SEASON OF MYTHS AND HOLLOW BOASTFULNESS by Donal Kennedy

Time flies and we are in the Season of Myths and Hollow Boastfulness, one portent of which is an advertisement for a Captive Poppy Display in the Ulster Museum. Other portents such as the obligatory wearing of poppies by all appearing on UK television screens and all non-abstentionist Members of Parliament follow shortly.

I don’t say this to deny the courage and the suffering of those who served in the various wars or the non-combatants killed, injured or bereaved.When I was baptised in St Andrews, Westland Row, in late December 1941 or early in 1942 (I can’t quite remember!) my Godparents had proxies. They wereboth Doctors from Cork, my father’s youngest sister Maev and and her husband Bill O’Connell, who was in Britain’s Royal Army Medical Corps and couldn’t be there.I’m told Bill was one of the first RAMC Medics into Belsen on its liberation. Six weeks later my mother’s youngest sibling, my uncle Leo, two years her junior, a Senior Warrant Officer in Britain’s Royal Army Service Corps, died when the Japanese captured Singapore. My Uncle Jack, two years older than my mother, was badly wounded when one of the Kaiser’s shells exploded on the Battlecruiser Princess Royal off Jutland in May 1916 when he was six weeks shy of his 17th birthday. And her brother Jack was gassed in 1918 serving with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers and was invalided home.  Both my mother’s sisters married Irishmen who served in the Great War (one of them had also served in the Second Boer War). My father had been a member of the First Cork Brigade IRA, but never fired a shot in anger. His unit commander who had been in action during the Tan and Civil Wars was Godfather to my sister Brenda in 1937. I suppose the greatest man of violence in the family must have been my mother’s eldest brother, my Uncle Denis, a member of the Irish Christian Brothers?

One of the great myths of the Great War is that Britain got involved because Germany invaded Belgium and another is that Britain fought for the freedom of small nations. Those stories are pure poppycock and less immaculate tommyrot. British politicians, Tories such as Arthur Balfour and Liberal Imperialists such as Herbert Asquith, and leaders of the Commonwealth in the Committee for Imperial Defence had been planning to destroy their commercial rival Germany and to despoil the Ottoman Empire since 1904. King Edward VII, under the more innocuous pretext of a Whoring Tourist, help cement an alliance with France, bent on revenge for their defeat by the Prussians following France’s war of aggression in 1870. (Connossieurs of irony may appreciate that Alsace and Lorraine under the Kaisers enjoyed more autonomy than Ireland would havemhad under Home Rule. The British and French treatment of Greece in the Great War and Britain’s treatment of Greece during and after its sequel should dispel any idea of idealism or altruism in the corridors of power. And millions of decent men of many nations were suckered into dying like flies by monumental lies.

When Prime Minister, David Cameron visited St Petersburg,  he had the gall to tell his hosts that Britain had defeated Fascism, as if the population of that city alone, had not suffered more at the hands of the Nazis than the whole of Britain, and as if the British Army had captured Berlin.

Cameron’s predecessor Gordon Brown has boasted that Britain led the fight against Fascism. In fact British and French Governments, had they adhered to the Covenant of the League of Nations, as demanded in 1932 and 1935 by Eamon de Valera, could have forced Japan’s withdrawal from Manchuria and Italy’s from Abyssinia, and Dev would have asked the Dail to provide Irish troops to support the League.

British secret service agent Hugh Pollard was instrumental in Franco’s onslaught on Spanish democracy. Both Tony Blair and George W Bush would have you believe that Britain went to war in 1939 and the US in 1941 to save Europe’s Jews.

The Remembrance Circus is a smokescreen to perpetuate historical amnesia.