I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind. Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not. So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things. What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance. And all music is.
-Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
Tacoma seemed to bloom on November 11th, 2025. Beautifully painted clouds permitted plenty of sunshine to cast down on city streets. A lively crowd numbering just over one hundred trickled into the plaza bringing flags, or signs, or wearing a reminder of service. They all brought their fears, hopes, gripes, and their ideas about themselves and the land they grew up walking. It was a gorgeous backdrop for the city to recommence the annual observation of Armistice Day. The crowd respectfully encircled a motley group of tattooed, long-haired, sometimes bearded, always opinionated veterans wearing fatigues and patches. No dress uniforms, no military drills. It was about leaving all that behind.
Armistice Day opened with a land welcoming ceremony led by veteran Toby Joseph, Sr. He performed a moving rendition of his father’s love song and reflected on militarism from an indigenous perspective. Veterans spoke to pressing problems such as Veterans Affairs and LGBTQ+ medical care, the right to refuse illegal orders, and the history of active duty resistance. In one of the more memorable moments a physician and current conscientious objector spoke poignantly about his courageous decision to choose peace. Flanked by veterans stoically holding large pictures of Zahid Chaudhry in uniform and with family, Melissa Chaudhry delivered a tour de force keynote about her husband, moving me and many others to tears. Melissa sharply defended Zahid, elucidated the militarism that led to his detainment, and articulated beautifully the meaning of Armistice Day.
Zahid is a disabled veteran and immigrant; he is the President of Veterans for Peace 109 and for years has been an immovable fixture of the peace movement. He didn’t get to see the beautiful sky that day. He has been a comrade of mine for over a decade, going back to when I began organizing against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Zahid is wrongfully detained in the concentration camp known as the Northwest Detention Center on the Tacoma tideflats, two miles and a world away from city hall. As I write this, Zahid is experiencing cruel medical neglect and risks blindness if he is not released for required medical procedures soon. We would agree every person deserves excellent healthcare. It’s just especially cruel that a disabled veteran, with private health insurance in Olympia, risks blindness in the unnecessary custody of the U.S. government.
The day concluded with a memorial ceremony led by Pastor Shalom of First United Methodist Church. It was a wholly dignified ceremony that seemed to me life-affirming, peace-affirming, and inclusive. The enhancement of the remembrance ceremony to include not just our WWI veterans but all victims of militarism was beautiful, and only natural, given the armies can’t seem to keep the wars to themselves. The ceremony honored the original purpose of the day as imagined by folks like Kurt Vonnegut, while maintaining the universality that so many must have felt in the wake of the Great War. It is a high standard that future remembrance ceremonies will be based upon.
The weather was great for Armistice Day. The political climate was another matter; we gathered on stolen Puyallup land against a backdrop of hegemonic struggle, military belligerence, terror campaigns, genocide, and the rise of the authoritarian right across the breadth of the international system. At home we face surveillance, extra-constitutional policing, mass deportations, wanton nuclearisation, and the militarization of our streets. Political assassinations are on the rise. There is a massive military build up off the coast of Venezuela and already western operatives on the mainland. Domestically, our coffers are ransacked and public institutions are seized. Homeland Security has been allocated an unprecedented wartime budget to terrorize immigrants and urban dwellers for the delight of an increasingly openly white nationalist base. Trans rights are being ripped away. Peace is questioned as a value, human rights as a cause, and the worthiness of empathy itself is mocked by our leaders. The U.S. regime foolishly stokes dormant embers in the Caribbean and saber-rattles in the Pacific. The United States has funded, provided intelligence and abundant material support, and suppressed public knowledge of Israel’s genocide. We face a very real and imminent threat of ethnic cleansing and a collapse of LGBTQ+ and women’s rights. We face war.
So we celebrate peace. But we cannot simply enjoy the peace there is; we are without peace. It is only through resistance that we can create peace. It is only through solidarity that we can resist. And it is through love that we find solidarity. So we celebrate Armistice Day: Peace through Resistance.
by Eric Ard
