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There are moments when silence becomes complicity. This is one of them. Veterans For Peace will not remain silent while the machinery of killing is being normalized at home.
Across the country, governments are once again embracing state killing—the so-called death penalty—with disturbing enthusiasm. Oklahoma is preparing to execute veteran James Pavatt on November 12. The federal government is preparing to execute former Army Major Nidal Hasan by military firing squad.
Tennessee recently attempted to execute Christa Pike and failed, leaving behind yet another brutal example of the fiction that there is some clean, clinical, humane way for the state to kill a human being.
These are not isolated events. They are expressions of the same system: one that can only offer organized violence, and frames it as justice, order, or security.
November 12 comes one day after Armistice Day.
For Veterans For Peace, November 11 is not a celebration of military power. It marks the moment the guns finally fell silent after the slaughter of the First World War. It is a day to remember what war does to human beings and to recommit ourselves to lasting peace.
What does that commitment mean if the very next morning, the machinery of state killing starts right up again?
At the same time, the federal government is preparing to execute a former Army doctor and mass shooter by military firing squad. Whatever one thinks of his crimes, deliberately ordering soldiers to shoot a restrained human being to death is not healing. It asks service members to become instruments of murder and extends the trauma outward. To the condemned, to the families of the victims, to witnesses, to prison staff, and to the soldiers ordered to kill Not to mention the society that accepts this murder as normal.
Veterans know something about the consequences of organized violence.
We know that violence does not remain confined to its intended target. It ripples outward. It leaves wounds in individuals, in families and across communities. And institutions that repeatedly turn to violence teach society that violence is an acceptable answer to fear, anger and injury.
Simply put, capital punishment is war logic.
An enemy is identified. The state mobilizes the capacity for violence. It presents this destructive power as safety, order and justice.
We reject that logic abroad, just as we reject it at home.
There is no morally clean execution. There is no humane firing squad. There is no peaceful way to strap down a restrained human being and deliberately stop their heart.
And there is no contradiction between demanding accountability and rejecting so-called capital punishment.
Terrible crimes cause terrible harm. Victims and their loved ones deserve compassion, justice and real security. Those who cause grave harm can be held accountable and, when necessary, separated from society.
But justice is not synonymous with vengeance.
Firing bullets into a restrained human being does not restore the dead. It does not erase trauma. It does not end a cycle of violence. It adds another deliberate killing to the aftermath of the first.
This matters especially now.
We are living amid war, genocide, ecocide, nuclear brinksmanship, rising hate, political repression and the increasing militarization of our domestic society. These are not separate moral crises. They reflect the same dangerous impulse: when confronted with fear, conflict or human suffering, to reach first for instruments of violence.
Veterans For Peace was founded to challenge that impulse. Our Statement of Purpose calls on us to resist repression in our communities, oppose militarization, seek justice for veterans and victims of war, abolish war as an instrument of policy, and help build a peaceful world. Veterans For Peace therefore calls for an end to capital punishment in the United States, an immediate halt to scheduled executions, and the abandonment of firing squads and every other method devised to make state killing appear orderly or acceptable.
A society committed to peace must reject the machinery of death.
We have seen enough killing. It is time to choose a better path.
Peace at Home, Peace Abroad.