President Joe Biden awarded the so-called Presidential Medal of Freedom to Pope Francis on Saturday. The award, according to the White House, is allegedly reserved to “individuals who have made exemplary contributions to the prosperity, values, or security of the United States, world peace, or other significant societal, public or private endeavors.”
It’s unclear what the Pope Francis—who is well known for a kneejerk loathing of American Catholics—has ever contributed to American civilization or society. Indeed, Francis recently signaled his contempt for American victims of sexual abuse by appointing Robert McElroy as the next archbishop of Washington, DC. McElroy has spent most of his career as a longtime defender, ally, and confidant of known criminal pederast Theodore McCarrick and his toady Archbishop Donald Wuerl.
But, who can be surprised by such theater from the Biden White House? It is no different from any other administration of recent decades which dole out these awards to important fundraisers and political allies. In many other cases, presidents just hand out these awards to people the presidents would like to meet and would like to be photographed with. Many of these “great” Americans are just actors and pro athletes, people who do nothing of consequence beyond performing various entertainments on TV screens.
To be sure, the entertainers are at least morally neutral ephemera. Far more unfortunate are the awards given out to an endless parade of warmongers and political operatives who receive the Medal of Freedom as means of rewarding service to the ruling class.
For example, recall Donald Trump’s handing out the award to Miriam Adelson, an Israeli citizen whose “contribution” to society extends little beyond being a wealthy donor to the Trump campaigns. Adelson, and her late husband Sheldon Adelson, are well known for their advocacy for endless US intervention in the Middle East and the continual fleecing of American taxpayers to subsidize the State of Israel.
In this respect, Adelson is a typical recipient. As James Bovard showed in a mises.org article in 2021, the recipients of the Medal of Freedom area “who’s who” of war criminals and degenerate technocrats. He writes:
Presidential Medals of Freedom have long been far more squalid than the Washington Post recognizes—in part because the Post cheered the wars that spurred many of the most tainted awards.
President Lyndon Johnson distributed a bucket of Medals of Freedom to his Vietnam War architects and enablers, including Ellsworth Bunker, Dean Acheson, Dean Rusk, Clark Clifford, Averell Harriman, Cyrus Vance, Walt Rostow, and McGeorge Bundy. When he gave the award to Defense secretary Robert McNamara, he declared, “You have understood that while freedom depends on strength, strength itself depends on the determination of free people.” In reality, Johnson treasured McNamara for his ability to help deceive Americans about how the US was failing in Vietnam. McNamara’s lies helped vastly expand an unnecessary conflict and cost more than a million American and Vietnamese lives. The Washington Post editorial page didn’t complain about those awards, because the Post avidly supported that war. (After exiting the Pentagon, McNamara joined the Post’s board of directors.)
President Richard Nixon inherited the Vietnam War and expanded and intensified US bombing of Indochina. Nixon gave Medals of Freedom to Pentagon chief Melvin Laird (who helped shroud the war’s continuing failure) and his secretary of state, William Rogers. President Gerald Ford gave the Medal of Freedom to his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, and his chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld—two persons notorious for tarnishing the honor of the United States in foreign affairs. The Post didn’t denounce the Medal of Freedom for Kissinger; instead, they made the Great Deceiver a columnist.
President George H.W. Bush blanketed Medals of Freedom on top officials involved with the first Gulf War, including Norman Schwarzkopf, Colin Powell, James Baker, Dick Cheney, and Brent Scowcroft. The Post didn’t complain about those awards, because that was another war that the Post editorial page whooped up all the way.
The war on terror made Presidential Medals of Freedom even more shameless. Retired colonel Andrew Bacevich observed, “After 9/11, the Medal of Freedom went from being irrelevant to somewhere between whimsical and fraudulent. Any correlation with freedom as such, never more than tenuous in the first place, dissolved altogether.” After he deceived America into supporting an attack on Iraq in 2003, President George W. Bush conferred Medals of Freedom on his Iraq war team, including CIA chief George “Slam Dunk” Tenet, Iraq viceroy Paul Bremer, General Peter Pace, General Richard Myers, and General Tommy Franks, as well as prowar foreign lackeys such as Australian former prime minister John Howard and British former prime minister Tony Blair. The Post was outraged, because—no, wait, the Post editorial page thunderously supported that war, too.
The real function of the Medal is overwhelmingly propagandistic. Its intent is to communicate that those who receive the award are somehow great men and women who have achieved something wonderful in the service of the American people. This service to “the people” usually just means service to the state.
Functionally, there is no difference at all between the US’s Medal of Freedom ceremonies and the pomp surrounding the Order of Lenin awards handed out by the old Soviet Union. Like the Medal of Freedom, the Order of Lenin was the highest civilian award bestowed by the Soviet State. It was given out to those who made the Soviet state look good and those who pleased the Politburo in some way. As with the Medal of Freedom, the Soviets liked to give their “top award” to former heads of state for their “service” and to entertainers.
In reality, of course, it was all just pure propaganda. Bovard adds:
Presidential Medals of Freedom encourage Americans to view their personal freedom as the result of government intervention—if not as a bequest from the commander in chief. Ironically, the individual who poses the greatest potential threat to freedom has sole discretion to designate the purported best friends of freedom. The media usually provides gushing coverage of the award ceremonies, never mentioning that the arbitrary power of the Supreme Leader was why the Founding Fathers fought a revolution.
Indeed, one could argue that the very idea of chief executives handing out awards runs counter to the idea of “republican simplicity” that was supposedly once at the core of American republicanism. The great libertarian nineteenth-century anti-imperialist William Graham Sumner apparently believed as much. Sumner wrote on how the early Americans had once sought to create something that was different from the European absolutism and state-mongering of old. Speaking of the first Americans, he writes:
They went out into a wilderness, it is true, but they took with them all the art, science, and literature which, up to that time, civilization had produced. They could not, it is true, strip their minds of the ideas which they had inherited, but in time, as they lived on in the new world, they sifted and selected these ideas, retaining what they chose. Of the old-world institutions also they selected and adopted what they chose and threw aside the rest. It was a grand opportunity to be thus able to strip off all the follies and errors which they had inherited, so far as they chose to do so.
They had unlimited land with no feudal restrictions to hinder them in the use of it. Their idea was that they would never allow any of the social and political abuses of the old world to grow up here. There should be no manors, no barons, no ranks, no prelates, no idle classes, no paupers, no disinherited ones except the vicious. There were to be no armies except a militia, which would have no functions but those of police. They would have no court and no pomp; no orders, or ribbons, or decorations, or titles. (Emphasis added.)
Writing in the wake of the Spanish-American war, Sumner was describing how the old idea of the republic was being destroyed from within by the American desire to participate in the “great game” of imperialism and global intervention. Sumner was right, of course. By the turn of the twentieth century, the idea of freedom had become but a small afterthought in Washington DC. The old laissez-faire parties were gone, and the the ruling class was permitted to turn its attention to recreating the so-called “greatness” of the old world on American shores. This meant all the expense pushed by the great powers who put national prestige and “reasons of state” ahead of freedom. This new scheme replaced the old ideal of a frugal, parsimonious regime reined in from pursuing its international ambitions.
A century later, in the Washington of today, presidents fall all over themselves to hand out ribbons, decorations, and titles to their favored allies. All the while they are surrounded by the vulgar pomp of the ruling class as it congratulates itself and feasts at lavish junkets funded by the labors of those who actually work for a living.
