Why will members of Veterans for Peace again ring bells 11 times on Armistice /Veterans Day instead of shooting guns into the air?
As David Swanson, (founder of War Is A Crime.org and author of War Is A Lie) explains in his piece "Fahrenheit 11-11-11":
Believe it or not, November 11th was not made a holiday in order to celebrate war, support troops, or cheer the 11th year of occupying Afghanistan. This day was made a holiday in order to celebrate an armistice that ended what was up until that point, in 1918, one of the worst things our species had thus far done to itself, namely World War I. World War I, then known simply as the world war or the great war, had been marketed as a war to end war. Celebrating its end was also understood as celebrating the end of all wars. A ten-year campaign was launched in 1918 that in 1928 created the Kellogg-Briand Pact, legally banning all wars. That treaty is still on the books, which is why war making is a criminal act and how Nazis came to be prosecuted for it.
In the words of Thomas Hall Shastid in 1927:
[O]n November 11, 1918, there ended the most unnecessary, the most financially exhausting, and the most terribly fatal of all the wars that the world has ever known. Twenty millions of men and women, in that war, were killed outright, or died later from wounds. The Spanish influenza, admittedly caused by the War and nothing else, killed, in various lands, one hundred million persons more.
Writer Kurt Vonnegut, a WWII POW later wrote:
...November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy all the people of all 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 Veteran's Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veteran's Day is not... Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things.
Bells worldwide were therefore rung on the 11th month, the 11th day, at 11 a.m. in 1918 to celebrate and recognize the ending of WWI, " the war to end all wars. " To commemorate that peaceful pledge, bells were rung around the world on November 11 for over 35 years. The U.S. Congress declared November 11 a holiday in 1938, " ...a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be hereafter celebrated and known as "Armistice Day." But on June 1, 1954 the bells were silenced. President Eisenhower signed the 83rd Congress' Amendment to the Act of 1938 by deleting the word "Armistice" and inserting in its place the word "Veterans" thus politicizing the day. Many Veterans For Peace (VFP) members feel that the substitution of the word "Armistice" to "Veterans" changes the focus from peace to war.
It's too bad Americans, as a whole, unlike Europeans, have forgotten this important history of Armistice Day and in fact have reverted to celebrating war as heroic. Unfortunately most who celebrate "Veterans Day" largely embrace the "old Lie; Dulce et Dorcum est Pro patria mori" contained in these famous lines by Britain's greatest war poet, Wilfred Owen:
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
(WILFRED OWEN, 1893 -- 1918: Portrait by James Mitchell from a photograph of Wilfred Owen,
then an officer cadet, July 1916. On November 4th. 1918, Owen was shot and killed near the village of Ors. The news of his death reached his parents' home as the Armistice bells were ringing on 11, November 1918. )
Too often rhetoric and patriotic symbols are used instead of genuine compensation for the extraordinary sacrifices and services of military personnel. And since 90 percent of the victims of wars are now civilians, by honoring only veterans, the public is distracted from the awful price paid by those other than members of the military.
The VFP has therefore resolved to promote ringing a bell 11 times at its ceremonies on November 11 and at other solemn occasions such as funerals, to remind the public of that Armistice Day peace pledge. This year over 150 Minnesota churches have also pledged to join in, not only by ringing bells but also by asking their members either in their bulletins or from the pulpit, to work for peace. Ninety three years after the first Armistice Day, and given the special significance of this year, 2011, the commemoration takes on added importance. Let's ring the bell 11 times at 11 a.m. on the 11th month in 2011 to commemorate the end of the "War to end all wars!"
Celebrate and recapture peace on 11/11/11!
(Co-authored by Bob Heberle, VFP Chapter 27)
Christopher Holshek: National Service Day
Shane Claiborne: When Soldiers Become Saints
Glenn D. Braunstein, M.D.: A Salute to Military Medicine, Our Brave Warriors
John Philip Newell: 11/11/11: Our Instinct for Unity
We worry about the morrow rather than our past and have lost all vision in doing so!
An hour before dawn the road was still an empty picture of moonlight. The distant gun-fire had crashed and rumbled all night, muffled and terrific with immense flashes, like wave of some tumult of water rolling along the horizon. There came an interval of silence in which I heard a horse neigh, shrill and scared and lonely. The camp-fires were burning low when the grinding jolting column lumbered back. The field guns came first, with nodding men sitting stiffly on weary horses, followed by waggons and limbers and field-kitchens. After this rumble of wheels came the infantry, shambling, limping straggling and out of step. Thus, with an almost spectral appearance the lurching brown figures fliltted past with slung rifles and heads bent forward under basin-helmets. Moonlight and dawn began to mingle, and I could see the barley swaying indolently against the sky. Then, as if answering our expectancy, a remote skirling of bagpipes began, and the Gordon Highlanders hobbled in. But we had been sitting at the cross-roads nearly six hours, and faces were unrecognizable, when Dottrell hailed our leading Company.
It was all in the day's work - an exhausted Division returning from the Somme Offensive - but for me it was as though I had watched an army of ghosts. It was as though I had seen the War as it might be envisioned by the mind of some epic poet a hundred years hence.
I was the first fruits of the battle of Missionary Ridge.
When I felt the bullet enter my heart
I wished I had staid at home and gone to jail
For stealing the hogs of Curl Trenary,
Instead of running away and joining the army.
Rather a thousand times the county jail
Than to lie under this marble figure with wings,
And this granite pedestal
Bearing the words, ”Pro Patria.”
What do they mean, anyway?
This one, however, is from a Scot by birth, Aussie by residence:
But I can't help but wonder now, Willie McBride
if all those who lie here know why they died?
Did you really believe them when they told you 'The Cause?'
Did you really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame
The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain,
For Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.
Lest we forget
We did wonder but never questioned what happened to the 'Armistice' Day we grew up seeing our parents/earlier generations honour and celebrate.
Now we know. And in a sense, things are a mess, ain't they??
Not that we are pacifists, we're not.....
Or dont support Veterans, Soldiers and all who serve, we do.
Unequivocally.
But if one wants Peace or supports only Just Wars, it is beyond sad to see how well the ruling upper class take hold of things, even re-write History to create new myths and support......
If the World did still call it Armistice Day, we would have lived up to the West's highest Ideals, and it would hardly be likely that this 1st Decade of the 21st Century would have been so full of Conflict/Wars that were'nt really Just..... Who knows what other problems we might have solved or prevented all together.
:(
Some Moms
Amistice day should be remembered on 11-11, make it another Friday or Monday to celebrate our Veterans sacrifice...........Lets bring back Decoration day in May to remember those who gave all and lets have another day in spring to memorialize white sales and the returning of spring and summer!
So...What would Jesus do? He said... "Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you," Jesus said, "do ye even so to them..." (Matt. 7: 12).
So how would YOU like to be treated by your fellow man?
Just think how many great changes would be made from the single individual and the entire world if all started practicing Jesus' teaching. The individual would be kind, loving, and considerate to those with whom he came into contact and Nations and the entire world would be in perfect harmony. Crime, racism, and all human abuse would cease to exist. The world would never know war again.
I am not a religious person per se, because so many wars are fought over strong religious beliefs (my book is better than yours). However, I am a spiritual person who believes we are all connected together as one spirit consciousness.
Something to think about on ARMISTICE DAY! Just...IMAGINE...(John Lennon)
E Pluribus Unum...Out of many...ONE!
Taking "months to cool," "pools of molten steel" were "discovered" in the basements of the World Trade Center on 9/11: Jet fuel burns at 750F, steel melts at 2700F.
Happy Veterans' Day
However, the writers claim about wars being illegal due to Kellogg-Briand is not exactly true. Unfortunate though it may be, the U.S. claimed interpretive rights to the original pact wording, thus allowing self-defense and ensuring no obligatory actions be mandated for the U.S. against transgressors of the pact.
The idea driving the pact was to ban the use of war as an instrument of national policy, with the hopeful ideal of completely ridding the world from war. This can be, as has been proven, bypassed by 'smart' wording and interpretation.
Take a look at David Swanson's new book---he's just written an entire book on the history of the Kellogg-Briand Pact: http://warisacrime.org/content/imagine-if-war-were-illegal-%E2%80%94-it and then let us know if you can still maintain that war was not made illegal.
Click the Download button and follow the on screen directions.
Media Review: Military Education Benefits for College: A Comprehensive Guide for Military Members, Veterans, and Their Dependents
http://journals.naspa.org/jsarp/vol48/iss3/art7/