Throughout history,
armies have fought to protect kings, theocrats, and other kinds of dictators
from their own people. They fought for imperialistic conquest and/or plunder, or even to
satisfy the “honor” of some sundry rulers—militaries usually manned by average people who
rarely had anything to gain from the military adventures.
America’s military is
unique. It fights to protect the borders of a country established by a set of
ideas…the most radical set of ideas in man’s history. America is the first and
only country founded explicitly and philosophically on the principle that an
individual’s life is his to live, by unalienable right. America is the first and only country founded on the explicit
principle that the government exists as servant for and by permission of the
people, with the solemn duty to protect those rights; or, as Ronald Reagan put
it in his first inaugural address:
As established in the Declaration
of Independence, individual rights come before government—rights being
understood as guarantees to freedom of action to pursue personal advancement,
not automatic claims on economic rewards that others must be forced to provide. Then, as stated in the document that initiated the United
States of America as a politically autonomous entity, the Declaration states,
"to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men." That
is America. Even the British Empire from which America won independence, then
the freest society the world had ever known, was based on the premise that "rights" are privileges granted by the Crown. Englishmen were subjects, not truly
free.
Sadly, the knowledge of
what this country stands for is steadily slipping away…and along with it, our
rights. Fortunately, we’re still free to speak out. So the best way to honor
the military fighter who died in the line of duty, for those of us who still
retain that knowledge, is to remind our fellow Americans in any small way that
we can about America’s unique, noble, and radical Founding ideals.
We can still prevent
“the other way around”. But we must rediscover the knowledge of, and think
about, what it means to be an American. So, let us reflect on what really made
this country possible.
This Memorial Day
weekend, we will hear a lot about the “sacrifices” made by those who served and
died defending America.
It is said that this
nation, our freedom, and our way of life, are a gift bestowed upon us by the
grace of the “sacrifices” of the Founding Fathers and the fighters of America’s
wars from the Revolutionary War on. A gift? Yes. But, was it a sacrificial gift? Is it even possible that so
magnificent an achievement – the United States of America – could be the
product of sacrifice? As the closing words of this country’s Founding
philosophical document – the Declaration of Independence – attest, the Founding Fathers risked everything to make their ideals a reality:
And for the support of
this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence,
we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.
Some point to those
words, and bestow on the signatories of that document the “honor” of having
sacrificed for us, the "future generations." Nothing can be further
from the truth. Sacrifice--properly
understood--is the giving up, rather than the achievement, of values. America
was achieved.
What is any human
being’s highest attribute and value? It is his mind and his independent
judgment. To use one’s mind – to think – is an exclusively personal,
individualistic, self-motivated, self-chosen, selfish effort. All else in a
person's life is a consequence of the use, or lack of use, of his mind – for
better or for worse. One’s convictions about what one believes is right, one’s
passionate concern for ideas, is the product of the independent use of one’s
mind. The man who places nothing above the judgment of his own mind, even at
the risk of his own physical well-being, is not engaging in self-sacrifice. To
fight for one’s own fundamental beliefs is the noblest, most egoistic endeavor
one can strive for. Integrity is not selfless. It is not sacrificial.
The Founders were
thinkers and fighters. They were egoists, in the noblest sense, which is the
only valid sense. They believed in a world, not as it was, but as it could be
and should be. They took action – pledging their “sacred honor” at great risk
to their personal wealth and physical well-being – to that end. They would
accept no substitute. They would take no middle road. They would not
compromise. They would succeed or perish.
Such was the
extraordinary character of the Founders of this nation.
To call the achievement
of the Founders a sacrifice is to say that they did not deem the ideals set
forth in the Declaration as worthy of their fighting for; that the idea that
the individual’s life belongs to him and not to any collective and not to any
ruler was less of a value to them than what they pledged in defense of it; that
they did what they did anyway without personal conviction or passion; that the
Declaration of Independence is a fraud. To say that America was born out of
sacrifice is a grave injustice and, in fact, a logical impossibility.
World history produced a
steady parade of human sacrifices, and the overwhelming result was a steady
stream of blood, tears,and tyranny. The Founders stood up not merely to the
British Crown, but to the whole brutal sacrificial history of mankind to turn
the most radical set of political ideas ever conceived into history’s greatest
nation. It is no accident that the United States of America was born at the
apex of the philosophical movement that introduced the concept of the Rights of Man to his own life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, the
Enlightenment.
Only the most
extraordinary men of the most ferocious personal strength and courage could
have so uncompromisingly upheld, against overwhelming odds and hostility and
personal risk, so passionate a belief in their own independently held
convictions so as to have established the American Founding. The American
Revolution was history’s brightest demonstration of the rationally selfish pursuit of a noble goal by any group of people, ever. It was a
monumental human testament to the dedication these men had to their cause – the
refusal to live any longer under any social condition except full, genuine freedom,
and to "pledge eternal hostility against every
form of tyranny."
The highest tribute I
can pay to those Americans who died in the line of military duty, on this
Memorial Day, is not that they selflessly sacrificed for their country.
Self-sacrifice is not a virtue in my value system. It is an insult, because
that would mean that their country and what it stands for was irrelevant to
them; that they had no personal, selfish interest in it; that they were not
passionate about their service; that they were indifferent toward America's
enemies; that it made no difference to them whether they returned to live in
freedom or to live in slavery.
Freedom is thoroughly
egoistic, because it leaves all individuals free to pursue their own
goals, values, and happiness—by inalienable right and with the full protection
of his government. It follows that to fight for a free nation is thoroughly
egoistic. If American soldiers fight for their freedom, then the highest
tribute I can pay to those who perished in that cause is to say that they were
cut from the mold of the Founding Fathers; that they did not set out to die for
their country but rather that they set out to fight, at great personal
risk, for the only values under which they desired to live—that radical set of
ideals that is the United States of America.
A military, of course,
is not the first line of defense for freedom, nor an unmitigated good. As
stated at the outset, militaries fight to protect borders—more often than not
borders of unfree countries. Not so America’s military, which does protect a
free nation’s borders. America has not faced an existential threat to its
sovereignty in 30 years, and has not fought a war to protect its borders since
the 1940s. Today, thankfully, America is militarily untouchable. The
technological supremacy of our military power could instantly crush any power
around the world that dared pose a threat to our borders.
Yet today, nearly three
decades after the fall of the Soviet Communist menace—the last true existential
threat to America—we are less free than we were then, thanks to the growth of
the regulatory welfare state. Our freedom, once protected by our Constitution,
has actually been eroding for a century--and now faces it's greatest-ever internal threat, the rise of the reactionary Democratic Socialism, the so-called "New Socialists."
The fight for freedom
based on individual rights is fundamentally a
philosophical fight. Today, America’s military might is greater than ever
before, and yet freedom is at its lowest ebb since the end of the Civil
War. If America continues losing the knowledge of what freedom is, where it
comes from, and why we deserve it as an inalienable right, all of that
incredible military power won’t save us. If We the People, each as sovereign
individuals—we who have allowed a regulatory welfare state to grow into the
monstrosity it has become—want to honor the military that protects us from
foreign enemies, we must come to grips with this simple, observable fact: The
primary threat to Americans’ freedom today is not external—any foreign power
that threatens America as a sovereign nation will be crushed like a bug in
short order. The primary threat to America today is internal, in the form of
the ideas of collectivism, statism and democratic socialism eroding the ideals
of individualism, capitalism, and constitutional republicanism. It is not enough to put some
number of years into a military career. It is not enough to pay taxes to
support the military. We must fight with words and pen for our freedom every
day.
This is not to diminish
the role of the U.S. military; only to put it in proper perspective. We can’t
win the internal philosophical battle against the enemies of freedom without
keeping the external enemies of freedom at bay. We need our military, and it is
fitting that we recognize American soldiers lost in battle. It is fitting not
just because of the importance of the military, but as a reminder that “war is
hell”; that the cost of war to actual living human beings is horrendous; and
that Americans should never be pushed into battle for altruistic causes or with
rules of engagement that hamper their ability to protect themselves and win as
quickly as possible, as has too often been the case over the past century
(think “making the world safe for democracy,” or the “domino theory,” or the
“forward strategy for freedom”). If we deployed our military more to actually
defend our borders and less as the world’s policeman and do-gooder, we’d have
fewer dead soldiers to memorialize.
With the full context
understood, in memoriam of those who perished fighting in defense of a nation
founded on and defined by individual freedom, and to all of America’s service
men and women past and present:
Kudos for your service
in defense of a nation based on American ideals, for your desire to live in
freedom, and for your fierce determination to—I hope—accept no substitute. It’s
only fitting to recognize the service of persons who lost their lives in the
defense of the values that they, and all true Americans’, hold in common.
Happy
Memorial Day! Enjoy it. Live it.
That’s the best way to memorialize them.
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