{"id":334745,"date":"2017-11-12T22:28:32","date_gmt":"2017-11-12T21:28:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/lets-celebrate-peace-by-kathy-kelly\/"},"modified":"2017-11-12T22:28:32","modified_gmt":"2017-11-12T21:28:32","slug":"lets-celebrate-peace-by-kathy-kelly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/lets-celebrate-peace-by-kathy-kelly\/","title":{"rendered":"Let\u2019s Celebrate Peace | By Kathy Kelly"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Wilfred Owen, an English poet who was killed in action exactly one week before the Armistice that finally ended World War I was signed, wrote about the horrors of living in trenches and enduring gas warfare.<\/p>\n

In \u201cThe Parable of the Old Man and the Young,\u201d he revises the Biblical narrative about Abraham\u2019s willingness to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Believing God willed the slaughter, Abraham prepared to bind Isaac and slay him. Owen transforms Abraham into the European powers who were willing to slaughter youthful generations in the trenches of World War I.<\/p>\n

Only in this telling, Abraham refuses to heed the angel who urges that the son be spared. The old man \u201cslew the son, and half the seed of Europe, one by one.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thirty million soldiers were killed or wounded and another seven million taken captive during World War I. Some 50 to 100 million perished from a flu epidemic created by the war. \u201cNever before,\u201d\u00a0writes<\/a>\u00a0author and activist David Swanson, \u201chad people witnessed such industrialized slaughter, with tens of thousands falling in a day to machine guns and poison gas.\u201d<\/p>\n

A stunned and exhausted West greeted November 11, 1918, the day the war came to an end, as its delivery from horror.<\/p>\n

In 1938, Congress\u00a0declared<\/a>\u00a0Armistice Day a legal holiday dedicated to the cause of world peace. In 1954, the holiday was\u00a0renamed<\/a>\u00a0Veterans Day and morphed into an occasion for flag waving and military parades.<\/p>\n

Now, members of the group\u00a0Veterans for Peace<\/a>\u00a0are working across the U.S. to recover the original purpose of Armistice Day. They are using it to call for adequate psychological and material support for veterans, to help them cope with the terrors they have been forced to endure. Above all, they work to abolish wars.<\/p>\n

This year on November 11, at 11 a.m., Veterans for Peace chapters across the United States will ring bells, recalling that minute in 1918 when, as Kurt Vonnegut\u00a0wrote<\/a>, \u201cmillions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis event is more than just a historical remembrance,\u201d says Ed Flaherty, a member of the Iowa City Chapter of Veterans for Peace. \u201cIt is about today, about our pressing need to reverse the war-momentum and to take up the sweet burden of creating lasting peace.\u201d<\/p>\n

Writing on behalf of the group\u2019s Tom Paine chapter in Albany, New York, John Amidon explains that the veterans will be \u201cpurposefully walking\u201d in the local Veterans day parade because \u201cwe ain\u2019t marching anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

The tragically stubborn \u201cold man\u201d in Owen\u2019s poem rejected the angel\u2019s intervention urging him to choose life over death. We do not have to keep making that same mistake.<\/p>\n

Armistice Day gives us an opportunity to acknowledge the brutal futility of armed conflict, the wastefulness of our military spending, and the responsibility we share to abolish all wars.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Via Common Dreams<\/a>. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission or license.<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wilfred Owen, an English poet who was killed in action exactly one week before the Armistice that finally ended World War I was signed, wrote about the horrors of living in trenches and enduring gas warfare. In \u201cThe Parable of the Old Man and the Young,\u201d he revises the Biblical narrative about Abraham\u2019s willingness to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":334746,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-334745","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=334745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334745\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/334746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=334745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=334745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=334745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}