This is a powerful, powerful article which I share in honor of all veterans and in honor of all who have been affected by war - which means all of us everywhere. The ripples of war know no bounds, as do those of peace. May we all grow in our capacity to be true peacemakers, beginning within our own hearts. Peace... Molly
by Patricia Hynes for Buzzflash
Blessed is the veteran of World War I, who spent his life exposing the horrors of war for those who fight in it and the willful deceit of those who declare it and seek stature from it. In his first anti-war novel, Erich Maria Remarque wrote "I see how peoples are set against each other...foolishly, innocently, obediently slaying each other ...While they [the promoters and boosters of war] continued to talk and write, we saw the wounded and dying...The wrong people do the fighting." All Quiet on the Western Front was banned in Nazi Germany.
Blessed are the children of veterans who break the code of silence on the war that never ends: Living with the "attendant nightmares" of their veteran fathers and being "the objects of their war-ridden rage and war-honed violence." War Is Not Over When It's Overchronicles, through interviews and photos, the spill over of brutal violence against girls and women in five war-ruined countries. The author Ann Jones' own life was "darkened by war." Her thrice-decorated WWI-veteran father turned his war-fed anger and violence on her and her mother.
Blessed is the World War II combat veteran who turned his revulsion at the racism of boot camp and the brutality of war into a life of non-violent activism for Civil Rights and radical witness for peace. Philip Berrigan believed "...there will be no healing for veterans until we disavow war completely, until we disarm the bomb and the killing machine and ourselves." His lifelong question: "Can I remedy my violence, can I heal myself until I try to heal the body of humankind from the curse of war?"
Blessed is the writer Anonymous for her courage in exposing a taboo subject: The mass rape of an estimated 100,000 women in Berlin (of which she was one) by conquering Russian soldiers over a period of 7 weeks, and the mass rejection of these women, as shameless and besmirched, by returning German men who were emasculated by defeat. A Woman in Berlin was rejected by German publishers and published only years later in the United States. The author did not reveal her name because of fear of threats and reprisals.
Blessed is the daughter of two hibakusha, the shunned Japanese survivors of atomic bombs, who has assumed the mantle of speaking out against nuclear weapons and for world peace. The bombs scarred her parents, both mentally and physically; her father lashed out and her mother withdrew into depression. "For me," says Miyako Taguchi, who is founder of Hibakusha Stories from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Future Generations, "I always live with the effects, the reality of the bomb and the modern arsenals of more than 27,000 nuclear weapons. No matter who has them, we are all their victims."
Blessed are all the veterans against wars, current and past, and those who have returned to the countries and peoples they harmed to make reparation. Blessed are the Veterans for Peace who will walk from November 2-11 in rural Maine to bear witness to the human tragedy that recent wars have caused for local villages, towns and families, including unprecedented rates of suicide among soldiers serving in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and the many suffering from war-related PTSD, head trauma, and sexual assault.
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A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967
America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and loose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves. ~ Abraham Lincoln
All beings tremble before violence. All fear death. All love life. See yourself in others. Then whom can you hurt? What harm can you do? ~ The Buddha
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. ~ Carl Jung
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