Governments determine what day becomes a holiday. They declare what they will and won’t honor. They close their offices on such days, and an obedient media sets its programming in lockstep. For example, on Memorial Day, war movies prevail; Hollywood’s valorization of war. Of course, few movies can capture the terror, the stench, the cacophony of war, which is after all, legalized mass murder, brutality and death. But to the young, such movies fill minds with false glory, false patriotism and raw nationalism.
William Tecumseh Sherman, American Civil War General, said at a military academy in 1879, “War is at best barbarism. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.” he said.
Memorial Day isn’t a day of remembrance, it is a day of forgetting. We forget the horrors of war. We play Hollywood movies, we overeat and get drunk while politicians preen and plan for the next war. From in prison nation, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
