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armistice day
On Armistice Day, Veterans Call for an Armistice in Gaza and Beyond
One hundred and six years after the end of World War I, another such deadly concoction is brewing. War is permanent. Genocide is on TV. A desperate empire is pushing human civilization toward a tragic end.
Nov 11, 2024
November 11, declared Armistice Day at the end of World War I, is celebrated in the U.S. as Veterans Day. Understanding why requires us to recall World War I and its aftermath.
World War I was an international conflict, from 1914-18, that embroiled most of the nations of Europe, along with Russia, the United States, the Middle East, and other regions. The war pitted the “Central Powers”—mainly Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey—against the “Allies”—mainly France, Great Britain, Russia, Italy, and (from 1917) the United States. The war was unprecedented in the slaughter, carnage, and destruction it caused. Over 15 million people were killed—both soldiers and civilians, and over 25 million were wounded.
The First World War ended in November 1918 when an armistice was declared at the “11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month,” marking a moment of hope and the promise of peace. It was also a moment of great sadness and a sense of great tragedy. Many people prayed this would be “the war to end all wars,” and that Armistice Day would serve as an eternal warning never to repeat the past. But then came World War II.
“When U.S. bombs stop dropping on Palestinian children, the genocide will end.”
After the end of World War II and the Korean War cease-fire, in 1954 veterans’ organizations pushed the U.S. Congress to switch the holiday’s name to Veterans Day, a day to honor those who fight in war. Could it be that—having emerged from World War II unscathed and more powerful than ever, the United States was not ready to abandon militarism? Whatever the intention, the holiday’s meaning was turned on its head—a day for war instead of a day for peace.
The national organization Veterans For Peace has been working to Reclaim Armistice Day as a day that is dedicated to ending war once and for all. Veterans lead Armistice Day activities around the country, many incorporating the ringing of bells at the “11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.” Now the veterans group is also calling for peace in the Middle East.
The looming threats of climate catastrophe and nuclear annihilation have been overshadowed this year by Israel’s horrific ongoing genocide of Palestinian civilians in Gaza—up to 50,000 killed, nearly 70% of whom are women and children. For 13 months straight, unspeakable atrocities have filled our screens and haunted our consciences. We can see clearly that the U.S. government is complicit in Israel’s merciless ethnic cleansing. The bombs that Israel drops on Palestinian children are made in the USA and delivered by the U.S. government. U.S.-backed Israeli wars have now expanded to Palestine’s West Bank, to Lebanon, and to Iran, risking a wider war, possibly even a global war that could “go nuclear.”
According to Wikipedia: Scholars trying to understand the cause of World War I “look at political, territorial, and economic competition; militarism, a complex web of alliances and alignments; imperialism, the growth of nationalism; and the power vacuum created by the decline of the Ottoman Empire.” One hundred and six years after the end of World War I, another such deadly concoction is brewing. War is permanent. Genocide is on TV. A desperate empire is pushing human civilization toward a tragic end.
No More U.S. Bombs To Israel
This year, Veterans For Peace is calling for an Armistice—a permanent cease-fire in Palestine, Lebanon, and throughout the Middle East, and for an end to U.S. arms shipments to Israel.
“When U.S. bombs stop dropping on Palestinian children, the genocide will end,” said VFP Vice President Joshua Shurley.
The 39-year-old veterans’ organization, with chapters in over 100 US cities, recently issued a statement in support of Israeli and U.S. soldiers who refuse to take part genocide, illegal wars, and war crimes.
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Let’s Restore Armistice Day
The original November 11 embodied a resolve for world peace.
Nov 10, 2023
November 11—at the “11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month”—marks 105 years since the World War 1 armistice, which ended the nightmare of the deadliest war in history until then. The brutality of that first industrial war robbed 20 million soldiers and civilians of life and wounded another 20 million. In 1926 the U.S. Congress declared November 11 as Armistice Day: a legal holiday “to commemorate with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations.” Subsequently, President Calvin Coolidge issued a proclamation “inviting the people of the United States to observe the day in schools and churches with appropriate ceremonies of friendly relations with all other peoples.”
Armistice Day embodied a resolve for world peace.
All public ideals of peace with all other peoples were discarded on June 1, 1954, when the U.S. government renamed Armistice Day as Veterans Day. This erasure of Armistice Day tragically matched our country’s history of militarism after World War II: first bombing North Korea nearly out of existence and metastasizing into a pathological military-industrial-government complex that claims the lion’s share of our discretionary federal taxes and steals from our government’s social investments in health, education, housing, and welfare.
Undoubtedly, the voices of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers and vets turned war resisters will emerge in time in bitter protest against that war.
Former Marine Corps officer Camillo Mac Bica interprets the rebranding of Armistice day to Veterans Day as enabling militarists and war profiteers “to celebrate and promote militarism… misrepresent war members of the military as heroes, and encourage the enlistment of cannon fodder for future war for profit.” Many thousands of soldiers and veterans of major U.S. wars of the 20th and 21st centuries, including Mac Bica, have turned against war and revived the intent of Armistice Day: “friendly relations with all other peoples.”
Veterans For Peace was founded in 1985 by 10 U.S. veterans in response to the global nuclear arms race and U.S. military interventions in Central America.
In their words, it “is an organization of former soldiers and allies who know too well the costs of war—the obvious, visible wounds; the unseen wounds that curse us and our families for generations and the cost to society of maintaining a military larger than the next ten nations combined. Bitter experience taught us that war is insanity and suffering.”
Imagine (in the spirit of John Lennon) if every school celebrated at least one day of peacemaking for all 5th graders on International Peace Day September 21, as does the Maine Endwell School District with partners Veterans for Peace and the local historical society. The day is replete with music, with children playing instruments and making posters, a magician, and beekeepers—all with themes of peace—and interviews with children regarding what peace means to them.
Veterans for Peace’s position on the current war in Ukraine embodies their lived ideals: “It is time to drop the weapons and embrace diplomacy and peace. For the people of Ukraine, the people of Russia, the people of Europe, the United States and China. For the children, for the civilians, for the soldiers, for all living things: We demand Diplomacy, Not War. We demand Peace in Ukraine.”
I am reminded, as I write this piece, of Erich Maria Remarque who enlisted at age 19 in the World War I German army. Some 10 years after the war’s end, he published his first (and what some consider the greatest) anti-war novel, All Quiet on the Western Front. Remarque’s 19-year-old soldier protagonist acutely observes the corrupt dynamics of war: “I see how peoples are set against each other... foolishly, innocently, obediently slaying each other… While they [the promoters and boosters] continued to talk and write, we saw the wounded and dying…The wrong people do the fighting.”
In perhaps the most incisive moment of Remarque’s novel, a young German soldier gazes upon a young French soldier he has killed and ponders their common humanity, with words that undercut the war’s hard-bitten hatred and national chauvinism. “Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony.”
Undoubtedly, the voices of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers and vets turned war resisters will emerge in time in bitter protest against that war.
We remember soldiers who have died in U.S. wars on Memorial Day and soldiers who have served in the U.S. military, especially those maimed, injured, and broken by the moral injury of war, on Veterans Day.
Why not, then, RESTORE Armistice Day with its resolve for “friendly relations with all other peoples” for the sake of world peace, if we are to survive.
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An Armistice Day Legacy
Nov 11, 2007
Elly and Bob Nagler grew up an ocean apart but their commitment to peace has strengthened them throughout their 50+ years of marriage. Neither of them stands out particularly in physical appearance. In fact, you might even miss seeing them at local peace vigils, but they're there-every week, twice a week-since October 2002 before the war in Iraq began. And there's no mistaking their devotion to the cause of peace and the depth from which it comes in all that they do and say. It began through their fathers who both fought in World War I.
Elly Nagler's father was a Bavarian soldier and a French prisoner of war. He had hopes of becoming a priest but the war dashed that ambition.
"He had blood on his hands," said Elly, "and didn't feel he could be a priest." Instead, he became a writer, an organizer and eventually secretary for the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR), a non-governmental inter-faith organization founded in 1919 in London as a response to World War I. IFOR was the first organization of its kind in the world to be committed to peaceful nonviolence in favor of healing and reconciliation.
According to its Web site (www.ifor.org), "the founders of IFOR formulated a vision of the human community based upon the belief that love in action has the power to transform unjust political, social and economic structures."
Elly's father established a branch office for IFOR in Vienna and operated from there until 1938 when Hitler took over Bavaria; then the office had to close. After the war he re-established IFOR. Today IFOR flourishes with a presence in more than 40 countries.
Elly's sister, Hildegard Goss-Mayr, later took over her father's work at IFOR and became an international figure. A prolific writer and speaker, the Vatican asked Hildegard for her input on its important encyclical, Pacem en Terris (Peace on Earth), published in 1963. She has also conducted training programs on nonviolence in Latin America, Africa and Asia and has served as a consultant to leaders like Cory Aquino of the Philippines. As a result of her work, Hildegard was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times.
In comparison to her father and her sister, Elly doesn't consider herself a peace activist, but rather an "agitator for change."
"I'm just a human being," said Elly, the mother of four daughters and a son. "We should have a responsibility for each other and do all we can to make the world a better place." She thinks that the only way to settle conflict is through nonviolence and living up to our possibilities.
Actually, Elly is no slouch when it comes to peace activism. In 1947 she joined the Quaker youth work camp movement in Austria, Sweden, Mexico and El Salvador to help rebuild houses in villages and to provide assistance in refugee camps that harbored Russians, Germans and Ukrainians.
"I lost half of my heart in El Salvador," said Elly. It's probably one of the reasons the Naglers were so active in the Sanctuary movement of the mid-1980s when they helped harbor a Salvadoran family.
Bob Nagler grew up in Iowa City, the son of a famous hydraulics engineer who consulted on the Hoover Dam and several Mississippi River projects. When he returned from World War I, he vowed always to make the world a better place through his work as well as through his commitment as a peace activist for the Methodist church. He wanted to rid the world of war and to promote nonviolence as a peaceful solution.
In 1933 Bob attended the Epworth League's summer youth camp on Clear Lake, Iowa, a part of the Southern Methodists' religious education program. The theme that year focused on peace and the Oxford Pledge. The children learned that the pledge was derived from the world's first peace movement started in England during the late 1920s as a response to the disastrous global conflict of 1914-1918. Students at Oxford University had taken a pledge that they would "not fight for king and country" as their fathers had in World War I where 40 million people died, half of them civilians.
Bob was among half of the 200 kids at the camp who signed the peace pledge. Part of the reason the pledge has "stuck with him" to this day was because his father died less than three months later, leaving ten-year-old Bob, his mother and two younger siblings.
"My father was my hero," said Bob who sought to remember him by making the Oxford pledge his father's legacy to him. Eventually Bob became a Quaker. His father had worked with them and he knew they lived lives of peace and nonviolence. Besides, they helped other people in need, like his own family.
In 1943, while in the middle of his junior year of college, Bob was drafted into the Army. However, because of his Conscientious Objector status, he was assigned to a Civilian Public Service base camp in North Dakota under the direction of the Quakers. He later volunteered for a starvation experiment in Minnesota and an infectious hepatitis project in Philadelphia, where he became a human "guinea pig" and contracted hepatitis. His work with the Army led him to a career in science and he eventually became a chemistry professor and helped to start a chemistry program at Western Michigan University.
During his tenure at the university, Bob participated in a USAID science training program in Nigeria for a couple of years, which he found to be "the most fulfilling thing I ever did." He worked with the top five percent of all students there.
During the Vietnam War, Bob advised WMU students on Conscientious Objector status and participated in peace demonstrations. Of course, he was under F.B.I. observation for his activities, but he was undeterred. Bob has also worked with the local and national environmental councils and with the Physicians for Social Responsibility. Today, he writes monthly letters to his Republican congressman who always votes with the president. Nevertheless, Bob continues to convey his concerns about the war in Iraq and about science, particularly those issues involving the environment and stem cell research. What keeps the Naglers going after all these years? That's easy, they say: the consistency of their actions for peace and their concern for the world.
"You can make an impact on the world with your persistence in doing what you think is right," said Bob. "It is symbolic of your conviction."
Bob dreams that the United Nations will evolve into the meaningful peace organization it was meant to be.
"I'm not discouraged or encouraged about the world's situation," he said pointing out that there are now hundreds of organizations all over the world working for peace, educating people and publishing books on peace.
"Some of this will rub off. Peace activists are responding to those who make war more readily. They know that violence escalates itself and they want to stop it. They realize that other people have rights and opinions and that peace is a constructive activity."
"You can never give up on hope," said Elly, who has seen the total devastation of cities in her youth-twice-through two world wars.
"But we Americans and Europeans need to come off of our superiority complex," said Elly. "We need to realize that human beings have value. We take it for granted that total inequality exists because we don't know how to go about making the world where we see people as our equals. This will take much education."
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