100 years to the day that the First World War began [04/Aug/2014]

Day 2,449, 06:18 • Published in Israel Canada • by New Faustian Man


Warning: If you don’t live in the UK most of this will probably be meaningless


Today at a gathering of European leaders in Liege, Belgium, to commemorate the start of the First World War, Prince William sai😛 "We were enemies more than once in the last century and today we are friends and allies...We salute those who died to give us our freedom. We will remember them."

Freedom? Freedom from what exactly?

His statement seems to suggest that if the British Empire had lost the war, its working class would have been in a worse place than if it had won. Which is a dubious claim at best!

The empty propaganda that underwrites a lot of modern wars, suggesting they’re about democracy, fighting an abstract concept like “terror” etc. is notable by its absence when speaking about the First World War -- at least it is in the UK. Instead the RL media rolls out some curious nationalism that we should be “proud” of our ancestors who “sacrificed” their lives – never bothering to mention that this “sacrifice” was in defence of House Windsor’s empire against the imperial ambitions of Houses Hohenzollern and Habsburg; or that an overwhelming number of the soldiers were conscripts, i.e. forced to fight, and often die, in the war.

I think when someone like William Windsor makes a statement like “We salute those who died to give us our freedom. We will remember them...” he’s using “we” to refer to his class – not his nationality. Because I’m really at a loss to fathom out what the working class were sacrificing their lives for or what kind of concessions they were winning by fighting in that conflict. Certainly not representative democracy, health care or social housing. None of which existed in any real sense at the time.

Peer pressure is a motherfucker


In media outlets like the BBC there is complete – and obviously intentional – disengagement with the ideology then prevailing that fostered the First World War and press-ganged millions of UK and Commenwealth citizens into a genocide that ultimately claimed over a million British lives -- which is in stark contrast to coverage of the Second World War. There things are black-and-white: the Nazis are Evil and-here's-why, and the Allieds are Good and-here's-why.

The Motherland and her dependant colonial offspring. (William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1883)


Today the tack when covering the First World War is to eschew what/who we were fighting for – in the UK’s case that was on behalf of the interests of a bloodthirsty colonial empire, an empire which committed more acts of genocide than Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia – and concentrate on the ‘human story’, i.e. the people who were conscripted to fight in the actual thing. Which is an obvious by-product of the absolute dearth of class politics in the UK in general and its media in particular, outside of fringe publications or the odd pundit. Strange when intellectual postcolonialism and cultural marxism informs most other strands of our existence in the UK: gender politics, race relations, immigration, etc. -- yet is completely absent when the subject is class.


Watching the BBC on a day like today I get to wondering what century I’m in.

A War Loan rally in London designed to convince the public to invest in dodgy “war bonds”

Interesting fact: the British ta😜ayer still pays in excess of £136m a year interest on debt from the First World War, the total debt figure stands at £1.94bn, 99% of which belongs to a group of secret financial institutions. These same kind of financial instruments were available in Germany during the First World War and were an important tool when the Nazis framed domestic and “International Jewry” for all Germany’s woes.




The Irish National War Memorial Gardens is an Irish war memorial in Islandbridge, Dublin, dedicated to the memory of the Irish soldiers who gave their lives in the Great War.


youtube.com/watch?v=5GxLOenKHjE


300,000 Irishmen fought against the 'Central Powers', over 49,000 were killed in battle or perished through injuries sustained in the conflict.


“The total number of military and civilian casualties in World War I was over 37 million. There were over 16 million deaths and 20 million wounded ranking it among the deadliest conflicts in human history.

The total number of deaths includes about 10 million military personnel and about 7 million civilians. The Entente Powers (also known as the Allies) lost about 6 million military personnel while the Central Powers lost about 4 million. At least 2 million died from diseases and 6 million went missing, presumed dead.

About two-thirds of military deaths in World War I were in battle, unlike the conflicts that took place in the 19th century when the majority of deaths were due to disease. Nevertheless, disease, including the Spanish flu and deaths while held as prisoners of war, still caused about one third of total military deaths for all belligerents.”

[Source: Wiki]


“"We" salute those who died to give us our freedom. "We" will remember them."





37 million casualties of the First World War ≠ "We"




/rant over, NFM climbs off soapbox



R.I.P. everyone who gave their lives in the Great War o7



NFM