The Daily Signal - Victor Davis Hanson: The 1.2 Million Reasons America Exists Today

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Starting point is 00:01:33 Hello, this is Victor Davis Hansen for the Daily Signal. This Monday is Memorial Day. all the Americans who died on behalf of the United States from its beginning to the present, started out as Decoration Day. It was a phenomenon that grew out of the horrific Civil War in which 650,000 to 700,000 Americans North and South died, and people in that post-war era felt that their graves should be commemorated. And once people started to decorate the graves or put flowers on them or flags, that custom spread to the north, and each state then started to commemorate it. And it was finally federalized as a official holiday, not until 1971. I can remember when I was a senior in high school, it was announced that from now on the last Monday,

Starting point is 00:02:28 coinciding with a three-day weekend, would be commemorated as memorial. Many people, I found a lot of students confuse it or they don't even know what it is. They think that Veterans Day, which always falls on November 11th, is the same. No, it commemorates anybody, all, everybody who served in the armed forces, whether they were wounded, killed, or survived. And that's always on November 11th for a reason. It grew out of Armist's Day, and that was the ending of the First World War. It was decided to make it an iconic time or date, so it was the 11th month, November.

Starting point is 00:03:06 on the 11th day, at the 11th hour of the day where the fighting stopped, and then to memorialize it further, that name morphed into Veterans Day, to commemorate not just World War I's ending, but all the people that served. How many people have died in fighting for America? About 1.2 million, and that includes 20,000. 25,000 in the Revolutionary War, if we count disease as well, maybe 20,000 in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, 1848, there was probably 5,000. The big number, of course, was 650 to 700,000 in the Civil War,

Starting point is 00:03:56 since everybody on both sides who died was an American. And note the first great battle in April 1962, Shiloh, more people died in the initial big battle of the war at Shiloh than had perished in all the wars prior to Shiloh. And then, of course, there was a Spanish-American war. World War I where 117,000 died. My grandfather was farming, he was 26, he was mining his own business,

Starting point is 00:04:27 he was drafted and he went over to, Belgium and France, the next thing he knew he was at the Musa Organ and was gassed and invalided out after two years and came back severely disabled. And then, of course, World War II were somewhere between 405 to 450,000 died, depending on how we count those who were sick, whether it was battle-related or whether they were in the United States or overseas. I can remember I'm named after Victor Hansen was killed with a six marines. Division on May 19, 1945, in the last hour of fighting on Sugarloaf Hill. And then, of course, Korea with another 35,000, and then we had 58,000 in Vietnam, and 7,000 in Iraq and Afghanistan, and on and on. The singularity, though, we commemorate or we are depressed by or odd by the numbers in two wars,

Starting point is 00:05:29 the 400, say, 30,000 that died in the World War II and the 650 or 700. That's almost a million Americans died. And I think people should recognize that. We are now a country. We've never been on this frontier before in terms of percentages or the actual numbers of foreign born. We have about 53 million Americans who are not born in the United States. And that's about 16.2. percent of the current population. That's a huge number. And unfortunately, those large influxes occur at a time when we have lost confidence in the American system or experiment because we don't have civic education anymore. We don't have classes from K through 12, much less than the university, where people know about the iconic events, what the difference between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution is, what caused the Civil War, what caused the Civil War, what was Iwo Jima, what was Pearl Harbor. Nobody seems to have any reference, any knowledge of that.

Starting point is 00:06:37 And so what we need to do is to one of the ways, the best way, I think, to assimilate legal immigrants, is to remind them that they wanted to come to this country. We didn't force them to come. In most cases, we didn't invite them to come. They chose to come here because they felt in terms of security, personal freedom, economic viability. They would be better off than they were in their home countries. So when they arrived on this fully developed 250th year of America this year, they should ask themselves, and we should help them understand why this was such a prosperous great nation, why it's the

Starting point is 00:07:17 oldest constitutional republic in the world today, and why it has been so successful. And the answer is that from time to time in its 250th year history, it is called on young people 18, 19, 20 to go far overseas in almost every case except the Civil War, the Revolutionary War, and the War of 1812, and fight enemies, whether they were German militarist or Austria-Hungarian militarist or Naziism in Germany or fascism in Italy or Japanese. militarism or during the Cold War in Korea to stop communist aggression and Vietnam, same thing. But they were uprooted from a very comfortable existence and they gave their life so that the United States today would be what it is.

Starting point is 00:08:12 And if we don't tell people that, there's no appreciation that they came late to a country in which a million point two people had died to make it the attractive nation that entice them to come in the first place. And it's not just legal immigrants that need to re-learn the lesson of American sacrifice. It's our own youth. They grow up with iPhones. They grow up with sophisticated automobiles. They go up as beneficiaries of 21st century medicine.

Starting point is 00:08:41 All of that, all of that is a result, a dividend of the sacrifice of people that we don't even know anymore. And sometimes we don't even know the places or the circumstances in which they gave their fullest in their last. sacrifice. And they were all young and they never had a chance as the rest of us did to mature. So in this Memorial Day, think of the dead and what they did for us and try to commemorate. Thank you very much. This is Victor Davis Hansen for the Daily Signal. Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal. Please like, share, and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website at victorhansen.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.

The Daily Signal - Victor Davis Hanson: The 1.2 Million Reasons America Exists Today

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