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BS: Re. Battle of Britain, etc.
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Subject: BS: Re. Battle of Britain, etc. From: WalkaboutsVerse Date: 19 Sep 10 - 02:51 PM In response to the commemorations from Westminster Abbey today (BBC), and some of the hypocracy therein... Of course our forebears were right to bravely defend their land against Nazi imperialism; but so were, e.g., Aborigines, armed with not much more than wooden spears, against our conquering forebears. ALL imperialism is/was wrong: French, Spanish, British, Nazi, etc. Or, if you prefer it in verse, here.
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Subject: RE: BS: Re. Battle of Britain, etc. From: Little Hawk Date: 19 Sep 10 - 06:29 PM As far as I'm concerned, the Angels are virtually always with those who are defending their own homes and families and their own nation against an invader. Regardless of politics. That's the way I see it. I can think of maybe one or two exceptions to that in all history, but only one or two. Yes, all imperialism is wrong, and it's always driven by greed for money or other forms of material gain if you dig a wee bit under the surface. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Re. Battle of Britain, etc. From: Richard Bridge Date: 19 Sep 10 - 06:33 PM If one were hypercritical about this the only virtue would be if each country were still comprised of numerous princedoms... |
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Subject: RE: BS: Re. Battle of Britain, etc. From: GUEST,mauvepink Date: 19 Sep 10 - 06:42 PM To celebrate a war I think is wrong. Even one that is won. But as I see it what most remember are the brave men and women who went through it all. We can pity the civilians killed in its name and we can praise those that did what they thought was right for their country (on both sides). The Battle of Britain was won more by luck than good judgement, as Hitler kept changing tactics just at the point we may have been beaten, but one can never doubt the sheer bravery of all involved. It can be argued they had no choice. I accept that too. Nonetheless, it does no harm to remember those who died for freedom and those left behind who bore the brunt of it all. Sat in a Spitfire or Hurricane at least you had the chance to fight back. Sat on the ground in the Blitz all you could do was pray and hope. I detest war. I do not detest those that died in them nor those that survived them. They really are few now I agree what you say about imperialism mp |
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Subject: RE: BS: Re. Battle of Britain, etc. From: Little Hawk Date: 19 Sep 10 - 06:45 PM Well, Richard, there is something to be said for local autonomy, I think...but we must deal with present realities, and those involve a fairly large number of already established and functioning nation-states. I'm not of the opinion that Balkanization of those larger states is a particularly good idea. It usually leads to a great many extremely nasty regional wars over disputed boundary lines, etc. In other words, let's act positively with what we've already got right now. Invasion is a violent crime, just like breaking into a house and attacking its owners. The larger human community should not tolerate or tacitly support such crimes, regardless of whether they are committed by Saddam Hussein, Adolf Hitler, Joe Stalin, the UK, France, the USA, Israel, Russia, China, India and/or anyone else at all. No one should be considered above the law. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Re. Battle of Britain, etc. From: Little Hawk Date: 19 Sep 10 - 07:09 PM By the way, it's perfectly understandable that British people would still celebrate the heroic efforts of the RAF to defend Great Britain during the 1940-41 Blitz. All countries celebrate such courage and sacrifice...unless they are facing the bitter aftermath of total defeat in a great war. In that latter case, though, their soldiers faced the same dangers as other soldiers did and they should be able to carry some honour afterwards for having done so, I think, even if their cause was a failed one. (the Southern veterans of the American Civil War come to mind, for instance. Was not their courage and their sacrifice equal to that of the Union troops who won that war?) Wars are usually won in the end by he who has the greater industrial power, the greater population, and the greater material/financial resources. That was definitely the case in the two World Wars...and in the American Civil War as well. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Re. Battle of Britain, etc. From: gnu Date: 19 Sep 10 - 07:17 PM LH... "Wars are usually won in the end by he who has the greater industrial power, the greater population, and the greater material/financial resources." The rich subjugate the poor. I think I have said that a thousand times and it may seem old, but, they do. It's a game. It's a carrot. It's crap. But it makes the world turn. If we had peace and plenty, would the world turn? |
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Subject: RE: BS: Re. Battle of Britain, etc. From: Tug the Cox Date: 19 Sep 10 - 07:22 PM Hmmmm.....Japan and germany becamr great industrial powers after LOSING a big war....Uk was reduced to victorious penury. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Re. Battle of Britain, etc. From: Little Hawk Date: 19 Sep 10 - 08:25 PM Well, yes, gnu...you're quite right about that. ;-) The rich do indeed subjugate the poor and they send the poor out to fight their wars. And always have. Some rich people also send their own sons to war...if they are in those longtime military families that get caught up in ideas of martial "glory". Aristocrats have always had a tendency to do that. ***** Japan and Germany became great industrial powers after WWII for obvious reasons. They had just learned the utter futility of war to their very great sorrow, and they had just been disarmed! So they turned to peaceful competition in marketing instead. Smart move...and really, the only move to make at that point. The UK was at the end of its great imperial period and had become exhausted...yet was basking in the illusion that it had "won", and its armed forces were intact, therefore its people did not have the same degree of powerful motivation to rebuild that the Germans and Japanese did after facing total defeat. I'd say the UK was suffering from "victor's fever", whereas the Germans and Japanese were not. They knew very well where they stood. The British, however, were psychologically cushioned by their own victory from the hard reality that they were no longer truly a great power in the world, but had been supplanted by America and Russia. They were still dreaming the fading illusion of an empire that was really in its death throes. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Re. Battle of Britain, etc. From: akenaton Date: 20 Sep 10 - 03:17 AM The joke is that when the war ended, the real battle became obvious, the fight against the spread of Communism. The West bankrolled the german economy as what was termed a "shopwindow"....rebuilding the whole country. Before long the German workers had better pay and conditions than the victorious British. It was a game then....and its still a game The Russians lost more people in WW2 than all other countries put together....fighting what was arguably a Capitalist war. Hitler was supported by American and UK finance in his rise to power, as the Western leaders reckoned he was the one who could halt the Communist tide. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Re. Battle of Britain, etc. From: Richie Black (misused acct, bad email) Date: 20 Sep 10 - 04:49 AM It is wrong to celebrate war. Many here condemn government policies in Afghanistan and Iraq, yet celebrate events such as Dresden and the Battle of Britain. We do not need myths when it comes to war. There are two powerful myths about war and its relationship to change. One is the liberal myth. The other is the myth of redemptive violence, a source of the romanticisation of violence that infected many in the west through much of the 20th century and that appears in other guises around the world now. The Second World War was not "about" the liberation of the concentration camps. Similarly, the American civil war was not at first "about" the abolition of slavery - Abraham Lincoln only rather gradually came to be an abolitionist and to see this as an issue key to the war. And the Korean war was not "about" the developmental state that, in South Korea, eventually and extraordinarily emerged after the carnage. War is wrong and governments don't always tell the people their true reasons for going to war. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Re. Battle of Britain, etc. From: akenaton Date: 20 Sep 10 - 08:06 AM Very True! |
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Subject: RE: BS: Re. Battle of Britain, etc. From: WalkaboutsVerse Date: 20 Sep 10 - 11:31 AM Our monarchy and monarchists put quite a lot of time and money, at places such as Westminster Abbey, mentioned above, to help keep the army on side; because, if something or someone manages to spark a strong republican movement in the army, the U.K. will soon dissolve into 4 or 5 republics. There are quite a high percentage of folks in Wales and Scotland who want that, and some English are also chipping away... |
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Subject: RE: BS: Re. Battle of Britain, etc. From: s&r Date: 20 Sep 10 - 11:45 AM And of course one Australian who keeps on dripping away.... Stu |
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Subject: RE: BS: Re. Battle of Britain, etc. From: Backwoodsman Date: 20 Sep 10 - 12:18 PM It's nothing to do with a celebration of war, it's exactly the opposite. This remembrance of the incredible courage and sacrifices of those who fought the BoB serves to remind us of the futility of war. War is wrong. The courage and sacrifices made by those who fought it, however, are not, and they should never be forgotten, nor swept under history's carpet, by others who seem to have no real understanding of the enormity of those two things. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Re. Battle of Britain, etc. From: WalkaboutsVerse Date: 20 Sep 10 - 01:07 PM "And of course one Australian who keeps on dripping away" (Stu)...No - to be precise, I'm a voluntary English repatriate, actually born here the day Alf Ramsey's English team won the football World Cup. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Re. Battle of Britain, etc. From: s&r Date: 20 Sep 10 - 04:54 PM Was it the lady who doth protest too much? If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck.... Stu |
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Subject: RE: BS: Re. Battle of Britain, etc. From: WalkaboutsVerse Date: 20 Sep 10 - 05:07 PM ..."dripping away" (Stu) like water off a duck's back! |
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Subject: RE: BS: Re. Battle of Britain, etc. From: s&r Date: 20 Sep 10 - 07:06 PM So have you surrendered your Australian citizenship? Stu |
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Subject: RE: BS: Re. Battle of Britain, etc. From: catspaw49 Date: 21 Sep 10 - 06:43 AM Geeziz WavyFWBR......What's with the Alf Ramsey crappola? You keep saying that like its significant of something. Do you have his jock framed or something? Spaw |
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Subject: RE: BS: Re. Battle of Britain, etc. From: GUEST Date: 21 Sep 10 - 07:06 AM Before the 2nd World War started my father when he was a boy lied about his age to get into the Army, not so much as a heroic deed but as a way of getting away from a very cruel home life with his father. He admits that originally that was the case but found himself going into war. Then when the war started he was sent to Dunkirk on the first landing and was captured as a POW and interned by the Germans. My father had left school early to help in the home and to help run the farm and to help raise and protect his brothers and sisters and mother. But eventually he couldn't take any more of his father's cruelty and joined the army not only to get away from him but there were useful things he could learn there like how to drive which would help his family more on his return so he thought. At 14 or 15 from a rural country school out in the sticks what possibly could he have known about the politics of the war, only what he was told? As far as the Battle of Britain goes it is right to honour the men who fought especially for the ones without a voice in it all conscripted in or for whatever reason they found themselves involved in it and so that young people will know how to try to prevent another one happening, hopefully. Thankfully he didn't lose any limbs, but his hearing was badly impaired and he still needs oxygen for his chest and I didn't know but the night terrors he had through the years of his marriage with mum when I was small was terrifying for her. Ironically, the biggest enemy he had to fight was this country in the UK; he has had one big fight to get any War Pension due to him and didn't get any acknowledgement at all until recently. He did finally get his medals too, hurrah! And at the age of 88 he was informed that all this time he could have been entitled to change his car every so many years or so, good to let him know now he isn't driving anymore isn't it? This is not just one particular governments fault either. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Re. Battle of Britain, etc. From: WalkaboutsVerse Date: 21 Sep 10 - 01:23 PM "As far as the Battle of Britain goes it is right to honour the men who fought especially for the ones without a voice in it all conscripted in or for whatever reason they found themselves involved in it and so that young people will know how to try to prevent another one happening, hopefully."...yes, Guest, but you agree that it would be good to have someone criticising ALL imperialism, as above? |
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Subject: RE: BS: Re. Battle of Britain, etc. From: Paul Burke Date: 21 Sep 10 - 02:36 PM hypocracy? Government from underneath? Or by photographic fixer? |
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Subject: RE: BS: Re. Battle of Britain, etc. From: Bonzo3legs Date: 21 Sep 10 - 04:53 PM Without the Battle of Britain we would have been a few good films short! |
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Subject: RE: BS: Re. Battle of Britain, etc. From: s&r Date: 21 Sep 10 - 06:08 PM So you haven't surrendered your Australian citizenship then.. Stu |
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Subject: RE: BS: Re. Battle of Britain, etc. From: Don(Wyziwyg)T Date: 21 Sep 10 - 07:13 PM And the correct spelling is hypocrisy! Don T. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Re. Battle of Britain, etc. From: GUEST Date: 22 Sep 10 - 05:49 AM >"As far as the Battle of Britain goes it is right to honour the men who fought especially for the ones without a voice in it all conscripted in or for whatever reason they found themselves involved in it and so that young people will know how to try to prevent another one happening, hopefully."...yes, Guest, but you agree that it would be good to have someone criticising ALL imperialism, as above?< Yes I agree, I do, the first one was all about imperialism, countries trying to show their 'superior' might over each other and they didn't really care about ordinary lads on the field, as far as they were concerned they were expendable. My grandparents generation believed that it would be the end of all wars and could not understand the 'powers' reasoning for bringing another one about. I'm talking really on behalf of often poor working class boys conscripted or coerced into the forces who were expected to do their 'duty'. It is surprising (or not) that some veterans from the 1st war eventually came to see the futility of it all and saying that it was such a waste of so many young lives and for what? The future is with young people to keep questioning things more, debate and see it for what it is rather than be told to be patriotic to the bitter end no matter what the cost. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Re. Battle of Britain, etc. From: WalkaboutsVerse Date: 22 Sep 10 - 06:25 AM To Paul and Don: thanks for the spelling correction...but then, apparently, some of the best recipes derive from mistakes in the kitchen; thus, hypocrisy within a democracy could now be, as above, "hypocracy"..?! |
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Subject: RE: BS: Re. Battle of Britain, etc. From: Bonzo3legs Date: 22 Sep 10 - 07:27 AM I thought the second world war was about crushing the hideous nazis and japs??? |
