Veterans Day

[Chrissy]

I was writing in my journal today and wanted to share an experience.

I was looking into the history of Veterans Day and found this from Wikipedia.
" U.S. President Woodrow Wilson first proclaimed Armistice Day for November 11, 1919. In proclaiming the holiday, he said
"To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country's service and 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."
The United States Congress passed a concurrent resolution seven years later on June 4, 1926, requesting that President Calvin Coolidge issue another proclamation to observe November 11 with appropriate ceremonies. [2] A Congressional Act (52 Stat. 351; 5 U.S. Code, Sec. 87a) approved May 13, 1938, made the 11th of November in each year a legal holiday: "a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be thereafter celebrated and known as 'Armistice Day'."

A day to be dedicated to world peace. I think here in America, those ideas have been lost. I think now it's a day of no school and extra coupons for the big sale at the mall.
I recently attended a veterans day celebration at my daughter's elementary school. The children were encouraged to invite their friends and family who served in the armed forces to honor them. My father, having been in the navy, attended. My daughter was delighted with this. Each child who had a veteran come for them was treated with a celebrity status by their fellow students during the ceremony.
I watched these children as they recited the Pledge of Allegiance and poems about bravery, safety, and thankfulness. They sang songs like the Grand Ole Flag and America the Beautiful. They listened attentively as the men and women before them spoke using words like Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm and machine gun operator. At the end, the teacher's passed a box of tissues as some 300 children stood in unison and snapped a salute.
I cried as well. Not during the salute, but on my way home. I cried out of frustration and hopelessness. What future does humanity have when the "future" is inundated daily with lies by those they emulate? They receive praise and gratitude when they regurgitate memorized words when they have no concept of what they are actually saying. Would these same children honor and salute if there were other children from Afghanistan or Iraq standing next to them? I heard the words "liberty and justice for all", but I certainly couldn't find it.

 

[whitecoast]

I feel your frustration. Even high school had the traditional assembly and potpourri of nonsense. I felt like removing my poppy (a plastic flower traditionally handed out in Canada to commemorate remembrance day / veteran's day) but was brutally rebuffed by some teachers there. There is such a cultlike character to the glorification of the army and state and the illusory freedoms they claim to fight for. I remember maybe 1 or 2 years ago a human rights group wanted to hand out white poppies instead of the usual red, to commemorate the victims and collateral damage of war instead of the veterans. Some of the public response, especially from some military families, was nothing short of animalistic.

I think I'll spend remembrance day inundating facebook with newsfeeds about the rampant drone strikes and other modern atrocities. Seems fitting to the martial air of the whole day.

 

[Voyageur]

For those that remember, in many more 'British' affiliated places November 11th is marked by the Poppy.

This relates to John McCrae, a Canadian soldier who wrote 'In Flanders Fields'

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

This was the first war (WWI) and came to be represented in WWII and now in all the wars that have followed since.

Colour and Life in a Devastated Landscape

German soldiers carrying ladders through trenches in a smashed up wood on the Ypres Salient battlefield, 1915. German soldiers in trenches in a shattered wood on the Ypres Salient battlefield, 1915.

In the fighting zones the devastation caused to the landscape created a wasteland of churned up soil, smashed up woods, fields and streams. Few elements of the natural world could survive except for the soldiers who had little choice but to live in an underground network of holes, tunnels and trenches. In most cases the only living things they would see during tours of duty in the front line were scavenging rats, mice and lice.

James McConnell was an American pilot who had volunteered to fight in the war and was flying with the French Escadrille Lafayette. He recorded a vivid description of the destroyed landscape below him as he flew over the 1916 battlefield of Verdun. He describes the front line as a “brown belt, a strip of murdered Nature”:

“Immediately east and north of Verdun there lies a broad, brown band ... Peaceful fields and farms and villages adorned that landscape a few months ago - when there was no Battle of Verdun. Now there is only that sinister brown belt, a strip of murdered Nature. it seems to belong to another world. Every sign of humanity has been swept away. The woods and roads have vanished like chalk wiped from a blackboard; of the villages nothing remains but gray smears where stone walls have tumbled together... On the brown band the indentations are so closely interlocked that they blend into a confused mass of troubled earth. Of the trenches only broken, half-obliterated links are visible.” (1)

However, sometimes the sights and sounds of nature could be seen and heard through the fog of battle. Soldiers spoke of how birds, and most particularly the lark, could be heard twittering high in the sky even during the fury of an artillery bombardment.

This is part of 'The Story Behind the Remembrance Poppy' and the Great War (to end all wars) as it was called. http://www.greatwar.co.uk/article/remembrance-poppy.htm until later when WWII came along and the poppy remained a symbol to this day.

When young, there was not a year that in elementary school when the poppy was not drawn among the remembered heroes of the day - most families had one, a grandfather or father. Today, there are nearly none left from the latter war let alone the former war. What new generations know of these times is taught in school or written in books, if they read them, or in celluloid usually propagandized.

Adjacent to the town I grew up in there was a veterans hospital, a big one, and it became well know to us kids as we would go there and buy cheap smokes at .50 - .75 cents a pack (still a lot) - usually provided by a veteran who had our sympathies. Then, the veterans who were not at the hospital were very much a part of our lives; as said, fathers and grandfathers, and they had many a story, if they talked about them at all, or their diaries were left to read of the horrors.

Back then we would often join at the local town cenatath on this day and try to remember through the fallen and of those that remained. Of those that remained, many were broken and shell shocked. Many also had strength and will to help shape societies as best they could understand.

Anyway, that is how it went as the stories and some sort of history was absorbed until it became the history itself that became a little better understood, as did the business and politics of war.

Today, the poppy remains an even stronger symbol used to commemorate new wars in the guise of old wars. Soldiers today have had little or no personal mentorship with the past unless in stories of bravery from pictures on walls. In this, and I wish I could find it, was a young woman soldier being interviewed beside a older veteran from WWII with the younger one full of war cool-aid while the older veteran, cryptically, brought home the realities and where we are headed - over the head of the young one.

Without getting into past wars in terms of some of the political and corporate underpinnings, while a father or grandfather then fought for what they believed, and it was, against fascist purges of Europe (with a lot of manipulation), today the young soldier will jump at the chance to be assigned duty in let's say Ukraine or some other place, a posting of duty that supports the very fascists that were once the scourge that the veterans hospitals became a testament of the wreckage.

As for these new wars, not that the old wars did not have their 'allied' pathological aims - bombing of Dresden and so much more, the new wars are deeply pathological, and yet for the soldier they seem to believe in the right of them, and it has been drummed into them, the right of spreading 'democracy' to anyplace where people there have said, no thanks, you're democracy is not for us. However, in each case the military is there to help shove it down their throats, like it or not.

My friend was in the military for a number of decades and in sum he said, yeah, the first tour we were believers and by the second, if we even decide to do that, we are less believing, and by a third most come back hopelessly disillusioned by what we were doing. On the other hand, some just like the idea or act of killing, and will later become mercenaries if given the chance. He goes on to mention that with the forced military testing of vaccines and drugs, many now bare the burden of that biological war they were subjected to - many articles on SoTT discuss this.

Back to the Poppy. I don't wear one, nor attend ceremonies, yet I do try and remember and know what war means and how it happens. Always separate from what the Poppy means today in association, is of those who truly suffer as a result - societies victims whose families lost their mothers, fathers, sons and daughters, lost homes, villages, cities and the means to live that were, or are now, completely destroyed. Pick one, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, areas of South America, Iraq, Libya, Syria, places in deeper Africa, and now in a place called Ukraine (have missed many as a complete list). In reality, the whole world is suffering from the effects of wars and those who provide the justifications for them; and not much can be unconnected from war, it shapes things.

Mostly, as history well reveals, the British have worked these ends tirelessly from behind the scenes or from the point of the stick; from China, India, Tibet, the Middle East - the very four corners. Of any one country in time, their political hands were and are dripping from the exportation of wars blood. Others countries followed their lead.

On 'Crimes of Britain' it was noted they have their own Poppy campaign with a focus on Ireland, and to be sure Ireland brutally suffered under the thumb of the British political, military and police crimes.

For those in Britain or British occupied territory poppy season is now upon us. A culture of poppy fascism has emerged in recent years with those who refuse to wear one often being lambasted by the British media and the general public. James McClean, for instance, has year after year come under heavy criticism and even on the receiving end of death threats for refusing to wear a symbol that honours those that perpetrated the Bloody Sunday massacre on the streets of his city in 1972.

The poppy sold by the Royal British Legion remembers every single British soldier that has died since WW1. That includes those who carried out mass murder on the streets of Ireland, those who assisted in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1947 and those who butchered Iraqis and Afghanis this century. It is nauseating that the genocidal campaigns perpetrated by British soldiers are presented as ‘heroism’ by the Royal British Legion and its advocates. The funds raised by the annual poppy appeal are used to finance veterans of present-day conflicts taking a burden off the Ministry of Defence. The poppy is a symbol of British imperialism.

This year Crimes of Britain has produced the bleeding poppy in a sticker format as well as a badge as an alternative to both the red poppy and white poppy. Both of which remember British soldiers. We here at Crimes of Britain do not regard British soldiers as victims but perpetrators of heinous crimes against countless people all around the world.

The link provides further a method to purchase said Poppy https://crimesofbritain.com/poppy/ and the below video:

Warning: Some scene's are horrid.

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