Monday Memorial Day Reading

 

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

Memorial Day 2021 also happens to fall on the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre, when as many as 300 Blacks were murdered by White mobs, who looted and burned Tulsa's prosperous Black neighborhood of Greenwood on the basis of a false rumor.  It's a very appropriate twinning, since many historians believe the first observance honoring American war dead was by newly freed Black people who wanted to honor the thousands of Black soldiers who fought and died to preserve the Union in the Civil War.  

Karen Attiah writes about the moral responsibility of America to address what it owes to Black Americans:

The fact that serious reparations proposals are becoming more mainstream is a cause for hope that the United States might finally grow up. As school kids, my friends and I used to joke about reparations — not because the concept of some form of recognition and repair to Black people was laughable, but because we knew White people were not about to recognize and correct the harm they caused to Black people. Later we would learn that the U.S. paid reparations to the families of the Japanese Americans it forced into internment camps. That was the right thing to do — but by what possible logic would the same not be done to address generations of slavery, Jim Crow and segregation?

Some of what we’ll hear in this conversation: Direct cash payments are unfair. The crimes were too far in the past. The bill would be too high. Or, even more crudely, Black people should get over the past. But the past is always present. There are reminders everywhere, when it comes to White and Black relations, that it is not Black Americans who should get over the past, but White Americans. [snip]

A Memorial Day for the ages, indeed. The fact that GOP-led state governments are attacking scholarship on racism in this country reveals one truth: The United States has lacked the courage to face what it owes to Black Americans. Reparations will be the real test of whether the United States is interested in changing that — or would rather dance around its moral responsibilities for another hundred years.

E.J. Dionne, Jr., writes about the military sacrifice of Black Americans and the "promissory note" that awaits full payment:

We often declare, rightly I think, that those who gave their lives for our country were fighting for freedom. But after a year marked by a searing confrontation with racial injustice, in the present and in our history, we would do well to ponder the military sacrifice of Black Americans from the Civil War forward. In World War II alone, 1.2 million Black Americans served in the military. What did freedom mean for those who faced racial oppression?

“Black men have fought in every single war for the United States, most of them at times when they weren’t even considered first-class citizens,” says Christopher S. Parker, author of “Fighting for Democracy: Black Veterans and the Struggle Against White Supremacy in the Postwar South.”

In his interviews with Black veterans, Parker, a political science professor at the University of Washington, found a patriotism rooted not in the reality of their moment but in aspirations for the future — “hope that America would recognize its founding values. It’s the thing that kept them going,” he told me. [snip]

“A lot of people talk about patriotism these days,” Parker told me. “But what is patriotism? It’s a commitment to a set of founding values so complete that one is willing to make the ultimate sacrifice.”

This can be said of all we honor on Memorial Day. But Parker and Gates, like Franklin before them, are right to call our attention to Black Americans who served and sacrificed on the basis of what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called “a promissory note,” written in our founding documents — one that still awaits full payment. It’s hard to imagine a more sweeping sense of faith — and hope.

Think about that perspective as we hear racist right- wingers endlessly yapping about "wokeness" and critical race theory in their desperation to hold back the aspirations of our fellow Americans for yet another generation.

The Associated Press has taken a look at racism in the military:

In interviews with The Associated Press, current and former enlistees and officers in nearly every branch of the armed services described a deep-rooted culture of racism and discrimination that stubbornly festers, despite repeated efforts to eradicate it.

The AP found that the military’s judicial system has no explicit category for hate crimes, making it difficult to quantify crimes motivated by prejudice.

The Defense Department also has no way to track the number of troops ousted for extremist views, despite its repeated pledges to root them out. More than 20 people linked to the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol were found to have military ties.

The AP also found that the Uniform Code of Military Justice does not adequately address discriminatory incidents and that rank-and-file people of color commonly face courts-martial panels made up of all-white service members, which some experts argue can lead to harsher outcomes.

The military said it processed more than 750 complaints of discrimination by race or ethnicity from service members in the fiscal year 2020 alone. But discrimination doesn’t exist just within the military rank-and-file. That same fiscal year, civilians working in the financial, technical and support sectors of the Army, Air Force and Navy also filed 900 complaints of racial discrimination and over 350 complaints of discrimination by skin color, data from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission shows.

We're confident that with President Biden and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin at the top of the chain of command this culture isn't going to be allowed to fester on their watch.

Not all who served are patriots, of course.  Take for example this felonious lunatic:

Avowed QAnon disciple and confessed felon retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn has called for a Myanmar-like military coup in America.

“It should happen,” Donald Trump’s former national security adviser said in an astonishing declaration at a QAnon conference Sunday.

Myanmar’s military violently seized control of the country from its civilian government in late January, detained democratically elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi and top party members, and killed more than 700 protesters as of early this month. The military justified its action by claiming unproven “election fraud.”

Flynn presented his dark vision of a military coup and dictatorship in the U.S. in response to a question from the audience at the conference.

″I wanna know why what happened in Myanmar can’t happen here?” an unidentified member of the audience asked Flynn, though he pronounced the nation as “Minnimar.”

“No reason,” Flynn responded to wild screams of approval. “It should happen.”

Advocating the violent overthrow of the government is a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2385 and is punishable by not more than 20 years in the clink.  Flynn is increasingly making the case for a finding of  non compos mentis, in which case a long visit to a psychiatric facility would be merited.  Either way,  lock him up (and take away his rank and retirement benefits)!

Finally, please head over to Infidel 753's link round- up for the best selection of "interesting stuff" he's found on the Internet in the past week (and that's truth in labeling!).