A Voice from Down Under: The Last War Celebration This article tells it like it is. We can't go on honoring soldiers & supporting troops while saying we want peace. It's hypocritical, as the author states in her article: "...celebrating soldiers as heroes is telling the next generation that killing other people because your government says you must, is celebrating servants to the tyrant, not heroes. That celebrating your dead ancestors as heroes is celebrating that they lost their one young life long before their time instead of mourning that wasted young life. That this same message, if expressed in front of your children, is telling them you would value them more dead than alive, would the situation call for it. That saying you want peace, while simultaneously honouring soldiers, is hypocritical." Read the rest at: https://comehomeamerica.wordpress.com/2014/04/17/a-voice-from-down-under-the-last-war-celebration/
also from the article: In the age of nuclear and other high tech weapons, this statement is not true. I completely disagree with hers and yours position. It is possible to honor someone for their sacrifice in a way that still teaches that war should be avoided.
We celebrate soldiers because when war does come, they are the ones who meet it head on. And until everyone else gets rid of their soldiers too, it'd be foolish to get rid of ours. Peace only works one of two ways. Either everyone agrees or everyone else is gone. I will celebrate those men and women who put their lives on the line when called to do so. It doesn't mean I like war. It means I'm respectful of those who've given their lives or limbs, and sanity when asked because if war ever does come to America, it will be those men and women that protect the country. The people you need to be mad at about war are the people who send our soldiers into harm's way when it's not necessary. I disagreed vehemently with the Iraq war but I will respect the soldiers who went there, died there, with the only exception being those who committed atrocities(a tiny tiny percentage of them).
Problem is that the US is taking the war to others. The issue isn't defending the US, the issue is the US building an empire overseas. There's no reason to honor those who participate in aggressive wars. Your comment here leans toward the long ago discredited "just following orders" defense. Each individual is responsible for their own actions. Murder is murder. Putting on a uniform & killing people because a govt told one to do so doesn't change the nature of the crime. Since for an individual it is murder to go overseas to kill people it is murder to go overseas as part of a collective to do so also. There is no magic of the collective that suspends morality. "On general principles of law and reason, the oaths of soldiers, that they will serve a given number of years, that they will obey the the orders of their superior officers, that they will bear true allegiance to the government, and so forth, are of no obligation. Independently of the criminality of an oath, that, for a given number of years, he will kill all whom he may be commanded to kill, without exercising his own judgment or conscience as to the justice or necessity of such killing... " --Lysander Spooner, NO TREASON, NO. VI. THE CONSTITUTION OF NO AUTHORITY
I will blame those sending American soldiers into those other countries before I blame the soldiers themselves.
Anzac Day comes from WW1. In regards to Australia the soldiers didn't go to war because the government said they must because the AIF was a totally volunteer force. It was illegal during WW1 under Australian law for conscripts to serve outside of Australia.
