Remembrance Day: “Let this silence be a scream for peace.” by Felicity Arbuthnot

by Felicity Arbuthnot
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
London, England
13 November 2011

“Did you really believe, when they told you the cause,
Did you really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame,
The killing and dying it was all done in vain
Oh Willy McBride it all happened again –
And again, and again, and again, and again.” — (The Green Fields of France, William Bogle, 1944 – )*

Across the world the fanfare commemorating the “day the guns fell silent” has been trumpeted (literally, in many places) as having special resonance: 11.11.11: a once in a century event.

A Veteran Remembers, by Howard Zinn (2006)

by Howard Zinn
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Nov. 11, 2011

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

Let’s go back to the beginning of Veterans Day. It used to be Armistice Day, because at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, World War I came to an end.

We must not forget that conflict. It revealed the essence of war, of all wars, because however “just” or “humanitarian” may be the claims, at the irreducible core of all war is the slaughter of the innocent, organized by national leaders, accompanied by lies.

Remembrance Day: Reversing the Tide of War. Say No to Nuclear War by Michel Chossudovsky

https://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/

by Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research
November 11, 2010

Throughout the history of mankind there have been murderers and tyrants; and while it may seem momentarily that they have the upper hand, they have always fallen.” (Mahatma Gandhi)

The United States has discarded pretensions to international legality and decency, and embarked on a course of raw imperialism run amok.” (William Rockler, Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor)

Except for fools and madmen, everyone knows that nuclear war would be an unprecedented human catastrophe. … In a 2-megaton explosion over a fairly large city, buildings would be vaporized, people reduced to atoms and shadows, outlying structures blown down like matchsticks and raging fires ignited. And if the bomb were exploded on the ground, an enormous crater, like those that can be seen through a telescope on the surface of the Moon, would be all that remained where midtown once had been. (Carl Sagan, Nuclear Winter, 1983)

Tony Blair: Glossing Over Remembrance Day by Felicity Arbuthnot

by Felicity Arbuthnot
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
11 November, 2010

Image via Wikipedia

“You fasten all the triggers for the others to fire,
Then you sit back and watch when the death count gets higher,
You hide in your mansion’s as young people’s blood flows,
Out of their bodies and in to the mud.”  — Bob Dylan.

Today, is Remembrance Day, on both sides of the Atlantic. At the eleventh minute, of the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the guns of the First World War fell silent, leaving the estimated nine million who had died in battle, to the graves’ muteness across continents, and to France’s poppy fields. It remains the day when the deaths of subsequent tragedies and imperial follies are remembered. A day when even the cynical pause to read heartfelt notes on poppy wreaths, laid at the base of memorials, flowers refreshed on graves, stories of the lost, passed down and revisited, as more recent shared laughter, now also silenced..