From Zin Education
Project:
By Howard Zinn
Published on June 2, 1976 in
the Boston
Globe and republished in The Zinn Reader with
the brief introduction below.
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 cancelled.
* * * * *
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 be 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
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