US should make Armistice Day great again, ditch Veterans Day celebrations

Thomas L. Knapp

Submitted photo/Avens O’Brien

Two-time Medal of Honor recipient Smedley Butler tallied up the cost in his book, available free online, “War is a Racket”: “Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.” None of that is worth celebrating. It’s a cost, not a benefit.”

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OPINION — At “the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” of 1918,  guns officially fell silent across Europe and World War I came to a military end (the political finish came in 1919 with the Treaty of Versailles).

The following Nov. 11, the winning nations commemorated the final ceasefire with the first “Armistice Day” events.

Not celebrations as such, mind you: The observances were — and in some countries at least partially remain — somber remembrances (the UK now calls Nov. 11 “Remembrance Day”) of 20 million dead in “the war to end all wars,”  driven by sentiment against ever returning to that kind of carnage.

That sentiment, unfortunately, proved insufficient to prevent World War II and hundreds or thousands of subsequent deadly conflicts, which is bad enough.

Worse, though, is what America did with “Armistice Day.” In 1954, Congress replaced the traditional “Armistice Day” observance with a celebratory “Veterans Day.”

Instead of mourning war, we now celebrate warriors. Parades. Air shows. Political speeches. Free meals, drinks, haircuts, etc. for veterans.  A lot of “thank you for your service” to everyone identifiable as a veteran of the U.S. armed forces; quite a bit of mutual back-slapping among those of us who “served.”

To me, the best way to celebrate veterans would be stop making so many of us — especially, but not only, of the dead, maimed, traumatized and homeless varieties.

Since the first Armistice Day, the U.S. has fought a second “world war” and countless smaller wars — declared and undeclared — around the globe, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of American lives and millions of foreigners’ lives.

The U.S. armed forces maintain a global network of military bases, remain bogged down in the Middle East after a quarter century of the “global war on terror,” and have now been at on-again, off-again open war with Iran for a year-and-a-half.

The U.S. government constantly rattles its saber, actively seeks excuses to militarily intervene in other countries’ internal affairs and international disputes and fuels even the wars it doesn’t actively participate in with foreign aid and arms sales.

Two-time Medal of Honor recipient Smedley Butler tallied up the cost in his book, available free online, “War is a Racket”: “Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.”

None of that is worth celebrating. It’s a cost, not a benefit.

The U.S. armed forces’ oath of enlistment binds future “veterans” to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

Even if one accepts that as a worthy goal, when’s the last time it actually turned out to be the job?

Not during my lifetime, at least that I can think of, and I turn 60 the day before “Veterans Day.” The war I fought in was premised on kicking one tyrant out of Kuwait so another tyrant could return and rule again. Constitution? Nowhere in sight.

Commemorating “Armistice Day” — and making that commemoration a call for peace and a rejection of the American war racket — makes far more sense to me than celebrating “Veterans Day.”

If we want to thank veterans “for their service,” the first step is to bring them home and stop letting politicians put them in morally bankrupt jeopardy of life and limb.

Marine Corps veteran Thomas L. Knapp is a director and senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism, where this was first published. Please submit comments at yourvalley.net/letters or email them to azopinions@iniusa.org. We are committed to publishing a wide variety of reader opinions, as long as they meet our Civility Guidelines.