Excuse me, which freedoms did you think you were defending?

[avram]

This relates to some stuff that came up recently in lyonesse’s journal:

Anti-Iraq war veterans pulled from parade

TALLAHASSEE — A group of 30 military veterans critical of the war in Iraq hoped to use Tuesday's Veterans Day parade to call attention to the increasingly deadly conflict but instead found themselves fighting for something much more fundamental.

Members of Veterans For Peace and Vietnam Veterans Against the War were yanked off a downtown Tallahassee street, directly in front of the Old Capitol, while marching in the holiday parade they had legitimately registered in.

[...]

"We don't care where they are, as long as they're somewhere else," said Charles LeCroy, an Air Force personnel superintendent in Vietnam and second vice commander of American Legion Post 13 in Tallahassee. "It's disrespectful, that's what it is, and I just can't stomach or tolerate or conceive of it."

And here (emphasis added by me) is the US Department of Veterans Affairs, on the origin of Veterans Day (originally Armistice Day):

An Act (52 Stat. 351; 5 U. S. Code, Sec. 87a) approved May 13, 1938, and the 11th of November in each year a legal holiday — a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be hereafter celebrated and known as “Armistice Day.”

Patrick points out another recent related irony.