Memorial Weekend (in the USA) has come around once again. Memorial Day itself will be on Monday, 27 May.I can, in good conscience, do no other but post the following, with which I wholeheartedly agree.
In 1974, Howard Zinn was invited by Tom Winship, editor of the Boston Globe, who had been bold enough in 1971 to print part of the top secret Pentagon Papers on the history of the Vietnam War, to write a bi-weekly column for the op-ed page of the newspaper. He did that for about a year and a half. The column below appeared June 2, 1976, in connection with that year's Memorial Day. After it appeared, Zinn's column was cancelled.
Memorial Day will be celebrated as usual, by high-speed collisions of automobiles and bodies strewn on highways and the sound of ambulance sirens throughout the land.
It will also be celebrated by the display of flags, the sound of bugles and drums, by parades and speeches and unthinking applause.
It will be celebrated by giant corporations, which make guns, bombs, fighter planes, aircraft carriers and an endless assortment of military junk and which await the $100 billion in contracts to be approved soon by Congress and the President.
There was a young woman in New Hampshire who refused to allow her husband, killed in Vietnam, to be given a military burial. She rejected the hollow ceremony ordered by those who sent him and 50,000 others to their deaths. Her courage should be cherished on Memorial Day. There were the B52 pilots who refused to fly those last vicious raids of Nixon's and Kissinger's war. Have any of the great universities, so quick to give honorary degrees to God-knows-whom, thought to honor those men at this Commencement time, on this Memorial Day?
No politician who voted funds for war, no business contractor for the military, no general who ordered young men into battle, no FBI man who spied on anti-war activities, should be invited to public ceremonies on this sacred day. Let the dead of past wars he honored. Let those who live pledge themselves never to embark on mass slaughter again.
4 comments:
It seems like everyone lives in some kind of fugue state, T. Out here on the Edge, every soldier ever killed on any 'battlefield' is given a memorial garden or a statue and war is celebrated incessantly (our "freedoms" what about "theirs"? - oh right, brown people don't deserve it).
Cadets pour out of high school signing up (Cadets being a feeder tube for boys sent off to die or be maimed on the deserts of Afghanistan - more "freedoms").
I get so enraged and feel so helpless. I ask why don't we celebrate peace? Incredible women birthing and raising 20 children when they had no choice? Crickets.
And we need to thank these dead soldiers incessantly and forever for being pawns in a game played by generals in a backroom safe from harm.
XO
WWW
Wisewebwoman ~ I'll always retain thankful thoughts to our allies who fought in World War 2. That was a war which needed to be fought, and one which affected me, and my generation, personally. No war since has "needed" to be fought, but because war was discovered to be a profitable enterprise for some - well.....
As you wrote, why not celebrate peace? Dennis Kucinich, when he ran in the US presidential election some years ago, declared that he would establish a Department of Peace. What did he get? Ridicule.
Americans are brainwashed into thinking war is necessary, a part of being the greatest nation on earth. But is it? I don't think so. America is a country awash with arrogance; a nation in denial; one that assumes the only power is the power of the military. It has forsaken that other power, the one that recognises the power of peace, of feeding the starving, of comforting the afflicted, of curing the sick.
Howard Zinn was a brave man to publish the truth. He paid the penalty. That's America for you.
RJ Adams ~ Sadly, that is the truth for many people here, though thankfully for not quite all of us.
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