Looks like my post re Harry and his military exploits has been deleted. Is there an Off-offGuardian?

Don’t suppose Prince Harry could even imagine the horrors of the families of the “Ragheads” he killed, to use his wording.

https://twitter.com/dimitrilascaris/status/1191000852879855618

I can remember being shocked when the term “The Great War” came back into fashion. This was a term my father (born 1916) had used when I was growing up, and it sounded old-fashioned even then. He was a patriot of the old school, but he never ceased to tell me that WW1 was supposed to be “a war to end all wars”.

Now, you could say that when the term was first coined, the word “great” was taken as it’s literal meaning of “large” or “huge” and in that sense, of course, WW1 was indeed “great”. But in modern parlance, “great” means something entirely different, and I don’t think the return of this ugly phrase is entirely unintentional.

The town where I live takes part, like many others, in Heritage Week, whereby various historic properties are opened to the public, and usually on the Saturday, there are stalls in the market place based on whatever theme is chosen in any particular year. In 2014, inevitably, they chose the start of WW1. They had people in WW1 army uniforms prancing around with great big grins on their faces. Now, you could argue that this was a “commemoration” of the way that people in August 1914 thought (or were encouraged to think) that it was all going to be quite a jolly affair and “over by Christmas”, and “we don’t want to lose you, but we think you ought to go…” (cf. “Oh What a Lovely War”). Well, maybe, but that’s not the way it came over. It just looked like a celebration, not a commemoration.

In the past, I had actually helped out with Heritage Week, but I refused to have anything to do with this charade. Similarly, I refuse to wear a red poppy, which has now become a symbol of patriotism. I will wear a white one if I get the opportunity.

Re: “covert communication between Norway and USSR”. Some years ago, my wife and I did the Hurtigruten boat cruise from Bergen to Kirkenes (on the Russian border) (Yes, a terribly Guardian and middle-class thing to do…sorry).

A guide in Kirkenes told us that for years during the cold war period, the people around Kirkenes and the border generally were regarded with great suspicion by “those southerners” in Oslo, for their supposed pro-soviet sympathies.

Britain is one of the biggest state sponsors of terrorism on the planet. It has sponsored the Syrian terror groups, Al Qaida, ISIS, and the 57 varieties of Jihad, to the tune of about £3 billion under the guise of “humanitarian aid.” This has gone to people who film themselves beheading 12 year olds, mutilating corpses and eating parts of dead bodies, executing prisoners, and putting women and children in cages to be used as human shields. Nice to know that taxpayers’ money is being put to good use instead of being wasted on things like the NHS. A lot of it has gone on a big propaganda machine to produce bogus videos of “bombed hospitals” and gas attack hoaxes to justify aggression against Syria. The fraudulent “White Helmets Heroic Rescue Organisation” has a press and PR office of ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY PEOPLE. This was set up in Turkey by the British mercenary leader Le Mesurier. The SAS was active in Turkey and Jordan training these terror groups long before the fighting began in 2011. The “Syrian Observatory for Human Rights” was set up by MI6 to churn out anti Syrian propaganda. It is a one man band, a Syrian shopkeeper living in a terraced house in Coventry, who hasn’t been to Syria for 20 years and phones up his mates for third hand atrocity stories, peddled to complicit and credulous media hacks who treat his pronouncements like holy writ. This will probably blow up in our faces again soon (literally) like Libya did. The Manchester Arena bombing, where 22 teenage girls were blown to bits, was the handiwork of MI6’s pet terrorists in the Libya Islamic Fighting Group. What goes around, comes around.

I knew a member of the Dublin Fusiliers, who always said that he hoped he never killed any Germans. They didn’t actually see the Germans, but had to fire their Lee Enfields high in order to reach them. He said he fired his deliberately very high, so as not to be effective. “They (the Germans) were only following orders, like us” .

This man realised he was just cannon fodder and that he had been lied to, later in life.

When I clicked on the link, I just got a black screen with a message saying the video was not available.