World War One Commemorations: Its an Abomination to call Sacred, Soil Taken from WW1 Battlefields

By AM Wednesday, December 4, 2013

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Mick Hall with a piece that initially featured on Organized Rage on 2 December 2013. His grandfather, along with other family members fought in WW1, one of whom was only 15 when he signed up.'

It is difficult to believe anyone would be fool or wicked enough to call hundreds of sacks of dirt "sacred soil," when the earth in question was taken from places where hundreds of thousands of young men in the prime of life had their lives stolen. Not least because it's the type of thing a fascist government might do when pontificating about the glorious dead of the Third Reich.

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It is even more incomprehensible that this dirt was placed in prettified sacks and waved off from Belgium by innocent school children and shipped to the UK on a Naval warship. Which sailed up the River Thames and docked in the pool of London alongside HMS Belfast, where it received all the ruritanian pomp and circumstance the British military can muster.

Yet this is what occurred last week when these bags of dirt, which were 'allegedly' taken from seventy World War One battlefields, arrived in London to become the focal point of a so called sacred garden within Wellington Barracks, which will mark the 100th anniversary of the start of WW1 in 1914. If you think this obscenity through, imagine the outcry were the guardians of Auschwitz-Birkenau to call the bloodstained earth of that awful place 'sacred soil.' The only reason it still stands is as a warning from history for future generations. Sacred it is not!

As far as WW1 is concerned the only anniversary worth commemorating is the day that bloody and worthless conflagration ended and thus it has always been, until now that is.

What next will the coalition government suggest - the military selling small bags of 'sacred soil' to those who come to pay their respects in Whitehall at the national Cenotaph?

Never mind during, and after World War One, apart for VIP's, and there were few of those in the front lines, the families were never given an opportunity to repatriate the bodies of their loved ones to the UK. They were told the numbers were far too numerous for that and they were to be buried within the war graves cemeteries that litter northern France, Belgium and Turkey. Many came to doubt the name on the headstones would match with the body entombed below. How could it have been otherwise when many of the bodies were blown into smithereens, left to rot in no mans land, or buried in mass graves after the failure of latest wheeze the donkeys had to end the war?

The First World War, also known erroneously as the Great War, is seen as the first international conflict on a global scale. Millions of soldiers and civilians from 50 plus countries had their lives stolen during this imperialistic bloodletting.

Despite what the British government and military would have people believe, throughout the world the name ‘Flanders Fields’ is not looked upon as something to be proud of, but is associated with unprecedented human suffering and mass murder on an industrial scale. A period in history when Europe's political class and military caste betrayed a whole generation of European youth.

That today's Tory and Liberal-Democrat politicians waited until all the survivors of WW1 were dead, before they decided to spend millions over four years commemorating WW1, tells us all we need to know about these so called victory celebrations. For if still alive, those lions led by donkeys would never have stayed silent while another generation of political dross celebrated upon their dead comrades wounds.

If some readers feel I am being a little harsh by calling this jamboree 'victory celebrations,' how come beyond the ruling elites, no one from Germany, Austria, or Turkey, have been invited to this so called commemoration? If there were to be any 100 year commemoration it would have to be organised by all the nations which took part in the mass slaughter, but such an option was not even considered.

The poet Rudyard Kipling was willingly used at the start of the war as a propagandist to whip up a patriotic frenzy by the Coalition governments of Asquith and Lloyd George, which actively encouraged young men to march off to war with a smile on their faces, oblivious to what lay ahead.

It was only when his own 18 year old son John was slaughtered in the Battle of Loos, having spent just two days in the front line, Kipling realised what he and his generation had done. He summed up his own guilt and that of a whole generation of politicians, military men, and parents when he wrote after his son's death:

"If any question why we died/ Tell them, because our fathers lied."

This! This is the abomination which today's donkeys are asking the people of the UK to celebrate for the next four years. Shame on anyone who abandons the dead of World War One, and is willingly used in a propaganda exercise designed to whitewash aware the incompetence and crimes of the ruling classes of 1914, whether they were the politicians, senior officers in the military, businessmen, media barons or high financiers who in 1914 took Britain to war on a prayer and an imperialistic whim.