Veterans for Peace & Jack Gilroy / Syracuse.com – 2018-11-10 19:03:19
https://www.veteransforpeace.org/take-action/armistice-day
Help Us Celebrate Armistice Day 2018!
Veterans for Peace
(November 11, 2018) — Veterans For Peace has been celebrating Armistice Day almost since the organization’s inception, with a few chapters doing yearly events. However, in 2008 the effort became a national effort with the passage of an official Veterans For Peace resolution. Since then, chapters across the country have been “Reclaiming Armistice Day” pushing the celebration of peace into the national conversation on Veterans Day.
One hundred years ago the world celebrated peace as a universal principle. The first World War had just ended and nations mourning their dead collectively called for an end to all wars. Armistice Day was born and was designated as “a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be thereafter celebrated.”
After World War II, the US Congress decided to rebrand November 11 as Veterans Day. Honoring the warrior quickly morphed into honoring the military and glorifying war. Armistice Day was flipped from a day for peace into a day for displays of militarism.
Veterans For Peace has taken the lead in lifting up the original intention of November 11th – as a day for peace. As veterans we know that a day that celebrates peace, not war, is the best way to honor the sacrifices of veterans. We want generations after us to never know the destruction war has wrought on people and the earth.
Veterans For Peace is calling on everyone to stand up for peace this Armistice Day. More than ever, the world faces a critical moment. Tensions are heightened around the world and the US is engaged militarily in multiple countries, without an end in sight.
Here at home we have seen the increasing militarization of our police forces and brutal crackdowns on dissent and people’s uprisings against state power. We must press our government to end reckless military interventions that endanger the entire world. We must build a culture of peace.
This Armistice Day, Veterans For Peace calls on the US public to say no to more war and to demand justice and peace, at home and abroad. We know Peace is Possible and call for an end to all oppressive and violent policies, and for equality for all people.
Reclaim Armistice Day As Day Of Peace
Jack Gilroy / Syracuse.com
(November 2, 2018) — One hundred years ago this Nov. 11, the Great War, World War I, came to an end. People around the world rejoiced and celebrated the end of hostilities, a time to declare peace. The following year, 1919, the day became known as Armistice Day. It was not a day to celebrate war and warriors but a day to celebrate peace.
The British and German governments are issuing a unique joint appeal to communities across the world to ring their church and other bells in unison at 11 a.m. on Armistice Day, Nov. 11, 2018, to mark the one-hundredth anniversary of the end of the awful slaughter.
It’s time for Americans to reclaim Armistice Day.
In 1954, we dropped the name “Armistice Day” and adopted “Veterans Day.” We replaced a sacred day of thanksgiving with a day to glorify warriors. That was not the intent of veterans of World War I. Veterans rejoiced at no more artillery and mortar rounds ripping through young bodies, mustard gas searing lungs and burning skin, the end of machine gun fire projecting 450 rounds per minute, monster weapons of death like tanks, and weaponized aircraft that killed millions for Empire. People mourned for the mostly poor and working class soldiers drafted or lured by disinformation and propaganda lies.
When Armistice Day was declared one year after the war ended, people were beginning to understand that the bloodshed was not about valor or glory or medals or service, but about power and money. Just in the United States alone, 15,000 new millionaires were made in our short participation in the European war.
Republican Herbert Hoover, director of the Food Administration in Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s administration, summed up the situation by noting: “Older men declare war but it is the young who fight and die.” He could have added “who fight and die for lies of the rich and powerful.”
Rory Fanning, a former US Army Ranger with two deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq, has written: “It gets clearer and clearer with each passing year that Veterans Day is less about honoring veterans than it is about easing the guilty consciences of those who have sent others to kill and die for reasons that have very little to do with democracy and freedom.”
Kurt Vonnegut, one of our great American writers, lived the misery of World War II as a US infantryman in Europe. A character in Vonnegut’s “Breakfast of Champions” says: “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. Veterans Day celebrates ‘heroes’ and encourages going off to kill and be killed in a future war — or one of our current wars.”
Veterans for Peace of Broome County wishes to reclaim Armistice Day. Our group has petitioned all churches in Binghamton to ring their bells at 11 a.m. Sunday, Nov. 11, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of World War I. We urge Syracuse churches to join us by ringing their bells 11 times at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.
Veterans for Peace www.veteransforpeace.org urges all American churches with bells to help Veterans for Peace reclaim Armistice Day. Let us celebrate the end of war, not the warriors.
At 1 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 11, Veterans for Peace in Binghamton will offer Armistice Day poppies to parade viewers (of a Veterans Day parade) as a remembrance of the horror of all wars. That same day, on the lawn of First Congregational Church, corner of Main and Front, Binghamton, the Stu Naismith Chapter Veterans for Peace will have a cemetery illustrating the dead of both the Vietnam War and Iraq/Afghanistan wars.
The ratio of dead Americans to dead Vietnamese, Iraqi and Afghanistan people will be shown in the cemetery tombstone numbers.
We must comprehend the terrible human cost of war to deter us from making war again.
Posted in accordance with Title 17, Section 107, US Code, for noncommercial, educational purposes.
