Restore Armistice Day

November 11 – Once, a day to honor peace

 by Kim Carlyle

“Peace,” most Americans, as individuals, would say if asked their preference. But collectively, Americans prefer “War.”

We are a militaristic nation. If expenditures measure priorities, the U.S. overwhelmingly favors war. The National Priorities Project reports that 55% of discretionary spending in 2015 will go for military. The U.S. accounts for 40% of the world’s total military spending—more than China, Russia, the UK, France, and the ten next highest spending countries combined!

But we give no thought to war’s costs, or its morality, legality, or efficacy. (No war in my lifetime – and I’m an old man – has achieved its purported goals.) Still, we readily send our youth to fight and die, disregarding war’s long term effects on them and their families. Soldiers return with physical injuries, disfigurement, post-traumatic stress disorder, and moral injury—the feelings of guilt, grief, and numbness that haunt veterans who have been a part of something that betrays their sense of right and wrong.

Then we honor these veteran-victims of war for their sacrifice. But did their pain lead to any gain? Was the price they paid worth it? It may be right to honor those former members of the military who set out with the best of intentions, but doing so implicitly condones, if not honors, war itself.

War is the use of violence to try to get our way. Such behavior in the home, at the workplace, or on the playground would result in punishment or, at least, reprimand. Yet war or threat of war is the primary U.S. foreign policy tool – and Americans support it with their dollars and their children.

We’ve created a culture of war. Our media—news, television, and feature films—promote and glorify war; our politicians, with few veterans among them, beat war drums at the slightest provocation; our churches pray for our troops (but only our troops—not any other troops nor even the innocent civilians we call “collateral damage”); our holidays and monuments commemorate war.

It wasn’t always this way. We once honored peace.

Ninety-six years ago, on November 11, 1918, a senseless, four-year, worldwide bloodbath claiming twenty million lives ended. President Wilson proclaimed Armistice Day to remember the dead and give thanks for the victory “because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations.”

The 1926 Congressional resolution about Armistice Day stated, “the recurring anniversary of this date should be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations.” In 1938, November 11 became a federal holiday, “a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be thereafter celebrated and known as ‘Armistice Day.’”

A day dedicated to peace!

Congress even outlawed war. With the 1929 Kellogg-Briand Pact, the U.S and most of the world’s established nations agreed “that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means.”

Nonetheless, another great war, worse than the first, broke out and raged for six years.  But this war’s end brought no rededication to peace. Instead, Congress in 1954 changed Armistice Day to Veterans Day—a subtle shift of emphasis, from honoring peace to honoring veterans and, by extension, honoring war.

To truly honor today’s veterans for their well-intended sacrifices, let’s not create tomorrow’s veterans. Instead, let’s think critically, morally, humanly, as individuals about war; then collectively create a culture of peace. And let’s restore November 11 as a day “dedicated to the cause of world peace.”