Today is Veteran’s Day, the 11th of November.
Today we commemorate the anniversary of the end of World War I…The Great War…the war to end all wars…so it was said…though, regrettably it was not.
I am a veteran, as was my father and some-few of my friends…just a few, and that few includes a couple of my shipmates who I have maintained a connection with since my enlistment ended, thirty-two years ago.
From the end of World War I, until 1954, when we celebrated this day we called it Armistice Day[i], we held it as a remembrance of that moment in that “first great-global-conflict,” when the fighting stopped along all-lines, in the trenches and at the fronts.
The end of World War I was choreographed, like a dance, stopping suddenly and all-at-once; the halt came at the eleventh hour, on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, as if the war had a director who yelled “cut!” and all the actors on the stage, every pawn on the board, all the millions of people in their graves could get up from what they were doing and go home…that is not what happened; it was not a play.
Twenty million people were killed in World War I[ii], twenty million families broken, with many millions more suffering in the aftermath from broken bodies and broken minds…from broken hearts as well.
World War I was perceived by those who endured it as so horrible that it would end war itself, end it for all time…but that was wishful thinking.
the gods of war are busy, always
the conflicts they sew are
self-seeding
perennial cycles of violence
it is a hunger
that cannot be satisfied
a thirst that
cannot be quenched
their machinations are as constant
as the wind
they are as
certain of their power
as their victims are
of their failings
Today also marks the feast of saint
Martin of Tours[iii],
the patron saint of warriors; he was the first Christian soldier...otherwise
known as St. Martin of the Sword[iv]. It was in recognition of
him, and in observance of his “special day” that this date was selected to
bring World War I to a close.
The end might have come sooner for the soldiers in the struggle, but the politicians acting like art-directors, waited for a properly symbolic moment to bring the curtain down. They might have ended it the day before, and some soldiers who perished might then have lived to go home.
11:11:11
Set my criticism aside and note that it is also true, the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month was easy to set your watches too. The word went out and the time was set, everyone got the order and the play began, the air crackling with the tension of waiting, nearly eleven thousand soldiers were killed in the final hours, which ended with song and dance.
Pope, saint Gregory the Great[v] penned Martin’s hagiography. Most of Gregory’s hagiographical writings were works of fiction, either cut from whole cloth, or steeped and dyed from the barest scintilla of truth…we may be certain that the many miracles he purported to have performed were all the product of his fantastical mind. All popes had a penchant for relating falsehoods to their parishioners, they were deft purveyors of prevarications, if not true believers themselves, passing on the lies that they received in good faith, but could not turn away from even after reason had informed them of the truth.
Martin’s hagiography is a fiction and our celebration of him amounts to the perpetuation of propaganda that does not represent the good news of Jesus Chris. It is just another terrible series of fables, penned with a terrible purpose; which was to allow pope Gregory permission to grant Christians the right to takes up arms.
He gave Christian soldiers leave to march to war, a vocation which had been forbidden to the followers of Jesus, though they did it anyway, and awas still a matter of deep contention in the Church.
The spirits of conflict have a will of their own…and our wills are seemingly bond to them, like the double helix that determines so much of human nature, a determinate for which there is no deviation, they have passed on a disease of the heart and mind, for which there is no cure.
While there may be a spirit of war, there is no god of war; war is governed by human machinations and caried out by human predation, sometimes through base pretenders who pretend to possess divine authority…there are many in every generation.
In 1954, President Eisenhower, the man who had been Supreme Allied Commander during World War II, changed the nature of the November 11th holiday, by changing the name from Armistice Day to Veteran’s Day; he did so to honor of all Veterans…whoever they might be, to honor men and women, young and old, who had served in any conflict, anywhere in the world.
Friend or foe, ally or adversary, on this day we celebrate the courage of the average person, the women and men under arms, who were (are) willing to risk everything for their tribe, their nation or their clan, whether they chose to be in the field, to set sail, to stand on a wall or leap from the sky, weather they are soldiers, sailors, airmen or marines.
That is what we celebrate today on Veteran’s Day; we do not celebrate the end of war, because it seems that war itself will never end. We do not celebrate the fictional life of a so-called saint, whose usefulness as a tool of propaganda promoted the idea that it was not only possible to serve Jesus with a sword, but laudable.
Neither do we celebrate the lie that peace could ever be the fruit of war; the fruit of peace springs from a different seed altogether. If peace is to be the harvest, then we must sow seeds of tolerance and mercy, of compassion and humility...of justice and equity, and justice again.
What we celebrate today is the character of those men and women who had the courage to enlist, to risk their lives for the sake of their sisters and brothers, whether at home or beside them in the field…we celebrate especially those who were pressed into service against their will, we honor all veteran’s regardless of how they were called.
Remember; we should always celebrate the quality of our veteran’s contribution to our lives…their selflessness, while simultaneously naming the flaws in our collective-character that lead us to war: fear and greed, anger and hatred, and all of our other calamitous attributes.
The spirits of conflict have a will of their own…the Ares[vi] and Eris, brother and sister, War and Strife…they own a piece of us, they reside in each of us…propelling us by the love of conquest and victory…whatever that means.
We are possessed…collectively, we are all possessed.
One hundred years after the end of World War I, we are still waging war all around the world. The United States of America is engaged in armed conflict with the Iran (The Persian Empire), while undermining the position of our allies in Ukraine who are facing an existential threat from traditional adversary, the Russians. The security guarantees we made to our allies in the gulf have proven to be meaningless and paper thin. Iranian proxies in Yemen are engaged with the Saudi’s, together they have succeeded in slowing the flow of oil from that region to the world.
The war in Europe, between Russia and Ukraine, has the president of Russia asserting ownership over land and people; “Ukraine is ours” he says, as if the people and their territory can be seized by a foreign power, as if they can be denied the right of self-determination, as if they can be owned according to the barbaric principle of might makes right.
At the core of these conflicts is a denial of the following principles that are axiomatic to good government:
Legitimate powers of government may only derived from the consent of the governed, and that all-people are endowed with inalienable rights, the chief among them being life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Truths such as these, do not matter to mad-men who view people as assets…or liabilities, who see human beings as property or chattel…who speak as if their enemies are not human, and cannot conceive of a world in which they we might all live together.
I served in the Navy as a Hospital Corpsman, from 1990 – 1994.
I served during the first Gulf War[vii], though I did not serve in the theatre of combat where we killed thirty-five thousand Iraqi soldiers, and another two-hundred thousand people lost their lives. My father served for twenty-two years; the first four as a Marine, the next eighteen in the Air Force. He served in Southeast Asia, multiple tours of duty in Vietnam, first with the Airbourne Recon, and later as an air traffic controller.
For the war in Vietnam[viii] the official record holds that fifty-eight thousand, two-hundred and twenty American servicemen and women lost their lives; it was a war which we never called a war, one in which we killed over 3,000,000 people: Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian, and have killed millions more in many other nations in the decades since the end of that conflict and the beginning of my own enlistment, leaving millions more crippled and millions upon millions of families broken.
Human beings are terrible and profligate killers, we are experts at it, we Americans especially; what Eisenhauer said remains true: that every bullet we fire, every missile we launch, each of is an admission of our failure as human beings and especially of diplomacy; to paraphrase, violence does not beget peace, violence begets violence and this will always be the case.
Only peace and reconciliation can bring peace reconciliation; there is no time like the present to begin.
Remember this…peace is not a passive state, we must constantly occupy ourselves with the pursuit it. If war is like a pernicious weed, self-seeding and perennial, then we must weed the garden…or there will be no garden at all. We are called on to love one another, to pay respect to the inherent dignity of every human being, regardless of our disagreements, regardless of the pains we have endured, or caused, regardless of all the wounds we carry forward from our past.
To be free from our history, the history of violence, requires that we forgive one another and seek forgiveness for ourselves...to accept it when it is offered, because if we do not, we are doomed to continue the refrain into the next act, where we will be pounded to dust by its repercussions.
Love is the way out of conflict, there is no other way; if you want to honor our Veteran’s today, commit yourself to meeting conflict with love, pay respect to all people (even your adversary), advance the cause of restorative justice…then you will have found the way.
No comments:
Post a Comment