Let's get one thing clear: our soldiers are not fighting for freedom

Saying soldiers are fighting for our "freedom" is one of the cleverest propaganda techniques imperialists have so far come up with. When you say soldiers are fighting for meaningless phrases that no one could possibly oppose, then the people will be less likely to oppose your imperialist wars. If you oppose meaningless wars, you must also oppose "freedom."

This view is simplistic and intellectually insulting. It gives us permission to overlook or ignore the real reasons we go to war. It makes us look on at the deaths of our soldiers not with the horror that it deserves, but with pride. It allows war to continue unopposed.

Terrorists did not attack us because they hate our "freedom." They attacked us because we had bases in Saudi Arabia and Muslim holy lands. They attacked us because we've spend decades bombing the fuck out of them. They wouldn't have any reason to attack us if we would just get the fuck out. American military bases on foreign soil are putting you and me in danger. Saddam Hussein, who was placed into power by the United States, was never a threat to our freedom. Whatever weapons of mass destruction he may have once had were given to him by the United States to balance out the power game with Iran (which may have been why the Bush administration was so confident he had them). He was ousted because he stopped playing ball with us, as is the fate of all U.S.-backed dictators who do the same. We supported Hosni Mubarak to the bitter end because he was always a loyal ally of the United States. Richard Nixon once called Spanish dictator Francisco Franco (literally a fascist, left behind from the World War II era) a "loyal friend and ally of the United States." He put people in concentration camps. We backed the 1967-1974 military junta of Greece, which had thousands of people tortured and killed. We armed and supplied those who were committing genocide in East Timor. We overthrew the democratic government of Haiti in 2004, and threw in our support for the coup that overthrew the Maldives' president a few months back, only a single day after it happened. There's obviously an inconsistency here. How can America fight for "freedom," when we go around the world destroying freedom?

The biggest threat to our freedom is not overseas. It's right here at home in the halls of Congress, in the White House, inside the Supreme Court. The biggest threats to our freedom are those in Wall Street, who bribe our politicians and manipulate the country's news so that only their agendas are spread. The Patriot Act has obliterated the fourth amendment, it's completely gone. The fifth was on life support with NDAA, but thankfully, a recent court case just had a rare outcome (that of actually upholding the law) by striking it down. The first amendment is slowly being chipped away at, with the FBI consistently strongarming Google, Facebook, Twitter, and actual libraries for information on people they don't like. It's legal for the president and the CIA to murder American citizens on American soil with no trial. The entirety of the FBI's "counterterrorism" program is manufacturing its own terror plots, and entrapping dumbshit kids to carry them out, so they can arrest them and say they're stopping "terrorists." JUST IN THE NICK OF TIME! LIKE 24!

So for this memorial day, do not have pride in our soldiers' deaths. Look on their deaths in horror and disgust. Get fucking angry that it happened at all, for sole purpose of making the elite richer. They were manipulated into their graves. They were manipulated just like police, just like prison guards, or any other American in uniform in a position of authority. The great Howard Zinn wrote:

“In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, transport and communications workers, garbagemen and firemen. These people—the employed, the somewhat privileged—are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system fails. That will happen, I think, only when all of us who are slightly privileged and slightly uneasy begin to see that we are like the guards in the prison uprising at Attica—expendable; that the Establishment, whatever rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain its control, kill us.”