Profile for Harry Flashman
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Harry Flashman has commented 1,529 times (19 in the last month).
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Books
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The ANC, the IRA and the rise of influence of the left within Sinn Fein…
Tweet World by Storm has a nice piece up on the IRA’s role in helping MK, the armed wing of the ANC, in the 1980s. In particular he sees a strange alchemy at work there: …if one can think of a clearly legitimate contemporary struggle it was that against apartheid and it is to the [...] read our review »
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Christopher Hitchens, 1949 – 2011
Tweet Writer Christopher Hitchens has died aged 62. He was as contrary as he was brilliant. Here is a brief In Memoriam from Vanity Fair (his outlet of choice since 1992) and, here, a longer tribute from his friend Christopher Buckley Stanley in The New Yorker. Better, perhaps, though to post one of Hitchens’ own writings [...] read our review »
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A Political History of the Two Irelands competition…
Tweet It’s not often we get free things to give away to our readers, but courtesy of Palgrave Macmillan we have a nice paperback copy of Brian M Walker’s excellent history of partition of the island and how identities shifted in both the north east and the south and west: as most of the territory [...] read our review »
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Comment on If Ireland north and south can commemorate the First World War together, so should the Germans alongside the wartime Allies
on 19 June 2013 at 1:51 pm
“Just look at the number of Africans and Indians that were ‘recruited’ into the colonial /imperialist powers armies .”
Oferfuxake!
Let me spell it out again for the congenitally slow on the uptake.
The colonial troops later brought in from the overseas empires after the war started played no hand, act nor part in determining the start of the war in the summer of 1914 by the continental European powers.
Britain’s overseas empire is an utterly irrelevant red herring in the cause of the First World War and is only ever brought up by Irish Nationalists rushing to defend their “gallant allies” the Germans.
Sheesh, this is getting tiresome.
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Comment on If Ireland north and south can commemorate the First World War together, so should the Germans alongside the wartime Allies
on 19 June 2013 at 12:19 pm
Couldn’t agree more Joe, and as I said to Greenie I would be more than happy to discuss the iniquities of European colonialism, having lived for years now in a former Asian colony of a European empire.
However Britain’s overseas colonies had no role whatsoever in the decision-making process in the chancelleries of Europe in the long hot summer of 1914.
The First World War was first and foremost a war between continental European powers and would have started even if Britain hadn’t carved out chunks of Asia and Africa over the past century or so.
It’s really so simple I fail to see why I need to repeat this basic fact twice in the same thread.
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Comment on “Bellwether interface” kicking off with multiple petrol bomb attacks…
on 19 June 2013 at 12:14 pm
“Bellwether” surely?
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Comment on If Ireland north and south can commemorate the First World War together, so should the Germans alongside the wartime Allies
on 19 June 2013 at 11:14 am
“Colonialism had a role and Britain was the greatest colonialist of its time.”
I do appreciate that whataboutery is a national past-time in Northern Ireland and Irish chips on each shoulder regarding the perfidious Brits will never be entirely eradicated but as I pointed out to Greenflag above the colonial empire of Britain, established over the previous two centuries in Asia, Africa, North America and the antipodes had absolutely, precisely and unequivocally nothing to do with the war that broke out in Europe between the Central Powers and the Triple Entente in August 1914.
Nothing.
Zip.
Nada.
Zero.
Zilch.
Have I made myself clear?
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Comment on If Ireland north and south can commemorate the First World War together, so should the Germans alongside the wartime Allies
on 18 June 2013 at 4:40 pm
Point me to the jingoistic statements, as opposed to historical analysis, I made and I’ll reconsider.
The proposed draconian peace terms that Germany would have inflicted on France, and for some reason Belgium too, are entirely relevant to the discussion of whether Germany was badly treated at Versailles. care to examine Brest-Litovsk?
Versailles had nothing to do with the Wall Street Crash, hyper-inflation was created by Germany’s own central bank and had nothing to do with reparations.
So ho-hum we’re back to square one, the wars of German unification in the late 19th Century and the First and Second World Wars were all part of an ongoing policy of German expansionism and aggression towards its neighbours.
That was brought to an end when it was defeated, invaded, occupied and its cities laid waste by 1945.
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Comment on If Ireland north and south can commemorate the First World War together, so should the Germans alongside the wartime Allies
on 18 June 2013 at 12:28 pm
The loss of two French provinces to German control and massive eye-watering reparations in 1871 can not be dismissed lightly.
You conveniently choose to ignore the punitive terms proposed for Belgium and France by Germany had she been victorious in 1914 and the dreadful treaty of Brest Litovsk that Germany inflicted on defeated Russia.
It suits Germany’s apologists to ignore these facts and concentrate on Versailles which left Germany largely intact (with the exception of the Polich corridor), free to form a democratic regime and with little foreign occupation. The myth of the reparations damage to the German economy has long since been dispelled by economists.
Versailles did not cause WWII, the German electorate caused WWII by electing Herr Hitler as Chancellor and wholeheartedly supporting his Nazi thugs in their goal of having a rerun of WWI.
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Comment on If Ireland north and south can commemorate the First World War together, so should the Germans alongside the wartime Allies
on 17 June 2013 at 5:22 pm
I didn’t argue about who started the 1871 war GF, I pointed out that Wilhelmine and Hitlerite Germany (two sides of the same coin) imposed much harsher terms on their defeated opponents than the Allies imposed on Germany in 1918.
That’s a fact.
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Comment on If Ireland north and south can commemorate the First World War together, so should the Germans alongside the wartime Allies
on 17 June 2013 at 5:20 pm
“President Obama is being leant on to adopt a more aggressive stance by forces that make the Bismarckian Prussians look like ‘wets’”
Is he indeed? Poor diddums.
This is the man who jokes about using drones and has slaughtered countless men, women and children in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen in his drone strikes (more moral than locking the men up in Guantanamo apparently).
This is the president who has created the most oppressive and secret surveillance regime in human history.
He is being leaned on by dark and sinister forces is he?
Bullshit, he knows what he’s doing and has no qualms about it.
Your whiter-than-white wunderkind is a seriously dangerous individual, he makes Bush and Rumsfeld look like pikers Greenie.
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Comment on “Adding more weapons to this volatile situation could destabilise the entire region…”
on 17 June 2013 at 5:04 pm
Spain had their civil war, Franco won. Had absolutely no effect on world history, Hitler was already in power, so was Hirohito.
A lot of misguided people went to Spain from different countries and got killed by Spanish people or people from other countries or killed Spanish people or people from other countries in a war that was entirely a Spanish internal matter, as civil wars usually are.
As I recall the rebels in Spain were the “bad guys”, the secularist barely legitimate rulers of Spain were the “good guys”, and both sides inflicted unspeakable atrocities on the other. May turn out to be the same in Syria.
“Something should be done” is not always the most sensible option. Look at Libya.
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Comment on If Ireland north and south can commemorate the First World War together, so should the Germans alongside the wartime Allies
on 17 June 2013 at 2:23 pm
“but not any “extraordinarily aggressive posture”.”
Let me help you out Malcolm, if in the space of seventy years you invade your northern neighbour twice, your southern neighbour twice, your eastern neighbour twice and your western neighbour three times as well as invading half a dozen other neighbours once, the phrase “extraordinarily aggressive posture” toward your neighbours is probably justified.
What Germany suffered at Versailles pales into insignificance to what she imposed on France in 1871, Russia in 1917, would have imposed on Belgium and France had she been successful in 1914 and eventually did impose on France, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Norway, Denmark, Yugoslavia, Greece and Russia from 1938 onwards.
Germany was the aggressor in the two world wars, the facts speak for themselves.
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