Those of you who have bothered to watch “Howth Regatta and Lambay Races, 1942 ” and “Once Upon a Tram” shot in 1959 may be disappointed that they failed to substantiate the Misery Memoirs of professional,that is mercenary writers.
I am interested in history but a mere amateur and what I write I do for the love of it. It may be that an
enthusiastic amateur is as good as any pro. You may know of some who’re lying and some whore not. But, as I said, I’m strictly amateur.
Let’s consider the world beyond Ireland in 1959, the year I left school.
All the boasted “Democracies” had military conscription. Elvis was a GI for Uncle Sam. Britain was engaged in violence in many theatres, and had hanged nearly 1,100 convicted Africans at Thompson Falls in Kenya since the accession of Queen Elizabeth seven years earlier. Many more Africans were murdered, tortured and raped by her troops. Few white settlers, on land robbed from the Africans, were killed by the Mau Mau, indeed less than those killed in road accidents. Most of those killed were African collaborators with the British or their victims. Idi Amin earned his Commission with the King’a African Rifles, the first African to do so and later came to power as a British protege. On horseback Frank Kitson hunted Africans as if he was hunting foxes.
In Cyprus the British were hanging Greek Cypriots. During the First World War the British threatened
to bombard both Constantinople and Athens and offered the Greeks Cyprus if they would join them.
Frank Kitson won his spurs in Malaya where the “Emergency” had another year to run, having been
waged on it since 1948 by Clement Attlee.
Malaya was immensely wealthy and its tin and rubber were stolen by the British to repay War Debts to the USA and finance the British Welfare State. Rubber alone accounted for more than all the domestic exports of the UK to the US.
The targeted assassination of civilian trade unionists and other activists, the killing of livestock,
aerial spraying of Agent Orange, extrajudicial killing of unarmed villagers, the forcible relocation of up to a million civilians into concentration camps served as a template for the later American war on Vietnam. Britain under subsequent Tory and “Socialist” Governments coached the Americans in these atrocities
The Netherlands, France, and Belgium were up to their necks in such violence long after Hitler shot
himself.
President Higgins in his Christmas Message has highlighted the positive contribution of the Irish Defence Force, Educators and others to the human race during the crimes and follies of the Great Powers.
I still blame Pearse, Connolly, De Valera and their followers for my long and peaceful life, and from the rooftops cry –
CONFOUND THE BEGRUDGERS!
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