On November 11, 1918, the world finally had enough of the irrational killing spree known as World War I. Fifteen million individual human beings had perished in what was the largest military conflict the world had yet seen. Armistice Day, marking the end of the war, was declared a holiday by the Allied nations. Some countries still observe it every November 11.
Although the day was memorialized by governments whose integrity in the whole matter we can question, there is no doubt that there was much to celebrate in the end of hostilities. World War I convinced much of the world of the insanity of war.
Thanks mostly to mutual defense treaties among nations that had no real reason to fight each other, what started out as a royal family feud and regional squabble exploded into a global bloodbath. Serbia was joined by Britain, France, Belgium, Greece, Romania, Italy, Russia, Portugal, Montenegro, Japan, Brazil and, eventually, the United States, to fight Austria-Hungary’s alliance, which included Germany, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria. This madness was triggered when a Bosnian Serb secessionist, sponsored by members of the Serbian military, assassinated Archduke Ferdinand of Austria. One act of violence—over one localized territorial dispute—resulted in the loss of lives, property and liberty of tens of millions of human beings.
and ending with ...
At the end of the Korean War, President Eisenhower signed a bill in 1954 that changed the name of the national holiday to Veteran’s Day. Perhaps it made no sense any more to honor an Armistice that had been overshadowed by World War II and the beginnings of the Cold War. Whereas after World War I, the United States brought its armed forces home, the war against Communism guaranteed that the United States would henceforth have little interest in armistice, in truce, in peace.
And our country’s been at war ever since, with more and more veterans to observe every November.
Those who follow the link will find that this is from a right-wing/libertarian leaning website. Some people on the left have a bad habit of thinking in narrow-minded stereotypes, and by doing so they forget that there is and long has been an anti-war stance from the Libertarian point of view.
Me, I'm in the very strange state of having changed my voting registration from Green to Republican. The reason being that when the Presidential nomination caucuses occur in CO, the only 'anti-war' option is that of supporting Ron Paul on the Republican side. Since CO runs 'closed' primaries, if I want to support an anti-war voice during the nomination stage of this set of Presidential elections, I had to change my registration to Republican to do so.
For someone whom the first Presidential campaign they can remember was that of George McGovern, I find it both shocking and very revealing that the Democrats are offering no anti-war choice at all to their voters this time around. The Democrats are now firmly and undeniably a pro-war party. Heck, you'll need at least a smartphone's computing power just to keep up with all the new wars that the Democrats will have started in these four years. I don't expect the Republicans to be an anti-war party, but at least on that side there's someone with the guts and the convictions to stand up and fight for what they believe in. The very best you can say about the Democrats these days is that not a single person in that party cares enough about ending these wars to even stand up and try to oppose Obama.
