War Monuments Are Killing Us
By David Swanson
http://davidswanson.org/war-monuments-are-killing-us/
Remarks at Lincoln Memorial, May 30, 2017
Washington,
D.C., and much of the rest of the United States, is full of war
monuments, with many more under construction and being planned. Most of
them glorify wars. Many of them were erected during later wars and
sought to improve the images of past wars for present purposes. Almost
none of them teach any lessons from mistakes made. The very best of them
mourn the loss of a tiny fraction — the U.S. fraction — of the wars’
victims.
But if you search this and other U.S. cities, you’ll have a harder
time finding memorials for North American genocide or slavery or the
people slaughtered in the Philippines or Laos or Cambodia or Vietnam or
Iraq. You won’t find a lot of monuments around here to the Bonus Army or
the Poor People’s Campaign. Where is the history of the struggles of
sharecroppers or factory workers or suffragettes or environmentalists?
Where are our writers and artists? Why is there not a statue of Mark
Twain right here laughing his ass off at us? Where is the Three-Mile
Island memorial warning us away from nuclear energy? Where are the
monuments to each Soviet or U.S. person, such as Vasili Arkhipov, who
held off nuclear apocalypse? Where is the great blowback memorial
mourning the governments overthrown and the arming and training of
fanatical killers?
While many nations erect memorials to what they do not wish to repeat
as well as to what they wish to emulate, the United States focuses
overwhelmingly on wars and overwhelmingly on glorifying them. And the
very existence of Veterans For Peace jams that narrative and forces some
people to think.
Well over 99.9% of our history is not memorialized in marble. And
when we ask that it be, we’re generally laughed at. Yet if you propose
to remove a monument to a Confederate general in a southern U.S. city,
do you know what the most common response is? They accuse you of being
against history, of wishing to erase the past. This comes out of an
understanding of the past as consisting entirely of wars.
In New Orleans, they’ve just taken down their Confederate war
monuments, which had been erected to advance white supremacy. In my town
of Charlottesville, Virginia, the city has voted to take down a Robert
E. Lee statue. But we’ve run up against a Virginia law that forbids
taking down any war monument. There is no law, as far as I know,
anywhere on earth that forbids taking down any peace monument. Almost as
hard as finding such a law would be finding any peace monuments around
here to consider taking down. I don’t count the building of our friends
nearby here at the U.S. Institute of Peace, which if defunded this year
will have lived out its entire existence without ever having opposed a
U.S. war.
But why shouldn’t we have peace monuments? If Russia and the United
States were engaged in jointly memorializing the ending of the Cold War
in Washington and Moscow, would that not help hold off the new Cold War?
If we were building a monument to the prevention, over the last several
years, of a U.S. attack on Iran, would a future such attack be more
likely or less likely? If there were a monument to the Kellogg-Briand
Pact and the Outlawry movement on the Mall, wouldn’t some tourists learn
of its existence and what it outlawed? Would the Geneva Conventions be
dismissed as quaint if the war planners saw the Geneva Conventions
Monument out their window?
Beyond the lack of monuments for peace agreements and disarmament
successes, where are the monuments to the rest of human life beyond war?
In a sane society, the war memorials would be one small example of many
types of public memorials, and where they existed they would mourn, not
glorify, and mourn all victims, not a small fraction deemed worthy of
our sorrow.
The Swords to Plowshares Memorial Bell Tower is an example of what we
should be doing as a society. Veterans For Peace is an example of what
we should be doing as a society. Admit our mistakes. Value all lives.
Improve our practices. Honor courage when it is combined with morality.
And recognize veterans by creating no more veterans going forward.
--
David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson's books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. He is a 2015, 2016, 2017 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee.
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