Happy Armistice Day...

[ProudDad]

I celebrate the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918 when peace broke out over the killing fields of another major conflict in the last war humans will fight on Earth...

Now that that conflict has become the global "Permanent War Economy(tm)" with its corollary the "War on Nature for Short-Term Gain for the Few(tm)", celebrating ephemeral sanity is one of the few gifts left to us...

As long as war and warriors are glorified, we're screwed as a species and the Earth is doomed as a hospitable environment for her creatures...

This is a good day to think about alternatives to the status-quo...

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

1. " If it's natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how?" Joan Baez

[pinboy3niner]

9. Here's Joan Baez at Berkeley in 1974...

Joan Baez performance, 'Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye,' Berkeley, CA 1974
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiMt5-V-tQ4&feature=related

[Warpy]

2. My dad would have been 93 today

so it's a doubly somber holiday.

[ProudDad]

8. My condolences

See this post though...it might cheer you up...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x9537329#9537391

My father is a near vegetable in a nursing home this day...

No doubt in no small part because of the toxins he wallowed in on a cruiser in the pacific during wwii and in various Navy yards during his Navy career...

I learned the beginnings of pacifism from his stories of visiting Hiroshima shortly after the atomic slaughter there, after the war was "over"; and how the Navy confiscated the pictures he took so the USAmerican people wouldn't be exposed to what they'd done...

[Warpy]

10. Thanks.

I agree.

[Bucky]

3. Next year is 11-11-11

[Journeyman]

4. Armistice Day is sacred. Veterans' Day is not. . . .

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

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.

What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.

And all music is.

Kurt Vonnegut
Breakfast of Champions (1973)

[no_hypocrisy]

5. It was Armistice Day when I was starting school in the early Sixties.

No department stores had sales on that date. A somber reverence to the soldiers instead.

[ProudDad]

6. Thank You!!!

I love that man, and miss his corporeal presence on our Earth...

:hi:

[ProudDad]

11. Granfalloons...

The most commonly purported granfalloons are associations and societies based on a shared but ultimately fabricated premise. As examples, Vonnegut cites: "the Communist Party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company —and any nation, anytime, anywhere."

I'd add every military and para-military grouping to that list...

[enlightenment]

7. In Flander's Fields

the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

- Major John McCrae, written May 1915


"Futility"
Move him into the sun -
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds, -
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved - still warm, - too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
- O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?

- Wilfred Owen, died in battle, 7 November 1918

[TexasObserver]

12. Yes, I like the Original Holiday.

I'm a veteran, and I wish the holiday was more about remembering the peace after war.

Flag waving and glorifying war are two things we don't lack for on any day.

[ProudDad]

13. To Armistice Days, Past and Future

By David Swanson

At 11 a.m. on the 11th day of the 11th month, make a toast to Armistice Day, the official end of World War I, a war the United States fought in for less time than President Obama and the 111th Congress have kept the fighting going in Afghanistan and Iraq. Armistice Day is a better name for the day than Veterans Day because it honors both veterans and peace, our primary duty being to cease producing more veterans, a policy that would make us better able to provide a decent life for veterans and everyone else.

We learn a lot about the real motives for wars when whistleblowers leak the minutes of secret meetings, or when congressional committees publish the records of hearings decades later. War planners write books. They make movies. They face investigations. Eventually the beans tend to get spilled. But I have never ever, not even once, heard of a private meeting in which top war makers discussed the need to keep a war going in order to benefit the soldiers fighting in it.

The reason this is remarkable is that you almost never hear a war planner speak in public about the reasons for keeping a war going without claiming that it must be done for the troops, to support the troops, in order not to let the troops down, or so that those troops already dead will not have died in vain. Of course, if they died in an illegal, immoral, destructive action, or simply a hopeless war that must be lost sooner or later, it's unclear how piling on more corpses will honor their memories. But this is not about logic.

http://warisacrime.org/content/armistice-days-past-and-future