That is the tradition we need to restore. It lasted in the United States up through the 1950s and even longer in some other countries under the name Remembrance Day. It was only after the United States had nuked Japan, destroyed Korea, begun a Cold War, created the CIA, and established a permanent military industrial complex with major permanent bases around the globe, that the U.S. government renamed Armistice Day as Veterans Day on June 1, 1954.
Veterans Day is no longer, for most people, a day to cheer the ending of war or even to aspire to its abolition. Veterans Day is not even a day on which to mourn or to question why suicide is the top killer of U.S. troops or why so many veterans have no houses.
In the years following World War I, war was something to be lamented, exactly as if it were not desirable. World War I had cost, as one author calculated it at the time, enough money to have given a $2,500 home with $1,000 worth of furniture and five acres of land to every family in Russia, most of the European nations, Canada, the United States, and Australia, plus enough to give every city of over 20,000 a $2 million library, a $3 million hospital, a $20 million college, and still enough left over to buy every piece of property in Germany and Belgium. And it was all legal. Incredibly stupid, but totally legal. Particular atrocities violated laws, but war was not criminal. It never had been, but it soon would be.
The Outlawry Movement of the 1920s--the movement to outlaw war--sought to replace war with arbitration, by first banning war and then developing a code of international law and a court with the authority to settle disputes. The first step was taken in 1928 with the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which banned all war. Today 81 nations are party to that treaty, including the United States, and many of them comply with it. I'd like to see additional nations, poorer nations that were left out of the treaty, join it (which they can do simply by stating that intention to the U.S. State Department) and then urge the greatest purveyors of violence in the world to comply.
I wrote a book about the movement that created that treaty, not just because we need to continue its work, but also because we can learn from its methods. Here was a movement that united people across the political spectrum, those for and against alcohol, those for and against the League of Nations, with a proposal to criminalize war. It was an uncomfortably large coalition. There were negotiations and peace pacts between rival factions of the peace movement. There was a moral case made that expected the best of people. War wasn't opposed merely on economic grounds or because it might kill people from one's own country. It was opposed as mass murder, as no less barbaric than duelling as a means of settling individuals' disputes. Here was a movement with a long-term vision based on educating and organizing. There was an endless hurricane of lobbying, but no endorsing of politicians, no aligning of a movement behind a party. On the contrary, all four -- yes, four -- major parties were compelled to line up behind the movement. Instead of Clint Eastwood talking to a chair or Donald Trump's 4th-grade vocabulary, the Republican National Convention of 1924 saw President Coolidge promising to outlaw war if reelected.
And on August 27, 1928, in Paris, France, that scene happened that made it into a 1950s folk song as a mighty room filled with men, and the papers they were signing said they'd never fight again. And it was men, women were outside protesting. And it was a pact among wealthy nations that nonetheless would continue making war on and colonizing the poor. But it was a pact for peace that ended wars and ended the acceptance of territorial gains made through wars, except in Palestine, the Sahara, Diego Garcia, and other exceptions. It was a treaty that still required a body of law and an international court that we still do not have. But it was a treaty that in 90 years those wealthy nations would, in relation to each other, violate only once. Following World War II, the Kellogg-Briand Pact was used to prosecute victor's justice. And the big armed nations never went to war with each other again, yet. And so, the pact is generally considered to have failed.
What has failed is the idea of the United States as a law abiding citizen. The U.S. National Security Advisory, who poses a threat to actual security, not only holds the United States to be above the law, but publicly threatens any nation that supports the rule of law, even while violating the U.N. Charter by threatening war on others under the guise of law enforcement. And while most people in the United States are not eager for more wars, and there would be no rebellion if we were given peace, there is broad consensus across the political spectrum in the United States that the United States is special, so special as to merit its own standards and privileges properly denied to ever other nation.
I might add here that there is bad as well as good in people shunning Saudi Arabia over the murder of one U.S. corporate journalist but not over the murder of thousands of non-Americans. There's also something very disturbing in the accepted notion that one should sell bombs only to governments that do not abuse human rights, meaning kill anyone without bombs. There is also something both evil and incompetent in Trump arguing that you sell them weapons anyway to create jobs, since military spending is in fact a drain on jobs and the reverse arms race that the United States could easily lead could be made to economically benefit everyone.
In my latest book, Curing Exceptionalism, I look at how the United States compares with other countries, how people think about that, what harm this thinking does, and how to think differently. In the first of those four sections, I try to find some measure by which the United States actually is the greatest, number one, the only indispensible nation, and I fail.
I tried freedom, but every ranking by every institute or academy, abroad, within the United States, privately funded, funded by the CIA, etc., failed to rank the United States at the top, whether for rightwing capitalist freedom to exploit, leftwing freedom to lead a fulfilling life, freedom in civil liberties, freedom to change one's economic position, freedom by any definition under the sun. The United States where "at least I know I'm free" in the words of a country song contrasts with other countries where at least I know I'm freer.
So I looked harder. I looked at education at every level, and found the United States ranked first only in student debt. I looked at wealth and found the United States ranked first only in inequality of wealth distribution among wealthy nations. In fact, the United States ranks at the bottom of wealthy nations in a very long list of measures of quality of life. You live longer, healthier, and happier elsewhere. The United States ranks first among all nations in various measures one shouldn't be proud of: incarceration, various sorts of environmental destruction, and most measures of militarism, as well as some dubious categories, such as -- don't sue me -- lawyers per capita. And it ranks first in a number of items that I imagine those who shout "We're Number 1!" to quiet down anybody working to improve things do not have in mind: most television viewing, most paved asphalt, at or near the top in most obesity, most wasted food, cosmetic surgery, pornography, consumption of cheese, etc.
In a rational world, nations that had found the best policies on healthcare, gun violence, education, environmental protection, peace, prosperity, and happiness would be most promoted as models worthy of consideration. In this world, the prevalence of the English language, the dominance of Hollywood, and other factors do in fact put the United States in the lead in one thing: in the promotion of all of its mediocre to disastrous policies.
What we need is not shame in place of pride, or some new version of patriotism. What we need is to stop identifying ourselves so much with a national government and a military. We need to identify more with our actual smaller communities, and with the wider human and natural community of this little planet. We need a new Armistice Day conceived of by people who view the world and each other in those terms.
At the website WorldBEYONDWar.org/ArmisticeDay you'll find a list of events around the world and the opportunity to add an event not yet listed. You'll also find resources that include speakers, videos, activities, articles, information, posters and flyers to help with your event. One activity promoted by Veterans For Peace is the ringing of bells at that moment of 11 o'clock on the 11th day of the 11th month. Groups can contact us at World BEYOND War for help planning any activities. But I think they might also want to contact the Santa Cruz peace community as you have really taken the lead in restoring this peace holiday by marking it and the date one month before it and two months before it, etc. It's wonderful what you've done. Wonderful also is the Collateral Damage monument in Santa Cruz -- a model for a culture of peace.
I also want to plant another future activity idea in your heads that I just learned about this week. It seems that next April 4th is not just 51 years since the killing of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and 52 years since his best known speech against war, but it's also the 70th birthday of that wonderfully benevolent institution called NATO. So, there's going to be a big NATO Summit in Washington, D.C., on April 4, 2019, and we at World BEYOND War believe there should be a peace summit there too. We're starting to build a coalition, to plan speaking events and more festival-like big-art public demonstration events at that time and the previous weekend.
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