others. I don’t believe you.
Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler USMC, at the time the most decorated US soldier ever (not just one but two Medals of Honor!), wrote a pamphlet “War is a Racket” that is still as relevant today as it was:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
Oddly, despite this, bankers opposed to the New Deal approached him to do a coup against FDR. He immediately disclosed this to Congress, which investigated, found there was indeed a plot, but refused to do anything about it.
Thank you for mentioning Smedley Butler. Here is a section of “War is Racket” that is not discussed enough.
Thanks. I immediately thought of Smedley Butler when I saw the title of Conor’s post on this Memorial Day. The Joe Bageant quote above – “The brutal way in which America’s hardest-working folks historically were forced to internalize the values of a gangster capitalist class continues to elude the left..” — also reminded me of one of the most famous quotes from Butler’s book:
“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. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”
And his solution would still work today. For all deployments outside US territory the military votes on whether to get involved.
> Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler USMC, at the time the most decorated US soldier ever…
>wrote a pamphlet “War is a Racket”…
Two small but important points. (1) Don’t call him a soldier. (2) Don’t forget the crucial (ret.) in his title when referring to his book.
FDR might have kept that finding in his back pocket to use against those wealthy people that would normally oppose and try to sabotage him.
They got him in the end, didn’t they?
The Ramada war started by assassination is war for empire, oil and Israel.
Neither of which are “common defense”, much less excuse a Christian to partake in state run murder.
The cold war, our empire vs theirs, was marginally closer to “common defense”, but not that much!
Smedley Butler: “war is a racket”.
Listen to Leo XIV.
Pope Leo has a lot to say about war in the encyclical letter he just released. Here are a few paragraphs:
Cecil Rhodes’ dream–and his Rhodes scholarships offering English training were part of it–was to have the USA and Britain unite into a world controlling partnership of English speaking nations. Israel is also part of this colonizers’ nirvana since the country in many ways came to be via the English Balfour Declaration.
So it’s hardly surprising that former South Africans and Israelis are playing such a large role now. The fact that England is a shriveled version of its 19th century self and America fast becoming the same doesn’t seem to deter those who find the aristocratic past so alluring.
Unfortunately for them their supremacist goals are impractical and quite mad as seen in the current warfare disasters taking place. If we can’t roll out the guillotines maybe biology will take care of these gerontocrats for us.
Cecil Rhodes had his own issues and here is a quote from him-
‘The world is nearly all parcelled out, and what there is left of it is being divided up, conquered, and colonised. To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.’
Frankly that seems to be the same sort of mindset that some of our tech billionaires have.
Good catch, Rev.
Peace be with you, and everyone.
Much of this is covered in “Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War.”by Gerry Docherty and Jim MacGregor. Also, who do you think financed Hitler’s military when Germany was dead broke and starving from WW1 and the Treaty of Versailles? London and Wall Street. The book also explains how Herbert Hoover helped them falsify the history books about WW1.
The British wanted Germany to get Czechoslovakia to make Germany stronger to fight the USSR. They gave Poland a phony security guaranty and urged them to get belligerent with Germany to start the war. Their goals were the destruction of Germany and the weakening of the USSR (27M deaths). They were wildly successful.
Think about the horrible lives of the millions of lives of the soldiers in the trenches of WW1. They should have rebelled like on the eastern front. The European rulers should have been punished for this mega-atrocity.
The USA had to go into The Great War because JP Morgan jr. and a consortium of US bankers had loaned The Entente so much that if The Central Powers had won as it appeared they would in 1915-1916 the USA would have plunged into a depression that would have made 1929 look like a momentary embarrassment. These banks were not using their own funds as collateral but instead using vast amount of American’s savings.
Apparently they funded Mussolini too: http://lit.md/files/nstarikov/rouble_nationalization-the_way_to_russia's_freedom.pdf
Many thanks to you, Conor Gallagher, for the sheer humanity of what you have written here.
From William Tecumseh Sherman: “I confess, without shame, that I am sick and tired of fighting — its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands, and fathers […] it is only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated […] that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation. […] I declare before God, as a man and a soldier, I will not strike a foe who stands unarmed and submissive before me, but would rather say—‘Go, and sin no more.’”
I won’t even go into the Miriam Adelsons of the world or the Hillary Clintons or the Kaja Kallases who think that war is just part of their grift. But then, the vast majority of the war dead — go into any older graveyard in the Great Lakes States — is men. (Maybe I’m having a “boy issue” — but the good lieutenant is the lieutenant who brings his troops back home. And, maybe, this current degeneration into war means that men have to send moral vacuums like Hillary Clinton and Pete Hegseth and Mike Pompeo back home to make potholders and babble to themselves, which is the best fate that should be allowed them.)
This:
The growing acquisition of farmland by large corporations, investment funds, and institutional investors means that number is likely to grow. If there isn’t much industry to send overseas anymore, why not sell off the land?
What is one to think of a country that cannot even feed its people? Except a diet of corn syrup, cottonseed oil, and guacamole in plastic tubs. This problem was brought home to me after the death of Carlin Petrini here in Piedmont on 21 May. He founded SlowFood — which remains at its core a radical movement to preserve the land, to feed everyone, and to minimize waste. The essays in his honor kept repeating these points — the centrality of good, clean, just food.
Yet, all in all, I still appreciate the deep humanity of this essay. The only path forward is the path to peace, which is the path to justice, which is the path to making sure that everyone has daily bread and clean water. Restiamo umani.
‘So here’s to this Memorial Day remembering who the real enemies are.’
Not long ago I came across a quote saying that you get a war when the elites of a country tell the people who their enemy is. But you get a revolution when the people work it out for themselves.
If nothing else, serving opened my eyes about the US in ways that would have taken longer in civilian life, or not at all.
We thank you for your open eyes.
And we Boomers, some of us, have a deja vu view of all this. Johnson’s war in Vietnam was just as foolish as Trump’s. And just as Trump was driven by neocons, Johnson was somewhat reluctantly (he claimed) driven by the then anticommunist obsession of much of the ruling class.
So the real beginning of the end of our short lived empire took place in the 1960s–IMO.
Ah, Carolinian, there were so many beginnings.
Same here.
I enlisted because it was the only way i could pay for college. I got commissioned because it ended up that I was too good at artillery stuff to remain enlisted.
I was effectively radicalized by getting commissioned. After paying for the various obligations of being in the officer corps, i.e. buying uniforms, O-Club dues, paying for meals, losing the student loan repayment program despite a degree being mandatory for officers, etc. I made the same salary as I did as an E-5. I realized that if socialism, defined as a wage, training, clothing, housing, meals, medical & dental, education benefits, etc. was good enough for the enlisted folks then the long-standing, fervent, and perpetual effots to denounce it was BS. When combined with the realization that the very expensive new equipment that was replacing the Vietnam era and older stuff was low-quality crap, it was life changing.
This was my experience as well. I went in a “sweet summer child” and left a cynical young man. I will forever be ashamed of having once believed all the propaganda. We are certainly not the “good guys” our media and entertainment would have you believe.
> Many “serve” because they have precious few other options and are looking for a paycheck, a one-way ticket out of all the death, despair, and dead ends all around them.
The military is our de facto employer of last resort – our job guarantee. As long as you don’t wind up dead or maimed, you get good benefits. That’s at least one major answer to the headline.
The complete version of Butler’s “War is a Racket” is available from Feral Press, what we usually see is an excerpt.
Like Twain’s “War Prayer” it deserves a place on every American’s book shelf.
It’s also available on The Internet Archive
A not entirely OT observation: Trump is well known as a Germophobe but few have remarked that the people he surrounds himself with are telegenic.
No heavy set Men or Women.
And you never see pictures of Trump talking to wounded veterans at Walter Reed, he has no problem with sending young Men and Women into harm’s way, however when they come back horribly disfigured he avoids them like the plague.
Watching people being blown to bits on the screen is one of his pleasures, however he is too much of a Moral coward to acknowledge what those pretty explosions represent.
My only quibble – as non-native speaker – with this excellent piece, the title is so sophisticated (inverted in a way) that it might get overlooked and the plethora of extremely important data and hyperlinks with it.
With that, thank you very much for the work!
p.s. Will new updated pieces follow about the EU mess? Like the ones from 2024/25 about the energy issue?
As an american senior citizen, I can say I have lived for a while. I can also say that the american military has never done anything for me as an american citizen, in my entire lifetime.
I don’t get anything from american companies I don’t pay for. Those companies sell me goods, just like foreign companies.
The federal government works for the rich, who control the biggest economic groups. Their corporations, think tanks, academic cheerleaders, and armies of lawyers and priests with the never ending streams of money that control the media, which perverts the minds and opinions of my fellow citizens . This mental control of peoples minds is why people don’t see the military does nothing for them. They are lied to since childhood; indoctrinated in schools, universities, and churches.
we are taught to ignore history, pretend everything is going as good as can be expected…and to support our troops…
But the troops aren’t here for us.
I don’t speak english…. because of our troops… the last time someone fought for our freedom; they were fighting an english speaking monarchy. In this day, those troops only fight for the same american empire that is stomping on the freedom of americans. As we lose our freedoms which were enumerated in the bill of rights… those troops of today are on call to push us around while the ice goons take the lead.
I don’t blame all of the troops(even though there are a lot of real low-lifes in the ranks)… They are being victimized by the same empire as me. They just don’t know it. Or they do… and can’t really do anything about it.
If the troops want to fight for something… it ought to be the bill of rights…. not a neoliberal corporate oligarchy.
The only thing special about america was the bill of rights.
That no longer applies. 250 years marks the year that america really hit the skids.
Seth Harp’s book The Fort Bragg Cartel is a good book to read today.
Sometimes it’s truly hard to tell who you serve.
https://husseini.substack.com/p/memorial-day-when-israel-killed-34?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=201840&post_id=199180811&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ifc5&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
A gaggle of entrepreneur billionaires does not make good governance. The founders would weep if they could see the shoddy clowns now in charge of the U.S. Another wave of reform will ensue. The only question is how much more misgovernment we have to suffer before it arrives.
An early member of the Epstein class was Jay Gould. Sadly, he was 100% correct when he said “I can hire one-half the farmers of the United States to shoot the other half to death.”
It was later turned in to the phrase most people know today.
“I can hire half the working class to kill the other half.”
“The founders would weep if they could see the shoddy clowns now in charge of the U.S.”
Would they though? The founding fathers were a bunch of degenerates who wanted free real estate. That is why there was a revolution: Britain wanted to Make the Mississippi the western-most border of America with the natives retaining control beyond it. But a bunch of guys who would rape their slaves and enslave their own children had other ideas. These guys were the Epsteins and Trumps of their day.
Hear, Hear! This is why they dressed up as injuns when burning the three ships in Boston Harbour, to lead the British to war against the natives. What was the use of all that taxes collected from the colonies if not to make war against the natives and take their lands. That is the true meaning of no taxation without representation.
The Brits promised the Northwest Territory (north and west of the Ohio river) to the native people who had been aligned against the French culminating in 1763. The colonists wanted it.
I would be willing to engage in a debate with Thiel, with both of us assisted by AI and I am convinced I will win. LLMs, trained on the whole repository of human intelectual production, has the weight of valid and sound arguments to offer against anything Thiel can spout.
Debate? I’m willing to duel with any of them- I’d prefer pistols but would be willing to do sabres or staves.
The Reinhart tweet is missing, indeed the account is gone. It appears to be the correct account from an internet search. Does anyone know what happened?
Great thought provoking essay, appreciate your work.
Just looked on Bluesky and his account there is gone as well. Don’t see anything on his website, but doesn’t seem to have any update section.
Curious.
Strange. It was still in existence yesterday as I put this post together.
The Memory Hole.
Maybe we need to begin to memorialize links to forbidden knowledge while placing a copy on a local safe hard drive or USB/C stick, air gapped. Ive personally lost links to important information that I’ve put on the internet and copied to my computer. Both locations ended up empty.