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Reclaim Armistice Day and Honor the Real Heroes

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 By Arnold “Skip” Oliver

More than a few veterans, Veterans For Peace among them, are troubled by the way Americans observe Veterans’ Day on November 11th. It was originally called Armistice Day, and established by Congress in 1926 to “perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations, (and later) a day dedicated to the cause of world peace.” For years, many churches rang their bells on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month – the time that the guns fell silent on the Western Front by which time 16 million had died.

To put it bluntly, in 1954 Armistice Day was hijacked by a militaristic congress, and today few Americans understand the original purpose of the occasion, or even remember it. The message of peace seeking has vanished. Now known as Veterans’ Day, it has devolved into a hyper-nationalistic worship ceremony for war and the putatively valiant warriors who wage it.   [Read more…]

Remembering the Looks in their Eyes

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By Dana Levy

I was drafted into the US Army in 1966 and my (our) country seems to have been at war ever since. I was sent to Germany after my training in Basic and AIT as a soldier and order taker because my next older brother (drafted 2 months ahead of me) was in Korea.  The benevolent country of the USA wouldn’t send two brothers to a war zone at the same time back then.

We (this includes us all) don’t have such a policy any more and it is every man–whether young or old– for himself, not to mention the many women involved now. My supposition is that the new policy stems from the fact that we now have an all volunteer military. I only did two years in the service to my country and it is still constantly always right under the surface of my thoughts and actions.
  [Read more…]

Drill Team (a paean, not to the war machine)

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By Jay Powell

Surrender your free will to the machine.
That is the act performed,
when you enlist or accept a commission
and take the oath to obey,
without reservation.

They don’t tell you that,
when you are 16 or 17 or 18 or 19 years young.
Your brain, no matter how incredibly brilliant,
is not fully formed and hooked together (scientific fact).
You are still a babe,
whether you know it or not. …   [Read more…]

War and Peace Week at the San Diego Free Press

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By Anna Daniels

Almost one hundred years ago President Woodrow Wilson declared in vaulting prose that World War I was the war to end all wars, that it would make the world safe for democracy.  The vaulting prose came to naught– the war to end all wars didn’t.

The reality is that the United States doesn’t wage peace with anywhere near the same commitment that it wages war. The veterans who march in the Veterans Day parades this week, as well as those who consciously choose not to, will represent  a constant succession of wars, declared and undeclared, since World War II.

The Cold War. The Korean War. The Vietnam War. The Gulf War. The War in Afghanistan. The Iraq War.   [Read more…]

Baghdad Tattoo

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By Janet Parkinson /Poems Against War

Jalal Ahmed 07901 295135
Ali Abbas 07901 567256
Atheer Mohammad 07901 469798
are incised on my thigh.

My wife sees them when we make love.
I see them when I bathe, change clothes.
They are high enough to be covered
at the beach. I do not want
the world to know my fear.

I do not want the world to know
I have reason to fear. …
  [Read more…]

Hold on to Freedom

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By Bob Dorn

Freedom.  A word we don’t hear lately, cheated of life by politicians who told us that’s what wars are for.

After all those wars fought in its name, did we lose the concept, freedom?  What took its place? Hate?  Maybe that’s what’s left.

We’ve been suffocated by war; our culture is dying from it.  Road rage is normal. The military mails advanced war games to little boys whose memories of all those explosions can be tickled once they reach 18, all ready for the next “conflict.”  War is just a digital metaphor, a collection of remote buttons until they’re turned into launcher’s buttons.

Yipeee… they’re all gonna die, is that what Country Joe sang?  Nope, he said, we’re all gonna die.   [Read more…]

The History of Neighborhood House in Logan Heights: Sailors, Pachucos and Life In-Between

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Part III of the Not so Great Depression and World War II Come to Logan Heights

By Maria E. Garcia

World War II PosterThe Depression and the advent of World War II brought social and economic change to Logan Heights. Residents who lost their jobs and savings during the Depression found a scapegoat for their anger and fears in the form of their neighbors of Mexican descent.

These residents, many of whom who had been actively recruited by American business owners, ranchers and farmers in the early twentieth century were now seen as job stealers and a burden to the welfare system. They were denied employment, dropped from the welfare rolls and actively repatriated to Mexico. Sixty percent of the repatriated individuals were American citizens.

Several men that I have interviewed told of their mothers crying when they heard we were at war. Men were enlisting and being drafted. The whittling away of the Logan Heights population which first occurred during the repatriation, became even more apparent when so many of the men, often the household’s primary breadwinner, went off to war. An unprecedented number of women entered the workforce in the canneries and defense industry as a result.

But there was an influx of a new group in Logan Heights–sailors. …   [Read more…]

The History of Neighborhood House in Logan Heights: Life in Logan Heights During War Time

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Part II of the Not-so-great Depression and WWII

By Maria E. Garcia

Part I of this series presented a glimpse of life in Logan Heights during the the Great Depression. The Mexican Repatriation Act resulted in a massive, largely forced return of residents of Mexican descent in the US back to Mexico in the 1930’s. It is estimated that sixty percent of these individuals who returned to Mexico were American citizens. Last week’s article talks about one Logan Heights family that stayed– the Kennistons– and one family that left– the Leybas.

The months leading up to WWII and the declaration of war had a tremendous impact on life in Logan Heights. The radio and the newspaper were constantly focusing not only on the war, but on what could happen in San Diego should the war come to the shores of the United States. San Diego was definitely a Navy town with added patrols on the bay and Quonset huts springing up around various locations, some right in the middle of the barrio.

Several of those interviewed spoke of their mothers crying, knowing that their sons would soon be drafted and be off to fight in foreign places.   [Read more…]

Game of Drones: What Are the Rules of the Game for Civilian Drone Use?

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By Lawrence A. Herzog

Editor’s Note: This week SD Free Press will be re-posting a few past articles relevant to out War and Peace theme.

On a recent Sunday morning, I was hiking up the back streets of Soledad Mountain in La Jolla. Arriving on top and prepared to enjoy the stunning aerial view of our Pacific coastline, I suddenly heard a disturbing, loud, buzzing sound. As I poked my head around one of the black, granite-covered walls of the Veteran’s Monument, a small robot-sized helicopter jumped out, hovering just above me.

I was staring at, in today’s parlance, a drone.

“What the heck”? My eyes were soon drawn to its source, a man standing near the edge of the main parking area, operating a small remote control, with the drone now buzzing over toward him.

Curious, I walked over and said, “Hi, I was wondering, do folks need some kind of permit to operate near a Veteran Memorial site?” The drone operator did not respond. Within minutes, however, he was gone.

End of story? I think not.   [Read more…]

Memory Against Forgetting: The May 1970 Peace Memorial at UCSD

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Editor: the following is based on a speech delivered by the author, Niall Twohig on last Friday, May 9th, in front of a group of fifty gathered in Revelle Plaza at UC San Diego to unveil The May 1970 Peace Memorial. The Memorial is dedicated to George Winne, who immolated himself and died as a protest against the Vietnam War in May of 1970, plus it’s dedicated to those students who carried on the May 1970 Student Strike.

By Niall Twohig

Why a memorial for May 1970? Why a memorial for peace? Why now?

To suggest some answers, I want to ask you, the reader, to take an imaginative leap back in time to May 1970.

In order to make this leap, we have to remember that the U.S. was waging an unpopular proxy war in Southeast Asia, made all the more unpopular after the invasion of Cambodia at the end of April.

If we found ourselves transported to May 1970, this would be all too apparent. We would see the images?the aerial views of bombs upon bombs pulverizing the Vietnamese countryside, images of GIs burning huts, footage of badly burnt villagers running from the firestorm of napalm, photos of rows upon rows of mutilated bodies scattered in the fields and anonymous soldiers packed away in coffins draped in stars and stripes.   [Read more…]

Pilots Come Clean: Drone Warfare Is Riddled with Tragic, Bloody Errors

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Imagine if the drone wars going on in Pakistan and Yemen had a human face all the time.

By Pratap Chatterjee / AlterNet via Tom Dispatch 

Enemies, innocent victims, and soldiers have always made up the three faces of war. With war growing more distant, with drones capable of performing on the battlefield while their “pilots” remain thousands of miles away, two of those faces have, however, faded into the background in recent years. Today, we are left with just the reassuring “face” of the terrorist enemy, killed clinically by remote control while we go about our lives, apparently without any “collateral damage” or danger to our soldiers. Now, however, that may slowly be changing, bringing the true face of the drone campaigns Washington has pursued since 9/11 into far greater focus.   [Read more…]

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