I recently saw the 2005 movie Joyeux Noel
and the 2012 Pulitzer Prize-winning opera inspired by the film: Silent Night. They both commemorate the unofficial World
War I battlefield truce in the Christmas season of 1914. During the truce, soldiers from France,
Germany, and Britain—who’d been trying to kill each other for years—sang
carols, exchanged gifts, food, and addresses, and promised to visit each other
when the war was over.
It’s
likely you have never heard about the Christmas truce (I hadn't) and even more likely our
students have no idea it occurred. As we
approach the centennial anniversary of this little-studied event, opportunities
abound for teaching about propaganda, politics and war, and common humanity
that builds peace.
How did
the soldiers involved go to war in the first place? Among other reasons, they had been taught to
hate each other. Before cutting to the
trenches, the film begins with three close-ups, in classrooms, in sequence, camera
tight on a French child, an English child, and finally a German child, reciting
poetry decrying their countries’ enemies:
“Enfant francais: Child, upon these
maps do heed. This black stain to be effaced. Omitting it, you would proceed.
Yet better it in red to trace. Later, whatever may come to pass, Promise there
to go you must. To fetch the children of Alsace, Reaching out their arms to us.
May in our fondest France Hope's green saplings to branch, And in you, dear
child, flower. Grow, grow, France awaits its hour.
“Enfant anglais: To rid the map of every trace
Of Germany and of the Hun, We must exterminate that race, We must not leave a
single one. Heed not their children's cries. Best slay all now, the women, too.
Or else someday again they'll rise, Which if they're dead, they cannot do.
“Enfant allemand: We have one and
only enemy, Who digs the grave of Germany. Its heart replete with hatred, gall
and envy. We have one and only enemy: The villain raises its murderous hand.
Its name, you know, is England.”
In his 2001 book about the Christmas truce, Silent Night, Stanley Weintraub details hundreds of personal
encounters conveyed in letters, interviews, and diaries at the time of the
truce and years later. Numerous personal
accounts include this one of German private Carl Muhlegg, ordered to procure a
tree for his trench mates. “I handed the
captain the little Christmas tree…. He lit the candles and wished his soldiers,
the German nation and the whole world ‘Peace according to the message from the
angel.’” Muhlegg recalls that around
midnight the shooting stopped, soldiers climbed out of their trenches, and
so-called enemies met each other in the middle of the battlefield. “Never,” wrote Muhlegg, “was I as keenly
aware of the insanity of war.” (p.33)
Weintraub reports that officers were sent to threaten soldiers
to get back to the fighting. The
soldiers replied, “We can’t—they are good fellows, and we can’t.” Finally the officers turned on the men with,
‘Fire, or we do—and not at the enemy!’
They fired, but at the sky. “We
spent that day and the next wasting ammunition in trying to shoot the stars
down from the sky...” (p.141).
Years later, participants in the truce were still talking about
it, according to Weintraub. In a House
of Commons debate on March 31, 1930, British Cabinet minister Sir H. Kingsley
Wood recounted his experience of the Christmas truce as a major in the “front
trenches.” “[I] took part in what was
well known at the time as a truce. We
went over in front of the trenches, and shook hands with many of our German
enemies…. I then came to the conclusion
that I have held very firmly ever since, that if we had been left to ourselves
there would never have been another shot fired.
For a fortnight the truce went on.
We were on the most friendly terms, and it was only the fact that we
were being controlled by others that made it necessary for us to start trying
to shoot one another again…. [We were]
in the grip of a political system which was bad, and I and others who were
there at the time determined… never to rest… until we had seen whether we could
change it” (p. 169).
Nonviolent Soldier of Islam: Abdul Ghaffar Khan
Nonviolent Soldier of
Islam: Badshah Khan, A Man to Match his Mountains by Eknath Easwaran (1999) details
the fascinating evolution of the Pathan farmer, soldier, educator, and tribal
leader, Abdul Ghaffar Khan into an advocate and practitioner of nonviolence
before and during the time of the Indian independence movement and Pakistan’s
subsequent split from India. A friend
and colleague of Mahatma Gandhi, and well known among Indians, Pakistanis, and
the British occupiers he faced with a nonviolent “army” of hundreds of
thousands, Khan’s beliefs and work are little studied in the West.
Introduce your students to this Muslim proponent of nonviolence
to shatter their probable stereotypes about the history of Pakistan and
Afghanistan as well as Muslim nonviolence.
Begin with Khan’s own words: “There is nothing surprising in a Muslim or
a Pathan like me subscribing to the creed of nonviolence. It is not a new creed. It was followed fourteen hundred years ago by
the Prophet all the time he was in Mecca.”
Students can research Khan’s Red Shirt movement and philosophy: “You
see that the world is going toward destruction and violence. And the specialty of violence is to create
hatred among people and to create fear.
I am a believer in nonviolence and I say that no peace or tranquility
will descend upon the people of the world until nonviolence is practiced,
because nonviolence is love and it stirs courage in people” (p. 7).
Satygraha: Using passion to
transform the world
In the Afterword to the Nonviolent
Soldier of Islam, Timothy Flinders interprets the terminology of
nonviolence in a way that may be helpful to students. The person who engages in nonviolence both
transforms and is transformed in the struggle to change the world for the
better—nonviolently.
“Dissatisfied with the hopeless inadequacy of the phrase
‘passive resistance’ to describe the innate power
of nonviolence, Gandhi coined his own term in 1906: satyagraha. Satya means truth in Sanskrit, and agraha comes from a Sanskrit root
meaning ‘to hold on to,’ which Gandhi used as a synonym for ‘force.’ Thus satyagraha
carries a double meaning: it signifies a determined holding on to, a grappling with truth; while at the same
time it implies the force that arises from that grappling, what Gandhi called
‘soul force.’ Satyagraha stands for both the means and the ends, the struggle and
the force that is generated in that struggle….
“As heat is generated by friction, Gandhi contended, power is
released from within the depths of the human spirit in its struggle toward
truth…. ‘I have learned through bitter experience,’ Gandhi explained, ‘the one
supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into
energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can
move the world….’ Thus in its
transformative aspect nonviolence is not nonviolence at all, but violence
transmuted, harnessed, used. We could more properly call it transviolence, where the power of
passions like anger, hatred, and fear is reshaped into a potent fighting
force…” (p. 196-197).
James Lawson and A Force More Powerful
"We do not have the
world that we as people are capable of having," exhorted Reverend James
Lawson in his keynote address to participants in The Fletcher Summer Institute for the Advanced
Study of Nonviolent Conflict in
2012. Lawson closed his speech by urging
the audience to research—and learn to employ—the methods of nonviolence used creatively
and successfully over the last 110 years.
So how do we
study this powerful—nonviolent—force? Teachers
at every level can have students explore the Global Nonviolent Action Database
researched by George Lakey and students at Swarthmore College. Here they will discover practical evidence
that nonviolence actually works as they read about creative, dynamic, powerful,
and NONVIOLENT movements for peace and justice across the United States and
world. Advance searching helps students find historical cases dating back
to the year 300 when Catholics nonviolently defended a basilica in
Italy. Or select 1619 when Polish artisans nonviolently protested
for the right to vote in Jamestown, Virginia. They can search by types of
nonviolent campaigns for civil rights or democracy. Or, they can search
by case or geography for historical and recent nonviolent actions recently in
the headlines.
In addition, students
and teachers can read the book and view the movie: A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict, by Peter
Ackerman and Jack DuVall (2000). These
resources practically and compellingly teach about nonviolent strategies for
social change. The powerful movie shows
images of Gandhi's march to the sea to obtain independence for India and other
non-violent movements in Poland, South Africa, Denmark, and Chile. Notably, one segment focuses on Reverend
James Lawson organizing with student leaders and teaching college students the
methods they would practice and practice until their anti-segregation lunch
counter sit-ins in Nashville, Tennessee would become models of the successful nonviolent
force for social change that highlighted the United States Civil Rights
movement.
In addition to
reading and researching, teachers can attend conferences and workshops to learn
about nonviolence history. Among
conferences offered are the Fletcher Summer Institute for the Advanced Study of
Nonviolent Conflict, the Peace and Justice Studies Association Conference, and
other gatherings of educators and activists.
Journalist Colman McCarthy developed an entire bibliography of readings
for a Class on Nonviolence. Links for all resources are listed below,
along with two readings from the Fletcher conference page that can help students
and teachers understand that nonviolence is not practiced in a vacuum. Rather it requires “the trifecta of civil resistance: unity, planning, discipline. (Merriman)”
Why should we teach our children about the power
of building peace through nonviolent, peaceful means? Colman McCarthy’s answer is chillingly plain:
“Unless we teach our children peace, someone else will teach them violence.”
James Lawson echoes that concept, reminding us
that the powers that be have an interest in maintaining a militaristic, unjust
society of dominance and war. However,
Lawson sees—and has experienced—another reality. “I am persuaded the issue is not activism or
apathy, the issue is people discovering that there are—within the grasp of
their hands—simple but complicated tools for social justice, social equality,
for social change. That if we can adopt
it in the human family in many different places and ways, we can change the
course of history from exploitation and domination to the discovery of our
common humanity and to the fact that these issues that divide us are issues
that can be faced in a creative manner that can put them on the path toward
solution. Look at the history and evidence that millions and millions
of people have discovered a power, that if we use it together and discover how
to use it best, we can put on the agenda of the human family the other world
that is very possible.”
Teaching
for peace and nonviolent change begins with the links below:
·
Link to transcribed lines
from Joyeux Noel: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0424205/trivia?tab=qt&ref_=tt_trv_qu
·
Link to 10-minute documentary about
Badshah Khan: Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan 'Badshah Khan' - The Frontier Gandhi: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCTRs8_Bxbo
·
Link
to Pashto TV’s summary of Khan’s life and beliefs (with
reference to contrast to Taliban ideals): http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=kFc8WLHdCAc
·
Link to Reverend James Lawson’s 37-minute
Keynote Address, June 24, 2012, The Fletcher Summer
Institute for the Advanced Study of Nonviolent Conflict http://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/index.php/learning-and-resources/educational-initiatives/fletcher-summer-institute/fsi-2012/2303-keynote-address-rev-james-lawson/#karjl
·
Link to article by Hardy Merriman: The Trifecta of Civil Resistance: Unity, Planning, Discipline http://www.opendemocracy.net/print/56928
·
Link to article by Jack DuVall: Civil Resistance and the Language of Power:
http://www.opendemocracy.net/print/56917
·
Link to Teach for Peace: resources for teaching nonviolence and
peacebuilding: www.teachforpeace.org