Before They Go. My sister sent me a link to an online song of appreciation for the veterans of World War II, who are now dying off at the rate of 2,000 a day. The transmittal email that she passed along observed that one son of a veteran says that:

only after his father consumed several glasses of wine would he discuss "the unspeakable horrors" he and other soldiers had witnessed in places such as Anzio, Iwo Jima, Bataan and Omaha Beach.

I listened to the song and watched the slide show that accompanies it, at http://www.managedmusic.com/beforeyougo.html, and can certainly recommend it. I was born during the Battle of the Bulge, 61 years ago today. (My mother joked "I won that one", but the actual Battle of the Bulge was grim, not joyous.)
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While watching the presentation I could not help but think of the kinds of "unspeakable horrors" our soldiers in Iraq are witnessing and which are searing themselves into their brains. Militarists ignore the terrible toll that war places even on the victors, even decades later, to the end of life.
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"Before You Go" is a reminder to all of us that sooner or later, we too will go. The victors of World War II left a legacy of great value — tho that does not make them "The Greatest Generation", despite Tom Brokaw's assertion to the contrary. That honor would have to go to the generation that founded the United States in writing the Declaration of Independence; fiting the Revolution; and framing the Constitution. The second-greatest generation would be the one that preserved the Union and abolished slavery. The generation Brokaw lauds, which suffered the Great Depression and fought World War II, would be, at best, the third greatest.
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But they left so much work unfinished. In watching the slide show, I was struck by a picture of a black soldier in front of a white officer. The military was segregated in World War II. And the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union produced the takeover by Communists of all of East Europe, then the Cold War in which the Soviet Empire tried to defend its gains and expand Communism ever outward.
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The society that black heroes returned to was in many places, not just the Deep South, segregated and unfair. It took another generation, mine, to fite and win the civil-rights war and Cold War, and to open society to accept the presence and contributions of Hispanics and homosexuals, and empower women to define for themselves their role in life.
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The United States that the heroes of World War II, most of them conscripts forced into temporary slave armies to fite permanent political enslavement, came back to was almost unrecognizable from the United States today. For each good thing about 1950, the height of the postwar good life, there was a bad thing.
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You could leave your door unlocked in most of the country. But blacks couldn't vote or win political office in large parts of the Nation.
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Wholesome entertainments abounded and television became a nearly universal institution. But some books were still "Banned in Boston".
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Marriage was strong, but the return of millions of GI's pushed millions of women out of jobs.
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Suburbs sprang up; but cities collapsed as racism propelled white flite.
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Harry Truman desegregated the military, but did nothing about antihomosexual discrimination, in the military or more widely across society.
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And on, and on. Tho many white, heterosexual, middle-class people today would be perfectly comfortable in the United States of 1950, there's no way in hell that blacks, Hispanics, and homosexuals would go back.
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Still, all the progress we have made as a society would not have been possible had we lost World War II, so we can properly praise and sincerely thank the generation that is now vanishing into history, a history they nobly advanced. But let us not pretend that there were no atrocities on our side during World War II, no hypocrisy in our indignation at Nazi and Japanese racism. Gratitude does not require blindness.
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At least the war in which those atrocities were committed was a Just War, and the world is incalculably better off because the Allies won than it would have been if the Axis had won.
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I truly hope we can salvage some honor from the current war, by creating a democratic, multiethnic, and tolerant society in Iraq, and changing U.S. attitudes toward Arabs as to end the one-sided, anti-Arab unfairness that alone has made us targets for Moslem terrorism. But we must remember that things got worse in some ways and places after World War II — a Cold War of international nuclear terror between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, with tens of thousands of nuclear-tipped missiles being ever at the ready to fly and kill hundreds of millions in World War III; regional wars in Korea, Southeast Asia, Angola, the Horn of Africa, Central America, and elsewhere — before they got better.
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My generation's "permanent war", against Communism, isn't really over yet. There are still Communist insurrections in Nepal, South America, the Philippines, and elsewhere, and the Butchers of Beijing are still in power, executing a bedrock minimum of 3,400 people a year, not all of them common criminals. (By contrast, the U.S., with almost one fourth as many people, has had a total of just over 1,000 executions since the death penalty was restored in 1976, almost 30 years, and none of those was of a political prisoner.)
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Now we have embarked on a second "permanent war", against "terrorism".
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Unfortunately, this second war is perceived, quite rightly, both here and abroad, to be a war against Arabs in particular and Islam more generally. No good can come of it unless and until it becomes a war against injustice.
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As long as we pretend that this isn't about Israel, and continue to slaughter Arabs for Zionism, that long will we be deprived of the honor we won in World War II. And this permanent war will continue, never to be won, because you can't really win a war against a billion people without devoting a lot more than 160,000 soldiers to the task.
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If we really intend to win "the war against (Moslem) terrorism" without changing our fundamental stance of uncritical support for Radical Zionism, we will have to invade, occupy, and transform every Moslem country on Earth. I don't think we are ready, willing, or able to do that.
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Are we ready, willing, or able to do justice in Palestine? That would be a lot easier, wouldn't it?
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As we bid farewell to the veterans of World War II, we should turn our thoughts to our own legacy, to the consequences of our own present acts and those we take in what remains of our lives. One is never too young to think of how we will be remembered — and many of us aren't young. Will we leave our children and their children "permanent war"? Or will we accept that the only way to end this particular permanent war is to do justice in the Middle East?
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Let us do justice before we go.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,157.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 10:56 AM