A Veteran For Peace Speaks on Memorial Day 2024

[Brenda]

BY PAUL ATWOOD

My fellow veterans and you who have assembled with us: How many years have we mustered for our own Memorial Day rituals since we repudiated our previous roles as servants of militarism and war-making and turned to anti-war activism? How many times have we implored our fellow citizens to note the tragic and dreadful consequences and the deceits and lies that inevitably accompany war? Despite our efforts our nation’s rulers again and again spin their rationales to decry our “adversaries and enemies, ” to scheme us into yet more war or provide the weapons and “intelligence” for others to safeguard THEIR “interests, as is the case today in Ukraine and Gaza, and many more places few know anything about.

When was the last time the United States faced true danger from a foreign enemy? Could the Vietnamese have invaded our country? The Iraqis, the Afghanis? Was it during World War II, our so-called “Good War?” Germany failed to cross the English Channel. How could it attack America? We are told that our armed forces were dispatched to root out the evil of Nazism and its antisemitism yet how do we explain why the State Department refused entry to desperate European Jews? Why were American Jewish pleas to bomb the death camps ignored. Why were Nazi war criminals brought to our shores to aid in the development of our then newly minted Central Intelligence Agency and to advance the development of ICBM’s and then to project our nuclear threat across the entire globe?

We must not surrender to despondency. There is courage and possibility in the air, greatly so. The revolt of the young is mounting as they contemplate the withering of their futures, their massive debt, their shrinking employment potential, and the growing prospect of dystopia. We must encourage their escalating insurrection against the ravenous greed and suicidal trajectory of the military industrial congressional media university multiplex. One tenth of the Pentagon’s annual budget could provide Medicare for all and many more projects to improve life for all.

One of the original founders of the William Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequences at UMass-Boston, Paul Atwood served in the Marine Corps, and became active in antiwar efforts and veterans issues after discharge. He is retired from the faculty in the American Studies Department at UMass Boston. He edited the Joiner Center publication Agent Orange: Medical, Scientific, Legal, Political and Psychological Issues and recently co-edited Sticks and Stones: Living with Uncertain Wars. He contributes to the on-line journal Counterpunch. He is author most recently of War and Empire: The American Way of Life (Pluto, 2010).

https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/05/28/a-veteran-for-peace-speaks-on-memorial-day-2024/