Make Memorial
Day Be Inclusive Of "Foreigners" Killed In
America's Foreign Wars
By Jay Janson
27 May, 2007
Countercurrents.org
On
our very American Memorial Day, as we remember fallen family and friends,
let us be careful lest any tears in our eyes be selective.
Let our remembrance and compassion
not be limited to our own. In our space age of instant communication,
there is a growing awareness of one planetary humanity sharing our single
world and its resources.
Let us remember that the
non-American families and friends of non-Americans who have died in
American wars have the exact same painful feelings of loss and bewilderment.
The millions of Indochinese
killed by our fellow Veterans also bring tears to my eyes.
A million Koreans, thousands
of innocent Iraqi and Afghan women and children - every one of them
is worth remembering on Memorial Day as well. Maybe even more so, because
they died in their own country, most in their own towns, and many in
their very own homes.
I surely want to remember
those fellow veterans who gave their lives. But I believe the sincere
American will want to remember everyone who died in these many foreign
wars,including the 'foreigners'.
Life has taught this seventy-year-old
veteran to reserve my deepest compassion for those of us veterans who
followed immoral orders, and didn't have the presence of mind or education
to refuse to follow those orders. Like the poor pilot who dropped an
atomic bomb incinerating almost a million civilians in Hiroshima, and
went half-crazy afterward. He did not serve his country well, nor the
cause of freedom, and certainly not his own human conscience.
I have compassion for Veteran,
now Senator, McCain who flew 29 bombing missions knowing that Eisenhower
had written in his book that if there were an all Vietnam election (blocked
by the US) that Ho Chi Minh would have won by a plurality of more than
80%. But McCain was just following military orders like an unthinking
automaton.
Compassion for a Veteran
and presidential candidate, John Kerry, who said he killed South Vietnamese
before realizing it was wrong.
Compassion for former Governor,
Senator, now President of New School University, Bob Kerrey, who on
"60 Minutes" was exposed by his own point man of having had
his Seals gun down 19 young women and children, after seeing to the
throat cutting of an elderly man and his family, compassion for his
having accepted a medal for doing it, under the report of 'enemy' successfully
killed.
Did these three now highly
placed Americans serve us when they killed? They all had a college education,
which must have included a history of colonialism, especially the brutality
of French colonial subjugation of the Vietnamese. They must have known
that Ho Chi Minh was decorated by our OSS as a dedicated ally of ours
against the Japanese and Vichy French. They must have known that Truman,
against Roosevelt's promise, had brought the French army back in US
ships to fight an 8-year war against our former allies, the Vietnamese.
All this, because Ho Chi Minh was a communist? I don't think so. A top
cabinet minister of our ally, the French government was also a communist,
but that was OK.
My heart goes out more to
these famous American fellow Veterans more than for those Indochinese
peasants they killed. The dead -- especially those who died innocently--
they must be free now. They are honored by their relatives, and any
compassion from us for the Vietnamese comes horribly late and is even
suspect.
Six of my bunkmates in basic
training are buried in North Korea. I can shed tears for them, they
were young men - they wanted to live just as all the Korean relatives
of my Korean students would have rather lived than die in a war over
the economic confrontation of our country with the Soviet Union.
Veterans who loved their
country enough to know what the fighting was about are one thing. Veterans
who gave their lives fighting for injustice and against human respect,
blindly following a leader are quite another.
The world has become increasingly
complicated and yet our corporate conglomerate cartel of a mass entertainment
media has become increasingly reductive, simplistic and antidemocratic,
and I have compassion for those who work to make war acceptable, even
attractive to their audiences.
Right now the news is filled
with people who will someday become veterans like Lieutenant Calley
of Mai Lai fame. They tortured in the name of freedom, of democracy
maybe, of truth, or even God.
Or maybe they were just having
fun. Now when they are discharged and officially become veterans, I
will shed some tears for them, for the Karma they have put on their
souls and the danger they have put us all in as retribution is sought
in the name of their victims.
I once asked the guard in
the rotunda of the Russian Veterans Monument in Berlin if there was
anywhere a monument to the fallen German soldiers who fought the Russians
and Americans. "No", he answered, "they were fighting
for the wrong reason."
My tears go out to those
of all countries who fought for the wrong
reason and for the flags which they dishonored.
Shuttering anguish is what
I feel for the leaders who knowingly sent them to kill (and die, though
dying is less tragic than wrongly killing) for a wrong cause.
Actually, tears of joy come
to my eyes quite easily when I see the newsreel of Mohammed Ali proudly
saying that he would not participate in an unjust war against the Vietnamese.
History will show that Ali is a veteran of that war as much as those
who participated in the violence of genocidal terrorism. Ali had the
courage to stand up for an honest America.
Very Sincerely on Memorial
Day!
Your American Veteran
Jay Janson, who was during
eight years, Assistant Conductor of the Vietnam Symphony Orchestra in
Hanoi and on tour playing all the Brahms symphonies, and Beethoven,
Prokovieff, Shostakovitch, Haydn, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov,
dozens of Overtures and concertos including both Chopin concertos with
the only Asian winner of the Moscow Tchaikovsky Piano Competition, Dan
Tai-son, who practiced for it in a Hanoi bomb shelter. The orchestra
was founded by Ho Chi Minh, and it plays most of its concerts in the
Opera House, a diminutive copy of the Paris Opera. In 1945, our ally
Ho, from a balcony overlooking the large square and flanked by an American
Major and a British Colonel, declared Vietnam independent. (By the way
the little hotel, where I stayed in the 90s, lay just across from our
American Embassy in Hanoi, and the Ambassador was just so happy to be
arranging business contracts with the same government our Veterans died
trying to defeat, by killing as many of their patriot soldiers and volunteers
as possible.) Everyone in the orchestra lost family, "killed by
the Americans", they would mention simply, with Buddhist un-accusing
acceptance.
Again, happy Memorial Day,
and lets dedicate it to contemplating investigating wars in memory of
those who died in them. Life is too beautiful and brief to kill it off
early, and stop the music.
PPS On a positive and humane
Memorial suggestion:
Nothing could be better to
honor our fellow veterans' having given their lives, than to turn this
nation around into morality and honesty, and forgoing pompous and ridiculous
attempts to praise
ourselves indiscriminately, announce our intention to arrange compensation
to Vietnam War survivors of our now admitted 'MISTAKE'!
That would impress the whole
world, and gain the next president some moral high ground for leadership
of this nation.
The current compensation
'sympathy payment' for wrongful death of innocent Iraqis who file complaints
with the US led Coalition Government is about US $6,000, according to
a report published in the Christian Science Monitor in March, 2006.
Put ourselves in their shoes.
The shoes of Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, Iraqi and Afghan bereaved
families. Could we even imagine such bombings upon US towns and countryside?
We can improve the whole world and ourselves with such imagination.
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