Browsing: Society

A Brief History On December 29, Catholics and Lutherans celebrate the feast day of David, a man from the Bible perhaps most famous for slaying the giant Goliath.  Listed as 6 cubits tall (9 feet in today’s cubits, 6 feet according to some scholars), Goliath was the mightiest warrior of the Philistines, Israel’s go-to nemesis in those days.  David, as with other Biblical characters, is considered a “legendary” character by many historians and other people.  To believers, however, he is an historical figure that also happens to be a direct ancestor of Jesus Christ.  Digging Deeper With a rock that…

A Brief History On June 25, 1940, the day France surrendered to the Nazis, Germany began planning the invasion of Switzerland in Operation Tannenbaum. Digging Deeper Between June and October of 1940, a plan was worked out that called for German divisions to invade Switzerland from the North and for Italian divisions to invade from the South, with both sides annexing the respective German/French and Italian parts.  The operation kept getting delayed, however, and after the Allied invasion at Normandy on D-Day, it was cancelled for good. The Swiss knew the German were planning to invade them.  In fact, in…

A Brief History On December 27, 1929, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin signed an order to “eliminate the Kulaks as a class,” resulting in a sort of genocide.  The Kulaks were not an ethnic group but rather a social class that in today’s United States would be the equivalent of the upper working class or the lower middle class.  In the Soviet Union, Kulaks were the upper class of peasants who had accumulated more property, wealth and power than the lower-class peasants. Digging Deeper Stalin sought to separate the Kulaks into 3 main groups, the first of which were those to be executed.  The second group…

A Brief History On December 24, 1914, exactly 100 years ago today, British and German soldiers facing each other across No Man’s Land in the trenches of World War I confounded their superiors by leaving their trenches and walking out to meet and greet their enemies in the spirit of Christmas brotherhood. Digging Deeper Not only did the soldiers shake hands and converse but they even exchanged presents!  When they sang carols together, it just about gave the generals on both sides fits.  In some cases, football games (soccer) were played between opposing forces as well. French troops were a bit less eager…

A Brief History On December 21, 1965, the United Nations, often accused of being a useless organization, outlawed racism by passing The International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination.  This agreement went into effect in 1969 and to date has been signed by 87 nations (somewhat less than half of nations in the United Nations). Digging Deeper This convention called upon all member nations to “outlaw hate speech and to criminalize membership in racist organizations.”  Some of the nifty articles cover: methods to prevent discrimination, also in regard to immigration policies; definitions of appropriate terms; ways of resolving disputes and…