STILLE NACHT – Christmas 1914
I'm
reminded today of a song written by a good friend of mine, Cormac MacConnell,
about an incident that happened 100 years ago, Christmas Day 1914, in what
would come to be known as the First World War.
From
a section of the miles of trenches that faced each other in the mud and blood
of The Western Front came a voice, a German voice, singing Stille Nacht –
Silent Night – and from that song came one of the most poignant moments of that
terrible war, a ceasefire declared by the soldiers themselves.
One
by one, tentatively at first but then in greater numbers, the soldiers emerged
from the trenches and as they approached each other, bearing what little they
had as gifts, they could have been approaching a mirror.
Because
what they saw was themselves, the same people, the same miners, farmers,
factory-workers coming from the same families with the same stories of subjugation,
the same struggle for basic rights in their own countries, and not in fact the
butchers and animals each had been led to believe of the other through their
respective war propaganda machines.
A
day later they were back to slaughtering each other with bomb, bullet, bayonet,
and the High Command of both armies made sure such a meeting of minds wouldn’t happen
again. And it didn’t.
100 YEARS LATER,
WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED?
Well
there is another world war going, a global war, more and more of the world’s
assets and wealth being concentrated in the hands of a few. Think about recent
events in this country.
The
imposition of the Property Tax;
The
imposition of the Water Charge;
The
Universal Social Charge;
The
pillaging of billions from our National Pension Reserve Funds AND from people’s
own private pension funds;
The
imposition of the bank debt;
The
myriad misery-inducing cuts to public services;
The
gradual erosion of hard-won employment rights – on and on and on;
All
adding up to the impoverishment of a nation and its people;
All
adding up to decades of debt-slavery.
None
of this is accidental, all of this is being facilitated by legislators
LAW AS A WEAPON OF
MASS DESTRUCTION
There
is a different weapon being used in this global war. No longer is it bomb,
bullet, bayonet; now it’s the law being used against us. Law is what enables
this transfer of assets and wealth to the few at an accelerating rate, law is
what disables our ability to fight back, our right to fight back, and
as those laws are enacted, laws that enslave us to debt, we’re then told ‘YOU MUST OBEY - IT’S THE LAW! THIS IS A
DEMOCRACY!’
But
of course it’s not democracy, not here, not in the EU, not in the USA; in fact
in most so-called democratic countries across the world now what we actually
have is a mockery of democracy.
THE GREED GODS
Greed
is what rules in the world today, greed fed by money and profit. The Markets,
the Too Big To Fail banks and global corporations, they are the ones in charge,
they are the ones dictating policy to governments who then use their position
to make the laws enforcing those diktats on the people.
It’s
all too easily done of course. All you have to do is capture the key
decision-makers, the primary legislators, and the rest – the secondary
legislators, the back-benchers if you like – simply follow on, whipped into
line.
Even
the capture of the primary legislators is all too easy. There are two main
methods – corruption and fear. Either the primary legislators are bought off –
campaign contributions, benefit in kind, post-politics prime board positions,
or simply cash – or they are terrified into agreement by threatened dire
consequences if they don’t to as instructed.
The
secondary legislators? We’ve seen for ourselves the circus our Dáil has become,
the Laurel and Hardy act of Jerry Buttimer and Jim Daly when we in the Ballyhea
campaign had a Private Member’s Bill introduced by the Technical Group in November
2013 for the government to just ask the ECB to allow the destruction of the Promissory
Notes bonds. In what has become all-too-familiar from the government benches, Messrs
Buttimer and Daly totally ignored the actual motion itself, proceeded to expound
on matters that weren’t at all being proposed, then went on to use the
privilege of the chamber to denigrate us, tittering away at their own juvenile
jokes.
We
saw the circus to even greater effect on the night of the Promissory Notes ‘deal’,
when Minister Michael Noonan landed future generations with debt they never
incurred but debt we and they will be paying for the next 40 years, the drunken
cavorting in the Dáil chamber as the people were sold out.
And
we saw it again in the last few weeks in what – laughably – was presented as
the Water Charge ‘debate’.
GOVERNMENT PROPAGANDA,
MEDIA PRESSTITUTES
As
for the propaganda war, it’s endemic, not just all around us but in among us.
In
Europe we have German pitted against Greek, Irish pitted against German and so
on – nationalism again being whipped up, raising its poisonous head.
We
have white pitted against black against yellow against brown;
We
have left and all its –isms turned on itself, then pitted against right;
We
have Catholic pitted against Protestant against Jew against Muslim against
Hindu;
We
have native pitted against immigrant;
We
have employed against unemployed;
We
have private sector against public sector;
We even have man
pitted against woman.
But
if we turn and look at each other here today, if we look beneath the skin, as
was the case 100 years ago on the Western Front all we still see is our own
reflection. Because regardless of height, weight, colour, creed, gender,
religion, we are all members of the same race – the human race.
We
don’t all look the same, we don’t all think the same, we don’t all act the same
but under the skin runs the same red blood, beats the same human heart.
WE ARE HUMAN
BEINGS, ALL OF US.
But
there are those few who would dehumanise us,
Those
who would have us as mere chattel,
As
worker bees slaving in their hives
And
then at the other end,
As
mindless consumers
Succumbing
to the endless advertising from all their media outlets,
Promoting
infinite growth in what is a finite world.
Who
are they?
They
are the same greedy few who 100 years ago sent those same men from nations
right across Europe into those trenches to die in their millions;
They
are the controllers.
Theirs
today is still the propaganda of division and of hate,
of
fascism and of rampant nationalism;
They
are the ones who would now again have us at each other’s throats.
THEY are the enemy.
So
what do we do?
We
unite. And we fight. We park all our petty differences – because petty they all
are – and we fight. We fight to get those legislators who made those laws to
change those laws. And if they don’t, we fight to change the legislators.
In
a true democracy, law reflects the will of the people; it is for the people, by
the people. It is our will. In our own history though we know how law can be
abused, how law HAS been abused not just to bypass the will of the people, but
to subjugate. In our own history too however, we never gave up the fight to
overturn those laws.
PEACEFUL CAMPAIGN
This
time though, it’s got to be peaceful; just as those now still doing the
oppressing have become more subtle in their actions, so too must we become more
subtle in our campaign.
Go
back to the propaganda machine we’re facing:
We
all saw how the government and its spinners portrayed the protests of the last
few months, the demonising, the talk of sinister elements, the scare-mongering
about the threat of violence, the deployment of the militarised elements of the
Gardaí. We’ve seen also how the Gardaí have been deployed in the water meter
protests, the attempt to drive a wedge between us.
But
think back to 1914, to that Christmas. The gun fodder back then, the foot-soldiers
– were they the sons of those who
were ordering and directing that war? Were they hell.
Now
ask yourself about the rank-and-file Gardaí – whose sons and daughters are
they, whose brothers and sisters, whose fathers and mothers, whose cousins and
friends? Are they the enemy?
So
no, we don’t need violence on our streets, we don’t need destruction of
property in our towns and cities.
But
we do need destruction;
Destruction
of the kind of laws and policies that have led us to this,
Destruction
of the kind of governance that has led us to this,
Demolition
of this mockery of democracy.
For
that, we’re going to need be strong, we’re going to need to be steadfast, and we’re
going to need to be stubborn.
In
this group, after 200 weeks on the march, I think we’ve already proved – we
meet all those criteria.
THREE CHANTS TO
FINISH –
BURN THE BONDS, NOT
THE BILLIONS
BURN THE BONDS, NOT
THE BILLIONS
BURN THE BONDS, NOT
THE BILLIONS
