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Title: Ireland's War of Independence: The chilling story of the Black and Tans
Source:
The Independent
URL Source: http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article359132.ece
Published: Apr 21, 2006
Author: David McKittrick
Post Date: 2006-04-21 20:03:33 by Eoghan
Keywords: None
Views: 140
Comments: 18
Ben & Jerry's decision to give their latest flavour of ice-cream the same name as Churchill's notorious army has provoked howls of protest. David McKittrick describes the force's reign of terror against Irish nationalists To practically the whole world it may seem like a harmless, cheerfully cutesie name for a new American ice-cream flavour, just adopted by the popular manufacturer Ben & Jerry's. But some Irish-Americans have given the "Black and Tan" flavour a reception that is cold to the point of frigidity, complaining of its associations with one of the most notorious forces ever seen in Ireland. The Vermont-based company, unaware of origins of the name, based the new flavour on a drink that uses stout. The ice-cream launched in the US this month but it is now debatable whether Ireland will get a taste. It is difficult to know whether the arrival of Black and Tan flavour ice-cream could cause controversy and outcry in Ireland, but it would certainly generate a great deal of conversation and debate. Although the Black and Tans force was deployed for only a couple of years, from 1920 to 1922, nationalist Ireland still associates it with murder, brutality, massacre and indiscipline in the years leading to southern Ireland's independence. In this instance, its reputation is not based on any republican propaganda and exaggeration, since there is no dispute that "the Tans" killed and destroyed on a large scale. Nor did they make any secret of their ferocious reprisals. When a Tan was killed in Cork, they burnt down more than 300 buildings in the city centre and afterwards proudly pinned pieces of burnt cork to their caps. A British Labour Party commission reported that it felt feelings of shame at witnessing the "insolent swagger" of the Tans, whom they described as "rough, brutal, abusive and distinctly the worse for liquor". Another observer reported: "They had neither religion nor morals, they used foul language, they had the old soldier's talent for dodging and scrounging, called the Irish 'natives', associated with low company, stole from each other, sneered at the customs of the country and drank to excess." The Catholic cardinal of the day called them "a horde of savages, some of them simply brigands, burglars and thieves". Similar denunciations came from within the armed forces, their commander, General Frank Crozier resigned in 1921 because they had been "used to murder, rob, loot, and burn up the innocent because they could not catch the few guilty on the run". None of this, clearly, conveys anything of the light-hearted images of fun and enjoyment which ice-cream manufacturers would wish to convey to their customers. The Black and Tans were created after the First World War by Winston Churchill and other ministers who were faced with a increasing tide of violence from the IRA, which had launched a campaign to drive Britain out of Ireland. This is known as the War of Independence, though republicans took to calling it the "Tan War". With the IRA inflicting heavy casualties on the Royal Irish Constabulary, killing more than 50 of its officers, London created new forces to cope with republican insurrection. They were part of a hurriedly constructed counter-insurgency apparatus which included the existing police force, the regular army, secret service detachments and two completely new forces, the Auxiliaries and the Black and Tans. In the years that followed, all these groups were deployed against republican rebels, but the particularly violent behaviour of the Tans, together with their striking nickname, has meant that the blame for most of the misbehaviour has stuck to them. The nickname arose entirely accidentally, and is usually traced back to a well-known pack of Limerick foxhounds which had that title. As members of the new force poured into Ireland there were not enough uniforms to go round, so they were originally dressed in a motley mixture of army khaki and police tunics. Irish women, it is said, jeered at them as Black and Tans. Their irregular ensembles served to emphasise that, although they were technically part of the Irish police, they disregarded all normal policing procedures, and committed almost casual murders. Most of them were Great War veterans who answered an advertising campaign in Britain for men willing to face "a rough and dangerous task". With unemployment high, there were many ready to join for pay of 10 shillings a day plus board and lodging. Pay for a British Army private soldier was little more than a shilling a day. The recruits, many hardened by trench warfare, were given only a few months' training before being despatched to Ireland, supposedly to act as policemen but in fact to provide military steel. In Ireland, they faced a very different type of war. The IRA waged guerrilla warfare, with hit-and-run tactics, attacks on isolated police barracks and deadly ambushes in territory which was unfamiliar to the Tans. All the security forces found this an extremely frustrating type of conflict but the Tans in particular quickly abandoned the normal rules and conduct of war. They were in any case explicitly instructed to step outside the law, one police divisional commander instructing his men in a speech: "If a police barracks is burnt then the best house in the locality is to be commandeered, the occupants thrown into the gutter. Let them die there; the more the merrier." He instructed them to shout "Hands up" at civilians, and to shoot anyone who did not immediately obey. He added: "Innocent persons may be shot, but that cannot be helped, and you are bound to get the right parties some time. The more you shoot, the better I will like you, and I assure you no policeman will get into trouble for shooting any man." The old-style policemen did not care for the Tans, one saying years later: "The Black and Tans were all English and Scotch people; very rough, effing and blinding and boozing and all." A British Army officer complained to a general: "We are importing crowds of undisciplined men who are just terrorising the country." Not all of the almost 10,000 Tans scattered around Ireland were guilty of atrocities; some were actually liked. But many felt free, as individuals or as units, to go far beyond the substantial degree of licence they had been officially granted. Tans were reportedly among those who took part in "Bloody Sunday", an incident which followed the assassinations of a large number of suspected members of the British secret service in Dublin. Hours after these killings, security forces opened fire at a Gaelic football match in the city, causing 12 deaths and wounding scores. In other cases, homes and businesses, particularly creameries, were burnt by the Tans. In the town of Balbriggan near Dublin, the IRA killing of a police officer led to severe reprisals: two republican suspects were shot dead, and 19 houses and various buildings were torched. There were hundreds of reports of misbehaviour on a smaller scale. The late Lord Longford wrote of Tans torturing captured republicans, "cutting out the tongue of one, the nose of another, the heart of another and battering in the skull of a fourth". The government at first turned a blind eye to such incidents. Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson described a conversation with Churchill: "I warned him again that those Black and Tans who are committing very indiscriminate reprisals will play the devil in Ireland, but he won't listen or agree." The security forces, the Field Marshal said, "marked down certain Sinn Feiners as in their opinion actual murderers or instigators and then coolly went and shot them without question or trial. Winston saw very little harm in this but it horrifies me". Pressure on the government to end the activities mounted steadily, the Archbishop of Canterbury warning Lloyd George: "You do not cast out Beelzebub by Beelzebub." Churchill's wife Clementine joined in the chorus of protest, asking him to end the reprisals and adding: "It always makes me unhappy and disappointed when I see you inclined to take for granted the rough, iron-fisted 'Hunnish' way will prevail." Later, Churchill openly acknowledged the excesses of the Black and Tans, admitting in the House of Commons: "It was quite impossible to prevent the police and military making reprisals on their own account." Ministers pondered on whether they should officially endorse reprisals, and persisted in believing that the oppressive tactics of the Tans and other forces were on the point of delivering victory. Lloyd George famously boasted that he "had murder by the throat". But on top of everything, the harsh methods of the Tans did not even work, and certainly did not defeat the IRA. Professor Roy Foster wrote of the Tans: "They behaved more like independent mercenaries; their brutal regime followed the IRA's policy of killing policemen, and was taken by many to vindicate it." The historian, Peter Hart, agreed. "It was astoundingly counter-productive. The militarised police formed their own death squads and regularly engaged in reprisals against civilians. IRA violence only increased." Despite the battering which all this inflicted on the image of Britain at home and abroad, the continuing IRA campaign eventually led Lloyd George to seek talks with the republicans, which led to British withdrawal. In a little-known historical footnote, some of the Black and Tans were transferred to Palestine where, under much stricter discipline, their performance was judged a success. But in Ireland older folk still relate with a shiver what the Tans did in their little village or town, the name and reputation of the force continuing to resound throughout history. The name of the Black and Tans thus lives on to the present day, and can still be heard from the lips of republican orators driving home their ancient messages of British iniquity and Irish victimhood. The phrase can in other words still generate much heat, so much heat, perhaps, that an ice-cream company may think twice about associating its cool product with a topic that can still raise the temperature in Ireland. Come Out Ye Black and Tans I was born on a Dublin street where the Royal drums do beat And the loving English feet they tramped all over us, And each and every night when me father'd come home tight He'd invite the neighbors outside with this chorus: Chorus: Oh, come out you Black and Tans, Come out and fight me like a man Show your wife how you won medals down in Flanders Tell them how the IRA Made you run like hell away, From the green and lovely lanes in Killashandra. Come let me hear you tell How you slammed the great Pernell, When you fought them well and truly persecuted, Where are the smears and jeers That you bravely let us hear When our heroes of '16 were executed. Come tell us how you slew Those brave Arabs two by two Like the Zulus, they had spears and bows and arrows, How you bravely slew each one With your 16-pounder gun And you frightened them poor natives to their marrow. The day is coming fast And the time is here at last, When each yeoman will be cast aside before us, And if there be a need Sure my kids will sing, "Godspeed!" With a verse or two of Steven Beehan's chorus. Come Out Ye Black and Tans. By Dominic Behan (1929-89)
Poster Comment: Churchill's cold serpentine?...Yes, was from his Mum's side of the family...
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#1. To: Eoghan, CAPPSMADNESS, mehitable, aristeides, Jethro Tull, mirage (#0)
The Black and Tans were created after the First World War by Winston Churchill and other ministers who were faced with a increasing tide of violence from the IRA, which had launched a campaign to drive Britain out of Ireland. Ignorance of history is no excuse.
“I don't think we have to worry about Rumsfeld, he's a ruthless little bastard isn't he ?" The "Tans" were technically the Royal Irish Constabulary Reserve Force. The separate Auxiliaries were however even more undisciplined and brutal, according to accounts I've read.
"Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God." ---Thomas Jefferson
Like his grand strategy, with its combination of unilateral American world domination with nearly indiscriminate support for Israel’s Ariel Sharon, the cult of Churchill has been adopted by Bush from American neoconservatives. Churchill looms far larger in the mythology of neoconservatives than in the minds of mainstream Americans, who think of him as the brave and witty ally of President Franklin Roosevelt in the war against Hitler.
Ignorant pig, Iraq is the cradle of civilization.
“I don't think we have to worry about Rumsfeld, he's a ruthless little bastard isn't he ?" Thank you JT..."I must have slept through college Western Civ lecture ping"
If Jews, whom Churchill described as denizens of ‘the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America’, could have their homeland, perhaps they would not — to use Churchill’s words — conspire ‘for the overthrow of civilisation’. Lots of good quotes here, thanks JT.
“I don't think we have to worry about Rumsfeld, he's a ruthless little bastard isn't he ?" On my first visit to Ireland, I was introduced to a popular mixed drink there, the "Black & Tan," a mixture of half Guinness and half lager. Nobody seemed to take offense at the name of the drink.
Yep, Winnie liked a good cigar and fireside eugenics chat.
But it was their drink, not Ben and Jerry's icecream.
“I don't think we have to worry about Rumsfeld, he's a ruthless little bastard isn't he ?" Churchill on Gandhi 1930:
We Irishmen take pride in our thick skins, and our not taking offense at trivialities.
They should name it the Michael Collins instead.
Press 1 for English. Press 2 for Deportation.
He forgot to add "And God Save the Queen!".
“I don't think we have to worry about Rumsfeld, he's a ruthless little bastard isn't he ?" I can sure admire that but this is just crass commercialism. How about Ben and Jerry naming one "Brownshirts" then.
“I don't think we have to worry about Rumsfeld, he's a ruthless little bastard isn't he ?" Sounds like Sir Winsty was refering to Indians scooping up the Royal's salt brine without paying taxes... Look on the bright side...now the USSA colonials no longer need to pay tribute, we pay them, nothing extracted in return, and nothing granted. Compassionate Colonialism. An 8 year reign...if that.
I suspect they have. Yes they have.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Collins_(Irish_whiskey)
“I don't think we have to worry about Rumsfeld, he's a ruthless little bastard isn't he ?" Now that's a fine Irish tribute to the man.
Press 1 for English. Press 2 for Deportation.
Over the course of recent years, Americans have developed a reputation as the WHINERS of the world. Notice the Irish in Ireland don't give a shit, but the culture in America that seeks, and is vindicated and justified in it's existence by complaining. Hence the complaint. Black and Tan, HalfandHalf, Guinness and Harp. I'ts also a tribute to the Irish that an alleged cultural "crime" does not end up in explosions, burnings, riots and demos a la the Danish cartoons. Wouldn't surprise me if B&J's PR agency didn't generate the "controversy" itself to get press.
Ben & Jerry's decision to give their latest flavour of ice-cream the same name as Churchill's notorious army has provoked howls of protest.
- Richard Nixon excerpt white house tapes.
#2. To: Eoghan (#0)
They were part of a hurriedly constructed counter-insurgency apparatus which included the existing police force, the regular army, secret service detachments and two completely new forces, the Auxiliaries and the Black and Tans.
#3. To: robin (#1)
Winston Churchill
FEATURES 
Churchill for dummies
Winston S. Churchill is the hero of George W. Bush and the neocons. But, says Michael Lind, they know very little about the great wartime leader. If they did, they’d be horrified Soon after the installation by the Republican-majority Supreme Court of George the Second of the House of Bush, the American people learned that they had a new Founding Father: Winston Churchill. President George W. Bush let it be known that he had placed a bust of the British statesman in the White House Oval Office he had inherited from his dad. After the attack on the World Trade Center, the President’s speeches became self-consciously Churchillian. Earlier this year, marking the opening of a Churchill exhibition at the Library of Congress, Bush observed that Churchill was not just ‘the rallying voice of the second world war’ but also ‘a prophet of the Cold War’. 
The Weekly Standard, the neoconservative magazine funded by Rupert Murdoch and edited by William Kristol, has become the centre of the neocon Churchill cult. A Nexus search of the Weekly Standard of the past five years alone reveals 122 articles that mention Churchill. Typical is an essay of 4 March 1999 entitled ‘How Winston Churchill Can Save Us — Again’ by one Larry Arn, a frequent contributor who is an academic adviser to something called the International Churchill Society.
On 10 January 2000, the Weekly Standard declared that Winston Churchill was ‘Man of the Century’. This view is the consensus among the neocons. Charles Krauthammer, the Canadian émigré pundit, has written, ‘After having single-handedly saved Western civilisation from Nazi barbarism — Churchill was, of course, not sufficient in bringing victory, but he was uniquely necessary — he then immediately rose to warn prophetically against its sister barbarism, Soviet communism.’ Krauthammer’s fellow Canadian émigré, David Frum, denounced Bill Clinton for declaring that Franklin Roosevelt was the ‘Man of the Century’. According to Frum, who was still a subject of Her Majesty when he was hired as a speechwriter by George W. Bush’s White House, ‘FDR has to be found wanting. Of the three great killers of this century, one (Mao) was aided by Communist sympathisers within the Roosevelt administration ...Another (Stalin) benefited from Roosevelt’s almost wilful naiveté about the Soviet Union ...Roosevelt’s record even on the third killer, Hitler, is spotty. Roosevelt recognised Hitler’s danger early, but he hesitated to jeopardise his hopes for an unprecedented third term by riling isolationist opinion...’. Reading Krauthammer and Frum, you have to wonder whether Winston Churchill might not have ‘single- handedly’ won the second world war and saved civilisation even sooner, if he had not been handicapped by his alliance with the United States.
Only a Canadian like Frum could claim that FDR was an appeaser, compared with Churchill. It was Churchill who, in 1937, wrote in his book Great Contemporaries, ‘One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.’ Churchill’s posthumous reputation as an uncompromising anti-Soviet hardliner is another neocon myth. True, Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech of 1946 was seen as too strident by the Truman administration and much of the American public. But during the war it was Churchill, not FDR, who haggled with Stalin over ‘percentages’ of postwar influence in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. And in the mid-Fifties Churchill thought that Eisenhower was too hard on the Soviets and kept pushing the naive idea that a big-power summit could end the Cold War. The neocons never quote Churchill’s statement of 1954, ‘To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.’ The neocon goal of promoting democracy worldwide was shared by FDR and Woodrow Wilson, but not by the Tory Prime Minister who called Gandhi a ‘fakir’ and announced that he would not preside over the dissolution of the British Empire.
The peculiar neocon cult of Churchill has several sources. One is the veneration by the neocons of Leo Strauss, the German-Jewish émigré philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago and indoctrinated many leading neocon thinkers, including the late Allan Bloom. In declaring Churchill the ‘Man of the Century’, the Weekly Standard piously reprinted remarks that Strauss made at the time of Churchill’s death in 1965. Strauss’s Churchill was Hitler’s nemesis: ‘The contrast between the indomitable and magnanimous statesman and the insane tyrant — this spectacle in its clear simplicity was one of the greatest lessons which men can learn, at any time.’
Straussians like Leon Kass, the president of Bush’s bioethics panel, are opposed not only to reproductive cloning, but also to therapeutic cloning, embryonic stem-cell research and the well established practice of in vitro fertilisation. In an essay entitled ‘Can There Be Another Winston Churchill?’, published in 1981, the Straussian scholar Harry V. Jaffa claimed that Churchill would have opposed modern biotechnology: ‘Churchill’s most formative years were spent during the heyday of what we might call the evolutionary enlightenment. This was the period when the progress of Science, and in particular biological Science, gave rise to widespread hopes that the human species itself might deliberately be evolved ...The fittest might be planned in laboratories, and the test of their fitness would be their faculty for the harmonious and simultaneous enjoyment of all the objects of their desires.’ Churchill, Jaffa tells us, ‘implied that this state of perfect freedom, were it possible, would be a state of perfect misery’.
Jaffa doesn’t quote Churchill on this subject — possibly because, contrary to his implication, Churchill, unlike today’s American neocons, was an enthusiastic supporter of eugenics, who told Asquith in 1910, ‘The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate ... I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed.’ Hitler’s ultimately genocidal programme of ‘racial hygiene’ began with the kind of compulsory sterilisation of ‘the feeble-minded and insane classes’ that Churchill urged on the British government (and which was carried out in many states in the US in the early 20th century).
Two other factors influencing neocon Churchill mania are ‘the Anglosphere’ and Israel. As Jeet Heer pointed out in the National Post of Canada on 29 March 2003, ‘Today’s advocates of empire share one surprising trait: very few of them were born in the United States. [Dinesh] D’Souza was born in India, and [Paul] Johnson in Britain — where he still lives. [Mark] Steyn, [Charles] Krauthammer and [Michael] Ignatieff all hail from Canada ...’ Heer quotes Max Boot, a Russian-born neocon: ‘I think there’s more openness among children of the British Empire to the benefits of imperialism.’ Like Churchill, whose mother was American and who chronicled the history of the English-speaking peoples, the neocons and allied British conservatives like Conrad Black and John O’Sullivan, now editor of the Washington-based journal the National Interest, are enthusiastic about the idea that the world should be led by the ‘Anglosphere’. Outside these circles, however, the idea of an English-speaking union is ignored today as in the past by most Americans, who don’t see why Australia’s south-east Asian borders should be America’s.
As for the Israeli connection — a familiar feature of neocon ideology — Churchill, a lifelong supporter of Zionism, was a social Darwinist who preferred Jews to Arabs. On one occasion he wrote of the legitimacy of displacing ‘the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race, has come in and taken their place.’ Churchill’s Zionism coexisted with a fear that the Jews, deprived of a homeland, might make trouble for the world. In an essay that he wrote for the Illustrated Sunday Herald in 1920 entitled ‘Zionism versus Bolshevism’, which the neocons never quote, Churchill ranted that Jews were behind world revolutions everywhere: ‘This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky [Russia], Bela Kun [Hungary], Rosa Luxemburg [Germany], and Emma Goldman [the United States] ... this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing.’ If Jews, whom Churchill described as denizens of ‘the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America’, could have their homeland, perhaps they would not — to use Churchill’s words — conspire ‘for the overthrow of civilisation’.
Most American neocons know only the sanitised version of Churchill as a philo-semitic Zionist fellow traveller presented by Martin Gilbert. In an essay entitled ‘Israel at 50’, Alan Bock wrote, ‘Sir Martin Gilbert, the incredibly prolific British historian (and secular Jew, as he described himself to me), best known for his multi-volume treatment of the life and times of Winston Churchill, puts it this way in his new book, Israel: A History: “Israel is not only a nation that for the first three decades of its existence was surrounded by sworn enemies, but one that, following a victorious war in 1967, has had to share part of its own land with another people.”’ According to Churchill hagiographer Gilbert, then, even before 1967 the West Bank and Gaza were part of Israel’s ‘own land’.
While most Americans think of Churchill as the foe of the Nazis, many right-wing Jews in the United States and Israel revere him for his role in promoting European-Jewish colonisation of Palestine at the expense of the Arabs. When he was colonial secretary in the early 1920s, Churchill hived off Jordan from the rest of the Palestinian mandate. For years, American neocons, disseminating the propaganda of the Israeli Right, have claimed that Jordan or the ‘Trans- Jordan’ is, or should be, the only ‘Palestinian’ state. This Likud party propaganda line is echoed by non-Jewish neocons including William Bennett, who wrote in an essay entitled ‘Standing with Israel’, ‘There is no reason Jews should not be able to live in the West Bank.’ The fact that the UN partition of Palestine in 1947–48 superseded all previous British decisions is ignored by radical Jewish and Christian Zionists in the US and Israel.
In a speech to the House of Commons on 26 January 1949, Churchill repeated the Israeli lie that the Palestinians had voluntarily fled the country: ‘All this Arab population fled in terror to behind the advancing forces of their own religion.’ The Israeli historian Benny Morris, on the basis of Israeli archives, has shown how the Israeli government carried out a premeditated policy of deliberate ethnic cleansing during the war. When he turned 80 in 1954, the state of Israel sent Churchill a floral arrangement in the shape of a cigar.
It should be no surprise, then, that the neocon cult of Churchill flourishes in Israel as well as in the US. Shortly before he was appointed as senior director for Near Eastern and North African affairs at the National Security Council — a post that gave him responsibility for Israel/Palestine, Iraq, Syria and Iran — Elliott Abrams gave a speech comparing Ariel Sharon to Winston Churchill. ‘Sharon’s no Churchill,’ complained Don Feder, another neoconservative, on 15 March 2002. ‘Ariel Sharon has a split personality. He wants to be both Winston Churchill and Neville Chamberlain. His unilateral concessions, his unwillingness to treat Zion’s fight for survival as the war it is and the weakness he exhibits to a remorseless foe have his country on the edge of extinction.’ Yes, that’s right — Israel, in 2002, according to this typical American neocon, was on the edge of extinction! Fortunately, according to Feder, there was a Churchill in Israel: ‘Bibi [Netanyahu] waits in the wings....’ Whether or not Sharon or Netanyahu are Churchill, Yasser Arafat and any enemy of the state of Israel is Hitler — on that all neocons can agree.
The obsession of the neocons with Israel’s regional enemy Saddam Hussein has a Churchill connection, too. On 16 March 2003, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Churchill’s grandson and namesake, Winston S. Churchill, entitled ‘My Grandfather Invented Iraq: And He Has Lessons for Us Today’. He wrote, ‘It was my grandfather, Winston Churchill, who invented Iraq and laid the foundation for much of the modern Middle East.’ This is not an accomplishment of which to be proud, one might think. Churchill went on to draw the conventional comparison between the threat of Saddam and the threat of Hitler: ‘Had the allies held firm and shown the same resolve to uphold the rule of law among nations that President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair are demonstrating today, there is little doubt that World War II, with all its horrors, could have been avoided.’ Churchill’s grandson then compared the threat of Saddam’s supposed weapons of mass destruction with the Soviet atomic bomb: ‘As leader of the opposition in the British Parliament [in the 1950s] Churchill was gravely alarmed at the prospect of the Soviet Union acquiring atomic, and eventually nuclear, weapons of its own.’ If the world refused to follow those Churchillian leaders, Bush and Blair, then ‘a marriage of convenience would be consummated between the terrorist forces of al-Qa’eda and the arsenal of chemical, biological and nuclear capabilities which Saddam possesses’.
Citing Churchill to support Bush’s war to rid Iraq of alleged weapons of mass destruction was particularly ironic in light of Churchill’s own record with respect to WMDs in Iraq. As colonial secretary in 1919, Churchill wanted to use gas against the ‘unco-operative Arabs’ in Iraq. He explained, in terms that Saddam might have used to justify his gassing of Iraqi Kurds, ‘I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes.’
It is now clear that Saddam possessed no ‘arsenal of chemical, biological and nuclear capabilities’ and the US government has reluctantly admitted that there are no credible links, prewar or postwar, between Saddam’s regime and al-Qa’eda. Even their harshest critics, therefore, must acknowledge that in one respect the neocons have lived up to the words of Winston Churchill: ‘In wartime ...truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.’
Michael Lind is the Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., and author of Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics.
#4. To: Jethro Tull (#3)
Citing Churchill to support Bush’s war to rid Iraq of alleged weapons of mass destruction was particularly ironic in light of Churchill’s own record with respect to WMDs in Iraq. As colonial secretary in 1919, Churchill wanted to use gas against the ‘unco-operative Arabs’ in Iraq. He explained, in terms that Saddam might have used to justify his gassing of Iraqi Kurds, ‘I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes.’
- Richard Nixon excerpt white house tapes.
#5. To: Jethro Tull, swarthyguy (#3)
“Yes, but is this good for Jews?"
#6. To: Jethro Tull (#3)
‘One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.’
- Richard Nixon excerpt white house tapes.
#7. To: robin (#1)
#8. To: robin (#6)
#9. To: aristeides (#7)
- Richard Nixon excerpt white house tapes.
#10. To: Jethro Tull (#3)
"It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious middle temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half-naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the king-emperor."
#11. To: robin (#9)
#12. To: robin (#1)
Ignorance of history is no excuse.
#13. To: aristeides (#10)
- Richard Nixon excerpt white house tapes.
#14. To: aristeides (#11)
- Richard Nixon excerpt white house tapes.
#15. To: aristeides (#10)
"It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious middle temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half-naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the king-emperor."
“Yes, but is this good for Jews?"
#16. To: mirage (#12)
They should name it the Michael Collins instead.
- Richard Nixon excerpt white house tapes.
#17. To: robin (#16)
#18. To: robin (#9)
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