• The transfiguration of Armistice Day to Veterans Day and our recompense.

• Armistice Day and the Empire

Remarks delivered at Community Church of Boston, November 9, 2025 (transcript edited for clarity and corrections).https://www.vvaw.org/veteran/article/?id=4053

Thank you so much for having me again. It means a lot to get asked to speak to this group.

Smedley Butler was just referenced, and the Veterans For Peace chapter—the Smedley Butler chapter up here—that was the very first Veterans For Peace outfit that I ever came into contact with. At that point in 2009, as I was speaking out against the Afghan war, I’d spent 10 years in the Marine Corps, time in the State Department. I was a young man [I’ll add arrogant] and this idea of Veterans For Peace was kind of like, who are these loons? Who are these guys that I’ve got to now spend some time with?

And I was just absolutely enthralled with them, endeared with them—not just for their passion or for their experience, but because of their knowledge and because they put into practice, because they put into action what they had gone through. The mission of Veterans For Peace is to educate about the true costs of war. And that’s what Veterans For Peace does. That’s what chapters in Veterans For Peace, like the Smedley Butler chapter in Massachusetts, helped me do.

Because as I was starting to speak out against the war and going through this psychological, psychiatric, spiritual struggle with who I had once been, it was finding resonance, finding familiarity, finding fellowship and comradeship with members of Veterans For Peace that really helped me survive that process.

Easily the Most Profitable, Surely the Most Vicious

I want to go back to Smedley Butler for a bit. I know we have a youth group here, and they may not be familiar with Smedley Butler. He is the most decorated Marine in Marine Corps history. If the rules had been different, he’d be the most decorated service member across the entire US military’s history. Smedley Butler served for 33 years in the Marine Corps. He received two Medals of Honor. If the rules had been different, he would have received a third.

Following his service, he decried war. He broke from the silence that often accompanies [service members], particularly general officers, when they retire. He broke from that and he spoke out against not just war, but America’s imperialism.

I want to take a moment to read a couple of his more poignant or forceful quotes. Smedley Butler’s definition or commentary on war was that:

War is a racket. It has always been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

He spoke about his own career, his own service, what he actually did. And I’m going to read the longer quote here because I think it’s very important as we are on the verge of war in Venezuela, and I think a broader war possibly throughout Central and South America to achieve the Trump administration’s grand strategy of consolidation of control of the hemisphere.

Of his own career, Major General Butler said:

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service. And during that period, I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico, and especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of a half dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902 to 1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interest in 1916. I helped make Honduras ripe for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do is operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

You recognize his storyline, what he’s sharing there about what he actually was doing as a gangster for capitalism, as he described his military service. Juxtapose that with not just this administration, but going back decades, American administrations and their role, their intervention, their interference in Latin America. And you can see why—and I say this to the youth group that’s here—you can see why people like me, people like Dean, your teachers, we bang on about learning about history. As Mark Twain said, history may not repeat itself, but it certainly does rhyme.

Smedley Butler’s Medals of Honor—he received one for his action in Mexico, one for his action in Haiti. And again, if the rules had been different, he would have received a third one for his actions in China. And I wonder how many Americans know that 100 years ago or 110 years ago, we had men winning medals of honor for military action in Mexico or in China, let alone the rest of the [world].

I wanted to take that time to share about Smedley Butler because he is so instructive, not just his words that accurately describe American imperialism and American military service, but because it’s not distant, it’s not removed. This is congruent. This is a continuous line of history.

When I was [a kid] in the 80s, when I was the age of you guys in the youth group here, we [the US] were in Central America. Constantly there was this idea, this story about American troops may be going to [Central] America. American troops may be going to help in El Salvador or to maybe go to war in Nicaragua. And all the storylines were the same. Well, if we don’t do something to stop the communists in Nicaragua, then they’re going to take Guatemala next and they’re going to take Mexico after that. And next thing you know—I mean, it’s all the same storyline that gets repeated over and over again.

And so here we are now with this administration, of course, what looks like on the verge of carrying out military operations to overthrow the Venezuelan government while murdering people in speedboats, extrajudicially, unconstitutionally, and of course, threatening the rest of Latin America. We saw the news last week. The American government is making plans for military action in Mexico. So, 111 years after Smedley Butler receives his medal of honor in Mexico, we have troops lining up to [once again] do the same.

An Inconvenient and Problematic Holiday

The title of my talk today is Armistice Day and the Empire. Armistice Day, of course, was the term, was the recognition for the end of the First World War. The idea that there needs to be remembrance. And in the United Kingdom, where this really has its foundations, following the First World War, the idea was Remembrance Day.

The soldiers who fought in that horror show—16 million people were killed in the First World War, the first mechanized modern form of warfare between states that resulted in four years of war and 16 million deaths—the soldiers after the war in Britain marched under the banner of Never Again. The idea was to remember the horrors of it.

The idea of November 11th, for those who don’t know: the armistice, the truce, the fighting stops in the First World War on the 11th minute of the 11th hour of the 11th day of November. And so November 11th becomes Armistice Day.

That is recognized here in the United States up until 1954. And in 1954, those early days of the Cold War, this idea of having a reconciliation-based holiday was inconvenient and problematic for an American government that was pursuing a policy of aggressive containment of the Soviet Union. The idea of having a holiday that celebrated peace, that was a critique of war, that advocated for diplomacy rather than militarism, was something that the American government found to be, again, inconvenient and problematic in terms of its Cold War strategy and policies.

So they come up with this idea in 1954 to change Armistice Day to Veterans Day. The idea being, or the stated reason according to the American government why they changed it, was to honor all generations of veterans. [This] specious explanation was that we can’t just have Armistice Day anymore because we’re leaving out the World War II veterans. Anyone [can] see right through that, but that was the rationale. That was the argument. That was the reasoning behind changing Armistice Day to Veterans Day.

And of course, Veterans Day in a highly militarized society—I’ll get to that in a bit about how the American government has utilized that for its purposes, how the empire uses it for its purposes—Veterans Day soon becomes year-round, particularly in my lifetime, particularly following the end of the Cold War, when you didn’t have the threat of the Soviet Union. There was a vacancy of enemies, a vacuum, an emptiness in terms of who are going to be the bad guys.

I can remember in the 90s, this dilemma in Hollywood or among fiction writers like Tom Clancy: who’s going to be the bad guy in the films and the books? The Soviet Union is gone. Well, you know, fortunately, you had people in the Middle East, you had narco-terrorists, et cetera, et cetera. All the same people we’ve utilized for 35 years, still using it today.

For those students that are here, if you’re interested in Venezuela, I suggest you watch a film from 1993, 1994 with Harrison Ford based on a Tom Clancy novel called Clear and Present Danger. It is the same storyline that Trump is selling right now, with the exception that Tom Clancy, who wrote the book, was smart enough not to include the regime change. But you’ll see that, again, history may not repeat, but it certainly rhymes.

Thank You for Your Service: Manufacturing Consent

This idea of Veterans Day becomes necessarily a year-round affair, and that’s particularly done through the idea of supporting the troops. As you have American interventions, occupations, wars, and Americans are killed and [killing] in countries around the world, the American government and its ancillary and adjacent fellows within organizations within the empire—so the media, opposition politicians, Hollywood, et cetera—the idea is to promote this notion of supporting the troops, and supporting the troops because of their sacrifice, because they are the heroes in this Manichean story of good versus evil. We are the men and women with the white hats. We are going to make the world safe for democracy.

You have this usage of “support the troops” then become a mechanism through which dissent is suppressed. You see that a bit in Vietnam, but especially at the end of the Cold War. Any opposition to American military intervention, occupation, or war is met with a rhetoric of “support the troops,” a shouting down of those who have legitimate dissent towards U.S. warfare, met with this idea that you’re simply not patriotic. You’re betraying these young men and women who are over there. How dare you! Have you no shame! [That] type of beratement.

What that then morphs into is a clerical-like status, a deification of the American military. And this idea of “support the troops” becomes “thank you for your service”—almost a ritual-like obligation among the American people.

I’ve seen it play out many, many times. One that stuck in my mind is being on a train a number of years ago. There was an older woman, probably nearing retirement age, very professional looking, and there was this young man who’s a midshipman at the United States Naval Academy. So he’s never done anything besides go to college, essentially, in a uniform. And this woman, they exchange pleasantries, and then they separate. They’re in the aisle of the train, and they separate. And then she turns around and taps him and says, “I’m so sorry. I can’t believe I didn’t do this. I didn’t thank you for your service.”

And the horror of that—this idea that this woman feels compelled to ritually thank this young man for his service when he hasn’t done anything. Because he’s wearing a uniform, this woman who could have been anything—a judge, a doctor, an astronaut—she feels compelled to thank this young man for his service and apologizes for not doing it. [She] asks him for his forgiveness for not thanking him for his service.

So this ritual obligation permeates our society. And I see it all the time. It’s unthinking. It’s unflinching. And sometimes when I’m cranky—and I don’t wear a lot of veterans things, but I do wear my Veterans for Peace T-shirt sometimes—and sometimes when I am cranky, I will respond back.

Most of the time I just say thank you and carry on with my day. Just brush it off. But sometimes I will respond with, “You know, what are you thanking me for? I took part in organized murder.” And the couple of times I have said that I have been met with a sigh of relief. I remember one young woman in a Trader Joe’s at the cash register who, when I said that to her, was like, “Oh, my God, thank you for saying that. That’s how I feel. But I’m too afraid to say anything about it.”

And that’s the society we live in. It is heretical to think that American troops are doing anything but wearing the white hat, being the good guys, bringing democracy to nations, freeing people, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, however you want to describe it.

Harry Patch was the last living veteran of the trenches of WWI. London, Remembrance Sunday, 2016.
Photo: Matthew Hoh

We All Have Stories of This

What that does then is it hides the actual cost of war. Not only does it manufacture consent for the wars—because dissent’s not possible—but it hides the cost of the war. And I’m going to talk a bit about the cost to the veterans of my generation, my fellow Iraq and Afghan veterans. And I just want to caveat that, of course, with the cost to the American veterans of the war being nothing compared to what the Iraqi and Afghan people went through and are still enduring, just in whether it’s the scale and the scope, the sheer numbers, or the reality that American and Afghan veterans were perpetrators and Afghan and Iraqi civilians were victims.

But I want to address this Veterans Day. I want to address the veterans aspect of this.

When you look at the wars, the Iraq and Afghan wars, you’re talking about 7,000 dead American service members. If you include the contractors who were involved in these wars—men and women who in any previous conflict, any previous war would have been doing those jobs as a soldier—the actual dead from the Iraq and Afghan wars rises to 15,000. You had 7,000 dead service members and roughly 8,000 dead contractors in those wars.

You have 50,000 wounded, which when compared to other wars is not a whole heck of a lot. You compare it to Vietnam or other wars. The reality is that our body armor over there, our vehicle armor, the medical care that we had was so far beyond anything that had ever been seen in warfare before that many of us survived encounters with the Iraqi resistance or the Afghan resistance where we would have been killed in previous wars. We all have stories of this. We all have stories of being in roadside bomb attacks, getting hit by shrapnel, getting hit by bullets that in previous wars would have killed us.

And so what that means then is—well, let me just address one other thing with the wounded. One aspect of it, particularly with the medical care, is that men and women, American service members, survived wounds that in previous wars likely would have killed them. And so while the rate of amputations for American veterans of the [Iraq and Afghan wars] remained fairly constant with previous wars, you saw a degree of the amputations that had never been seen before. Of the amputated Iraq and Afghan vets, about a third of them were multiple amputees. And 90% of those had lost both legs.

In Afghanistan, because of the conduct of the war, so many of our troops were dismounted. They weren’t in vehicles. They were walking on foot patrols. And the rate of testicle amputation for these young men is shockingly high. There are stories, there are interviews, there are reports from the doctors who went through and who have gone through periods of questioning themselves whether or not saving these young men was the right thing to do because the ruination of them, these amputations, how badly hurt they were, was going to have them live lives that would be incredibly difficult.

The other aspect with the body armor and the vehicle armor [protecting us] from the insurgent or resistance attacks was that, again, we survived things that we shouldn’t have survived. I had Marines who survived three, four, five, seven, eight roadside bomb or IED attacks against their vehicles in one deployment, in one seven-and-a-half-month deployment. And most of the time you just walked away from it, shook yourself off. Maybe your bell got rung a bit. Maybe you saw stars. Most likely not, though.

And then what you have, though, is you’ve had this epidemic of traumatic brain injury occur among Iraq and Afghan vets, for which we’ve never seen anything like it. And the numbers run into the hundreds and hundreds of thousands. The last figure I saw was over 500,000 Iraq and Afghan vets have traumatic brain injury, most of it from explosive blasts. When you run the numbers on that, if you have 2.7 million Iraq and Afghan vets and 500,000 have traumatic brain injury, you’re talking one in five Iraq and Afghan vets have a brain injury that is having a very real impact on their life in terms of relationships, work, school, being a part of society. [The stress that ripples onto family, friends, co-workers, fellow students, neighbors, etc., is burdensome, exhausting and destructive.]

These brain injuries are incredibly insidious and they are one of the three components of the war in terms of wounds that are called invisible wounds. And they manifest and they have physical consequences. They have psychological and psychiatric consequences. And they have spiritual consequences.

As Always, PTSD

PTSD—of course, the rate of PTSD in these wars is in line with previous wars, something that most many people do not realize or understand: how bad off the psychological and psychiatric consequences of all wars were.

Following the Civil War, if you go back and you read literature from the period following the Civil War—the end of the 1860s, 70s, 80s—you’ll find that the literature of the time, the news media, the fictional accounts, what have you, you’ll find references in there continually to American Civil War veterans who are killing themselves, who are dying of overdose, who are dying of exposure in the streets. The estimate is that more American veterans of the Civil War die after the war, particularly from overdose, than die during the Civil War. And remember, there were 600,000 who died in that war.

World War II, the same thing. Everyone thinks of [it as] the good war. And people say, why do these Iraq and Afghan vets have problems when their World War II veterans didn’t? And that’s absolute nonsense. There is no evidence whatsoever to support that. [The psychological costs of WWII] was something that was suppressed by the American government, something that these men were not allowed to talk about or discuss in society. The only people who seem to have known about what they went through were their families and, of course, the clubs they joined.

If people are familiar with the origin story of the Hell’s Angels and other motorcyclist clubs, that’s where that comes from—from these veterans from World War II who are looking for some type of outlet, someplace where they’re understood and someplace where they can act out what is going through their minds and through their souls.

The rate of psychiatric casualties in the Second World War was enormous. We do have some documentation on this. You had, during the Second World War, [more than 300,000] men from the Army alone being hospitalized each year during the war for psychiatric reasons. You have to remember, too, that PTSD doesn’t become an actual diagnosis—and I should say PTSD is post-traumatic stress disorder—PTSD doesn’t become an actual diagnosis recognized by the American medical community until 1980. And during the Second World War in the 40s, you’re having 350,000 men hospitalized every year from psychiatric wounds of the war. The discharge papers from the war show that in the Army and the Marine Corps, you’re looking at discharge rates of 25 percent to one third for psychiatric wounds [note: closer to 40% of those who saw combat].

What, Will These Hands Ne’er Be Clean?

This leads us to the third aspect of these invisible wounds: the moral injury. And moral injury is simply a clinical term for guilt, shame, regret. It’s the consequences that you endure for having transgressed your moral code, your ethics, your belief, your religion. It is something that is existential. The foundations of who you are are ripped away. It is something that doesn’t go away. It’s something that cannot be reasoned with.

The best example I can give of moral injury is to go to Shakespeare and to read Macbeth and witness what Lady Macbeth goes through. That invisible blood that’s on her hand that she can’t get out—”Out, out, damn spot.” And even though she’s not the one who wielded [the] knife, what happens to Lady Macbeth—the guilt from that, the shame from that—that’s what moral injury is.

And everything we know—and you can go on to the medical catalog, the medical library run by the National Institute of Health and look this up—everything we know is that the leading cause of suicide in combat veterans is moral injury. We’ve known this for a long time. The earliest record I can find of it is 1990: VA researchers determined that the best predictor of suicide in Vietnam veterans is combat-related guilt.

In 2015, the University of Utah does a meta-analysis. They look at 24 or 25 different studies that are examining the relationship between combat, guilt, and suicide. And what they find is that—well, they throw one of the studies out for reasons of methodology—all the other studies, these 23 or 24 other studies, they all show without a doubt, clear, definitive results that demonstrate there is an undeniable link between combat, guilt, and suicide.

It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that the VA actually started treatment programs about killing. I remember in 2014, 2015, the VA did an assessment and their question was essentially, “Should we ask veterans about how they feel after killing somebody?” I mean, I thought I was on crazy pills when I read that assessment.

And you look through the VA suicide data. Every year the VA puts out a suicide report and it’s got how many veterans kill themselves with guns and how many veterans kill themselves they think because they were locked away during COVID and how many, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And it doesn’t touch on the aspects of combat. [Although] at times they let it slip.

In [2016] the VA] published a suicide report that actually had the data there showing how many veterans were killing themselves—or were killed by suicide, excuse me, I should phrase this correctly—how many veterans were killed by suicide who were Iraq and Afghan vets, and the numbers were off the chart.

Whether it’s from the VA’s reports or reports by universities and research by journalists, we know that for Iraq and Afghan veterans, depending upon their age and sex, compared to their peers—people who are their age and who are their sex—rates of suicide among Iraq and Afghan veterans are anywhere from six to 14 times higher than their peers, particularly the more you’re able to isolate who saw combat and who didn’t.

I mean, this is an astounding thing that this is simply not spoken about. And you could see this in the VA data in other ways. They don’t publicize it this way, but you could read through the material and understand it. You look at VA suicide data over time, generationally, and you’ll see that the highest levels of suicide are among those age groups that correlate to war. So you’ll see high rates of suicide among World War II veterans, Korea and Vietnam veterans, Iraq and Afghan veterans. For those veterans who served during peacetime—during the Cold War, during the 90s, in the last 10 years or so, as the United States has gotten away from active combat or large scale combat—you see lower levels of suicide.

And the understanding of this is simple. It’s this idea that we can’t have this discussion. This goes against the idea of our troops as heroes, as our troops as young men and women who are wearing a white hat. This goes against the Manichean struggle of the United States as a force for global good in the world. How can it be that we sent these young men and women overseas to fight these right and just wars, and now they’re coming home and putting guns in their mouths and blowing the back of their heads off? That can’t be right. It’s got to be something else. It’s got to be because they can’t find jobs. It’s got to be because they miss their friends—all these other nonsensical reasons that get put forward as explanations for why combat veterans have such high rates of suicide.

Can you imagine someone from the VA going in front of Congress and saying, “Senator or Congressman or Congresswoman, the reason why our veterans are killing themselves is because they’re ashamed of what they did in these wars, these righteous and just wars to bring freedom to the Iraqi and Afghan people, to fight Al-Qaeda and the Taliban and, you know, good versus evil, et cetera”? Can you imagine someone doing that in front of Congress? It’s impossible. It’s impossible.

So the political weight of that ensures that there is no appropriate address to this idea of moral injury and what it does to the men and women who have gone overseas wearing a uniform, thinking they are heroes, thinking they are doing the right thing.

I’ll give you one stat to show that. In 2006, in Iraq, [a] survey done of Marines in Iraq in 2006—this is three years after the invasion, this is four and a half years after 9/11—[more than] 70% of those Marines surveyed in Iraq thought that they were there because Iraq was aligned with Al-Qaeda and was involved in the 9/11 attacks. Four and a half years after 9/11, [more than] 70% of Marines in Iraq thought that. They thought they were there doing the right thing. They thought they were there keeping America safe from another 9/11.

And you can imagine what happens when you realize that’s not the case. You can justify a dead kid on the ground that your fellow Marine or soldier shot because that’s the reality of war. War’s terrible, et cetera, et cetera. But we have to be here because we have to keep America safe. And then to come home and have that pulled apart.

One of the things that then occurs, this dissonance that veterans endure, is this “support the troops,” [and] “thank you for your service.” You’ve got to go to a baseball game or you go to a hockey game and they ask the veterans to stand up so 15,000 or 50,000 people can applaud them and thank them for their service. And meanwhile, this young man or woman is in their heads saying to themselves, “Why am I being applauded? I participated in organized murder. I’m ashamed of what I did. I regret what I did. I’m thinking about killing myself because the stress I am going through with this moral injury, the mental, the psychological, the spiritual distress I am enduring, the only release I can see from that is suicide.” That’s how difficult it is.

They’ve done surveys of veterans where they’ve asked, “What’s worse, losing your legs or the moral injury?” And they say the moral injury. And I can tell you as someone who has all three—TBI, PTSD, and moral injury—the moral injury is far and away the worst, is far and away the darkest, is far and away the most painful. That existential crisis that you’re enduring, the ripping out of the foundations of who you thought you were, it is a blackness for which you feel suicide will be the only relief.

This idea was brought up before. Dean, you led the congregation here in a call and response where it was, “my heart is filled with love.” And I want to refer to an interview that our friend, the great Scott Horton at Antiwar.com had with a man named Jason Jones, who’s a veteran, a conservative activist. He does a lot of relief work. He’s involved heavily in providing relief into Gaza and other places around the world.

And Jones told this story about his grandfather who fought in the Korean War and that when his grandfather passed away, his last words, his last thoughts, he cried talking about the Chinese and the Korean boys that he killed 50 years before. And Jones says that his belief in God and the existence of God is tied into this understanding of the trauma of war. I’ll quote him:

“I’m a Christian, and I think PTSD and war trauma is the greatest proof of God’s existence because it proves that we were created to love each other, not hurt each other.”

So this moral injury just doesn’t square with Veterans Day. You won’t hear any discussions of this on Tuesday. Veterans will get a free meal at Denny’s and people will thank them for their service in a thousand different ways, mostly transactional. But you won’t hear much discussion of this idea that what they did overseas fills them and has ruined them with shame and regret and guilt.

The moral injury, it’s bad for politics and there’s a dissonance for the public. And this dissonance for the public is purposeful. This manufacturing consent for war, the hyper-sensation or the hyper-touting of militarism, the “thank you for your service” ritual obligation that the American people carry with them—it’s purposeful. It’s deliberate.

Cultus Imperatorius Americae

And you can see that in our politics. You can see that in our schools. You can see that in our news media. You can see that in entertainment and Hollywood. And more recently, in the last couple of decades, in sports.

People have referenced it before, but many of you are familiar with the contractual relationship that the Pentagon had with the major sports leagues, paying NFL teams to do salutes to veterans before the game or during halftime. We will see at the Super Bowl again, another overflight of F-35s or B-1 bombers or something like that. There is this permeation, this saturation of American society with militarism that is not organic or native or just happened. It is purposeful. It’s deliberate.

Hollywood is the best example of that. The United States military has a relationship with Hollywood. The Pentagon has contracts with every studio or nearly every studio in Hollywood. The Pentagon has had script authority on thousands and thousands of movies. The last time I wrote about this was five years ago. So the data I had when I looked this back up was from 2016. But in 2016, it was approximately 2,500 TV shows and movies the Pentagon had been involved with in Hollywood.

This is not new. This starts right away. The first Academy Award winner, the first picture to win the Oscar, Wings in 1927, was about Army Air Corps pilots in World War I. And the Department of War at the time provided dozens of planes and—actually thousands—I think they provided 3,500 soldiers for the film. So this relationship has always been there.

It’s a transactional relationship. The studios save a heck of a lot of money on it. Estimates run into the millions, maybe even tens of millions of dollars. There is one researcher who looked at this and found that if people remember the film Captain Phillips, comparing that to a film that came out the same time, Gravity, which took place in space—so there were no military ships or tanks or helicopters to use, they had to do everything by CGI. Meanwhile, Captain Phillips, the story of the American cargo ship captain who gets taken prisoner by the Somali [pirates] and then the Navy SEALs rescue him—very heavy in ships and sailors and helicopters. Well, this analysis that was done showed that the studios may have saved as much as $50 million by using the Navy ships and sailors and helicopters and so forth for the film.

This is big money. And the script authority that the Pentagon has means that any script, even when it doesn’t even deal with the military—if you want to have a story about a veteran who comes home, he can’t handle what he’s been through and he kills himself—the Pentagon’s not going to okay that. They’re going to say to the studio, “We don’t like this. And for the next Transformers film or the next Bradley Cooper action movie, if you want our helicopters or our tanks or our ships, you better change this veteran suicide story.” And that’s how it works.

And the Pentagon also benefits because there’s an aspect to society where this is manufacturing consent. This is popularizing, not just popularizing, but normalizing militarism. And they’ve also seen it in their recruitment. So the Pentagon would often pair their advertisements for recruiting with superhero films. And they found that when they show a recruiting ad after The Incredible Hulk or Batman or whatever, you’re looking at about a 25% increase in young people wanting to join the military.

All this, of course, feeds the military-industrial complex. All this allows for the consent of the governed to be found in Congress for trillion-dollar defense budgets. Even if you look right now, you have the soldiers in the military, service members not being paid, but the Pentagon has found ways to pay them illegally by diverting money from other places. They would never do that for air traffic controllers. They would never do that for park rangers. They would never do that for Social Security administrators. But they’ll do it for the soldiers because the political benefit is there.

[This] deification, this clerical status of veterans contributes to the high suicide rates and all the other issues that come with veterans—I haven’t even spoken about other factors with veterans [substance abuse, homelessness, domestic abuse, etc]. Just as these communities across America are wed to, are part of this hyper-militarization, they suffer because as they’re willing to see a trillion dollars go to the government, that puts into play a scarcity narrative that while we can afford to fund the military, we can’t afford to fund education or health care or environmental protection, or you think of any other type of issue facing our communities. And you’ll find that the answer to the problem or the answer to the solution that’s often presented is we don’t have enough money for that.

So with this embrace of militarization, this embrace of veterans and the need for a trillion-dollar military budget, our communities are causing great harm to themselves.

Prior to 1945, we were an empire. And then following the Second World War, we were one of two empires. And then after the Cold War, these last 35 years, we are the empire. And so you understand the need for narrative, you understand the need for construct, you understand the need for some metaphysical infrastructure to define and sustain and validate the empire.

And so you see this in what comes out of Veterans Day, the transfer of Armistice Day to Veterans Day, then the idea of Veterans Day is year-round, and then the idea of “support the troops,” then it’s this ritual obligation of “thank you for your service.” And you can understand how we are here now in this militarized society where the war state, the war parties, dominate our country.

White Poppies And War Horses

What do we do about it? Of course, we resist in every way. We try and do counter-narrative. If you notice, I’m wearing a white poppy. The poppies of course are really a British thing, European really, British. The red poppies are meant to remember the poppies that grew in the fields of dead following the First World War. And in Britain this time of year for Remembrance Day they wear it. If you visit London or Manchester or wherever you’re going to see people wearing red poppies on their lapel and it’s meant to remember the soldiers of the Great War—never forget.

The white poppy, however, is meant to remember all the victims of war. And it is contentious. It is ugly. If you wear a white poppy on the tube in London, it’s likely someone’s going to say something to you about it. That you’re not supporting the soldiers. You’re dishonoring their memory. It’s so much that when I do speak to British audiences, I won’t wear the white poppy because I know it’ll be a distraction. Here in the United States, it’s great because people ask, “What is this? What does this mean?” You get a chance to talk about it.

There’s also supposedly a purple poppy if we want to get into the depths of our depravity and our sickness and our madness and our cruelty as a race, as a species. There’s supposedly a purple poppy for the animals killed in war. In the First World War, 8 million horses were killed. Sixteen million people, half as many horses were killed as people killed in that war. The depths of our cruelty or depravity, I think [are] expressed well in the animals that have suffered in our warfare.

It’s also one of the reasons why, [as an] aside, I believe that horses—there’s such a therapeutic connection between horses and veterans. I’ve not seen any literature attesting to this, this is my assumption, that the reason why there is this therapeutic link between combat veterans and horses is because I think horses have gone through warfare with us for eons and that there’s something within the horse that understands the trauma of war, the horror of war, the guilt and shame of taking part in war.

Only The Worst Among Us

This is a tough time of year for many veterans. A lot of us don’t like the attention. A lot of us don’t like the “thank you for your service.” I know very few that do. Only the worst among us, among veterans, enjoys the “thank you for your service” obsequiousness, that ritual obligation. Many of us are dissonant in our beliefs on the wars compared to those around us.

And so it’s a pleasure. It’s helpful to me to be able to speak to an audience like yourselves who understand this, an audience that I’m not trying to convince of anything. I’m not trying to win as if I’m in a debate. I know you as an audience understand this. I hope my remarks today gave some maybe some clarification on how veterans arrive to this point, how our society is constructed that dooms veterans after the wars, how it ensures that, as attributed to Plato, the only ones who have seen the end of war are the dead.

And how our use, that utilization of veterans by the empire for its imperial purposes, is very well founded, constructed, established, and effective. The political calculus that went into changing Armistice Day to Veterans Day, as disgusting as it may have been, I don’t think anyone can say it wasn’t effective.

So we have to understand how the empire works, what they will do to achieve its ends. And of course, we have to find ways to counter it.

I really appreciate you all having me here again. And thank you for having this space and for being this congregation, being this church and being this community that I really adore and value.

Thank you.
Matthew Hoh

Full Community Church of Boston November 9, 2025 service, including Q&A:

Matthew Hoh was the 2022 Green Party of North Carolina candidate for U.S. Senate

Main Graphic:
World War I; transport of the wounded. Oil painting by Ugo Matania
Wellcome Collection gallery (2018-04-06): https://wellcomecollection.org/works/swrekjxp CC-BY-4.0
Library of Congress: Library reference: ICV No 18536
Photo number: V0018185

Insert:
Brigadier General Smedley Butler, 1927. From the Smedley Butler Collection (COLL/3124), Marine Corps Archives & Special Collections.
Official USMC photograph