This is my frank, no holds barred, 'ticking off' of my own 'Christian' faith, my own country and culture. It is totally unpatriotic and will cause offence. So do not read it.
We have been way out of order and brutal in our behaviour around the world from the 1500s - towards millions of black indigenous populations first and then we added Communists and Muslims to that list in the 1900s. Earlier, the shocking and shameful slaughter of the Christian Crusades.
The Russian Empire, including Ukraine for 1,000 years, has been the same but has not been all over the world as we have been. However, it has been equally brutal in slaughtering their own people in the last century. We Europeans slaughtered six millions Jews and other minorities in the 1930s and 40s. What was Stalin's figure? More than that.
In that century, the whole of Europe and their empires died in their tens of millions from an inexplicable, foolish and totally unnecessary war. Those to be slaughtered let their foolish, gun toting leaders, like the BBC'S 'Greatest Briton Who Ever Lived' winner in 2000, to take them to their deaths from August 1914 - and it went on to 1945, with an interval. The violent leaders wanted war. The people submitted, rushed to war instead of resisting and using non-collaboration, and non-violent resistance.
In his book, 'Stalingrad', Antony Beevor wrote of that carnage:
"The whole story of folly, pitilessness and tragedy is revealing ... " (Preface) I think that could apply to the whole human story. Certainly, for the Great Powers unable to live in peaceful co-existence.
In this decade, in just over two years, our side repeated the Nazi holocaust - we Europeans, all members of the Eurovision Song Contest, too! - in killing and maiming an unknown figure but it must be well over 100,000 Gazans. People like you and me, with their fingers crossed, dreading a horrible death in their tents and concrete apartments by OUR missiles. Our friend and ally, Bibi Netanyahu, did the deed in razing to the ground the tiny country of Gaza in an OTT and Old Testament blitz of revenge for 7.10.23 that greatly exceeded the OT ethic of an eye for an eye and, a tooth for a tooth.
What the early Israelis did to Jericho and to Sodom and Gomorrah, the modern Israelis, with our military assistance, have done to Gaza. And, with members of the Israeli Cabinet openly boasting that they were following God's command to exterminate the Amalekites by annihilating Hamas and the Gazans. Yet, we don't mind, one jot, provided Bibi doesn't turn his extermination intentions on ourselves. Gazans are dispensable. We are not!
At this Christmas time, we remember what King Herod did to the baby male Jews of Palestine. He wiped them out - Bibi's boast, too. And, he carried it out.
To Herod's disgusting record of genocide, we have to add our very own Bibi Netanyahu, who is our Little European Hitler and, Russia's Putin, to whom we have set a very bad example.
For military historian, Antony Beevor, war meant, “The greatest sufferers were the civilians, and above all women and children.” So true in Gaza.
The arrogance and brutality and greed of our Judeo-Christian civilization leaves plenty of room for improvement in 2026.
Gandhi, when he arrived in London -
Journalist: What do you think of Western civilization?
Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea.
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