War may come naturally to societies, but not to individuals.
O
n December 24, 1914, strange things were happening in the battlefield trenches. In the region of Ypres, Belgium, German troops propped Christmas trees on their parapets and decorated them with candles. That evening, they sang out Christmas carols in German to their enemies across the muddy no-man’s land. The British troops responded by singing Christmas carols in English. The camaraderie escalated and soldiers on both sides began to leave the trenches, mingling and exchanging gifts of whisky, jam, cigars, chocolate and the like. The Christmas truce spread down both trenches, according to military historian Gwynne Dyer, “at the speed of candlelight.” While accounts of this often-told tale vary, all would agree that the Germans initiated the truce. In his book, The Small Peace in the Great War, Michael Jurgs notes that events were kicked off a few days before Christmas when a German regiment lobbed a carefully wrapped package across the no-mans land to the British side. Inside was a chocolate cake, with a note requesting the soldiers to join in an hour-long ceasefire that evening, to celebrate their captain’s birthday. This mass outbreak of peace on the front alarmed the high command on both sides. They issued orders against fraternization, but it was days before all the men were back in the trenches, returning to the all-important business of killing each other. (In 1915, a similar Christmas truce occurred between German and French troops, and during Easter of 1916, a truce also opened up on the Eastern Front.) We have Remembrance Day, but where on the calendar do we mark such epochal moments in wartime, when the sacrificial lambs laid down their arms and greeted one another as kindred spirits? Boomers and their offspring have been lucky enough to live through an extended period of relative peace, following the two great wars. According to the conventional wisdom, our Canadian bacon was saved by the Cold War doctrine of MAD – “mutual assured destruction.” An atomic Sword of Damocles hung over our heads, making conventional warfare a thing of the past. Of course, this is only a partial truth. While it’s certainly likely that nuclear stalement put a crimp into conscription, that didn’t stop the superpowers from playing out their proxy wars across the world, from Angola to El Salvador. The Cold War put diplomatic
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relations between East and West into deep freeze, but a hot war in the global south sent millions to their graves and created misery for millions more survivors. The fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of communism, momentarily halted superpower brinksmanship, but not much else. The march of war continued through Kosovo, Rwanda, Darfur, Lebanon, The Congo, Afghanistan and Iraq. Back in the seventies, I was just a naïve kid on the outskirts of Empire, whose closest acquaintance with battle was the TV series MASH and the BBC series The World at War. The sitcom was bloodless and the documentary footage grainy and discreet. The past was buried and the future looked good. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had been unseated and put to work shuffling papers in the Pentagon and Kremlin. It seemed my parents’ generation hadn’t just defeated poverty, but conventional warfare as well. The price was paid in body counts. Factoring war-related famine and disease, there were an estimated 10 million civilian casualties in World War 1 and 47 million in World War 2. Every year on Remembrance Day, the Commonwealth nations officially commemorate the sacrifices of members of both the armed forces and of civilians in times of war. But the remembering is definitely weighted toward the warriors. Yet in the final analysis, war isn’t about remembering, but dismembering – separating people from their fami-
by Geoff Olson
to slide back into a nuclear confrontation is a twist of the kaleidoscope that shifts international relations into a new pattern of rival alliances.”
D
oes war come naturally to human beings? Let’s go back thousands of years, before the emergence of civilization. Imagine a group of tribes living together peacefully, in balance with their environment and with one another. Suddenly, there is a dry spell or a collapse of the local food supply. One tribe decides to make some weapons and conquer the next tribe, turning them into slaves. The other tribe has three choices: 1) If they flee, the paradigm of violent tribe expands into their territory. 2) If they submit to slavery, the paradigm of violent tribe expands into their territory. 3) If they build weapons to fight back, the paradigm of the violent tribe expands into their territory. This is the crux of Andrew Bard Schmookler’s 1984 work, The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution. In Schmookler’s thought experiment, diplomacy is not an option with the violent tribe, which subverts the surrounding tribes to their paradigm. He believes this is how the heavily barricaded, heavily armed city-states of the ancient Near East emerged. There is little in the archaeological record to contradict him.
We have Remembrance Day, but where on the calendar do we mark such epochal moments in wartime, when the sacrificial lambs laid down their arms and greeted one another as kindred spirits?
lies and homes, and even their life and limb. For most of history, it has smashed civilian life, paralyzed relief efforts and dehumanized its blunt instrument: the warrior class whose youthful idealism is channelled into the state narrative of heroism. The Cold War may be over, but we’re still in a hairtrigger situation, especially with the US policy of preemptive nuclear strikes against “rogue states.” In his book War, Dyer observes, “All the major states are still organized for war and all that is needed for the world
Similarly, historian and eco-activist Derrick Jensen holds that civilization is not only inseparable from war; it is war. Expanding city-states required a growing influx of energy and resources from outlying areas, which put them in continual conflict with their neighbours. To defensively arm was interpreted as an aggressive posture, requiring a preventative response. Preemptive strikes predate the Bush administration by thousands of years and arms races are older than Hadrian’s Wall.
