Virtue- Signalling is the expression of statements calculated to reflect credit on their author rather than on the apparent subject of their approval.
The author may boast a Moral Compass but be unable to recognise one if it pricked him in the arse.
I have before me a volume COURAGE Eight Portraits which I first came across in the bookshop in Ampleforth, the Public School in Yorkshire, where I once stopped for Mass on a Sunday. The school produced its share of courageous warriors, some of them with more guts than brains, some bloodthirsty fanatics, and lying propagandists. But that’s by the bye.
One of the Eight Portraits featured Edith Cavell, a truly brave woman shot by a German firing squad in Belgium in 1915.
On the centenary of her death Dame Stella Rimington, former Director of MI5 revealed that the Germans had Cavell bang to rights according to the recognised code of war at the time.
The British boasted that the shooting had been worth two Army Corps to them, as tens of thousands of chivalrous youth flocked to her colours to wreak vengeance on equally chivalrous Germans.
The Church of England inscribed Cavell’s name in its Calendar of Saints.
Another of the Eight Portraits features Raoul Wallenburg a heroic Swede who saved many Jews from murder by the Nazis at the end of the Second World War. He disappeared in mysterious circumstances after Hungary was liberated from the Nazis by the Soviets. And it is not considered politically Incorrect in the West to blame theSoviets for his death without an iota of evidence.
Unportrayed by the compiler is another Swedish Hero, Count Folke Bernadotte, who had also saved many Jews from murder by the Nazis.
Bernadotte was appointed by the United Nations as their Mediator in Palestine in March 1948 and always travelled unarmed and with an unarmed French Officer, Colonel Serot, as his Aide de Camp.
On the 17th September 1948 in broad daylight in Jerusalem their car was halted by men in Israeli uniform and shot dead. On the following day the UN Security Council issued Resolution number 57.
The bodies of the murdered men were flown to Paris (Bernadotte’s en route to Stockholm). In Paris to pay their respects were the Secretary General of the UN, the Prime Minister of France, the Secretary of State of theUnited States and Britain’s Foreign Secretary.
The order for the murder of Bernadotte was Yitzhak Shamir, who was to serve 2 terms as Prime Minister of Israel (1981/1982 and 1986/1992). He was impenitent for what was described by the UN Security Coincil as a cowardly crime.
The compiler of the Portraits served in a British Cabinet which killed scores of thousands of Iraqi civilians on the lying pretext that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the people of Britain. Britain’s foremost expert on weapons of massed destruction refuted that claim and died with slit wrists. The jury might be out on who cut his wrists – if there had been a jury.
But there was no autopsy, no Coroner and no jury. So your guess, dear reader, may be no worse nor better than mine.
The Compiler was Gordon Brown.
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