We are the problem, not the solution!

THE ORIGINS OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR - the war that started a century of wars by the West

We were talking about the origins of the World War in two halves at Llanrug. Here is a fuller explanation from the history according to me!

The 20th century was the most violent, destructive and horrific in the history of humanity, it seems to me. But we can't blame the Muslims, the Hindus, the Buddhists or the blacks. It has to be us - the Christians and the whites, in my opinion!

It was British imperialist attitudes that led to us joining the other nations of W Europe in 1914.

There was and still is a culture of warfare, after centuries of attacks and invasions by us on our neighbours in Europe and around the world. There were seven wars with France, alone, in 290 years! The 1914-18 war was simply the greatest, the best, the most violent by that time.

A great world power like ourselves can do nothing but go to war to prove its might to all and sundry.

The Great War was about protecting and extending our Empire from more recent upstarts like Germany.

We Brits love our war fighting or hard power (Tony Blair's phrases). We were tripping over each other to get on out there, thinking it would all be over by Christmas, 1914.

That war and its aftermath led, inevitably to dealing with the unfinished business of 1918/19 that brought such injustice that one of our own European men, Hitler came to dominate Germany and, who clearly, had to be dealt with. But we can't blame the foreigner, or even the blacks or the Arabs for Hitler! Hitler was a manifestation of our own violent past - and present.

Then, the second half of the century saw yet more killings by the mighty victors in 1945 - killings of the inhabitants of SE Asia, directly and of the people of the Middle East with our Western manufactured weapons (and the Russians)! Apparently, the USA has bombed nineteen countries since our '45 victory. Our friend and our ally in the Middle East is Israel whom we arm to the teeth to represent our interests against the Arab nations. With her, we are responsible for the wholesale collateral damage in Lebanon, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq and the rich nations induced climate change that brings famine and flood, drought and fire.

I think we slid into the war to end all wars¹ for all the reasons previously mentioned plus, it was due to our re-armament to keep up with German re-armament. There was also a mistaken belief, it seems, that we were obliged to keep to our alliance - one is attacked and the others in the alliance come to that nation's help. In fact, according to my brother in law, Tony Verduyn – the barrister and historian - we could have broken away from the alliance, not declare war and could have been neutral. On the other hand, it seems to me, our ships could have been attacked, anyway until we were forced to retaliate and declare war against the country sinking our shipping. This was how the US was brought into both world wars - in 1917 and 1941or 42, I think were the dates.

It was the mindset of the time (1914) that failed to put the brakes on the slide towards war, once more in W Europe. There was, in no way a sufficient abhorrence of war fighting amongst countries like ourselves. We all too readily took to violence, as in past centuries. This was the mindset in 1914, when war was second nature to both politicians and people - as it still seems to be today if and when it's going to be miles from our shores!

Some weeks went past after the shooting in Sarajevo before the nations started the warfare. Hence, the slide, the drift, the inevitability of it all, with none of the UK politicians of 1914 realising the horrific consequences of their far too relaxed stance towards launching yet another war! 100 years on, we are still seeing the consequences of how victors in war fighting, like ourselves, have their aggression reinforced to the detriment of countries who are chosen to be our enemies.

NOTES:

¹ Our so sincere and well intentioned phrase, of course, but in reality, more self-delusion and hypocrisy!

The fool has said in his heart ...

... there is no over-consumption, no over-population and no runaway greenhouse effect! There is widespread complacency, scepticism, even denial over all three!

• The scientific evidence can't possibly be right! We've lived like this for 250 years burning up our finite fossil fuels and, in the process, our quality of life and our length of life have both improved. We have flourished, thanks to fossil fuel exploitation!
• 2,500 scientists from 130 countries on the United Nations Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change are plain wrong! I know best, so there!
• They can't possibly be right when their reports over the years have consistently maintained their conclusion that the major warming is due to human consumption and, hence, emissions of 200 greenhouse gases.
• It stands to reason, its obvious, that natural variations over the years in the world's climates and much solar activity are to blame for ice shelves disintegrating, glaciers retreating, and the many extreme weather events and disturbed weather patterns.
• What I think is right, so there! The scientists have got it wrong! I know best!

In fact, it is highly unlikely that, in the history of the earth, has it ever before seen such an enormous increase in greenhouse gases over such a very short time, relative to the geological time scale. It seems reasonable, therefore to assume that this will have a negative effect on life support systems. We sow the wind and reap the whirlwind. Over habitation makes the planet uninhabitable.

We all live in the rich West so unsustainably; the more extravagantly you live, the more you are taking an unfair share of the earth's resources. Hence, we are all fools - and worse; we are stealing from the rest of the planet's population and our own descendants! Fools and thieves, no less!

Israeli Propaganda!

I don't like this misleading e-mail one little bit. Please do not pass it on!

It was the white, Christian, western Europeans who were responsible for the Jewish holocaust, not the Arab/Muslims. We killed tens, certainly, thousands of Arab/Muslims in the 1991 Gulf War and, again in this latest War of Terrorism since the 7 October 2001 that now amounts to hundreds of thousands of deaths from our (US/UK) unethical and illegal foreign policy.

We used Saddam Hussein as our surrogate to attack Iran from 1980 to 1988 when our Russian and Western weapons slaughtered one million young men in the Iran/Iraq War. Unlike ourselves, the West, Iran has not attacked another country for over 200 years. Yet, here we are having them as our latest enemy that we are planning to attack 'cos we assume that they are building (or just wanting) to build nuclear weapons! No evidence, mind you; just assumptions!

The e-mail is factually wrong. Russia was our ally throughout the 2nd WW. It was not just the "German and Russia (sic) peoples looking the other way!" The former BBC correspondent, Charles Wheeler has shown how Churchill and the War Cabinet were also anti-Semitic and looked the other way. They knew about the industrial killing of the Jews and others in Germany but, very nearly, did absolutely nothing to help. They were not even prepared to bomb the rail lines taking the victims to the concentration camps. We Brits invented the concentration camps, too! This was during the Boer War when over 20,000 women and children died in the appalling conditions that we allowed in those camps.

The Jews in Israel are the most heavily armed and protected nation in the Middle East and the only nation with WMD in the Middle East. Israel is our Western outpost in the Arab/Muslim Middle East. The US gives them $1.5bn of weaponry every year! It is absurd to think that the Jews there are ever going to be wiped off the face of the earth by Muslims. We are wiping the Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan and in Palestine and Lebanon off the map! This Jewish propaganda is all cock-eyed.

The Islamic extremists are simply defending their homelands from the United States of Aggression with its best buddy, the UK. We are the occupying force that the extremists/insurgents want shot of - and quite understandably so!

"The conquest of the world and the destruction of anyone who doesn't believe the way they do." For many centuries, the W European powers have been conquering the world and destroying the cultures and religions of the lands they discovered and claimed for their God and King, as well as killing the native populations. The white, Western nations have been supreme on this planet for many centuries. We still hold the upper hand and will never willingly relinquish it, will we? It is plain stupid/mischievous to put it about, as this e-mail does, that we would ever let the Arabs/Muslims conquer Israel or to drive her into the sea, let alone conquer the rest of the world! The rich, Western, white nations are the conquerors of the world and will remain so for as long as we can hang onto our power and wealth.

I think it is more the Chinese than the Arabs that the neo-Cons in the White House are fearful of. The Chinese, they think, might knock them off their powerful, pedagogic pedestal one day! The Muslims/Arabs are under the thumb of imperialistic America and its friends and the Muslim extremists can be imprisoned and tortured and killed, at will, by our forces.

I do commend the writings of blogger, climateextremist.blogspot.com, for sane, common sense on how we can all, as members of the one human family, get on better with each other. Read, 'Harnessing the Power of Belief ', dated October 2006.

Slow Learners - wrong to invade; slow to withdraw!

1. Our presence, I feel, in Iraq and Afghanistan is an irrelevance at best and a provocation at worst.
2. There is not nearly enough troops on the ground to stop the violence that, anyway, we initiated on the 19 March 2003. We were the criminal aggressors.
3. Our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan continue our very long history of invading and occupying other countries around the world. The sooner we reverse this unethical foreign policy and get out the better, in my opinion.
4. 16 years of killing Vietnamese and her neighbours failed to prevent our defeat, then. So far, 6 years in Afghanistan and 4.5 years in Iraq has failed to reverse our failures and defeats in those countries.
5. Former BBC war correspondent, Martin Bell on Radio 4's, 'BH' on 2.9.07 said that nothing further can be accomplished in Iraq and we should leave. His exact words, "There is nothing left to do there(in Basra) that can be done ... Blame laying is in order in view of the depth of the catastrophe ... The troops cannot be risked anymore than they are being risked. They are merely an occupation force. They are being shot at. There is nothing left they can do."
   
6. LibDem foreign policy is for a timetable to be published for a phased withdrawal from Iraq. What do they say about Afghanistan?
7. "We could have stayed there for another six months ... and killed a lot of people in the process, but what would that have achieved?" Lt Col Patrick Sanders, Commanding Officer, Basra Palace, quoted in 'The Independent', 5 September 2007

Funky funeral service, plus ...

... karaoke with the lyrics in the hymn book!

Today, excellent funeral/thanksgiving service for Ray Smith (84) with the sound of the Glenn Miller Big Band accompanying the congregation in and out of the cemetery chapel! 'The King of Love' and 'Immortal Invisible God only wise' sung so lustily, too - at least, by me, to the permanent hearing impairment of the poor woman immediately in front of me! Best sing song I've had for a long time! Best Christian funeral I've been to. The best humanist funeral was in 2003 (Andy Verduyn).