“I do not want the recognition of my service to be used as a glorification of war.”
http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/11/188408/real-costs-war
The late, great Howard Zinn, a World War II vet who was a columnist for The Progressive, wrote about Veterans Day, “I do not want the recognition of my service to be used as a glorification of war.” He decried the fact that Veterans Day, “instead of an occasion for denouncing war, has been turned into an occasion for bringing out the flags, the uniforms, the martial music, the patriotic speeches reeking with hypocrisy.”
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In his book about the history of the Iraq War, Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq, British journalist Nicolas Davies reviews the sordid history of U.S. involvement in Iraq, starting with the lies that got us there. American politicians, the media, and the public have developed a protective amnesia that helps us forget just how outrageous some of our government’s actions are. You may remember that our government spent a lot of time both confirming and denying that the Iraq War had anything to do with oil. Alan Greenspan called the Iraq War “essential” to secure world oil supplies, adding in his memoir, “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: The Iraq War is largely about oil.”
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“When then-U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton voted to authorize the war against Iraq in 2002, she justified her support for the invasion as a way to protect America’s national security,” Sirota writes. “But less than a decade later . . . Clinton promoted the war-torn country as a place where American corporations could make big money.”
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The International Red Cross did a survey in seventeen countries on “the limits of what’s permissible in war.” The People on War Report found that Americans are much more accepting of attacks on civilians—at a rate of 42 percent, twice as high as other U.N. member nations. And Americans are more likely to believe that the Geneva Conventions have “no real relevance.” The reasons for this, Davies suggests, include our isolation from the realities of war, deliberately distorted media coverage and lack of education on war, and the corrosive effects of widespread covert action by our government. The rules just don’t seem to apply to us.
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