Christmas Truce

Michael Winship writes about The Christmas Day That Peace Broke Out when a bunch of World War I soldiers actually practiced the true meaning of their faiths, and stopped fighting, of their own accord and agreement, apart from the governments involved, in an event that has since become known as "The Christmas Truce of 1914."



Windship himself had gone to see an off-Broadway play on the same subject, Alex Gwyther's Our Friends, The Enemy, whereupon this small group of soldiers from each side took up the December 7th same-year-advice of Pope Benedict XV.

Windship writes:

That Christmas of 1914, the peace lasted in some places longer than others; and in still others it never happened at all. Afterwards, word came from on high that such behavior - insubordination! - would never again be permitted. One German infantryman in the trenches also thought it was a disgrace. "Such a thing should not happen in wartime," he declared. His name was Adolf Hitler.

In a similar spirit of peace and resistance to wars not of our own making (i.e. if we do not participate, to begin with), Tom Morello's Firebrand Records, in conjunction with Veterans For Peace U.K. have just released the following anti-war Christmas song about that World War I Christmas Truce.  The song is performed by London-based Food Not Bombs singer Fenya, lyrics by Ryan Harvey, and features "former soldiers of conflicts stretching from the Second World War to the present interventions and occupations in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan."



From Vimeo:

"The Christmas Truce lives in the hearts of millions of people,” says Veterans For Peace UK coordinator Ben Griffin, who served in Northern Ireland, the former-Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Afghanistan with the Parachute Regiment and the Special Air Service. “However we need to move on from the idea of a truce being something that is only carried out at Christmas. Throughout history soldiers have formed truces with their supposed enemies; in fact soldiers often find that they have a lot more in common with the enemy than with their own governments."

“I wrote this song to tell a simple story that reflects a much larger reality,” Harvey says. “Soldiers have spoken out, protested, and revolted in almost every war in history. We encourage and need this resistance, because historically, it is one of the single strongest factors in bringing wars to an end. At a time when a civil and proxy-war is ripping Syria apart and the world seems to be lingering on the brink of yet another global catastrophic conflict, this ever-relevant song references history to describe the present. 

”“We hope to convince people that war is not the solution to the problems of the 21st century,” Griffin concludes.

Merry Christmas. May the true spirit of brotherhood govern humanity - rather than political and economic purveyors of war and senseless slaughter.  May we, in reality - not just hope - live together in peace and justice, each and every day, in accordance with the message of the 1914 Truce.

Merry Christmas Mr. Brown

By Aloe Blacc and Alex Finkin, Merry Christmas Mr. Brown.

Tree Of Life

Lila Downs singing Arbol de la Vida (Day of the Dead).  Poetry for Day of the Dead here.

Real Change

The Bernie Sanders campaign will be releasing its first T.V. advertisement in Iowa and New Hampshire.  Feel the Bern in Real Change, posted below, paid for only by the hard-earned contributions of everyday Americans, not the corporations:

Hey Bernie Sanders

There's a lotta great Bernie Sanders tunes.  (Hey, the man inspires for a lotta good reasons, right?)

Here's one of my favs among those many.  Hey Bernie Sanders, by Brian Estes and performed by Brian Estes (who also does a great job with it here) and Happytown ... Feel The Bern!

Hot Sausage and Mustard!

Per twitter stream, these school lunches in other countries make me weep for mine.  The cookie in the U.S. example about the same size as the piece of roast beef in the French lunch.  

"Compare cookie to roast beef"

Those perfectly normal, everyday food items on school lunch plates in .. Brazil, Italy, Finland, South Korea, France, Ukraine, Spain .. even impoverished Greece?  --->>

"This is what (even) a poor country 

provides its children for a school lunch"

Here in the well-to-do U.S.A. (certainly much wealthier than Greece), those normal food items (i.e. from the nutrition community's well-known requisite food groups) are called "luxury" food items. (That means you're not supposed to expect to eat it - even if that is all that food is!)

No, you're supposed to expect to eat make-believe food.  The "let's pretend it's from one of the food groups" the way Reagan said catsup was a vegetable.  The other stuff?  That's for the crowd at the Waldorf.

And .. they wonder why childhood diabetes is at epidemic levels in the United States? 

Let's fund more studies to figure this out .. maybe in another couple of hundred years, we'll know why.  And maybe after another couple of hundred more, we'll do something about it.

So quit yer complainin' and finish those deep-fried cardboard chicken balls with red high fructose corn syrup!

"What a lunch, my little pretties! What a school lunch!"

Poetry

A tremendous recitation by Dave Clinch from "one of the greatest political protest poems in the English language," The Masque of Anarchy (or The Mask of Anarchy) by Percy Bysshe Shelley.