I have just attended a fascinating breakfast briefing meeting at the Imperial War Museum learning about the plans to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War in 2014.
Now that the last survivors have died, we are left with cold shocking facts – 350,000 servicemen left permanently disabled; for every one of the 1,560 days of the war, 577 men on average were casualties.
The Imperial War Museum have put together a really interesting and multi faceted plan to ensure we do not forget.
War – started by politicians, who never get involved in the dirty hand to hand stuff.
Nope, that’s for the Plebs to be killed and maimed.
Actually Lord Blagger, a large number of MPs and Lords actually quit Westminster to serve in the front lines in combat. There are shields in the House of Commons chamber commemorating those who have died in war, and panels all over the Royal Gallery and Westminster Hall.
No more uninformed comments please.
Now that you know how many were killed and maimed in the first world war, and what a crime it was, why are you not giving the figures for those of today. The men who die and are maimed for the British/US political games. You know, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the rest you don’t tell us about.
Now there is the start of recognition of the crimes committed by the politicians and their greed fest, those of the ilk of the Blair creature. Followed by Brown, Straw, Campbell, et al, and now, Cameron. All under the guise of, what was it called, defence of the realm.
Do you see any of their sons on offer?
Pleeeeeeese!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rsj9uCi3xQY
Quite.
It’s for the plebs to die so Blair etc can play their games.
“To ensure we do not forget”
we need much more than an annual splendiferous Cenotaph Parade
and a more-costly and deeply-security-walled-off Museum Building complete with Lifeless Contents.
We need a new People-Responseable-Institution,
on a daily practical and UK-resident-participatory basis,
and to be designed and budgeted truly worthy as an Entrenched-Constitutional-Response to Our-Truly-Common-Needs
as they were sacramentally-expressed by our ‘hidden and gagged’ active-service personnel, at the horror-fronts in defence against the Bestial-Japanese, when our Far-East survivors composed a message, lost because obscured by the daily greater priorities of actions in North-Africa, Italy, and in the Europe liberation campaigns ‘making-better-and closer-to-home-news’ :
(“) To those of you surviving,
when you get home to Britain, tell them
how we gave our Today
that you may have a Tomorrow(“).
We need to be maturely making that Tomorrow,
by daily improving our internal individual life-sustaining abilities,
as well as our mutual Longest-Term Strategic and immediately sustainworthy Expertises and Efforts.
Lord Hodgson,
I think World War One seems as remote as the Peloponesian War to many people around the World. There is some truth to the perception of distance. A few empires based in Europe have been replaced by complex webs of security relationships and treaties around the world. America and Russia had a forty year phase of reshaping eachother and the world. The greatest difference is in the robust European Union. We strain to see a risk of repeating that particular calamity…
On the other hand, many in the USA want to withdraw from commitments to a position similar to those held in the start of the First World War. The potential for conflict from North Africa and Eastern Europe flowing into the EU in some way or another is more real than at many other times. The same problem of conflicting plans and strategies and people seeking to take advantage of mutual unpreparedness is not impossible. The relatives of Queen Victoria may have their analogy in a few associations and clubs where the few think they speak for more of their own countries than they do.
Perhaps the Great War is not so far from us. It would be a good chapter not to repeaat I imagine…
I very much doubt you will get wars between states.
After all, look at the scenario. UK invades France to get lots of tax revenues to pay off its debts. Hmmm, the big flaw is that the French won’t pay taxes.
So will there be war? You bet. It will be citizen versus state.
What will people do when they find their entire pensions have been stolen from them by Peers and MPs, and they are left destitute in their old age?
What will the young do when they discover its all tax and no services in an attempt to pay for the elderly?
They will riot, certain as eggs are eggs in France and the UK. So its going to be civil war.
Why do you think MPs want to keep their addresses secret? Partly is so they can carry on troughing, but equally, they know that when people find out about their frauds, there will be lots of Stephen Timms.