Is it merely a coincidence that those who in 1916 spread the story that Roger Casement was homosexual had, in 1915 declared to the world that Edith Cavell, the nurse shot by the Germans in Belgium, was merely a nurse, and not involved in activities, which, in wartime. carried that penalty amongst all the belligerents?
Is it merely a coincidence that the Church of England includes Edith Cavell in its Calendar of Saints and that, when some people were advocating that Casement be reprieved, the Archbishop of Canterbury was shown what purported to be salacious extracts from Casement’s writings, lest that Christian Prelate advocate his reprieve?
If one can believe Dame Stella Rimmington, former Director of MI5, the Sainted Nurse Cavell was up to her neck in activities which in wartime merited her execution, THE TIMES in 1916 claimed that that execution was worth an Army Corps to Britain’s Forces, and in October 2015 (last year) THE DAILY TELEGRAPH confirmed that tens of thousand of men had joined the British forces, angered at the supposed injustice of Miss Cavell’s execution.
By coincidence Roger Casement wrote within weeks of Miss Cavell’s death that the lying was the key to Britain’s success.
“Directed with judgement and exposed at the right moment, the lie is the ‘white weapon’ par excellence, that takes the edge off the bayonet and blunts the bravest sword. A fine art cannot be acquired in a day. It has taken British statesmanship (and British journalism) a very long study, and a most assiduous application to perfect an art acquired in the strenuous days when Great Britain was only a small island in the North Sea, and not the focus of an imperial system on which the truth never rose.”
And Casement has been described as a being half-mad! He had British governments and media bang to rights!
That’s my THOUGHT FOR TODAY on Casement. Further thoughts on him will come in instalments
….. on which the truth never rose. Abairt ghonta sin.
Edith Cavell violated the conditions of Red Cross neutrality on several levels. She was part of a seventy-strong ‘ratline’ while helped almost 1,000 Allied soldiers escape to neutral Holland, she also used this route to send information about German troop numbers & deployment back to British military intelligence analysts based at Room 40, Admiralty House, London, (although it’s unlikely other members of the escape network were aware of this) She also worked with local resistance helping to organise the distribution of underground anti-German propaganda ‘La Libre Belgique’ and ‘Le Mot du Soldat’. Of course the biggest lie of all was one of omission – that ‘plucky little Belgium’ was a nasty little imperial power in its own right and had been responsible for shameful human rights abuses and atrocities in Central Africa. no long before the outbreak of WW1, Casement knew all about this, He witnessed it, wrote about it and tried (unsuccessfully) to shame the British and Belgium government’s into doing something about it