The day they laid down their swords and shields

This week is the 100th anniversary of the 1914 Christmas Truce among the World War I combatants in Europe.  It has been memorialized in films such as Joyeux Noel . 

It is memorialized every year in a stirring musical production (“All is calm”) in Minneapolis.

A group called Operation Plum Pudding is collecting letters from and newspaper articles about British soldiers who participated in the truce. 

A group of students from Brigham Young University have developed an emotionally intense interfaith video based on the event to promote the possibility of peace from their own Christian perspective.

If you do a search on Christmas Truce, 1914, you will find links to a myriad of both recent and classic news articles and videos on this event. It is encouraging that a brief experiment in peace has some status along with all the commemorations of war.

On this 100th  anniversary of the Christmas respite from slaughter, many of us take heart in envisioning warriors putting down their arms when courageous people on both sides extend a hand of peace. However, in 1914, as in the savage eras before and since then, many men in the upper echelons of the power structures  see  “fraternizing” (making unrelated people into brothers) as dangerous to their purposes. If you want your people to kill their people, you don’t want your people to find out that their people are human beings like themselves, with mothers and fathers, possibly wives or sweethearts, and perhaps children.

So, my question for this holiday season is how can we create a society, a world, in which people recognize that there are no unrelated people.  We are all brothers and sisters; killing, maiming, and destroying members of our families and the lands in which they reside is not a good way to ensure the survival of humanity or other life on the planet.

 

The US government: Guilty of torture, as charged

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Abu Ghraib, Oct. 20, 2003. Nude detainee handcuffed to bed with pair of panties draped over his face. In the public domain.

Today’s post is an excerpt from an interview with guest author Dr. Anthony Marsella back in 2008. What the US administration has been doing and attempting to justify in its “war on terror” is terrifying; it is also torture, as the recently released report on torture from the U.S. Senate corroborates.

“The issue of torture is important for our very nation. What is at stake is our moral authority in the world. The US Administration has simply used the notion that torture is an essential tool for our national defense. In fact, [George Bush] has had the audacity to say that the use of torture may be necessary to protect America.

This kind of rabid nationalism, this fear of non-existent provocation is consistent with many political leaders throughout history who sought to control and dominate people by creating fear and anxiety, so that they would increasingly rely upon their national leader for protection. This is an old trick used by dictators.

Unfortunately the media has failed to respond and the American public has been taken in by all this propaganda, so resistance has not been as widespread as we would like it to be. It would be wonderful if throughout the US all organisations as well as people would simply say to the government: what are you doing? Stop it! It is against the law! You are destroying our national character and integrity….

On the one hand Bush said: “We refuse to be part of this. America does not torture” and on the other hand we know what happened in Abu Ghraib, in Guantanamo, in Kandahar and in rendition. We also know that the Pentagon has decided to eliminate some of the Geneva Convention restrictions on Torture from its army training manual and the highest members of the US administration have had meetings in which they have authorised and actually orchestrated torture activities.

This duplicity, along with the very act of permitting torture itself, has a heavy cost on America because in the eyes of the world we have lost our moral authority. We have lost whatever role and stature we had. We are no longer the voice for democracy, freedom and justice.”

Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D., is Emeritus Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii. The complete interview can be found at http://xa.yimg.com/kq/groups/6158459/1031475337/name/Marsella%20-%20The%20Moral%20Cost%20of%20Torture%2Edoc