A Blast From the Past on Veterans Day

Here is a blast from the past on Veterans Day if you ever saw one:

I’ve had it with the incessant whining about what “we” owe the military veterans. Every Republican and Democratic candidate panders to this special-interest group, and the toothless tigers of the media regard this shameless prostration as wholly uncontroversial, even commendable. There soon will be a cabinet department for veterans affairs!

Enough! Why should people who were (or are now) in the armed forces be accorded such obeisance? The standard answer is, “they served—even sacrificed for—their country.” Nonsense. They did no such thing. Anyone familiar with the revisionist history of America’s wars knows that no one in the armed forces ever did anything to defend the American people from danger, because there was no such danger. The American people have been repeatedly lied and tricked into wars by, in Albert Jay Nock’s words, “the men who by deviltry and chicane and compromise and all the devious ways of the professional ‘statesmen,’ get into office and make up governments.” The veterans, in other words, did not serve their country, they served the state and its villainous officers. Most veterans—especially the conscripts—did so unwittingly, having been deceived along with ,the rest of us. But that does not change the fact that what they did was not objectively in the service of the American people.

Veterans Day and Memorial Day are national holidays and that’s not going to change any time soon. But libertarians could put these days to good use by devoting them to the promotion of revisionist history—especially regarding World War I, II, the Cold War, and Vietnam.

Sheldon Richman, Liberty, January 1989

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9:57 am on November 12, 2011