A Real Armistice
Veterans’ Day is an appropriately solemn occasion, and I’m glad it’s back on November 11th instead of it being on an adjacent Monday to facilitate mattress sales. Originally Armistice Day was set to remember an end to the Great War eleven minutes after the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, in 1918. World War One, as it was later called, was “the war to end all wars.”
The horror of it was thought to be of such magnitude that no nation could ever engage in such an obscenely-lethal enterprise again. It didn’t take long, less than a generation, to overcome the distaste for war and start another one. The Korean War – they called it a police action – began only five years after World War Two was over. We were involved in Vietnam only a few years after most of the shooting stopped on the Korean peninsula.
Since then, there has been Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Iraq twice, and Afghanistan. That doesn’t include all the wars we have supported with funding and training, like Georgia most recently; we had 1000 of our troops training their troops for the invasion of South Ossetia.
War is good business. Back during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, we were selling to both sides, as were 29 other countries, including the other four members of the United Nations Security Council; such principles. Today we are the arms merchant for the world, selling more bombs, guns and missiles than all other countries combined.
Back in 1975, the head of World Airways arranged an airlift of Vietnamese orphans to Oakland. The CBS correspondent reporting the event closed his report noting, “Tomorrow, for the first time in their young lives, these children will wake up in a nation not at war.”
At some point, truth and decency will triumph over the depravity that governs today, and the world will be able to declare a final armistice. Then celebrating Veterans Day will have real meaning.
©2008 SetonnoteS
.