Frohe Weihnachten!
Okay, so it’s still 8 days away. Hell yeah.But today rynie and yours truly went to catch a movie which well…got me thinking and on the verge of going emo (yet again. Fuck this is about one time too much. Haw.)
Joyeux Noël is a movie which was selected for this year’s Cannes Film Festival and it’s about, well, Christmas. (The title is French for merry Christmas, for the linguistically uninitiated) Some background for you…
December 1914. World War I has just broken out. The fighting is hard, bloody and violent. Yet on Christmas Eve, the machine-guns and rifles gradually fell silent as men and officers alike stood down for the one festival which bound them all together – be they English, Scots, French, or German – Christmas. In fact, many instances of fraternizing were reported along the front, where troops met in no man’s land just to spread the alcohol, food, and most importantly, the cheer. Some localities even saw the forces burying their dead on Christmas day – one last day before war began again.
Of course, there were serious repercussions. The powers that were couldn’t very well shoot hundreds of their junior officers and soldiers for high treason, so they were displaced to another front. As one French lieutenant put it, ‘you don’t understand our war.’
Perhaps during World War I, there was still sense and moralities in civilized people. That was a time before all the megalomania (and Judenhass of WWII) came in, and soldiers remained human. I was touched…indeed, acts which if committed today would probably lead to a summary execution. I guess the world has moved on, although for better or for worse, I do not know. Many times it seems like we’ve moved yet one more step closer to blasting ourselves back to the Stone Age.
I mean, look.
Someone is denying the Holocaust out there and suggesting that the Jewish state move to Alaska. Somewhere out there people are starving to death on tree bark while their government focuses on nuclear weaponry. Someone is trying to gain a foothold into the Middle East by trying to model Iraq to American-style democracy. To all these people, what is humanity?
The value of human life and humanity seems to have been depreciating with the times. Anyway...
To them, people are pawns – weapons to show that they’re the World’s only superpower or to show any particular form of power – absolute, unquestioning military strength. They glorify the armed forces and their business of war – when war is something which deep down, no one really wants (except the megalomaniacs as above, perhaps) and perhaps the sad thing is that individual nations, and the increasing access to things like education (a very important tool for any sovereign state to consolidate its power, may I add) have begun to erode at the common identity of Man. This is going to be complex, but let me explain.
Nations which have access to widespread education have become able to teach…no, indoctrinate into their people since young that this is right and that is wrong; they are the enemy and these are our friends; I guess why such fraternity between the men of World War I was because they were largely workers; farmhands, bakers, and the like. Education never focused on warfare – not that many had access to education in the first place anyway. That’s why what they knew was what their parents taught them – religion, a close sense of companionship, as well as a sense of compassion for others which not many today can claim to possess. What brought them together was the very simple fact that:
They were all soldiers. None of them wanted to be in this war. And it was Christmas, Goddamn it.
To see the effectiveness of mass brainwashing, you should look no further than Hitler, the Nazis, and WWII. His theories of Aryan superiority, Juden-Hass, and the glorification of the Nazi cause led to the fanaticism of his soldiers and the magnitude of his atrocities during WWII. So something is proven: morals can be subverted by indoctrination.
The people on top will never understand what those at the bottom are going through – they just expect them to follow their orders and carry on. They are the ones who will talk to you about the high ideals and all that high-strung bullshit. I doubt that CO understands what most of us 2nd lieutenants are doing. Most of us are just content to shut our traps and avoid trouble as far as possible. And those up there are just content to assume that alles in Ordnung. Everything’s dandy.
All this talk about globalization – do they not realize that in some very core aspects, they’re polarizing the peoples of the world, dividing them along lines of nationalities?
This Christmas, ask yourself:
Where is the love?
posted by quatscherei @ 23:58
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