By Robert Kreider
We called it "Armistice Day."
I recall as a schoolboy in the late twenties on Armistice Day at 11:00 a.m. being instructed by Miss Biederman (and the next year by Miss Steiner) to lay my head down on my desk in remembrance of those who died eight to ten years before in the World War--no WWII then on the horizon.
There was the school janitor, Mr. Potee, and his brother with war disabilities to remind us of veterans. I had just outgrown a khaki wool suit which my mother had made from an army uniform a neighbor gave her.
I remember our family doctor who had been "gassed" in the war. It was a time of innocence. The U.S. then had a standing army of only 100,000. I had not heard of Adolf Hitler. The U.S did not have 1,000 military bases positioned around the world nor 100,000 (or is it down to 50,000?) nuclear warheads poised to destroy possible enemies.
I am now reading Timothy Snyder's acclaimed history, BLOODLANDS, that tells in numbing detail how Stalin and Hitler mandated the mass killing of 14 million, mostly civilians.
One genocidal dictator pitted against another genocidal dictator. The killing fields were in the borderlands between Germany and Russia: Poland, the Baltic States, Belarus, Ukraine.
Killing was to be done in another neighborhood. In "the Good War" the U.S. allied itself with Stalin, who managed the killing of almost half of those 14 million.
Many of the methods of killing were similar, although the Nazis were innovative with gas chambers. Both mastered the techniques of mass starvation. Both killed in the name of high national purpose - scapegoating, intimidating, demonizing the victims.
Victims were conspirators, criminals, enemies of the state. With incredible bureaucratic care the Soviets recorded the names of victims. I am at page 271 of a 400-page book. I feel voyeur guilt in staying on to the book's end as an observer of the carnage.
I also think of other mass killing: British and American obliteration bombing of German cities, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the civilian victims in Iraq and Afghanistan. I also think of all the unapologetic scapegoating in contemporary political rhetoric.
As an antidote to BLOODLANDS, these fall months I have been teaching a Sunday School class studying the Psalms. I have been impressed that amidst the soaring, lyrical language of the devout psalmist are the repeated moments of anguish, self criticism and contrition.
Is penance and contrition ever a viable political stance?
Those are melancholy nostalgic reflections for a day we once called "Armistice Day."
Robert Kreider is a former president of Bluffton University. He lives in North Newton, Kansas. His e-mail address is: [email protected]
