Joyeux Noel

The true story of the “Christmas truce” of 1914 in WWI. On Christmas Eve, somewhere on the trench lines where a Scottish unit was stationed next to a French unit, peace broke out between the two sides. A German opera singer and his fiance (also an opera singer) sang for both sides; the troops came out and shared stories, alcoholic beverages, and pictures; and on Christmas Day they buried their dead and played some football. They could walk around No Man’s Land without worrying about shooting each other. Needless to say, the top brass considered all this “treason” and forbid this from ever happening again. Sure enough, it was GOOD for morale and BAD for the war. How can you shoot at men you’ve talked to in person just hours before? How can you go on when you can see how stupid the war is? When you see you have more in common with the poor soldiers on the other side than with the idiots running the war on your own? And imagine if this “truce” had occurred all the way up and down the trench line, from Switzerland to the English Channel. The war would have been over immediately; they would have faced a wholesale mutiny on all sides, German, French and British. It doesn’t take too much to imagine the soldiers telling the officers, “fuck you, if you and the top brass want a war, you can fight it yourselves!”

Clearly, soldiers who took enemy trenches could see that their foes lived in as much misery and filth as they did. Watching your own soldiers get wiped out by “friendly fire” drove home how much damage they were doing to each other. For the life of them, the soldiers could not grasp what the war was all about. Even had they been astute enough to have some idea of the assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo, that still wouldn’t explain why Germans, French and British were slaughtering each other in France. Why not just let the Austrians and Serbs murder each other – assuming the Archduke’s life was worth even that?

In “All Quiet on the Western Front”, the German soldiers casually speculate on the reason for the war. Although (with a few exceptions) they’re fairly bright soldiers, they still come up with blanks. Even the dull soldier has the common sense to realize, “I’ve never even MET an Englishman until I fought them in the trenches, and I dare say many of them would say the same about us.” Time and time again the soldiers realize, “I have no particular beef, gripe, complaint, or grudge against the opposing side, either as an aggregate country or against enemy soldiers in particular.” How can they? They’ve never even met each other.

WWII was a bit different. There, suddenly, they had ideology to motivate them – ideological motivations which were mostly absent during WWI. The Germans were motivated by regular nationalism (most Wehrmacht personnel), National Socialism (Waffen SS), and anti-bolshevism (all of them); add to this the remarkable multi-national nature of the Waffen SS, somehow able to recruit French, Belgians, Dutch, Danes, Norwegians, etc. (former enemies!) to fight against the Russians – hell, they got RUSSIANS to fight the Russians. Again, testimony to how brutal and unpopular Stalin and the Soviet government was that there was no shortage of not only Ukrainians and other ethnic groups, but even Russians, willing to fight for the Nazis against the Red Army. For their part, the Russians were motivated by their own nationalism (for most soldiers of the Red Army) and communism (for the minority). The Allies were motivated by abstract notions of freedom and liberty; and the moral indignation became even fiercer once US troops began liberating concentration camps and discovering what the Germans were really up to all this time. The Japanese sincerely believed in their own country’s destiny to rule Asia and defeat the caucasian US/European powers. Of course, WWII was also a dynamic war, with no stalemates on any front. Men died, but in the course of attacking and defending, not this business of thousands dead for a few inches of strategically inconsequential mud. The front moved too fast for soldiers to worry too much about how their enemies were dealing with it.

And in Iraq today there is no connection between the US troops and the insurgents they fight against. The insurgents don’t see us as normal human beings trying to make Iraq a better place, we’re just occupiers. And our troops aren’t inclined to view the insurgents as normal human beings trying to liberate their own country, they’re just a bunch of sick fucks (which they are). The cultural and religious differences are too much between the sides to permit the kind of fraternization which occurred in No Man’s Land on Christmas Day in 1914, to occur in Iraq today.

Consider this, too: in the US, we have Protestants, Catholics, Jews, etc. all living together peacefully without killing each other (Northern Ireland is a different story). Yet in Iraq there is civil war beween Sunnis and Shi’ites – sects of the SAME RELIGION! If Sunnis and Shi’ites can’t get along with each other, how can Muslims possibly relate to, much less peacefully coexist with, other religions? More directly, how can the Muslim insurgents ever relate to the US soldiers? We’re talking about fanatics by their nature. But at least us Americans and Europeans can enjoy our own peace and Christmas.