Cover Photo by Mark R. Day

Saturday, September 28, 2013

Speech: Comments, I made at Rose Hill Cemetery, Hagerstown, MD 21 September 2013


     Good morning,  I am Mark Day, and I represent the Sons of the Union Veterans of the Civil War, the successor organization to the Grand Army of the Republic, and whose members are the descendants of the brave men who fought the War to Preserve the Union.  More over today, I stand here as the Commander of the Department of the Chesapeake Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, of which Maryland is part, to honor the men of Western Maryland, both Black and White or  Blue and Gray, who struggled throughout the terrible Civil War, which ripped our national union apart.

     The veterans of Western Maryland,  both those of the  Grand Army of the Republic and the United Confederate Veterans,  we recognize today all believed in the cause of  Liberty;  for which they willingly suffered and in many cases had witnessed friends and family die to preserve.  They were patriot hero's in every sense of the word and we owe them a debt, which can never be fully paid through either our oration or humble tokens of honor.

     Just for a moment try to place yourself in the position of these men from the towns and cities of Western Maryland.  Men with names such as Samuel Broom, Augustine Mason, Oliver Hicks, and Benjamin Brooks each stepped up to the recruiting table to become Musicians, Doctors, and Infantry soldiers fighting for the right to enjoy the fruits of their own labor, which we call Liberty.

     Following  the War the Grand Army of the Republic was represented by two post here in Hagerstown, the Reno Post and the Lyon Post.   During the terrible ordeal of the Civil War these men and their confederate counterparts were enemies, but following the war they became brothers in arms as they worked within their communities to support the widows and children of lost comrades and to honor the memory of the sacrifices made by soldiers of both sides through patriotic education of the public and participation in local civics.

      It is fitting therefore that we, the recipients of their sacrifice in the name of Liberty and Union, take time to  rededicate these monuments and dedicate a new monument to the men of Lyon Post #31.   These brothers have done their duty and passed the torch to us.  Now it is our duty to continue their yet unaccomplished task of preserving our nation's history and remembering that, the cost of our Liberty was found in the sacrifice of patriot blood.

     May God grant us the wisdom to always be a people who remember the sacrifices made by men in both Blue and Gray and may we also remember that they came together to help heal and reunite our nation as Americans.
Thank you for allowing me this opportunity to speak.  May God bless our great Union and preserve our belief in Liberty for all mankind..
 
Written by Mark R. Day 21 September 2013 [10:30am], copyright by Mark R. Day, 21 September 2013, all rights reserved.

Note: This revised speech was the product of a hastily made change to the original when, I was told that my talk had to fit the programs theme "Reconciliation and Remembrance."  I was asked to speak at the Confederate cemetery re-dedication and the local commander of the SCV was to speak at the re-dedication of the Reno GAR marker.

Speech: Comments, I planned to give at Rose Hill Cemetery in Hagerstown, MD 21 September 2013


     Good morning,  I am Mark Day, and I represent the Sons of the Union Veterans of the Civil War, the successor organization to the Grand Army of the Republic, and whose members are the descendants of the brave men who fought the War to Preserve the Union.  More over today, I stand here as the Commander of the Department of the Chesapeake Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, of which Maryland is part, to honor the men of Western Maryland, both Black and White, who fought to ensure the survival of the United States of America and the long standing ideal, which had been inculcated in our national identity, that "All Men are Created Equal." 

     The men of Western Maryland,  whose Grand Army of the Republic Post's , we recognize today all believed in the causes of  Liberty and Union; for which they willingly suffered and in many cases had witnessed friends and family die to preserve.  They were patriot hero's in every sense of the word and we owe them a debt, which can never be fully paid through either our oration or humble tokens of honor.

     Just for a moment try to place yourself in the position of these men and particularly in the shoes  of the African American men who would answer the call to take up arms.   On January first 1863 Abraham Lincoln through the Emancipation Proclamation  declared "All persons held as slaves within the said designated states and parts of states are, and henceforward shall be free . . . And, I further declare and make known that such persons, of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States . . . "  In the towns and cities of Western Maryland men with names such as Samuel Broom, Oliver Hicks, and Benjamin Brooks stepped up to the recruiting table to join units such as the 19th USCT and 1st United States Colored Infantry.   Free men fighting for the freedom of an entire race and the right to enjoy the fruits of their own labor called Liberty.

     Following  the War the Grand Army of the Republic was represented by two post here in Hagerstown, the Reno Post and the Lyon Post.   During the terrible ordeal of the Civil War these men were brothers in arms and in the post war they continued to work within the communities to support the widows and children of lost comrades and they worked to honor the memory of the sacrifices made by the Union soldiers through the patriotic education the public and participation in local civics.

      It is fitting therefore that we, the recipients of their sacrifice in the name of Liberty and Union, take time to  rededicate the Reno Post monument and dedicate a new monument to the Lyon Post.   These brothers have done their duty and passed the torch to us.  Now it is our duty to continue their yet unaccomplished task of preserving our nation's history and remembering that, the cost of our Liberty was found in the sacrifice of patriot blood.

     May God grant us the wisdom to always be a people who remember and may God bless our great Union and preserve our belief in Liberty for all mankind..


Written by Mark R. Day 16 September 2013, copyright by Mark R. Day, 16 September 2013, all rights reserved

Monday, September 2, 2013

Comments on the September 11, 2012 Benghazi incident


On the topic of Benghazi, I believe that the current administration [Obama]was actually caught off guard by an  event that to any outside observer  seemed inevitable.  The Administration simply did not take reasonable precautions based on the nature of the situation in Libya and underestimated the potential insurgent response to American involvement in Libya .  I must also admit that, I have a problem in forming a complete understanding of the attack on the Benghazi embassy because there has never been a complete telling of this story with all of the pertinent details.  As a result I am left to postulate my current position, minus the political rhetoric,  which  is to blame the deaths of four Americans on the State Departments failure to seek proper protection for the ambassador and the ambassador's own personal disregard for his safety.  Like so many current day events, which most Americans hear or see in thirty second sound bites and bathed in the passion of political posturing, the death of the American ambassador and his protection unit is a major event.  However, Benghazi like events have happened before in our national history and will undoubtedly continue to happen well into our future because our government often is compelled to place Americans,  in the military or in the foreign service,  on the edge of danger to gather intelligence and monitor situations.  For example, In China, at the turn of the century the United States had a enclave in the capital city of Beijing, which was attacked by the Boxer's during their attempt to throw the westerners out at the turn of the century.  Later also in China there was an incident on the Yangtze River in the 1930's, when American patrol boats, The American China Squadron, came under attack by forces of Japan prior to the start of World War II, and of course there was the USS Liberty incident in the 1970's where the Israeli Navy sank an American spy ship during the War Yam Kippur War.  I am sure that in their time each of these previously mentioned events must have caught the attention of the media and I am equally sure there were calls for investigations by Congress.  However that is the nature of the beast, you have to be on the ground to really know what is happening and it may not always be easy to prevent the loss of lives.  In fact we must conclude that the lives of the men in Benghazi were lost in the service of protecting American interest.   

Sunday, September 1, 2013

An Essay on American Foreign Policy


     George Washington's celebrated foreign policy position of neutrality regarding the internal conflicts of European and other foreign nations has long since sealed its position and relevance as a primary fundamental of American Foreign Policy. I would also allow that Thomas Jefferson, a more liberal and cosmopolitan founding father than Washington established the parameters for the use of our military forces when intervening in foreign affairs.  
Jefferson may have used his powers as Commander in Chief to employ the Navy and the Marine Corps to raid and invade the Barbary Coast of North Africa, and eradicate the threat posed by pirates but Jefferson's intervention policy was purely intended to preserve and defend the rights of Americans' and protect American economic investment.  The plan took no intrinsic stand and contained no altruistic or egalitarian ideals.   

 
    From these facts it could be concluded, that when the foreign policies of Washington and Jefferson are coupled they establish a guideline for American foreign policy, which calls for restraint from involvement in conflicts, which do not directly impact the safety and livelihood of our people while allowing for quick and decisive action to prevent harm if America was directly threatened physically or economically. This policy, which was intended to limit the use of military force, served us very well during the formative years of our republic and into the early years of the Twentieth Century.  Of course there were occasional adventures outside of these traditional boundaries.  For example the opening of Japan by Perry, the annexation of Hawaii,  and the Banana Republic policies in the Caribbean and Central American states reflected American trade policies that required aggressive foreign intervention.  However,  the first real modification to American foreign policy came with the inclusion of the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.  Roosevelt's policy was the first mention of American forces being used to police other countries and allow for independent American  military action to hold them accountable.  Wither or not President Theodore Roosevelt intended this new addendum to the legacy of Washington and Jefferson to be used only in situations where American citizens and American interest were under duress we can not know, but his new policy precipitated a shift from restraint and added a proactive, Big Stick, intervention component to American foreign policy.
 

     Interestingly even with this new concept of, an interventionist, foreign policy American entry in the First and Second World Wars was, for the most part, still restrained and required a tremendous amount of propaganda, on the part of the British, and the provocation of unrestricted submarine warfare, on the part of Germany, to bring us into World War I and twenty years later the attack on Pearl Harbor, by Japan, was required to overcome American isolationist restraint before becoming convinced that engagement in a foreign war was necessary.   In fact, an argument could be made, that even though America broke away from its traditional foreign policy of non-intervention and participated in the two World Wars, that decision still reflected the principles for military action defined by Jefferson because they meet the requirement for proof that American interest were in danger, much as it had been in the time of the Barbary Pirates.

 
     Now here we are today, embroiled in an never-ending cycle of conflict in the Middle East and North Africa.  There is no doubt that the use of Chemical weapons by the Syrian government against its own people was deplorable but what has changed in American foreign policy, that makes the use of American missiles against a sovereign foreign state in retaliation for the use of chemical weapons, that had no impact on Americans or American economic interest possible.   If you look at his through the lens of the foreign policy precedents established by Washington and Jefferson the question of American intervention in Syria seems rhetorical and irrelevant.  Similarly the application of the Roosevelt Corollary's "Big Stick" policing policy fails to apply to Syria for the same reasons because there is no actual proof that the Syrian Civil War has impacted American interest.  How then did protecting the lives of foreign citizens in a foreign state become the America's obligation?  Let's propose the following thoughts as possible answers.  First, following World War II America found itself embroiled in an ideological battle for the world with Communist Russia. I believe that our leaders felt that we had to clearly define ourselves as the champions of the oppressed people of the world in order to draw a clear distinction between ourselves and our opponents in the Cold War. This new definition of what America is and what it stands for has shaped all our foreign policies since 1945. Second, in the aftermath of World War II, our leaders and intellectuals where convinced that they had to ensure Wilsonian Liberalism became the basis of human and international relations. I think they believed the failure to follow Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Point's had directly lead to the tragedy of World War II. Third, the Holocaust and unparalleled civilian death toll from World War II forced us to re-evaluate the effect of conflict on common men, women, and children. This new view of our common humanity lead to a quest for universal human rights as exemplified by global health and food programs to ensure life, global suffrage movements and the end of discrimination to promote liberty, and finally global fight for fare wages and private ownership to promote the pursuit of economic success.

 
     For more than seventy years the United States  stood at the forefront of the fight to bring about these changes and our foreign policy evolved to provide monetary means and military support for all who endeavored to overcome oppression. Policies such as the Truman Doctrine were created to state our new goals for the world wide preservation and expansion of democracy.  Then later with the coming of  global communications the world seemed to be shrinking.  We began to read stories of human suffering and the atrocities of Communism and with the introduction of mass world wide real time satellite communications,  Americans' reached a sense of unity of purpose in the cause of providing safety and human rights to all mankind.  During the forty years of Cold War Era American foreign policy was focused on the defeat of Communism and the betterment of our fellow human beings.  However our realities changed with the sudden fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union  in the 1990's as those events brought about a new period of history in, which the United States has found itself in the position of having won the war but being unsure and unsatisfied with the outcome.  Much of what America fought for in the push to achieve Wilsonian Liberal Democracy had been accomplished. The evidence of American success can be found throughout the world.  The end of segregation in South Africa, the establishment of nations based on the ideal of popular sovereignty and self determination in the third world, and the ability to have private ownership of property in Russia and China stand as stunning successes. However, all the new nations were not democratic and in some cases the people chose to form and live under governments that failed our American litmus test.  Many American foreign policy leaders saw a world in chaos seemingly out of control and disordered.  The end of the Cold War had released a tremendous pent up desire for nationalism and political reform not seen since the middle of the nineteenth century.  Revolution and change were in the air of the former Soviet Republics, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East.  In many cases these movements took shapes and styles which looked, to us, undemocratic and repressive even though they were the fulfillment of the self-determination process advocated by Wilsonian Liberalism. Lacking an understanding of the cultural and social forces at work in these countries, we strove to re-educate and if necessary prod, or bribe them with dollar diplomacy to take another direction and we condemned them if they failed to comply. Unlike the rest of the world the United States still clung to the super power / defender of democracy and human rights identity it had created for itself during the Cold War Era and this has influenced our foreign policy negatively. We have not accepted the obvious victory of our ideology of Wilsonian Liberalism and its impact on the modern world. In some instances the revolutions of the last twenty years were peaceful but for the most part they were meet by resistance from the tumbling governments of totalitarianism in places like Yugoslavia.  Later still came violent revolution and change to  Egypt, Burma, Tunisia, Libya and now Syria.  America found itself in a conundrum over foreign policy, should America involve itself in these new nations to ensure the rise of democratic governments or should we allow the people to create their own institution of government.  It is this conundrum which has lead to our current predicament.  American foreign policy planners failed to remember that our own struggle to form a nation took a rebellion, then more than twenty years of political compromise and strife, and finally a Civil War to be accomplished. The question of America's survival in those early years had been in doubt; just as it is in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and so many other places today, but left to our own solutions we inevitably worked through the problems of slavery, states' rights, and national identity emerging a stronger and more unified people and nation.  Our most significant failure in dealing with the end of the Cold War has been to not let the emerging nations work out their own problems and assuming that these nations need American supervision as they grow and learn how to govern themselves.  

 
     Often we have taken very self-serving foreign policy stances for our own economic benefit.  The 1990-91 War with Iraq, also known as Desert Shield / Desert Storm is an example of our self-interest and indulgence in interventionism to preserve our economy.   Yes, Saddam did brutally attack  Kuwait and his forces were barbaric in their behavior, but was that the primary reason for intervention?  Where the babies that were taken from their incubators truly our main concern?  In truth the problem was Saudi Arabia and Saudi Oil.  In this case American interest and American economics were in danger from a foreign power and therefore the use of military forces was justified under the Washington Jefferson model.   Unfortunately the continuing  presence of Saddam Hussein and our ongoing problems dealing with the emerging Iranian government, post Shah, lead us to impose ourselves on the hospitality of Middle Eastern nations in the Persian Gulf to allow large scale basing of American military assets.  The establishment of a permanent military presence in the Middle East directly lead to the rise of radicals like Osama Bin Laden, who called for an end to the foreign presence and its perceived threat to corrupt Islamic culture. 

 
     Then in 2003 George H.W. Bush took American Foreign interventionist to new levels when America invaded the nation of Iraq without provocation and under the pretense that we were conducting a preemptive strike aimed at protecting the world from Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. With this invasion of Iraq in 2003 President Bush had unilaterally extended the Roosevelt Corollary to include the Eastern Hemisphere under the police power of the United States and for ten years we have fought to police the Iraqis, the Afghans, the Koreans, and Iranians. We now have a foreign policy that is handcuffed by its belligerent nature and worldwide scope.  American foreign policy is no longer capable of preserving the peace or protecting American interest but rather it has exposed our weakness to our enemies.  In the last twenty years the nations and people of the world have begun a process not unlike that, which was used to establish America and to search for and even to establish new identities for themselves in a  post Cold War Era.   Unfortunately American foreign policy leaders have sought to preserve the status quo antebellum and have painted the changes in the world as an ideological struggle, this time with what they perceive as extremist Islam and they have not looked to America's own history for examples or models of behavior that would allow the people of these new countries work out their problems themselves.   As a result our insistent involvement in the internal affairs of other nations has provoked the ire of those who see our meddling as outside interference and they have struck back at us in horrendous ways.
Inevitably we used military force to intervene and then took it upon ourselves to undertake the rebuilding of Iraq and Afghanistan, two countries which were seen as radical and extreme, into model democracies based on our American model of government and our nation rebuilding experience in Japan or Germany following World War II.  This proved to be a both an impossible task and a public relations disaster because we continually fail to take cultural differences and religious differences into account during our involvement. Clearly our foreign policy has become counterproductive, isolated us from our traditional allies, and diluted the power of the United Nations as a force for peace. Our current policy has in fact had the effect of doing exactly the opposite of what Washington and Jefferson sought to do for it has put American lives and American property at risk around the world and at home.

 
 
       So in conclusion let me make these final observations. First, American foreign policy in the Twenty-first Century should return to the ideals of Washington and Jefferson and intervention should only occur when American lives and property are imminently in danger.  Second, we should allow these new nations and their people room to grow and offer them the same opportunity, that we had to resolve their problems without outside  interference.  Lastly, we should accept that the wars of ideology are a fabrication of our cultural bias, that the world has changed and no longer fits into our redundent Cold War understanding, and that we must find a way to reestablish our original American purpose and identity in order to offer an example of a nations good citizenship and virtue in the world.


written by: Mark R. Day 9/01/13, copyright by Mark R. Day 9/01/13 all rights reserved