Upon the 96th anniversary of the Armistice
Every act of creation is an act of destruction, and the United States Congress realized that when they changed Armistice Day to Veterans Day during the height of the "Red Scare" in 1954.
Armistice Day was-- and is-- sacred. A day that commemorates peace. A day shared by all of humanity. A reminder of the folly of war. We are only four years away from the 100th anniversary of the signed agreement that ended World War I, a conflict that could originally be called the Great War. In France and Belgium, where much of the war on the "Western front" was fought, the day is notably still referred to as Armistice Day.
Veterans Day, rather, is a dishonor to the almost 18 million humans that lost their lives in the Great War and the 23 million more that were maimed or wounded. They gave their lives, and the day that ended the fighting is now a day in the United States that is covered with syrup. It's a day for sloganeering and empty or even cross-purposed sentiment. A day for fake idolizing intended to mask the uneven sacrifices that families have made. It's a day designed to choke political dissent, a day to promote the nationalism, chauvinism, and totalitarianism that caused the Great War. I won't celebrate it.
Veterans Day is not a day for heroes. It's a day for celebrating a military culture and the American empire, neither of which is heroic. Our freedoms are in danger today, but not from threats that lie outside our borders. They're threatened by these people that wrap themselves in the flag, hysterical citizens that wish to dissuade intelligent critique of conflict and promote deference to power, the type of people that gave us Veterans Day. The heroes of unheroic wars are not the people that fight the war. Those men and women are victims, dead mice to be gnawed at by the proverbial cat that is the state-corporate complex. Real heroes are the men and women that oppose unheroic wars.
posted by CM @ 4:22 PM
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