Memorial Day 2020 (4 of 4): History matters, especially on Memorial Day.

There are long, long trails a-winding ...

... through places like France.

Aisne-Marne American Cemetery

With headstones lying in a sweeping curve, the 42.5-acre Aisne-Marne American Cemetery and Memorial in France, sits at the foot of Belleau Wood. The cemetery contains the graves of 2,289 war dead, most of whom fought in the vicinity and in the Marne Valley in the summer of 1918. The memorial chapel sits on a hillside, decorated with sculptured and stained-glass details of wartime personnel, equipment and insignia. Inscribed on its interior wall are 1,060 names of the missing. Rosettes mark the names of those since recovered and identified. During World War II the chapel was damaged slightly by an enemy shell.

Belleau Wood adjoins the cemetery and contains many vestiges of World War I. A monument at the flagpole commemorates the valor of the U.S. Marines who captured much of this ground in 1918.

Respecting the memory of American soldiers who died while in the service of their country is a task perhaps best undertaken with respect for history.

Speaking only for myself, I take it very seriously. It's a habit of thought almost certainly springing from my father's fascination with far-off events that conspired to transport a hick from bucolic Georgetown, Indiana to the Pacific Theater of Operations -- and in his case, back home again.

Others weren't as lucky, and every year on Memorial Day, I pause to reflect on the serendipity of it all.

As a prelude to Memorial Day, there tend to be scolding social media reminders to the effect that Americans fixated on holiday feasting, partying and recreation somehow dishonor the nation's military heritage. To be sure, I contribute my fair share of rants about the general populace and its chronic ignorance of history.

However, I don't think honor and bacchanalia are mutually exclusive concepts. After all, the venerable institution of the wake combines them very effectively, and what's more, the human condition is incapable of sustaining a permanent state of mourning. Life does go on.

Like the vast majority of topics pertaining to human beings, the notion of dying for one's country is inordinately complex. John Gonder once touched on it during a conversation, when he mentioned the notorious escape clause during the American Civil War, where men drafted into the Union Army could buy their way out of service by paying $300 or providing a substitute to serve (and sometimes die) in their place.

During the Vietnam War, songwriter John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival noticed it, too: Exactly how is it determined who risks dying for his or her country, and who subsequently profits from their deaths?

Dick Cheney might know the answer.

Preferably, respecting the memory of American soldiers who died while in the service of their country is a task best undertaken with a respect for history on the part of those still living, along with sadness and regret that human civilization seems not to have evolved to a point of no longer requiring violence to settle issues. War is a ridiculous concept, although humans seem enamored of it.

It's also a holiday weekend, and I suspect you are enjoying it.

Carry on, then.

Memorial Day (Snopes)

Claim: Former slaves reburied dead Union prisoners of war in May 1865, thus creating the modern observance of Memorial Day.

MIXTURE:

TRUE: In May 1865, free blacks in Charleston reburied dead Union prisoners of war and held a cemetery dedication ceremony.

UNDETERMINED: The event referenced above is the origin of the modern Memorial Day observance.

Wikipedia's article goes into greater detail.

Memorial Day 2020 (1 of 4): Howard Zinn asks, "Whom Will We Honor Memorial Day?"

Memorial Day 2020 (2 of 4): Charles Ives, from Decoration Day to Memorial Day.

Memorial Day 2020 (3 of 4): "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream."

Memorial Day 2020 (4 of 4): History matters, especially on Memorial Day.

Memorial Day 2020 (1 of 4): Howard Zinn asks, "Whom Will We Honor Memorial Day?"

"No politician who voted funds for war, no business contractor for the military, no general who ordered young men into battle, no FBI man who spied on anti-war activities, should be invited to public ceremonies on this sacred day. Let the dead of past wars be honored. Let those who live pledge themselves never to embark on mass slaughter again."
-- Howard Zinn

To me, the most disrespectful act that might be directed against the fallen from past wars, or the veterans still among us, is to accept self-censorship as it pertains to discussing the honest, real-world reasons why these conflicts occurred. There's no "either-or" fallacy stipulating that we all fall into line, or else be considered traitors.

Memorialize, and never stop asking questions, even when the answers are unpleasant. Some day we might learn. If we tolerate silence, then our children obviously will be next. If we tolerate war, pestilence and mayhem, then a little Zinn is good for whatever remains of our souls

Whom Will We Honor Memorial Day?, by Howard Zinn

Published on June 2, 1976 in the Boston Globe and republished in The Zinn Reader with the brief introduction below.

Memorial Day will be celebrated … by the usual betrayal of the dead, by the hypocritical patriotism of the politicians and contractors preparing for more wars, more graves to receive more flowers on future Memorial Days. The memory of the dead deserves a different dedication. To peace, to defiance of governments.

In 1974, I was invited by Tom Winship, the editor of the Boston Globe, who had been bold enough in 1971 to print part of the top secret Pentagon Papers on the history of the Vietnam War, to write a bi-weekly column for the op-ed page of the newspaper. I did that for about a year and a half. The column below appeared June 2, 1976, in connection with that year’s Memorial Day. After it appeared, my column was cancelled.

* * * * *

Memorial Day will be celebrated as usual, by high-speed collisions of automobiles and bodies strewn on highways and the sound of ambulance sirens throughout the land.

It will also be celebrated by the display of flags, the sound of bugles and drums, by parades and speeches and unthinking applause.

It will be celebrated by giant corporations, which make guns, bombs, fighter planes, aircraft carriers and an endless assortment of military junk and which await the $100 billion in contracts to be approved soon by Congress and the President.

There was a young woman in New Hampshire who refused to allow her husband, killed in Vietnam, to be given a military burial. She rejected the hollow ceremony ordered by those who sent him and 50,000 others to their deaths. Her courage should be cherished on Memorial Day. There were the B52 pilots who refused to fly those last vicious raids of Nixon’s and Kissinger’s war. Have any of the great universities, so quick to give honorary degrees to God-knows-whom, thought to honor those men at this Commencement time, on this Memorial Day?

No politician who voted funds for war, no business contractor for the military, no general who ordered young men into battle, no FBI man who spied on anti-war activities, should be invited to public ceremonies on this sacred day. Let the dead of past wars be honored. Let those who live pledge themselves never to embark on mass slaughter again.

“The shell had his number on it. The blood ran into the ground…Where his chest ought to have been they pinned the Congressional Medal, the DSC, the Medaille Militaire, the Belgian Croix de Guerre, the Italian gold medal, The Vitutea Militara sent by Queen Marie of Rumania. All the Washingtonians brought flowers .. Woodrow Wilson brought a bouquet of poppies.”

Those are the concluding lines of John Dos Passos angry novel 1919. Let us honor him on Memorial Day.

And also Thoreau, who went to jail to protest the Mexican War.

And Mark Twain, who denounced our war against the Filipinos at the turn of the century.

And I.F. Stone, who virtually alone among newspaper editors exposed the fraud and brutality of the Korean War.

Let us honor Martin Luther King, who refused the enticements of the White House, and the cautions of associates, and thundered against the war in Vietnam.

Memorial Day should be a day for putting flowers on graves and planting trees. Also, for destroying the weapons of death that endanger us more than they protect us, that waste our resources and threaten our children and grandchildren.

On Memorial Day we should take note that, in the name of “defense,” our taxes have been used to spend a quarter of a billion dollars on a helicopter assault ship called “the biggest floating lemon,” which was accepted by the Navy although it had over 2,000 major defects at the time of its trial cruise.

Meanwhile, there is such a shortage of housing that millions live in dilapidated sections of our cities and millions more are forced to pay high rents or high interest rates on their mortgages. There’s 90 billion for the B1 bomber, but people don’t have money to pay hospital bills.

We must be practical, say those whose practicality has consisted of a war every generation. We mustn’t deplete our defenses. Say those who have depleted our youth, stolen our resources. In the end, it is living people, not corpses, creative energy, not destructive rage, which are our only real defense, not just against other governments trying to kill us, but against our own, also trying to kill us.

Let us not set out, this Memorial Day, on the same old drunken ride to death.

And as an epilogue of sorts.

Berrigan, Ellsberg and Memorial Day, by Doug Noble (CounterPunch)

Memorial Day is a day noted for its parades honoring veterans by ennobling, glorifying (and thereby perpetuating) US war and militarism. The peace community in Rochester observes instead a solemn riverside service memorializing the thousands of victims of current US war and aggression, with each victim symbolized by a single rose tossed lovingly into the river’s flow.

Victims memorialized include the casualties of US sanctioned war and aggression, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Syria to Yemen to Somalia to South Sudan to Palestine. Also the many innocent victims of drone attacks, inhumane US immigration and incarceration policies, militarization of the police, and preventable gun violence. And the worldwide victims of catastrophic climate change, fed by US policies of denial and consumption. And an entire global population victimized by the threat of nuclear Armageddon triggered by senseless US provocations of Iran, North Korea, Russia, China.

There would not be enough roses to identify and honor even the tiniest sample of the the thousands of innocent victims lost to aggressive US policies. Such roses could easily choke the Genesee River in sorrow. Yet remembrance, however heartfelt, is still insufficient. After all, in his Gettysburg memorial address, Abraham Lincoln noted the futility of consecrating the war dead without rectifying the war’s cause: “It is for us the living to be dedicated to the unfinished work … so that these dead shall not have died in vain.” What, then, might move us toward peace, a peace threatened, most of all, by our own government’s unrelenting appetite for war?

I turn to the book of Daniel – that is, the book of Daniel Berrigan and Daniel Ellsberg, two icons whose monumental contribution to peace cannot be misconstrued ...

Memorial Day 2020 (1 of 4): Howard Zinn asks, "Whom Will We Honor Memorial Day?"

Memorial Day 2020 (2 of 4): Charles Ives, from Decoration Day to Memorial Day.

Memorial Day 2020 (3 of 4): "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream."

Memorial Day 2020 (4 of 4): History matters, especially on Memorial Day.

Bernie Sanders on Donald Trump's "saber rattling" over Iran.

Bernie Sanders was on Face the Nation last Sunday.

Bernie Sanders Is Exactly Right About Trump’s Saber Rattling on Iran, by John Nichols (The Nation)

In a remarkable exchange, the senator rejects the notion that a “limited strike” on Iran is anything less than “an act of warfare” that could lead to catastrophe.

The topic of the aborted air strike against Iran was raised.

Oh, just a limited strike; oh, well, I’m sorry. I just didn’t know that it’s okay to simply attack another country with bombs. ‘Just a limited strike’—that’s an act of warfare. So two points. That will set off a conflagration all over the Middle East… The war in Iraq, Margaret was a disaster I believe from the bottom of my heart that (a war) with Iran would be even worse, more loss of life never ending war in that region, massive instability. We’re talking about, we have been in Afghanistan now for eighteen years. This thing will never end. So I will do everything I can number one to stop a war with Iran. And number two here’s an important point. Let’s remember what we learned in civics when we were kids. It is the United States Congress, under our Constitution, that has warmaking authority not the president of the United States. If he attacks Iran in my view that would be unconstitutional.

At greater length:

Sanders discusses the subject at considerably more length in an important new article for Foreign Affairs—“Ending America’s Endless War”—in which he argues, “Terrorism is a very real threat, which requires robust diplomatic efforts, intelligence cooperation with allies and partners, and yes, sometimes military action. But as an organizing framework, the global war on terror has been a disaster for our country. Orienting U.S. national-security strategy around terrorism essentially allowed a few thousand violent extremists to dictate the foreign policy of the most powerful nation on earth. We responded to terrorists by giving them exactly what they wanted.” The article concludes:

The American people don’t want endless war. Neither do we want a foreign policy that is based on the logic that led to those wars and corroded our democracy: a logic that privileges military tools over diplomatic ones, aggressive unilateralism over multilateral engagement, and acquiescence to our undemocratic partners over the pursuit of core interests alongside democratic allies who truly share our values. We have to view the terrorism threat through the proper scope, rather than allowing it to dominate our view of the world. The time has come to envision a new form of American engagement: one in which the United States leads not in war-making but in bringing people together to find shared solutions to our shared concerns. American power should be measured not by our ability to blow things up, but by our ability to build on our common humanity, harnessing our technology and enormous wealth to create a better life for all people.

For the bottom line, however, go back to the video, where Sanders rejects the empty language of political and media elites and clearly explains that “The United States does not want to continue to lose men and women and trillions of dollars in never-ending wars in the Middle East.”

Memorial Day 2019 (4 of 4): History matters, especially on Memorial Day.

There are long, long trails a-winding ...

... through places like France.

Aisne-Marne American Cemetery

With headstones lying in a sweeping curve, the 42.5-acre Aisne-Marne American Cemetery and Memorial in France, sits at the foot of Belleau Wood. The cemetery contains the graves of 2,289 war dead, most of whom fought in the vicinity and in the Marne Valley in the summer of 1918. The memorial chapel sits on a hillside, decorated with sculptured and stained-glass details of wartime personnel, equipment and insignia. Inscribed on its interior wall are 1,060 names of the missing. Rosettes mark the names of those since recovered and identified. During World War II the chapel was damaged slightly by an enemy shell.

Belleau Wood adjoins the cemetery and contains many vestiges of World War I. A monument at the flagpole commemorates the valor of the U.S. Marines who captured much of this ground in 1918.

Respecting the memory of American soldiers who died while in the service of their country is a task perhaps best undertaken with respect for history.

Speaking only for myself, I take it very seriously. It's a habit of thought almost certainly springing from my father's fascination with far-off events that conspired to transport a hick from bucolic Georgetown, Indiana to the Pacific Theater of Operations -- and in his case, back home again.

Others weren't as lucky, and every year on Memorial Day, I pause to reflect on the serendipity of it all.

As a prelude to Memorial Day, there tend to be scolding social media reminders to the effect that Americans fixated on holiday feasting, partying and recreation somehow dishonor the nation's military heritage. To be sure, I contribute my fair share of rants about the general populace and its chronic ignorance of history.

However, I don't think honor and bacchanalia are mutually exclusive concepts. After all, the venerable institution of the wake combines them very effectively, and what's more, the human condition is incapable of sustaining a permanent state of mourning. Life does go on.

Like the vast majority of topics pertaining to human beings, the notion of dying for one's country is inordinately complex. John Gonder once touched on it during a conversation, when he mentioned the notorious escape clause during the American Civil War, where men drafted into the Union Army could buy their way out of service by paying $300 or providing a substitute to serve (and sometimes die) in their place.

During the Vietnam War, songwriter John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival noticed it, too: Exactly how is it determined who risks dying for his or her country, and who subsequently profits from their deaths?

Dick Cheney might know the answer.

Preferably, respecting the memory of American soldiers who died while in the service of their country is a task best undertaken with a respect for history on the part of those still living, along with sadness and regret that human civilization seems not to have evolved to a point of no longer requiring violence to settle issues. War is a ridiculous concept, although humans seem enamored of it.

It's also a holiday weekend, and I suspect you are enjoying it.

Carry on, then.

Memorial Day (Snopes)

Claim: Former slaves reburied dead Union prisoners of war in May 1865, thus creating the modern observance of Memorial Day.

MIXTURE:

TRUE: In May 1865, free blacks in Charleston reburied dead Union prisoners of war and held a cemetery dedication ceremony.

UNDETERMINED: The event referenced above is the origin of the modern Memorial Day observance.

Wikipedia's article goes into greater detail.

Memorial Day 2019 (1 of 4): Howard Zinn asks, "Whom Will We Honor Memorial Day?"

Memorial Day 2019 (2 of 4): Charles Ives, from Decoration Day to Memorial Day.

Memorial Day 2019 (3 of 4): "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream."

Memorial Day 2019 (4 of 4): History matters, especially on Memorial Day.

Memorial Day 2019 (1 of 4): Howard Zinn asks, "Whom Will We Honor Memorial Day?"

"No politician who voted funds for war, no business contractor for the military, no general who ordered young men into battle, no FBI man who spied on anti-war activities, should be invited to public ceremonies on this sacred day. Let the dead of past wars be honored. Let those who live pledge themselves never to embark on mass slaughter again."
-- Howard Zinn

To me, the most disrespectful act that might be directed against the fallen from past wars, or the veterans still among us, is to accept self-censorship as it pertains to discussing the honest, real-world reasons why these conflicts occurred. There's no "either-or" fallacy stipulating that we all fall into line, or else be considered traitors.

Memorialize, and never stop asking questions, even when the answers are unpleasant. Some day we might learn. If we tolerate silence, then our children obviously will be next. If we tolerate war, pestilence and mayhem, then a little Zinn is good for whatever remains of our souls

Whom Will We Honor Memorial Day?, by Howard Zinn

Published on June 2, 1976 in the Boston Globe and republished in The Zinn Reader with the brief introduction below.

Memorial Day will be celebrated … by the usual betrayal of the dead, by the hypocritical patriotism of the politicians and contractors preparing for more wars, more graves to receive more flowers on future Memorial Days. The memory of the dead deserves a different dedication. To peace, to defiance of governments.

In 1974, I was invited by Tom Winship, the editor of the Boston Globe, who had been bold enough in 1971 to print part of the top secret Pentagon Papers on the history of the Vietnam War, to write a bi-weekly column for the op-ed page of the newspaper. I did that for about a year and a half. The column below appeared June 2, 1976, in connection with that year’s Memorial Day. After it appeared, my column was cancelled.

* * * * *

Memorial Day will be celebrated as usual, by high-speed collisions of automobiles and bodies strewn on highways and the sound of ambulance sirens throughout the land.

It will also be celebrated by the display of flags, the sound of bugles and drums, by parades and speeches and unthinking applause.

It will be celebrated by giant corporations, which make guns, bombs, fighter planes, aircraft carriers and an endless assortment of military junk and which await the $100 billion in contracts to be approved soon by Congress and the President.

There was a young woman in New Hampshire who refused to allow her husband, killed in Vietnam, to be given a military burial. She rejected the hollow ceremony ordered by those who sent him and 50,000 others to their deaths. Her courage should be cherished on Memorial Day. There were the B52 pilots who refused to fly those last vicious raids of Nixon’s and Kissinger’s war. Have any of the great universities, so quick to give honorary degrees to God-knows-whom, thought to honor those men at this Commencement time, on this Memorial Day?

No politician who voted funds for war, no business contractor for the military, no general who ordered young men into battle, no FBI man who spied on anti-war activities, should be invited to public ceremonies on this sacred day. Let the dead of past wars be honored. Let those who live pledge themselves never to embark on mass slaughter again.

“The shell had his number on it. The blood ran into the ground…Where his chest ought to have been they pinned the Congressional Medal, the DSC, the Medaille Militaire, the Belgian Croix de Guerre, the Italian gold medal, The Vitutea Militara sent by Queen Marie of Rumania. All the Washingtonians brought flowers .. Woodrow Wilson brought a bouquet of poppies.”

Those are the concluding lines of John Dos Passos angry novel 1919. Let us honor him on Memorial Day.

And also Thoreau, who went to jail to protest the Mexican War.

And Mark Twain, who denounced our war against the Filipinos at the turn of the century.

And I.F. Stone, who virtually alone among newspaper editors exposed the fraud and brutality of the Korean War.

Let us honor Martin Luther King, who refused the enticements of the White House, and the cautions of associates, and thundered against the war in Vietnam.

Memorial Day should be a day for putting flowers on graves and planting trees. Also, for destroying the weapons of death that endanger us more than they protect us, that waste our resources and threaten our children and grandchildren.

On Memorial Day we should take note that, in the name of “defense,” our taxes have been used to spend a quarter of a billion dollars on a helicopter assault ship called “the biggest floating lemon,” which was accepted by the Navy although it had over 2,000 major defects at the time of its trial cruise.

Meanwhile, there is such a shortage of housing that millions live in dilapidated sections of our cities and millions more are forced to pay high rents or high interest rates on their mortgages. There’s 90 billion for the B1 bomber, but people don’t have money to pay hospital bills.

We must be practical, say those whose practicality has consisted of a war every generation. We mustn’t deplete our defenses. Say those who have depleted our youth, stolen our resources. In the end, it is living people, not corpses, creative energy, not destructive rage, which are our only real defense, not just against other governments trying to kill us, but against our own, also trying to kill us.

Let us not set out, this Memorial Day, on the same old drunken ride to death.

And as an epilogue of sorts.

Berrigan, Ellsberg and Memorial Day, by Doug Noble (CounterPunch)

Memorial Day is a day noted for its parades honoring veterans by ennobling, glorifying (and thereby perpetuating) US war and militarism. The peace community in Rochester observes instead a solemn riverside service memorializing the thousands of victims of current US war and aggression, with each victim symbolized by a single rose tossed lovingly into the river’s flow.

Victims memorialized include the casualties of US sanctioned war and aggression, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Syria to Yemen to Somalia to South Sudan to Palestine. Also the many innocent victims of drone attacks, inhumane US immigration and incarceration policies, militarization of the police, and preventable gun violence. And the worldwide victims of catastrophic climate change, fed by US policies of denial and consumption. And an entire global population victimized by the threat of nuclear Armageddon triggered by senseless US provocations of Iran, North Korea, Russia, China.

There would not be enough roses to identify and honor even the tiniest sample of the the thousands of innocent victims lost to aggressive US policies. Such roses could easily choke the Genesee River in sorrow. Yet remembrance, however heartfelt, is still insufficient. After all, in his Gettysburg memorial address, Abraham Lincoln noted the futility of consecrating the war dead without rectifying the war’s cause: “It is for us the living to be dedicated to the unfinished work … so that these dead shall not have died in vain.” What, then, might move us toward peace, a peace threatened, most of all, by our own government’s unrelenting appetite for war?

I turn to the book of Daniel – that is, the book of Daniel Berrigan and Daniel Ellsberg, two icons whose monumental contribution to peace cannot be misconstrued ...

Memorial Day 2019 (1 of 4): Howard Zinn asks, "Whom Will We Honor Memorial Day?"

Memorial Day 2019 (2 of 4): Charles Ives, from Decoration Day to Memorial Day.

Memorial Day 2019 (3 of 4): "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream."

Memorial Day 2019 (4 of 4): History matters, especially on Memorial Day.

Looking for bipartisan consensus? Unfortunately, endless wars fill the bill.

Follow the money.
Follow the money.
Follow the money.

Rinse and repeat.

How to Challenge the Elite Consensus for Endless War, by Andrew J. Bacevich (The Nation)

There’s only one way: ​We have to harness the energy of millions of fed-up voters.

 ... the contours of basic policy evade critical examination, and American wars continue as if on autopilot.

The circumstances permitting this mindless undertaking to persist are so well-known that they hardly bear repeating. They include a brain-dead policy elite; a military system that insulates the vast majority of Americans from sacrifice; a cynical decision to saddle future generations with the responsibility to pay for today’s wars while the present generation enjoys tax cuts; congressional abdication of its constitutionally assigned war powers, compounded by more than a few members of the House and Senate being deeply in hock to the military-industrial complex; the hiring of what Tom Engelhardt has dubbed “warrior corporations”—profit-minded contractors, proxies, and mercenaries—effectively hiding the magnitude of war from American view; the absorption of available political energy by eminently worthy causes—the anti-Trump resistance and #MeToo offer examples—that inadvertently consign war to the margins; and finally, divisions within the feeble anti-war camp, one wing leaning left, the other leaning right, with neither willing to make common cause on matters where their views coincide.

Of course, underlying these is the enduring conceit, regularly celebrated in Washington, that Providence summons the United States to exercise global leadership now and forever, with that leadership expressed primarily through threatened or real military action. All of these together create a layered and interlocking defense that insulates the militarized status quo from challenge.

Even so, the profound American disregard for actual policy outcomes remains something of a puzzle. After all, at some level we see ourselves as a pragmatic people, preferring what works to what doesn’t. Yet as far as our wars are concerned, the gap between declared intentions and the results achieved continues to grow from one year to the next, while political elites, for the most part, pretend not to notice. Let Afghanistan, a conflict now promising to extend into eternity, serve as the prosecution’s exhibit number one.

Here, I submit, part of the problem lies with Trump himself, widely viewed by members of the intelligentsia as a noxious charlatan. For this very reason, when the president, however inadvertently, utters a self-evident truth—that our post-9/11 wars cost a lot and aren’t working—his endorsement of that truth drains it of significance. It’s akin to an involuntary reflex: If Trump says our wars have achieved nothing, then surely they must have done some good, right?

Yet, however ironically, Trump’s own ascent to the presidency might itself offer a clue about how to extricate ourselves from these “forever wars.”

Choking on it: "What Caused the United States’ Decline?"

As a useful preface, it helps to know that I consider American "exceptionalism" to be sheer idiocy. 

Ironically, former foreign service officer Louis Sell, now an author and teacher, was at the Louisville Free Public Library on Thursday evening to discuss his latest book. It's about US-Soviet relations in the context of the USSR's collapse, Sell's take was wonderful, and the topic provides an excellent segue into Tom Engelhardt's piece.

Why are we in a state of constant warfare throughout the world, having reached a point where so many Americans on the left side of the aisle are as hawkishly interventionalist, if not more bellicose, than the ones on the right?

Part of it owes to the vast extent of consumer borne fantasy-as-lifestyle, the sort of daily escapism that hinders realism once one steps outside the movie theater or  away from the video game console.

But more importantly in terms of America as nation-state, it's about biting off more than we might possibly chew, because we no longer were contained by the Cold War stalemate -- and both God and Big Money told us so.

Who's going to perform the Heimlich maneuver for the United States?

Han Solo, perhaps?

What Caused the United States’ Decline? by Tom Engelhardt (TomDispatch.com, via The Nation)

Hint: you don’t have to look far.

When it comes to cluelessness, there’s another, far stranger path the United States has been following since at least the George W. Bush moment that couldn’t be more consequential and yet somehow remains the least noticed of all. On this subject, Americans don’t have a clue. In fact, if you could put the United States on a psychiatrist’s couch, this might be the place to start.

AMERICA CONTAINED

In a way, it’s the oldest story on Earth: the rise and fall of empires. And note the plural there. It was never — not until recently at least — empire, always empires. Since the fifteenth century, when the fleets of the first European imperial powers broke into the larger world with subjugation in mind, it was invariably a contest of many. There were at least three or sometimes significantly more imperial powers rising and contesting for dominance or slowly falling from it. This was, by definition, the history of great powers on this planet: the challenging rise, the challenged decline. Think of it for so many centuries as the essential narrative of history, the story of how it all happened until at least 1945, when just two “superpowers,” the United States and the Soviet Union, found themselves facing off on a global scale.

Of the two, the U.S. was always stronger, more powerful, and far wealthier. It theoretically feared the Russian Bear, the Evil Empire, which it worked assiduously to “contain” behind that famed Iron Curtain and whose adherents in this country, always modest in number, were subjected to a mania of fear and suppression. However, the truth — at least in retrospect — was that, in the Cold War years, the Soviets were actually doing Washington a strange, if unnoted, favor. Across much of the Eurasian continent, and other places from Cuba to the Middle East, Soviet power and the never-ending contest for influence and dominance that went with it always reminded American leaders that their own power had its limits. This, as the twenty-first century should have (but hasn’t) made clear, was no small thing. It still seemed obvious then that American power could not be total. There were things it could not do, places it could not control, dreams its leaders simply couldn’t have. Though no one ever thought of it that way, from 1945 to 1991, the United States, like the Soviet Union, was, after a fashion, “contained.”

In those years, the Russians were, in essence, saving Washington from itself. Soviet power was a tangible reminder to American political and military leaders that certain areas of the planet remained no-go zones (except in what, in those years, were called “the shadows”). The Soviet Union, in short, rescued Washington from both the fantasy and the hell of going it alone, even if Americans only grasped that reality at the most subliminal of levels.

This equilibrium lasted until the USSR's collapse in 1991, and ten years later, Osama bin Laden's terrorist attacks provided the opportunity for W & Co. to try swallowing the planet.

It's been mostly downhill ever since.

Despite what it looked like in Washington once upon a time, the disappearance of the Soviet Union proved to be no gift at all, but a disaster of the first order. It removed all sense of limits from America’s political class and led to a tale of greed on a planetary scale. In the process, it also set the U.S. on a path to self-decline.

The history of greed in our time has yet to be written, but what a story it will someday make. In it, the greed of those geopolitical dreamers will intersect with the greed of an ever wealthier, ever more gilded 1%, of the billionaires who were preparing to swallow whole the political system of that last superpower and grab so much of the wealth of the planet, leaving so little for others.

Whether you’re talking about the urge to control the planet militarily or financially, what took place in these years could, in the end, result in ruin of a historic kind. To use a favored phrase from the Bush years, one of these days we may be facing little short of “regime change” on a planetary scale. And what a piece of shock and awe that’s likely to prove to be.

All of us, of course, now live on the planet Bush’s boys tried to swallow whole. They left us in a world of infinite war, infinite harm, and in Donald Trump’s America where cluelessness has been raised to a new power.

The belated Memorial Day post by Howard Zinn: "Whom Will We Honor Memorial Day?"

I had no idea Cannon Fodder was a game, and has been for a long time. Small wonder we're doomed as a nation.

One reason that I'm a last-minute type of guy is because if the planning is done too far in advance, I forget about it. So it was with this, which was laid out prior to Memorial Day for publication on Memorial Day, then slipped down the queue. By the time I saw it again, ten days had elapsed. 

Better late than never, I guess.

---

"No politician who voted funds for war, no business contractor for the military, no general who ordered young men into battle, no FBI man who spied on anti-war activities, should be invited to public ceremonies on this sacred day. Let the dead of past wars be honored. Let those who live pledge themselves never to embark on mass slaughter again."
-- Howard Zinn

To me, the most disrespectful act that might be directed against the fallen from past wars, or the veterans still among us, is to accept self-censorship as it pertains to discussing the honest, real-world reasons why these conflicts occurred. There's no "either-or" fallacy stipulating that we all fall into line, or else be considered traitors.

Memorialize, and never stop asking questions, even when the answers are unpleasant. Some day we might learn. If we tolerate silence, then our children obviously will be next. If we tolerate war, pestilence and mayhem, then a little Zinn is good for whatever remains of our souls

Whom Will We Honor Memorial Day?, by Howard Zinn

Published on June 2, 1976 in the Boston Globe and republished in The Zinn Reader with the brief introduction below.

Memorial Day will be celebrated … by the usual betrayal of the dead, by the hypocritical patriotism of the politicians and contractors preparing for more wars, more graves to receive more flowers on future Memorial Days. The memory of the dead deserves a different dedication. To peace, to defiance of governments.

In 1974, I was invited by Tom Winship, the editor of the Boston Globe, who had been bold enough in 1971 to print part of the top secret Pentagon Papers on the history of the Vietnam War, to write a bi-weekly column for the op-ed page of the newspaper. I did that for about a year and a half. The column below appeared June 2, 1976, in connection with that year’s Memorial Day. After it appeared, my column was cancelled.

* * * * *

Memorial Day will be celebrated as usual, by high-speed collisions of automobiles and bodies strewn on highways and the sound of ambulance sirens throughout the land.

It will also be celebrated by the display of flags, the sound of bugles and drums, by parades and speeches and unthinking applause.

It will be celebrated by giant corporations, which make guns, bombs, fighter planes, aircraft carriers and an endless assortment of military junk and which await the $100 billion in contracts to be approved soon by Congress and the President.

There was a young woman in New Hampshire who refused to allow her husband, killed in Vietnam, to be given a military burial. She rejected the hollow ceremony ordered by those who sent him and 50,000 others to their deaths. Her courage should be cherished on Memorial Day. There were the B52 pilots who refused to fly those last vicious raids of Nixon’s and Kissinger’s war. Have any of the great universities, so quick to give honorary degrees to God-knows-whom, thought to honor those men at this Commencement time, on this Memorial Day?

No politician who voted funds for war, no business contractor for the military, no general who ordered young men into battle, no FBI man who spied on anti-war activities, should be invited to public ceremonies on this sacred day. Let the dead of past wars be honored. Let those who live pledge themselves never to embark on mass slaughter again.

“The shell had his number on it. The blood ran into the ground…Where his chest ought to have been they pinned the Congressional Medal, the DSC, the Medaille Militaire, the Belgian Croix de Guerre, the Italian gold medal, The Vitutea Militara sent by Queen Marie of Rumania. All the Washingtonians brought flowers .. Woodrow Wilson brought a bouquet of poppies.”

Those are the concluding lines of John Dos Passos angry novel 1919. Let us honor him on Memorial Day.

And also Thoreau, who went to jail to protest the Mexican War.

And Mark Twain, who denounced our war against the Filipinos at the turn of the century.

And I.F. Stone, who virtually alone among newspaper editors exposed the fraud and brutality of the Korean War.

Let us honor Martin Luther King, who refused the enticements of the White House, and the cautions of associates, and thundered against the war in Vietnam.

Memorial Day should be a day for putting flowers on graves and planting trees. Also, for destroying the weapons of death that endanger us more than they protect us, that waste our resources and threaten our children and grandchildren.

On Memorial Day we should take note that, in the name of “defense,” our taxes have been used to spend a quarter of a billion dollars on a helicopter assault ship called “the biggest floating lemon,” which was accepted by the Navy although it had over 2,000 major defects at the time of its trial cruise.

Meanwhile, there is such a shortage of housing that millions live in dilapidated sections of our cities and millions more are forced to pay high rents or high interest rates on their mortgages. There’s 90 billion for the B1 bomber, but people don’t have money to pay hospital bills.

We must be practical, say those whose practicality has consisted of a war every generation. We mustn’t deplete our defenses. Say those who have depleted our youth, stolen our resources. In the end, it is living people, not corpses, creative energy, not destructive rage, which are our only real defense, not just against other governments trying to kill us, but against our own, also trying to kill us.

Let us not set out, this Memorial Day, on the same old drunken ride to death.

And as an epilogue of sorts.

Berrigan, Ellsberg and Memorial Day, by Doug Noble (CounterPunch)

Memorial Day is a day noted for its parades honoring veterans by ennobling, glorifying (and thereby perpetuating) US war and militarism. The peace community in Rochester observes instead a solemn riverside service memorializing the thousands of victims of current US war and aggression, with each victim symbolized by a single rose tossed lovingly into the river’s flow.

Victims memorialized include the casualties of US sanctioned war and aggression, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Syria to Yemen to Somalia to South Sudan to Palestine. Also the many innocent victims of drone attacks, inhumane US immigration and incarceration policies, militarization of the police, and preventable gun violence. And the worldwide victims of catastrophic climate change, fed by US policies of denial and consumption. And an entire global population victimized by the threat of nuclear Armageddon triggered by senseless US provocations of Iran, North Korea, Russia, China.

There would not be enough roses to identify and honor even the tiniest sample of the the thousands of innocent victims lost to aggressive US policies. Such roses could easily choke the Genesee River in sorrow. Yet remembrance, however heartfelt, is still insufficient. After all, in his Gettysburg memorial address, Abraham Lincoln noted the futility of consecrating the war dead without rectifying the war’s cause: “It is for us the living to be dedicated to the unfinished work … so that these dead shall not have died in vain.” What, then, might move us toward peace, a peace threatened, most of all, by our own government’s unrelenting appetite for war?

I turn to the book of Daniel – that is, the book of Daniel Berrigan and Daniel Ellsberg, two icons whose monumental contribution to peace cannot be misconstrued ...

Memorial Day 2017 (3 of 3): History matters, especially on Memorial Day.

There are long, long trails a-winding through places like France.

Aisne-Marne American Cemetery

With headstones lying in a sweeping curve, the 42.5-acre Aisne-Marne American Cemetery and Memorial in France, sits at the foot of Belleau Wood. The cemetery contains the graves of 2,289 war dead, most of whom fought in the vicinity and in the Marne Valley in the summer of 1918. The memorial chapel sits on a hillside, decorated with sculptured and stained-glass details of wartime personnel, equipment and insignia. Inscribed on its interior wall are 1,060 names of the missing. Rosettes mark the names of those since recovered and identified. During World War II the chapel was damaged slightly by an enemy shell.

Belleau Wood adjoins the cemetery and contains many vestiges of World War I. A monument at the flagpole commemorates the valor of the U.S. Marines who captured much of this ground in 1918.

Respecting the memory of American soldiers who died while in the service of their country is a task perhaps best undertaken with respect for history, period.

Speaking only for myself, I take it very seriously. It's a habit of thought almost certainly springing from my father's fascination with far-off events that conspired to transport a hick from bucolic Georgetown, Indiana to the Pacific Theater of Operations -- and in his case, back home again.

Others weren't as lucky, and every year on Memorial Day, I pause to reflect on the serendipity of it all.

As a prelude to Memorial Day, there tend to be scolding social media reminders to the effect that Americans fixated on holiday feasting, partying and recreation somehow dishonor the nation's military heritage. To be sure, I contribute my fair share of rants about the general populace and its chronic ignorance of history.

However, I don't think honor and bacchanalia are mutually exclusive concepts. After all, the venerable institution of the wake combines them very effectively, and what's more, the human condition is incapable of sustaining a permanent state of mourning. Life does go on.

Like the vast majority of topics pertaining to human beings, the notion of dying for one's country is inordinately complex. John Gonder once touched on it during a conversation, when he mentioned the notorious escape clause during the American Civil War, where men drafted into the Union Army could buy their way out of service by paying $300 or providing a substitute to serve (and sometimes die) in their place.

During the Vietnam War, songwriter John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival noticed it, too: Exactly how is it determined who risks dying for his or her country, and who subsequently profits from their deaths?

Dick Cheney might know the answer.

Preferably, respecting the memory of American soldiers who died while in the service of their country is a task best undertaken with a respect for history on the part of those still living, along with sadness and regret that human civilization seems not to have evolved to a point of no longer requiring violence to settle issues. War is a ridiculous concept, although humans seem enamored of it.

It's also a holiday weekend, and I suspect you are enjoying it.

Carry on, then.

Memorial Day (Snopes)

Claim: Former slaves reburied dead Union prisoners of war in May 1865, thus creating the modern observance of Memorial Day.

MIXTURE:

TRUE: In May 1865, free blacks in Charleston reburied dead Union prisoners of war and held a cemetery dedication ceremony.

UNDETERMINED: The event referenced above is the origin of the modern Memorial Day observance.

Wikipedia's article goes into greater detail.

Our new American fascism: "Ordinariness is no protection against doing great evil."

Just the other night over beers, I ventured the opinion that another global conflict on the order of the World Wars is inevitable -- not the disruptive but ultimately low intensity of the "war on terrorist Muslims," and not nuclear conflict (losing too many markets is bad for the 1%), but the big conventional kahuna, perhaps with a handy plague or famine to follow.

Cynicism aside, realism informs us that this cycle of pain has been repeated throughout human history, again and again. War becomes attractive, and is viewed as an acceptable alternative to negotiation, once enough people have forgotten what it really means, and with attention spans ever shorter amid the most readily available surplus of useful information in mankind's history, it's hard to come up with a plausible argument for the maintenance of peace.

I might suggest there are effective uses to thoughtful knowledge of the past, but that's thinking, and I'm not sure this notion is of interest at the precise moment when American wheels threaten to skip rails.

I'd suggest that recalling the lessons of the Holocaust, and remembering why we return so often to Eichmann, Arendt and the "banality" of evil, except that so many of our homegrown fascists are yelling so loudly, and the sound of those boots landing on human faces tends to drown out the teaching moment.

Why Adolf Eichmann’s final message remains so profoundly unsettling, by Giles Fraser (The Guardian)

 ... All of which doesn’t make Eichmann any less disturbing. It makes him more so. For what Arendt’s Eichmann did was to demonstrate that ordinariness is no protection against doing great evil. Cesarani too, sees Eichmann as a sort of “everyman”. No, he wasn’t just a travel agent, indifferent to the destination of his passengers. He was personally responsible, a responsibility he blindly denied right to the end. Which is precisely why the moral message of his story remains profoundly unsettling: if ordinary people were capable of such great evil, then, given the right circumstances, so are the rest of us.

Women for peace: In the beginning, Mother's Day was celebrated differently.

It's another example of why genuine historical facts tend to be far more interesting than how they're eventually not remembered, 155 years later.

The Original Mother’s Day Proclamation: A Mother's Day Reading (Plough)

 ... In the United States, the origins of the official holiday go back to 1870, when Julia Ward Howe – an abolitionist best remembered as the poet who wrote “Battle Hymn of the Republic” – worked to establish a Mother’s Peace Day. Howe dedicated the celebration to the eradication of war, and organized festivities in Boston for years.

We think he thinks he's going to war: Is anyone ready for an adults-only discussion about City Hall's UEA provocations?

Maybe, maybe not. It depends on whether we can find any adults.

The Green Mouse says that this Wednesday's Urban Enterprise Association board meeting will be the culmination of a lame duck but still conniving City Hall's recent campaign against the UEA's statutory autonomy, and that the mayor will attend the meeting to demand (a) an immediate surrender, (b) defenestration for the UEA's director, Mike Ladd, and (c) an immediate screening of the Marx Brothers' classic satire, "Duck Soup," to be funded (of course) by the UEA's bulging and just-out-of-reach coffers.

Speaking personally, I join councilman Dan Coffey in saying: "UEA? Leave it be!" I wonder if our mayoral candidates have an opinion?

REWIND: Two Memorial Day posts from 2008.

Holiday reading from the archives, as compiled here: Two Memorial Day posts from 2008.

Memorial Day as a universal concept.

Thinking about Muhammad Ali and the Democrats on Memorial Day.