Perusing the newspapers
earlier I saw that the Daily Mail was not only critical of the Bishop of
London for his comments about the "baby-boomer" generation - he being a
member should not criticise it etc being the argument - but also for
saying that the Great War was a European
civil war and that church leaders should reflect seriously on how their
predecessors on all sides had endorsed men going off to fight. The
Bishop's comments were apparently all the worse for being in line with an EU
approach that the war had been such a civil conflict and in line with the Government apparently wanting not to blame the Germans when it came to commemorating the outbreak of hostilities next year.
Well now, the European civil war argument is not new - it was certainly used by F. Scott Fitzgerald in writing about the '20s, and strikes me as an excellent way to understand the dreadful disaster that was the
1914-18 war. You do not have to be an obsessive devotee of the modern
EU to think that. One can be very Eurosceptic indeed about the
structures of the Union without wanting to ignore the fact that the UK is
inextricably bound up with what happens on the continental mainland of
Europe - that is, after all, why we were drawn in in 1914.
As
to blaming the Germans - well what actually started the war was not the Deutches
Reich, but an act of terrorism against the established order in
Sarajevo. That set off a tragic and disastrous series of political chain reactions that
drew in most of Europe, due to mutual suspicion and the failure on all sides to look at the wider scene. It would be less than historically accurate to think that the war started when Germany invaded
Belgium - that is of the "Fog in Channel, Continent cut off" school of
thought.
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