I suppose it had to happen.
After the 'success' of the Jubilee and the Olympics a Prime Minister desperate for another diversion has come up with the brilliant idea of celebrating the 100 year anniversary of the start of the First World War.
I wonder if his advisers suggested hanging on for four years and celebrating the end?
What is there to celebrate about Europe tearing itself apart over a carnage that lasted four long bloody years?
What is there to celebrate about countries being destroyed, populations decimated in a conflict that effectively represented a fin de siecle of an age and which in its turn ushered in the Great Depression?
Am I missing something?
Maybe the Prime Minister sees it as a way of nailing down Europe.
First there will be a referendum and we will pull out of Europe, then we will celebrate the defeat of those European nations that had the temerity to challenge our primacy as a political and economic empire?
Coming within days of the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize for the European Union, recognition of what is good and significant about an economic and political alliance that has managed to ensure peaceful co-existence between its member states for over sixty years, it seems somewhat contradictory.
What will we celebrate, the Lions or the Donkeys?
The phrase seems to have its origins in the German High Command who described the ordinary soldiers of the British Army as Lions who were led by Generals who were Donkeys.
One German general commenting that if the British Generals had matched their troops courage with a similar degree of strategy they would have been invincible.
Well, history as Orwell commented is always written by the victors and I suppose that the committee chosen to plan the celebrations will write their own version of what happened.
The sub-text, as with the Olympics and the Jubilee will inevitably be to set out a narrative that tells a story about the unity and greatness of the British Isles.
I have no doubt that we live in a Great Country, it is the triumph of the Lions that despite everything, they survive the lack of strategy, the corruption and the wrong-headed-ness of the Donkeys who insist that they are in charge.
Maybe that is something to celebrate?
After the 'success' of the Jubilee and the Olympics a Prime Minister desperate for another diversion has come up with the brilliant idea of celebrating the 100 year anniversary of the start of the First World War.
I wonder if his advisers suggested hanging on for four years and celebrating the end?
What is there to celebrate about Europe tearing itself apart over a carnage that lasted four long bloody years?
What is there to celebrate about countries being destroyed, populations decimated in a conflict that effectively represented a fin de siecle of an age and which in its turn ushered in the Great Depression?
Am I missing something?
Maybe the Prime Minister sees it as a way of nailing down Europe.
First there will be a referendum and we will pull out of Europe, then we will celebrate the defeat of those European nations that had the temerity to challenge our primacy as a political and economic empire?
Coming within days of the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize for the European Union, recognition of what is good and significant about an economic and political alliance that has managed to ensure peaceful co-existence between its member states for over sixty years, it seems somewhat contradictory.
What will we celebrate, the Lions or the Donkeys?
The phrase seems to have its origins in the German High Command who described the ordinary soldiers of the British Army as Lions who were led by Generals who were Donkeys.
One German general commenting that if the British Generals had matched their troops courage with a similar degree of strategy they would have been invincible.
Well, history as Orwell commented is always written by the victors and I suppose that the committee chosen to plan the celebrations will write their own version of what happened.
The sub-text, as with the Olympics and the Jubilee will inevitably be to set out a narrative that tells a story about the unity and greatness of the British Isles.
I have no doubt that we live in a Great Country, it is the triumph of the Lions that despite everything, they survive the lack of strategy, the corruption and the wrong-headed-ness of the Donkeys who insist that they are in charge.
Maybe that is something to celebrate?
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