Honor Our Veterans By Not Creating More of Them

PDF: Honor Our Veterans By Not Creating More of Them

Nov. 10, 2025—When he received the surrender of the Japanese in 1945, General Douglas MacArthur said, ¨We have had our last chance.¨ He had borne witness to the destructive capacity of the nuclear bomb, two of which had been dropped on Japanese cities, proving that mankind had crossed the threshold to potential self annihilation. The act of war is already so unnatural, and the act of killing another human being so contrary to human existence, that once the demon has been unleashed, who would be so naïve to believe that the war will not cross every other boundary condition? That’s what General MacArthur understood when he said that mankind must now figure out some other means to resolve our differences, or "Armageddon will be at our door.”

Unfortunately, it seems that the western world has a new generation of leaders who are deluded enough to believe that nuclear war is winnable. That belief puts all of us in jeopardy.

Since Vietnam and September 11, 2001, there are nearly 3 million American veterans. Ask any one of them who has been in actual combat, whether they would like to send their child into the combat they experienced. Why are 22 of these soldiers committing suicide in the United States every day?

As far as nuclear war goes, every war game scenario shows that once a nuclear weapon has been launched, within 90 minutes to five days, everyone will end up launching everything they have. That means the end of us all. If you don’t get vaporized in the first round of strikes, you can die of radiation sickness or starvation in the hours and days later.

Think of the wars raging around the planet now. The Russia - Ukraine conflict, which had been entirely avoidable, has probably taken close to 2 million lives, at least 1.7 million of which are Ukrainian, and it only continues because the markets are addicted to defense contracts and crazy people say, “Russia must be defeated,” in spite of the fact that Russia is winning. (What has happened to Ukraine should make anyone think twice about wanting to be an ally of the United States.)

Then we have the horror show in Gaza, and wider Southwest Asia. We have seen refugee camps bombed and burned killing hundreds of children and desperate civilians per night, but thanks to the billionaire fascist technocrats, we are not allowed to accuse Israel of war crimes, or admit our own complicity. So the killing goes on, using robotic vehicles carrying bombs and AI targeting programs (with endearing names like “Where’s Daddy?”) which can target specific individuals with extraordinary precision, and time the strikes to kill their entire family for maximum psychological impact. Do you think a society which fails to condemn such atrocities would really stop short of using a nuclear bomb, or unleashing another kind of weapon of mass destruction?

We have another genocide occurring in Sudan, and a Secretary of State Rubio who is having wet dreams about a war with Venezuela, which will be as successful as the one against Afghanistan. When does it end?

It will end when we become better human beings. One way to help ourselves to do that is to think of those veterans we know who gave their last full measure of devotion, whether in WWII, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, or by their own hand here at home. How can we give meaning to their lives cut short? We, the living, can give meaning to those souls who have died in all of these wars by resolving that the loss that they suffered was a contribution to the end of war. As a result of their sacrifice, mankind came to understand that enough is enough, and that every child born from 2025 on will have the opportunity to live a full life free from the scourge of war; that mankind finally realized the foolishness of wasting our talent on destruction, and resolved instead to direct our energy to building beautiful new cities, greening the desert, and eradicating poverty and disease.

In the case of the United States, this would mean a rededication to the universal principles expressed in our Declaration of Independence. Every human being is created equal, and the first inalienable right is the right to live! Our nation was never intended to be a perpetrator of the British colonial system, but to put an end to that evil system. If we can act to fulfill that mission and become a friend to the peoples of the world who are similarly seeking their freedom and economic independence, the lives of our veterans will not have been spent in vain, and that no more will follow.

If you think that the end of war is an impossibility, ask yourself why it is harder to imagine peace among nations than to imagine the annihilation of us all. Veterans think you should do something about it.