The celebration of the Armistice, signed towards the end of World War I, continues to be celebrated across the globe. In France and Belgium the day is a public holiday. In the nations of the British Commonwealth, Remembrance Day is celebrated with parades. They call it Veterans’ Day in the U.S.A. where military losses are mostly remembered. The Great War’s 15,000,000 casualties were largely of the military who lost their lives in the bloodbath of the trenches. Civilians accounted for the bulk of the much larger 55,000,000 casualties during the Second World War.
Service in the military may be voluntary or compelled. America still has a Selective Service system requiring young men to register but only to serve as conscripts in case of a national emergency. The Israeli Defense Force conscripts women (the only nation to do so) as well as men. The women serve for two years, the men for three. In Russia men serve as conscripts for one year, recently reduced from18 months. In China men are required to give two years’ service. Some women who meet educational requirements may give service also. National Service is required of Singaporeans but not of foreigners living in the Republic. There is no conscription in Australia and New Zealand.
We count military service in terms of the years and months spent in uniform or as a reservist. That is an inadequate assessment. The inadequacy of the idea has been brought home by the effects of the war being waged in Afghanistan and Iraq. It has also become very obvious from the fallout of child soldiers used in civil wars, not only in Sub-Saharan Africa, Uganda, Zaire, and Sierra Leone, but in armed groups in at least 24 countries in every part of the world. This service is measured in continuing cost to individual military personnel and their families—who bear the wounds, both physical and psychological, suffered in conflict.
WODEN SAYS in the words of Laurence Binyon:
“At the going down of the sun and in the morning, / We will remember them.”
Of course, it is good to turn up at the local celebration of the Armistice on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month and keep the two (II) minutes’ silence. It’s also good to support rescue and recovery appeals for those who suffer from wounds and PTSD and the like. Yes, it is good to do that. But there is an underlying spiritual truth that must be recognized, uncomfortable though it may seem to some people.
When, as a soul, we pre-planned our next incarnation with our council of 12 guides, we examined together the experiences we needed as a soul to enhance our growth and maturity. When the discussion was over, we made our free choices. For some it was to understand the delicate overtones of human relationships. For others it was to have the experience of abandonment by a loved one. Still others of us took a more graphic scenario—choosing to experience raw “inhumanity to man” in some form. The lesson would stretch and challenge us, but we would not—as souls—be destroyed. You cannot destroy the soul.
The choices we made, of our own free choice, set the pattern for the lesson we would learn at some point in our next human life—but it only set the pattern. Within the parameters we had freely set were the circumstances by which the lessons would be taught us. So, if we had opted for physical impairment as our lesson, it might come as the result of a motor cycle crash, a drive-by shooting, or being blown up in Baghdad. We supplied the lesson topic; the universe supplied the means by which the topic was taught.
There are no accidents, say the Masters of the Spirit World. If you are caught by the Lord’s Resistance Army, given a gun, and forced to kill, then that is the lesson you requested. If you cannot or will not discover your soul’s reaction to the lesson and thus grow in wisdom, then the universe will present the same basic lesson to you again, in a parallel experience, either in the same human life or during a subsequent one. If you choose to experience addiction, one way the universe will drive you to your destination may be for you to suffer PTSD on the battlefield, come home, and take to drink or drugs to get rid of the memories. Then the lesson you asked for must be learned.
So, when we remember—at sunset and at dawn—those wounded or killed in war, let us bear in mind that each one is a soul who chose a tough lesson even before it came down to planet Earth. And let us show compassion for each one and salute the courage that went in to the hard choice of lessons freely made. It may be our turn next time.
Revenge
Thursday, March 11th, 2010A week ago, a Taliban fighter detonated a car bomb near a police checkpoint in Kabul. Ten died, among them two members of the United Nations delegation. They were not engaged in military operations. Both the men were Afghans, as was their assailant. Over fifty Afghans were injured in the blast. The UN expressed its distress at the loss of life, but does not intend to close its operation in the Afghan capital. Life must go on as usual, it seems.
The attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, triggered this war. When the US invaded Afghanistan it was to remove the ruling Taliban who had created a safe haven for al-Qaeda. Hamid Karzai was installed as president after the rapid defeat of the Taliban. The Americans, who have never dislodged Osama bin Laden’s terrorists, effectively bungled the operation, and are still—eight years later—fighting the Taliban and looking for bin Laden.
There is a clear winner in this conflict:
• It is not America and its NATO allies, led by Britain. They are mired in a war that threatens to kill increasing numbers of troops and, some commentators have said, could last 50 years at the rate things are going.
• It is not the Afghan people, who are dying in increasing numbers in a conflict that they never asked for and that causes great suffering.
• It is not the Pashtun ethnic group, which we simplistically identify as the Taliban. They call the border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan their homeland. Pashtuns see the war as an unfinished struggle for freedom and self-determination.
• It is not Pakistan, which has seen its borders invaded by NATO’s army and is now suffering from a hail of deadly explosions in its urban areas at the hands of the Taliban insurgents.
The winner—already—is al-Qaeda.
Despite losing some of its top commanders, the influence of this fundamentalist Islamic group has seen its campaign strengthened immensely by this war. Intending to win more hearts and minds of radical Muslims throughout the world, it has more than achieved its objective in every month of each of the eight years of conflict. In mosques and madrassas, in big groups and little terrorist cells, the world has seen an enormous rise in acceptance among Muslims of al-Qaeda’s anti-Christian, anti-Zionist thinking and organization. Were the Americans to kill or capture Osama bin Laden today, the event would only strengthen the movement’s radicalism. The West is infinitely more in danger of terrorist hits by al-Qaeda now than it was eight years ago.
WODEN SAYS: Sir Francis Bacon once called revenge “a kind of wild justice,” and there is plenty of revenge in this tangled situation.
I am reminded of the story of the old French farmer who had a traffic accident with his horse-drawn cart and a much younger neighbor riding a modern tractor. The magistrate ruled in favor of the neighbor, although the farmer was without doubt the injured party. So the farmer dragged the broken cart into his driveway, where the neighbor would see it every day. For years the farmer looked upon the cart and seethed in fury, plotting revenge. For years the neighbor passed by the gate thinking, “That old, broken-down cart looks quite picturesque there.”
The farmer’s wife knew the anger that was in her husband’s heart, a desire for revenge that paralyzed and sickened him. Worrying about him made her so ill that she died. Their son, a businessman, came from Paris for the funeral. Seeing the driveway blocked by the cart, he asked a neighbor to pull it to the dump with his tractor—yes, same neighbor, same tractor.
Without the cart to remind him, the farmer forgot about the injustice and lost his desire for revenge. He felt better, and even struck up a friendship with the neighbor’s widowed mother, and in the fullness of time, they married.
The NATO forces in Afghanistan include the German army, formerly a sworn enemy of France and Britain, Poland and the Netherlands, all of which are also with Germany in the European Union. Japanese goods and people are welcomed in the United States, which formerly opposed Japan and dropped atomic bombs on her cities. Making peace can be done, and has been successful. The symbol of change is the Berlin Wall that fell 20 years ago this week.
Revenge is indeed a wild justice, and it motivates this impossible war in all its aspects. So, with all the power that an Anglo-Saxon deity can muster, Woden says: “Enough is enough. Mr. Obama, pull out of this war.”
Tags: Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden, war
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