November 11, 2018 will mark the 100th
anniversary of the armistice that brought the cease fire in the “war to end all
wars,” the bloodiest in human history up to that time. Europeans suffered utter
carnage with deaths in the millions. American forces entered the war only in
its last year and suffered the least number of casualties-approximately 110,000
deaths, many of them due to the influenza epidemic of that year. Thus only a
small fraction of the American public suffered the terrors of World War I- the
troops themselves, their families and closest friends. It is by no means inaccurate
to note that a similar measure applies to the numerous wars waged by the United
States today. Less than 1 percent of the U.S. population is making the grievous
sacrifices required of soldiers in the various overseas conflicts in which the
United States is involved. We say this not to disparage our fellow citizens but
because we believe that the public’s removal from the reality of war and
militarism blinds many to its logical and utterly negative outcomes.
In commemoration of this
day we, as Veteran For Peace, ask our fellow citizens to inquire of themselves
honestly - What has been achieved by these wars and have the dreadful costs
been worth the consequences past and
potential?
The national holiday
of remembrance observed at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the
eleventh month is today called Veterans Day to honor all who have worn the
uniform and we certainly mourn the sacrifices and losses endured by all who
have served. We also lament the actuality that the cession of war in 1918 failed
to reconcile the belligerents or bring about the amity envisioned by Wilson and
by all Americans who believed the U.S. should never have entered the war. To
cite the most fateful outcome of the so-called “peace” in its aftermath the conflicts
in the Middle East and the wider region today derive from the betrayal by
American allies, Britain and France, of their pledge of Arab independence.
President Woodrow
Wilson invested the original day with the following words.
…with gratitude for the victory, both
because of the thing from which it
has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations…
We entreat our fellow
citizens to note and process the irony of his words. War had somehow freed us
from war and foreshadowed a world order of peace and justice!
The tragedy of the
postwar world that Wilson envisioned to be a “world made safe for democracy” is
that the treaty signed at Versailles in 1919 incontestably made the world safe only
for yet more war.
Wilson hoped that his
famous Fourteen Points, and especially his League of Nations, could lead the
great powers away from fevered economic competition, mutual suspicion,
ultra-nationalism and an all-inclusive arms race toward a “peace without
victory” and a new international order whereby states that had long antagonized
each other could collaborate and manage a new era of comity, internationalism
and an end to the general and perpetual arms race.
Although the League
of Nations was established at Versailles the United States Senate refused to
join it and the British, French and Italians disregarded Wilson’s larger
conception to impose what one observer labelled a “Carthaginian peace” on
Germany. All of Europe’s imperial powers were equally to blame for the war.
Germany acceded to the armistice on the generous terms outlined by Wilson but
the American allies determined to punish their enemy to the maximum extent
possible. How many readers know that Britain continued to impose a total
blockade of foodstuffs, even at neutral ports, that so further weakened Germany
over the next year that domestic civil strife impelled the new Weimar Republic
to accept the harshest terms including exclusive responsibility for initiating
the war, the so-called “war guilt” clause, acceptance of French occupation
troops, and the imposition of crippling reparations? Such draconian stipulations
catapulted Germany into a depression so crushing that war orphans went hungry
and amputee veterans begged in the streets. Despair generated in that dismal
environment nourished the seeds of Nazism.
Thus the post war
ceasefire lasted all of one generation until most of the factors that had
produced the “Great War” in the first place re-emerged to generate Round Two.
In the inferno of World War II at least five times as many human beings died as
in Round One and the slaughter culminated in the employment of those dire
weapons that portend the obliteration of human civilizations if not the
extinction of our species.
The origination and
deployment of nuclear weapons guaranteed the subsequent nuclear arms race that
now holds nine nations in its satanic embrace with more countries considering
their development.
A year ago the peoples
of our world held their collective breath as our president threatened to visit
“fire and fury” on North Korea in response to that tiny nation’s development of
its own small nuclear arsenal, that is a response to the menace it feels from
the U.S. In Syria the U.S. and Russia face off over differing agendas for the
future of that country with ground forces close enough to set off a clash that
could lead to worse. American forces remain in Afghanistan and Iraq although
polls have shown that a majority of Americans now favor withdrawal from the
latter nation. Washington abets the criminal war now being waged by Saudi
Arabia against the already destitute and shattered nation of Yemen, thereby
stoking the possibility of war between Riyadh and Tehran, which may decide to
renew Iran’s nuclear program in retaliation for President Trump’s withdrawal
from the Joint Plan of Action agreed to by the U.S. China, Russia, Germany,
France and Iran. Since then Trump has
withdrawn from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces agreement signed by President
Reagan and former Soviet premiere Gorbachev in 1987 that reduced the 65,000 hellish
weapons then in existence by more than 75%. Now an ominous return to the Cold
War and all its potentially calamitous perils looms.
When the armistice of
1918 went into effect the peoples engaged in that ruinous conflict breathed a
collective sigh of relief and held out hope that we might learn from the
appalling experience and never again allow such industrial mass murder.
James Madison, the
principal author of the United States Constitution admonished us long ago that:
Of all the
enemies of public liberty war is most to be dreaded because it comprises and
develops the germ of every other.
Numerous former high
ranking officials of what we like to call the “national security state’ have today
warned that we are now closer to World War Three and the employment of nuclear
weapons than we have been since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
On this Armistice Day
let us find the will to abolish these weapons that do anything but safeguard
our security and find the collective will and means to abolish war before it
abolishes us.
Veterans for Peace, Chapter 9, Boston,
Massachusetts
