Portside

Reader Comments- Selma - the movie; Labor, Racism, PBA's Patrick Lynch, Police Police Unions; Sports, Athletes, Equality and Anti-Racism; the 1914 Christmas Truce; It's a Wonderful Life, Comrade; Prosecute those responsible for Torture; Okinawa rejects "Pivot to Asia"; Fighting Anti-Semitism and Jim Crow; Announcements- Invisible Lives, Targeted Bodies - Impacts of Economic Injustice on Vulnerable LGBTQ Communities; Symposium: Dynamics of Possible Nuclear Extinction

The tale of the 1914 Christmas Truce survived through the letters and photos of soldiers who, along 600 miles of trenches, suspended war and shared Christmas - with their enemy. The war to end all wars did the opposite, sowing seeds of future ones. Industrial warfare - bombing cities; using chemical poisons; and a punitive peace treaty, with the winners dividing up the empires of the losers - all but guaranteed that future conflicts would be settled by military force.

1. Our decision makers have no respect for the lessons of history. They think the lessons don’t apply to them. They think they can make history freely: that history is like a blank canvas for their creative (and destructive) impulses. They figure they are in complete control. Hubris, in other words. 2. Opposing War - Lessons of WWI.

Reader Comments - Flashmob for Mandela; The Progressive 'Left"; War and Christmas Truce of 1914; Socialist Origins of the Pledge; Radicals in City Hall; Fidel Castro on Mandela's Death and Who Supported Apartheid; Korea; MSNBC; Announcements - "No Separate Justice" Launch in New York City Jan. 7; Esperanza Spalding Protest Song & Video Calling For Guantanamo Bay

Military chaplains seem to be another cog in the apparatus of making war maximally effective. Christian chaplains seem to not pay much attention to the Ten Commandments either, especially the ones that say "thou shalt not kill" or "thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's oil". 99 years ago one of the most unusual aberrations in the bloody history of warfare - never allowed to be repeated again - occurred.