In the frozen mud of the trenches of Flanders, a song crossed no man’s land. Stille nightin German, answered by a silent night wobbly from the other side. It was Christmas Eve 1914, and the men who had been killing each other for weeks decided for a few hours to be something else: they exchanged cigarettes, gifts; They shared chocolate and bottles of liquor and even played a game of soccer. That truce did not come from orders from above, but from the intuition of those below, from a tacit understanding: that war was not theirs; It wasn’t any of them. A sigh lasted, erased by cannon fire, but left a crack in History. In World War II there were no Christmas truces. Where the carnage of the First was an absurd distribution of colonies and balances of power, the Second was burdened with the weight of ideologies; It was a struggle of ideas that held the promise of shaping the world forever. On one side, fascism and the transactionism of identity in exchange for submission and, on the other, an amalgam of democracies and communisms, of uncomfortable allies who only shared the certainty that there was something greater at stake. Behind the flags there were beginning to be visions, and the war went from being meaningless to a crusade. And when you kill out of conviction, there is no room for Christmas carols.
If the Second Great War left anything, it was the conviction that the trenches are no longer made of mud and wood, but of ideas, and that the fight is no longer won only with bullets, but with narratives. Today we dropped as many bombs as hashtags and we live in a state of impossible truce. And in the ideological war that we live in, Twitter – I absolutely refuse to follow Musk’s lead and call that rubbish No one is born mistake-proof; We grow based on them, but in this long life – and, depending on what days, so miserable –, the stumble is not forgiven. This past week it was the turn of journalist Pedro Vallín, who published a rather unfortunate tweet on his personal account, responding to a Valencian user with whom he was arguing, in which he urged him to put his head in the toilet and flush. “Call it domestic DANA,” he told her. Obviously, and if you ask for my opinion, it seems to me to be a disproportionate and distasteful response and that, even if he did not intend to despise the victims, it is very legitimate that there are people angry about his comment. It is sad, by the way, that it has served certain sectors of the worst crowd on social networks – I have not read Vito Quiles and company these days, but you know who I am referring to – to have ammunition with which to attack Pedro and, incidentally, another bunch of journalists.
#Christmas #Truce
