Dec. 25, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
07:53
2871 The Christmas Truce of 1914
A deeply emotional look at the Christmas Truce of 1914 - which was a series of widespread but unofficial ceasefires between German and British soldiers during World War I. In the week leading up to the holiday, soldiers crossed trenches to exchange seasonal greetings and talk. In areas, men from both sides ventured into no man's land on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day to mingle and exchange food and souvenirs. There were joint burial ceremonies and prisoner swaps, while several meetings ended in carol-singing. Men played games of football with one another, giving one of the most enduring images of the period. An excerpt from The Truth About World War 1: The Hidden History.
And over the craters and the body parts and the barbed wire and the little pockets of poison gas and the burping earth of feral discontent, the soldiers wake to hear singing.
It's Christmas.
They wake to hear Christmas songs.
And they hold the white flags up and the Germans and the British and another place is the French.
They climb into No Man's Land and they clear.
They don't fight.
They sing songs with each other.
They share drinks.
They try to learn each other's language in a rudimentary fashion if they didn't speak it already.
They embrace.
They play soccer in No Man's Land.
They are brothers, they are friends, they are not slaughtering each other for a day, for an idea, for a belief, for Jesus.
This was completely horrifying to the commands on both sides of the conflict, and soldiers were severely disciplined for this, and severe discipline 100 years ago was a pretty significant thing.
But that day of peace and brotherhood and drinking songs And football is an astonishing moment of crystalline brotherhood in an otherwise suicidally, fratricidally malevolent conflict.
It shows to me just the power of an idea to end slaughter.
The power of a thought, of the possibility of peace spontaneously emerging between people who the day before and the day after will return to attempting to kill each other in as great and horrible manner as possible.
That has to me always been Absolutely an astounding moment in human history.
And when I first read about that when I was a kid, it haunted me.
It haunted me for like 40 years.
It's haunted me.
That you can put down your rifles and your grenades.
And your machine guns.
And you can...
On the power of thought, on the power of an idea, you can walk and meet people who you were formerly trying to slaughter, hug them, sing songs with them, make jokes with them, play games with them, and then return back to the slaughterhouse.
This...
The capacity of an idea to break the cycle of violence has really been haunting me for these many decades.
The idea that there can be thoughts that can put the safety on weapons has always been astounding to me.
And I have, of course, throughout my life, struggled and striven and Sweated blood, it feels like, to find this key, this key that turns every day into hug your enemy Christmas time.
And I have looked everywhere.
I have looked everywhere.
I have looked in history.
I have looked in philosophy.
I have looked in religion.
I have looked in psychology.
I have looked in self-knowledge.
I have looked in neurology.
I have looked in everywhere to try and find this philosophical Santa Claus That brings a scabbard for the endless sword of the species to put this goddamn stuff away and stop killing each other.
And stop hurting each other.
For nothing!
For flags!
For sociopaths, for the people in charge, who you and I have as much in common with as a zebra does with a lion.
I'm reading a book, and you can find it at freedomainradio.com, called The Origins of War and Child Abuse, about how war is not about resources, it's not about territorialism, it's not about nationalism fundamentally, it's the acting out of early childhood.
I think that there's a lot of truth in that, which is why I'm so insistent on talking about people in this conversation about their histories and saying, man, you've got to get to therapy, man, you've got to get some self-knowledge, you've got to deal with this trauma, don't hit your children, this is all part of...
Trying to turn that day, December 25th, 1914, to try and turn that day into something we cannot or we don't have to be ejected from because the sun goes down and the sun comes up and the bombs go up and the bombs go down and the body parts go all the fucking place.
Thank you.
We can have that.
We can have that day forever if we want as a species.
You can read your Alice Miller.
Poisonous pedagogy.
Adolf Hitler was beaten so severely he went into comas.
German children were hung from hooks.
German babies were hung from hooks in tight swaddling infested with parasites and And so when he refers to enemies of the state as parasitical bloodsucker, he invokes powerful body trauma memories in people.
But that, when I read that as a child, that day, December 25th, 1914, that's when I knew, I knew, I knew that And I think I was seven or eight when I read it, 40 years ago.
I knew that violence, warfare, bloodshed, murderous rage, terror, trauma...
The cycle of violence that we are attempting to burst out of, to struggle free from, to cast aside, to shuck off like a snake's skin of hellish history.
That the cycle of violence that so sweeps up the natural world where everything eats everything.
That a mere idea, a mere thought, it's Christmas today.
That thought stopped.
War.
Thought can stop war.
That's been everything I've been about since I started working on this conversation.
It can be done.
It must be done.
It must be done.
We can't...
We cannot, as a species, climb over any more goddamn bodies.
There's too many.
Sigh.
And at some point it'll be too many to recover from.
And then we slide back into medieval or pre-medieval barbarism, to dark ages barbarism armed with the most savage, star-shredding, interstellar weapons that the remnants of the free market have coughed up to plague us from here to eternity.
