100 years to the day that the First World War began [04/Aug/2014]
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.
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.
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.
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."
/rant over, NFM climbs off soapbox
R.I.P. everyone who gave their lives in the Great War o7
NFM
Comments
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Well done.
Voted!
Thanks mate o7
i'd stare rape both of her holes and she'd like it.
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If we never won the First World War, Hitler probably wouldn't have gained power (you probably wouldn't have heard of him). This has nothing to do with my opinion on anything but I thought I would just share it.
We may never know what that detail could have changed in history. I'm not even going to start to count the possibilities 😃
this guy ... you've prolly never heard of him: hipster hitler.
If the Central Powers had come out victorious the world would have experienced a new industrialised empire that would've ruled uncontested for the next hundred years and encompassed most of the world in all likelihood. It may not have been as overtly racist or chauvinistic as a movement like Nazi Germany, but unlikely it would be been any less hesitant to commit genocide.
'Freedom from what exactly' This is a very good question, in my opinion William might be getting his world wars confused. WW1 was about dick waving colonial powers and was the culmination of a very dark period of European history and Eurocentric ego's.
The only Freedom it encouraged was the highlighting of hypocrisy and the realisation (by some) that perhaps Colonialism is in fact a bad thing, but even that is a strenuous link.
Whats more- Colonialism never ended. Its still on power, although in different forms, nicely packed.
The fact the rhetoric often used to describe the world wars is interchangeable -- that going by it you'd be hard pressed to make a distinction between Britain as an empire willing to waste a million+ citizens to hold onto its gains -- and in the second gave everything it had in fighting against a movement [Nazi Germany] that wanted to exterminate the vast majority of the human race -- is very sad tbh.
The problem is no one in the media ever seems to point that out.
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WW1 should have been contained in the Balkans, the Sanity of Treaties (invasion of Belgium as forbidden to the Treaty of London) was 'our' excuse to protect 'the empire' from German Weltpolitik. Germany and Britain, on paper, should have been allies, but greed led to millions of deaths, in the name of patriotism, achieving not a great deal for either side. It also led to the social and economic situations in the Weimar Republic that allowed Hitler to seize power.
I am grateful for their sacrifice for our country, but WW1 should have been avoided, and it shouldn't have cost the lives of so many innocent people.
I don't think that girl there's at risk of much "stare-raping" really.
True. But someone who believes they can get "raped" by someone merely looking in their direction is bound to be a bit delusional anyway.
Good thoughtful article.
Poor people protect the investments of the rich. We call that war.
Voted, but the royal family is lamee
And inbred. Prince William, the guy in the first pic, was born with six toes on both feet. They're an out-of-date freakshow.
ahaahahahaa is that really true? xD... and yes, that is true.
Yeap, the offending toes were apparently removed however when he was still a baby.
Wilhelm II, the German Emperor and George V "King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and Emperor of India" were first cousins -- yet fought a war against eachother on very little pretext that killed millions of their citizens -- so that these people were also inbreeding doesn't really come as a surprise to me 😛
Haha, yeah.... well.... the British King obviously had no actual power beyond ceremonial at that time, but still.
voted hard... those who do not know history's mistakes are doomed to repeat them !
great article !
Thanks mate o7
Also what strikes me about that war was how the Generals refused to change their tactics, especially the English leadership. Throughout most of the war they kept up full frontal assaults against well defended German positions always ending up with the same results, thousands of men dead, dying, wounded in No Man's Land. And the Germans still in firm control of their positions. On the first day of The Somme Irish regiments were ordered over the top in full gear and at parade formation only to be cut to pieces before getting anywhere near German Trenches, my grandfather was one of those "lads" laying wounded in a shell hole for 3 days before they were able to get him. Or the way Canadian troops were,ordered forward at Passchendaele even though the mud was so thick that it slowed down all other attack groups to give support to the shock troops, which resulted in more slaughter amongst the pill boxes. It was all pure insanity
I put a lot of it down to sheer incompetence, some of their military thinking was 50 years out of date and had more place in the Napoleonic Wars than WW1; and tbh I think they thought of the conscript armies as pieces on a chessboard anyway, and were totally nonplussed by the kind of carnage their strategies brought about. The British high command and most of the commissioned officers were upper class, same with the Germans, Prussian aristocracy, so they had absolutely no connection with the common soldiery, meaning they had no compunction about ordering the kind of death charges into machinegun fire that engagements like the Somme or Verdun are infamous for.
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Freedom: 1 nation = 1 state
> UK is not freedom
> Pride Power Bank of Scotland o/
> cCc One Ireland cCc
Just blame Napoleon III and jamesw
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Nice article!