COMMEMORATING WORLD WAR ONE IN MONOCHROME : DIARY NOTES: AUGUST 6TH 2014
Commemorating World War One in Monochrome
It is only two days since the start of events commemorating the
start of World War One and I am already beginning to feel somewhat ‘war weary.’
As a passionate amateur historian it is not that I fail to recognise the
significance of the centenary, few could fail to understand that. No, it is
that I am becoming increasingly tired, indeed frustrated and irritated, by the ‘monochrome’
way in which the events of a hundred years ago are being both reported and commemorated.
It is as if the black and white footage in which the period is recorded is
being replicated in the way it is being remembered. A just war fought for “British
Values,” to paraphrase the Prime Minister.
Well possibly, although one would have to state clearly what
precisely those values were/are. Would those values be democracy? Tell that to
the Indians, West Indians and Africans who fought and died in their thousands
on all fronts, - whilst the Germans had a much wider franchise. Perhaps those
values are standing up to bullies, defending the rights of small countries?
This might have produced a hollow laugh from the Boers or any number of small
African Kingdoms. Free speech and liberalism perhaps? The suffragettes
who had been force fed in prison and the hundreds of men imprisoned for conscientious
objection to the war could have bust a gut over that one.
Wartime Propaganda. How much has the narrative really changed. |
My point here is not to make a political point, but to highlight
the lack of nuance and the continued parading of the ‘guilty Germans’
narrative, - a narrative I now believe to have been comprehensively demolished
by the likes of the historians such as Christopher Clark and Sean McMeekin.*
The war was a catastrophe
of almost unimaginable proportions, with consequences still being felt to this
day. Great Britain with its mixed messages and dithering during the July Crisis
of 1914 bears some responsibility for this war; though to now watch media
coverage in this country you would be hard to find any acknowledgement of this.
Put another way there was a moral case for going to war[1]
on August 4th 1914, but things should never have got to that stage
and Great Britain bore some of the responsibility that they had. A little
humility and admission of this failure would not have gone amiss at some of the
commemorative events. Instead we had smug self-satisfaction, most in-elegantly
personified by the Prime Minister remarks.
Where are the tales of the young German boys from villages
and towns across Germany being sent to their slaughter, or the Russian peasants
propelled into Germany, badly led, badly equipped and with no idea of what it
was they were supposed to be fighting for? Where are the portraits of the
Czechs, Croats and Poles, conscripted into a struggle not their own? Or the
Italians clinging to near vertical cliffs as they fought over small provinces
of the Austro Hungarian Empire? In short where is the presentation of this
immense tragedy outside of the prism of the ‘this sceptre’d Isle’ version of
history?
No Gutter too Grubby
In a small footnote to the events taking place on Monday an
obscene attempt was made by a grubby little band of political apparatchiks in
the Tory party, – the so called ‘kill Mill’ unit – to use the event to try and discredit
the Labour leader Ed Miliband. Miliband was set up, unlike the Prime Minister
he was not given time to personalise the message on his commemorative wreath. This
was used against him. No gutter too grubby then. In response I reproduce a poem
that I composed a couple of years back when a similar disgusting ‘controversy’
sought to exploit the dead for political purposes.
‘David Cameron has called the ban on England's footballers
wearing poppies on their kit "outrageous".’ BBC News 09/11/11
Mr Cameron’s in a froth
And the Sun is seething hot
And they curse the foreign crowd
Who say the Poppy’s not allowed.
The dead don’t care,
The dead don’t care.
The Radio pundit can’t believe it
Who can possibly conceive it?
No Englishman can hide
From this blow to English pride.
The dead don’t care,
The dead don’t care.
So we summon up our Shakespeare
Stand our ground and make it clear
That our courageous footballers
Will wear the poppy here.
The dead don’t care,
The dead don’t care.
*See ‘The Sleepwalkers’ penguin books 2014 and McMeekin’s ‘The
Russian Origins of the First World War’ Harvard Press 2013, respectively.
[1]
And also a strong moral case for staying out, though the German invasion of Belgium
and the subsequent war crimes that they committed there made this case much
harder to be heard.