Adam Hochschild, a TomDispatch regular, teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism of the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of several books, including King Leopold’s Ghost and To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918. His most recent book is American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis.
Memorials across the world pay tribute to “fallen soldiers,” but virtually none exist for those who fought for peace.
The first day of the Battle of Somme was one of the deadliest in history.
What if, from the beginning, everyone killed in the Iraq and Afghan wars had been buried in a single large cemetery easily accessible to the American public? Would it bring the fighting to a halt more quickly if we could see hundreds of thousands of tombstones, military and civilian, spreading hill after hill, field after field, across our landscape?