Hacker News Reader

Comment by pwg | Hacker News Reader

This suggestion is not likely to go very far. The reason Nov. 11 is Veteran's Day is that it is in honor of the armistice with Germany that formally ended World War I:

"major hostilities of World War I were formally ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, when the Armistice with Germany went into effect." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veterans_Day

So any attempt to 'move' Veteran's Day will likely meet resistance due to this connection. This is also why this day is a fixed calendar day (at least in the US) rather than a "first/second/third Monday of the month" type holiday like most of the other official federal holidays. It shares the same connection with specific exact calendar dates as does the 4th of July, Christmas, and New Year's day.

View on HN

I would argue that the number of people who know this is a tiny fraction of the population and, unsettling as it is to contemplate, in the subsequent century we’ve had major wars which are equally important to commemorate so it’s not like a single date can cover all of them.

I doubt America WANTS to remember every war. Only the popular ones that it won. WW1 they were on the winning side and WW2 they were the good guys.

The Korean war is more murky. Almost nobody knows it now but South Korea was a military dictatorship, not a paragon of democracy and freedom.

The First World War was the second most recent major war in American history, and I think the statute of limitations has passed on making V-J Day a national holiday.

Veterans Day/Armistice Day is also one of the few secular national holidays that we share with most Western countries.

Strange you don't consider Vietnam a major war. I won't blame you for forgetting Korea though as even contemporaries did so.

For me the definition of "major war" is were civilians forcibly conscripted.

Total deaths of the Vietnam War, on all sides, were around 1.5 million. Korea was around 1.2 million.

WWII was 50-90 million and WWI was 40 million. Vietnam and Korea (two conflicts that my father actually fought in) were wars, for sure, but not major wars compared to the World Wars.

US had 418,500 WWII deaths, and Korea had 128,650. Both within the same order of magnitude of each other. Vietnam surprisingly had only 60,000 US deaths - it is more notable for the resistance at home it spawned.

There's no reasonable way to conclude these were not "major" wars in the context of US history.

In the context of US history, the World Wars transformed the United States from a parochial, isolationist regional power into a powerful superpower.

The Korean War transformed the United States from a country that occupied half of Korea with the permission of a local, democratically elected government to a country that occupies half of Korea with the permission of a local, democratically elected government. Vietnam transformed the United States into a slightly less interventionist country for 20-30 years and reduced the scope of Johnson's social welfare reforms.

The World Wars also saw the wide-scale mobilization of the entire nation, including rationing, large-scale transformation of American industry to war production, coastal blackouts at night to protect shipping traffic, ubiquitous propaganda, and other measures. World War II was more disruptive to the life of the typical American at home than any other war that didn't physically take place on American soil. (In fact, parts of World War II did take place on American soil.) Korea and Vietnam--"major" wars maybe in isolation, but not at all compared to WWII.

I never argued about the relative importance of the wars, just that your bar for "major" is extremely high.

You also forget about Korea as the start of the communist domino theory that directly led to the Vietnam intervention. And vastly understate the cultural changes that happened as a result of the Vietnam war protests.

Korea and Vietnam simply weren’t as significant as the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the First World War, or the Second World War. They weren’t completely insignificant historical events, but they also just aren’t comparable to the half dozen biggest wars in US history, and that’s what I call “major wars” because the marginal difference between WWII and Korea is so much bigger than the marginal difference between Korea and, say, Grenada.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com