I must speak, that I may find relief;
I must open my lips and answer.
I will not show partiality to any man
or use flattery toward any person.
For I do not know how to flatter,
else my Maker would soon take me away.-Job 32:20-22
The above verse comes from the book of Job. Most people overlook the book of Job, especially followers of the heretical prosperity gospel. The essence of the story is that sometimes bad things happen, even to righteous men, and that God does not always protect you from them. The above quote is toward the end, just before God Himself confronts Job as a whirlwind and basically humbles him. Job, you see, was asserting that he was righteous before God and did not deserve the calamity that had befallen him. Meanwhile, three of his friends were asserting that God had punished him for some wrong he had committed. And while both sides made excellent points, both sides were ultimately wrong: Job for justifying himself rather than God and his three friends for not being wise enough to counter Job.
Enter Elihu who uttered the above words. He was the youngest of those beside Job and had held his tongue because he believed that maybe Job and his friends were wiser than he. When he found that they were not, he burned with anger and went on a rant about the righteousness of God. He started off with that statement, indicating that although he was young and probably less experienced than those around him, he knew enough to know that he must speak up.
And so on this Memorial Day, I must speak up. I must speak without flattery and be brutally and distastefully truthful: those soldiers we honor today died for no reason. They may have died a heroic death. They may have saved their fellow soldier’s lives in the process. And such things are admirable.
But they were sent to illegal wars or immoral wars. In the last half-century starting with the Korean War and everything up until now, there has been no Constitutional war. The Constitution requires that the Congress draft and approve a formal declaration of war. There hasn’t been a formal declaration of war since World War II. Hence, all previous wars in which brave soldiers fought, bleed, and died for were illegal.
Beyond that, pretty every war in the 20th century was immoral. World War I, for instance, was not our fight. Our nation was pushed into it by a bunch of Anglophiles who hated Germans. Of course, then President Woodrow Wilson stated that it was a war to spread democracy. Sound familiar?
With World War II, it gets worse. While Germany committed serious atrocities to their own people, our own government conspired to push Japan or Germany into attacking a United States military base in order to justify entering the war because, again, our country was still being run by Anglophiles. And so, for the sake of entering the United States into a war where hundreds of thousands of Americans would die, President Franklin D. Roosevelt allowed innocent men to die at Pearl Harbor. This is all documented and well known by many.
And so we spend the day going through ceremonies and honoring the dead soldiers in some sick way of worshipping the State. We honor the dead as a means to promote the government agenda of needless death. We think it patriotic to parrot slogans like “Freedom isn’t Free” when we can’t explain how a soldier in some piss-poor, backwater country could possibly be defending our freedoms. In the meantime, the Federal government, along with the State and local governments, continues to take away all of our rights and freedoms that God gave to us.
So honor the soldier. But never forget why he died in the first place. Never forget that he died for no good reason.