The Chris Moeller Archives

Remembering the Armistice

We've reached another somber Armistice Day. Ninety-one years after the end of World War I, the United States military now engages itself not in one, but two wars simultaneously-- one for Iraq's oil, and one for Afghanistan's oil pipeline, both about extending America's capitalist and imperialist reach.

Our leaders tell us that the wars are about liberating people, but an estimated 128,000 to one million Iraqis are now dead, not liberated, just as there were two and a half million people dead from our excursion into Vietnam a generation ago, and four and a half million dead before that in Korea. In Afghanistan, we're "officially" in search of a Saudi nationalist hiding in the mountains, yet our strategy strangely is to bomb the Afghanis that live in the cities. No, our true mission there is to install and support the dictatorship that will most adequately protect the pipeline.

All but one of our World War I veterans is now dead, but our servicemen and women continue to be sold a phony bill of goods. The sad fact of the matter is that their deaths in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan have all been for naught. Americans have not been made safer. Our national interests have not been in jeopardy in any of these conflicts. The dead have been robbed by their government in the most heinous way imaginable-- their lives were taken under the false pretense of spreading and insuring liberty. In fact, the mostly-poor die in American-led conflicts so that rich men can stay rich.

The advocates-- the proverbial cranks and shafts-- of the war machine surely espouse an appreciation for the unequal sacrifice of our military veterans. They engrave their names on shiny walls, praise their courage on bumper stickers, and even believe perhaps that the futility of one person's death in war will be made somehow less by sending a next generation of soldiers into bloody conflict-- as if throwing one corpse upon another will help justify having thrown the first.

Armistice Day was originally established as holiday because our grandparents and great-grandparents were so universally grateful that World War I (and it was still simply "The Great War" at that time) had come to an end. There was recognition of that particular conflict as the epitome of war's fruitlessness. The Kaiser had been deemed evil and the war justified, but now 10 million soldiers were dead in the mud in France, millions more shell shocked, gassed, and crippled, and 40 million civilians joining them in graves across Europe. Recognizing the Armistice was meant to be an annual reminder of war's pain and suffering, an occasion to denounce war, not one to wave nationalist flags, to parade around in mothballed uniforms celebrating the "glory" of war, to make wretched speeches flooded in hypocrisy, or worst of all, to make mockery of our decent impulse to honor our veterans.

posted by CM @ 2:13 PM