Good old Prince Harry: his father (I think) doesn’t like modern architecture, he likes retro buildings; Harry doesn’t like to see young men lolling about: “I dread to think where I’d be without the Army. Bring back National Service”. Here, Harry, ask us another. We all know where you’d be: lolling about in unimaginable luxury and dressing up as a Nazi.
And ‘National Service’, which was the discussion topic on Talk Back today – would it be a good idea? A nice man on with me called Robert, having ‘served’ (more on that later) in the RIR, thought it would.
Which clears up one thing – we’re talking about military national service. Then the question becomes “Is it a good idea to teach young people to take orders and learn different ways to kill people?” I’m not sure about you but I’d give a big NO to both those things. Yes, yes, as my fellow-panellist Robert pointed out, the British army provides discipline, it teaches respect, punctuality, a trade, lets you visit different parts of the world, if you’re lucky you can help in the fight against Ebola. But the spine of National Service is all about discouraging individuality, especially individual thought, taking orders, and learning how to kill other people.
Is there a case, William Crawley wanted to know, for a national service where people serve their community or serve others abroad? There is indeed. There are 800 million people in the world who go to bed hungry every night. It’d be good if the youthful energy (of men and women) could be channeled into helping those who are suffering and dying in our unequal world.
So Harry nearly got it right: there is indeed a case for getting young people to engage in selfless activity by helping those most in need. But not using the business end of a gun.
Finally, let’s start being truthful. The last time Britain used National Service personnel, they deployed young men in places like Malaya, Cyprus and Kenya. We now know the horrors that were inflicted on the people living in those places.
The least that any country with an army – which is virtually every country – the least they could do is concede that, when the chips are down, they believe in using or threatening violence to achieve political ends. Otherwise why have the army? Oh – and for God’s sake stop referring to being in the British Army as ‘serving’ in the ‘Defence’ forces. How was Britain defending herself in Malaya, Cyprus or Kenya? (Or Ireland, come to that). Call them what they really are: the Attack forces. And finally, let’s drop that silly word ‘serving’. What it’s really about is killing or threatening to kill. Which serves no one.
Spot on, Jude. The Peace Corps is one remarkable example, spoiled by other US overseas adventures.
The Captains and the Kings, fighting to the last drop of someone else’s blood.
“We have many goods for export, Christian ethics and old port…”
Bernard Law Montgomery did not do respect given his comments during the War of Independence.
“To win this sort of war you must be ruthless. Oliver Cromwell or the Germans, would have settled it in a very short time. Nowadays public opinion precludes such methods… .” (Sheehan 2005:151)
Just a minute, wasn’t the Great War fought for the defence of small nations?
Maurice Walsh in ‘Foreign Correspondents and the Irish Revolution’ an unpublished PhD Thesis in 2006 stated,
“Britain had defined the war against Germany as a struggle between civilisation and barbarism, morality and militarism.”
It is clear that murders and violent reprisals carried out by sections of the Crown forces may be viewed as an integral part of Government policy particularly if one examines the colonial adventures of British troops.
“There are demographic figures…a census of the Africans in Kenya in 1948 and 1962…between 130,000 and 300,000 Kikuyu are unaccounted for… we will never know exactly how many Kikuyu died during the last years of British colonial rule in Kenya.” (Elkins2005:366)
In conclusion, it is important that we reflect carefully on the words of the Prince.
“And yet we cannot define skilful, killing one’s fellow citizens, betraying one’s friends and showing no loyalty, mercy or moral obligation. These means can lead to power but not glory.”
That was Machiavelli’s Prince.
That’s it really . What defence? What was the Ulster Defence Regiment actually defending in a divided society? Who would have to join this army to be drilled and skilled and possibly killed for the glory of …..what? …So that our millionaire masters in the Conservative Party can loll about safe in their beds or eating their canapes while the underclass youth of the sink estates and slums of the nation does their killing for them in foreign places…possibly in wars that are meaningless to them and serve only to try out the new weaponry that they are busily devising in their factories .All that money wasted in warfare that could be used in hospitals or to fight hunger and disease. Yes…some wars are hard to avoid when the threat is from some mad dictator , busily eating up surrounding countries , but we all know that most of these conflicts have been at base …about money.Sure …discipline our youth . Make them learn to think for themselves by educating them properly and giving them a reason to get out of their beds in the morning. That doesn’t have to entail marching up and down and learning to kill people.
Funny thing, Esteemed Blogmeister, but the same Defence Forces have been on what one is still pleased to call one’s mind of late.
That would be the more recent model, the one with blackened faces and night vision scopes lying in wait in the muck of Norneverland ditches, rather than the vintage model of same, the khaki clad version with puttees bonding with barbed wire in the mud of the Somme..
Down here in The Free Southern Stateen we have been, for some time past, hearing not a little about the earlier model, rather..
In tones that are tender and in tones that are gruff
Come back Squaddie Reilly to Ballyjamesduff
Come back Squaddie Reilly to the Stateen that’s free.
What gave rise to one’s current musings was the night two weeks ago when, after a fashion, an Argentintan gaucho name of Senor Lionel Messi saved (gulp) one’s life from the same more recent model of squaddie(s),
The night when a putative perma-tanned Perkie found oneself in a bar (no name, no pack drill) on the centrally-heated shore of the Mediterranean. He had just emerged from his self-imposed hibernation, now that the winter of his sporting discontent was over. and had become a born-again soccer fan again.
Which happened to coincide with the semi-finals of the Champions Cup, and from which the last of the Premiership gallowglasses had already been blessedly eliminated, having been dumped on their hallowed asses.
The bar was all but empty, not unlike the pampas of Argentina..
Just the barman, Perkie in his floral-patterned bermuda shorts perched high on a barstool, elbow to glass of favourite short, and a trio of middle-aged mates from Blighty, that green and grassy land.The latter were not all interested in the game, as their backs around a glassy table were firmly to the telly. Chacun a son goatee.
Turned out they were all ex-squaddies who had served in the same Defence Forces. This soon became clear as the more doubles of Bell’s whiskeys were communally downed their decibel level .accordingly rose.
Against his better j., Perkie found himself lending an ear, as there was nothing much of note happening on the telly on high. Even L. Messi was uncharacteristically subdued. The score line still read: nil all. Both sides were slowly losing as the clock ticked down. And not only the battle to hold Perkie’s legendary 8 second span of concentration.
Next thing, Squaddie One came to the bar, just as Perkie was ordering his third and final short, being a responsible tippler.
-So, what side of d’fence you sittin’ on then, Paddy?
Paddy? thought Perkie. So much for his night-classes in elocution to perfect his Dort accent.
-Me?, he responded. I’m sitting on the expensive side of the bar.
-Come off it, Paddy. You know well wot I’m on about.You an IRA man?
Just then the mesmerising Messi came to the rescue with one of his trademark sleights of foot. All heaven broke loose as the attention of all four patrons and one barman was hijacked by the operatic reaction of il telecronista.(The commentary was in Italian).
Somewhere in the lull between Lionel’s brace of goals, one heard of how Squaddie One, in blended whiskey tones that were rather more gruff than tender, divulged he had served many tours in Norneverland, the toughest one of which was in East Tyrone, where the local IRA were a load of cocky b’s. and how he had managed to get his mug in the front page of what he and his mates called The IRA Times, heh, heh, on account of ‘im being the squaddie wot had potted the top IRA man in East Tyrone except it wasn’t ‘m wot done it only them loyalist blokes who were real mean b’s.
Five minutes is a long time in a polite political conversation.
Short duly downed, final whistle duly blown, Perkie duly made a beeline for the exit on foot, eyes straight ahead, funnily enough bringing to mind the words of another P. French song, ‘Slattery’s Mounted Fut’.
‘I’m not as bowld as lions but I’m braver nor a hen
And he who fights and runs away lives to fight again’.
But not before Squaddie One was smartly up on his unsteady sized twelve flip flops to bar one’s exit from the bar.
Jerking his thumb in the direction of the smaller of his two seated mates, the one who bore a remarkable likeness to one of those six-fingered rubes in ‘Deliverance’.
-See ‘m , Paddie.
Perkie aka Paddy nodded.
-Soon as I told ‘m you was an IRA man ‘e was all set to garrote you,so ‘ e was.
With Squaddie One’s raucous hoot of laughter still syringing Perkie’s inner ears, one finally made it outwards and onwards.
Later on in the safety of his luxury suite in the Hotel Dozzinale oddly enough it wasn’t the name of Lionel Messi which colonised the thought processes of an ungrateful Perkie .
But of another, probably lesser player involved in the other semi-final.
Name of Garret. That would be, ar ndoigh, Garret Bale.
Bale. Same pronunciation, different spelling of the leprechaun for mouth: beal.
Beal. Beal Feirste. Belfast. Garret ‘Motor Mouth’ Bale. Prime Minister of the FSS. Probably lesser PM. Whose mother hailed from Beal Feiriste. The other mother side. Which he was never slow. To remind the generaltiy of. Thus, Giving. Him. A greater. Insight. Squaddies.Squaddies and Baddies. Facilitators of emergency. Legislation. Snaking regarder. Beal. Beal dunta. Beal oscailte. Snore.
zzzzzzzzzzzzz
Perkie – you have just brought to life a single instance of what many have experienced in one form or another. The sense of panic arm-wrestling with the sense of outrage, the former winning by an Irish mile…How wonderful that the Messi magic should have worked on two fronts simultaneously. It’s moments like that which make me believe that somewhere, somehow, there will be a rebalancing of the scales. I’ve just watched a recording of the Mullaghmore bomb that killed Mountbatten. It was broadcast on 17 May. That’d be the 41st anniversary of the Dublin and Monaghan bombs, the commemoration of which was striking by its absence. Similar to your own absence from that squaddie-infested bar, prestissimo as we say in music…
Have to let the past go Jude go on I dare you
Squaddies? Methinks not. Lewd fellows of a baser sort. Squaddies are disciplined and do respect.
Jude, nobody mentioned, or even seemed to think of, the elephant in the room in today’s discussion on ‘national’ service.
Assuming such a scheme would be compulsory, and likely include our wee two-thirds of a province, could you imagine the ‘respect’ generated in nationalist/republican conscripts being indoctrinated by Brit RSMs?
Harry’ mouthing have just shown him up to be the gobshite that he is.
And when he slobbers about being taught ‘respect’, the Brit army version of it means that the squaddie learns his ‘proper’ place in the pecking order of the gentry. How to bow and scrape, tug your forelock and say: ‘yes sir, no sir’.
I think the people of N Ireland have had enough of that old guff over the years.
Happy Harry seems to have a brain half the size of Charlie’s – I wonder, what is half of sweet FA?
The “Ministry of Peace”, which was concerned with War, 1984.
A clear and potent article Jude. Sometimes in calling a spade a spade, can make a person look like a heretic. It is never, ever Heresy to speak the truth.
The gall of the royal family never ceases to amaze but not in a good way. A sponger like Harry, the spare to the heir, paid a fortune simply because of whose womb he came from, an oaf who can do no wrong in the eyes of the British people, tied to the British military, occasionally seen helping people in distress, but mostly kept out of sight, living the sort of life only Premier League footballers could dream of, however unlike Wayne Rooney Harry Wales has no talent. Undeserved wealth disgusts me, the whole notion of people being given shed loads of money for nothing is just wrong. The people who support this are the same people who condemn unmarried mothers for claiming a few thousand pounds for housing benefit.
Britain is getting as bad as America when it comes to the whole “serving” thing. You have American soldiers committing murders abroad, torturing innocents and killing left right and center and we still hear those ‘patriotic’ Americans shouting “support your troops, they fight for your freedom”. Give me a break, if they were fighting for your freedom they would be stationed at home, on your shores, defending your country not unleashing bloody murder on foreign shores. The same goes for British troops here, they came here to bring peace to the North of Ireland and were literally welcomed with open arms. That wasn’t good enough for the Unionist government here and that’s when the British army became the Unionist attack dog in Ireland, North and South. If they’re going to use the word serve, let them use it when they’re defending their own country, they don’t defend mine, all they have done here is cause chaos and grief.
Couldn`t agree more.
Succinct!!!
Grma aris, Jim…