MEMORIAL DAY 2015 III: Why the USA needs a holiday to honor anti-war protesters who fought back against America's unjust wars....
[Editor's Note: The following article by Dylan Matthews, May 25, 2015, came to us via Portside from Vox. Some of us with longer memories than others will note that this weekend would have been the "Memorial Day Holiday" had the country not changed the date for marking the holiday. Originally and for most of its years, Memorial Day was marked on May 31. The following article came to us via Portside and makes a point that we at Substance can certainly support. The decision by some of us to oppose the Vietnam War (and, in the case of this reporter, become the first Conscientious Objector in the draft board in Elizabeth, New Jersey) was difficult if we came from a working class environment where all of the adult men had been in "the service" during World War II.
Nevertheless, when it became clear that the Vietnam War was an imperialist war, and an extension of the unconscionable return of French colonialism to "Indochina" after World War II, it had to be done. One of the difficutlties working class men and women (of all "races") faced during the 1950s and 1960s was that the working class history had been burned out of the American history books as completely as certain books had been burned more dramatically in Nazi Germany. Hence, it required a lot of work, before the Internet, for working class men who graduated from high school in the 1960s (I was Class of 1964) when the Draft was still in power to learn that our opposition to the war was no a perversion or unique. While it was relatively easy in certain college towns and in those privileged places where "progressives" lurked, they were not organizing or working to get the truth out in Union County New Jersey in the early 1960s.
Hence, my friends and I face the simplest of choices in the fact of the Draft: enlist or be drafted. As a result, most of my friends (many of us had been Boy Scouts and athletes) enlisted -- in the U.S. Marine Corps. We were in good shape, etc., and all the old Hollywood lies ("Sands of Iwo Jima") were still in place with some new ones ("The Green Berets") added on. I was simply lucky to get a college scholarship and a year to study things while my best friends from high schools wound up dead before he was old enough to vote and another friends from high school and Boy Scouts wound up a POW for more than six years. Those facts were the result of the lies.
The following essay suggests that as teachers we need to make sure that that book burning never happens again, either the subtle kind like was (and is) practiced in the USA or the more vulgar kind, as practiced in Nazi Germany. While the Internet makes is easier to learn some facts of history, we have to be careful that we are not lulled into believing that we can get all the facts thanks to the Web. In some ways, the Web makes it easier, not harder, for tyrants to control information -- and thus thought. George N. Schmidt, Editor, Substance].
When the "Fort Hood Three" announced their opposition to the Vietnam War in 1966, anti-war activity in the U.S. military was still not as widespread as it was to become soon. By 1968, dozens of GIs at the same Texas military base (Fort Hood) refused to be sent to Chicago to be used against protesters, including the editor of Substance, during the Democratic National Convention, and anti-war activism within the military was world wide and growing in effectiveness. The film "Sir No Sir!" and the book Soldiers in Revolt are both still available to help Americans of a new generation understand the tradition of working class opposition to America's imperialist wars, while the histories in the Howard Zinn tradition help everyone understand how long and deep has been that opposition... It's Time We Have a Holiday to Honor Those Who Try to Stop Wars Too, by Dylan Matthews, May 25, 2015, Vox
American history is littered with examples of pointless wars fought for bad reasons, and with people who risked their careers and their freedom to oppose them. some wars aren't worth fighting. Some causes aren't worth sacrificing American lives for. Those who've fought to remind the government of those basic facts deserve our respect and our thanks.
Memorial Day and Veterans Day often get equated, but there is an essential distinction between the two. Veterans Day honors all who have served the American military in wars. Memorial Day honors those who've perished. It's an annual reminder that wars have grave human costs, which must be both recognized and minimized.
Those costs are not inevitable. We ought to also set aside time to remember those throughout American history who have tried hardest to reduce them, to prevent unnecessary loss of life both American and foreign: war resisters.
War resistors can be heroes
American history is littered with examples of pointless wars fought for bad reasons, and with people who risked their careers and their freedom to oppose them. The Mexican-American War, for one, was a blatant land grab. While James K. Polk claimed that Mexico had struck first - saying in his war message to Congress that "Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon America's soil" - the truth was that he had sent American troops into disputed territory between the Rio Grande and the Nueces River, whereupon Mexican troops, concerned by American encroachment, attacked.
Abraham Lincoln, then in his only term as a congressman from Illinois, questioned Polk's rationale and introduced what came to be known as the "spot resolutions" demanding that the president point out the exact spot on which American blood had been spilled, to prove that it was really American land. Lincoln received vociferous attacks from Democratic newspapers and meetings back in his district; participants at one rally condemned him as "this Benedict Arnold of our district." But he was on the right side of history: the war was unjustified and caused needless suffering.
World War I was, if anything, more pointless than the Mexican-American War. The best that could be said of American involvement in the conflict is that it helped bring seemingly ceaseless bloodshed between European nations to a quicker close. But the war itself was fought for no great principle. It was not a fight against tyranny; Germany was a constitutional monarchy, much like Great Britain, and the Allies counted Czarist Russia among their ranks. It was not redressing any unprovoked invasion. It was a tragic unfurling of alliances that claimed 10 million lives and laid the groundwork for both Stalinism and Nazism.
And for the crime of opposing US entry into that morass, dozens saw federal prison time, mostly under the Espionage Act of 1917. In World War I alone, socialist leader Eugene V. Debs, Rep. Victor Berger (socialist-WI), Jehovah's Witnesses leader Joseph Franklin Rutherford, activist Kate Richards O'Hare, anarchist Emma Goldman, and German-American businessman William Edenborn all served time behind bars for their opposition to the war. Berger was denied his seat in Congress for his conviction, one of the few times a duly elected American politician was barred from office for having the wrong opinions.
Outside the United States, World War I resisters suffered even more. More than 20,000 Britons refused the draft, and of those more than 6,000 were sent to prison and endured "hard labor, a bare-bones diet, and a strict 'rule of silence,'" as the writer Adam Hochschild explains. Those who refused to fight upon making it to the front often faced death. The British and French armies shot 320 and 700 men, respectively, for refusing to kill.
You don't have to be a pacifist to respect resistance
Desertion is an extreme measure, and it's easy to condemn those who resisted in that manner, to claim they were cowards or fell down on their duties to their fellow soldiers. It's easier still to point to wars of more moral clarity - the fight against Nazi and Japanese imperialism in World War II, the destruction of slavery in the Civil War - and ask what conceivable moral point resistance, especially desertion, would have served.
There's no comparing isolationist or anti-Semitic opposition to World War II with clearheaded opposition to the waste of World War I or Vietnam. But advocates of war have never lacked for political backing. Relatively few have suffered for supporting a conflict that turned out to be a calamity, and even in the rare cases it's happened the cost has been minimal. Supporting World War II was correct - but it was also easy. Opposing World War I was hard. That makes the contribution of those who did the latter all the braver and more commendable - and all the more necessary.
The accomplishment of these war opponents are sometimes hard to identify. The antiwar movements we remember are those tied to wars that were actually fought - that is, to cases where the movements fell short. Debs and Goldman and O'Hare could not stop American involvement in World War I. Their intellectual descendants couldn't keep the US from escalating in Vietnam or invading Iraq.
But one can still find cases when antiwar sentiment helped prevent a calamitous military action. Public aversion to war helped prevent the Oregon boundary dispute ("Fifty-four forty or fight!") from turning into an all-out war with Britain. Antiwar sentiment kept the US out in the early years of World War I, and helped force the Mexican-American War to a speedy resolution. Exhaustion with military intervention in the wake of Iraq has helped ensure a peaceful resolution to the nuclear dispute with Iran of recent years.
These weren't solely the result of principled antiwar efforts. In the Oregon case, for example, opposition arose as much from Southerners opposed to the acquisition of more free territory as from anything else. But insofar as the organized antiwar movement did contribute to public opinion in those cases, it saved lives and demands recognition. And those cases where war opponents failed deserve remembrance as a reminder that the mayhem of a pointless war isn't inevitable, that at least some present at the time were fighting to stop it.
Some countries honor their war resistors
Other countries have started to recognize this and honor their war resisters accordingly. A memorial in Glasgow, Scotland - a hotbed of British antiwar sentiment during World War I - commemorates "those who opposed World War One in order to challenge the purpose of the war and the waste of lives." Monuments in Ypres, Belgium, and Alrewas, England, honor those World War I soldiers who, due both to disillusionment and sheer terror, deserted rather than continue killing in an unjust war. An official monument to Austrian deserters of World War II was unveiled in Vienna last year. The sculptor Mehmet Aksoy's Monument to the Unknown Deserters of Both World Wars, debuted in West Germany in 1989, honors "the man who refused to kill his fellow man."
The US is a long way away from accepting, say, a memorial for those who deserted the military or dodged the draft during Vietnam. Merely deciding to spare them prosecution was controversial enough - and their counterparts from Iraq and Afghanistan still face the possibility of jail time for refusing to kill. Even the more modest step of honoring those who tried to stop war through peaceful means - organized protest, tax evasion, other forms of civil disobedience -would likely be a tall order. The Vietnam War Memorial faced tremendous opposition upon its unveiling for not being an uncritical celebration of the conflict.
But some wars aren't worth fighting. Some causes aren't worth sacrificing American lives for. Those who've fought to remind the government of those basic facts deserve our respect and our thanks.
On June 30, 1966, the Fort Hood Three issued public statement about their refusal to be sent to Vietnam. They denounced the war as "immoral, illegal and unjust."
In front of over 40 cameramen, reporters, and activists, the three declared (through a statement delivered by Private Dennis Mora, since the other two had already been arrested):
"We represent in our backgrounds a cross section of the Army and of America. James Johnson is a Negro, David Samas is of Lithuanian and Italian parents, Dennis Mora is a Puerto Rican. We speak as American soldiers. We have been in the army long enough to know that we are not the only G.I.'s who feel as we do. Large numbers of men in the service either do not understand this war or are against it . . .
