A letter to the Catholic Universe newspaper:
Even a cursory examination of British newspapers will find hate – directed by its owners and editors at some party or nation, and deliberate manipulation of their readers. Even some religious people have been manipulated – witness the inclusion of the British spy Edith Cavell in the Church of England’s Calendar of Saints.
In 2015, the Centenary of Cavell’s execution by the Germans in Belgium, the former Director of MI5, Dame Stella Rimington, revealed that Cavell had, indeed, been passing information to the British, and, according to the laws of war, the Germans had her “bang to rights.”
Within months of her execution THE TIMES was boasting that the “atrocity” had been worth a couple of Army Corps to the British, (as scores of thousands of brave, generous, chivalrous and deluded dupes) flocked to her colours.
The Times, these past four years, has been reproducing pieces from the Great War. The paper, was then most contemptuous of pacifists, who were being imprisoned and ill-treated with its approval. Many of those men were every bit as courageous as the men in the trenches, many of whom were their brothers. One pacifist, Fenner Brockway, was in Derry in January 1972 to witness the Paratroops on Bloody Sunday. Like Clement Attlee’s pacifist brother, his prison conditions were ameliorated after Irish Nationalist MPs in Westminster, advised by Insurgent Republican prisoners in 1916, raised their plight in Parliament.
Ireland’s most noted Pacifist and Feminist, Francis Sheehy Skeffington was murdered on the orders of a British Officer onEaster Tuesday 1916 in Dublin. Like the Paratroopers of 1972, neither the Officer, nor his cowed irregular firing squad ever faced justice in this life.
The principle that British troops can kill with impunity iappears to be upheld by General Nick Carter and many retired Generals, and ex-soldiers including “Conservative MP Johnny Mercer – a man admired by Leon Spence (Political Comment, November 9th). I’d be surprised if Johnny Mercer and and Leon Spence combined had half the guts of the average pacifist.
As for the average British Cabinet Minister, the late Taoiseach GarretFitzgerald, well thought of in Britain, recalled his surprise that so many of them were in thrall to the British Forces.
By all means remember the dead, but do not make the mistake of being suckered into slaughter or slaughtering others by brazen hate-mongering liars and their sycophants.
Donal Kennedy
London
Comments are closed.