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May 30, 2023 - Lionel Nation
14:51
Memorial Day Means Nothing

This is what happens when you don't know history.

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In America, there's not a cliché we don't love.
We know every cliché, every response to every event, you name it.
Support the troops.
Memorial Day.
Remembering those who've fallen.
Now let's go to the beach.
Let's go barbecue.
Watch the way the media handle this.
They get the roly-poly jerk weatherman to come up to talk about how great the summer is.
Be careful for the sun.
Be careful for the sun.
What am I trying to say?
What kind of language is this?
Be careful about the sun.
Wear a sunscreen.
You're talking to somebody from AAA about how many people are going to be on the road and gas prices and Memorial Day and the first day of summer.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
And remember those who've fallen.
And back to the fun and back to the excitement and back to the long weekend.
That's where we are.
We talk a good game.
More people than you would ever imagine.
Confuse Memorial Day with the 4th of July.
They have no idea what this is about.
And when you really get down into it, and you say, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Before you go, can I ask you a question?
What exactly are you...
Remembering.
We're memorializing what?
The people who have died for us.
The people who have died, you mean American servicemen and women?
Yes.
Who've died what?
In wars?
Yes.
And why did they die in war?
And this is the part that gets me all the time.
And let me tell you in advance, let me warn you, people are going to be absolutely very upset over the fact that...
They're going to misconstrue what I'm saying as a defilement or some type of a rude referencing to people who died.
You're going to hear that people, everyone, everyone who has ever died in war or battle, every serviceman, every airman, every marine, every sailor, man, woman, you name it, died to protect us and to ensure and guarantee our freedom.
They say this.
It's very nice, but it's wrong.
It's wrong.
Nobody who died in Iraq ever did this for my freedom of speech.
Nobody who ever died in Afghanistan ever did this to protect my freedom of speech, or Vietnam for that matter, or Korea.
The closest I think one could make, the closest, the argument that we can make might be World War II.
Probably, without a doubt.
I think, you know, the Axis powers, we can discuss that later, given the limitations of this particular format.
Nobody died in Vietnam to protect somebody's ability to speak up in Cleveland.
And the irony of that is, is that for all of our thanks for these brave men and women, and they are and were, we live under more draconian Limitations of free speech than ever.
We are unable to say more and have more restrictions now than we ever have.
It's amazing.
From cancel culture to shadow banning to every conceivable form of social media shelving you can imagine.
It is ridiculous for us to keep repeating these tropes.
Now let me explain something to you, and this is the most important.
Nobody to this day can even explain to you what Vietnam was about.
Ask them.
Ask anybody.
Ask.
What was Vietnam about?
Don't tell me the domino effect.
And please don't mention the Gulf of Tonkin.
Whatever you do, don't mention that.
But tell me, what was it about?
What do you think it was about?
Tell me.
And they can't answer it.
They have no earthly idea.
It was a fraud.
It was a fraud.
We had no business.
And the best part about this is that we're now celebrating the 100th anniversary or 100th birthday, the centenary of Henry Kissinger without recognizing anything that he did.
Tolstoy said that history would be a wonderful thing if only it were true.
And speaking of Tolstoy, Talk to anybody about the contributions, the relative contributions, of Russia to the war effort in World War II.
There is a statistic that has been bandied about, that has been mentioned and clarified and debunked, because it deals with Russia, of course.
And it goes something like this.
80% of all Soviet men...
Who were born in 1923 died before the end of World War II or in World War II, however you want to phrase it.
Let me say this again.
80% of all Soviet men born in 1923 died in that war.
Look at the numbers.
Look at how many people sacrificed their lives.
Existential threats.
And by the way, look at our version of involvement in World War II.
Our Saving Private Ryan version of World War II.
Because to many Americans, and not because of any bad intent, but out of nations, they believe, absolutely, That America did everything in World War II.
That the Eastern Front, Stalingrad, Barbarossa meant nothing.
I don't want to go into that right now.
But history would be a wonderful thing if only it were true.
We have a version of history that's filled with propaganda since the days of Capra, Jack Warner.
Go through the list.
Our, the merging of entertainment, you know, Breitbart said that politics is downhill from, downstream rather from, it may be downhill, but downstream, from entertainment.
Every time I have been studying, I missed, I missed Vietnam by days.
And remember this, it was a part of my youth.
And my music, and my adolescence, and teens, and everywhere, I had a POW bracelet I wore.
We were immersed in Vietnam.
I remember every moment of it.
Every night, Walter Cronkite would list the names of those individuals who died, the newest talent, with their pictures, these innocent people.
And after a while, they kind of looked all alike.
We were losing the...
Ability to remain sensate over the individual horror of this.
And it just, it was horrible.
And I never understood it.
And I still don't understand it.
I interviewed.
I interviewed.
And this is Robert McNamara.
And he had just, it was right around the time of the documentary The Fog of War.
And I said to him one time, I said, you misunderstood this, didn't you?
You thought this was some movement, some metastatic flow through the world and through Indochina and Japan and Thailand of communism and that it had to be stopped and stifled.
He said, yes!
I said, but it was a civil war.
Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist.
Yes!
I said, well, when did you find this out?
Why didn't you do something about it?
And LBJ said, I cannot be the first president to lose a war.
That simple.
It was his ego, his Texan ego.
I can't lose a war.
Say what you want about Ronald Reagan, but when the Marine barracks in Lebanon were bombed, he said, we're out of here.
That's it.
We spent more illusion, more fantasy, trying to juxtapose and connect 9-11 with Iraq.
Still haven't done it.
Weapons of mass destruction.
You know, the smoking gun could be a mushroom cloud.
Colin Powell holding up the talcum powder.
I mean, it just, we never learn.
We never learn.
So I get angry.
I get angry, especially when I see people confuse Memorial Day with the 4th of July.
And I live here on the west side of Manhattan.
And I see, and I can, I saw all the ships coming in, the Hudson River.
Because this is Fleet Week.
This is Fleet Week.
Normally, sailors and Marines who walk around the city and they look 10 years old, representing us, representing our country.
And I see them standing up in their whites, lining the periphery of these ships.
And I think to myself, I want to go up to each one of them, each, and say, if I have anything to do with it, you will never die.
In some foreign land for some cause that scholars are going to be trying to parse and break down generations after you're dead.
You will not do this.
War in the 21st century and on is going to be nothing like you've ever seen before.
We're F-35 raptors and what are we talking about?
What is this?
With AI and the cyber front, you're going to see EMPs, you're going to see warfare.
That is so completely different.
But the reason, there's no money in that.
Because we still have the military-industrial complex, and we still have these war profiteers, and we still have a bunch of people playing Clue with chess, with little chess pieces.
But the chess pieces are men and women.
I've had it.
I am profoundly anti-war and profoundly pro-self-defense.
There's a big difference.
So remember what today is.
And you know what?
You'll be the only one.
Now, some people are going to take offense at this.
They're going to say, well, I'm not that person.
Fine.
So what?
You're the only one who's not like that.
Because everybody I know, believe me, today they're going to say, Happy Memorial Day.
Happy Memorial Day?
Happy?
This isn't the 4th of July, but I've said this.
I've said this, okay?
So let me just say this.
As an American, as a historian, somebody who is an adult, somebody who knows a little bit about what he's talking about, I despise war.
I despise war that never had to take place.
And especially in this God-fearing country of ours, we claim to be Christian and God and this and that.
What would God think?
What would you say to a Martian or some extraterrestrial biological entity, some EBE gray critter, some UFO alien type who comes here and asks you, why do you kill each other?
Why?
Why do you have 800 military bases in 70 countries when, what, France, Russia, Great Britain has, what, 30 combined?
How do we do this?
How do we do this?
But the Great Reset is here.
Klaus Schwab said it.
Let me tell you something.
This national and international primacy and supremacy, those days are over.
And one of the things we have to do...
Is to realign and reorient ourselves when it comes to war.
And one more thing.
Somebody said to me the other day, you know what's funny?
I don't know about Social Security.
Should I take Social Security early?
Because it may not be here.
Nobody ever says to the military-industrial complex and all of the defense contractors, well, you better get these shipments out now because I don't know if we're going to have enough money for all these bombs and airplanes and things like that.
You never...
You never hear that.
You will hear all types of limitations being put up.
Raising the retirement age and capping medical reimbursements and school lunch programs.
Oh yeah, that's no problem.
That will do because you've got to tighten the belt.
But when it comes to death and supplying the instrumentation of death, no problem.
We will always find money to kill because that's who we are.
And that's why artificial intelligent beings are going to wipe us out.
But that's for another time.
So I'm not going to say, Happy Memorial Day.
I'm going to say, Observe Memorial Day.
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