Remember millions of Americans, who were trained to kill, wound up falling in love the charming people they were sent overseas to kill. Unfortunately, a lot of us had the experience of getting to know the poor children of designated enemies or suspected enemies and yet are still marching on holidays.
It has been more than six decades since America fought a defensive war.
Americans have permitted our now permanent-war military establishment
and the Military Industrial Financial Complex to turn all national
holidays into celebrations hailing all U.S. wars, past and present.
Americans don't need to follow what conglomerate commercial war
supporting TV announcers report as wonderful.
Read
Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, Eugene Debs, General Smedley Butler,
Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Howard Zinn, and the voices of today's
dissenters who are wise to the homicide for lies and money that has be
going down for the last sixty-five years.
Albert Einstein thought soldiers, through their ignorance, are victims of war. Einstein wrote:
"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my
contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the
spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should
be done away with at once.
"Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country
stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war
is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an
action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is
nothing but an act of murder."
Einstein founded an international campaign for universal conscientious objection.
And
an ever-increasing percentage of these veterans of undeclared wars in
Korea, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Dominican Republic, Panama, Grenada,
Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq now realize they were lied to in order to
gain their participation in crimes against humanity.
Can anyone imagine how veterans, who are ashamed of having being taken
in by lies to willingly go and cause loss of life in nations that never
attacked the United States, feel on Veterans Day?
- especially those of us who actually have memories of firing into the
bodies of our brothers and sisters overseas in warfare programed within a
nefarious and inhumanely false foreign policy?
No! Only those of us who feel anguish for the dead and maimed civilians,
the "enemy" soldiers defending their country from our invasion more
than and our own misled buddies can imagine such feelings of misery and
betrayal.
For
us, many of whom are members of anti-war and anti-U.S. foreign policy
lies organizations like Veterans For Peace, Veteran's Day is a bitter
experience of listening to patriotic speeches of politicians, anchors
and commentators, who have never seen combat, waxing on about ultimate
sacrifice for our freedoms, aiming their words at the young and
impressionable, eager to prove themselves and follow in our footsteps in
far-away exotic lands, unaware of the continuing treasonous deception.
Veterans experience a hell of emotions different fom those expressed
in speeches of praise for veterans of all America's wars, without regard
to the justness of any of these wars. How about the veteran who killed
an Iraqi, maybe a child, in what Obama rightly called a "dumb war" - a
veteran who has seen dead Afghani civilians after an air-strike. Vets
don't need a day! We already have Memorial Day. Vets want a War Victims' Day!
How can any knowledgeable veteran march in parades that in reality are
like an 'Honor Warriors of Immoral and Illegal Wars Day', 'Honor the
Pentagon Day', 'Honor the CIA-Led Assassins' day', 'Honor Lying
Presidents Day,' 'Honor War-Mongering Media Day' 'Honor Clergy Who
Blessed War Day'?
Post
World War II veterans were veterans of what exactly? Veterans of blind
service to those who invest in and promote wars for profit? Of an
undeclared war on a poor country? Turn Veterans Day into 'Veterans Mourn
Those They Killed Day'! This should be the attitude of peace activists
on Veterans' Day.
Read Noam Chomsky's The Year 501 - the Conquest Continues.
Enough! Away with our hypocrisy and shaming ourselves in embarrassment,
unable to confront ignorance, fear and manipulation by media for the
amoral and homicidal bankers "who own the government as you and I know" said FDR in confidence.
Veteran! Denounce your veteranship if you know you 'served' killing
innocent people in a dishonorable, illegal, undeclared war. Be
determined to know, to learn, how you were duped, tricked, hyped into
'service' in dishonorable wars costing the lives of millions of innocent
human beings.
Speaking out against the glorifying of war intention of Pentagon-fed corporate media programing on Veterans Day and for prosecution of such deceitful war propaganda, should come easy for veterans who have had the courage to brave death in the confusion of unjustified imperialist wars.
No! No Veterans' Day for me. Instead, a day for veterans to mourn
participation in killing, maiming and damage done invading the lands and
lives of others and call for these crimes to be prosecuted.
On Veterans Day, remember the informed and strong willed who cried "Hell
no, I won't go!" Be conscious of our own 'Damn, I shouldn't have gone!'
regret. Those that refused to go, refused to murder poor people and
shame America for all posterity.
Veterans who are educated to the ways of the world see an official
Victims of War Day or War Victims Day coming in a future peaceful and
intelligent world. Such a day would of course be have to include the
warriors of all sides as well as their victims.
A day for veterans, include those that followed criminal orders. Forget it! Better a 'VETERANS MOURN KILLING DAY!'
Come on, Americans, especially fellow veterans! It's normal to mourn any
death isn't it? We can have a day to mourn violent death instead of
praising those who brought it overseas in our name.
Even better than mourning or parading mistakenly is speaking out and demanding laws be enforced and US wars be prosecuted.
KOREA
Those who are veterans of the horrific loss of life that was the Korean
'police action' against communism can in their maturity look at the
reality of now non-communist Russia and two dozen other former communist
nations; at Communist China and Communist Vietnam which are
economically allied and interwoven within the fabric of the consumer
culture of the U.S. - do they not wonder at the sacrifice of millions of
lives in Korea for a truce, and three times that Vietnam for a defeat? -
some millions of people that could be alive today.
Those fallen veteran buddies, like six bunkmates buried in North Korea,
who never made it to parade or watch on either of these great holidays
for armed forces recruitment, and who would be pissed if someone tried
to 'honor' their being tricked into dying trying to kill Koreans in
Korea.
Those veterans who would be pissed if someone tried to 'honor' their being tricked into dying trying to kill Koreans in Korea.
Before they died, they knew they had been suckered. All six did not want
to kill Koreans, even go to Korea, which they knew nothing about.
Nothing about our dictatorship in the South's massacre of tens of
thousands of men, women and even their children during the years before
the Koreans of their northern government swept the South, welcomed by
many, the southern government conscripts deserting or refusing to fight.
My six buddies would understand why today there is a unrelentingly
severe military dictatorship in the northern part of Korea, knowing what
we did in both northern Korea and southern Korea, flattening almost
every city, town and village from the air, threatening to drop the
Atomic bomb on Koreans still fighting us, more than million of them
dying north of the line dividing the Korea nation, and all this
happening after Korea had already been unified in six quick weeks.
Would that my six bunk-mates could know of Communist, now capitalist,
China today and the nearly peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Know it was not necessary for them and two and a half million Koreans to
die for a political Cold War confrontation with a USSR that would cease
to exist anyway.
For them and others to have died fighting millions of so called
communists in small countries that were former Japanese or French
colonies is sad. That my buddies and many millions of good people could
be alive today but for successful lies spread in media. Were they alive,
I would tell them of how Korea was divided by the U.S. and how, after
the First World War,
President Wilson officially recognized the Japanese claim that Korea was Japanese territory by the right of conquest.
Seems that when capitalism succeeded to block the humanistic reforms of
socialism, it begat communist revolution, and when capitalism
restructured colonial slavery to neocolonialism it begat terrorism - all
of which, capitalism included, will not exist eternally in their
present forms. Veterans, who have seen the human face of the 'enemy'
know best about the phony pretentious of war.
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