End of empire and returning soldiers

Rebelheart

pedroeibar1 wrote: »

Those statements are bigoted, insulting and derisive of many posters and those who fought.... As usual, the comments posted by you carry your corrosive political agenda, your fixation with Britbashing, Myers and Bury, and add zero to the subject at hand.

Now, now pedroeibar; if you cannot raise your mind to debate the issue and are reduced to ad hominem perhaps you should disengage from this or indeed any discussion which requires rational thought rather than jejune outbursts.

pedroeibar1 wrote: »

Those statements are bigoted, insulting and derisive of many posters and those who fought.

Whatever about this puerile rant - I freely admit to being opposed to British imperialism and its perennial casuists such as yourself - it remains a truism that the people who fought for the British Empire in World War One fought for, well, British imperialism and all the accompanying supremacy, inhumanity and dehumanisation which that ideology represented and inflicted across the world. The fact that Irish-born people were among this group can only absolve them in the most backward, tribal Irish mind. To take a holistic "one world" view, these Irish-born footsoldiers of the British Empire are just as guilty as British people who fought for the British Empire's supremacy. Without them, the British Empire could not have survived. You are defending the commemoration of people who kept the British Empire subjugating peoples across the world. When your hyperbole is stripped away, that's what your morality on the subject of commemoration comes down to.

Rebelheart

pedroeibar1 wrote: »

The claim “WW I, by the way, was a war between two imperial powers- it was not some great moral crusade for the rights of small countries” is sanctimonious, supercilious and made with the benefit of hindsight.

Oh, I really do think you should read the writings of many people in the summer of 1914 who were vehement in their criticism of Irish people helping the British imperialist state which occupied all of Ireland in its war against a state which never occupied Ireland. Try, for instance, this man (8 August 1914).


Leaving aside your lamentable historical ignorance, your logic for justifying these footsoldiers of the British Empire is extraordinary: because certain people claimed that they were doing it for noble reasons at the time it must be respected? You've just given carte blanche to everything British imperialists have done. Sure, what would Humphrey Gilbert's, Walter Devereux's and Oliver Cromwell's soldiers have known - sure didn't they believe they were just "civilising the wilde Irishe"? We can't blame them, it seems. What a legend of a line. Next, you'll be defending those footsoldiers of the United States in the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 because they genuinely believed there were "weapons of mass destruction" and the war they contributed to had nothing to do with oil. Sure if they believed it, we must respect them, we must commemorate them. It's "Commemorate any auld eejit as long as he's wearing the uniform of my preferred group of thugs" time. Well done.

The list of who we should commemorate could go on and on. Yet, curiously, the list doesn't seem to include the footsoldiers of states which fought against the British Empire. Interesting. People who fought for Nazi Germany for what they considered the best motives? Oh, well, em, sin scéal eile ar fad.

Is your hypocrisy, and that of your fellow apologists who want to make a gazillion excuses in order to make a moral distinction between those who fought for German fascism and those who fought for British imperialism, sinking in yet? Even a bit?

Rebelheart

pedroeibar1 wrote: »

You ignore those who did believe the War was for Belgium

You may claim they fought for noble things like "little Belgium" - Ha, do you know anything about the savagery of "Little Belgium"? - but the fact is they in reality fought for the state which ran the biggest imperialist state in the history of the world.

If I were to pick a single state and military in the entire world in 1914 which would be the unlikeliest defender of "the rights of small nations" bar none it would be the British state and its servants for which you like to make apologies. No country was doing more in 1914 to ensure small countries remained subjugated to the needs of the British state and its elite. You've well and truly swallowed all the propaganda of British Army recruiters in Ireland in the autumn on 1914. The sorrow of it is that you don't realise it and take it as fact, indeed the only "fact" of the period. These cannonfodder for the British Empire didn't have to fight to defend it. They could have followed the example of thousands of Irish people by refusing to join Britain's latest imperial war, World War I. But the money was good....

It just doesn't sound as good if mé féiner, money-hungry mercenaries for British imperialism are being commemorated when the Irish-born servants of the British Empire in WW I are being commemorated, does it?

Rebelheart

pedroeibar1 wrote: »

you also ignore the Redmondites - look at the number of Volunteers who fought in WWI and compare it to the number of those who stayed at home.

This sums up the sheer idiocy of your thinking and how depressingly little moral consistency or even thought you have put into this. As if the greater number of Irish people who fought for the British Empire in World War II bestows a greater morality on their deeds. Hello? Some four million men marched into Russia on behalf of the Nazi state in June 1941. This clearly proves they had a greater morality? Yeah? Oh, wait. They weren't fighting for the British Empire, your favourite crowd of reprobates. Ergo, we must create different rules on morality, old bean. Seeing that you have a propensity for throwing the word 'bigotry' around, your thinking here personifies bigotry.

pedroeibar1 wrote: »

You also deride those who enlisted either from a sense of adventure or economic necessity.

Indeed I do, especially when you clearly cannot distinguish between "economic necessity" and "economic advancement". Moreover, where are your defences for the people who volunteered to join the military forces of the Nazi state for the same reasons? Is your hypocrisy and that of your fellow apologists for the footsoldiers of British imperialism sinking in yet?

Rebelheart

pedroeibar1 wrote: »

you also ignore the Redmondites - look at the number of Volunteers who fought in WWI and compare it to the number of those who stayed at home.

Look at what they were getting paid for fighting for the British Empire in a war which they thought would be over by Christmas 1914, and look at what they were getting if they stayed at home in British-occupied Ireland....

In your next apologia, you'll have to try harder to elevate the deeds of these people into the realms of courageous self-sacrifice.

pedroeibar1 wrote: »

As usual, the comments posted by you carry your corrosive political agenda, your fixation with Britbashing, Myers and Bury, and add zero to the subject at hand.

Well, you certainly haven't added zero. Your post nicely encapsulates the moral bankruptcy, moral inconsistency and hypocrisy at the heart of people who demand Irish-born servants of the British Empire be commemorated despite the iniquity of that Empire for which they fought. Your post also depressingly highlights the dishonesty and tribal self-interest which refuses to extend the same compassion towards the commemoration of people who fought for German fascism as they extend to those who fought for British imperialism.

jonniebgood1

Rebelheart wrote: »

This sums up the sheer idiocy of your thinking

...
Seeing that you have a propensity for throwing the word 'bigotry' around, your thinking here personifies bigotry.

Rebelheart wrote: »

Rebelheart wrote: »

Leaving aside your lamentable historical ignorance
...

This amounts to personal abuse. You get a ban for this.
Fortunately I think that frees me from having to judge on the other content of your series of posts which to be mild have very little to do with history or historical fact. Please refrain from posting if you cannot be more civil in future.

moderator.

ejmaztec

Rebelheart wrote: »

The issue raised here of posters who feel that those who fought for British imperialism should not be equated with those who fought for German Nazism hits on a massive hypocrisy of those who make apologies for men who defended British imperialism and its elite, racist and sectarian interests in Ireland and against peoples across the world.

Neither WW1 nor WW2 saw the British involved in elitist, sectarian or racist agendas. The standard Rebelheart view doesn't apply in either of these cases.

As the two posters quoted below make clear, they bestow a superior morality on those who volunteered to fight for British imperialism than they would bestow on those who volunteered to fight for German Nazism. They are unable to answer this: what makes British imperialism, and those who volunteered to protect and expand it, more worthy of being commemorated than German Nazism and those who volunteered to protect and expand it?

I wouldn't answer your heavily loaded and biased question, because in my opinion WW1 was never about the protection of the British Empire, or indeed its expansion. The British could have grabbed all of the former Austro-Hungarian territory, but they didn't. Certainly, in cahoots with the French, the Ottoman Empire was carved up, but both countries had interests in the area, so that was to be expected.

At all turns the immorality of imperialism is avoided and fingers are pointed in unison at the Nazis. The Nazis:the best deflection the British could ever have for their own,extraordinary in historical terms, record of imperialist subjugationand inhumanity throughout the centuries.

If I had a deep undying obsessive abject hatred of all things British, and zero knowledge of what the Nazis were all about, I would probably agree with you, but I haven't and I don't.

If they had the honesty to say either A)footsoldiers for both British imperialism and German Nazism should be commemorated or neither set of volunteers should be commemorated,they would have some moral consistency. Trying to say one is morally superior to the other is, among other things, a tribal defence of the indefensible.

Anyone disagreeing with Rebelheart is dishonest? There must be an awful lot of “dishonest”people around. I find your attitude indefensible, and insulting to the victims of Nazi genocide.

Again: without such people fighting for them, both British imperialism and German Nazism would not have thrived. The footsoldiers are guilty, and thus unworthy of commemoration by any civilised society which values freedom and the equal humanity of every person regardless of their race, religion or whatever.

I doubt that kind of society exists now, let alone at the time of WW1 or WW2. It may exist in the land of dreams, Star Trek, or Cloud Cuckoo Land, but nowhere else.

.

Zebra3

Fratton Fred wrote: »

The triple entente was signed in 1907.

Your point has nothing to do with my post.

The Entente did not oblige Britain to go to war in 1914.

Fratton Fred

Zebra3 wrote: »

Your point has nothing to do with my post.

The Entente did not oblige Britain to go to war in 1914.

It made it very difficult for them not to as well. It was one of the main factors in creating the "tinder box" that Europe became.

Ultimately though, Britain went to war for one reason and that was the fear that if Germany conquered France, the combined power (in particular sea power) would leave Britain powerless to defend itself or the empire.