Worth Remembering – Part 2 August 5, 2014
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Irish Politics.trackback
Just on foot of President Higgins comments yesterday here’s Simon Jenkins (no man of the left he) in the Guardian discussing the British commemoration:
Clearly events of the magnitude of a war should be remembered. But when those who fought and suffered are almost all dead, “remembering” is a task for the intellect and imagination. It is essentially work for historians, but we have to pump up “human interest” in it, especially for children, with tales of personal distress and terrible cruelty. The repetition of virtually identical “stories from the trenches” becomes banal, a nightly pornography of violence.
The Cedar Lounge Revolution 
I disagree with Mr. Jenkins more often that not – but that was a good piece.
Here in Germany there’s due attention to the anniversary (especially since Central European wars are now on the agenda) but I can detect no glorification of the slaughter.
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I suspect that somewhere in their subconsicious, the neo liberal revisionists believe that if they can manage to re-write the history of the first world war, they can surely manage to rebrand the class divisions that went with it.
Not so much toffs and toughs, perhaps, but certainly the attendant inequalities.
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The line of thinking from Bruton, Stephen Collins and others has parallels with the denigration of ‘populism’ we see today and I think the demand for tributes to Redmond and Home Rule should be seen as an attempt to re-centre political elites in a period that saw ordinary people awakened and active like no time before or since
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The letters page in today’s IT has six or seven letters on commemorating WW1. By my reading, all bar one are critical of the fawning commemoration overkill (an appropriate word maybe?).
Best line I read was from the chap who despaired that he’d be reading this stuff in the Irish Times for the next four years but whose wife reassured him that it would probably be all over by Christmas.
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An excellent piece from Brian Hanley is it wasn’t already posted
http://www.lookleftonline.org/2014/08/look-back-in-anger/
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