BATTLES, LONG AGO AND MORE RECENT, not to mention Emergencies! by Donal Kennedy

Nearly 30 years ago my wife and I travelled from London to Bologna with our car by ship and train, en route to Rome and other places.

In those days we camped taking our tents with us.

In the lashing rain we found a campsite by the Trasimene Lakes where the Hannibal of

Carthage gave the Romans very bloody noses in 217 BC. I found it very exciting, having

been told about the Punic Wars by the Christian Brothers.

There was a restaurant on the campsite and we dined and wined with a Dutch couple

for an enjoyable hour or two. He was Lutheran Clergyman, who had been chaplain to

his country’s forces in Indonesia in the late 1940s. At first he approved of their job but soon sickened of it,

One of the less publicised facts of history is that when Hitler shot himself and Japan

Surrendered, “democratic” European Imperialist powers resumed the plunder of African

and Asian nations with all the cruelty they had been unable to exercise during the previous five years.

The Netherlands had withstood the Nazis for about 48 hours in 1940. France had capitulated in June 1940. Britain surrendered  Singapore to a comparatively tiny Japanese force.

De Gaulle was an admirably brave man. But standing behind a BBC  microphone

in London and calling on his countrymen in France to resist their conquerers impresses

me less than standing on the pavement outside the GPO  on Easter Monday 1916 and

reading the Proclamation of the Irish Republic. The Irish Electorate endorsed the Proclamation less than three years after that reading. It took rather longer for De Gaulle to get a mandate.

Under the guise of an Emergency the British Government, led by Clement Attlee waged

a savage war in Malaya, on a scale dwarfing the terrorism of the Boer War.  

Attlee’s war was the template for the war waged by the Americans on Vietnam. And the robbery of Malayan rubber almost paid off the American Loan to Britain and was the major source of Britain’s Welfare State.

General Frank Kitson earned his spurs in Malaya and later boasted how on horseback

he had hunted and killed fleeing Africans in Kenya.

When Harold Wilson was British Prime Minister the British Ambassador in Jakarta, Sir

Andrew Gilchrist masterminded (1965) a coup in Indonesia which murdered almost a million civilians and transferred the almost limitless resources of that  archipelago to

western companies. As Ambassador in Dublin in 1969, Gilchrist established the oath-

bound Irish Times Trust.

I’ll come back to such matters presently quoting chapter and verse.