Veterans For Peace host Mayor Owens, discussion for ‘Reclaim Armistice Day’
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When people thank Arny Stieber for his service to the United States Armed Forces, he doesn’t find gratitude, joy or acknowledgement for his time spent during the Vietnam War. Stieber simply hands them a business card.
The card reads “Don’t thank me for my ‘service.’ I was in the military, not the service.” The message on the card concludes with: “The military solution to conflict is death and destruction. That’s not ‘service.’ Call it what it is – the military.”
Congregating in the May Memorial Unitarian Universalist Society near the Nottingham neighborhood of Syracuse, Veterans For Peace held a “Reclaim Armistice Day” event with guest speakers including Syracuse Mayor Sharon Owens and SU Adjunct Professor of Women and Gender Studies Sarah Miraglia.
The event centered around rhetorical changes in the decades since the 1919 founding of Armistice Day. The holiday was first proclaimed as a remembrance of the costs of war – specifically World War I – and its eventual shift to become what is now celebrated nationally as Veterans Day.
Owens took the stage proclaiming Nov. 11 in Syracuse as ‘Armistice Day for Peace.’
“There’s a prerequisite to peace, and that prerequisite is a changing of the hearts and the minds of mankind,” Owens said. “A change in the heart, changing what we think… until our hearts change to not seek greed, anger, discrimination and bigotry.”
Owens formalized the words, wishes and experiences of the event’s speakers and shifted the meaning of Veterans Day away from glorifying “warriors,” instead focusing on the “essence of a holiday dedicated to peace.”
The calls to reexamine the nature of the holiday were personal to the members of Veterans For Peace in attendance, especially Stieber, who spoke about his experience in Vietnam and the lingering effects of his time at war.
Stieber spoke of his time in the service and memories of it, but his strongest emotions regarding his relationship with the military came years after his return from service, ignited at home while watching the movie “Platoon.”
When a scene in the movie depicting the Vietnam War showed children interacting with servicemen in a small village, all of the memories flooded back.
“I saw those little kids,” Stieber said. “I can smell it, I can feel it.”
Stieber said he didn’t know how deep his trauma from his service had been buried inside, but in that moment, all of the emotions he’d bottled up exploded.
“It all came out, and I just dropped out of life for a while,” Stieber said.
Inspiring his pursuit of pacifism, that moment sparked a lifetime of activism in Stieber, who designed the international organization’s flag.
Stieber closed the event with a pair of poems he wrote, the first describing “the box” – representing the flag-draped coffins fallen soldiers are brought home in – and its symbolism. The second was a piece about children used as a call to bring about an end to violence in Gaza, Sudan, Lebanon and other sites of warfare.
Despite falling on the same day, Stieber drew a distinction between Armistice Day and Veterans Day, saying the latter is a day aimed at peace and ending war, while the former “glorifies the war fighter.”
The event’s other speakers said war isn’t only fought on foreign soil in distant lands. Miraglia, the event’s keynote speaker, and longtime General Counsel of the Onondaga Nation Joe Heath focused their remarks on the internal warfare fought in the U.S. and its effects on its people.
Miraglia equated nationbuilding with homemaking in her address but asked for whom that home was for.
“Warfare was central to the racialized construction of the U.S. home (to) reconcile the dispossession of the Declaration of Independence’s promise of equality,” Miraglia said.
Comparing contemporary conflicts to the treatment of Indigenous people, enslaved African Americans and women within the country, Miraglia described a “logic of elimination” that carries to the present as a strategy used in engagements from the United States to the Middle East.
Heath, who as a conscientious objector to military service described himself as a “radical pacifist,” focused his remarks on the violence between Indigenous communities and white American settlers, and the parallels it draws to conflicts like that of Gaza and Israel.
Describing the strategy of land seizure as a process of killing in order to conquer, Heath’s words drew parallels to Miraglia’s “logic of elimination” through purported desires to use war as a means of “land theft.”
Heath said those gathered should “focus on ending all wars,” using history as a reminder of the costs of conflict, and said it’s time for justice and peace.
Stieber concluded the event with a call to action for those assembled: using their voices, adding that silence is the “garden of violence.”
“Move forth, spread peace,” Stieber said. “Leading by example, I found, is the best way to do it.”
