I’m not often at a total loss for words but this morning I came near it. That’s because, on nuzhound.com, I read Fionnola Meredith’s article on children and dressing up in (para)military garb.
You’ll remember some months ago I was nearly drowned in a tsunami of condemnation when I suggested that the Boys’ Brigade had military features. I was ignorant, I was sectarian, I was outrageous, I should apologise immediately. There was nothing (para)military about the Boys’ Brigade.
In her Belfast Telegraph column, Fionnola is deeply indignant about a group of children in West Belfast, on Remembrance Sunday, parading in commemoration of “a teenage IRA terrorist who blew herself up with her own bomb 25 years ago”. The West Belfast children were dressed in paramilitary uniform – berets, dark glasses, neckerchiefs. Fionnola didn’t like that.
“Here’s the thing: you do not have to be an unreserved admirer of British military actions – past or present – to feel your stomach turn when you see kids dressed up as IRA terrorists. You merely need to be human… and humane…. These youngsters are required to take on adult hatred and its accompanying murderous narrative. They are required to endorse a very selective version of history.”
Well, you betcha, Fionnuala. The same day at various cenotaphs there were photographs of children of roughly the same age – maybe younger, even – dressed in full British military uniform, lined up, placing poppies where told, generally being inducted into the ways of militarism.
Fionnola figures that militarism is one thing, paramilitarism is another. She’s critical of the “jackdaw” style of the West Belfast children’s (para)military gear (a style-crime?), as well as believing they are being led into old hatreds and sectarianism. They are being taught how to be terrorists.
I think Fionnola would benefit from taking a look at her own words: “They are required to endorse a very selective version of history”. Isn’t that what the children at the cenotaph are being asked to do? They’re certainly not being taught that World War One in particular was a monstrous slaughter-house for millions as two imperial powers clashed, that the British Army, excluding the Second World War, were engaged in ghastly acts of torture and killing in Kenya, Malaya, Burma, Ireland. They are being taught that if the British army was involved, and if British soldiers were killed during that involvement, then they should be honoured and imitated.
There’s a case to be made for not having children involved in these commemorations at all. There is no case to be made for saying that one kind of militarism is solemn and commendable while the other is jackdaw, perverse and evil.
What was it Lady Thatcher said? “A crime is a crime is a crime”. Although not, of course, if it involves the British army.
Of course there is a lot of hypocrisy around. . . and playing to galleries. Wouldn’t it be better if adults discouraged children from dressing up as soldiers, period. Republicans can take a lead here. How to commemorate their dead without all the paraphernalia of militarism. To me, all armies look the same and they are pretty indiscriminate when it comes to whom they kill. Time, perhaps, to demilitarise all commemorations.
Children should not be included in any of these events. They are too young to understand what they are involved in and what it means.
Jude, I’m surprised that you can’t see the obvious difference in – and I make no bones about it – British Protestant children being dressed up to look like their daddies and granddaddies. It is ok because it is harmless, they are part of the British establishment here in the colony and they are being taught to respect the sacrifices of their forefathers. Same as it’s OK for mini versions of all the British armed forces to be equipped and trained in publicly funded schools here. You still don’t seem to grasp that if republicans do it, it is subversive, indecent,cruel to children because they are not part of the winning side. Imagine if some of the non state schools set up and trained Republican Cadets on their premises. There is more of a chance of the British Armed forces being invited into non state schools to recruit and proselytise. Just because some motor mouth has a column in an establishment newspaper doesn’t give their views any more crediblility than any of us other slabbers. British good Irish bad.
kids dressing in uniform or fancy dress costumes and marched into church for confessions,before taking silly vows they are to young to understand should be looked at aswell.
I agree children shouldn’t be indoctrinated into religion but I get the impression you’re singling out one particular religion for your particular point here.
Have you never heard of the Army of the Lord, Billy?
faith of our fathers..is that a war song.
“kids dressing in uniform” – they all do it all day, every day from age 5 to 18/19.
Why are british and irish kids the only ones in Europe and the USA to wear school uniforms? Regimented as soon as they start learning to read and write?
And then for after school activities they change into different uniforms for Scouts, brownies, girl Guides and so forth
https://eurofree3.wordpress.com/2016/06/01/why-are-british-and-irish-school-children-regimented/
You’ve got it , ben…
Are you pointing the finger at the boys’ brigade, scouts, cubs, girl guides and brownies?
Sorry if I have forgotten any other British military youth killers-in-training outfits!
Would you like to stand over that allegation?
Why?
The more pressing issue would be children joining bands that have known paramilitary links and indeed are used as a recruiting agency for paramilitaries. At the moment, we’re giving these bands hundreds of thousands a year, on top of the UDA’s £1.5 million. Yes, there’s a lot of hypocrisy running around.
As regards children and religion, I’ve no problem with parents raising their kids in a faith and ethos that preaches love thy neighbour. However, kids joining sectarian organisations that require oaths to never marry a certain demographic of people is deeply disturbing.
Jude,
You are opposed to the hypocrisy of the ignorant who don’t have the wherewithal to occasionally question the dominant narrative!
You must be a subversive!
I suppose Ms Meredith has never heard of the army cadet corps all under 18 years old, who were recently paraded out recently for the benefit of some visiting royal personage, and they get to fire real guns!
I suppose Ms Meredith has never heard of the army cadet corps all under 18 years old, who were recently paraded out for the benefit of some visiting royal personage, and they get to fire real guns!
Of course she has but if she wrote anything about that the Telegraph would give her the chop. That paper has been rewriting the history of the conflict for years now.
Let’s face it .Every child is indoctrinated from the minute it is born. It doesn’t matter the household, religion. the ethos.A child will copy what its parents and teachers decide until it becomes a thinking aduly .By that time it may be subject to other influences and begin to make decisions for itself and possibly go against the ideas and scripts that have been forcibly taught it from birth. Usually ,the damage or otherwise , is already done.
Look at any family here and it’s easy to see why they grow into the adults they become.At the top of our local government we have atwo-headed example of it right before our eyes. The two extremes of how it might work , if you like .We’ve got “Marlene” our specific two-headed PushmepullyoU.
That kind of thing produced everything we now have to live with .The deference to war -heroes who were really only sacrifices bred and raised to die .They thought they were serving some higher purpose or they wanted to wage revenge against “the other” because of the folklore they’d been stuffed with from the cradle. They picked it all up with their mother’s milk or on their daddy’s knee.Mixing it all up with religious instruction made martyrs and maybe even hypocrites , of them. They were getting “thou shalt not kill ” in one ear and something very different in the other .They could never really balance that one .
To dress children as little uniformed “soldiers” of any description is to dress them for war and war-games. It is preparing them for the discipline of obeying so that when the time comes they’ll be ready to throw their lives on the bonfire of some economic war or some ill-thought out foreign debacle.It is simply how it is done . It is those who survive such horrors and who are able to understand how their lives have been manipulated who need to be listened to .
As you say Jude , the World War One was not heroic on any level .It was an industrial slaughter for no purpose or of any benefit for those who were bundled into it. it was a testing ground for the new industry of mechanical Maxim guns, the first tanks and mechanical cannons and these brand new flying machines , while men slunk about in waterfilled trenches and bomb craters full of the filth of dead and rats…all waiting for death. Fear and fearsome filth was the only order. It was not some great sacrifice by those men .They were instead sacrificed by rote by their misguided imperial governments for no real purpose. They should be remembered , but not by anyone wearing any kind of blood -stained uniform. As for the paramilitaries. Well we all know that there was no heroism in the bombing , shooting ,killing and slaughter that went on in the streets here either .It was all driven by fear and hatred on both sides, no matter how we care to write it up and it degenerated into gangsterism in the end.It is what it is and all of it was taught from the cradle.
Ps ..In reference to …”a thinking aduly”….that’s not some new word i’ve just invented ….slip of the fingertip!!!
“The West Belfast children were dressed in paramilitary uniform – berets, dark glasses, neckerchiefs. Fionnola didn’t like that.”
The dark glasses would be one point of difference. I mean it’s not as it if was sunny.
“There was nothing (para)military about the Boys’ Brigade.”
There isn’t.
paddykool writes:
“As for the paramilitaries. Well we all know that there was no heroism in the bombing , shooting ,killing and slaughter that went on in the streets here either .It was all driven by fear and hatred on both sides, no matter how we care to write it up and it degenerated into gangsterism in the end”
“Well we all know”. Unfortunately, Paddy, it would appear we don’t all know that: hence this website.
This website is a frightening place at times.
PF…This web site is an arena for a diverse set of opinions . It is hardly Jude’s fault that everyone doesn’t always think in diverse ways. It’s not the website that is a frightening place in any case. …it’s what rattles about in some of the minds out there.As far as I can see, Jude allows anyone to beat their own drum to the point of incoherence sometimes….. unless they become actively libellous or foolishly insulting. After all , he lets me write whatever I like and my opinions hardly find favour in some camps right across the board….
“It’s not the website that is a frightening place in any case. …it’s what rattles about in some of the minds out there.”
Clearly, paddykool, I was connecting the two, directly.
“As far as I can see, Jude allows anyone to beat their own drum…”
It was his drum I was referring to.
As I said, “This website is a frightening place at times.”
PF ..Get a grip on yout fears.
paddykool
I didn’t say *I* was frightened, I said this website is a frightening place – as is so because of the repeated and dangerous moral conflations which are made.
I really can’t be much clearer.
Then again, I only have one eye.
He lets you write, Harry, because you showed him your doctor’s letter and it works out cheaper than medication. Anyway, stick to bees. You seem to know something about them. Leave the weightier problems to us thinkers.
“us thinkers”…? you jest , surely, fiosrach? ha ha! Don’t be getting ideas above your station ….
It stands to sense that rival tribes will skirmish with each other. The next step is how to distinguish enemies from friends. Answer flags and uniforms. Anybody who is middle of the road is a goner. You’re either for us or against us. At times of great tension the letsgetalogerists disappear but as things cool down they appear to tell the world that this is not of their making. Likewise separate housing. Know who your neighbour is. It is about self preservation and is as old as the human race. When you feel old age coming on, you have to be certain that the next generation is ready and trained to jump into the breach. What pisses me off is why can’t they confine it to their own country?
It is difficult to contemplate the spectacle of young boys in military uniform without thinking of good oul’ Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scout movement, Esteemed Blogmeister: he virtually went from steerage to Peerage as a result.
He was a peculiar bird, was old Uncle Bob , one who shared a lot of similar proclivities with his fellow member of the Peerage, Lord Horatio Kitchener. Such as possessing an extensive collection of photographs of nekked young boys, a tendency to fill the female roles in British Army barracks theatrical circles, that sorta thingy.
Both were up to their tonsils in The Great Donkey Derby 14-18. And on both sides of the Atlantic too. The Boy Scouts of America, f’rinstance, as a Good Turn in 1917 conducted the very first census of standing black walnut trees.
The wood of said trees was prized as raw material for gunstocks and aeroplane propellers alike.
If one were seeking a go-to newspaper, an Organ of Rex Accord in which to find a bitter-lemon word about Uncle Bob the odds are that The Unionist Times would possibly be not even on the long list.
Small surprise, Esteemed Blogmeister, to find the name of one, Fiona Meredith being numbered among the occasional parishioners of The Unionist Times.
Indeed, the Great Donkey Derby 14-18 itself has been getting a great morning gallop in TUT, going backward and indeed, forward. No lack of the khaki getting a look in, neither. The Unionist Times has been, or if it hasn’t been, then ought to be likened to Wind Screen Ypres, a daily device to remove the rain, snow, narrow nationalist prejudice and other debris from the Wind Screen of West Britannia.
Waterford, curiously enough, has been to the fore of putting the Four Year Donkey Derby to the forefront of the post-nationalist province aka the Free Southern Stateen. Yes, indeed, Waterford / Veorafjordor / Port Láirge: so good they named it thrice.
So many plaques have been unveiled to mark the contribution made by the locals to the GDD that it has become, erm, crystal clear to the local dogs in the Decies street they have begun to bark that even the backs of walls are now being used to accommodate the insatiable demand for plaques.
That these streets are by no means mean is evidenced by the plaque which commemorates the time when, down which, as a schoolboy, the redoubtable Raymond Chandler walked.
Particularly relevant to today’s blog is the piquant plaque to young John Condon – the youngest combatant of all to fall in the mud, and the blood of the trenches of the Derby to end all Derby’s. Still only a lad of (gulp) fourteen summers he had lied about his age in his desire to enlist and to hack it in khaki.
In mitigation, it must be said that the Big Lie was the zeitgeist of the time, indeed of The Unionist Times of the times that were in it. (See Uncle Bob and Lord Kitsch above).
And if all these unveiling ceremonies of great solemnity are marked by the ever presence of those angelic guardians of our military heritage, the Royal British Legion it must be added, in fairness, that ditto is true of a never absent reporter from The Unionist Times.
Why, as recently as only last Saturday, going backwards, a Blue (!) Plaque was unveiled to the six Brothers Collins who fought in the khaki even while they were being backstabbed by the lackeys of terrorism in Easter 16. Four of the Brothers Collins gave their lives for the Freedom of Small Nations, one survived while one is still unaccounted for. Missng in faction, by all accounts.
The youngest of the four Brothers Collins to die , according to The Unionist Times was (gulp) Stephen Collins (16). A decent man in a blueshirt of the Decies, John Deasy, MP, Fianna Fail Better, performed the unveiling ceremony. Of decent political stock, his daddy before him was the courageous and less than ostentatious MP, Austin Deasy who ploughed a lonely furrow by standing four square with La Thatch by giving his non-pareil version of the Great Irish Auk squawk at the Falklands.
How then to account for the leakage of so many young men of twenty and less from Waterford ? Contemporary politico-geographers posit the theory that it was not a long way to Tipperary, either then or now.
Moral Superiority, sans doute, is in the very DNA of the Organ of Rex Accord. If one deconstructs DNA to stand for Decency v NA for Nationalism.
Indeed, the D for Decency has been the default word of late in The Unionist Times even as the Highest Peak in its High Moral Ground surveys the current political landscape going forward, from Moscow to Washington, via Holland, Hungary, France and the (gasp) UK itself.
CaraunToole (for it is he!), the Summit of the Magilligoody-goody Reeks sees parallels between the rise of Teutonic nationalism prior to the GDD 14-18 and the contemporary neo-pandemic of the nastier form of nationalism.
One will look, incidentally, in vain for the I-word in the, erm, Current Conversation. No, not I, Sir Oracle but rather I for Imperialism. Not only has it been dropped from the team of terminology but has been seemingly beaten off the panel itself. Which is passing odd, rather.
Certainly if one considers the twin opposites of Nationalism and Imperialism through the medium of Leprechaun: Mise agus Tusa / Me and You.
As Nationalism equals the Mise, then indubitably Imperialism is synonymous with Mise but I want what Tusa has.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc, that sorta philosophical thingy leads one with the only logical conclusion:
-It is Imperialism which is the serial Tusa grabber; and is not at all fussy about which Tusa it grabs.
So, why the banishment of the I-word from polite discourse? Could it be what the Highest IQ in The Unionist Times shrilly sounds off about, both oft in the stilly night and in the silly day as well:
-The Modern Crisis in Masculinity !
This is where The Perkin’s inner vexed sexist must exit, stage right. For it is an old Warbeckian Tradition, first nurtured by a distant but still revered ancestor, one Gaylord Warbeck in Tudor times. And succinctly summed up by him in this pithy stage:
-Never ye tangleth on matters of masculinity, ever, with anyone by the name of , erm, O’Toole.
I don’t think it a great idea to be involving children in these things at all.
They will probably get over it for the most part and one day laugh at the pictures of themselves in silly sunglasses.
We should be more concerned about the indoctrination in religion they are steeped in from the earliest years. These are just comforting fictions and should be taught as such until children are old enough to decide for themselves if they want to embrace them.
gio ….You might think that they are comforting fictions but a lot of people really do believe them as “fact”…even into adulthood.
My religion taught me to love God and to love my neighbour as myself. Presumably the religious figures who take part in the Remembrance services also believe those basic tenets of Christianity?
paddy
Some do I suppose.
I would prefer to see children taught comparative religion and let them figure it out for themselves.
That’s a different story gio but it’s not the reality out there . It is evident , especially in our little closed society that plenty of adults really believe those childhood teachings exactly as the simple stories they were taught as children. Many have not really thought too much about them as adults , just as many adults have never read anything else since their schooldays. Teaching comparative religion is generally left to those parents who think their children might next a broader education or to those with an inquisitive mind and that will only happen in individual circumstances .
I see Jude equating illegal terrorist groups with the Army again.
“You’ll remember some months ago I was nearly drowned in a tsunami of condemnation when I suggested that the Boys’ Brigade had military features.”
No you weren’t. You were condemned for saying a BB parade was a bit like a dissident terrorist display.
ie, they were wearing military garb.
People will not accept the other side`s point of view, regardless of whether it is correct or not. Because it is the other side`s. I long ago stopped trying to convince unionists that their good guys were my bad guys and vice versa. On a similar note I have just seen an advert appealing for help for children suffering as a result of wars, however people have been wearing poppies to honour the very people who have caused …..children to suffer in wars.
“I long ago stopped trying to convince unionists that their good guys were my bad guys and vice versa.”
I’d like to think we could all do better than relative morality.
“I’d like to think we could all do better than relative morality”
Relative morality and viewing everything through a sectarian binary prism in which everything is on one side or another and either good or bad depending on which of those sides it is on.
What an utterly depressing way to understand the world.