Why Can’t People Get Along?

“Nothing will end war unless the peoples themselves refuse to go to war.” ~ Albert Einstein

During a conversation with a friend about Iran and Ukraine and the government’s role in each unconstitutional war, she grew increasingly exasperated.  President Trump had just issued his Easter Sunday threat that unnerved her and much of the rest of the world. She had voted for Trump in 2024.  Where was the peace he promised? Despair broke through and she blurted out, “Why can’t people get along!?”

According to a consensus of cynics, people can’t get along because we’re all a bunch of thieving, envious, back-stabbing sons-of-bitches.  Freaks who believe otherwise are off somewhere knitting or writing poetry.

I think a better answer is the traps we’ve set for ourselves. How to Win Friends & I... Dale Carnegie Best Price: $3.98 Buy New $10.84 (as of 02:35 UTC - Details)

The first trap is the State itself.  We have allowed the State to exist out of a misunderstanding of free market incentives; consequently the State, not the people under it, is sovereign.

The second trap is the State’s make-or-break undertaking: War.  Is there a better example of a failure to get along?

The State creates abstractions to fill the war environment it needs.

The Russians want to conquer the world, the Iranians are terrorists.  Anyone who sides with or likes the Russians or the Iranians is not only a traitor but an agent of the devil.  And don’t you dare criticize Israel, anti-semite!

Russians, Iranians, us — bound together by State criminality.  There are no specifics about the pawns who will actually engage the enemy.  We hear, read: “Kill everybody.” “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.” “‘Good Russians’ can only be found in graveyards.” Terrorists are them, not us.  Automatic military registration.

And from rare voices of protest:

“The poor, sir, who are the ones called upon to rot in the trenches, have no organized power, have no press to voice their will upon this question of peace or war.”

“O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells . . .”

The war to end war

In All Quiet on the Western Front, author Erich Maria Remarque presents war as a spiritual and physical hell — a triumph of duplicitous abastractions.  In memoir-like fashion Paul Baumer tells how he and his German classmates signed up for the Great War after hearing patriotic speeches at school.  But the horror of trench warfare and living conditions soon changed them.  “We are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? Youth? That is long ago. We are old folk.” Never Split the Differ... Raz, Tahl Best Price: $14.11 Buy New $14.09 (as of 11:15 UTC - Details)

Later in the book Baumer kills a French soldier and thinks he can survive mentally if he never learns the dead man’s name.  But he does.

The silence spreads. I talk and must talk. So I speak to him and to say to him: “Comrade, I did not want to kill you. If you jumped in here again, I would not do it, if you would be sensible too. But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. It was that abstraction I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony—Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy? If we threw away these rifles and this uniform you could be my brother just like Kat and Albert. Take twenty years of my life, comrade, and stand up—take more, for I do not know what I can even attempt to do with it now.”

The bloodless abstraction “the enemy” had collapsed to an individual person with a life that Baumer ended on a reflex.

The “threat” of humanity during a Christmas cease fire

As Christmas threatened to dilute the fighting spirit in the trenches of France, and since soldiers on both sides had already exchanged friendly jeers across No Man’s Land that separated the good guys from the bad guys, in which the dead and dying of the war to end all wars were scattered, the high command on both sides “absolutely prohibited” any friendly intercourse with the enemy.  Writes Stanley Weintraub in Silent Night,

Any slackening in the action during Christmas week might undermine whatever sacrificial spirit there was among troops who lacked ideological fervor. Despite the efforts of propagandists, German reservists evidenced little hate. Urged to despise the Germans, Tommies saw no compelling national interest in retrieving French and Belgian crossroads and cabbage patches. Rather, both sides fought as soldiers fought in most wars—for survival, and to protect the men who had become extended family.

As Christmas 1914 got closer the orders of the high command lost their luster.  Soldiers were now hearing orders from a higher command. Pure Encapsulations Ma... Check Amazon for Pricing.

When [Christmas Eve] came, opposing troops . . . called to each other from trench to trench and sang. A French soldier wrote to his mother that after they first met with the enemy, they chorused, each in his own language, “À bas la guerre!”—Down with the war!

A more stunning example of gross insubordination would be hard to find.

For one brief moment in 1914, the soldiers stopped seeing uniforms and began seeing faces again.  If only they had managed to keep up their mutinous spirit until the war was aborted, we would have had every reason to thank them for their service each and every year.

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