“the nation is only being held together with hydrogenated fat, wheat gluten, over-extended credit and particle board” … and Juy-zusss!

FOR SURVIVING KIN, EVERY DAY IS MEMORIAL DAY
Lets make Memorial Day be inclusive of non-Americans fallen in American wars.
On our very American Memorial Day, as we remember fallen family and friends, let us be careful lest any tears in our eyes be selective.

Let our remembrance and compassion not be limited to our own. In our space age of instant communication, there is a growing awareness of one planetary humanity sharing our single world and its resources.

Let us remember that the non-American families and friends of non-Americans who have died in American wars have the exact same painful feelings of loss and bewilderment.

The millions of Indochinese killed by our fellow Veterans also bring tears to my eyes.

A million Koreans, thousands of innocent Iraqi and Afghan women and children – every one of them is worth remembering on Memorial Day as well. Maybe even more so, because they died in their own country, most in their own towns, and many in their very own homes.

I surely want to remember those fellow veterans who gave their lives. But I believe the sincere American will want to remember everyone who died in these many foreign wars,including the ‘foreigners’.

Life has taught this seventy-year-old veteran to reserve my deepest compassion for those of us veterans who followed immoral orders, and didn’t have the presence of mind or education to refuse to follow those orders. Like the poor pilot who dropped an atomic bomb incinerating almost a million civilians in Hiroshima, and went half-crazy afterward. He did not serve his country well, nor the cause of freedom, and certainly not his own human conscience.

I have compassion for Veteran, now Senator, McCain who flew 29 bombing missions knowing that Eisenhower had written in his book that if there were an all Vietnam election (blocked by the US) that Ho Chi Minh would have won by a plurality of more than 80%. But McCain was just following military orders like an unthinking automaton.

Compassion for a Veteran and presidential candidate, John Kerry, who said he killed South Vietnamese before realizing it was wrong.

Compassion for former Governor, Senator, now President of New School University, Bob Kerrey, who on “60 Minutes” was exposed by his own point man of having had his Seals gun down 19 young women and children, after seeing to the throat cutting of an elderly man and his family, compassion for his having accepted a medal for doing it, under the report of ‘enemy’ successfully killed.

Did these three now highly placed Americans serve us when they killed? They all had a college education, which must have included a history of colonialism, especially the brutality of French colonial subjugation of the Vietnamese. They must have known that Ho Chi Minh was decorated by our OSS as a dedicated ally of ours against the Japanese and Vichy French. They must have known that Truman, against Roosevelt’s promise, had brought the French army back in US ships to fight an 8-year war against our former allies, the Vietnamese. All this, because Ho Chi Minh was a communist? I don’t think so. A top cabinet minister of our ally, the French government was also a communist, but that was OK.

My heart goes out more to these famous American fellow Veterans more than for those Indochinese peasants they killed. The dead — especially those who died innocently– they must be free now. They are honored by their relatives, and any compassion from us for the Vietnamese comes horribly late and is even suspect.

Six of my bunkmates in basic training are buried in North Korea. I can shed tears for them, they were young men – they wanted to live just as all the Korean relatives of my Korean students would have rather lived than die in a war over the economic confrontation of our country with the Soviet Union.

Veterans who loved their country enough to know what the fighting was about are one thing. Veterans who gave their lives fighting for injustice and against human respect, blindly following a leader are quite another.

The world has become increasingly complicated and yet our corporate conglomerate cartel of a mass entertainment media has become increasingly reductive, simplistic and antidemocratic, and I have compassion for those who work to make war acceptable, even attractive to their audiences.

Right now the news is filled with people who will someday become veterans like Lieutenant Calley of Mai Lai fame. They tortured in the name of freedom, of democracy maybe, of truth, or even God.

Or maybe they were just having fun. Now when they are discharged and officially become veterans, I will shed some tears for them, for the Karma they have put on their souls and the danger they have put us all in as retribution is sought in the name of their victims.

I once asked the guard in the rotunda of the Russian Veterans Monument in Berlin if there was anywhere a monument to the fallen German soldiers who fought the Russians and Americans. “No”, he answered, “they were fighting for the wrong reason.”

My tears go out to those of all countries who fought for the wrong reason and for the flags which they dishonored.

Shuttering anguish is what I feel for the leaders who knowingly sent them to kill (and die, though dying is less tragic than wrongly killing) for a wrong cause.

Actually, tears of joy come to my eyes quite easily when I see the newsreel of Mohammed Ali proudly saying that he would not participate in an unjust war against the Vietnamese. History will show that Ali is a veteran of that war as much as those who participated in the violence of genocidal terrorism. Ali had the courage to stand up for an honest America.

Very Sincerely on Memorial Day!
Your American Veteran
Jay Janson, who was during eight years, Assistant Conductor of the Vietnam Symphony Orchestra in Hanoi and on tour playing all the Brahms symphonies, and Beethoven, Prokovieff, Shostakovitch, Haydn, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, dozens of Overtures and concertos including both Chopin concertos with the only Asian winner of the Moscow Tchaikovsky Piano Competition, Dan Tai-son, who practiced for it in a Hanoi bomb shelter. The orchestra was founded by Ho Chi Minh, and it plays most of its concerts in the Opera House, a diminutive copy of the Paris Opera. In 1945, our ally Ho, from a balcony overlooking the large square and flanked by an American Major and a British Colonel, declared Vietnam independent. (By the way the little hotel, where I stayed in the 90s, lay just across from our American Embassy in Hanoi, and the Ambassador was just so happy to be arranging business contracts with the same government our Veterans died trying to defeat, by killing as many of their patriot soldiers and volunteers as possible.) Everyone in the orchestra lost family, “killed by the Americans”, they would mention simply, with Buddhist un-accusing acceptance.

Again, happy Memorial Day, and lets dedicate it to contemplating investigating wars in memory of those who died in them. Life is too beautiful and brief to kill it off early, and stop the music.

PPS On a positive and humane Memorial suggestion:

Nothing could be better to honor our fellow veterans’ having given their lives, than to turn this nation around into morality and honesty, and forgoing pompous and ridiculous attempts to praise ourselves indiscriminately, announce our intention to arrange compensation to Vietnam War survivors of our now admitted ‘MISTAKE’!

That would impress the whole world, and gain the next president some moral high ground for leadership of this nation.

The current compensation ’sympathy payment’ for wrongful death of innocent Iraqis who file complaints with the US led Coalition Government is about US $6,000, according to a report published in the Christian Science Monitor in March.

Put ourselves in their shoes. The shoes of Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, Iraqi and Afghan bereaved families. Could we even imagine such bombings upon US towns and countryside? We can improve the whole world and ourselves with such imagination.
copyright All Souls UnitarianUniversalist (non God preaching) Church Lexington Avenue at 81st Street, New York City

If ‘human relationships are reciprocal’ and ‘that which we resist persists’, I wonder if there isn’t a third option, an anti-’little Eichmann’?
Practice peace, cultivate compassion and develop self awareness.

To the tyrants I say, “you can do what you want, but it is not going to get you where you want to go.” Since freedom is our true nature we will always have the freedom to abuse and persecute. The problem is that human relationships are reciprocal. We teach others to do likewise, or the opposite. What goes around, comes around.

Tyrants are people have succumbed to fear, abusing their humanity as they abuse others. They are paranoid cowards who surround themselves with weapons and armies and spies creating a world that eventually really will be out to get them.

Tyrants assemble the greatest earthly powers to pit against change and diversity and freedom, collectively known as “the Unknown”.

It is no contest. They have already failed.

Yes, there are adaptable and resilient people such as I, but our nonconformity comes at the cost of family and friends and certainly lifestyle. I too divested myself of the exploitative assholes, but these are the people that run, that feed the entire economy, and to avoid them creates much solitude. Noone is as lonely as an awakened intellectual at a fourth of July suburban block party, watching debt ridden gluttons proudly displaying their procreated cannon fodder while celebrating not justice or freedom, but their own fleeting, largely undeserved prosperity.

The kinship of like minds, dissidents if you will, is preserved via the internet, as long as this technology is allowed. For we do represent an enlightened minority and as Phil implies in his ever prescient and erudite essays: we will be needed to put together the pieces of a humane society.

Thanks, as always.

s

Very interesting article. I feel much the same on a daily basis. Funny how folks are willing to trade their lives for conveniences, so that they won’t be bothered with reality. I, myself, have left the US. The contradictions were too much for me. Th0ugh I fear that the situation will become worse as the “thinkers” leave, I cannot be a part of what is happening there. There are many people leaving the US with their minds and money. Deconstruction might be a good thing in the end. The big problem is that the “crazies” have billions of dollars of possible debt to employ and nuclear weapons at hand. If these folks really believe in the “end times” they can actually create that reality.

The past has shown that the dissidents usually flee so that they can agitate from abroad. They eventually come to power from the outside, with mixed results. Is that the future for the US? I do not know. I do know that things must change.

Thanks,

Rob