Today (Saturday 15 October) THE TIMES carries the above headline by one its associate Editors, Ben MacIntyre. I don’t know how, when in 1937 the Luftwaffe’s Condor Legion bombed that town the paper reported it, or how its critics reviewed Picasso’s masterpiece when it was first displayed at the World Fair in Paris that year. Nor do I know, when, if ever,it reported the pivotal role of British Major Hugh Pollard in Franco’s mutiny in July 1936 and his service in Britain’s Madrid Embassy when.Franco eventually entered that city. Pollard was the creator of Black Propaganda in Ireland, no sooner produced than discredited in 1920, a polluted source of much “revisionist” research to this day. You may check Pollard on Wikipedia.
The London based monthly HISTORY TODAY, founded by the renegade Irishman Brendan Bracken (a virtual template for the late Patrick Cosgrave) a few years ago reported on the British Royal Airforce’s 1923 activities in IRAQ, bombing civilians in towns and cities and machine-gunning fleeing civilians. I’m told similar attacks were mounted on Managua, Nicaragua’s Capital by the United States in the late 1920s or early 1930s but I have been unable to confirm that.
I can’t remember THE TIMES agonising over the destruction of cities by American or British bombardment and I wouldn’t expect it of Ben MacIntyre, a gung-ho admirer of the SAS and other such charning heroes. I’d like to think that the Tara Street Walkers at THE IRISH TIMES were any better, but Fintan O’Toole has waded in in support of MacIntyre’s propaganda line.
The internationally recognised Government of Syria is not composed of angels, but it is faced by a rebellion. The Government of the United Kingdom,
faced by a rebellion in 1916, employed artillery and machineguns, killing many women and children in Dublin. The IRISH TIMES at the time supported the British bombardment and called for the extermination of the rebels.It appears its current stars have not forgiven the surviving rebels escaping extirpation
nor the electorate for establishing a democratic state.
Ironically the 1916 leaders were demonised and mocked for firstly having the ‘undemocratic’ cheek to attempt to overthrow a brutal dictator(Britain) and secondly for surrendering to save the lives of the civilian population from overwhelming fire power from the said dictator. Fast forward 100 yrs and in the city of Alleppo, others are using civilians as human shields to protect themselves from again overwhelming fire power of a ‘brutal dictator’. And yet the great and the good are praising and rallying to support those cowards in Alleppo. Laughable.