Mission Creep: Armistice Day To Veterans Day

The U.S. has always been an incredibly violent society. Founded on genocide of Native people (ongoing to this day) and slavery (ditto), what chance was there for us to not turn Armistice Day into Veterans Day? 

The survivors of the first industrialized war, one where even the wealthy sent their sons to be slaughtered, did not think the price of an entire generation of young men worth it. How many believed they were sending their beloveds off to stop barbarity in its tracks? How many knew that the fight had broken out over competition for the rich colonies of the rapidly failing Ottoman Empire?

As my friend Abby's grandmother said after returning home from organizing against incipient World War I, the whole thing was about Mosul Oil.

As an adult on 9/11, I watched my own country turn into a jingoistic herd of war mad flag wavers. 

Youngsters who remember nothing of that day know this: you dare not be called unpatriotic. Support the troops became a posture that no official hoping to be elected could afford to omit.

The droves of people who sat by while their military invaded Afghanistan were traumatized by seeing the twin towers burn again and again and again, with soon-to-be corpses sailing out of the windows.

Photo of airplane maintenance worker was edited by me to obscure a homophobic slur.

They'd woken up a bit by the war in Iraq. Millions bought the twin lies that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11, and that he was a madman with weapons of mass destruction he aimed to use. But the people who oppose wars when a Republican is Commander-in-Chief came out in droves to object to the impending shock and awe unleashed on civilians in Bagdhad (and, later, Mosul).

By the time Obama was in office, continuing those wars and upping the ante by drone bombing civilians around the globe while his government admittedly "tortured some folks," satisfied Democrats had gone back to reading the New York Times and believing it. 

That satirical newspaper The Onion was consistently more fact-based than legacy media did not seem like a reason to give up their prestige. Educated, liberal, and peering myopically through a tiny peephole deemed to be "world news" was where they were comfortable.

In the same way that big money crept in and hollowed out organizations that had once challenged the powerful, alternative media was infected. Common Dreams, Democracy Now!, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, The Intercept -- arguably once worthy of attention, now worse than useless. Worse because they hide their defense of oligarchs behind platitudes of either wokeness or limited investigations careful not to drill down far enough to see the levers of entrenched power at work. Many people are fooled by this strategy. The old are fooled by it because they value their comfort. And conformity for social animals is usually comfortable. The young are fooled by it because they want to belong and for their efforts to matter. 

What happens to the few who don't get fooled?

My ex once explained to me that historically the Ottoman Empire would send agents out into the provinces, e.g. Greece, where he was born, to find rebellious youth. Preteens or young teens with a penchant for kicking over the established order were evident living as a religious minorities under a repressive imperial government. These young men were lured into distant, luxurious jobs for life in the imperial service. The price: castration. 

A thousand NGOs now employ once idealistic young people to go through the motions of halting climate catastrophe, "saving democracy," or upholding civil rights. Entire careers are built on not achieving the stated goals.

The Ottomans thrashing in their imperial death throes unleashed the first genocide of the 20th century, marching a million Armenians to death in the Syrian desert.

The U.S. thrashing in its imperial death throes already has attempted genocide on its bloody hands. As its ability to control its vassal states and far-flung colonies unravels, it becomes increasingly dangerous (I know, hard to believe). But the nuclear weapons it claims others want to use in a first-strike are gleaming in their bays, and the bombers that could drop them are fanning out around the globe. 

Today, legacy media outlets will glorify the imperial forces, now expanded even to outer space as a "warfighting domain." Politicians will weep, embracing the mangled bodies of warriors. Little children will be paraded before their father's coffins, draped in flags.

And liberals will cling to their comfort here in the heart of the empire, unless of course the final bomb is dropped. Then they will emerge from the radioactive dust like hikabusha before them to testify to the need for an armistice that endures.

#VeteransDay Or Armistice Day -- Glorify War Or Work For Peace?

"Glorify peace, not war: Armistice Day vs. Veterans Day" by Rory Fanning via PopularResistance.org

Repost with light editing of my post from 2018.

It is Armistice Day again, 11/11, the ceasefire that ended the imperial war that ushered in the death and destruction of the 20th century. 

The seeds of violence, industrialized killing, and wars for peace (or to end all wars, or to save the innocents of Belgium, or of your country here ____) were sown.

The activist Bernarda Shahn once told me that her mother said prior to the outbreak of what would be known as World War I, "This whole thing is about nothing more than Mosul Oil."

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

My own grandfather went to the war fresh out of Skowhegan High School. He was a popular, good-looking boy who looked forward to getting right back to Maine to help his family run their ice business. He was injured on the last day before the Armistice, catching shrapnel in his leg and then being gassed as he lay wounded on the field.

It took his family over a year to locate him in a hospital in New York; eventually he returned home, went to college, and married a registered nurse. He served in the Maine House and Senate while running the Skowhegan Ice Company. His leg was saved by fusing the knee so that all his life he was unable to bend it. His lungs and heart were permanently affected too, and he died of heart failure when his only child, my father, was 19.

"Don't believe them when they say the next war is a good war," my father reported his father told him. "There is no such thing."

My own father believed the gung-ho propaganda hyping the "Good War" of his youth -- World War II, which grew directly from the bloody roots of WWI. He believed the recruiters, who told him Korea was a good war, too -- the front line in stopping the march of China and Communism.

Because his father begged him to go to college and not enlist, he didn't make it to Seoul until after his father had died and combat had been ended by a ceasefire that perpetuates the war to this day. My father went to Korea as an occupier and was profoundly affected by the poverty and suffering observable in the wake of a war that had killed more than 4.5 million people.

My dad taught me that wars are a way for the rich to get richer, and the poor to get poorer.

Every year I take the flag off his grave, and that of his father, and that of my brother -- a man who never went to war at all. The cemetery workers who take orders from the VFW don't know who was actually a veteran. I guess they figure that any man between the ages of 18 and death was some kind of a soldier.

Every year now, I share this video of veteran father Will Hopkins addressing his children's teachers about what he would like them teaching (here's a direct link for those of you reading this blog post as an email:  https://youtu.be/wmMTLnU_hsY ).



Most of the veterans I know don't want to be thanked for their service. Like Will Hopkins, they don't want to be used to glorify war on behalf of U.S. corporations who profit. They wish we would give peace a chance.

Armistice Day For The War To End All Wars Now Used To Glorify U.S. Imperial Wars

June 8, 1972: Kim Phúc, age 9, near Trang Bang after being burned by napalm
(photo by Nick Ut / The Associated Press)

November 11, Armistice Day, was long since turned into a "patriotic" show of faux concern for veterans of the U.S.'s many, many wars. Children and teenagers have known nothing else, and they get the message loud and clear that "patriotism" is mandatory or else.

I want to share this moving poem by Veterans for Peace co-founder Doug Rawlings here. I have been pasting it in as the perfect comment on social media rah-rah "patriotism" around Armistice Day.

THE GIRL IN THE PICTURE

            for Phan Thi Kim Phúc

"Whatever you run from becomes your shadow."-- traditional

If you're a namvet, a survivor of sorts,

she'll come for you across the decades

casting a shadow in the dying light of your dreams,

naked and nine, terror in her eyes

Of course you will have to ignore her --

if you wish to survive over the years --

but then your daughters will turn nine

and then your granddaughters nine

As the shadows lengthen.

So, you will have no choice on that one night 

screaming down the Ridge Road, lights off,

under a full moon, she standing in the middle of the road,

still naked and nine, terror in her eyes

Now you must stop to pick her up, to carry her back

home to where she came from, to that gentle

village where the forgiving and the forgiven

gather at high noon. There are no shadows.

                                                          -- Doug Rawlings

The burnt children just keep piling up while the U.S. taxpayer funding it all looks to the flag and pretends not to see what wars are doing to our soul.

from Salon: An Afghan man holds up the body of a child that was killed during clashes between Taliban and Afghan security forces in Kunduz province north of Kabul, Afghanistan, Thursday, Nov. 3, 2016. Authorities say a joint raid by U.S. and Afghan forces targeting senior Taliban commanders killed two American service members and 26 civilians. Afghan officials said they were still investigating the attack and its civilian casualties, some of which may have been caused by the airstrikes. 
(AP Photo/Najim Rahim)]

Afghanistan is the war the corporate party candidates ignored. But those whose babies are burnt by it are well aware of what 13+ years of U.S. military presence has done there. 

Napalm burns did not kill Kim, although they were expected to. She grew up and became a goodwill ambassador for UNESCO. In 1996 she had the opportunity to meet the pilot who coordinated the bombing of her village; she forgave him. 

Here she is with her family.

Kim Phúc survived her trauma but many of the U.S. soldiers who came home with moral injuries from their participation in the war in Vietnam went on to suffer from drug addiction, homelessness and suicide. Many veterans have reported feeling especially horrible when people call them heroes. Even if they were drafted as teenagers, their guilt is overwhelming, and they often have not survived it.

The only winners in war are the profiteers who make money from it. Why do you think corporate media outlets work so hard to make every child in the U.S. "thank" veterans?

Here's what little kids were coloring at my school this week:

The saddest thing is it's likely no one will ever teach them that November 11 was originally celebrated because it marked the end of a horrific war that devastated millions.

The war in Vietnam is now undergoing a similar revision of history as the baby boomers who lived its truth die off. Veterans for Peace has created Full Disclosure as a resource for those interested in knowing the truth. And, if you happen to be in Maine today, you have the opportunity to hear the story of a VFP member, Vietnam vet S. Brian Wilson, and his heroic work for peace in the decades since he lost both legs.

Mandatory Patriotism Is Always A Bad Idea

Mandatory patriotism is never a good idea. This sign I passed today announces that school children in the district where I pay property taxes to support education were not in classes learning to read, write or think mathematically on Tuesday at 1:30pm. Instead, they were being told to thank veterans while listening to feeble-minded platitudes such as “they gave us our freedom.”

A poor substitute for actually studying our Constitution, the Bill of Rights or the Magna Carta.

This year November 10 was the day prior to what used to be Armistice Day, marking the ceasefire negotiated on the 11^th hour of the 11^th day of the 11^th month, ending European combat and, ultimately, World War I. My father’s father was wounded on that day and it was a long time before he made it home again, his health permanently broken. He told his only son, “Don’t believe them when they tell you the next war is a good one. There is no such thing.”

When I reflect on what I studied as a history major and continue to study as a teacher of history, enforced patriotism at the taxpayers’ expense targeting children who have not yet attained the age of reason makes me feel like weeping. It’s nearly always practiced by aggressive, warrior nation-states and it nearly always ends badly.

Shutting down critical thinking by silencing questioners and dissenters by mandatory displays of chauvinism is a recipe for a dumb populace easily enlisted as cannon fodder.

I stayed at a friend’s house last night and she told me of her friend whose son had refused, in around 2006, to stand for the pledge of allegiance in homeroom. He was threatened with suspension eventually and when his mother protested she was told that the mandatory pledge of allegiance was “school policy.” She didn’t think that school policy trumped the 1^st amendment, and she took the case all the way to the superintendent and the school board. They agreed with her, but meanwhile the football coach had told the boy that if he didn’t stand for the pledge he was off the team. The boy knuckled under.

My friend said she was most appalled by the fact that no teachers in this public high school in a university town in the western mountains of Maine stood up for the boy’s rights. Only one teacher told the mother that he agreed the boy had the right not to stand, but said he didn’t dare speak openly about it for fear of losing his job. Everyone else was either mute or vocally agreed with the mandatory pledge of allegiance. By teenagers who had not even reached adulthood. In what sense is such a pledge even valid?

One of the arguments the boy had heard was that he was a hypocrite because he would sing the national anthem before football games. The student tried to argue that pledging allegiance to a nation was quite a different matter from singing a patriot song. I give him an A+ for critical thinking on that one.