The problem with Veterans' Day
Nov. 11th, 2009 10:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
necturusVeterans' Day is on November 11 because it is the anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I, one of the bloodiest wars in history, an utterly pointless four-year conflict that bled Europe white and set the stage for World War II, the Cold War, and the Arab-Israeli mess. The end of that war, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, was justly commemorated as Armistice Day, an annual reminder of the horror that was "the war to end all wars".
Today that is all but forgotten; Veterans' Day, as the holiday was renamed in the U.S. after World War II, is just another generic patriotic rah-rah support-the-troops holiday, an echo, if you will, of Memorial Day. It should never be let pass without remembering that patriotism killed off a whole generation of Europeans between 1914 and 1918, young men who read about the likes of Napoleon, Wellington, and Bluecher, and thought war was something romantic and ennobling, a grand adventure.
War is utterly, irredeemably evil. No amount of patriotic bullshit must ever be allowed to obscure that fact.
Today that is all but forgotten; Veterans' Day, as the holiday was renamed in the U.S. after World War II, is just another generic patriotic rah-rah support-the-troops holiday, an echo, if you will, of Memorial Day. It should never be let pass without remembering that patriotism killed off a whole generation of Europeans between 1914 and 1918, young men who read about the likes of Napoleon, Wellington, and Bluecher, and thought war was something romantic and ennobling, a grand adventure.
War is utterly, irredeemably evil. No amount of patriotic bullshit must ever be allowed to obscure that fact.
