One of the most shameful things I’ve ever done was to write a school essay, aged nine or 10, arguing that Remembrance Sunday should be scrapped. My case, from memory, was that it all happened a long time ago, and we shouldn’t dwell on the past. My teacher wrote a rather terse red-inked rejoinder at the bottom telling me why I was wrong. These days, I’d have probably won a prize for ‘free expression’, but in the 1970s such sentiment was beyond the pale. Consider the national outcry over Michael Foot’s choice of overcoat a few years later. Why did I do it? I can’t really remember the motivation. It was probably the desire to show off and be controversial, a character trait you’ll be pleased to learn I have completely grown out of.
Not everyone has grown out of the desire to show off and be controversial. For example, Stephen Lowe, the retired Church of England Bishop of Hume, hit the airwaves last week in defence of FIFA’s decision to ban poppies from the England football team’s kit. His argument was that ‘FIFA is right’ and complained that ‘poppies are becoming compulsory’. He also launched a broadside against one-minute silences ahead of football matches whenever ‘someone drops dead.’
I met Stephen Lowe once, when he came in to the Department for Communities and Local Government representing the Church of England. His tactic was to berate the Labour government at length, and then demand a monthly meeting with the secretary of state, a request I recall that was not met. You may remember when he last hit the headlines, after banning the hymn I Vow To Thee My Country from his church, even if wedding couples had requested it.
I’m biased. I love the hymn. I had it at my wedding, and I’ll be having it at my funeral. The music is of course Holst, but the words are a poem written before the First World War by Britain’s Ambassador to the United States, Cecil Spring-Rice. The words talk of loyalty and sacrifice both to one’s country, and to a higher calling of Christian duty. The second verse in particular, is explicitly non-militaristic and non- jingoistic, in defiance of the charge made by the Bishop:
‘And there’s another country, I’ve heard of long ago,
Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know;
We may not count her armies, we may not see her King;
Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering;
And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase,
And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace.’
Stephen Lowe’s little outbursts on questions of patriotism and remembrance are representative of a deeper, more considered conversation about the meaning of Remembrance Sunday. As a Labour supporter, I am conscious of my party’s historic role. In both the First and Second World Wars, the Labour Party played a decisive part in delivering victory. James Callaghan once described it as ‘saving the nation twice in the century’. Labour ministers and prime ministers have ordered British service men and women into harm’s way, from WWII to Afghanistan and Iraq. Labour members have more reason than most to want to wear a poppy, given the work the Royal British Legion does with the modern casualties of war. Perhaps that’s why Tony Blair became the biggest financial donor to the British Legion in its history, with his multi-million pound gift.
But for me, there’s a deeper, cultural significance too. I’ve just marked Remembrance Day by standing at the war memorial in my adopted home town. The memorial is not merely a monument to those who died in the First World War. It is a statue of Nike, the winged goddess of Victory. She is holding a sword. The statue is a celebration of military success as well as commemoration. For some, Remembrance Sunday has become a time to contemplate the ‘dead of all wars.’ But it was designed to celebrate the fact that we’d won.
The Cenotaph on Whitehall was created for the London Victory Parade in 1919. It was a temporary structure, made of plaster and wood. So popular was it, that the Lutchyns-designed Portland stone Cenotaph was built in 1921. It was constructed by the same building company responsible for London’s County Hall, South Africa House, and the University of London Senate House, for which we are grateful, and New Zealand House and the Festival Hall, for which we are not. Eagle-eyed classicists will note that the dates MCMXIV – MCMXIX translate as 1914 – 1919, when the peace treaties were signed.
Britain has no 14th July or 4th July or other national day. The closest we come is Remembrance Sunday, with its rituals and songs. I defy anyone to hear Purcell’s Dido’s Lament without thinking of wreath-laying at the Cenotaph. When I first watched the ceremony on television in the 1970s, the thousands of World War Two veterans were in their fifties, there were hundreds of marching First World War veterans, and at the front of the march-past, there were veterans of the Boer War. Today, the tangible connections to the world wars are fast disappearing.
You can’t ignore the politics. When I mark the two-minutes’ silence, I am not thinking about the concentration camp guards at Belsen, or the Japanese soldiers in Burma or the Iraqi Republican Guard. Let their own nations deal with their histories as they see fit. I am thinking about British and Commonwealth service men and women, and British civilians, and how their victories shaped our society. As we lose the personal connections to the world wars, we should re-dedicate Remembrance Sunday, not merely to the dead, but to the political ideals for which they died.
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Paul Richards is a former special adviser and writes a weekly column for Progress, Paul’s week in politics
but we must also sadly remember that these boys ,yes and girls, choose to be soldiers,and their mothers let them. ‘ Political ideals ‘ ,tricky territory,better just that they died in what hopefully was the surely only justifiable cause – defence ?
As an Irishman, Sir Cecil Spring Rice was well aware that the British Empire was morally conscripted to protect inefficient British industry against the threat of German commercial expansion (all the time spending PROPORTIONATELY more on armaments than did Germany). Lord Morley, who resigned from the Liberal Cabinet on the issue showed in his resignation statement and memoirs how the conditional guarantee to the Low Countries (not just Belgium) was caricatured (and betrayed, since the AngloFrench Entente planned to invade Belgium in any case) in order to swindle the Parliamentary Liberal Party into this disastrous war. Very reminiscent of our Party “War Conference” of 2002.
CSR was also aware that Redmond’s support of Irish lads volunteering for John Bull’s profits (speech at Woodenbridge) destroyed the Irish Parliamentary Party and Irish unity. James Connolly supported the German war effort on the basis – factually correct, but in my view irrelevant – that Germany was more socialist than the UK. British plundering of the Iraq section of the Ottoman Empire served to train many Irish lads to form Ireland’s true army – the IRA. Iraq also served as a training ground for the first Labour government’s bombing of Iraqi civilians, bombastically endorsed by Winston Churchill, the bumbling butcher of the Dardanelles, Norway, Mers-el-Kebir, Dieppe, Hamburg, and Dresden: “I see nothing wrong in using poison gas on backward natives”. AngloAmerican addiction to terror bombing of civilians is the contemporary version of the Extermination Camps. The mass ethnic cleansing and pogroms of black Libyans in Tawarga and elsewhere by our client Quislings exemplify these ‘ideals’ in the practice most recent – to date, until Paul Richards comes to grips with the civilians of Iran…..
The Armistice of 11.11 was in fact a swindle, as the AngloAmerican war blockade continued to starve German civilians to death for many months, and of course Churchill’s war of intervention against Soviet Russia expanded from the transCaucasus across almost all of Russia.
Chamberlain’s crazed guarantee to Poland to continue the exile of the city of Danzig from Germany and the deprivation of areas of German majority population led the UK into an untenable position – AJP Taylor’s Origins of the Second World War has not been refuted. Moreover, the Second World War was not fought by the UK to oppose totalitarianism, or even Nazism – but to keep the Germans down, and to preserve the British Empire, as Churchill put it. John Charmley in his “Churchill – an End to Glory”
articulates what everyone knows – LendLease gave the Empire to the Americans….
The victims of this massive succession of swindles and crimes of course include the millions of British servicemen and patriots who were gulled into believing that these aggressions were defending the UK – remember Saddam Hussein’s “rockets ready to attack the British at 45 minutes’ notice”.
Paul Richards has declined morally and politically since he was ten – when he was clearly not a mere opportunist and self-deceiving jingo. His one achievement, perhaps, is to make it clear that those who wear poppies (red ones, at least) are serving the cause of British aggression. At least the Russian (and to a lesser extent the Chinese) governments are attempting to tame the mad dog alliance Richards seems to celebrate. They, if not the British establishment, have learned from experience the truth of Nietzsche’s dictum (re 1871) that nothing is more disastrous for a nation than losing a war – except winning one.
think imma vom now
ah Nietzsche ,that great God killer, that was the war he won – well now what. New world order with the mix we have now can only reasonably refer to humanitarian humanity, parity of sorts,the kind that did make people think yes ,they were simply fighting the Nazis ; simply stopping western cities being bombed by terrorists; ethnic minorities being exterminated ( like the Kurds) presumably ?
Only WESTERN cities should have immunity from bombing, thinks ‘peace and love’ it seems.
The SS(Warsaw 1944)-style assaults on Fallujah and Sirte are of course ‘saving civilian lives…’
Prussia was defending itself against French aggression in 1870 – a fact as unrefuted as the books by Taylor and Charmley which neither Richards nor ‘love and peace’ have even tried to refute. Perhaps P&L and Richards are too lazy to read them? As for the unfortunate Kurds, victims of British policy since their leading participation in the genocide of the Armenians in 1915, Brit policy a la Lawrence/Sykes-Picot ensured they missed their opportunity for a nation-state. Saddam Hussein achieved alliances with Barzani and Jalabani, successively – simultaneous alliance with the two Kurdish nations being almost impossible at the time or, perhaps, since. The Turkish regime has never attempted anything of the sort, and is currently attacking alleged PKK support basis in the Kurdish region of Iraq with tanks and bomber planes. But then of course using the latter against civilians is part of Anglo-american ‘civilisation….. GHW Bush’s NWO was baptized in the blood of Iraqi conscripts retreating under terms agreed by the Alliance of the Willing…
Nietzsche and Brecht agreed – das Denken ist unbequem….
Members of my family and other families died for our liberal democratic way of life. Thanks for your article Paul. I will stand, as usual, by the war memorial with sorrow and pride.
I do not find thinking as uncomfortable as many others though WC ! I was trying to convey the sense in which most decent well meaning people including myself view the need for our armed forces.Y es I think there should be more opportunity for history to be debated in the public arena and there I do think the media fall short. But generally all history is discourse /dialectic not the weapon I sense it is in your hands,careful not to mistake the thinly disguised hatred in your text for the opposite of laziness !
A lot of psycho-analysis of my humble self here! no argument, though…. (as for the hatred of industriousness P&L imputes to me, I do not understand this at all…Chairman Mao rather well said”no investigation of the subject, no right to speak”… !not even correction of a literal – the leader of the anti-Barzani forces in the Kurdistans is Jalal Talabani and his dynasty, not Jalabani….! Actually most decent well-meaning people in the world live outside the UK…. they might be interested in Paul Richards’ and your prejudices especialy those who have lost freinds and relatives murdered in hand to hand thuggery or worse in Basra or Abu Ghraib, or from bombs falling from 20-30,00 feet…. …No doubt the threat from Saddam Hussein against our home islands needed careful scrutiny…..If you bother to read MEIN KAMPF you will find paeans of praise to the British Empire.. as for Dunx E, WHAT about the British liberal democratic internal policy was threatened in 1793-1815, 1914-1918 or for that matter in 1939-45? Hitler admired British liberal democracy as a good method of swindling the masses and as per above would have been happy for it to continue within the narrow bounds (!!!) of the British empire of 1939….
I know that most of the Blairites of “Progress’ despise fellow members of the Second International, especially when they don’t grovel before Uncle Sam. So here’s something from the ‘formerly’ Land of the Free:
On November 11, 1918, the world finally had enough of the irrational killing spree known as World War I. Fifteen million individual human beings had perished in what was the largest military conflict the world had yet seen. Armistice Day, marking the end of the war, was declared a holiday by the Allied nations. Some countries still observe it every November 11.
Although the day was memorialized by governments whose integrity in the whole matter we can question, there is no doubt that there was much to celebrate in the end of hostilities. World War I convinced much of the world of the insanity of war.
Thanks mostly to mutual defense treaties among nations that had no real reason to fight each other, what started out as a royal family feud and regional squabble exploded into a global bloodbath. Serbia was joined by Britain, France, Belgium, Greece, Romania, Italy, Russia, Portugal, Montenegro, Japan, Brazil and, eventually, the United States, to fight Austria-Hungary’s alliance, which included Germany, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria. This madness was triggered when a Bosnian Serb secessionist, sponsored by members of the Serbian military, assassinated Archduke Ferdinand of Austria. One act of violence—over one localized territorial dispute—resulted in the loss of lives, property and liberty of tens of millions of human beings.
It was a complete diplomatic disaster on numerous fronts. Pat Buchanan summed it up well in his book Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War (2008):
Had the Austrians not sought to exploit the assassination of Ferdinand to crush Serbia, they would have taken Serbia’s acceptance of nine of their ten demands as vindication. Had Czar Nicholas II been more forceful in rescinding his order for full mobilization, Germany would not have mobilized, and the Schlieffen Plan would not have begun automatically to unfold. Had the Kaiser and [Chancellor Theobald von] Bethmann realized the gravity of the crisis, just days earlier, they might have seized on [Sir Edward] Grey’s proposal to reconvene the six-power conference that resolved the 1913 Balkan crisis.
And the governments of other major belligerents—Russia, Britain, and the United States—were also too willing to go to war.
The mass death of the was barbaric, on an unspeakable scale and amounted to nothing good. In one day at the Battle of the Somme, the British suffered more losses than any other day in the history of the empire. Practically all sides stooped to committing atrocities. Particularly savage was Britain’s starvation blockade against Germany that consumed between 600,000 and 800,000 lives, according to most estimates.
At the Battle of Verdun, the insanity of war was most apparent. From February to July in 1916, Germans and Frenchmen slaughtered each other relentlessly because their governments told them to. Germany “won” after losing 330,000 soldiers to France’s 350,000. It was all over a worthless piece of land, which, by the end of the battle, was littered with corpses and with about 1,000 rifle shells per square meter. Neither side gained any true strategic victory from the battle.
And on November 11, 1918, the world had finally had enough on this insanity. About ten million soldiers and millions more civilians were dead. The war left behind about nineteen million refugees and nine million orphans. In recognition of the horrible war and the glorious peace, November 11 would be known internationally as Armistice Day, a day for remembering the veterans and war dead from around the world, a day to reflect on the moment that the killing ended and the two sides called a truce.
The United States had lost 116,700 men to the war, just in terms of military deaths. Many returning soldiers brought back the Spanish flu that took many thousands more lives in 1918 and 1919. During the war, America lost priceless economic and civil liberties that were never fully restored.
Americans, by and large, didn’t want to enter the war in the first place, and Woodrow Wilson had won in 1916 on a campaign slogan that he “kept us out of war.” More than twenty years after World War I, Americans reelected Franklin Roosevelt for his third term after he promised not to send Americans to die in another global conflict.
The disastrous effects of World War I had continued, however, and US entry had prolonged the conflict, most likely making the outcome worse. The property destruction eventually translated into global depression. The brutal treatment of Germany under the egregiously unfair Versailles Treaty and German suffering under crushing sanctions and debt made the country ripe for the rise of Adolph Hitler. The war had decimated the Russian monarchical structure and had given Lenin what he needed to establish communism. The damage to internationalism and globalism would not be undone for at least several decades, and in the meantime, international distrust and broken friendships allowed for hostilities to build up, from Europe to Asia, until the boiling point eventually came.
As totalitarianism of different strains began to take root throughout Europe, Americans looked across the sea and saw the failures of foreign intervention. The Great War hadn’t made the world safe for democracy. Anti-war scholarship became mainstream in a way that has never again been repeated.
As war in Europe once again broke out, most Americans wanted nothing to do with it until December 7, 1941, when the Japanese military attacked Pearl Harbor. World War II was even far worse than its antecedent. After that, the United States would never revert to a peaceful state for longer than a few years.
At the end of the Korean War, President Eisenhower signed a bill in 1954 that changed the name of the national holiday to Veteran’s Day. Perhaps it made no sense any more to honor an Armistice that had been overshadowed by World War II and the beginnings of the Cold War. Whereas after World War I, the United States brought its armed forces home, the war against Communism guaranteed that the United States would henceforth have little interest in armistice, in truce, in peace.
And our country’s been at war ever since, with more and more veterans to observe every November.
* The way I had this originally written came off to some readers as placing more blame on Serbia than was deserved. This was not my intention, but I am guilty of welcoming this interpretation. I have attempted to clarify my position on this, mostly with the quote by Buchanan.
another view, as Paul Richards is probably too young to remember the cult of the ‘glorious Gloucesters’ who died – and killed – to save the Quisling fascist dictatorship of Synghman Rhee – btw the 1951 budget ‘need’ for £4700million to defend the UK against Kim Il sung 9000 miles away, with his army weaponed up mainly with sticks and old MoissonNagant Tsarist rifles was what launched prescription charges in the NHS. Pathe News gleefully depicted the napalming of every Korean in sight….More of the wonderful ideals Paul Richards would have us celebrate. (to be fair, not all of the AngoAmerican massacres of Koreans were committed from the air, old fashioned soldier-to-villager mass murders were effected with machine gun and rifle…
JEJU ISLAND, South Korea – The South Korean government has been campaigning to have its southern island of Jeju recognized as one of the seven new wonders of nature. A favorite honeymoon spot in Asia and an official “island of peace,” Jeju already boasts several UNESCO World Natural Heritage sites.
There’s an extinct volcano at the island’s center, miles and miles of exquisite coastline, extraordinary lava formations on land and coral formations at sea, and…a huge naval base currently under construction.
An increasingly vocal anti-base movement believes that one of these things is not like the others. Anti-base activists have gone to jail, gone on hunger strike, and gone to great lengths to stop the Korean government from building the 970-million-dollar military facility in the southern part of the island in Kangjeong Village.
“The most beautiful coastline on this most beautiful island is the Jungdeok coast, and it is also the base construction projects epicenter,” says Matthew Hoey, an arms control analyst who is the international coordinator of the Campaign to Save Jeju Island.
“This base site is about two kilometres from the nearest UNESCO World Natural heritage site. It is madness that the government is allowing the military to destroy the beauty of the island to build this dangerous facility. It could undermine Jeju’s UNESCO status in the future without a doubt. As for the Seven Wonders competition in light of the base construction project, it is the ultimate hypocrisy.”
The South Korean government plans to open the naval base in 2014 to host submarines, warships, and the three new Aegis-equipped destroyers that cost South Korea one billion dollars each. The government argues that the base will protect sea lanes for Korean commerce and bring economic benefits to the island.
But Korean activists see different motives for the Jeju naval base. Under the terms of their mutual security alliance, the United States can use any South Korean military facility, and that would eventually include the Jeju base.
“Jeju is located in a very strategic area between China and the United States,” points out Wooksik Cheong, who heads up the Seoul- based Peace Network. “It’s a strategic point where the United States can check or contain China.”
With President Barack Obama attending the APEC Summit in Honolulu this week and then heading off for points further west including Australia and Indonesia, the United States is pledging a refocus on Asian issues.
In a widely cited article in Foreign Policy magazine, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that, after 10 years of focusing on Afghanistan and Iraq, “one of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade will…be to lock in a substantially increased investment – diplomatic, economic, strategic, and otherwise – in the Asia-Pacific region.”
It’s the “strategic” part that worries Wooksik Cheong, who sees the Jeju base as a key node in the missile defense system that the United States wants to construct in the Asia-Pacific.
“The United States argues that Okinawa and Guam form a single integrated battle field with the Korean peninsula,” he says. “So, Washington argues that Seoul should contribute to protecting these islands from the ballistic missile threat from China or North Korea.”
Since it has a relatively small nuclear arsenal, China has interpreted such a missile defense system as potentially neutralizing its deterrent capabilities. If China expands its nuclear and ballistic missile arsenals as a result, the naval base at Jeju would help stimulate an arms race in the region.
In Kangjeong Village, meanwhile, opinion is divided on the base issue. The mayor of the village went to jail at the end of August as part of his opposition to the base, and he remains there still. Dozens of other protestors have gone to prison, including South Korea’s foremost film critic Yang Yoon-Moo, who conducted a 71-day hunger strike that garnered national and international attention.
After security forces ejected them from the construction site, protestors have maintained a vigil in Kangjeong Village near the fence that conceals the construction equipment.
Jeju Island has a long history of resistance to outside pressure that goes back at least as far as the military campaigns against the Mongol invaders in the 13th century. For some people on Jeju island, the anti-base movement recalls earlier experiences of resistance, particularly the uprising of Apr. 3, 1948 that the Korean government, with U.S. military support, brutally repressed.
During that precursor to the Korean War, government forces and right- wing militias killed one-tenth of the population, or 30,000 people, and tens of thousands of islanders went into exile in Japan.
“The Jeju people around me, they hardly know the real situation, and many think the naval base will keep the country safe,” says Hye Kyoung An, a Jeju activist. “Someone like me thinks that the naval base will give Jeju people trauma, like what came from Apr. 3. But some other people think totally the opposite. They think a strong military can protect the people of Jeju.”
A majority of islanders favor a referendum on the issue, according to a survey conducted by the provincial government. The South Korean government has not shown any interest in holding a referendum.
Activists have cited potential environmental damage and the destruction of priceless archaeological ruins as reasons to halt the construction. The South Korean government has said that 15-20 percent of the base construction has already been completed.
“That 20 percent completion figure is one of the great misconceptions of the base project and the progress to date,” counters Matthew Hoey. “That number reflects the amount spent on the base construction to date out of the total base budget. Keep in mind that a tremendous amount of money has been wasted due to the crackdown on villagers and efforts to suppress the protesters’ right to free speech and public assembly which has resulted from the illegal process that led to the base plan approval in the first place.”
Voting for the seven new wonders of nature ends on Friday – 11/11/11. Jeju is in very good company. The 28 finalists include the Grand Canyon and the Great Barrier Reef. Neither the website nor the campaign billboards that dot the island, however, mention the Jeju naval base.
One wonders what was the terse rejoinder to the young Paul Richards’s essay in modernism, ‘a young country’ (the Fascist anthem in Mussolini’s Italy was Giovinezza’…) dismissal of the ‘forces of conservatism {{- a Blairite before his time, he seems later to have retrogressed}}……perhaps we have a right to know what his teacher wrote……..
As far as the “United Nations” war against Korea is concerned (quotes because the rules of the UN/Security Council make it clear that all 5 permanent members must vote in favour of a resolution for it to be binding, and in 1950 the USSR was abstaining on the basis that the functioning authority in mainland China – the People’s Republic, was being exiled agaisnt all rules and conventions of international law as well as of the UN, to keep Chiang Kai Shek’s rump regime, driven to Taiwan, as part of the capitalist majority…. Anyway, here’s an indication of how the common values we share with our great transatlantic ally are put into practice, long before the British concentration/murder camp at Hola in Kenya (apart from Barbara Castle the Labour Party was keen to cover this up), let alone Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo:
(from antiwar.com – I have noticed that the Blairite contributors to these debates never cite evidence or even give references, perhaps because, very much to their credit, they are embarrassed by the history of the ‘dodgy dossier’ and so many previous attempts to fake atrocities on the part of their targets in order to excuse, boast of , and disguise their own)
As the AP reporters, in interviews with veterans and the survivors of the massacres, show: American soldiers machine-gunned hundreds of civilian refugees under a railroad bridge near the South Korean village of No Gun Ri, some 100 miles southeast of Seoul. The AP report demonstrates that the cultural rot that had inured us to the destruction of Dresden and the atomic bombing of the two Japanese cities really began to set in during the Korean war.
DEVOLUTION
This is big news in America: it is old news in South Korea. For years, the survivors of the massacre have been petitioning the South Korean and U.S. governments, demanding recognition of the crime and compensation. They were simply ignored, or brushed off, and told that there was no evidence pointing to war crimes committed by American soldier’s, either at No Gun RI or anywhere else. Now, the Associated Press has unearthed that evidence, and it seems Beston’s diagnosis “of a culture which has lost its natural humanity” is optimistic, at best. The Korean War seems to have been the beginning of a descent into barbarism – a retrogression that has devolved quite naturally into the carpet-bombing of Iraq and the “humanitarian” devastation of the former Yugoslavia.
VETERANS TESTIFY
Eugene Hesselman, of Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, was there that day in late July. He quotes his captain as saying: “The hell with all those people. Let’s get rid of all of them.” Norman Tinkler, of Glascoe, Kansas, was there too. He says, “We just annihilated them.” Yet another veteran of that noble war, Edward L. Daily, of Clarksville, Tennessee, sums up the whole grisly episode with a bit of prose worthy of Stephen King: “On summer nights when the breeze is blowing, I can still hear their cries, the little kids screaming.”
WHO WILL PROTECT US FROM OUR PROTECTORS?
No one knows how many South Koreans were murdered in this way: the incident at No Gun RI alone involves several hundred. “The command looked at it as getting rid of the problem in the easiest way,” says Daily, and “that was to shoot them in a group. How many North Koreans were in there, I can’t answer that. But we ended up shooting into there until all the bodies we saw were lifeless.” We were slaughtering the very people we were telling the world were in danger from the “Communist threat” – when the real and most immediate threat to them was from their own “liberators.”
A MATTER OF POLICY
I will not dwell on the numerous horrifying details, amply supplied in the original Associated Press article, but merely point out the lesson for today: that the goal of governments in wartime is the same as it is in peacetime – to cover up their crimes and even give them a gloss of necessity if not nobility. Even today, with the evidence broadcast around the world, the Pentagon continues to deny any knowledge of what was apparently military policy in the Korean non-war, aptly and succinctly summed up by Mr. Hesselman’s nameless captain: The hell with all those people. Let’s just get rid of them.
As Paul Richards ought to know, Michael Foot’s overcoat at the Cenotaph ceremony was a standard British Army warm coat; the Sun, that great Blairite rag falsely portrayed it as a duffle coat (though actually duffel coats had long been standard Royal Navy issue…). Fawning and grovelling at the feet of the Murdochs has long been a hallmark of Blairism, and if Mr Richards and his friends want to accompany that dynasty into, hopefully, political exile, economic bankrupcty and gaol, they will find inmates to their taste, though mass murder ona false propectus would not doubt appal many of the honest traditional bank robbers and muggers they would meet.
Your previous correspondents seem to have overlook the fact that it was the 7th Cavalry (veterans of the genocidal activities at Wounded Knee) that committed the mass murder at No GunRi, and Captain Bateman’s attempts to assign the blame to misunderstandings, poor communications and bad nerves on the part of junior officers bear the hallmarks of exculpatory cover-ups. My Lai and Lt Callye’s slap on the wrist ‘punishment’ is another shining gem in the crown of the Special Relationship.
ha Chairman Mao also said “off with his head” .Hardly psychoanalysis WC just statin’ the bleedin’ obvious!
I was the only person allowed to demonstrate in Grosvenor Square ,day after 9/11 my banner said Give Peace a Chance – and on the back- America do not retaliate ,the Police captain said “I can live with that ,you can stay ” Because straight away it was obvious how this would take the Americans. I stayed there all day until it got dark,it was mainly cab divers who shouted obscenities but others too, long with “they’ll be over here next” (meaning bombers) I have said on this site before I thought perhaps we went to Iraq because we still had not repaid the financial debt to the Americans for WW2 and that maybe the TB thought our troops would temper the attitude of the American troops who went with “kill’em all” written on their helmets” But certainly the night they started bombing ,knowing how many would miss target as usual I was so distressed I actually went to the local church,I found others there too .I never go to Church because I feel hypocritical as I do not believe ; the guilt of bombing and killing civilians in our name/my name too much though. Well nearly too much obviously as I’m sure you will try and point out.But we have busy lives,I do, so I trusted the Labour Government to have just cause and I still do .
ground to air missiles at the Olympics,and the FBI,maybe the Americans should just stay at home,we might be more of a target with them here ?