Howard Zinn: Whom Will We Honor Memorial Day?

 By Howard Zinn

Published on June 2, 1976 in the Boston Globe and republished in The Zinn Reader with the brief introduction below.

Memorial Day will be celebrated … by the usual betrayal of the dead, by the hypocritical patriotism of the politicians and contractors preparing for more wars, more graves to receive more flowers on future Memorial Days. The memory of the dead deserves a different dedication. To peace, to defiance of governments.

In 1974, I was invited by Tom Winship, the editor of the Boston Globe, who had been bold enough in 1971 to print part of the top secret Pentagon Papers on the history of the Vietnam War, to write a bi-weekly column for the op-ed page of the newspaper. I did that for about a year and a half. The column below appeared June 2, 1976, in connection with that year’s Memorial Day. After it appeared, my column was cancelled.

* * * * *

Memorial Day will be celebrated as usual, by high-speed collisions of automobiles and bodies strewn on highways and the sound of ambulance sirens throughout the land.

It will also be celebrated by the display of flags, the sound of bugles and drums, by parades and speeches and unthinking applause.

It will be celebrated by giant corporations, which make guns, bombs, fighter planes, aircraft carriers and an endless assortment of military junk and which await the $100 billion in contracts to be approved soon by Congress and the President.

There was a young woman in New Hampshire who refused to allow her husband, killed in Vietnam, to be given a military burial. She rejected the hollow ceremony ordered by those who sent him and 50,000 others to their deaths. Her courage should be cherished on Memorial Day. There were the B52 pilots who refused to fly those last vicious raids of Nixon’s and Kissinger’s war. Have any of the great universities, so quick to give honorary degrees to God-knows-whom, thought to honor those men at this Commencement time, on this Memorial Day?

No politician who voted funds for war, no business contractor for the military, no general who ordered young men into battle, no FBI man who spied on anti-war activities, should be invited to public ceremonies on this sacred day. Let the dead of past wars be honored. Let those who live pledge themselves never to embark on mass slaughter again.

“The shell had his number on it. The blood ran into the ground. . .Where his chest ought to have been they pinned the Congressional Medal, the DSC, the Medaille Militaire, the Belgian Croix de Guerre, the Italian gold medal, The Vitutea Militara sent by Queen Marie of Rumania. All the Washingtonians brought flowers .. Woodrow Wilson brought a bouquet of poppies.”

Those are the concluding lines of John Dos Passos angry novel 1919. Let us honor him on Memorial Day.

And also Thoreau, who went to jail to protest the Mexican War.

And Mark Twain, who denounced our war against the Filipinos at the turn of the century.

And I. F. Stone, who virtually alone among newspaper editors exposed the fraud and brutality of the Korean War.

Let us honor Martin Luther King, who refused the enticements of the White House, and the cautions of associates, and thundered against the war in Vietnam.

Memorial Day should be a day for putting flowers on graves and planting trees. Also, for destroying the weapons of death that endanger us more than they protect us, that waste our resources and threaten our children and grandchildren.

On Memorial Day we should take note that, in the name of “defense,” our taxes have been used to spend a quarter of a billion dollars on a helicopter assault ship called “the biggest floating lemon,” which was accepted by the Navy although it had over 2,000 major defects at the time of its trial cruise.

Meanwhile, there is such a shortage of housing that millions live in dilapidated sections of our cities and millions more are forced to pay high rents or high interest rates on their mortgages. There’s 90 billion for the B1 bomber, but people don’t have money to pay hospital bills.

We must be practical, say those whose practicality has consisted of a war every generation. We mustn’t deplete our defenses. Say those who have depleted our youth, stolen our resources. In the end, it is living people, not corpses, creative energy, not destructive rage, which are our only real defense, not just against other governments trying to kill us, but against our own, also trying to kill us.

Let us not set out, this Memorial Day, on the same old drunken ride to death.

Please go here for the original article: https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/whom-will-we-honor-memorial-day/

EXCELLENT — Gabor Maté, Chris Hedges & Aaron Maté on 'Palestine: The Moral Issue of Our Time'

Tears. My heart is so deeply moved! This morning I watched the entirety of the conversations with Aaron Maté, his father Gabor Maté, and Chris Hedges. And this talk is outstanding, simply beyond excellent. Please consider making the time to watch, listen to, and share with others these essential truths and the depth of wisdom, integrity, courage, and boundless caring and love communicated and embodied by Gabor Maté and Chris Hedges. They are among the great authors and activists, intellectuals and independent journalists, truth-tellers and wisdom keepers of our times. May we all be informed, inspired, and propelled into ever greater actions on behalf of Palestinians and the highest good for us all. — Molly

Palestine: The Moral Issue

of Our Time

Chris Hedges and Gabor Maté, introduced by award-winning journalist Aaron Maté, discuss the "moral issue of our time," Gaza. Hedges and Gabor Maté deliver speeches, engage in a two-way discussion and take questions from the audience. Thanks to the Middle East Children's Alliance and Nick Laparra of Let's Give a Damn for putting on the event, getting us the footage and allowing us to share it on our YouTube channel and Substack. You can watch the full event, complete with a musical performance by Mona Miara, here at the Let's Give a Damn YouTube channel.

Please go here for the original: https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/gabor-mate-chris-hedges-and-aaron

Valuable resources:

Chris Hedges: https://chrishedges.substack.com/

Gabor Maté: https://drgabormate.com/

Aaron Maté: https://www.aaronmate.net/

Elias Rodriguez’s Murderous Gift to Israel

Police tape cordons off the Capital Jewish Museum after shooting deaths of two Israeli embassy employees following an event there on Wednesday night. (Sdkb /Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0)

The barbarism of the live-streamed genocide in Gaza has inflicted moral injury on a scale untold, says John Wight. This is how Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation and this abhorrent double murder should be understood.

By John Wight

Days after the deed, we can only but wonder what are the thoughts now occupying the mind of 30-year-old Elias Rodriguez of Chicago.

As he languishes in his jail cell contemplating life and fate, is he still satisfied that he did the right thing? Or has he awoken to the totality of what he now faces in consequence, up to and including a possible death sentence?

In truth, with the gunning down of the Israeli diplomats Yaron Lischinksy and Sarah Milgrim as they emerged from an event being held at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., what he has done is hand Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, wanted by the International Criminal Court, and his supporters across America and beyond a most prized gift.

The result is them rinsing every last morsel out of this assassination/murder. This in a determined attempt to occupy a moral high ground in the midst of the ongoing holocaust in Gaza, one they most certainly have zero right to occupy and never have.

In the process of being detained at the scene, Rodriguez made a point of calling out “Free Palestine!” multiple times. In response, Netanyahu wasted no time in declaring that the chant “Free Palestine,” is today’s equivalent of “Heil Hitler.”

What has Elias Rodriguez really achieved with the shooting dead of these diplomats? This is the question. Apart from extinguishing their lives, and also by extension his own, it is an act of individual terror which does nothing — nothing — to advance the righteous cause of anti-Zionism and Palestinian liberation.

But then, was Rodriguez’s motivation really political at all? Or was his deed driven by a momentary lapse into insanity over an ongoing live-streamed genocide that the world has proved powerless to stop? 

The moral injury inflicted on all of us in consequence has been untold. How could it not when as in a never-ending procession, we have been showered with the images and footage of the unrelenting slaughter that has and continues to be visited on a poor indigenous people? Said slaughter and carnage has been undertaken in the name not of security or self-defence, as tirelessly claimed, but in the name of ethno-fascism. This is the fine point of it.

Reduced to Bearing Witness

Vigil on Feb. 26, 2024, organized by Code Pink at the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., the site of U. S. Airman Aaron Bushnell’s self sacrifice for peace the day before. (Elvert Barnes, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Throughout, we have been reduced to the role of bearing witness, which is where the self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell and now the double murder committed by Rodriguez should be understood. For both men, bearing witness gave way to a bursting desire to “do something” — to place themselves in the gears in a futile attempt to somehow stop this Israeli machine of mass murder from grinding on and on.

In the aftermath of Rodriguez’s act, much has been made of his link to the U.S. Marxist-Leninist Party of Socialism and Liberation (PSL). At this writing, you can guarantee that the F.B.I. and other branches of U.S. law enforcement will be poring over the organization’s website, emails and the speeches made by its leading lights at various conferences and demonstrations with anti-terrorism legislation in mind.

It can also likely look forward to having its offices raided in a chilling echo of the war that was waged against the Black Panther Party by U.S. law enforcement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In some quarters, the claim that Rodriguez’s killing of this couple belongs in the category of a false flag is being argued. Such claims should be summarily dismissed. The denial of agency to “regular people” and the assumption that “power” is behind every single event has sown dragon’s teeth when it comes to making sense of a world that to large extent has lost its mind.

The Shaping of Human Affairs 

Gavrilo Princep outside the courthouse in Sarajevo in 1914. (Unknown photographer/Wikimedia Commons /Public Domain)

Throughout history, acts of individual terror and assassinations have shaped human affairs. In pre-Bolshevik Russia, the anarchist belief in the “propaganda of the deed” informed the assassination of leading members of the Russian ruling elite, up to and including Tsar Alexander II in 1881.

The most impactful of such deeds was, of course, committed by Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princep in 1914. Princep’s assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, in Sarajevo led directly to the carnage of the First World War.

Back to today, political violence is as American as apple pie. It also underpinned the establishment of the State of Israel and has driven its existence since. Both states were literally born in violence, with the ensuing development of both shaped by same. 

This should be borne in mind when we hear the siren voices of authority declaiming against Rodriguez’s act as being un-American and anti-Semitic. It was not. It was instead entirely in keeping with the DNA of a society in which the Second Amendment, and the right it confers on the people “to keep and bear arms,” is venerated and worshipped — and always has been. It is also entirely in keeping with that of Israel, where the gun has done far more than the ballot box to shape the country’s national identity.

Gaza is in ruins, thousands of Palestinian infants and children are dead — with thousands more maimed — and famine looms. Under such grim and barbaric circumstances in the year 2025 not 1425, some people may find it difficult to muster a surplus of sympathy over the deaths of two supporters of the state and government responsible.

But sympathy is not the issue here. The issue, or at least the primary issue, is the extent to which it has moved the dial forward or not when it comes to opposing this monstrous crime committed against a civilian population.

One thinker who seriously grappled with the issue of acts of individual terror in his time was Leon Trotsky. He wrote a long article on the subject in 1911 — “Why Marxists Oppose Individual Terrorism.”

Trotsky:

“In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their powerlessness, and turns their eyes and hopes towards a great avenger and liberator.”

Elias Rodriguez, this otherwise ordinary young man from Chicago living an otherwise ordinary existence, has with one act of murderous violence crashed his way into the consciousness of a world  corrupted by genocide in our time. Believing that he was engaged in an act of exemplary solidarity with its countless victims, he produced a handgun and extinguished the lives of a young couple. 

There comes a point, surely, when the hegemonic penchant for death has to be superseded by the penchant for life.

John Wight, author of Gaza Weeps, 2021, writes on politics, culture, sport and whatever else.  Please consider making a donation in order to help fund his efforts. You can do so here. You can also grab a copy of his book, This Boxing Game: A Journey in Beautiful Brutality, from all major booksellers, and his novel Gaza: This Bleeding Land from same. Please consider taking out a subscription at his Medium site.

Please go here for the original article: https://consortiumnews.com/2025/05/23/elias-rodriguezs-murderous-gift-to-israel/

Lewis Goldstein: A Jew Against Genocide

This is an excellent piece by my friend Lewis. 

Deepest bow of respect and gratitude. 

🙏 Molly

Photo by BBC News

A JEW AGAINST GENOCIDE

By Lewis Goldstein

In general, I do not like to identify as a Jew. I was born into and raised Jewish, and am 99.9% Ashkenazi Jew according to my DNA . I do not think the World Community is well-served if we identify as being of a particular religion or tribe. Rather, it is time we acknowledge and identify with broader, more inclusive truths, such as we are all humans, sharing this world with other humans and nonhuman beings.

However, because of the Holocaust being perpetrated on the People living in Gaza, I am compelled to speak out as a Jewish Person, angry and ashamed that the Israeli government is murdering and starving the Palestinian People. I also cry out to every other country and every Person complicit in this genocide by remaining silent or supporting it with weapons, such as the US.

There is no justification for silence or inaction. Sending (or attempting to send) “humanitarian” aid, while simultaneously supplying weapons, is an insane form of psychopathy. We cannot accept arguments that it is ‘complicated’, resulting from millennia of deeply rooted and justifiable animosity. It is quite simply brothers killing brothers (Muslims and Jews, all children of Abraham) and in the process, men murdering all the women and children through their insane hatreds, all for a strip of seaside real estate and illegal territorial occupation, using Biblical gibberish as rationale.

Supplying aid while also supplying weapons and doing nothing to force Israel to administer that aid and stop the killing and starvation is as insane and cruel as the Walrus in Lewis Carroll’s poem from Through the Looking Glass. As the title suggests, this is ass-backward. A portion of the poem follows with the bold type mine to stress the hypocrisy.

From The Walrus and the Carpenter

By Lewis Carroll

“I weep for you,' the Walrus said:

I deeply sympathize.'

With sobs and tears he sorted out

Those of the largest size,

Holding his pocket-handkerchief

Before his streaming eyes.

O Oysters,' said the Carpenter,

You've had a pleasant run!

Shall we be trotting home again?'

But answer came there none —

And this was scarcely odd, because

They'd eaten every one."

Netanyahu would be the Carpenter, the Jewish Hitler who doesn’t have any empathy or feeling towards those he is murdering and starving. Everyone in support or denial are his Nazi collaborators.

Do you have a child, a grandchild? All children are our children. It is our children being murdered and starved to death every day. Whatever identity you might ascribe to the people living in Gaza, or to yourselves, they are our people. THEY ARE US.

* * *

Please go here for the original article on Lewis Goldstein's Substack: https://goldsteinl.substack.com/p/a-jew-against-genocide?r=1flrbi&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&triedRedirect=true

Sea Level Rise Will Cause ‘Catastrophic Inland Migration’, Scientists Warn

We must not forget or turn away from that which is causing massive destruction, extinctions, catastrophic disasters, dislocation and migration, unfathomable trauma and pain, loss and starvation, resource wars and violence, suffering and death each and every day. In the midst of so many horrors and heartbreaks, there is an imperative that we not lose sight of the human caused climate catastrophe and its roots in fossil fuels, greed, disinformation, and actively blocking the development of and transition to renewable energy resources. These are the most criminal acts in all of our human history. Truly evil. This is the crisis which has us all on a suicidal trajectory. We must expose that which causes such profound harm and in every way possible stand in protection of all life on Earth. — Molly

The loss of ice from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets has quadrupled since the 1990s. Photograph: Bernhard Staehli/Shutterstock

Rising oceans will force millions away from coasts even if global temperature rise remains below 1.5C, analysis finds

By Damian Carrington

Sea level rise will become unmanageable at just 1.5C of global heating and lead to “catastrophic inland migration”, the scientists behind a new study have warned. This scenario may unfold even if the average level of heating over the last decade of 1.2C continues into the future.

The loss of ice from the giant Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets has quadrupled since the 1990s due to the climate crisis and is now the principal driver of sea level rise.

The international target to keep global temperature rise below 1.5C is already almost out of reach. But the new analysis found that even if fossil fuel emissions were rapidly slashed to meet it, sea levels would be rising by 1cm a year by the end of the century, faster than the speed at which nations could build coastal defences.

The world is on track for 2.5C-2.9C of global heating, which would almost certainly be beyond tipping points for the collapse of the Greenland and west Antarctic ice sheets. The melting of those ice sheets would lead to a “really dire” 12 metres of sea level rise.

Today, about 230 million people live within 1 metre above current sea level, and 1 billion live within 10 metres above sea level. Even just 20cm of sea level rise by 2050 would lead to global flood damages of at least $1tn a year for the world’s 136 largest coastal cities and huge impacts on people’s lives and livelihoods.

However, the scientists emphasised that every fraction of a degree of global heating avoided by climate action still matters, because it slows sea level rise and gives more time to prepare, reducing human suffering.

Sea level rise is the biggest long-term impact of the climate crisis, and research in recent years has shown it is occurring far faster than previously estimated. The 1.5C limit was seen as a way to avoid the worst consequences of global heating, but the new research shows this is not the case for sea level rise.

The researchers said the “safe limit” temperature for ice sheets was hard to estimate but was likely to be 1C or lower. Sea level rise of at least 1-2 metres was now inevitable, the scientists said. In the UK, just 1 metre of sea level rise would see large parts of the Fens and Humberside below sea level.

“What we mean by safe limit is one which allows some level of adaptation, rather than catastrophic inland migration and forced migration, and the safe limit is roughly 1cm a year of sea level rise,” said Prof Jonathan Bamber of the University of Bristol in the UK. “If you get to that, then it becomes extremely challenging for any kind of adaptation, and you’re going to see massive land migration on scales that we’ve never witnessed in modern civilisation.” Developing countries such as Bangladesh would fare far worse than rich ones with experience of holding back the waves, such as the Netherlands, he said.

Durham University’s Prof Chris Stokes, lead author of the study, said: “We’re starting to see some of the worst-case scenarios play out almost in front of us. At current warming of 1.2C, sea level rise is accelerating at rates that, if they continue, would become almost unmanageable before the end of this century, [which is] within the lifetime of our young people.”

The average global temperature rise hit 1.5C for the first time in 2024. But the international target is measured as the average over 20 years, so is not considered to have been broken yet.

The new study, published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment, combined data from studies of warm periods up to 3m years ago; observations of ice melting and sea level rise in recent decades; and climate models. It concluded: “Continued mass loss from ice sheets poses an existential threat to the world’s coastal populations.”

Prof Andrea Dutton of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was part of the study team, said: “Evidence recovered from past warm periods suggests that several metres of sea level rise – or more – can be expected when global mean temperature reaches 1.5C or higher.”

At the end of the last ice age, about 15,000 years ago, the sea level was rising at 10 times the rate today, driven by self-reinforcing feedbacks that may have been triggered by only a small increase in temperature. The last time CO2 levels in the atmosphere were as high as today, about 3m years ago, sea level rise was 10-20 metres higher.

Even if humanity can bring the planet back to its preindustrial temperature by removing CO2 from the atmosphere, it will still take hundreds to thousands of years for the ice sheets to recover, the researchers said. That means land lost to sea level rise will remain lost for a long time, perhaps until the Earth enters the next ice age.

Belize moved its capital inland in 1970 after a devastating hurricane, but its largest city is still on the coast and will be inundated with only 1 metre of sea level rise, Carlos Fuller, Belize’s longtime climate negotiator, said: “Findings such as these only sharpen the need to remain within the 1.5C Paris agreement limit, or as close as possible, so we can return to lower temperatures and protect our coastal cities.”

Please go here for the original article: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/may/20/sea-level-rise-migration