Charlie Stross On The Upcoming WW1 Centennial Celebrations

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Charlie Stross On The Upcoming WW1 Centennial Celebrations

Post by Zaune »

And yes, "celebrations" are the right word. Or at least they will be if David Cameron gets his way.

Charlie's Diary
I'm shocked but unsurprised by the idiocy of Prime Minister David Cameron in saying that, for the centenary of the outbreak of the first world war, he wanted to see a "commemoration that, like the Diamond Jubilee celebrations, says something about who we are as a people". I never had a particularly high opinion of Call me Dave, but in this instance he's clearly intent on digging himself a new pit in my esteem.

David Cameron is an Old Etonian, a child of privilege who was schooled at Eton College: he therefore has no excuse for not knowing better. Eton College made a grim contribution to the British Army officer corps during that war—a contribution paid in blood, many times over. Call Me Dave spent his teen years surrounded by the charnel memorabilia of that war, but it seems to have skidded past his cranium as effortlessly as he himself swarmed up the greasy pole to the top of politics. So some remedial schooling in the history of his own school is in order ...

Dave, if you're reading this, I'd like you to imagine the class you were a member of at age 16. This class probably had 20-25 boys in it. To put the first world war in perspective, I'd like you to line your classmates up against a notional wall. Now imagine it's 1914, and you and your classmates are 16, and we're going to emulate the first world war. I want you to take a revolver, load one chamber with a bullet, and play Russian Roulette with each boy in turn. One random trigger pull each, up close against their head. If the gun doesn't go off, fine: if it blows their skull apart, reload with one round and proceed to the next boy.

Once you've finished playing Russian roulette, you can have your PR people drag the corpses away. Then you start all over again, this time holding the gun against an arm, leg, stomach, or crotch—it doesn't really matter—as you pull the trigger. This second game of roulette is not about killing: it is about savage, crippling, maiming injuries. Shattered kneecaps and hands, castration and colostomization. Oh, by the way, this time you load the pistol with two rounds to double the probability of each boy catching a Blighty.

The screaming, weeping, leaking survivors are the ones who made it back to England's green and pleasant land alive. I wonder if they'll have anything positive to say about your iterated game of Russian roulette?

If you'd been 16 in 1914, then of your class at Eton probably 4-6 would have died (Eton boys ended up as officers: the death rate among junior officers was double that among the non-commissioned ranks). Another 6-8 would have been wounded—faces burned off, arms and legs and spines shattered, lungs scarred by gas until they coughed themselves to death in middle years—these are not pretty injuries, duelling scars or badges of honour: these are vile blows that turn strong young men into lifelong cripples (the sort of people who these days fail their ATOS work assessments and are denied disability payments two weeks before they die of their condition: but I digress).

Only a small fraction of Eton's 1914 class survived the war without physical injury. Lest you assume the death toll was confined to gung-ho officer chappies leading their men over the top, even for the non-commissioned ranks it was a brutal war: around 5% of the total male population of the UK died on the front line, and another 10% were damaged, wounded in body or mind. (As a reference point for foreign readers, the death toll among the British was considerably worse than that of the American Civil War—and among the French it was bloodier by far.)

This is the event that Call Me Dave, our inexplicably ignorant excuse for a Prime Minister, thinks is a suitable subject for a commemoration that says something positive about the British people: a teachable patriotic moment for the masses. Only a second-rate reject from the marketing industry could come up with such an abjectly peurile pile of shrapnel-severed bollocks: that, or a fool who has swallowed Michael Gove's conveniently patriotic educational myths without so much as a pinch of skepticism or introspection. The first world war started as a family scrap driven by the bloated egos of the richest, most powerful family in Europe—lest we forget, Kaiser Wilhelm II was closely related by blood to both Tsar Nicholas II and King George V of Great Britain—and ended up as a nightmarish industrialized slaughterhouse. It was a mincing machine into which the menfolk of entire towns vanished, a Pals Battalion at a time: a death factory that manufactured an average of a thousand British corpses a day for years on end.

They said at the time that the British soldiers were lions led by donkeys. And it seems that as a nation we are still led by donkeys ...
I'm inclined to consider the last line an insult to fucking donkeys.
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Re: Charlie Stross On The Upcoming WW1 Centennial Celebratio

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Attached, the full text of Cameron's original speech.
The Rt Hon David Cameron MP

Transcript of the speech given by Prime Minister David Cameron on Thursday 11 October about plans to mark the First World War centenary.
Prime Minister

Thank you very much, Andrew, for those words and thank you for all the work that you’ve done. This is, I think, a very exciting time for one of the finest museums in the world. It is a museum I particularly love. I will never forget when my mother brought me here as a boy and being absolutely captivated by everything within the museum. But almost more interesting was bringing my own children here, quite recently, they’ve come twice, I think, altogether. And realising that even when I was a boy there were still people alive who had fought in the Great War. There aren’t now, but my children were just as captivated and interested as I was. I think that speaks volumes about what we are discussing today.

The completion of transforming IWM London will see the Imperial War Museum reopened as the centrepiece of our commemorations for the centenary of the First World War. With that transformation, new generations will be inspired by the incredible stories of courage, toil and sacrifice that have brought so many of us here over the past century.

From the breathtaking sights of the hanging gallery to the unforgettable smell of the trenches, from great art - like this painting of The Menin Road by Paul Nash - to the many moving stories recorded from the front line, the Imperial War Museum is not just a great place to bring your children - as I said, as I’ve done - it is actually a special place for us all to come, to learn about a defining part of our history and to remember the sacrifice of all those who gave their lives for us, from the First World War to the present day.

We should also recognise that in the decade since the introduction of free access to our national museums, the annual number of visitors here has increased by almost two-thirds. I passionately believe we should hold on to this heritage and pass it down the generations. That is why, even in difficult economic times, we are right to maintain free entry to national museums like this. It is why we will continue to do so.

Today, I want to talk about our preparations to commemorate the centenary of the First World War. I want to explain why, as Prime Minister, I am making these centenary commemorations a personal priority, and I want to set out some of the steps we are taking to make sure we really do this properly as a country.

Let me start with why this matters so much. Of course, as Andrew said, there will be some who wonder: why should we make such a priority of commemorations when money is tight and there is no one left from the generation that fought in the Great War?

For me there are three reasons. The first is the sheer scale of the sacrifice. When they set out, none of the armies had any idea of the length and scale of the trauma that was going to unfold. For many, going off to war was a rite of passage. Many of them were excited; they would eat better than they had when they were down the mines or in the textile mills. They would have access to better medical care, and many thought they’d be home by Christmas, anyway. There is the story of the Russian High Command asking for new typewriters and being told the war wouldn’t last long enough to justify the expenditure.

As Major J V Bates from the Royal Army Medical Corp wrote:

‘Being our first experience of war, we men were not so much frightened, as very excited. It wasn’t until after two or three weeks of continually fighting rear-guard action, reconnaissance patrols and seeing our mates killed and wounded that the real horror of it came home to us. And if everyone else was as frightened as I was, then we were all petrified.’

Four months later, one million had died in the heavy artillery battles that actually came before the digging of the trenches. Four years later, the death toll of military and civilians stood at over 16 million, nearly 1 million of them Britons. 200,000 were killed on one day of the Battle of the Somme. To us, today, it seems so inexplicable that countries which had many things binding them together could indulge in such a never-ending slaughter, but they did. The death and the suffering was on a scale that outstrips any other conflict. We only have to look at the Great War memorials in our villages, our churches, our schools and universities.

Out of more than 14,000 parishes in the whole of England and Wales, there are only around 50 so called ‘thankful parishes’, who saw all their soldiers return. Every single community in Scotland and Northern Ireland lost someone, and the death toll for our friends in the Commonwealth was similarly catastrophic. In the 1920s over 2,400 cemeteries were constructed in France and Belgium alone, while today there are cemeteries as far afield as Brazil and Syria, Egypt and Ireland.

Rudyard Kipling, whose own son was lost, presumed killed, at the Battle of Loos in 1915, described the construction of these cemeteries as the biggest single bit of work since any of the pharaohs, and as he pointed out, the pharaohs only worked in their own country. Such was the scale of sacrifice across the world. The then Indian empire lost more than 70,000 people; Canada lost more than 60,000, so did Australia; New Zealand, 18,000. And as part of the UK at the time, more than 200,000 Irishmen served in the British forces during the war, with more than 27,000 losing their lives. This was the extraordinary sacrifice of a generation. It was a sacrifice they made for us, and it is right that we should remember them.

Second, I think it is also right to acknowledge the impact that the war had on the development of Britain and, indeed, the world as it is today. For all the profound trauma, the resilience and the courage that was shown, the values we hold dear: friendship, loyalty, what the Australians would call ‘mateship’. And the lessons we learned, they changed our nation and they helped to make us who we are today.

It is a period of our history through which we can start to trace the origins of a number of very significant advances: the extraordinary bravery of Edith Cavell, whose actions gained such widespread admiration and played an important part in advancing the emancipation of women; the loss of the troopship SS Mendi, in February 1917 and the death of the first black British army officer, Walter Tull, in March 1918, are not just commemorated as tragic moments, but also seen as marking the beginnings of ethnic minorities getting the recognition, respect and equality they deserve.

The improvements in medicine were dramatic. In 1915 wounds which became infected resulted in a 28% mortality rate; by 1917 the use of antiseptics saw the death toll drop to just 8%. Plastic surgery developed into a well-established speciality over the course of the war.

At the same time there were hugely significant developments in this period, which, frankly, darkened our world for much of the following century. The advance in technology transformed the nature of war beyond recognition. The tanks and aircraft of 1918 were the forerunners of those that fought with such devastation in World War II. They would have been almost unimaginable for the cavalry regiments that set out in the autumn of 1914.

The war’s geopolitical consequences defined much of the twentieth century. It unleashed the forces of Bolshevism and Nazism and, of course, with the failure to get the peace right, the great tragedy was that the legacy of ‘the War to end all wars’ was an equally cataclysmic Second World War, just two decades later.

So I think for us today to fail to recognise the huge national and international significance of all these developments during the First World War would be, frankly, a monumental mistake.

There is a third reason why this matters so much. It is more difficult to define, but I think it is perhaps the most important of all. There is something about the First World War that makes it a fundamental part of our national consciousness. Put simply, this matters not just in our heads, but in our hearts; it has a very strong emotional connection. I feel it very deeply. Of course, there is no one in my family still alive from the time, or anything close to it. My grandfather, my uncle, my great uncle all fought in the Second World War. I have always been fascinated by what happened to them and tried to listen to their experiences.

Even though the family stories that I’ve heard direct from the participants, as it were, were all from World War II, there is something so completely captivating about the stories that we read from World War I. We look at those fast fading sepia photographs of people posing stiffly and proudly in their uniform. In many cases it was the first and last image ever taken of them, and this matters to us.

The stories and the writings of the Great War affect us too. That mixture of horror and courage, suffering and hope; it has permeated our culture. From the poems of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, my favourite book, Robert Graves’s memoirs recounting his time in the Great War, Good-Bye to All That. To modern day writers like Sebastian Faulks, from Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, focusing on the aftermath of trauma, to War Horse, showing the sacrifice of animals in war. Current generations are still absolutely transfixed by what happened in the Great War and what it meant.

The fact is, individually and as a country, we keep coming back to it, and I think that will go on. This is not just a matter of the heart for us in Britain. It is a matter for the heart for the whole of Europe and beyond. From The Last Post Association, whose volunteers have played every night at the Menin Gate since 1928, to Tyne Cot Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery, to the Memorial to the Missing, in Belgium, which is the largest British war cemetery in the world, visited by nearly half a million people every year, still today, to the battlefield memorials right across Western Europe.

For me, when asked: what is the most powerful First World War memory you have? It is going to visit the battlefields at Gallipoli. I’ll never forget going, having a fantastic Turkish guide who showed me the beaches we were meant to land at, the beaches we did land at, the fight that went on up those extraordinary hills. One of the most powerful things I’ve ever seen is the monument erected by the Turks in Gallipoli. Before I read you the inscription, think in your mind, think of the bloodshed, think of the tens of thousands of Turks who were killed, and then listen to the inscription that they wrote to our boys and to those from the Commonwealth countries that fell. It is absolutely beautiful, I think. It goes like this:

‘Those heroes who shed their blood and lost their lives, you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore, rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us, where they lie, side by side, in this country of ours. You, the mothers, who sent their sons from far away countries, wipe away your tears. Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land, they shall become our sons as well.’

So beautiful, beautiful words on this First World War monument. For me, those words capture so much of what this is all about. That from such war and hatred can come unity and peace, a confidence and a determination never to go back. However frustrating and however difficult the debates in Europe, 100 years on we sort out our differences through dialogue and meetings around conference tables, not through the battles on the fields of Flanders or the frozen lakes of western Russia.

Let me turn to the plans for the centenary. Last November I appointed former Naval doctor Andrew Murrison as my special representative. I am very grateful to him for the excellent work he has been doing in assembling ideas from across Government and beyond, and for putting the UK among the leaders in this shared endeavour and for laying the foundations of our commemorations. Today, I am honoured to be able to say that he is going to be joined by some of the most senior figures in British public life, including Tom King, George Robertson, Menzies Campbell, Jock Stirrup and Richard Dannatt. That’s two former Secretaries of State for Defence, one of whom was also a Secretary General of NATO, a former Chief of the Defence Staff, a former Chief of the General Staff. They’ll be joined by others, including world leading historians, like Hew Strachan, and world class authors like Sebastian Faulks. I hope they’ll provide senior leadership on a new advisory board that is going to be chaired by the Secretary of State for Culture, Maria Miller.

Our ambition is a truly national commemoration, worth of this historic centenary. I want a commemoration that captures our national spirit, in every corner of the country, from our schools to our workplaces, to our town halls and local communities. A commemoration that, like the Diamond Jubilee celebrated this year, says something about who we are as a people.

Remembrance must be the hallmark of our commemorations, and I am determined that Government will play a leading role, with national events and new support for educational initiatives. These will include national commemorations for the first day of conflict, on 4th August 2014, and for the first day of the Somme, on 1st July 2016. Together with partners like the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and the custodians of our remembrance, the Royal British Legion, there will be further events to commemorate Jutland, Gallipoli and Passchendaele, all leading towards the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day in 2018.

The centenary will also provide the foundations upon which to build an enduring cultural and educational legacy, to put young people front and centre in our commemoration and to ensure that the sacrifice and service of a hundred years ago is still remembered in a hundred years’ time.

Now, the Imperial War Museum is already leading the First World War Centenary Partnership, a growing network of over 500 organisations, helping millions of people across the world to discover more about life in the First World War and its relevance today. Today we are complementing that with a new centenary education programme, with more than £5 million of new Government funding. This will include the opportunity for pupils and teachers from every state secondary school to research the people who served in the Great War, and for groups of them then, crucially, to follow their journey to the First World War battlefields. I think that will be a great initiative and really welcomed by secondary schools and secondary school pupils.

We are also providing a further £5 million of new money, in addition to the £5 million we have already given to support transforming IWM London - this project right here at this incredible museum. It will match contributions from private, corporate and social donors.

So our commemorations, if you like, will consist of three vital elements: a massive transformation of this museum to make is even better than it is today, a major programme of national commemorative events properly funded, given the proper status that they deserve, and third, an educational programme to create an enduring legacy for generations to come. All of this will be overseen by a world class advisory board chaired by the Secretary of State for Culture, supported by my own special representative Andrew Murrison.

And that is not all, because we stand ready to incorporate more ideas because a truly national commemoration cannot just be about national initiatives and government action, it needs to be local too. So the Heritage Lottery Fund is today announcing an additional £6 million to enable young people working in their communities to conserve, explore and share local heritage of the First World War.

That is in addition to the £9 million they have already given to projects marking the centenary, including community heritage projects. And they are calling for more applications; they are open to new ideas, to more thinking. So whether it is a series of friendly football matches to mark the famous 1914 Christmas Day truce, or the campaign led by the Greenhithe branch of the Royal British Legion to sow the Western Front’s iconic poppies here in the UK, I think we should get out there and make this centenary a truly national moment, but also something that actually means something in every locality in our country.

So, in total over £50 million is being committed to these centenary commemorations; I think it is absolutely right they should be given such priority, as I have explained. As a twenty-year-old soldier wrote just a week before he died: ‘But for this war, I and all the others would have passed into oblivion like the countless myriads before us, but we shall live forever in the results of our efforts.’

Our duty towards these commemorations is clear: to honour those who served, to remember those who died, and to ensure that the lessons learnt live with us forever. And I think that is exactly what we can do with these commemorations.

I think we have got a moment or two for questions or points or any observations anyone would like to make.

I mean what I said about wanting ideas; I think we have a good framework here of national commemorations, the Heritage Lottery Fund I think can fund a lot of local activity but I am sure out there there are still some great history or commemorative projects that can be brought to book. So I hope people can come up with them.
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Re: Charlie Stross On The Upcoming WW1 Centennial Celebratio

Post by Zaune »

He wouldn't be going on about honour and courage and all that feel-good crap if he'd actually read the books and poets he namechecks.

And they didn't give their lives for us, or their country or anything good and noble. They gave their lives because the whole of fucking Europe was too wrapped up in its own patriotic dick-waving for a sanity-check. We were like fucking schoolboys squaring off in the playground. We ought to be ashamed of it.
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Re: Charlie Stross On The Upcoming WW1 Centennial Celebratio

Post by Thanas »

It would be interesting to see the makeup of the historian's board, it more than anything should tell us how sincere he is being.

Hew Strachan is a telling choice - he is a good historian, not eurocentric, he is fair in his assesments. But he also writes from the officer perspective, for example writing things like the trenches being lifesavers and without them the horrors would have been greater etc.. In short, sometimes the perspective of the common men gets lost. But then again, he is one of the few writers to highlight the plight of the black soldiers and Indians. So Strachan is a good choice.

As for Cameron, he focuses IMO a bit too much on British sacrifice and the good that comes out of it. See for example Bomber Command.
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Re: Charlie Stross On The Upcoming WW1 Centennial Celebratio

Post by Eternal_Freedom »

I would like to point out that despite what Stross keeps talking about, Cameron only mentioned "celebrations" once in that speech and that was "...like the Diamond Jubilee celebrations last year..."

I really don't think it's fair to clam Cameron for "celebrating" WW1 when that isn't what he said.
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