A typical irreverent comment on "Veterans Day": It's a lot like when the War Department was changed to the Defense Department. You can cover a cow pie in strawberries but I'm still not going to eat it. Translation: we can try to sanitize our wars of aggression by turning them into a holiday where we celebrate our veterans for protecting our freedoms but we ought to know better than to believe that nonsense. What we did in Vietnam, Iraq, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Libya, had nothing to do with our freedoms or security.

Like Noam Chomsky said about the empty slogan "support our troops":

"The point of public relations slogans like 'Support Our Troops' is that they don't mean anything [...] that's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody is going to be against and I suppose everybody will be for, because nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. But its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something, do you support our policy? And that's the one you're not allowed to talk about."

Veterans Day was originally Armistice Day, the day World War 1 ended—the war to end all wars. From a public relations perspective it makes sense to warp the holiday into an abstraction that avoids more policy-related questions and historical context, and instead has us focused on emotive topics like "veterans" and "our troops."

 Holidays like Veterans Day are completely useless, other than to give a periodical reminder to fall in line behind policies that harm other people. Days like this don't mean anything. You can't just say you support the troops and freedom unless your actions demonstrate that you actually do support those things. Unfortunately, our actions continually demonstrate the opposite. I don't want to hear a single thing about support for the troops and freedom until we can show we are actually serious about it.