Still my truth:

Memorial Day 2017, Unfiltered
27 May 2017
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2017/05/27/memorial-day-2017-unfiltered/

My only update: the Ken Burns documentary on the Vietnam War is okay. Just remember to ignore the opening comment of ‘honorable men with good intentions who started it,’ because that comment is just a sop to the Koch brothers and other corporate donors to PBS (Burns needed the money to make the film). The testimony of the actual war participants seen and heard in the documentary gives a lie to that opening comment and gives the truth about the historic culpability of our successful war criminals. Memorial Day is a hypocritical pacifier and distraction by pathos offered to the American victims of American wars by the American perpetrators and beneficiaries of those wars: “Rich man’s war, poor man’s fight.”

My own shrine to the victims and the truly noble of that war is here:
Haunted By The Vietnam War
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2015/02/22/haunted-by-the-vietnam-war/

I want to be sure y’all see this (some may even read it):

We Need Memorial Day to Obscure the Unbearable Truth About War
Jon Schwarz, 29 May 2017
https://theintercept.com/2017/05/29/we-need-memorial-day-to-obscure-the-unbearable-truth-about-war/

Posted by Vivek Jain (on Facebook page of Intercept article linked just above):

“We must recognize that we cannot depend on the governments of the world to abolish war, because they and the economic interests they represent benefit from war. Therefore, we, the people of the world must take up the challenge. And although we do not command armies, we do not have great treasuries of wealth, there is one crucial fact that gives us enormous power: the governments of the world cannot wage war without the participation of the people. Albert Einstein understood this simple fact. Horrified by the carnage of the First World War in which 10 million died in the battlefields of Europe , Einstein said: “Wars will stop when men refuse to fight.”

“That is our challenge, to bring the world to the point where men and women will refuse to fight, and governments will be helpless to wage war.

“Is that utopian? Impossible? Only a dream?

“Do people go to war because it is part of human nature? If so, then we might consider it impossible to do away with war. But there is no evidence, in biology, or psychology, or anthropology, of a natural instinct for war. If that were so, we would find a spontaneous rush to war by masses of people. What we find is something very different: we find that governments must make enormous efforts to mobilize populations for war. They must entice young people with promises of money, land, education, skills. Immigrants are lured with promises of green cards and citizenship. And if those enticements don’t work, government must coerce. It must conscript young people, force them into military service, threaten them with prison if they do not comply.

“Woodrow Wilson found a citizenry so reluctant to enter the First World War that he had to pummel the nation with propaganda and imprison dissenters in order to get the country to join the butchery going on in Europe .

“The most powerful weapon of governments in raising armies is the weapon of propaganda, of ideology. It must persuade young people, and their families, that though they may die, though they may lose arms or legs, or become blind, that it is done for the common good, for a noble cause, for democracy, for liberty, for God, for the country.

“The idea that we owe something to our country goes far back to Plato, who puts into the mouth of Socrates the idea that the citizen has an obligation to the state, that the state is to be revered more than your father and mother. He says: “In war, and in the court of justice, and everywhere, you must do whatever your state and your country tell you to do, or you must persuade them that their commands are unjust.” There is no equality here: the citizen may use persuasion, no more. The state may use force.

“This idea of obedience to the state is the essence of totalitarianism. And we find it not only in Mussolini’s Italy , in Hitler’s Germany , in Stalin’s Soviet Union , but in so-called democratic countries, like the United States.”

– from Howard Zinn’s essay, “The Enemy Is War,” found in “A Power Governments Cannot Suppress”

I want to be sure y’all see this (some may even read it), so I repeat:
https://theintercept.com/2017/05/29/we-need-memorial-day-to-obscure-the-unbearable-truth-about-war/

Above Intercept article links to (poem by Wilfred Owen):

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decorum-est

Another poem, about a WWII aviator:

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57860/the-death-of-the-ball-turret-gunner

Mike Nichols (director of Catch-22) mentioned the above poem in commenting on his movie.

Catch-22 (trailer)
https://youtu.be/ljHrBh0gV8s

[Read the book, by Joseph Heller]

Anti-War and Socialist Psychology Books and Movies
23 January 2018
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2018/01/23/anti-war-and-socialist-psychology-books-and-movies/

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