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Memorial Day

An Ethically Honest Memorial Day

May 26, 2026 Amy Dalton, Waging Nonviolence. , , ,
On Memorial Day, it is my family’s practice to remember and honor all those who have died in war — including but not limited to those who have served in our country’s military. This broader act of memorialization is both truer to the history of Memorial Day, and more responsive to the moral imperative that all humans — and especially U.S. citizens — face as a result of the suffering and risk that organized violence causes throughout the world. Like Veteran’s Day, Memorial Day has been gradually co-opted as an opportunity to show unquestioning, blank-check support for the U.S. military.

Memorial Day: The Glorification Of War, Not War’s Victims

May 25, 2026 Edward Curtin, Scheer Post. , , ,
Rather than being haunted by the ghosts of war, many Americans are very proud of all its soldiers killed while killing foreigners for the military industrial complex and the super-rich who own the country. For the U.S.A. is a warfare state; it has been waging imperialistic overseas wars for a long, long time, and using its soldiers as cannon fodder. Most families of dead soldiers find it impossible to admit that their loved ones died in vain, even if courageously. Without waging wars, the U.S. economy, as presently constituted, would collapse. Business goes on as usual.

REI Union Workers Launch Boycott Over Dispute With Co-op

May 23, 2026 Miles Hadfield, Coop News. , , ,
On May 15, REI Union workers launched a boycott against the co-op, which sells outdoor leisure gear, in protest against its “bad faith bargaining”. Timed to disrupt REI Co-op’s anniversary sale, which takes place through May 25, the boycott follows recent negotiations that ended on 30 April, in Chicago. The union claims that REI “failed to offer a single proposal until the final day of bargaining, and failed to send its own vice president of labor relations, or any key decision-maker, to the table”. Campaigners hit out at “outlandish, bad faith proposals” from the co-op, including a moratorium on the REI Union’s organising activity, which would prevent it from supporting workers at other REI stores hoping to unionise for the duration of the contract.

Veterans Reflect On The Meaning Of Memorial Day

May 23, 2025 Michael T. McPhearson and Gerry Condon, Popular Resistance. , , , ,
This Memorial Day weekend, Veterans For Peace is calling on its members and friends to reflect on the gravity of the day, whose official purpose is to “honor all those who died in service to the U.S. during peacetime and war.” Veterans For Peace chooses to honor ALL who have died in wars, both combatants and civilians. Our hope is that a sober accounting of the casualties of war will mitigate against the tendency to turn Memorial Day – like Veterans Day – into a patriotic celebration of U.S. militarism. We remember the words of President Eisenhower, who during World War II, was the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe: "War is a grim, cruel business, a business justified only as a means of sustaining the forces of good against those of evil". He also famously stated, "I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.” 

Veterans For Peace Memorial Day 2024 Statement

May 27, 2024 Veterans For Peace. , , ,
Members of Veterans For Peace remember America's war dead not just once a year, but every day of our lives, with the solemnity they deserve, not the crass commercialism Memorial Day has become. We remember the war dead and the far greater number of wounded with missing limbs and the even greater number living with invisible, lifelong devils and injuries in their heads. We remember the lost contributions they could have made to society that they literally bottled up or destroyed in the epidemic of suicide rampant among veterans. We remember the domestic violence caused by their devils. We remember their children whose lives were more painful and less joyful than they could have been because of those devils.

Veterans For Peace Memorial Day Statement

May 28, 2023 Veterans For Peace. , , , ,
This Memorial Day we remember all who have died in war and understand that no one wins in war. Many of us have been personally touched by war. But we must also extend that mourning. We remember the civilian victims, and their families. Honoring and remembering some deaths while ignoring others not only perpetuates war, but also ignores the moral injuries of war, a significant cause of veteran suicide. Veterans For Peace is made up of military veterans, family members and friends who are joined by our pledge to serve the cause of world peace and abolish war. We bring a different message to Memorial Day than the themes usually promoted by popular media, the government and traditional veterans’ organizations.

My Great-Uncle Was Shot At The Memorial Day Massacre

May 28, 2023 Carol Quirke, In These Times. , , , , ,
You might think that, having been raised a mile from where 10 workers were killed and 30 more were shot by police while picketing a steel plant, I would have heard of such a tragedy. More confounding, my great-uncle, Eddie Marasovic, was wounded by a police bullet in that violent affair that would become known as a massacre. Yet I knew nothing of it. It happened in May, 1937, before I was born, on the prairie outside the Republic Steel plant on Chicago’s East Side. This spit of land, along Lake Michigan’s southern tip, linked the steel plants of southern Chicago to a long string of industry that reached through Indiana, giving rise to what labor economists called the largest steel producing region in the world.

The Great Con Of American Patriotism

May 30, 2022 Robert Scheer, ScheerPost.com. , , ,
American soldiers born decades apart in the state of New York, Ron Kovic and Maj. Danny Sjursen, are two crucial dissenting voices that have experienced firsthand the futility and brutality of America’s interventionist wars. Kovic, a Marine veteran who was paralyzed in the Vietnam War, has spent the rest of his life fighting against the U.S. war machine. The film “Born on the Fourth of July,” starring Tom Cruise, was based on his book, a work he hoped would combine with his activism to dissuade young people from buying into the toxic patriotism that leads Americans to fight destructive, ultimately pointless wars. In the latest installment of “Scheer Intelligence,” Kovic tells [ScheerPost] editor-in-chief Robert Scheer, “I couldn’t stop speaking against that war. I was arrested a dozen times."

Memorial Day Salute To A Repentant Ex-Marine

May 26, 2022 Steve Early, Popular Resistance. , , ,
In its recent front-page series on foreign domination and poverty in Haiti, the New York Times vividly recounted the role of the U.S. Marine Corps in this painful history. The accompanying photos showed Marines, in battle dress, boarding a ship in Philadelphia headed for Port-au-Prince more than a century ago, forming a skirmish line in the jungle, and posing with the bodies of Haitians killed while resisting the U.S. overthrow of their government. As the Times reported, one highlight of this mission was the brazen theft of $500,000 in gold from the Haiti’s national bank and its transfer to the vault of a bank on Wall Street.  One of the officers who departed from Philadelphia, to help oversee this brutal and murderous occupation was Smedley Darlington Butler, the son of a U.S. Congressman and the product of a wealthy Quaker family from the nearby Main Line town of West Chester.

For Memorial Day, Here Is How We Stop All Wars

June 1, 2021 Margaret Flowers, Clearing the FOG. , , ,
For Memorial Day week, Clearing the FOG speaks with David Swanson, the cofounder and executive director of World Beyond War, an international organization that is working to abolish all war. World Beyond War will hold its annual conference virtually from June 4 to 6. The conference, called "From Weapons Fairs to War Zones: Unraveling the War Machine," will bring activists together to share how they are stopping weapons corporation exhibitions, divesting from war, closing foreign bases and more. They will discuss what type of world they are working to create. David also speaks about his recent book, "Leaving World War II Behind," that debunks the myth of that as "the last good war."

Veterans For Peace Statement On Memorial Day

May 31, 2021 Veterans for Peace. , ,
We are tired of parades, memorials and pageantry. Take back your  “thank you for your service” and 50% off sales. We want people to live without threats of U.S. bullets and bombs. We remember the enormous loss of civilian life that is forgotten in today’s memorials and hidden from view in the U.S. consciousness. America has no space on its calendar to memorialize these victims. We grieve the loss of friends and the death of veterans unable to forget the tragedies and forgive themselves. We are ANGRY that there is a holiday that glorifies nationalism and patriotism and ignores the trauma that U.S. militarism enacts all over the globe.

Memorial Day Panel By US Anti-war Veterans

May 28, 2020 Danny Sjursen, Fortress on a Hill. , , ,
A group of anti-war veteran activists discuss how they view Memorial Day through the lens of their time in the military and their work afterwards. The guest list included Matthew Hoh, Clifton Hicks, Jovanni Reyes, Erik Edstrom, Ryan Keen, Keagan Miller, Danny Sjursen, and Chris Henrikson.

Memorial Day Is Killing Us: Celebrated To Death

May 25, 2020 By Erik Edstrom, Tom Dispatch. , , ,
For those first six months after my return from war, thudding back slaps and free beers from well-meaning civilians numbed my sense of betrayal. But over time, I realized that all of this "thank you for your service" stuff was just a culturally ingrained reflex, like saying "bless you" to someone who sneezes. When it comes to our military, the mantra of the public is: thank, don't think. To most of them, war -- the war my friends died for -- is elevator music. Perhaps Americans have generally forgotten that, almost 19 years after the Afghan War began, numbers, names, and percentages don't go in the graveyard, people do. For 18 Memorial Days, the American public has been complicit in allowing our troops to be sent into a series of wars that everyone knows to be costly and self-defeating, while simultaneously maintaining the audacious idea that, in doing so, they "support the troops." Believe me, that’s not patriotism.

The People’s Memorial Day

May 26, 2019 Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, www.popularresistance.org , , , ,
By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese. War culture runs deep in the United States. You can see the glorification of war consistently once you are aware of it - it is expressed in entertainment, the war memorials that are in every town, and the deference we are expected to show to people in the military, e.g. special treatment at airports. This war culture equates patriotism with worship of the military. And it is on broad display every Memorial Day. Now that we are sixteen years into the "war on terror", even though a war against a tactic is nonsense - especially given that terrorism grows as the US bombs more countries and kills more civilians - this Memorial Day is a good time to question who benefits from war and who pays the price. Highly decorated Marine, Smedley Butler, answered these questions this way: "War is a racket. It always has been."
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