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veterans 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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Trump Issues Sinister Threat to 'Root Out' Leftists If Elected in 2024
The former president's description of leftists as "vermin" was right "out of the Nazi playbook," wrote one observer.
Nov 12, 2023
Former U.S. President Donald Trump pledged during a Veterans Day speech on Saturday to "root out" those he described as "radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country" if he's elected in 2024, an openly fascistic threat that drew comparisons to Nazi rhetoric.
"We are a failing nation. We are a nation in serious decline," Trump, the current Republican presidential front-runner, told the crowd gathered in Claremont, New Hampshire. "2024 is our final battle."
The former president vowed to target communists and Marxists—ideological groups that he described as "radical left lunatics"—and "rout the fake news media until they become real."
"The real threat is not from the radical right. The real threat is from the radical left, and it's growing every day—every single day," Trump claimed. "The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within."
David DeWitt, editor-in-chief of the Ohio Capital Journal, characterized Trump's remarks as "rhetoric literally out of the Nazi playbook" and joined others in criticizing The New York Times for initially headlining its coverage of the speech, "Trump Takes Veterans Day Speech in a Very Different Direction."
The former president also said Saturday that his administration would launch the "largest domestic deportation operation in American history," institute "strong and ideological screenings for all immigrants," revive the Muslim ban, further slash taxes, gut regulations, and prioritize the approval of fossil fuel pipelines.
Trump's speech heightened alarm over his authoritarian intentions should he win another term in the White House four years after attempting to overturn the election that removed him from power. The former president is currently facing more than 90 felony charges, many of them stemming from his election subversion efforts and the January 6, 2021 insurrection that he provoked.
The Washington Postreported earlier this month that Trump and his allies "have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations."
"In public, Trump has vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to 'go after' President [Joe] Biden and his family. The former president has frequently made corruption accusations against them that are not supported by available evidence," the Post noted. "To facilitate Trump's ability to direct Justice Department actions, his associates have been drafting plans to dispense with 50 years of policy and practice intended to shield criminal prosecutions from political considerations. Critics have called such ideas dangerous and unconstitutional."
Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch argued the scheme "would be, in essence, the military coup that [Trump] wasn't quite able to pull off on January 6, 2021."
Pointing to a recent survey that showed Trump leading incumbent Biden—who is running for reelection—in key battleground states, Bunch warned that "America is on the brink of installing a strongman in the White Housewhose team has been surprisingly open about their plans for an autocratic, 'Red Caesar' rule that would undo constitutional governance."
In response to Trump's threat to "root out" leftists, Bunch wrote on social media, "Looks like someone picked up the book of Hitler speeches on his nightstand recently."
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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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