For Memorial Day, retired USMC LTC Max Morton memorializes the lost Republic, and the warriors our new oligarchy has betrayed.

When I talk about members of the military who I served with, I purposely use the term warrior. Despite the social deconstruction du jour, the purpose of the military is to conduct war. Clausewitz famously stated, “war is the continuation of politics by other means,” and that other means is fighting and killing the enemy. If you think sending your military to war to do anything other than kill your enemy is acceptable, realistic, or moral, you are a dangerous fool who has no understanding or regard for the myriad disturbing consequences of half-assed armed conflict. So nouveau U.S. Army commercials and Navy wokeism comedy aside, the purpose of the military is to kill the enemy, and the people who do that killing are warriors.

Like many in flyover country, I come from a family with a tradition of military service, some of us were the proverbial lifers and others single-hitch patriots, so the concept of service and sacrifice is ingrained into our psyche. For our family, having to give your life in service to your country was always a possibility. Within that context, Memorial Day, for me, has been not just a remembrance but an acknowledgement of the outcome associated with that risk…that is until this year.

When I look at America, the way it is today, I wonder if any of the killing and dying was worth it. America today is run by someone, we’re not really sure who, and every part of its culture and history is being deconstructed.

The Constitution is not even a speed bump to a new class of oligarchs and tyrants who are in the process of “reimagining” America as a giant Eveready battery to power their globalist business interests. Clearly half the country no longer believes in ideals like individual liberty, freedom, free speech, live-and-let-live, the Golden Rule, or tolerance.

What happened? If I could go back in time and talk to my dead friends and comrades who fell in service to America, what would they say? Would they still have volunteered? Would they still have put their lives on the line for this? Because this is pretty much nothing like the way of life I know they signed up to defend. This is an abomination. This is something I expect they would fight against.

It’s a near-certainty that, before very much longer, they will get their chance.

To paraphrase my colleague Angelo Codevilla, what’s happening now in America is not a perversion or aberration, it’s an assertion of power. What we are seeing is the transformation of America from a free and sovereign nation accountable to the citizens, to a vassal state coalition of oligarchs and rogue national security bureaucrats sympathetic to, if not outright supportive of, China’s global hegemony. Who is really on top in this relationship has yet to be determined. Is it the bureaucrats in service to the oligarchs, or is it the oligarchs backing a rogue bureaucracy? Either way, in the words of the late, great George Carlin, “It’s a big club and you ain’t in it.”

The current regime likes to talk about the domestic extremist danger to “our democracy.” What they really mean is that traditional Americans are a threat to their transformation of America away from a sovereign nation-state to some form of authoritarian oligarchy.

Too many Americans fail to understand the very real threat to their lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness posed by a regime that holds this belief. Unfortunately, Americans seem to be waiting for a white knight or some divine miracle to roll back the regime’s ongoing transformation of America. The truth is, that old America, the one you grew up in, the one you think of as normal, doesn’t exist anymore. It’s gone, and it isn’t coming back.

Whether the current regime is backed by an oligarchy-supported deep state bureaucracy, or a deep state bureaucracy supported by China-sympathetic oligarchs, the clear and present danger to every traditional American is centered in Washington, D.C.

On this Memorial Day, I will be thinking of my friends and comrades who made the ultimate sacrifice, and I’m not afraid to say that some of those memories will be difficult. But I know that their beliefs and the way of life that motivated them to serve as warriors still exists. It exists in every defiant American who refuses to bend the knee to the tyrant. It exists in every American who still believes in liberty, freedom, and equal justice under law. It exists in those who yearn for the self-determination of a republic. I think that’s worth fighting for, and I think there are others out there across America who believe the same.

Then they will be forced to confront the cold, hard nut of the matter: that “fighting for it” does in fact mean fighting for it—as opposed to speechifying about it, politicking for it, or voting it back into existence. Reclaiming our liberty and restoring some facsimile of our former Republic can only be done the old-fashioned way, the same way the Founders created it. Those valiant, indomitable men proclaimed their willingness to hazard “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor” neither lightly nor unknowingly. They well knew what that pledge might bring down on their heads; when they pronounced themselves free and independent, they said exactly what they meant, and they meant exactly what they said. They signed the Declaration fully aware that the price of fulfillment for their mutual pledge was payable exclusively in blood, ruin, and death. They did it anyway. They risked all, sacrificed much, and won everything.

None but a purblind chucklehead could dare to dream that our Founders’ present-day heirs might secure such a lustrous prize for themselves at a discount rate. With every word of delusional drivel asserting the existence of a way to redeem their loss at only trifling physical expense, another entry is stamped into the “UNWORTHY” side of freedom’s ledger.

None of which in any way tarnishes the men for whom Memorial Day was established, of course. Lincoln probably said it best:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Beautiful words, which recent events have put a painful sting into. Our closer, from the incomparable Rudyard Kipling.

The Veterans
Written for the Gathering of Survivors the Indian Mutiny, Albert Hall, 1907

To-day, across our fathers’ graves,
The astonished years reveal
The remnant of that desperate host
Which cleansed our East with steel.

Hail and farewell! We greet you here,
With tears that none will scorn–
O Keepers of the House of old,
Or ever we were born!

One service more we dare to ask–
Pray for us, heroes, pray,
That when Fate lays on us our task
We do not shame the Day!

Amen.