The Cruel Irony of Veterans Day
By Connor O’Keeffe, Mises Institute
Today is Veterans Day. It’s a day when politicians like to give speeches praising the extraordinary courage and selflessness of America’s veterans and active-duty military personnel.
It’s also a day when American military history is often treated like a vague, homogeneous blob of sacrifice. But it’s worth getting a bit more specific.
We celebrate on November 11 because that’s the day, back in 1918, when World War I ended. It was famously the day when the guns fell silent at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
Less famous is the fact that the agreement to stop fighting had been reached around 5 am that day. But the Allied high command rejected their German counterparts’ request that everyone stop firing as quickly as orders could be circulated, opting instead to wait until the more poetic time of 11 am. And, in those last few hours, 2,738 soldiers would lose their lives—including an American private who was shot and killed at 10:59 am, seconds before both sides were officially ordered to cease firing.
However, the tragedy of those last few hours of unnecessary fighting was immediately overtaken by an overwhelming sense of relief. The world had never seen death and destruction at a scale even close to what had just consumed Europe. The military and civilian deaths are estimated to fall somewhere in the range of 15 to 22 million.
As we know now, the war was, unfortunately, only the opening phase of a three-decade-long catastrophe that saw Europe collapse into revolutionary violence, regions like the Middle East torn into territorial disputes that are still ongoing, and the world descend into a second, even larger global war. This period was so destructive and cost humanity so much that now, almost a century later, we’re still struggling to fully understand it.
But no one knew that all of that lay ahead 108 years ago today, when the fighting stopped. Still, the day was less a rowdy celebration and more, again, grounded in a sense of relief that the horror in the trenches and the suffering everywhere else the war touched were finally over.
And a year later, when President Wilson proclaimed the anniversary as an American holiday—then called Armistice Day—the day still carried a somber sense of remembrance for those who had died, reflection on the horrors they had gone through, and, above all, urgency for making sure that nothing like it ever happened again.
However, not everyone shared that sense of relief or the weary desire to move fully on from the war. Because several groups had benefited enormously from the institutional changes brought about by...(READ THIS FULL ARTICLE 100% FREE HERE).