OMNI
ARMISTICE REMEMBRANCE DAY FOR PEACE,
NOVEMBER 11, 2025
Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, Ecology, and Democracy
https://omnicenter.org/donate
What’s at
Stake: Militarization of USA. David Swanson: “For decades in the United
States, as elsewhere, this day was called Armistice Day, and was
identified as a holiday of peace, including by the U.S. government.
It was a day of sad remembrance and joyful ending of war, and of a
commitment to preventing war in the future. The holiday’s name was
changed in the United States after the U.S. war on Korea to “Veterans Day,” a
largely pro-war holiday on which some U.S. cities forbid Veterans For Peace
groups from marching in their parades, because the day has become understood as
a day to praise war — in contrast to how it began.”
View our
fellow Arkansas veteran Col. Ann Wright of Bentonville’s YouTube statement against
war: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtJg-nGM_w0
(But don’t
miss Matthew Hoh’s talk on US militarism at the end.)
CONTENTS
Ann
Wright on YouTube.
War and
Climate.
Mike
Ferner. Film MADMEN ARSONISTS.
Gerry
Condon. “Reclaim Armistice Day.”
David Swanson. Armistice Day = Remembrance Day for Peace,
Stop the Wars.
Mike
Ferner. “Reclaim Armistice Day.”
Matthew
Hoh. “Armistice Day and the Empire.”
TEXTS
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Mitch. “Tell
the Trump Administration: Attend COP30 & Act on Climate.” Tipping Point, Civic Shout. 16192 Coastal Highway, Lewes, DE, 19958, USA
Sign
the Petition
What’s
at Stake: “Climate
change is accelerating at an alarming rate, and the U.S. is reportedly
planning to skip COP 30, the United Nations climate summit to be held in
Brazil. The White House is now
telling journalists that the United States will not send high-level
representatives to the upcoming COP30 climate summit in Brazil and that,
instead, Donald Trump is working with world leaders on energy policies as a
part of trade deals. That decision is an unacceptable refusal to
engage on climate — not just “energy” — at the leadership level, even as
the world burns, floods, and churns with deadly storms.” [And this climate catastrophe is
inseparably connected to the preparation and execution of wars. -D]
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Mike Ferner, Navy
Corpsman 1969-73
Veterans
For Peace
Click here to
see the Madmen Arsonists!
RECLAIM ARMISTICE DAY 2025
Reclaim the message of peace. Displayed
at the weekly vigil of the North County Peace Group in Setauket, NY on 25A and
Bennetts Road on Saturday, November 8. Join the movement to stop the cycle of
endless war, corporate war profiteering and the use of military tactics and
troops in our communities. Myrna
Gordon, Port Jefferson, NY
To view this discussion
visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/vfp-all/CAAd_%3DqyqwPk5-czrp1TxEQdxrQDydCNTR0X2HfK9BWrcx3co%3Dg%40mail.gmail.com.
Preview YouTube video Veteran speaks TRUTH about war
and government
[VFP-all] Veterans For
Peace. “Reclaim Armistice Day 2025.”
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Gerry Condon via uark.onmicrosoft.com 11-8-25
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to Gerry
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RECLAIM ARMISTICE DAY 2025 -
Veterans for Peace
Until Never Again Means Never Again
for Anyone
From Erasure to Resistance
On November 11, 1918, the guns finally fell silent. The “eleventh
hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” marked a global sigh of relief
and a promise: War No More. Armistice Day was meant to remind
future generations of the cost of empire and the necessity of peace.
In the United States, that meaning was later erased. In
1954 Congress renamed it Veterans Day, shifting the focus from
ending war to glorifying it. A day of peace became a billboard for endless wars
and the corporations that profit from them. That erasure serves the same
interests that erase truth everywhere—from Palestine to our own communities.
https://popularresistance.org/reclaim-armistice-day-2025/
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Armistice / Remembrance Day is
fast approaching. You can find
or add a local event to the calendar here. You can
also create your own event, and it need not be on November 11. For example,
the WBW chapter in Madison, Wisconsin, is working with veterans groups to
hold an event on November 19.
This is also a great
time to take online action to end wars. The U.S. Senate voted last
night for the second time to NOT prevent a war on Venezuela (and the U.S.
House is illegally refusing to hold a vote). Take action now to help end war
in . . .
·
Venezuela
·
Palestine
·
Cameroon
·
Congo
·
Ukraine
·
Sudan
Why We Can Use This Moment
November 11, 2025,
is Remembrance / Armistice Day 108 — which
is 107 years since World War I was ended in Europe (while it continued for
weeks in Africa) at the scheduled moment of 11 o’clock on the 11th day of the
11th month in 1918 (with an extra 11,000 people dead, wounded, or missing
after the decision to end the war had been reached early in the morning — we
might add “for no reason,” except that it would imply the rest of the war was
for some reason).
In many parts of the world,
principally but not exclusively in British Commonwealth nations, this day is
called Remembrance Day and should be a day of mourning the dead and
working to abolish war so as not to create any more war dead. But the day
is being militarized, and a strange alchemy cooked up by the weapons
companies is using the day to tell people that unless they support killing
more men, women, and children in war they will dishonor those already killed.
For decades in the United States,
as elsewhere, this day was called Armistice Day, and was identified
as a holiday of peace, including by the U.S. government. It was a
day of sad remembrance and joyful ending of war, and of a commitment
to preventing war in the future. The holiday’s name was changed in
the United States after the U.S. war on Korea to “Veterans Day,” a largely
pro-war holiday on which some U.S. cities forbid Veterans For Peace groups
from marching in their parades, because the day has become understood as a
day to praise war — in contrast to how it began.
Here are
resources to make Armistice / Remembrance Day a day to mourn all victims of
war and advocate for the ending of all war.
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For a world beyond war,
David Swanson, Executive Director
World BEYOND War
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World
BEYOND War is a global network of volunteers, chapters, and affiliated
organizations advocating for the abolition of the institution of war.
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Reclaim
Armistice Day 2025
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Nov
4, 2025)
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to me
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SPECIAL
EDITION
View or
share this email as a web page.
ABOVE: Celebrating Armistice Day
in 2024 (L to R): Lonestar Chapter in Fairbanks, Alaska;
Twin Cities Chapter in Minneapolis, Minnesota; Hampton Roads Chapter Norfolk,
Virginia
Reclaim
Armistice Day 2025
Until Never Again Means
Never Again for Anyone
From Erasure to Resistance
On November 11, 1918, the
guns finally fell silent. The “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the
eleventh month” marked a global sigh of relief and a promise: War No
More. Armistice Day was meant to remind future generations of the cost
of empire and the necessity of peace.
In the United States, that
meaning was later erased. In 1954 Congress renamed it Veterans
Day, shifting the focus from ending war to glorifying it. A day of
peace became a billboard for endless wars and the corporations that profit from
them. That erasure serves the same interests that erase truth everywhere—from
Palestine to our own communities.
Who Benefits from Erasure
The beneficiaries are easy
to find. The same weapons manufacturers and security firms arming Israel’s
genocide of Palestinians build the surveillance tech used by ICE and police to
terrorize immigrants and poor communities here at home. The same billion-dollar
prison corporations running detention camps profit from wars and occupations
abroad. Militarism overseas and militarism at home are one system. Every
drone strike has its mirror image in every ICE raid, no-knock warrant, and act
of state violence against Black, Brown, queer, Indigenous, or immigrant lives.
We must resist fascism at
home as well as abroad!
What Armistice Day Must
Mean Now
Veterans For Peace calls
on all veterans and allies to reclaim Armistice Day as a day
of truth and resistance. Let us honor not only the dead of past wars but the
living who still suffer under empire: Palestinians facing genocide, Latin
Americans facing U.S. intervention, Indigenous nations defending their lands,
migrants fleeing U.S.-backed violence, LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC communities fighting
for dignity, and service members who dare to question unlawful orders.
This November 11:
·
Ring the bells 11 times for
peace. Hold vigils, write op-eds, fly the VFP flag, and
demand: Ceasefire Everywhere. End ALL Occupations.
Our Oath and Our Promise
As veterans, we swore to
support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
Today, that means resisting fascism in every form and standing with the
oppressed until the guns fall silent and true justice prevails.
Until “Never Again” means
Never Again—for Anyone, Anywhere.
VFP OUTREACH RESOURCE
For VFP members and chapters hitting the
streets during November actions, we encourage you to download
and print a supply of these HALF-PAGE FLYERS to
hand out to interested parties when you're out and about. Designed for the
October No Kings protest, this piece serves to introduce
people to Veterans For Peace and entice veterans to become members. There is a
space on the bottom of one side where you can fill in local contact information
to help grow your chapter.
FOLLOW
VETERANS FOR PEACE ON SOCIAL MEDIA
Mike Ferner, Navy Corpsman 1969-73
Veterans For Peace
Click here to see
the Madmen Arsonists!
From: Matthew Hoh from Matt’s Thoughts on War and Peace <matthewhoh@substack.com>
Date: Tue, Nov 11, 2025 at 8:09 AM
Subject: An Inconvenient and Problematic Holiday
To: <mike@veteransforpeace.org>
Matthew Hoh. “Armistice Day and the Empire.” Nov. 11,
2025. https://substack.com/@matthewhoh
The
transfiguration of Armistice Day to Veterans Day and our recompense. Remarks delivered at
Community Church of Boston, November 9, 2025 (transcript edited for clarity and
corrections).
Thank
you so much for having me again. It means a lot to get asked to speak to this
group.
Smedley Butler
was just referenced, and the Veterans For Peace chapter—the Smedley Butler
chapter up here—that was the very first Veterans For Peace outfit that I ever
came into contact with. At that point in 2009, as I was speaking out against
the Afghan war, I’d spent 10 years in the Marine Corps, time in the State
Department. I was a young man [I’ll add arrogant] and this idea of Veterans For
Peace was kind of like, who are these loons? Who are these guys that I’ve got
to now spend some time with?
And I was just absolutely
enthralled with them, endeared with them—not just for their passion or for
their experience, but because of their knowledge and because they put into
practice, because they put into action what they had gone through. The mission
of Veterans For Peace is to educate about the true costs of war. And that’s
what Veterans For Peace does. That’s what chapters in Veterans For Peace, like
the Smedley Butler chapter in Massachusetts, helped me do.
Because as I was starting
to speak out against the war and going through this psychological, psychiatric,
spiritual struggle with who I had once been, it was finding resonance, finding
familiarity, finding fellowship and comradeship with members of Veterans For
Peace that really helped me survive that process.
Easily the Most Profitable,
Surely the Most Vicious
I want to go back to Smedley
Butler for a bit. I know we have a youth group here, and they may not be
familiar with Smedley Butler. He is the most decorated Marine in Marine Corps
history. If the rules had been different, he’d be the most decorated service
member across the entire US military’s history. Smedley Butler served for 33
years in the Marine Corps. He received two Medals of Honor. If the rules had
been different, he would have received a third.
Following his service, he
decried war. He broke from the silence that often accompanies [service
members], particularly general officers, when they retire. He broke from that
and he spoke out against not just war, but America’s imperialism.
I want to take a moment to
read a couple of his more poignant or forceful quotes. Smedley Butler’s
definition or commentary on war was that:
War is a racket.
It has always been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable,
surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the
only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
He spoke about his own
career, his own service, what he actually did. And I’m going to read the longer
quote here because I think it’s very important as we are on the verge of war in
Venezuela, and I think a broader war possibly throughout Central and South
America to achieve the Trump administration’s grand strategy of consolidation
of control of the hemisphere.
Of his own career, Major
General Butler said:
I spent 33 years and four
months in active military service. And during that period, I spent most of my
time as a high class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the
bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make
Mexico, and especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I
helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to
collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of a half dozen Central American
republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the
International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902 to 1912. I brought light
to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interest in 1916. I helped
make Honduras ripe for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927,
I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back
on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do is
operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.
You recognize his
storyline, what he’s sharing there about what he actually was doing as a
gangster for capitalism, as he described his military service. Juxtapose that
with not just this administration, but going back decades, American
administrations and their role, their intervention, their interference in Latin
America. And you can see why—and I say this to the youth group that’s here—you
can see why people like me, people like Dean, your teachers, we bang on about
learning about history. As Mark Twain said, history may not repeat itself, but
it certainly does rhyme.
Smedley Butler’s Medals of
Honor—he received one for his action in Mexico, one for his action in Haiti.
And again, if the rules had been different, he would have received a third one
for his actions in China. And I wonder how many Americans know that 100 years
ago or 110 years ago, we had men winning medals of honor for military action in
Mexico or in China, let alone the rest of the [world].
I wanted to take that time
to share about Smedley Butler because he is so instructive, not just his words
that accurately describe American imperialism and American military service,
but because it’s not distant, it’s not removed. This is congruent. This is a
continuous line of history.
When I was [a kid] in the
80s, when I was the age of you guys in the youth group here, we [the US] were
in Central America. Constantly there was this idea, this story about American
troops may be going to [Central] America. American troops may be going to help
in El Salvador or to maybe go to war in Nicaragua. And all the storylines
were the same. Well, if we don’t do something to stop the communists
in Nicaragua, then they’re going to take Guatemala next and they’re going to
take Mexico after that. And next thing you know—I mean, it’s all the same
storyline that gets repeated over and over again.
And so here we are now
with this administration, of course, what looks like on the verge of carrying
out military operations to overthrow the Venezuelan government while
murdering people in speedboats, extrajudicially, unconstitutionally, and of
course, threatening the rest of Latin America. We saw the news last week. The
American government is making plans for military action in Mexico. So, 111
years after Smedley Butler receives his medal of honor in Mexico, we have
troops lining up to [once again] do the same.
An Inconvenient and Problematic
Holiday
The title of my talk today
is Armistice Day and the Empire.
Armistice Day, of course, was the term, was the recognition for the end of the
First World War. The idea that there needs to be remembrance. And in the United
Kingdom, where this really has its foundations, following the First World War,
the idea was Remembrance Day.
The soldiers who fought in
that horror show—16 million people were killed in the First World War,
the first mechanized modern form of warfare between states that resulted in
four years of war and 16 million deaths—the soldiers after the war in Britain
marched under the banner of Never Again. The idea was to
remember the horrors of it.
Veterans
For Peace, London, Remembrance Sunday, 2016. Never Again was
the banner carried by veterans following WWI. Veterans For Peace were the only
ones marching with that banner. Photo: Ellen Davidson.
The idea of November 11th,
for those who don’t know: the armistice, the truce, the fighting stops in the
First World War on the 11th minute of the 11th hour of the 11th day of
November. And so November 11th becomes Armistice Day.
That is recognized here in
the United States up until 1954. And in 1954, those early days of the
Cold War, this idea of having a reconciliation-based holiday was inconvenient
and problematic for an American government that was pursuing a policy of
aggressive containment of the Soviet Union. The idea of having a holiday that
celebrated peace, that was a critique of war, that advocated for diplomacy
rather than militarism, was something that the American government found to be,
again, inconvenient and problematic in terms of its Cold War strategy and
policies.
So they come up with this
idea in 1954 to change Armistice Day to Veterans Day. The idea being, or
the stated reason according to the American government why they changed it, was
to honor all generations of veterans. [This] specious explanation was that we
can’t just have Armistice Day anymore because we’re leaving out the World War
II veterans. Anyone [can] see right through that, but that was the rationale.
That was the argument. That was the reasoning behind changing Armistice Day to
Veterans Day.
And of course, Veterans
Day in a highly militarized society—I’ll get to that in a bit about how the
American government has utilized that for its purposes, how the empire uses it
for its purposes—Veterans Day soon becomes year-round, particularly in
my lifetime, particularly following the end of the Cold War, when you didn’t
have the threat of the Soviet Union. There was a vacancy of enemies, a
vacuum, an emptiness in terms of who are going to be the bad guys.
I can remember in the 90s,
this dilemma in Hollywood or among fiction writers like Tom Clancy: who’s going
to be the bad guy in the films and the books? The Soviet Union is gone.
Well, you know, fortunately, you had people in the Middle East, you had narco-terrorists,
et cetera, et cetera. All the same people we’ve utilized for 35 years, still
using it today.
For those students that
are here, if you’re interested in Venezuela, I suggest you watch a film from
1993, 1994 with Harrison Ford based on a Tom Clancy novel called Clear and Present Danger.
It is the same storyline that Trump is selling right now, with the exception
that Tom Clancy, who wrote the book, was smart enough not to include the regime
change. But you’ll see that, again, history may not repeat, but it certainly
rhymes.
Thank You for Your Service:
Manufacturing Consent
This idea of Veterans Day
becomes necessarily a year-round affair, and that’s particularly done through
the idea of supporting the troops. As you have American interventions,
occupations, wars, and Americans are killed and [killing] in countries around
the world, the American government and its ancillary and adjacent fellows
within organizations within the empire—so the media, opposition politicians,
Hollywood, et cetera—the idea is to promote this notion of supporting the
troops, and supporting the troops because of their sacrifice, because
they are the heroes in this Manichean story of good versus evil. We are the men
and women with the white hats. We are going to make the world safe for
democracy.
You have this usage of
“support the troops” then become a mechanism through which dissent is
suppressed. You see that a bit in Vietnam, but especially at the end of the
Cold War. Any opposition to American military intervention, occupation, or war
is met with a rhetoric of “support the troops,” a shouting down of those
who have legitimate dissent towards U.S. warfare, met with this idea that
you’re simply not patriotic. You’re betraying these young men and women who are
over there. How dare you! Have you no shame! [That]
type of beratement.
What that then morphs into
is a clerical-like status, a deification of the American military. And
this idea of “support the troops” becomes “thank you for your service”—almost a
ritual-like obligation among the American people.
I’ve seen it play out
many, many times. One that stuck in my mind is being on a train a number of
years ago. There was an older woman, probably nearing retirement age, very
professional looking, and there was this young man who’s a midshipman at the
United States Naval Academy. So he’s never done anything besides go to college,
essentially, in a uniform. And this woman, they exchange pleasantries, and then
they separate. They’re in the aisle of the train, and they separate. And then
she turns around and taps him and says, “I’m so sorry. I can’t believe I didn’t
do this. I didn’t thank you for your service.”
And the horror of
that—this idea that this woman feels compelled to ritually thank this young man
for his service when he hasn’t done anything. Because he’s wearing a uniform,
this woman who could have been anything—a judge, a doctor, an astronaut—she feels
compelled to thank this young man for his service and apologizes for not doing
it. [She] asks him for his forgiveness for not thanking him for his service.
So this ritual obligation
permeates our society. And I see it all the time. It’s unthinking. It’s
unflinching. And sometimes when I’m cranky—and I don’t wear a lot of veterans
things, but I do wear my Veterans for Peace T-shirt sometimes—and sometimes when
I am cranky, I will respond back.
Most of the time I just
say thank you and carry on with my day. Just brush it off. But sometimes I will
respond with, “You know, what are you thanking me for? I took part in organized
murder.” And the couple of times I have said that I have been met with a sigh
of relief. I remember one young woman in a Trader Joe’s at the cash register
who, when I said that to her, was like, “Oh, my God, thank you for saying that.
That’s how I feel. But I’m too afraid to say anything about it.”
And that’s the society we
live in. It is heretical to think that American troops are doing anything but
wearing the white hat, being the good guys, bringing democracy to nations,
freeing people, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, however you want to describe
it.
Harry
Patch was the last living veteran of the trenches of WWI. London, Remembrance
Sunday, 2016. Photo: Matthew Hoh
We All Have Stories of This
What that does then is it
hides the actual cost of war. Not only does it manufacture consent for the
wars—because dissent’s not possible—but it hides the cost of the war.
And I’m going to talk a bit about the cost to the veterans of my generation, my
fellow Iraq and Afghan veterans. And I just want to caveat that, of course,
with the cost to the American veterans of the war being nothing compared to
what the Iraqi and Afghan people went
through and are still enduring, just in whether it’s the scale and the scope,
the sheer numbers, or the reality that American and Afghan veterans were
perpetrators and Afghan and Iraqi civilians were victims.
But I want to address this
Veterans Day. I want to address the veterans aspect of this.
[COSTS OF US WARS]
When you look at the wars,
the Iraq and Afghan wars, you’re talking about 7,000 dead American service members.
If you include the contractors who were involved in these wars—men and women
who in any previous conflict, any previous war would have been doing those jobs
as a soldier—the actual dead from the Iraq and Afghan wars rises to 15,000.
You had 7,000 dead service members and roughly 8,000 dead contractors in those
wars.
You have 50,000
wounded, which when compared to other wars is not a whole heck of a lot. You
compare it to Vietnam or other wars. The reality is that our body armor over
there, our vehicle armor, the medical care that we had was so far beyond
anything that had ever been seen in warfare before that many of us survived
encounters with the Iraqi resistance or the Afghan resistance where we would
have been killed in previous wars. We all have stories of this. We all have
stories of being in roadside bomb attacks, getting hit by shrapnel, getting hit
by bullets that in previous wars would have killed us.
And so what that means
then is—well, let me just address one other thing with the wounded. One aspect
of it, particularly with the medical care, is that men and women,
American service members, survived wounds that in previous wars likely would
have killed them. And so while the rate of amputations for American
veterans of the [Iraq and Afghan wars] remained fairly constant with previous
wars, you saw a degree of the amputations that had never been seen before. Of
the amputated Iraq and Afghan vets,
about a third of them were multiple amputees. And 90% of those
had lost both legs.
In Afghanistan, because of
the conduct of the war, so many of our troops were dismounted. They weren’t in
vehicles. They were walking on foot patrols. And the rate of testicle
amputation for these young men is shockingly high. There are stories, there are
interviews, there are reports from the doctors who went through and who have
gone through periods of questioning themselves whether or not saving these
young men was the right thing to do because the ruination of them, these
amputations, how badly hurt they were, was going to have them live lives that would be incredibly
difficult.
The other aspect with the
body armor and the vehicle armor [protecting us] from the insurgent or
resistance attacks was that, again, we survived things that we shouldn’t have
survived. I had Marines who survived three, four, five, seven, eight roadside bomb
or IED attacks against their vehicles in one deployment, in one
seven-and-a-half-month deployment. And most of the time you just walked away
from it, shook yourself off. Maybe your bell got rung a bit. Maybe you saw
stars. Most likely not, though.
And then what you have,
though, is you’ve had this epidemic of traumatic brain injury occur
among Iraq and Afghan vets, for which we’ve never seen anything like it. And
the numbers run into the hundreds and hundreds of thousands. The last figure I
saw was over 500,000 Iraq and Afghan vets have traumatic brain injury,
most of it from explosive blasts. When you run the numbers on that, if you have
2.7 million Iraq and Afghan vets and 500,000 have traumatic brain injury,
you’re talking one in five Iraq and Afghan vets have a brain injury that is
having a very real impact on their life in terms of relationships, work,
school, being a part of society. [The stress that ripples onto family, friends,
co-workers, fellow students, neighbors, etc., is burdensome, exhausting and
destructive.]
These brain injuries are
incredibly insidious and they are one of the three components of the war in
terms of wounds that are called invisible wounds. And they manifest and they
have physical consequences. They have psychological and psychiatric consequences.
And they have spiritual consequences.
As Always, PTSD
PTSD—of
course, the rate of PTSD in these wars is in line with previous wars, something
that most many people do not realize or understand: how bad off the
psychological and psychiatric consequences of all wars were.
Following the Civil War,
if you go back and you read literature from the period following the Civil
War—the end of the 1860s, 70s, 80s—you’ll find that the literature of the time,
the news media, the fictional accounts, what have you, you’ll find references
in there continually to American Civil War veterans who are killing
themselves, who are dying of overdose, who are dying of exposure in the
streets. The estimate is that more American veterans of the Civil War die after
the war, particularly from overdose, than die during the Civil War. And
remember, there were 600,000 who died in that war.
World War II,
the same thing. Everyone thinks of [it as] the good war. And people say, why do
these Iraq and Afghan vets have problems when their World War II veterans
didn’t? And that’s absolute nonsense. There is no evidence whatsoever to
support that. [The psychological costs of WWII] was something that was suppressed by the
American government, something that these men were not allowed to talk about or
discuss in society. The only people who seem to have known about what they went
through were their families and, of course, the clubs they joined.
If people are familiar
with the origin story of the Hell’s Angels and other motorcyclist clubs, that’s
where that comes from—from these veterans from World War II who are looking for
some type of outlet, someplace where they’re understood and someplace where
they can act out what is going through their minds and through their souls.
The rate of psychiatric casualties in
the Second World War was enormous. We do have
some documentation on this. You had, during the Second World War, [more than 300,000] men
from the Army alone being hospitalized each year during the war for psychiatric
reasons. You have to remember, too, that PTSD doesn’t become an actual
diagnosis—and I should say PTSD is post-traumatic stress disorder—PTSD doesn’t
become an actual diagnosis recognized by the American medical community until
1980. And during the Second World War in the 40s, you’re having 350,000 men
hospitalized every year from psychiatric wounds of the war. The discharge
papers from the war show that in the Army and the Marine Corps, you’re looking
at discharge rates of
25 percent to one third for psychiatric wounds [note: closer to 40% of
those who saw combat].
What, Will These Hands Ne’er Be
Clean?
This leads us to the third
aspect of these invisible wounds: the moral injury.
And moral injury is simply a clinical term for guilt, shame, regret. It’s the
consequences that you endure for having transgressed your moral code, your
ethics, your belief, your religion. It is something that is existential. The
foundations of who you are are ripped away. It is something that doesn’t go
away. It’s something that cannot be reasoned with.
The best example I can
give of moral injury is to go to Shakespeare and to read Macbeth and
witness what Lady Macbeth goes through. That invisible blood that’s on her hand
that she can’t get out—”Out, out, damn spot.” And even though she’s not the one
who wielded [the] knife, what happens to Lady Macbeth—the guilt from that, the
shame from that—that’s what moral injury is.
And everything we know—and
you can go on to the medical catalog, the medical library run by the National
Institute of Health and look this up—everything we know is that the leading
cause of suicide in combat veterans is moral injury. We’ve known this for a
long time. The earliest record I can find of it is 1990: VA researchers
determined that the best predictor of suicide in Vietnam veterans
is combat-related guilt.
In 2015, the University of
Utah does a meta-analysis. They look
at 24 or 25 different studies that are examining the relationship between combat,
guilt, and suicide. And what they find is that—well, they throw one of the
studies out for reasons of methodology—all the other studies, these 23 or 24
other studies, they all show without a doubt, clear, definitive results that
demonstrate there is an undeniable link between combat, guilt, and suicide.
It wasn’t until a couple
of years ago that the VA actually started treatment programs about killing. I
remember in 2014, 2015, the VA did an assessment and their question was
essentially, “Should we ask veterans about how they feel after killing somebody?”
I mean, I thought I was on crazy pills when I read that assessment.
And you look through the VA
suicide data. Every year the VA puts out a suicide report and it’s got how
many veterans kill themselves with guns and how many veterans kill themselves
they think because they were locked away during COVID and how many, et cetera,
et cetera, et cetera. And it doesn’t touch on the aspects of combat. [Although]
at times they let it slip.
In [2016] the VA]
published a suicide report that actually had the data there showing how many
veterans were killing themselves—or were killed by suicide, excuse me, I should
phrase this correctly—how many veterans were killed by suicide who were Iraq
and Afghan vets, and the numbers were off the chart.
Whether it’s from the VA’s
reports or reports by universities and research by journalists, we know that
for Iraq and Afghan veterans, depending upon their age and sex, compared to
their peers—people who are their age and who are their sex—rates of suicide
among Iraq and Afghan veterans are anywhere from six to 14 times higher
than their peers, particularly the more you’re able to isolate who saw combat
and who didn’t.
I mean, this is an
astounding thing that this is simply not spoken about. And you could see this
in the VA data in other ways. They don’t publicize it this way, but you could
read through the material and understand it. You look at VA suicide data over time,
generationally, and you’ll see that the highest levels of suicide are among
those age groups that correlate to war. So you’ll see high rates of suicide
among World War II veterans, Korea and Vietnam veterans, Iraq and Afghan
veterans. For those veterans who served during peacetime—during the Cold War,
during the 90s, in the last 10 years or so, as the United States has gotten
away from active combat or large scale combat—you see lower levels of suicide.
And the understanding of
this is simple. It’s this idea that we can’t have this discussion. This goes
against the idea of our troops as heroes, as our troops as young men and
women who are wearing a white hat. This goes against the Manichean
struggle of the United States as a force for global good in the world. How can
it be that we sent these young men and women overseas to fight these right and
just wars, and now they’re coming home and putting guns in their mouths and
blowing the back of their heads off? That can’t be right. It’s got to be
something else. It’s got to be because they can’t find jobs. It’s got to be
because they miss their friends—all these other nonsensical reasons that get
put forward as explanations for why combat veterans have such high rates of
suicide.
Can you imagine someone
from the VA going in front of Congress and saying, “Senator or Congressman or
Congresswoman, the reason why our veterans are killing themselves is because
they’re ashamed of what they did in these wars, these righteous and just wars
to bring freedom to the Iraqi and Afghan people, to fight Al-Qaeda and the
Taliban and, you know, good versus evil, et cetera”? Can you imagine someone
doing that in front of Congress? It’s impossible. It’s impossible.
So the political weight of
that ensures that there is no appropriate address to this idea of moral injury
and what it does to the men and women who have gone overseas wearing a uniform,
thinking they are heroes, thinking they are doing the right thing.
[Crucial role of ignorance in US
wars. -D]
I’ll give you one stat
to show that. In 2006, in Iraq, [a] survey done of Marines in Iraq in 2006—this
is three years after the invasion, this is four and a half years after
9/11—[more than] 70% of those Marines surveyed in Iraq
thought that they were there because Iraq was aligned with Al-Qaeda and was
involved in the 9/11 attacks. Four and a half years after 9/11, [more than] 70%
of Marines in Iraq thought that. They thought they were there doing the right
thing. They thought they were there keeping America safe from another 9/11.
And you can imagine what
happens when you realize that’s not the case. You can justify a dead kid on the
ground that your fellow Marine or soldier shot because that’s the reality of
war. War’s terrible, et cetera, et cetera. But we have to be here because we
have to keep America safe. And then to come home and have that pulled apart.
One of the things that
then occurs, this dissonance that veterans endure, is this “support the
troops,” [and] “thank you for your service.” You’ve got to go to a baseball
game or you go to a hockey game and they ask the veterans to stand up so 15,000
or 50,000 people can applaud them and thank them for their service. And
meanwhile, this young man or woman is in their heads saying to themselves, “Why
am I being applauded? I participated in organized murder. I’m ashamed of what I
did. I regret what I did. I’m thinking about killing myself because the stress
I am going through with this moral injury, the mental, the psychological, the
spiritual distress I am enduring, the only release I can see from that is
suicide.” That’s how difficult it is.
They’ve done surveys of
veterans where they’ve asked, “What’s worse, losing your legs or the moral
injury?” And they say the moral injury. And I can tell you as someone who has
all three—TBI, PTSD, and moral injury—the moral injury is far and away the worst,
is far and away the darkest, is far and away the most painful. That existential
crisis that you’re enduring, the ripping out of the foundations of who you
thought you were, it is a blackness for which you feel suicide will be the only
relief.
This idea was brought up
before. Dean, you led the congregation here in a call and response where it
was, “my heart is filled with love.” And I want to refer to an interview that
our friend, the great Scott Horton at Antiwar.com had
with a man named Jason Jones, who’s a veteran, a conservative activist. He does
a lot of relief work. He’s involved heavily in providing relief into Gaza and
other places around the world.
And Jones told this story
about his grandfather who fought in the Korean War and that when his
grandfather passed away, his last words, his last thoughts, he cried talking
about the Chinese and the Korean boys that he killed 50 years before. And Jones
says that his belief in God and the existence of God is tied into this
understanding of the trauma of war. I’ll quote him:
“I’m a Christian, and I
think PTSD and war trauma is the greatest proof of God’s existence because it
proves that we were created to love each other, not hurt each other.”
So this moral injury just
doesn’t square with Veterans Day. You won’t hear any discussions of this on
Tuesday. Veterans will get a free meal at Denny’s and people will thank them
for their service in a thousand different ways, mostly transactional. But you
won’t hear much discussion of this idea that what they did overseas fills them
and has ruined them with shame and regret and guilt.
The moral injury, it’s bad
for politics and there’s a dissonance for the public. And this dissonance for
the public is purposeful. This manufacturing consent for war, the
hyper-sensation or the hyper-touting of militarism, the “thank you for your
service” ritual obligation that the American people carry with them—it’s
purposeful. It’s deliberate.
Cultus Imperatorius Americae
And you can see that in our
politics. You can see that in our schools. You can see that in our news
media. You can see that in entertainment and Hollywood. And more recently, in
the last couple of decades, in sports.
People have referenced it
before, but many of you are familiar with the contractual relationship that the
Pentagon had with the major sports leagues, paying NFL teams to do salutes to
veterans before the game or during halftime. We will see at the Super Bowl
again, another overflight of F-35s or B-1 bombers or something like that. There
is this permeation, this saturation of American society with militarism that is
not organic or native or just happened. It is purposeful. It’s deliberate.
Hollywood is the
best example of that. The United States military has a relationship with
Hollywood. The Pentagon has contracts with every studio or nearly every studio
in Hollywood. The Pentagon has had script authority on thousands and thousands
of movies. The last time I wrote about this was five years ago. So the data I
had when I looked this back up was from 2016. But in 2016, it was approximately
2,500 TV shows and movies the Pentagon had been involved with in Hollywood.
This is not new. This
starts right away. The first Academy Award winner, the first picture to win the
Oscar, Wings in 1927, was about Army Air Corps pilots in World
War I. And the Department of War at the time provided dozens of planes
and—actually thousands—I think they provided 3,500 soldiers for the film. So
this relationship has always been there.
It’s a transactional relationship.
The studios save a heck of a lot of money on it. Estimates run into the
millions, maybe even tens of millions of dollars. There is one researcher who
looked at this and found that if people remember the film Captain
Phillips, comparing that to a film that came out the same time, Gravity,
which took place in space—so there were no military ships or tanks or
helicopters to use, they had to do everything by CGI. Meanwhile, Captain
Phillips, the story of the American cargo ship captain who gets taken
prisoner by the Somali [pirates] and then the Navy SEALs rescue him—very heavy
in ships and sailors and helicopters. Well, this analysis that was done showed
that the studios may have saved as much as $50 million by
using the Navy ships and sailors and helicopters and so forth for the film.
This is big money. And the
script authority that the Pentagon has means that any script, even when it
doesn’t even deal with the military—if you want to have a story about a veteran
who comes home, he can’t handle what he’s been through and he kills himself—the
Pentagon’s not going to okay that. They’re going to say to the studio, “We
don’t like this. And for the next Transformers film or the next Bradley Cooper
action movie, if you want our helicopters or our tanks or our ships, you better
change this veteran suicide story.” And that’s how it works.
And the Pentagon also
benefits because there’s an aspect to society where this is manufacturing
consent. This is popularizing, not just popularizing, but normalizing
militarism. And they’ve also seen it in their recruitment. So the Pentagon
would often pair their advertisements for recruiting with superhero
films. And they found that when they show a recruiting ad after The
Incredible Hulk or Batman or whatever, you’re looking
at about a 25% increase in young people wanting to join the military.
All this, of course, feeds
the military-industrial complex. All this allows for the consent of the
governed to be found in Congress for trillion-dollar defense budgets. Even if
you look right now, you have the soldiers in the military, service members not
being paid, but the Pentagon has found ways to pay them illegally by diverting
money from other places. They would never do that for air traffic controllers.
They would never do that for park rangers. They would never do that for Social
Security administrators. But they’ll do it for the soldiers because the
political benefit is there.
[This] deification, this
clerical status of veterans contributes to the high suicide rates and all the
other issues that come with veterans—I haven’t even spoken about other factors
with veterans [substance abuse, homelessness, domestic abuse, etc]. Just as
these communities across America are wed to, are part of this
hyper-militarization, they suffer because as they’re willing to see a trillion
dollars go to the government, that puts into play a scarcity narrative that
while we can afford to fund the military, we can’t afford to fund education or
health care or environmental protection, or you think of any other type of
issue facing our communities. And you’ll find that the answer to the problem or
the answer to the solution that’s often presented is we don’t have enough money
for that.
So with this embrace of militarization,
this embrace of veterans and the need for a trillion-dollar military budget,
our communities are causing great harm to themselves.
Prior to 1945, we were an
empire. And then following the Second World War, we were one of two empires.
And then after the Cold War, these last 35 years, we are the empire.
And so you understand the need for narrative, you understand the need for
construct, you understand the need for some metaphysical infrastructure to
define and sustain and validate the empire.
And so you see this in
what comes out of Veterans Day, the transfer of Armistice Day to Veterans Day,
then the idea of Veterans Day is year-round, and then the idea of “support the
troops,” then it’s this ritual obligation of “thank you for your service.” And
you can understand how we are here now in this militarized society where the
war state, the war parties, dominate our country.
White Poppies And War Horses
What do we do about it? Of
course, we resist in every way. We try and do counter-narrative. If you notice,
I’m wearing a white poppy. The poppies of course are really a British thing,
European really, British. The red poppies are meant to remember the
poppies that grew in the fields of dead following the First World War. And in
Britain this time of year for Remembrance Day they wear it. If you visit London
or Manchester or wherever you’re going to see people wearing red poppies on
their lapel and it’s meant to remember the soldiers of the Great War—never
forget.
The white poppy,
however, is meant to remember all the victims of war. And it is contentious. It
is ugly. If you wear a white poppy on the tube in London, it’s likely someone’s
going to say something to you about it. That you’re not supporting the
soldiers. You’re dishonoring their memory. It’s so much that when I do speak to
British audiences, I won’t wear the white poppy because I know it’ll be a
distraction. Here in the United States, it’s great because people ask, “What is
this? What does this mean?” You get a chance to talk about it.
A
lone bouquet of peace poppies at the Cenotaph in London, Remembrance Sunday,
2016. Photo: Veterans For Peace UK.
There’s also supposedly a purple poppy if
we want to get into the depths of our depravity and our sickness and our
madness and our cruelty as a race, as a species. There’s supposedly a purple
poppy for the animals killed in war. In the First World War, 8 million
horses were killed. Sixteen million people, half as many horses were killed as
people killed in that war. The depths of our cruelty or depravity, I think
[are] expressed well in the animals that have suffered in our warfare.
It’s also one of the
reasons why, [as an] aside, I believe that horses—there’s such a therapeutic
connection between horses and veterans. I’ve not seen any literature attesting
to this, this is my assumption, that the reason why there is this therapeutic
link between combat veterans and horses is because I think horses have gone
through warfare with us for eons and that there’s something within the horse
that understands the trauma of war, the horror of war, the guilt and shame of
taking part in war.
Only The Worst Among Us
This is a tough time of
year for many veterans. A lot of us don’t like the attention. A lot of us don’t
like the “thank you for your service.” I know very few that do. Only the worst
among us, among veterans, enjoys the “thank you for your service” obsequiousness,
that ritual obligation. Many of us are dissonant in our beliefs on the wars
compared to those around us.
And so it’s a pleasure.
It’s helpful to me to be able to speak to an audience like yourselves who
understand this, an audience that I’m not trying to convince of anything. I’m
not trying to win as if I’m in a debate. I know you as an audience understand this.
I hope my remarks today gave some maybe some clarification on how veterans
arrive to this point, how our society is constructed that dooms veterans after
the wars, how it ensures that, as attributed to Plato, the only ones who have
seen the end of war are the dead.
And how our use, that
utilization of veterans by the empire for its imperial purposes, is very well
founded, constructed, established, and effective. The political calculus that
went into changing Armistice Day to Veterans Day, as disgusting as it may have
been, I don’t think anyone can say it wasn’t effective.
So we have to understand
how the empire works, what they will do to achieve its ends. And of course, we
have to find ways to counter it.
I really appreciate you
all having me here again. And thank you for having this space and for being
this congregation, being this church and being this community that I really
adore and value.
Thank you. (Full Community Church of Boston November 9,
2025 service, including Q&A:
END ARMISTICE DAY 2025
