Memorial Day or Government Day?

Since governments are the world's greatest killing
machines, honoring Americans killed in the service of
government should be called Government Day. (AP
photo/Rich Addicks/The Journal & Constitution)

“War is the health of the state.” - Randolph Bourne

Memorial Day is the day we set aside each year to honor the men and women who died fighting America’s wars.

But it might just as well be called Government Day. 

If you’ve never paid much attention to history it probably hasn’t occurred to you that governments are absolutely crucial when it comes to war-making. 

Without governments, people have a really hard time getting a good war off the ground. 

For example, from 1878 to 1891, two families who lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains tried to have a war. They were the Hatfields and the McCoys. 

They started killing each other in various ways, but it was a very slow-going affair. Only 11 or so ended up dead after 13 years, including one who was hanged by the authorities. 

Without a government to organize and run it, the Hatfield and McCoy War was such a dismal failure as a people-killer that most historians just write it off as a feud. 

Another feud, which was actually called a war, was the Lincoln County War. Rival cattle raisers in Lincoln County, New Mexico Territory, started killing each other over control of lucrative monopoly beef contracts with the US Army. 

The war turned nasty when the rival ranchers began hiring outlaw gangs and gunslingers to do their wet work. One of the leaders in the Lincoln County War is known to us today as Billy the Kid. 

As a war it was a small, local, unimpressive affair. Without governments raising armies and attacking each other in massive numbers the Lincoln County War resulted in 22 killed and 9 wounded. 

Gangs in Chicago in the 1920s had their own private little wars. It was urban warfare. Rival gangs attacked and killed each other using Thompson submachine guns, which they affectionately called Tommy Guns. They carried them in violin cases at the risk of being called sissies and fired them at each other from Packards and Studebakers while racing through the streets at breakneck speeds of 13 miles an hour or so. 

It was a pathetic little war. An absolute failure compared to the incredibly impressive mass murders that governments can easily pull off. 

By many accounts, the Twentieth Century, which oddly consists of all those years that begin with the number 19, was the bloodiest century in the history of the world. Not only did governments fight wars against each other, like World War I and World War II and a Korean War and a Vietnam War and hundreds of smaller wars all around the planet, but many governments made war against their own citizens. National Socialist Germany and Soviet socialist Russia and Communist China and the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia used their governments to murder millions upon millions of unarmed people for committing the crime of not being liked by the leaders of their governments. 

Some historians allow as how the governments of the Twentieth Century killed more people than all of the governments in all of the other centuries put together. 

So you see, this is one of the reasons why libertarians don’t much like governments. They have a saying, “War is the health of the state.” What that means is that the more governments wage war the bigger, meaner, uglier, nastier, stronger – in other words, healthier – governments get. 

Family feuds and greedy land grabbers and gangs of bootleggers can kill lots of people in local areas but only governments can manage the mass slaughter of millions over the entire globe. 

Perhaps some day the good-hearted, loyal, patriotic people of America will figure out the difference between fighting for their country and fighting for their government, and the power-craving politicians who run it. 

Until then, by all means honor those who died fighting in America’s wars. Almost all of them, as well as the loved ones they left behind, genuinely believe that they were fighting to preserve our freedoms. 

But of course the megalomaniacs who arrogantly fight and claw their way up the political power ladder to become the nation's "leaders" know better. They known that the vast majority of America's wars have nothing to do with threats to our freedoms. Wars are fought for the glorification of the politicians' overweening egos, nothing more. 

So maybe, in reality, this day should be called government day, because only government can fill our national cemeteries in such obscenely enormous numbers.