War School: the Battle for Britain’s Children

War School looks at what Remembrance means for veterans of Britain’s many conflicts in the century since the end of the War To End All Wars and reveals how government policies are targeting ever younger children for future rectruitment into the armed forces.

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  1. Charles L. Gallagher says:

    Our teachers work very hard to present a non violent approach to living and respecting others. Yet here we have the ‘War Mongers’ of the BritNat establishment sowing the seeds for their future crop of ‘cannon fodder’. Is it not time that Head Teachers with the help of the Scottish Government prohibited these people from our schools and trying to contaminate the minds of our young people.

    For centuries the establishment around Wastemonster have an unmovable mindset that it’s only the English that know how to rule and were prepared to use military force to achieve their beliefs no matter what the cost e.g. WW1.

    1. Jo says:

      Charles
      An interesting post given all we saw over the centenary weekend, including a call from Monsieur Macron for the creation of a European army.

      While it is right to honour the dead, I felt deeply uncomfortable with some of the other stuff alongside and in particular with the idea that those who perished died gladly. A quick swatch at the many headstones in graves throughout Europe shows just how many were mere weans who, more than likely, died horribly and terrified.

      My thoughts too were with those who didn’t die but had come home and were expected to just, “keep calm and carry on”. My grandfathers’ generation. My dad’s generation in WW2, which, let’s remember, began twenty years after “the war to end all wars” had ended! Those men who came home home were expected to simply erase unspeakable things from memory. No PTSD in those days!

      Many of those men “coped” through drink, through raging at wives and families and through never speaking about it. Two consecutive generations.

      In my community there were celebrations to mark the centenary. This involved local schools in decorating poppies for events on Sunday. I stress again that it is right to honour those who died. What worried me was the lack of attention paid to the overall conditions and consequences of war, not just for the perished, but for those who did not. That’s not healthy or honest but then the same could be said of the slogans, “Lest we forget”, “We will remember them”. In reality we don’t remember. If we truly did, we would, by now, be teaching new generations about the futility of war and the awful price paid by both those who fought and died in it and those who lived the remainder of their lives haunted by their memories of it.

      1. Charles L. Gallagher says:

        Hi Jo,

        I agree with you 100%. But what also sickens me is that nowhere have I heard anyone speaking out about the clowns in Government (Almost 100% public school educated, well so called educated) and the establishment that vainly allowed the situation to develop. In my mind this was in part down to the old matriarch Victoria who ruled the roost amongst her close relatives in the royal houses of Europe, in particular Russia, Germany and in the old Austro Hungarian monarchy’s aided and abetted by a shower of so called diplomats. These clowns entered into a series of totally impossible Treaties. We never hear any serious examination of their part, apart from a Conference in Paris convened by President Macron but given a miss by Trump where I believe it was on the agenda for discussion, “What and who brought about WW1 and could it have been avoided?” So far I’ve heard or read anything about this.

        Turning to the way WW1 is being presented to our school children I was very angry at an item on Grampian News on Friday 9th November which showed school kids being shown a new exhibit of a so called replica of a WW1 trench outside the Gordon Highlander’s Museum. It was beautifully made with nice planked sides, nice dry duck-board flooring all very cosy. Better if it had shown how it really was, holes hewed out of mud with inches of mud, water and human detritus up to their ankles and beyond. Apart from bullets and shells I wonder how they avoided a major cholera, dysentery or typhoid epidemic, of course maybe it did and was conveniently buried in the mud along with countless thousands of very brave men and butchered at the hands of clowns. Clowns who rarely saw the front line preferring the comfort of warm beds, good regular food and wine, not forgetting their after dinner brandy. As a teenager I was taken by my parents to one of these cemeteries and I always remember my father pointing out how rare it was to read a name and rank above major, as my father commented, “They were safely tucked away well out of range of the enemies guns, brave eh.”

        A few final thoughts from my dad, he said to me ask any school kid, “Who started WW1 and the answer you’ll get 99.9% of the time will be German?” and he always maintained that due to the eejits that dwelt and still do in Wastemonster, Elysee Palace and Washington, WW2 was in fact WW1, Part 2 and the present situation in the Middle East is wholly down to them by creating countries where religious disputes between factions of the same religion was a recipe for disaster, need I go on. How prophetic my dear dad’s words were.

        Brave people must always be remembered in a dignified way but do we really need military style marches with all the pomp and ceremony that goes with anything military, it is simply not remembrance but a not so subtle form of ‘brain-washing’ young and impressionable generations. Are for instance our current youngsters being taught that at the present time 13,600 ex-servicemen and women are homeless. Like many before them in this country once they are no longer of any use they are all too quickly forgotten and seen as an inconvenience. In this respect I must applaud the work being done to help ex-service people by the Scottish Government.

        Sorry to go on but all their ‘faux’ outpourings make me really mad.

        1. Jo says:

          Charles
          Thank you for that response which I believe makes highly valid points, points too often ignored in the world we inhabit today.

          Yes there is indeed a lot of romantic drivel broadcast about the trenches. The nostalgia is difficult to understand along with the love for packing up troubles in old kit bags. It’s as if there’s a concerted effort to gloss over the really dark stuff associated with war.

          You’re right too about the clowns in government who make all the decisions about going to war when it’s the lives of others at risk, not theirs. Twas always thus.

      2. Interpolar says:

        Agreed. I was at a memorial service last Sunday which went through all the right motions before singing all three pathetic verses of God Save the Queen at the end. The irony seemed lost on most present. Obviously I did not sing, and not just because it Is not (=no longer) my anthem.

        1. Charles L. Gallagher says:

          The ‘dirge’ and especially the last verse has never been my anthem as fortunately I sail under a different flag. I have never attended a Remembrance Sunday service preferring to remember the two members of my family both lost in the Pacific, one a Royal Engineer on The Burma Railway and one an Engineer fighting to keep the USS Yorktown afloat after being mortally damaged in the victory at the Battle of Coral sea. In our family we remember on All Souls Day ALL deceased members of our family in peace and war.

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