This post by Mercedes Schneider is a lovely illustrated tribute to her father, who was a veteran of World War II.
I must say, as I grow older, I grow more cynical about war. Since Vietnam, people have been referring to World War II as “the good war.” And there is no doubt that Hitler and his racist ideology had to be stopped.
Yet, I was struck the other day by a friend’s observation that World War II was the only war we ever “won.” We had to. World War I now looks like a family quarrel among the royals, with millions of young men playing out their game, leaving in its wake the bitterness and destruction that led to World War II. Korea ended with no sense of victory. Vietnam ended with a sense of despair and futility. In Iraq and Afghanistan—the people we think we are defending–often wearing the uniform of our ally– shoot our boys and girls in the back or the face.
I am grateful to those who made the ultimate sacrifice, I honor those who served when called to duty. But I am sick of war.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Dear Dr. Ravitch:
Thank you for this informative article. You are the educational warrior who will fight with the last breath to wipe out ignorance from greed. Physical war is horrible, but educational war is much more terrified. Just take a look at China where many thousand years of civilization are almost destroyed by communist ignorance within less than a century (1950 – 2014+). It only take 100 years of ignorance to transform their beautiful and civilized Chinese leaders and citizens into evil money hunger people who intentionally manipulated the word “patriot” to create chaos and to destroy humanity.
We will always win any war whenever educators or cultivators have the highest quality in honesty, integrity, kindness and truly care for the welfare of all “children” regardless of their background. Back2basic
I think honorable of our men and woman in uniform. My father was a merchant marine during WWII, and was stationed in Brest, France at one point.
But I too am sick of war.
Sick of the cost to life and limb.
And most of all, sick of how much it costs taxpayers at a critical crowd-out cost to our own internal, domestic public infrastructure.
War costs far to much, and it mainly enriches the contractors who “provide” goods and services to the military in our decades old military industrial complex.
I need money.
I need guided reading books for my students, a Smart Board, and I need a bigger teaching space other than the office in which I conduct small group instruction (8 to 11 children depending on the group, 3 groups a day).
Whole Foods does not need to build another store.
Trader Joes does not need to produce another product covered in chocolate.
We do not need to be in Syria or Afghanistan or Iraq. We never did.
We do NOT need to be the world police any more. All our morality has been replaced by hegemony and foreign policy hypocrisy.
All our “American exceptionalism” has been replaced by NSA spying and an absence of national healthcare.
All our middle class are too busy paying down college debt.
I am sick to death of war . . . . . .
We all are.
An official publication of the U.S. Army, Army Times, recently ran a cover story that posed this question: Ten years on, what are we doing over here, and what were we ever doing over here? And the answer that it gave was, basically, who the hell knows?
Six trillion dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives later. And many of those the lives of children. What end is worth maiming or killing children, that particular inevitable “collateral damage”? This is the question that is never asked in the jingoistic run-up to wholesale murderous and destructive activity.
What end is worth that? That one toddler who lost an eye and a leg, who is scarred for life?
I often think that if, when these matters are debated, some divine power could miraculously transport one child in the throws of agony as a result of military activity to the legislative chamber, that if these people saw with their own eyes, smelled with their own nostrils, heard with their own ears what they were ACTUALLY talking about, we would make very, very different decisions.
My stepfather was on Iwo Jima. He was an ex baseball player, a physically powerful man, a political conservative, seemingly impervious to pain, physical or emotional, emotionally centered, controlled, stoic and strong. In short, he was traditional man’s man, as people conceived of masculinity in the 1950s. I never say him exhibit emotional weakness of any kind. On two separate occasions, I saw him pick tiny pieces of shrapnel out of himself that had worked their way to the surface of his body DECADES after the war, once out of his palm, once out of his calf. On both occasions, he grinned and shook his head and explained to me what it was.
We went together to see Saving Private Ryan. I and the rest of the audience were riveted when, in the film, the guys hit the beach. I looked over at him. His face was buried in his hands. He was weeping.
It was very difficult to get him to talk about the war. He fought his way across that island. I’ve watched footage of what he experienced. He was just a kid.
Iwo Jima: The 36-day assault resulted in more than 26,000 American casualties, including 6,800 dead. Of the 20,000 Japanese who fought there, only 1,083 survived.
I recently did an interesting calculation. HALF the estimated committed cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would have put solar panels on the roof of EVERY building in the United States.
And think of the jobs that such productive use of our resources would have generated.
Six trillion dollars.
Let me give you an idea how much money that is.
A million seconds is about 11.5 days.
A trillion seconds is about 31,556.9 years.
When the Shock and Awe rained down on Baghdad, I thought, here we are, these millennia later, at what Western history books call the birthplace of “civilization,” raining down bombs on this place.
Raining down death.
I’ve been reading Lloyd Lofthouse’s Running with the Enemy. Lloyd is a frequent contributor on this blog. I highly recommend his book.
And this, by Smedley Butler:
Click to access warisaracket.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
I too am sick of war. The only way to end war is to end all human life. People will always find something to fight about: religions, cultures, land, resources, the list could go on for eons.
My Dad was in the Army Air Corps at Hickam Field on 12/07/1941. He was in the Pacific for most of the war. My mother served as well as did some of my aunts and uncles. My grandfather too – at the War College and later in Japan.
I believe some wars are justified and I am concerned about human rights in all countries. I am horrified by what I see in Syria. At this point the UN seems to be a useless waste of
resources human and financial. What will be the cost of the genocide in Syria? What if we had not stopped Hitler and Hirohito? What then?
We don’t go into these wars to stop egregious actions of genocide. Otherwise, we would have intervened in Rwanda. I agree with you that there are things worth fighting for. But we must always, always consider the true cost and the true motivations of those urging us to war.
This we do not do.
“. . . the true cost and the true motivations of those urging us to war.”
That information is unavailable to the common man.
Unless they choose to find it and most Americans are just too damn lazy and too falsely patriotic (they’re nationalists not patritots) to do so. god bless america and all that.
A short reading list:
Ambrose Bierce‘s “Chickamauga,”
Thomas Hardy’s “Channel Firing” and “The Man He Killed,”
Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,”
Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front,
Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun,
Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, and
Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”
Mark my words: If you allow the creation of a centralized Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth, the time will come, eventually, when every work I have mentioned here will be banned.
As you referenced above add Smedley Butler.
Recently a letter from the “Friends” society came and had the banner enclosed: War is not the answer. I agree. We spent millions on the Marshall plan but the world loved us, had no reason to fear us. The 6 trillion mentioned above- not counting even the displaced people in Iraq, the horrific cost in lives and suffering among our soldiers and the Iraqi people let alone Afghanistan where it cost a million dollars a year for each soldier etc etc and the result: much of the world fears and even hates us, thinks we are a bully etc. For a fraction of that money spent on teachers, farmers, builders of schools etc would we not have had now to spend untold millions of dollar for national security, have our privacy compromised to the point some wonder if our Constitution has any validity any more. Yet, we somehow find all kinds of money – which is often wasted as in Iraq to wage war but not wage peace. Whether good or bad, contrast what is spent on our military and that which is spent on our State Department. I wonder often: what have we become.
Yes there are dangers. Our forefathers faced dangers from the frontier in all sorts of ways but they had the courage to face those dangers.
Do we wage peace or wage war? Do we spend money on helping people or in finding ways to destroy them? Questions which seem worthy of discussion.
Gordon,
The money spent on wars by our government has been horrific. I doubt it would have been spent elsewhere other than on the war machine – it was probably borrowed from China.
An ancestor of mine came over on the Mayflower. For this I apologize. Many of the dangers those forefathers you mentioned faced, were the indigenous people who were being cheated, sickened, killed, and displaced once the forefathers took it upon themselves to look at the wilderness as one big colonization opportunity. They took and took and took and we still reap the misery they sowed. As I stated earlier: wars will end when there are no humans left on earth.
Mercedes: thank you for your posting.
Diane: thank you for this posting.
To the commenters: thank you for your comments.
😎
Mercedes’ tribute to her father is terrific. Thanks for sharing. My Broad-infected district (Fulton County Schools in Georgia) required employees to report to work today for a snow make-up day. On a holiday meant to respect the men and women who gave their lives for our freedom, I don’t think they showed much respect for their own employees or those who are meant to be honored today. But this district seems to be purposefully cultivating a culture of disrespect. This requirement is just the latest in what seems a never-ending chain of insults.
Ah, disrespect, the new workplace normal.
When the county first suggested that Memorial Day will be used as a snow make-up day, it was so far in the distant future, we couldn’t perseverate on the injustice. Memorial day came, and it became so egregious that we were not spending time with our families and loved ones honoring those that served for our freedom. Another employee said to me that due to the fact that the system has a culture of fear, the employees can’t say anything about these system level decisions. Therefore, the system is allowed to do as it chooses without regard to the people that it impacts.
“World War I now looks like a family quarrel among the royals, with millions of young men playing out their game, leaving in its wake the bitterness and destruction that led to World War II.”
That may sound simplistic, but I think it’s absolutely spot on. Who the hell really cared about Archduke Ferdinand –except aristocratic relatives? What a lousy reason for a world war and the death of 16 million people –which set the stage for an even more brutal world war to follow, resulting in over 37 million deaths.
And what a great description of it all. You are such an articulate historian, Diane!
It’s hard to believe how many Western countries and colonies were still ruled by monarchies 100 years ago. Many thought that could never happen here, but we had our gilded age then, too. With the resurgence of a new gilded age, we are now seeing what lengths a ruling class will go to, to insure their continued wealth and power, as well as their aims to dominate, exploit and manipulate the less fortunate masses. And the casualties from such social and economic wars are innumerable.
H2 (the History Channel) has a show on entitled, “The Billionaire Agenda,” which is reporting truthfully about our country’s billionaires and their influences.
http://www.history.com/shows/americas-book-of-secrets/videos/the-billionaire-agenda
I’m not crazy about the announcer and rather sensational approach to reporting used, but there are credible people on there, such as Robert Reich –and maybe that’s what is needed to get through to common people about what is going on around them.
I too have been wondering about the wisdom, value, and need for the wars we have been involved in since WWII and thought about another aspect regarding the treatment of those who have served.
Being that Monday was Memorial Day, a day to honor those who are in or have been in the military as well as those who have paid the ultimate price for their service, it seems to me an odd paradox that on that one day of the year we recognize their service whereas at the same time, the Veteran’s Administration gives those who have been wounded or are suffering from PSTS, the unconscionable treatment that is currently being reported. There are other aspects of our treatment of veterans that makes no sense to me whatsoever. It just seems so insensitive, uncaring and downright hypocritical.
Every time we go to war, we further slash the VA budget. I’m not exactly excusing what’s happened at the VA, but for the most part they do the best they can. I was there once with my uncle, who is, to put it as politely as possible, a huge pain in the backside. The lengths those people went to serve him in the face of his belligerence was at least as heroic as anything any soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan ever did.
Kind of like public schools have. Done the best they can. While being the main host of integration in this country! At a huge cost— possibly their existence–but a huge gain: a society that cannot ignore segregation.
We too went to school yesterday, but parents had a vote on makeup days. It was early release everyone was out by 1:30. A veteran who teaches at our school had her second graders lead a tribute around the flag pole.
War is what made “Be Still My Soul” my go-to hymn when I need strength. And that goes for the war on public school too.