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| Тема |
 Veterans Day and patriotism |
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| Автор | me (Нерегистриран) | |
| Публикувано | 13.11.01 07:11 |
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Mnenie na edin vietnamski veteran. Za palnia text:
http://www.counterpunch.org/
"The bombing of Afghanistan is not a just war; it is just another war. It is yet another act of terror against the people of the world. Each innocent person that is killed must be added to, not set off against, the grisly toll of civilians who died in New York and Washington. It is a classic confirmation of the essential lesson I learned in Vietnam: that soldiers are required to do their jobs because politicians fail to do theirs. Make no mistake, the war on terrorism is the desperate act of politicians who failed miserably in the leadership responsibilities to those who elected them, and who, by the very act of starting the war, have failed us even again.
Conveniently lost in the post-catastrophe patriotic orgy orchestrated by the government is the fact that this happened because of the government's utter failure to protect its citizens. Consider this: one of the terrorists was apparently on the FBI's "watch list". This man was flying in and out of the country, sometimes with an expired visa, having meetings with Iraqi intelligence officers in Prague, visiting jailed terrorists in Spain, and all the while taking pilot lessons in Florida. And nobody noticed? It was a "failure of bureaucracy" they tell us. And their response? Create more bureaucracy to watch over the other bureaucracies.
It takes no deep thinker to recognize that the ham-handed retaliation our government is engaged in is precisely the reaction the terrorists were trying to provoke. They want a holy war between Islam and the West, and by God, we will help them recruit their forces. The war on terrorism will do nothing except create more terrorists, and the tragedy we have just experienced will pale in comparison to the tragedy before us.
All this will be branded by some as "unpatriotic". I beg to differ. This is my patriotism. With all due respect to some of my well-meaning neighbors, my patriotism is more meaningful, more appropriate than the mindless flapping of ragged American flags from the antennae of SUVs and pick-up trucks. In a democracy, dissent is the highest form of patriotism.
This Veterans Day, I will think of my friend Sasha. I first met Sasha when I went to the then Soviet Union in 1988 as part of a delegation of Vietnam veterans to meet with Soviet Afghanistan veterans--Afghantsi, they called themselves. I remember the first few moments when we met at the airport in Moscow. Everything was a bit awkward and formal, neither side knowing quite what to do. Then one Afghantsi--his eyes blazing with the look I knew all too well--suddenly pulled up his shirt to show several bullet wounds. "You see these," he said fiercely, "These bullets were fired from an America-made M-16." One of the Vietnam veterans who accompanied me quickly pulled up his shirt. "You see these," he said, "These bullets were fired by a Soviet-made AK-47." The two men stared at one another briefly, then fell in each other's arms and wept.
I remember standing in a frigid wind-swept Moscow park , my arm around Sasha, in front of a peculiarly irregular boulder, standing on end with a plaque on it. This was the Afghantsi Memorial, put up by the Afghantsi themselves when the Soviet government failed to honor their request for a government sponsored memorial. There was a large group there -- Afghantsi and Vietnamsi--and the former soldiers each took turns speaking from the heart. The message from all was the same: We must honor those who died, we must take care of those who survived. We must promise to each other that our sons will never go through what we did.
Empty words, it seems. The sons of the Afghantsi are now dying in Chechnya, and the children of the Vietnamsi are soon to be Afghantsi. Yet it is the one idea I still find worth fighting for.
The most relevant way to celebrate Veterans Day is to fight to make it irrelevant.
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