Tag: Vietnam

Inconvenient memories: Veteran’s Day 2014

Posted on by kathiemm

by Guest Author Ross Caputi

cost ofwar
Iraq war protest poster showing Lancet estimate of Iraqis killed, May 28, 2008. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. Author: Random McRandomhead.

Most Americans believe Veterans Day is a day of remembrance; in reality, it’s generally a day of forgetting.

On Veterans Day, people applaud as veterans march in parades, wearing their medals and fancy uniforms. People who have never seen or smelt war’s rotting corpses bask in an atmosphere of pride and patriotism, suppressing inconvenient memories of hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in Iraq, millions in Vietnam, hundreds of thousands in Korea, and so on throughout our nation’s short and bloody history.

On Veterans Day, we are spared all the unpleasantries that might give us pause about the value or benevolence of our wars. We listen to the bands playing, but ignore the troubles faced by returning veterans. Where is the glory in PTSD, addiction, suicide?

On Veterans Day, we make believe that support for the troops is apolitical. Just like the victims of our wars, the reasons why young Americans have been asked to go to war, and the consequences of those wars are conveniently forgotten and nobody seems to notice.

On Veterans Day, we are called upon to remember America’s wars, sanitized of the harm they brought to countless victims around the world, and abstracted from their historical and political context. We are asked to support our veterans while forgetting the reality of what they participated in. It is a pleasant fairy tale, and I wish I could partake in it. But my experience as a Marine in Iraq has forever changed the way I look at war and the way I feel about being a veteran.

Let’s change the way we celebrate Veterans Day. Let’s make it a day of learning, not forgetting. Let’s be sympathetic to the ways veterans have suffered without ignoring the suffering of civilian victims. Let’s teach and learn about the wars in which our veterans have participated without glossing over the historical and political context in which they occurred. Let’s end the reflexive support for popular mythology, the jingoism, the cheer-leading, and the forgetting. Let’s refuse to encourage the next generation to follow in the footsteps of today’s veterans.

The U.S. government’s assault on children

Posted on by kathiemm

We’ve heard considerable rhetoric recently about the vileness of subjecting children to poison gas–and vile it is. So are other means by which children are maimed and murdered, and the government of the United States is complicit in vile acts against the world’s children.

For example, being burned to death–as happened to thousands of children in the World War II firebombing of cities in Japan and Germany–is ghastly, whether it kills or scars for life.

Being born with birth defects related to Agent Orange, or being killed or maimed by unexploded ordinance (a continuing scourge for children in Vietnam) is a legacy of U.S. government intervention.

An article in the Independent reports, “Dramatic increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which was bombarded by US Marines in 2004, exceed those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, according to a new study.”

According to a 2012 Children’s Defense Fund report [opens as pdf], “In 2008, 2,947 children and teens died from guns in the United States and 2,793 died in 2009 for a total of 5,740—one child or teen every three hours, eight every day, 55 every week for two years.” Any government that does not fight the gun lobby is complicit.

There is an international chemical weapons convention to which our government has alluded in trying to make its case for bombing Syria.

There is also a convention that prohibits the use of anti-personnel mines, which the U.S. has failed to ratify. How does a government that has authorized widespread “collateral damage” have the moral authority to unilaterally punish other violators of international conventions?

Let us hope and pray that the current administration listens to the millions of American voices calling for a nonviolent alternative to raining terror on children and other innocent civilians in yet another Middle Eastern country.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Star Wars off their rockers

Posted on by kathiemm

In the world of Hollywood, R2-D2 is an appealing robot who comes to the rescue in every Star Wars movie. In the real world, robots are being created to kill on their own—that is, without human direction and oversight.

Big dog military robots
Big dog military robots. Image in public domain.

Although proponents of killing without risk to one’s own side use terms like “lethal autonomous robotics” or “autonomous military robots” to describe the latest product of deadly technology, the term “killer robots” captures better what these machines are programmed to do.

The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots makes a very compelling case for why it is so risky to program robots to kill and then to turn them loose.

Concerns about killer robots are strong enough and widespread enough that the Human Rights Council of the United Nations is urging a moratorium on their development “before it is too late.”

A U.N. ban on the development of killer robots is a good idea, as was the U.N. 1997 Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction–the international agreement banning antipersonnel landmines. The U.S. is among the small number of nations that have not signed that treaty.

UNICEF estimates that in the world today there are 110 million landmines in 64 countries; many of those (e.g., in Vietnam and Afghanistan) were planted by the U.S.  Every month about 800 people–mostly innocent children and other civilians–die from landmines, and thousands more are seriously injured.

Do we really need to add killer robots to our arsenal of deadly weapons?

So many Americans cloak themselves in hatred and search for an evil empire to destroy with the latest Star Wars weaponry. They may succeed. And the empire they find and destroy may be our own.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

A living tapestry of peace and reconciliation (Part 2)

Posted on by kathiemm

By guest author Alan O’Hare, a Seanchie (Celtic storyteller)

Rossville Street, Derry Peace mural
Mural in Derry, Northern Ireland. Image used under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

As you reflect upon the visions of peace and reconciliation presented in this blog, I invite you to co-create a living tapestry that celebrates the voices of peace activists and serves as a beacon for others.

Focus now on the center of this limitless tapestry, where visitors from across the ages are eavesdropping on the conversations of teachers of peace. In their midst is a floating multidimensional puzzle that pairs of participants work on together.

What a meditative gathering it becomes as Thich Nhat Hanh, Elise Boulding, and Bishop Tutu move gently and playfully among the guests, offering pieces of the puzzle that have fallen to the floor.

As a band of international roving musicians begin playing, Nelson Mandela joins hands with Aung San Suu Kyi and invites other guests to join their dance of celebration and reflection. In moments, a circle of once-alienated sisters and brothers are singing so joyfully that puzzle solvers stop and join in.

On the rooftop is the entrance to an endless museum of art, co-created by prisoners of war and oppression, celebrating the human dream and spirit. In this world of peace, reconciliation, and harmony, standing alone in a corner are remnants of violence inside a dumpster. They await conversion into mulch for growing new forms of learning, creating, and healing. These remnants include photos, drawings, and scrapings of:

  • Fenced-in, starving prisoners from an endless corridor of concentration camps
  • Bombed-out images from Rwanda, Hiroshima, Dresden, Vietnam, China, and more others than can ever be counted
  • Endless reams of plans and designs for weapons of destruction, cruelty and subjugation

From all of these terrifying remnants, we are reminded once again of the tragic, dehumanizing echoes of the past that can move us to learn new ways to be or not to be with one another.

Is this vision realistic, possible, or even desirable? The mission of the griots and other storytellers is to bear witness to the voices of the past and to move us to search among the endless possibilities for a more loving future.

We hope you will join us in pursuing a path to world peace and reconciliation. Please share your stories and dreams at engagingpeace.com.

Alan O’Hare, LifeStoryTheatre.org