Over one hundred years ago the world celebrated peace as a universal principle. The first World War had just ended and nations mourning their dead collectively called for an end to all wars. Armistice Day was born and was designated as “a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be thereafter celebrated.”
After World War II, the U.S. Congress decided to rebrand November 11 as Veterans Day. Honoring the warrior quickly morphed into honoring the military and glorifying war. Armistice Day was flipped from a day for peace into a day for displays of militarism.
Veterans For Peace has taken the lead in lifting up the original intention of November 11th – as a day for peace. As veterans we know that a day that celebrates peace, not war, is the best way to honor the sacrifices of veterans. We want generations after us to never know the destruction war has wrought on people and the earth.
Veterans For Peace has been celebrating Armistice Day almost since the organization’s inception, with a few chapters doing yearly events. Since 2008, with the passing of an official Veterans For Peace resolution, it became a VFP national effort. Each year, chapters across the country “Reclaim Armistice Day” by pushing the celebration of peace into the national conversation on Veterans Day.
Veterans For Peace is calling on everyone to stand up for peace this Armistice Day. More than ever, the world faces a critical moment. Tensions are heightened around the world and the U.S. is engaged militarily in multiple countries, without an end in sight. Here at home we have seen the increasing militarization of our police forces and brutal crackdowns on dissent and people’s uprisings against state power. We must press our government to end reckless military interventions that endanger the entire world. We must build a culture of peace.
Wishful thinking…Amerikkkan POLITICIANS just love to send Young Soldiers to fight WARS and be killed…
Been so for the last 75 Years and it will NOT change !!
Discover within the Courage to Dare and Resist Violence
So, it’s soon to be Armistice Day this 11-11-16. This is also called Remembrance Day, since it’s the day WWI ended with an armistice signed on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month 1918 and our forebears had the foresight to name it thusly so we do not forget and make the same mistake of world war again. This was called ‘The War to End All Wars’ because it was so horrific and spurious that a future war of this magnitude would seemingly be impossibly insane to contemplate or repeat. It was so repulsive and horrific that dozens of nations decided to outlaw war forever by signing an agreement to finally end the scourge of war. Endorsed in 1928 and still on the books, it’s called the Kellogg-Briand Pact which is still legally binding. It was signed into law by the US Senate by a vote of 85-1.
I presume since most of you support da troopers that you support the evil that they do? So you are by definition an accomplice in war crimes and crimes against humanity. Also by definition ‘Peace is the normal state of a nation’, ergo perpetual war is not only abnormal it is psychotic and actually used as faux state to keep us mooing and bleating along in harmony, goose-stepping down a tunnel that will be our end.
So much for the hope that war would be a thing of the past and that humanity learned its lesson for within the next generation we suffered a war far worse. It was then dissolved in 1954 when this noble aspiration became a americanized federal holiday to honor american vets. Now we have 23 holidays ‘honoring’ militarism. Do you folks see a pattern here? Why do you want to become Sparta or Germany circa 1938? Illegal exported aggressive violence is not a defense of das fatherland or der homeland. It is however the epitome of odium. This cycle is tightly wound and cutting off the blood flow to our hearts, minds and souls.
Off to terrorize by vicious onslaught societies all over the world is not defensive protection of american shores but simply a pretext to acquire by force, trade routes, contracts and acquisition of resources for corporate self-interests and domination. This is what the founding fathers warned us about and advised us not to do. James Madison: 1) “If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”
2)”No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
3)”Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.”
This perpetual war we are in now is not a war, but we are at war with a tactic that we’ve been using for centuries and now we’re at war with ourselves, so to speak. We never rectify, but instead turn our backs, wash our hands and then do it again somewhere else for the same reasons with the same consequences expecting different results but never ever achieving them. Do know what that is called by Einstein?
This conflict really has no beginning, no ending, but with an open end that leads to the abyss. More $ is tossed into American militarism than the rest of the world does combined and this is ‘defense’? No this is for aggressive offense which was banned at Nuremburg but we seem to above the law, beyond any accountability or responsibility, or principle wherever we do it even when proven it was a crime. This is for profit, for this is simply a racket inflicted on us all for those who reap a whirl land that we can ill afford.
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, and the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” Dwight Eisenhower
The Great War as it was called, to make the world safe from, I mean safe for diluted democracy or more honestly for the plutocracy was simply another war for economic dominance between two conflicting sides. From this insidious war begot WW2, and then morphing into the cold war to vomit forthwith into our present ‘war’ of terror, using terrorism on those who dare not to succumb to our invasive hectoring, addiction, and ego. Always an enemy to fear, fight and conquer from the genocide and ethnic cleansing of 330+ Indian tribes to our present slaughter we are committing around the world which couldn’t be done without amoral troops and idiotic blind-support at home shopping at wal-mart, generally happily oblivious to the horror we commit.
I understand the concept (but personally disagree with) that nations or empires need to defend their borders as in our case, from the NSA, from the FBI invented and funded plants, retaliation from CIA terror attacks on allies, civilians, blow-back from drone terrorism inflicted on grandmothers, pregnant women, children medics, american citizens, or from southern neighbors coming back to their land that was stolen by us, and of course the most abused victim of all; the truth.
Yet our gallant and enthusiastic storm troopers are used for aggressive warfare all over the world and it is not just immoral it is illegal. The ‘war on terror’, ‘support the troops’, ‘navy, a force of good’, ‘God bless america’ and the other meaningless, silly slogans are designed to compel one and all to fall in line in quiet obedience and with goose-stepping compliance is the prodding for dumbed down sheelpe, not empathetic critical thinkers. Because we must support the troops, does this mean that we must support the policies that send our kids to kill and die in lands not our own, or what they do over there?
Thank you Marine General Butler who wrote the greatest essay concerning this in his: “War is a Racket.” Thank you conscientious objectors, since you have the courage and brains to be the real heroes of peace. Arguably attributed to Thomas Jefferson; “Dissent is the highest form of Patriotism.” For the veterans, by becoming unthinking assassinations, gangsters of capitalism, unethical war ho’s, hired guns, are not hired so much for your nation’s defense but for self-serving, greedy, oligarchic owners who possess stock in the ‘industrial-military-complex’.
So who should truly, sincerely thank the vets and the nation for this? Should the victim’s thank you? From the graves of over 1 million Iraqis should a great bellow of appreciation come forth with ghostly haunted cries and screams? From the orphanages and hospitals should the children and wounded write letters of thanks? Should the lame and disabled hobble or limp to the nearest us military base to grovel and kiss your combat boots? Should they pay for the bullets, missiles, depleted uranium shells, drones and bombs?
What of the Afghans, Yemenis, Pakistanis, Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, and so many more? How many were slaughtered and for what? For a filthy polluted false flag, for a lie, for a filthy racket? No flag can ever fly higher than the pile of bones from its victims though it does try to and the red, white, and blue is really up there climbing past the stratosphere.
Where is the honor in dishonorable acts? Who are the real heroes? Heroes are those who save lives not those who take them. Heroes are those people who help people, who assist with a helping hand, a kind word, a teacher, a nurse, a humanitarian. Heroes do not pick up guns and kill at command for profit and gain over at their neighbor’s home giggling in glee. Support the troops? Is this an implication to ‘basically’; support the team? What if the ‘team’ is committing acts that are illegal and immoral violating virtually everything the team members were taught as children at home, at church and at school to honor as probity, as principles and civic values? And after we do our carnage, we then walk away without a backward glance, patting ourselves on the shoulders pretending our horrifying terrorism was a good deed. And you expect any civil human being with a conscience to honor this dishonor, to thank a vet? Are you that sociopathic?
If I can convince one kid not to join the military, then I have accomplished much. Thank a vet for becoming a gangsta’ of capitalism, a war ho, becoming antichristian by joining a force that has mutated into the greatest terrorist criminal organization the world has ever known, that is nefarious, so no, I will not give thanks for debauchery? Thank a vet for being a killing machine for the 1%? Thank a vet for being un-american by committing un-american acts? I’m not grateful, just a bit more honest and objective, far less nationalistic and a bit more empathetic to your victims. I simply prefer to follow the messages of the prince of peace who teaches one to love ones enemy and commands us not to kill, to put down the sword rather than to blindly, without conscience, follow the god of war like stupid lemmings to the butchery of others. Thank a vet? For making us all less free, less safe by killing human beings who are no threat to us, destroying buildings, towns, cities, ancient civilizations, while militarily occupying other lands? This noxious nationalistic addiction to manic militarism and phony paux patriotism is killing this society’s sullied soul. There’d be no war today-If mothers all would say: “I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier.” Because you know our leaders would never fight. The rich profit and the poor die…That is nothing to be thankful about.. To become a solder is not just immoral, it is amoral because then your become a paid ho’ for war, absolved of accountability by agreeing to become unquestioning, obeying cannon fodder that will one day regret to the point of suicide.
“There’d be no war today-If mothers all would say: “I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier.” Because you know our leaders would never fight. The rich profit and the poor die…That is nothing to be thankful about it is rather something to mourn, condemn, shun and then never do again… Thank a vet? No thanks.
Sincerely, peacefully, hopefully
On June 4, 1926, Congress passed a resolution that the “recurring anniversary of [November 11, 1918] should be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations” and that the president should issue an annual proclamation calling for the observance of Armistice Day. By that time, 27 state legislatures had made November 11 a legal holiday. An act approved May 13, 1938 made November 11 a legal Federal holiday, “dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be hereafter celebrated and known as ‘Armistice Day.’” In actuality, there are no U.S. national holidays because the states retain the right to designate their own, and the government can only designate holidays for federal employees and for the District of Columbia. In practice, however, states almost always follow the federal lead.