Subject: RE: BS: Christmas Truce (1914)
From:
Jim Carroll
Date: 08 Jan 14 - 04:21 AM
I have become sick to the stomach of Keith's one-man 'patriotic' nit-picking attempts to apportion blame for and efforts to whitewash the horrors and lies surrounding the mindless carnage that was World War One.
His arguments, when looked ate, are based on two 'witnesses' a tabloid journalist an a military historian who is employed by the Army to teach history (Gary Sheffield) - all the others may have made passing comments on the subject, but are no more than passing references to various points on our understanding of some aspects on the war, but boiled down, his 'star witnesses are a Daily Mail journalist and a British Army employee.
One of his 'witnesses' has actually written a book describing Britain as having "sleepwalked into World War One".
Max Hastings has been described as "weak on the causes of World War One" by a real historian - (a point Keith has refused to respond to to date).
Sheffield's argument is based on the entirely false premise that the popular misconception is that war was fought over "trivial issues".
"I was influenced by what amounted to a "national perception" of the Great War as an utterly futile conflict, fought over trivial issues."
Nobody seriously argues that the war was "trivial" except flag-wavers of the Keith school of non-thought who put it down to a humanitarian gesture to help "poor little Belgium", a genocidal regime whose crimes the world didn't even acknowledge, let alone attempt to prevent, or the assassination of an Arch-Duke.
As far I I understand it, the war was a clash between Empires for economic and political domination - nothing more or less than that, and undisputed by any historian, including Gary Sheffield.
World War was the consequence of the mishandling of the peace brought
attained by the heroes who risked and gave their lives for a hard-won victory - that mishandling included the appeasement and sometimes open support of Hitler and his Nazi monsters who could and should have been stopped by Britain and the Allies - but weren't.
Keith has once again attempted to make this latter fact "off topic"; we are apparently being told that soldiers who fight wars should have no say in why they are fought and what the consequences are.
Keith claims that "all historians" support his view - in fact no historian supports his view as to why men joined up or why the war was fought - none whatever.
In fact, the long document he has described as "unreadable" makes the point that it is both wrong and stupid to attempt to apportion blame for the war as all were a responsible, albeit to different degrees.
It was little more than five years of horror, where mainly working men on both sides were set to slaughter each other in the mud of Europe to maintain Imperial political and economic dominance of the world markets - it turned out to the beginning of the end of those Empires - its early death-throes.
As many people have said, we may have won the war, but the people who fought it lost the peace - that is what needs to be discussed in the coming year - no who was to blame for it all.
Personally, my interest in this, and all wars is peripheral.
As a pacifist (sort of) I regard all wars as evil and avoidable.
My mother's mother's husband died on the Somme; her second husband used to frighten the life out of me as a child with his horrific scars from being burned by mustard gas.
My father's brother, my Uncle Gerry, was a war hero in world war two, decorated for bravery as a commando attached to a tank regiment.
He was among those who entered the concentration camps and witnessed the real horrors of war.
He never spoke about it, and we never knew of his military record, other than to see him 'jump' in a military parachute display in a Liverpool park when I was a youth.
He was elevated enormously in my estimation when I found that he was later court martialed for refusing to be sent to participate in the (little-talked-about) Greek Civil war- he said he was horrified by the photographs of soldiers carrying the heads of Greek partisans in order to collect a bounty on them.
As I said, I'm sick of garbage from people like Keith who turn these wars into fights between 'goodies and baddies'
I agree with the feller who said that patriotism is the refuge of scoundrels, usually cowardly and dishonest ones with an axe to grind.
Jim Carroll
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