Jim Carroll - 26 Nov 15 - 12:24 PM

A recycled multi-coloured rant

1: Soldiers are liars - Wouldn't know Jom - you prove to us that you actually talked to an ex-soldier and maybe I'd start to believe you - Oh but your and your "interview team" didn't bother to check anything did you, this ex-serviceman did not tell you where he served, he did not tell you what regiment he served in, he told you some cock-and-bull story about first military police, which then became special squads of military police executing British soldiers, unfortunately he never specified any time, or place and although those being shot would have been in the same platoon or company "your soldier" couldn't put a name to any of his friends he saw being shot for not getting out of the trench quick enough. Hundreds of memoirs and autobiographies of soldiers who served and fought during the Great War exist and no mention of these summary executions exist - I believe them, they most certainly were not liars.

2: historians are liars - No historians who wrote about the Great War in the period 1919 and 1970 did not have access to the information that historians who wrote about the same period post 1970 to the present. As the latter day historians have more information from more varied sources (Primarily foreign sources) their studies are more comprehensively researched and provide us all with a far better picture as to what actually happened and why. Obviously such work "discredits" views and conclusions reached in the pre-1970 works.

3: Spectator reviewers are liars - Spectator reviewers are only giving their opinion on what they have read, they are most likely riding to the instructions given by their editor who has told them what "slant" to put on it. The opinion of a reviewer is as valid as the opinion of anyone else.

4: "Max Hastings" - As far as I am concerned, he is a right wing tabloid journalist who learned his trade in a fascist supporting bumwipe of a newspaper - one of your own, in fact.

Now talking about feet being in mouth Jom old boy:

Taking them in reverse order
(a) I do not, nor have I ever, owned a newspaper.
(b) I believe the newspaper in question ceased to support fascists about five years before Max Hastings was born - Before the death of the first Viscount Rothermere in fact.
(c) Max Hastings learned his trade as you put it working for the Evening Standard.

All a matter of record you prat - all you have to do is look it up. Oh but I forgot your style of doing "research".

5: "Dodgy' battalions in the Ypres Salient, wholesale abandonment of weapons and positions, pusillanimous leadership, a reluctant showing at the Marne, a navy that couldn't fire, politicians who knew nothing of war, it all makes for chastening reading."

Taking all of the above at face value, care to explain how it was that in November 1918 the victory celebrations took place in London and in Paris - NOT in Berlin or in Vienna Jom? It is a simple enough question, if the answer to it was because the British learned from their mistakes and put in place the changes necessary to come out of the greatest conflict mankind had ever experienced on the side that was victorious then poor leadership and a reluctant populace would not explain it - good leadership and a country four square behind it would.

Rant on Jom - it must be playing absolute hell with your blood pressure.