It’s common to have a national holiday celebrating the birth of someone significant in a nation’s history. In the US, there’s George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., etc. What we don’t do is celebrate the death of really bad people, and in my Libertarian, freedom-oriented view, some of the same people whose birthdays the national government wants to celebrate, I’d prefer to celebrate their death.

Now, this is morbid, and it’s bad form to speak ill of the dead, but it’s the logical time to acknowledge the harms caused by some truly horrible people. Celebrating their birthday doesn’t make any sense, so what other event could we use?

Calendar

14 April: Abraham Lincoln

29 November: Henry Kissinger

Criteria

We need some guidelines. This is a work in progress, so this may change as I flush out my ideas.

1. They had to have harmed and killed a large number of people.
   • I care more about people and their well being than I do about nationalism or any other ideology, so I’m really focused on people who have harmed people.
   • Intent doesn’t matter, at least not very much. History loves to paint someone in a positive or negative light based on an ideology, but why someone did something is often very hard to determine, and often is completely fabricated. So we focus on results, not speculation. However, when someone is stating clearly why they’re doing something, that is considered as it’s the user’s own words, not some 3rd party.
2. They need to be in the top quintile of having harmed people at their position.
   • People in power have the power to hurt a lot of people. I don’t want to add just about every US president to this list as it’d lose some meaning, so it needs to be the worst of the worst.
3. Their actions need to directly lead to this harm.
   • The more distant the action and the harm, the more debatable the blame. We could argue how bad economic policies led to the suffering and starvation of people 20 years later, but we need to be able make a solid correlation.
4. They need to be dead.
   • As bad of form it may be to celebrate someone dying, it’s worse if they’re alive. I do have a list of people I will celebrate when they die, and I may mention them, but they won’t make the calendar until they give me a solid date.

Celebration Death Days

Henry Kissinger: 29 November 2023

This may suffer a bit from recency bias, but I think Henry Kissinger made the world a slightly better place when he died on 29 November 2023. This man was an influential figure in the US government’s war machine for decades. His only focus was what benefits the US, and had no qualms how many foreigners he killed in the process.

Al Jazeera has has a list of conflicts in which Kissinger was instrumental.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/30/henry-kissinger-10-conflicts-countries-that-define-a-blood-stained-legacy

Glenn Greenwald gives a long-winded (Greenwald is never concise but always informative) history of the the conflicts driven by Henry Kissinger. https://rumble.com/v3yw9em-system-update-show-190.html.

Abraham Lincoln: 14 April 1865

This will raise some feathers. We’re taught as children Lincoln is a hero, saved the union and freed the slaves. It’s difficult to unlearn dogma you were “taught” as a kid.

Some basic numbers. Estimates vary, but a common number is about 620,000 US citizen casualties. This dwarfs any other war, with the next worst war being WWII with 405,000. Granted, WWII killed many more people, and I care more about all people, not just “Americans”, but from a national perspective, the Civil War was a disaster.

https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/civil-war-casualties

But it was for a good reason. Two responses to this.

1. I don’t care much about intent, as it’s mostly speculative and a basis for propaganda. Many, many people died as a result of Lincoln’s actions. That’s what I care about.
2. By Lincoln’s own admission, he did not care about slavery, the most damning one being this excerpt from his 1st inaugural address. “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”

This is explained away by most people. He was a politician, and saying what you need to get elected (lying) is a familiar trait of politicians. But, if you’re going to argue Lincoln’s intention, to ignore what he said and accept what others have said seems pretty silly.

Lincoln made pretty clear his main reason for the war was he did not want to see the union split into two, certainly not under his watch. He would’ve done whatever he needed to do to prevent that, and deaths weren’t much of a consideration. Maybe he did, eventually, care about ending slavery for moral reasons, although the evidence suggests it was much more of a war tactic than a moral issue for him. That said, the war and slaughter started long before he would’ve changed his mind for any moral reason.

When people say the civil war was about slavery, they’re not wrong, they’re just not being very specific or insightful. Of course slavery was a factor, as was a state’s right to succeed, and clearly several other, less important, factors. It’s about all of these things. People trying simplify it to one issue are, usually purposefully I believe, trying ti prevent the discussion of less savory aspects of the war.

That said, slavery in the US did end, so like many disasters in history, it wasn’t all bad. However, slavery was common in the western world (and sadly, still exists in some less developed countries). The US is the only nation I’m aware of who found the solution to be the killing of a huge percentage of the population. Slavery was going to end regardless, as it did elsewhere. Abolition was a growing movement, and the invention of the cotton gin would’ve likely drastically reduced slavery w/o legislation and slaughter, but who knows for sure. There’s much fodder for this on the internet. Maybe Lincoln sped that up a bit, but at what cost.