Recently we had a freshly minted Holocaust Day.
Holocaust Day was set up by that well known humanitarian Tony Blair, at the instigation of Zionists, who wanted to hijack the Holocaust to deter criticism of Israeli sectarianism and atrocities by defining such criticism as ‘anti-Semitic’. Among those present at the IDF love-fest in Trafalgar Square, supporting the massacres in Gaza, were two leading figures in the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust
Now Blair’s co-conspirator in war crimes, Gordon Brown, has given the nation its first Armed Forces Day.
Armed Forces Day was set up after a recommendation from a study by the Conservative MP Quentin Davies for Gordon Brown, who wanted to find a way to raise public understanding and appreciation of the armed services.
Now it’s true that public understanding of the role of the British armed forces is sadly lacking, though this book is a good place to start.
Encouraging an understanding of Britain’s armed forces in bringing mass murder, misery and repression across the globe would be an excellent idea. How about some acknowledgement of the hidden truth that the greatest military force ever to leave Britain between the first and second world wars was sent to Palestine to smash the great Palestinian revolt of 1936-39? One of those involved was a thug whose actions in Palestine were no different to those of the Nazis in Eastern Europe – a chap by the name of Bernard Montgomery. Not to mention that odious blood-drenched fundamentalist psychopath Orde Wingate.
With the full militarisation of civil society, orderly-room discipline, it was hoped, would tame the Palestinians. By late 1938, permission to travel had to be obtained from the army, thousands were held without trial in "administrative detention" (concentration) camps, collective punishments became widespread and judicial homicide (hangings) took scores of lives.
It was the memory of sadistic collective punishments and the form they took which lodged most firmly in the memory of most ordinary people. Two of Sonia Nimr’s interviewees recalled how: "The English used to come to our village and asked the Mukhtar to take the men to the village square, and the women and children to the village mosque. We used to stay from morning to evening. When we went to our houses in the evening we found the oil, wheat, barley and flour all mixed together and thrown on the beds. We found our cattle, cows and sheep cut loose. One year this lasted for thirty days. They used to come and do this every day. They used to make the men walk on prickly pear leaves bare foot."
Another interviewee said: "There was a clash near our village Sha’ib [between the rebels and the British forces]. After it was finished, and we had buried the man from our village who was killed in the clash, a mine exploded under an army vehicle. They [the British] came, and surrounded our village, and then they demolished more than forty or fifty of the houses in the village."
The atrocities committed by the British army in Palestine have been wiped from national memory.
In relation to numbers of inhabitants, Palestinian losses in 1936-39 are equivalent to losses by Britain of 200,000 killed, 600,000 wounded and 1,224,000 arrested. In the case of America the losses would be one million killed, 3 million wounded and 6,120,000 arrested!
But the real and most serious losses lay in the rapid growth of both the military and economic sectors which laid the foundations of the Zionist settler entity in Palestine. It is no exaggeration to say that this economic and military presence of the zionists, whose links with Imperialism grew stronger, established its principal foundations in this period (between 1936 and 1939) and one Israeli historian goes so far as to say that "the conditions for the Zionist victory had in 1948 been created in the period of the Arab revolt.
The real purpose of Armed Forces Day is, of course, to try and whip up public support for Britain’s Third Afghan war. In reality this is just the latest episode in Britain’s squalid, blood-stained imperialist history.
Neither the Pentagon nor the British Ministry of Defence will win Afghanistan through firepower. The strategy of "hearts and minds plus" cannot be realistic, turning Afghanistan into a vast and indefinite barracks with hundreds of thousands of western soldiers sitting atop a colonial Babel of administrators and professionals. It will never be secure. It offers Afghanistan a promise only of relentless war
In today’s Daily Mail, Max Hastings froths about under-resourcing of the Third Afghan war, sobbing The facts are almost unbelievably bleak.
