When I was a child, November 11th was celebrated as "Armistice Day." Parades were held and, as I recall, it was a school holiday. The purpose of this holiday, we were told, was the celebration of the end of the war that was "to end all wars." That war, along with its sequel, had been conducted by a federal agency known as the "War Department." But as those were the days when wars were popularly considered aberrations, and with war now becoming a permanent institution in America, the War Department was too honest a name, and the agency in charge of fomenting and conducting wars was renamed - initially - the National Military Establishment. But the word "Establishment" was a give-away to the permanent nature of what was in the offing. And so, as Orwell understood so well, the agency had its name changed, once again, to the Defense Department.
With the minds of most Americans now tuned in to how war was to become as permanent and integral a part of the state purpose and apparatus as government schools, Armistice Day was also required to undergo a transformation. It would be counterproductive to permit Americans to celebrate the end of wars - they might retain the outdated mindset that peace was a desired condition. And so, on June 1, 1954 - at the heart of the Cold War - Armistice Day was renamed "Veterans Day," to both celebrate and mandate the state's sacrificing the lives of young men to the new god of war. Thus did the desire for "peace" become an un-American activity, a sentiment suitable only to "traitors" or to naive "wackos" who fail to understand the "practical" demands of the modern world.
