“… If We Want It, Quite Enough”

(updated from December 25, 2013)

In what has become an annual tradition, every December the media sentimentalizes the North American Aerospace Defense Command’s seasonal outreach of paranoia and good cheer through a "live" global online tracking of Santa Claus’ globetrotting, using satellite technology, AWACs and even a protective fighter escort, courtesy of the world’s most massive and belligerent military force:

If adults have difficulty with this bizarre, long-running PR association between a high-tech death machine and the hope for universal peace (begun quite accidentally in 1955 when a child calling Sears Roebuck's Santa wish line got NORAD, instead), print, TV and now the Internet have done their best to keep the tone light by exhorting parents to essentially “play along people, it’s Christmas!” Read more on military co-opting of Christmas here.

Kids might enjoy the exciting graphics, but they deserve better—as do we all. 

Certainly the participants in the Christmas Truce of 1914 thought so, demonstrating that we do have the capacity to do something more concrete toward creating a better future than focusing on a holiday whose message has been reduced to a seemingly unattainable abstraction by the very engine working against it with such desperation--perhaps as much as the panicked generals in World War I felt when they saw British, French and German soldiers crossing trenches on the Western front bearing family photos and gifts of food, becoming fast friends and patriots to their better natures, while facing charges of treason to their respective armies:

The horror of war for the few who prosecute it, as opposed to the many who execute it, is in the infectious awakening on the part of the latter that they are more than their social pressure, training and assigned roles say they are.

Coverage of the Truce in The Illustrated London News, 1/9/15

On the contemporary, domestic front, civilian reaction can be equally epiphanous, to judge by the intense listener feedback in 1988 to a Boston-area FM radio personality who played repeatedly "Christmas in the Trenches", a ballad on the Truce written by John McCutcheon four years prior: "Even more startling than the number of requests I (got) is the reaction to the ballad afterward by callers who hadn't heard it before. They (telephoned) me deeply moved, sometimes in tears, asking 'What the hell did I just hear?'"

Iraq-assigned ADS ACTD System 1

mounted on a Hummer

Spreading to Russian and German troops fighting on the Eastern front, as well, the Truce episode, when acknowledged in the mainstream at all, is considered a flukish, last gasp of humanity on the cusp between a relatively chivalric past and a dehumanizing future of absolute conflict, bristling with cluster bombs, depleted uranium shells and Active-Denial Systems. 

Russian and German soldiers, Eastern
front, 1914

Yet, in welcome contumacy to the hoped-for ethical fogging afforded by the increased reliance by Pentagon planners on Predators, Global Hawks and other unmanned aerial vehicles, 2013 saw former American drone operator Brandon Bryant admit to the unique form of heartache and remorse of his assigned role in killing hundreds of people in Afghanistan from a cushioned console in a stateside air force base. 

Brandon Bryant

Rather than being insulated from the consequences of his actions, advanced remote imaging unexpectedly provided a slant on war's personal cost at once both new and eerily evocative, in its own way, of Remarque's dehumanizing account of soldiers being blown out of their very uniforms by explosives in All Quiet on the Western Front. Bryant recalls watching via infrared the heat leave one target's body as he expired: "It took him a long time to die. I just watched him. I watched him become the same color as the ground he was lying on."

If such examples of human empathy can continue to assert themselves now, as well as on Christmas, 1914, despite propagandistic and technological erosions, they deserve our courage (and willingness in  overcoming our own indoctrinated fears) to meet and draw inspiration from them, year-round.   

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Additional Information:

History as Mystery

Michael Parenti

City Lights Publishers, 2001

All Quiet on the Western Front

Erich Maria Remarque

Ballantine Books, 1929

We CAN Change the World: The Real Meaning Of Everyday Life

David G. Stratman

New Democracy Books, 1991

Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce

Stanley Weintraub 

Plume, 2002