On May 30, 1868, when a Civil War general Called the Americans To commemorate the sacrifice of Union soldiers. It was originally called Decoration Day for the practice of decorating graves with wreaths and flags. And there were many graves – More than 300,000 men died on the Union side, and almost as much for the Confederacy. total, More died on both sides of the civil war More than in every other US conflict through the Korean War, combined.
It wasn’t long, though, before the commemoration began to be overshadowed by the celebration. Within a year, the New York Times opinion The holiday would no longer be “holy” if parades and speeches became more central than commemoration of the dead. What happened, especially after Congress designated Memorial Day as the last Monday in May in 1971, made it the perfect launchpad for summer, The main purpose of the holiday is increasing unwavering compliance.
For those for whom Memorial Day is a memorable moment for three days of hot dogs and hamburgers, the gap will likely widen in the future, as veterans of previous wars pass away and The divide between America’s all-volunteer military and its civilians deepened. Less than 1 percent of the US adult population serves in the military, and those who are are still signing up A small handful of regions and families with a history of military service. (You can include my own family in that rarefied number: My brother is a retired Army captain who served in Iraq.)
With an ever-inflating defense budget — now Close to $900 billion — The footprint of the U.S. military is hardly shrinking, but the number of those Lincoln will potentially be called upon to provide to call “The last full measure of devotion” is
Yet Memorial Day has a larger gap: it is among those who died as combatants (to use one of Pentagon terms), and many more around the world who died not as participants in war, but as victims of it.
When civilians die in war
The past is not only foreign to us, but bloody. From the interpersonal to the international, conflict has been a constant throughout most of human history. Between 1500 and 1800, there was hardly a year when there was no great power Get involved in some kind of war.
Although warfare became somewhat less common as we entered the 1900s, it did not become less deadly. Far from it – although the death toll in war in the past was more concentrated among combatants, the twentieth century saw the horrors of total war blossom, where little distinction was made between combatants and civilians bystanders, and new weapons capable of mass, indiscriminate killing.
Go back to the Civil War, which sits at the junction between war because it was practiced for so long, and it would become more horrific. More than 600,000 soldiers were killed in the conflict, against At least 50,000 civiliansFrom direct casualties to many who died from war, starvation and disease.
This number was terrifying, yet it would only increase in subsequent wars.
In World War I, roughly equal numbers of combatants and civilians were killed worldwide — About 10 million in each direction. In World War II, more combatants were killed than in any other conflict in human history, at around 15 million. Yet for every soldier, sailor or airman killed, about one and a half civilians will die, in total, at one count, About 40 million.
The end of the dead will come in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when As many as 210,000 people – almost all of them Japanese civilians – died in the first and so far only atomic bombings. Not only were these new weapons capable of killing on a vastly greater scale than before, but they existed mainly to threaten the lives of non-combatants.
Fortunately, with weapons now in the military’s hands, World War II was a high-water mark for combat deaths. In the decades that followed, deaths in war for both combatants and civilians Strongly rejected, minus the occasional spike in conflicts like the Korean and Vietnam wars. People around the world are far less likely to die in war today than their ancestors were, which is one of the most undeniable — if tenuous — markers of our species’ under-appreciated progress.
Yet even in this era of relative peace, civilians still bear the brunt of war when it comes, when it is fought by the United States. According to Brown University Cost of War ProjectMore civilians were directly killed in post-9/11 conflicts than combatants on either side—and when Indirect death toll from starvation and destruction Included, that bay is only wide.
In Ukraine, the war has so far killed more than 10,000 civilians, including more than 500 children, adding up to February. 42 civilians were killed or injured Every day in war. In Gaza, the civilian death toll is impossible to accurately count but recent UN estimates put the number of dead children, women and elderly people north of 15,000, with thousands of bodies still unaccounted for. Even those civilians escaped death Constantly experiencing bad appetite — all of which were directly caused by war.
And of course, Israel itself About 700 civilians were lost in the October 7 attackHowever, many non-combatants are still held hostage by Hamas and other militant groups.
A new kind of Memorial Day
The United States has its Memorial Day to honor fallen soldiers, while other countries do remembertheir victory day. Yet there is only a A handful of monuments To honor the countless civilians killed in the war.
It’s not hard to imagine why. Perceptions around the Vietnam Veterans Memorial have seen a shift — from A patriotic atrocity towards a celebrated act of national mourning – Even if we don’t believe in war, we can respect the sacrifice of soldiers who died in war. But those who died without a rifle in hand, those who died in infancy and childhood, those who died because they could not fight and defend, show what war is ultimately for: a waste. And we cannot begin to know how to identify the unmarked.
America has been a historical exception in many ways, but perhaps none more so than the fact that its civilians have largely been spared the ravages of war. (Though the same, of course, can hardly be said for its indigenous populations, so long treated as enemy combatants on their own land.) Americans have fought and Americans have died, but at ever-increasing distance, a distance that grows every Memorial Day.
The general decline of war is one of our greatest achievements as human beings, which can be unequivocally celebrated. Perhaps we would feel more like that if we gave the deaths of civilians the same respect as those of soldiers—a new kind of memorial day that could begin here.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter.Sign up here to subscribe!
Update, May 27, 2024, 9 am: This story, first published May 31, 2023, has been updated to include new data on civilian deaths in Ukraine, Gaza and Israel.
