Whom Will We Honor Memorial Day?
by Howard Zinn
Memorial Day will be celebrated ... by the usual betrayal of the dead, by the
hypocritical patriotism of the politicians and contractors preparing for more
wars, more graves to receive more flowers on future Memorial Days. The memory
of the dead deserves a different dedication. To peace, to defiance of
governments. In 1974, I was invited by Tom Winship, the editor of the Boston
Globe, who had been bold enough in 1971 to print part of the top secret
Pentagon Papers on the history of the Vietnam War, to write a bi-weekly
column for the op-ed page of the newspaper. I did that for about a year and a
half. The column below appeared June 2, 1976, in connection with that year's
Memorial Day. After it appeared, my column was canceled. * * * * * Memorial
Day will be celebrated as usual, by high-speed collisions of automobiles and
bodies strewn on highways and the sound of ambulance sirens throughout the
land. It will also be celebrated by the display of flags, the sound of bugles
and drums, by parades and speeches and unthinking applause. It will be
celebrated by giant corporations, which make guns, bombs, fighter planes,
aircraft carriers and an endless assortment of military junk and which await
the $100 billion in contracts to be approved soon by Congress and the
President. There was a young woman in New Hampshire who refused to allow her
husband, killed in Vietnam, to be given a military burial. She rejected the
hollow ceremony ordered by those who sent him and 50,000 others to their
deaths. Her courage should be cherished on Memorial Day. There were the B52
pilots who refused to fly those last vicious raids of Nixon's and Kissinger's
war. Have any of the great universities, so quick to give honorary degrees to
God-knows-whom, thought to honor those men at this Commencement time, on this
Memorial Day? No politician who voted funds for war, no business contractor
for the military, no general who ordered young men into battle, no FBI man
who spied on anti-war activities, should be invited to public ceremonies on
this sacred day. Let the dead of past wars he honored. Let those who live
pledge themselves never to embark on mass slaughter again. "The shell had his
number on it. The blood ran into the ground...Where his chest ought to have
been they pinned the Congressional Medal, the DSC, the Medaille Militaire,
the Belgian Croix de Guerre, the Italian gold medal, The Vitutea Militara
sent by Queen Marie of Rumania. All the Washingtonians brought flowers ..
Woodrow Wilson brought a bouquet of poppies." Those are the concluding lines
of John Dos Passos angry novel 1919. Let us honor him on Memorial Day. And
also Thoreau, who went to jail to protest the Mexican War. And Mark Twain,
who denounced our war against the Filipinos at the turn of the century. And
I.F. Stone, who virtually alone among newspaper editors exposed the fraud and
brutality of the Korean War. Let us honor Martin Luther King, who refused the
enticements of the White House, and the cautions of associates, and thundered
against the war in Vietnam. Memorial Day should be a day for putting flowers
on graves and planting trees. Also, for destroying the weapons of death that
endanger us more than they protect us, that waste our resources and threaten
our children and grandchildren. On Memorial Day we should take note that, in
the name of "defense," our taxes have been used to spend a quarter of a
billion dollars on a helicopter assault ship called "the biggest floating
lemon," which was accepted by the Navy although it had over 2,000 major
defects at the time of its trial cruise. Meanwhile, there is such a shortage
of housing that millions live in dilapidated sections of our cities and
millions more are forced to pay high rents or high interest rates on their
mortgages. There's 90 billion for the B1 bomber, but people don't have money
to pay hospital bills. We must be practical, say those whose practicality has
consisted of a war every generation. We mustn't deplete our defenses. Say
those who have depleted our youth, stolen our resources. In the end, it is
living people, not corpses, creative energy, not destructive rage, which are
our only real defense, not just against other governments trying to kill us,
but against our own, also trying to kill us. Let us not set out, this
Memorial Day, on the same old drunken ride to death.
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