[Peace-discuss] Passionate article

[Morton K. Brussel]

It's grammar leaves a little to be desired, but the message comes 
through with force.

MKB

Class war / Christmas Truce

Andrea Noll

Germans to the front! We're at it again: 3 340 'Bundeswehr' soldiers 
stationed in Kosovo (Nato-KFOR), 1 330 in Bosnia-Herzegowina 
(Nato-SFOR, (in 2004 EU-command?)), a few dozen in Macedonia (EU 
operation 'Concordia' and Nato HQ Skopje), more than 2 000 in 
Kabulistan and Kunduz (UN/Nato operation ISAF). 200 German troops in 
support of ISAF in Usbekistan. Several hundred Germans as part of 
operation "Enduring Freedom" at the Horn of Africa, in the Gulf of 
Oman, and in Kenya. And finally 230 Germans in the Eastern Mediterrian 
(Nato's "Active Endeavor").

The newly established Nato Response Force (NRF) - decided November 2002 
at the Nato Summit in Prague for "humanitarian crisis intervention" 
worldwide - has already 9 000 troops under command. Germany is to 
contribute one of the biggest single contingents - 1/4 of all troops. 
The buildup is to be completed till autumn 2006 (21 000 soldiers). So, 
while Germany, as other European countries, officially abstains from 
the war in Iraq we're part of America's wars "against terror" in many 
places all over the world - under the command of EU, Nato (or UN/Nato, 
as in Kabulistan and surrounding warlord countries, formerly known as 
Afghanistan).

Meanwhile Bigger EU is busy creating "Nato independent military 
structures" and again we Germans ("Germany is to be defended at the 
Hindukusch", says German Defense Minister Wolfgang Struck) play an 
important part. In 2004 the European Union will establish its own 
massive Rapid Reaction Force - "for rescue and humanitarian 
intervention". It's supposed to operate independent from Nato and its 
centers of command. In December 2003 the EU Summit rubber-stamped ESS, 
the European Union's new security strategy paper, or 'Solana Doctrine' 
(no, not the Bush-Wolfowitz-Doctrine, but there are resemblances).

André Brie, member of the EU Parliament (for the German leftist party 
PDS) noted:

"The new "security strategy" was officially confirmed in Brussels. It's 
not about crisis prevention or efficient development aid nor is it 
about a stabilizing diplomacy. It's merely about rebuilding Europe ... 
into a military power capable of "robust" intervention worldwide, and 
this explicitly not against Nato and the US but with them - in order to 
enact American world interests" ('Freitag', December 19, 2003).

And there's the planned European Satellite Navigation System Galileo, 
supposed to render Europe independent from American GPS. Will it open 
the (military) stargates to us? Is it an important step forward for 
two-paced Europe? Will we eventually become independent from Nato and 
adventurous U.S. (and, yes, there's ESA's blind hound dog (Beagle 2) on 
Mars - the Roman God of War)?

Mainstream media want to sell us Galileo and EU's socalled "independent 
military structures" as our splendid way to (military) self 
determination. "Emancipation" and "independence" are terms favouritely 
used to sweeten to us the bitter pill of immense costs for 'Secure 
Europe in a Better World' (rather Insecure Europe in an ever more 
Endangered Imperialistic-Globalised World) (1).

But don't let yourself be fooled. André Brie's perfectly right. EU's 
new military forces will be but auxiliary armies for the U.S. - to be 
quickly integrated in Nato structures in case of need. And Galileo? 
Better read the smallprint of our proud starraker's project. The US 
Administration has already worked out a deal with EU, that in case of 
military necessity America is to close down our (civil) stargate 
Galileo whenever it chooses - which would leave more than one European 
driver or rescue team in the dark. The U.S. is in high command - no 
matter, what Europeans decide.

"Behind the maze of field trenches, in which working men and employees 
shot down each other while their bosses made good profits by it..."(2)

Europe's military buildup is class warfare. It's a war against Europe's 
working people who pay the price - and not only in Euro or Pound. The 
ever growing costs for the buildup of a military infrastructure on a 
supranational EU-level, and for transforming our (defensive) national 
armies into (aggressive) reaction forces will swallow our European 
welfare states.

And it's "lower class" soldiers from Germany, France, Italy or Britain 
to return in the bodybags - not Defense Ministers or EU strategic 
planners like Mr. Solana. It's the young 'Zeitsoldat' to step on a 
landmine in Kosovo, it's Gefreiter Schmidt or Müller who gets killed in 
an ambush in Kabul.

It's ordinary people of the Jessica Lynch type that pay the price for 
our Governments' wargames - as it's ordinary Afghans or Iraqis who pay 
the price of war, not the warlords. Ordinary people in Europe - as the 
people of the U.S., of Russia or Israel - must understand, and 
understand quick: No matter who the officially declared enemy, they 
will be among the victims. So, instead of playing 'universal soldier' 
we must join in an 'universal peace camp' and overrun our warmongers.

In Israel the Refusenik movement and the rebelling elite troops are an 
encouraging sign. In the U.S. and allied countries doubts about the 
"war on terror" seem to rise. And Russians have learned in a bloody 
lesson that their war on Czechenia has opened Pandora's box. People in 
the EU have yet to learn: The new militaristic buildup won't make their 
continent any securer or more independent, but it sure will make us all 
poorer - and not only morally.

Christmas Truce 1914

"O German mother dreaming by the fire, While you are knitting socks to 
send your son His face is trotten deeper in the mud".(3)

World War I 1914 on the Western Front. It's the first year of war. On 
both sides soldiers live in trenches - trenches, inch-high filled with 
freezing water. Fleas and lice and attacking rats, a ceaseless, 
penetrating rain from above. "Poor soldiers never die, they just fade 
away", as Woody Guthrie once sang. Rations for normal soldiers are 
lousy, the troops - the German occupiers of Belgium and Northern France 
on one side, and Belgian, British and French defenders on the other all 
share the same conditions: cold, hunger, 'black feet', pneumonia, and 
officers that force them to suicidal attacks across the fenced 
'Nomansland' between the trenches.

Christmas Eve 1914 saw a strange phenomenon in many parts of the 
Western Front (stretching from the North Sea to the Swiss border). It 
often started with the singing of German Christmas carols. "More, 
more", shouted the deadly foe across Nomansland. "Encore, encore!" or 
"Well, done, Fritzens!" Sometimes, British, more rarely, French or 
Belgian, troops joined in the chorus from the other side. Suddenly 
lights flared up on top of the trenches on the German side - like a 
string of pearls. Was it a cheap trick of the "huns"? It was "like the 
footlights of a theatre" one British soldier wrote home. "We not shoot, 
you not shoot!" shouted the Germans, or held up signs. And they meant 
it. Not a single shot fell.

So started what later became renown as the Christmas Truce or Little 
Truce.

It was a big one though, the decision of many, many hundred thousand, 
mostly ordinary rank and file, soldiers to rebel peacefully against 
war. Though it was a spontaneous, unorganised act, it spread quickly. 
Various sectors of the Western Front saw the same phenomenon. Soldiers 
getting up from behind their save trenches - cautiously, with hands 
held up, to show they were unarmed.

When the other side, with whom they had exchanged deadly fire for so 
many months, didn't shoot, they started moving ahead towards 
Nomansland. In some cases the impulse came from German soldiers 
carrying little Christmas trees (a custom unknown in other countries 
then) with lamps shining from them. When the first Christmas day dawned 
soldiers on both sides of the divide came out of the trenches on a 
massive scale and joined their fellow enemies in Nomansland. Their 
first duty was to bury the dead of this senseless 'Stellungskrieg' 
(static warfare) (4) sometimes lying there unburied for weeks.

In some cases befoed soldiers buried the bodies together and not all of 
the dead were Christians. On the British side many Common Wealth 
Soldiers - as they were called - fought for a British Empire that held 
their own countries occupied. Colourful ribbons of dead Indish 
soldiers' turbans blew in the chilling wind. December 25th saw a cold, 
clear day on the Western Front. After having buried their dead, the 
young men - enemies - communicated, using hands and feet, exchanged 
what little food they had, pipes, cigarettes, helmets, in some cases 
even played soccer.

Ypern saw a real soccer match between German Saxons and a Scottish 
Highlanders team. That they had more in common with those sick, hungry, 
frustrated guys on the other side of Nomansland than with their own 
commanders in safe, warm Qatar Headquarter (pardon, just a slip of 
tongue) was a lesson they all had learned during those weeks and months 
in the trenches. So, they made war on war. For their commanders and 
monarchs the Christmas Truce was a nightmare of peace (emperors always 
think of peace as a nightmare and that hasn't changed).

The reaction of their officers, the local commanders in the trenches, 
varied. Since fearing open rebellion by their hungry and frustrated 
troops they often accepted fraternisation for a day or two, hoping it 
would ease tensions. But often they were simply overrun by the 
spontaneous development of events. In some cases they used the 
opportunity for espionage. Sometimes officers threatened to shoot their 
own soldiers if they tried to go across. In some cases they even did. 
But all in all the Christmas Truce was an overwhelming success. 
Soldiers' fotographs published in the British press are impressive 
proof of this strange armistice (in France, Belgium and Germany footage 
and reports of the event were censured) (5).

Just a sentimental story? An act of chivalry? A Christmas carol? A 
Lili-Marlen- Story? Far more than that. It was the start of a peaceful 
mutiny of ordinary soldiers against war. It was a spontaneous campaign 
of thousands and thousands of 'Refuseniks', many of them having 
realized instinctively that they were shooting at the wrong enemy.

They were 'cannon fodder' - those poor guys on both sides of the 
divide. Threatened with diciplinary action, or even death, most 
soldiers returned to the trenches after Christmas. But, the fact that 
at least in one region the truce held till late February - a truce of 
ordinary soldiers fighting in a regular army, mind you - shows, they 
really meant it. If the Christmas Truce of 1914 had lasted, if it had 
spread and ended the war it would have saved the lives of 9 Million 
men, women and children, dying from January 1915 till the end of war in 
late 1918.

The end of World War I saw the end of four monarchies: Russia, German 
Kaiserreich, Austria-Hungary and the Osman Empire. People were fed up 
with those antidemocratic aristocratic warmongers.

"The ones who call the shots won't be among the dead and lame, and on 
each end of the rifle we're the same" ('Christmas in the Trenches', a 
ballad by John McCutcheon).

In Germany World War I had been widely greeted with enthusiasm. Even 
the Socialdemocrats joined in the patriotism and signed the Kaiser's 
war credits. Sound judgement was reserved to the far left. Rosa 
Luxemburg, the German Socialist and ardent pacifist murdered by 
right-wing soldiers in 1919, was sentenced in 1914 to one year in 
prison for her pacifist call-ups. Passionately, she had warned German 
men, the real enemy was not their French counterparts but the Kaiser 
who planned to misuse them as cannon fodder.

No matter if you wore British khaki or German 'feldgrau', if you had 
the Prussian 'Pickelhaube' or the Tommy cap on your head, if your name 
was Jean or Fritz or John you were on the wrong side of Nomansland, 
bound to shoot your brothers - fellow-workers, -employees, 
fellow-farmers, fellow- students.

"I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are 
fighting to those who want the war to go on for ever. Feeble, 
inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and 
may it burn their lousy souls", wrote British artist Paul Nash in a 
letter home to his wife (1917).

Every war has its winners. Big weapons' producers/sellers and other 
multinationals always profit from war - no matter who the final victor. 
Governments profit from war - using it as a smokescreen to distract 
from domestic problems, and its costs as a pretext for economically 
dispossessing their own people. War is a game in which the loser is 
known beforehand: ordinary people. Ordinary people in Israel, paying 
the price for Sharon's wars against the Palestinians/Arabs (Israel 
being one of the biggest military powers on earth while its economy is 
in tatters). Ordinary people in the U.S. who pay for Bush's wars with 
drastic cutbacks in public spending, and with being the object of hate 
all over the world. It's the "underclass" Allied soldier, dying in 
Bagdad's trenches for a cause which he/she doesn't understand.

It's people all over this planet trodden down by imperialistic boots.

"I am the enemy you killed, my friend. I knew you in this dark: for so 
you frowned Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed. I parried; 
but my hands were loath and cold. Let us sleep now..."

These are words from the trenches of WWI, written by Private Wilfred 
Owen, a British soldier who fell only weeks before the end of war, in 
November 1918. On the other side of the trench lay his German 
counterpart, Gefreiter Gerrit Engelke, known as "the first genius of 
literature to emerge from the proletariat":

"On body-eating Somme I lay opposite to you...", he wrote, "but you 
didn't know! Enemy to enemy. Human to human, body to body, warm and 
cramped."

Engelke died around the same time as Owen.

Today's high-tech soldiers will have to make a decision. Do they want 
to be but remote-controlled robot Terminators - or humans with a clear 
sense of when it's time to lay off the uniform?

Remember: If those Christmas Truce soldiers had been sticking to it, 
they could have saved the lives of 9 Million people! And I'm sure, if 
they had known what lay ahead of them they wouldn't have returned to 
the trenches, no matter what. How many lives can today's soldiers save 
if they leave their "trenches"?

(1) You may read Solana's doctrine 'A Secure Europe in a Better World' 
under: www.statewatch.org/news/2003/dec/solanaESS%2011%20.EN.pdf

(2) 'Der bewachte Kriegsschauplatz', Kurt Tucholsky's famous WWI essay

(3) Highly decorated British "hero" of World War I Siegfried Sassoon 
wrote these lines. Because of his war criticism he was tested for 
psychological disorder

(4) For more on the horrors of the 'Stellungskrieg' on the Western 
Front read Erich Maria Remarque's classic: 'All Quiet on the Western 
Front'

(5) Due to this censorship, the 'Christmas Truce' has remained widely 
unknown in Germany (unlike Britain, where in the last 89 years many 
books were written on the subject). In 2003 'Der kleine Frieden im 
Großen Krieg' was published - the first book (to my knowledge) on the 
German perspective. Its author, Michael Jürgs, was interviewed on CNN - 
Christmas Eve 2003, primetime - on the subject.


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