Britain’s Great War
The Great Fraud of 1914-18
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Lord Hankey’s ‘The Supreme Command’ was preceded by ‘Government Control in War’ (1945) a collection of the Lees Knowles series of lectures given by Hankey in Trinity College, Cambridge at the end of the second war on Germany. In these lectures Hankey gave a taste of what he was going to say in far greater…
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Who was Maurice Hankey? Lord Maurice Hankey gave unparalleled service to the State he served over more than three decades. He was much more than just a Senior Civil Servant. It would be no exaggeration to say that he kept the British State together over a generation. ‘The Supreme Command’ (1961) by Hankey, though largely…
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Here is a version of a talk I gave on 31st August 2014, at St. Mary’s College, Falls Road as part of Féile an Phobail (West Belfast Festival) on the Catholic predicament in ‘Northern Ireland’ 1914-68. The event was chaired by Mark Langhammer and introduced by Jim Gibney. “In 1920/1 the Catholics of the North…
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What was the Great War and what was responsible for it? The Great War was a traditional British Balance of Power war infused with a new moral imperative. The Balance of Power was the traditional British policy of disrupting European political stability and economic development used to keep the continent occupied as Britain, the island, grabbed the…
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‘Poor Little Belgium,’ the cause of Britain entering the European war of 1914 and turning it into a World War, was nothing of the kind. It was, in 1914, a highly militarised society at the centre of the world’s arms industry with a massive army and a dubious neutrality. It was one of the most brutal…
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There has been a strange silence in this part of the world over the centenary of the opening of the Great War on the Ottoman Empire. After the great fanfare surrounding the centenary of the war on Germany and all the nonsense about Ireland having apparently forgotten its part in such a world-historic event nothing…
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There has been remarkably little comment in Ireland and England about the war that began 100 years ago yesterday. That is the war on the Ottoman Empire. Perhaps no war has had such repercussions for things today as this war. And yet there are no discussions about how it came about, what it was for…
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On the Republic of Turkey’s Republic Day, Happy Birthday from Ireland. There are many parallels between Ireland’s and Turkey’s struggles for independence which were apparent to both Irish Republicans and Turkish nationalists at the time. A few years ago I discovered that an enthusiastic commentary had been published in Ireland about Mustapha Kemal Atatürk, the…
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The Second part of the Guardian of the Gate looks at British geopolitics and the way Serbia was supported in war as the gatekeeper between Europe and Asia. The maritime power, Britain, was determined to prevent a stable and prosperous Europe developing and connecting up with the Eurasian heartland. This part also describes how Britain…
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It is now 100 years since Serbia acted as a detonator for the Great War. It was not responsible for that Great War – only the war with Austro-Hungary that the provocative assassination in Sarajevo sparked off. It is possible that this war could have been confined and become just another Balkan war. But it…
