Today is the day when Americans typically express gratitude for the sacrifices of soldiers. However, it's just as valid to remember them as victims of State-sponsored violence. Millions of people have been killed by their fellow man, not because the two individuals disagreed, but because some other individual, pompous enough to play chess with others' lives, ordered it. The State's wars have ended lives, ruined entire families, and obliterated whole communities - not just soldiers, but innocent civilian men, women, and children. We should be thankful for this - for the pettiness of state politics, for the gullibility of human beings, for the foreign soldiers our men killed?
Here at Social Memory Complex we remember all victims of state violence, regardless of nationality or professed ideological flavor. None of them deserved to die this way. Until the State is finally overcome, we must keep their memory alive as that which was lost to preserve a power and privilege too monsterous to contemplate much more often than once a year.
Let the picture remind us that the wars we memorialize result in more than gravestones, American flags, and cookouts.
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