The National Museum of American History, and a billionaire who has funded a new exhibit there, would like you to know that we\u2019re going to need more wars if we want to have freedom. Never mind that we seem to lose so many freedoms whenever we have wars. Never mind that so many nations have created more freedoms than we enjoy and done so without wars. In our case, war is the price of freedom. Hence the new exhibit: \u201cThe Price of Freedom: Americans at War.\u201d<\/p>\n
The exhibit opens with these words: \u201cAmericans have gone to war to win their independence, expand their national boundaries, define their freedoms, and defend their interests around the globe.\u201d Those foolish, foolish Canadians: why, oh, why did they win their independence without a war? Think of all the people they might have killed! The exhibit is surprisingly, if minimally, honest about imperialism, at least in the early wars. The aim of conquering Canada is included, along with bogus excuses, as one of the motivations for the War of 1812.<\/p>\n
The most outrageous part of the opening lines of the exhibition, however, may be the second half: \u201c. . . define their freedoms, and defend their interests around the globe.\u201d The exhibition, to the extent that I\u2019ve surveyed it online, provides absolutely no indication of what in the world can be meant by a war being launched in order to \u201cdefine our freedoms.\u201d And, needless to say, it is the U.S. government, not \u201cAmericans,\u201d that imagines it has \u201cinterests around the globe\u201d that can and should be \u201cdefended\u201d by launching wars.<\/p>\n
The exhibit is an extravaganza of lies and deceptions. The U.S. Civil War is presented as \u201cAmerica\u2019s bloodiest conflict.\u201d Really? Because Filipinos don\u2019t bleed? Vietnamese don\u2019t bleed? Iraqis don\u2019t bleed? We should not imagine that our children don\u2019t learn exactly that lesson. The Spanish American War is presented as an effort to \u201cfree Cuba,\u201d and so forth. But overwhelmingly the lying is done in this exhibit by omission. Bad past excuses for wars are ignored, the death and destruction is ignored or falsely reduced. Wars that are too recent for many of us to swallow too much B.S. about are quickly passed over.<\/p>\n