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Published on
Monday, November 12, 2018
by
Common Dreams
Armistice Day First
“You can no more win a war than win an earthquake.”
by
John LaForge
In 1954, Armistice Day was replaced with Veterans Day, and so our public
celebration of peace and an end to war became a rally to “support the troops,”
a state and federal day off, and a platform for military recruitment. (AP)
In 1954, Armistice Day was replaced with Veterans Day, and so our public
celebration of peace and an end to war became a rally to “support the troops,”
a state and federal day off, and a platform for military recruitment. (AP)
It gets harder to commemorate World War I, because of time and the public’s
embrace of, or indifference to, a permanent war economy.
About the Great War British novelist H.G. Wells wrote on August 14, 1914, “This
is already the vastest war in history. … For this is now a war for peace. It
aims straight at disarmament. It aims at a settlement that shall stop this sort
of thing for ever. Every soldier who fights against Germany now is a crusader
against war. This, the greatest of all wars, is not just another war -- it is
the last war!”
Optimists said it would be short, “Home by Christmas!” Instead, it was the
worst bloodbath to date with an estimated 16 to 37 million dead. Combat and
other acts of war killed at least seven million civilians and more than 10
million military personnel, while diseases, hunger, pogroms and targeted
genocide killed millions more. Rather than “for ever” stopping war, the
unprecedented wartime profiteering and victor’s imposition of vengeful
reparations set the stage for World War II’s 70 million fatalities, and the
nearly continuous string of money-making legalized murder that has continued
since. One low estimate is that since “war to end all war,” about 100 million
people have died in war zones.
Armistice Day was established in 1919 to revere the peace, and to remember and
commemorate WW I’s the suffering, horror, fear, pain, and loss. In 1918, the
headlines roared: “Armistice Signed, End of the War!” and Armistice Day was
grounded in the near universal revulsion against war’s dreadful costs,
futility, graft, pointlessness and particularly against the corruptions and
cold ambitions of the politicians who prolonged the conflict. Today’s US
government annually spend hundreds of billions on weapons production jobs that
our xenophobic fearmongering and its consequent wars sustain. As long as US
allies keep trading their oil and cash for US guns, even barbaric, medieval
dictatorships like Saudi Arabia (which has beheaded 600 prison convicts since
2014) are coddled, pampered, guided and supplied militarily in its ghastly war
of deliberately induced pandemics and malnutrition against Yemen.
In September 2014, on a visit to Italy’s largest military cemetery, the Pope
warned of a “piecemeal” World War III that may have already begun -- with
dozens of ongoing, undeclared wars, official crimes, state-sponsored fighter
jet and drone attacks, and specialized commando raids the world over. A short
list of current warring includes US combat in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan,
Syria, Yemen, and Somalia; civil wars in Nigeria, Maghreb, Libya, and South
Sudan; and the Mexican drug war. Pope Francis said about all this, “Even today,
after the second failure of another world war, perhaps one can speak of a third
war, one fought piecemeal, with crimes, massacres, and destruction.”
In 1954, Armistice Day was replaced with Veterans Day, and so our public
celebration of peace and an end to war became a rally to “support the troops,”
a state and federal day off, and a platform for military recruitment. Not
everyone was pleased. The novelist Kurt Vonnegut, a World War II veteran and
POW, later wrote, “Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was
sacred. Veterans’ Day is not. So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder.
Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.”
Two critics of World War I come to mind. Montana Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin
said, “You can no more win a war than win an earthquake,” and in his statement
during his Court Martial in 1918, Max Plowman said: “I am resigning my
commission because I no longer believe that war can end war. War is a disorder,
and disorder cannot breed order. Doing evil that good may come is apparent
folly.”
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
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