Memorial Day is a specific American holiday, going back to the Civil War.
Our overseas Anglospheric readers celebrate Remembrance Day on November 11 (Armistice Day in the US) in honor of a soul-destroying, seemingly pointless slaughter that destroyed the old order between 1914 and 1918.
But by 1914, the United States had already been memorializing its own soul-destroying, seemingly pointless slaughter for fifty years.
I should say that in both cases, the participants thought they were achieving something, but the end, they hadn’t.
In a sardonic aside in an essay on some Southerners' dreams of a new secession, Sam Francis described the Civil War as having been fought at the price of the deaths of 600,000 white men “over the burning issue of whether four million black men are to be slaves or serfs.”
After the war, the North tried to grant political equality to blacks (this was called Reconstruction) but after a reconciliation occurred between Northern and Southern whites, the North gave up trying to enforce this. (This was called the failure of Reconstruction).
The 600,000 remained dead.
John Derbyshire’s father fought in the Great War, and received the Victory Medal, inscribed with the words "The Great War For Civilization." Twenty years later, they had to fight the same war again—Peter Brimelow’s father fought in that one—only harder.
And there wasn’t a lot of civilization left in Europe, much of which was occupied by the Communists, and the rest of which had to be garrisoned against them.
So if you were expecting the current War in Afghanistan to accomplish anything, all I can say is that bigger and better wars have been fought a lot harder and still done very little.
Still, American troops deserve all the praise and thanks they get on days like this. They also deserve a better Commander-in-Chief.
And when they come home, they’ll need jobs.
Returned soldiers will be looking for work, in an already tough labor market, and they are likely to find their jobs taken by immigrants.
At the present moment legal immigrants are being admitted in their millions by the Obama Administration while the economy is tanking. The illegal immigrants are also staying, thanks to Obama’s Administrative Amnesty.
It’s not only random Mexicans and Central Americans that will displace young veterans from their jobs—it’s also their Afghan and Iraqi “allies”—or even enemies— who will be entering as “refugees.” Thousands of such refugees have been issued, and there are calls to admit many, many more:
In 2007, John Derbyshire wrote a column about this phenomenon—the US admitting Iraqi refugees while American soldiers were actually occupying Iraq under the title: Please Go Fight for My Country So I Can Take Your Job.
Ten years ago, I suggested an alternative destination for refugees—Mexico, which must have a shortage of “willing workers” considering the number it’s exported. That column was called Dear Mr. Fox: Please Find Attached our Poor/ Tired/ Dispossessed, Etc..
Veterans will need jobs. The United States does not need more immigrants, and it definitely doesn’t need Muslim refugees.
That would be just one more insult to troops who seem, once again, to have been fighting for no good reason.
Previous Memorial Day Columns
