I have lived in England these past 58 years and spent the last 16 years of my working life as a public librarian in London..
In all that time I have never once encountered a book, nor an essay on the League of Nations.
Nor a magazine article
Nor a television programme.
Nor heard the League mentioned on a radio programme.
It is a great taboo.
The internet is not much help. I was hoping to do a blog on it. All members of the League pledged
themselves to its Covenant, but I could not find out the words of the Covenant.
Virtually all members of the League reneged on its Covenant.
The great exception was Ireland, whose delegate Eamon de Valera demanded in vain that effective sanctions be brought against Japan for its attack on Manchuria and on Italy for its rape of Abyssinia.
Dev was, at the time, head of the Free State government and was prepared to commit an Irish army contingent to a League force, if such could be assembled to protect the victims of aggression.
Had the other states honoured their pledges they would have saved the world from the Second World
War which followed within just over twenty years after the end of the First.
The founding of the League is dated from 25 April 1919 with the victors’ imposition of famine on the losers of the vindictive Treaty of Versailles.
In 1919, having led Sinn Fein to a landslide victory in a general election, with a mandate to establish
a Republic, Dev voiced the fear that the Versailles Treaty was a recipe for renewed war. When that
war came De Valera kept the Irish State out of it.
At the United Nations Ireland played a blinder . Its policy was rational and ethical and proven wise. It championed the freedom of peoples suffering under imperialism. It joined neither the Western nor Eastern Military Blocs.
Ireland raised the question of China’s admission to the UN and took guidance neither from the US
State Department, nor that Department’s Catspaw, Cardinal Spelman, when the latter telephoned the
Irish Delegation, to object
Ireland contributed troops to the UN to attempt to bring peace to countries suffering from the
crimes and follies of the victors of Versailles.
And above all, by giving the peoples of the earth a respite from nuclear war by fostering and
fathering the Nuclear Non Proliferation which lasted from 1968 to 2022.
It seems that the Treaty, the result of 10 years of hard work by Ireland’s Frank Aiken, is now
a dead letter. The United States appears ready to arm South Korea and Japan with nukes,
and the Ukraine regime’s determination to acquire them provoked the Russian incursion
in February last year.
Ireland’s present Government, and wannabe Government parties, have a embraced the treacherous
and suicidal policies of John Redmond in 1914.
Th parties which have renounced principles may be labelled Groucho Marxists.
Groucho Marx said “These are my principles, but, if you don’t like them, I have others”
Groucho was an admirable clown, unlike the dirty-shirted American pawn in Kiev, whose praise Irish clowns crave.
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