Europe a Nation blog by Robert Edwards

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Donald Trump, Man of Peace

DONALD TRUMP FOR PRESIDENT? 

by Robert Edwards 

(ESA No 59, Spring 2016)

An old associate recently expressed the view that he would like someone to shoot Donald Trump. He said Trump is a racist and says unkind things about women. I have never regarded either of these positions to be worthy of a bullet in the head. He is a member of the Labour Party and seems to have forgotten what happened to former MP, Jo Cox. My communist father was opposed to capital punishment but thought the Duke of Windsor should have been hanged for treason. Neither my old associate nor my father could see any contradiction in this kind of double thinking. Neither thought it wrong.

Donald Trump, for all his provocative, challenging posturing, has revealed himself to be a man of peace surrounded by a political establishment (Republican and Democrat) that is devoted to permanent war against other countries. It is a violent system based on a belief that America is exceptional among all the nations in the world, thus, it is this “exceptionalism” that defines America’s global totalitarianism.

He has opened up a debate on issues that were scorned or simply ignored by this Establishment. He poses these questions and answers them and much of America likes him for that, as so should we:

 –“Should the United States always be the world’s leader and policeman?

–“What is NATO’s proper mission today, 25 years after the end of the Soviet Union and when international terrorism is the main threat to the West?

–“Why does Washington repeatedly pursue a policy of regime change, in Iraq, Libya, possibly in Ukraine, and now in Damascus, even though it always ends in ‘disaster’?

–“Why is the United States treating Putin’s Russia as an enemy and not as a security partner?

–“And should US nuclear weapons doctrine include a no-first use pledge, which it does not?

His “America First” platform means, of course, non-interventionism and this rattles the neo-cons and AIPAC, otherwise known as the Jewish Lobby.

In a Washington Post interview, Trump said, “I watched as we built schools in Iraq and they’d be blown up ... and we’d build another one and it would get blown up. And we would rebuild it three times. And yet we can’t build a school in Brooklyn ... at what point do you say hey, we have to take care of ourselves. So you know, I know the outer world exists and I’ll be very cognisant of that but at the same time, our country is disintegrating, large sections of it, especially in the inner cities”.

He talks of improving schools for African-American children  as opposed to dropping bombs on brown children in other countries. This man is most definitely not a racist.

America is tired of foreign wars, or at least a large section of it is. Hillary Clinton, however, has a history of war-mongering and has never apologised for any of it. Do you remember her response after the murder of Colonel Gaddafi? She said, “We came, we saw ... he died”, and then that mad cackle with the mouth opened wide. Since the destruction of Libya, Europe has been faced with large swathes of migration from North Africa with absolutely no control from its source. Not only was the bombing of Libya and the murder of Gaddafi a mistake but they were terrible crimes. Then, America doesn’t see anything it does as wrong because American “exceptionalism” doesn’t recognise international law or the Geneva Conventions ... rules are for other, lesser nations.

Trump believes Iraq was a crime and wants peace with Russia and China. He calls for collaboration with President Putin. Under Obama’s watch, American-led Nato troops are massing near Russia’s border. Why? For no other reason than to provoke war.  It is America that is the aggressor.

Trump is now favoured by the European Left. The physicist Jean Bricmont wrote of Trump, “He denounces the empire of US military bases, claiming to prefer to build schools here in the United States. He wants good relations with Russia. He observes that the militarist policies pursued for decades have caused the United States to be hated throughout the world. He calls Sarkozy a criminal who should be judged for his role in Libya. Another advantage of Trump: he is detested by the neoconservatives, who are the main architects of the present disaster”.

You are still frightened by Trump? Don’t be. Hillary Clinton is the biggest threat to the entire world. William Blum wrote an article titled, American Exceptionalism and the Election Made in Hell (Or Why I’d Vote for Trump over Hillary).

He wrote, “My main concern is foreign policy. American foreign policy is the greatest threat to world peace, prosperity and the environment. When it comes to foreign policy, Hillary Clinton is an unholy disaster. From Iraq and Syria to Libya and Honduras, the world is a much worse place because of her; so much so that I’d call her a war criminal who should be prosecuted”.

America can change all that by voting for Trump over Clinton.  Trump wants peace in this world and Clinton does not. That much is clear.

copyright©Robert Edwards2016

Charlie Hebdo, Free Speech and the Jews

Charlie Hebdo, Free Speech and the Jews

by Robert Edwards      ESA No 55, Winter issue 2014/2015

We have learned recently that the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo was in financial difficulties and down on its luck before the tragic events that took away a number of its cartoonists. This indicates it was not as popular as the European media has been making out. Far from being a noble and upstanding defender of free speech, it was quite the opposite. It was very hostile to those deemed to be “anti-Semitic”.

Charlie Hebdo sacked an 80 year old cartoonist, Maurice Sinet, in 2009 after he was put on trial for “anti-Semitism”, worded officially as “inciting racial hatred”. If he were on trial for offending Islam, he would have been carried around the offices of the magazine and toasted as a great “satirist”. But there are no laws to protect Islam. Only the Jews are sacrosanct.

After the Paris March for Unity, the French state gave the magazine a million euro, then there were the sponsorships from various newspapers, including from some in Britain. A massive number of the latest ‘Mohammed’ issue were printed, the same kind of cover that inspired a previous violent response. Sales were brisk, as they say, but they failed to learn the obvious lesson which had little to do with free speech.

Charlie Hebdo is basking in the sun of an early glowing summer of publicity but it will not be long before it faces its own winter of discontent and sales drop away again. It was about to close before the gunmen arrived at the offices.

It claims it knocks everyone, including Jews, but this was not case in the past. The French people know this and had largely turned their backs on the publication.

Maurice Sinet used the pen name of Siné. He wrote articles as well as contributing cartoons when employed by Charlie Hebdo but he crossed a red line when he  commented on the marriage of Jean Sarkozy, son of a French president, to a Jewish heiress. He wrote (in French) that if Jean Sarkozy planned to convert to Judaism, as was rumoured, “He’ll go a long way in life, that little lad”. Personally, I find that highly amusing but from another section all hell broke loose.

Meddling Jewish journalist, Claude Askolovitch, went on the attack with accusations of “anti-Semitism” whereupon the editor of Charlie Hebdo demanded that Maurice Sinet get down on his knees and apologise to the Jews. Philippe Val, the editor, was to sack Sinet for an “anti-Semitic” cartoon along with an article after Sinet told him he would prefer to “cut off his own balls” than write a letter of apology.

So Maurice Sinet (the cartoonist Siné) was to be taken to court for “anti-Semitism” over his Sarkozy cartoon. It was a civil case brought by Ligue Internationale Contre le Racisme et l'Antisémitisme that rebounded with Maurice responding with a separate case of slander. This led to further litigation between Maurice Sinet and his former employer Charlie Hebno for wrongful dismissal. In 2010, Maurice was awarded 40,000 euro for wrongful dismissal, with editor Philippe Val later resigning from Charlie Hebno and Maurice founding his own publication Sine Hebno (see right).

Even the inevitable death threats from the Jewish Defence League did not deter the courageous octogenarian cartoonist including the online threat, "Twenty centimetres of stainless steel in the gut, that should teach the bastard to stop and think." The usual response from rabid Zionist Jews, you could say. Death threats were not new to me, either.

This is a different story to my own experience with Jews objecting to my cartoons. In 1981, I was tried at Snaresbrook Crown Court in East London for “counselling and procuring, aiding and abetting the publication and distribution of material likely to incite racial hatred” ... namely a publication called The Stormer. Note the phrase “likely”, which more or less precluded the necessity of proof. The complaint came from the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

I pleaded not guilty on some very sound grounds. I did, indeed, draw all the cartoon strips for the entire four page comic but I neither published nor distributed it. I left the original drawings with a man called Jimmy Styles in East London who then took them to the late Tony Hancock, a printer on the South Coast. I had heard the police had raided Jimmy Styles’ carpet shop in Roman Road and pulled up the floor boards looking for the originals and negatives for printing. I was kept in the dark about this until I read about its distribution, from the South of England all the way up to Dundee, in a tabloid newspaper.

The man who supplied and drove the transport for distribution was Ray Hill who, it turned out later, was a mole and agent provocateur for the Zionist group Searchlight, which poses as an anti-fascist outfit but, in reality, serves the Zionist entity. He was working for them at that time. As such, Searchlight bears huge responsibility for the distribution of a publication that was originally created as a simple private experiment in bad taste. By the standards of material in the United States, where free expression is enshrined in the US Constitution, it was feeble stuff.

American Jewish academic, Victor Navasky, wrote in his book The Art of Controversy - Political Cartoons and Their Enduring Power, in a chapter on me, " The Israel-watcher in me acknowledges that he got Begin's activities as a member of the Stern Gang right but feels that Edwards undercuts his own observation by the hatefulness of the message implicit in his visual language. The citizen in me finds his ideas repugnant, yet the sociologist in me wonders why the authorities find his work, which itself is a caricature of conventional bigotry, sufficiently threatening to earn him imprisonment."

Victor Navasky disapproves of me as a person but his liberal inclinations find appreciation in the idea that freedom of expression must cover all aspects of the art of caricature and cartoons no matter how offensive they may be to some. Surely it is the very essence of caricature, that exaggerates, stereotypes and reveals perhaps the darker side of humankind, that should be free of all censure, artistic limitation and should be given full rein in order to experience its full potential. This should include experiments in bad taste. The liberal aspect of my nature demands it.

I have recently appeared on Iran’s English-speaking PressTV news channel, giving my views on the treatment of BBC reporter Tim Willcox who attended the Paris March of Unity. There, Willcox interviewed the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor who was going on about how the Jews are the target. He interjected with, “The Palestinians have also suffered by Jewish hands”. Again, the full force of Jewish intolerance is felt and they fell on Willcox demanding their pound of flesh. This was intolerable, they said, mentioning the Palestinians is an anti-Semitic act, don’t you know? Israel had been maligned by this deviating from the Zionist narrative. Then Prime Minister Netanyahu gate-crashed the proceedings even when told he was not welcome, pushing his way to the first column of marchers, up with the best of them, waving like mad when all others showed a more solemn demeanour. This was your proverbial “pushy Jew” of legend showing them who is boss. The rest of the world cringed at this vulgar behaviour.

Back to Willcox, this is the BBC whose editor of the Middle East news desk sent a memo to all its journalists reminding them they should always give a pro-Israel slant in their news reporting. Its anti-Palestinian propaganda is supplied, of course, by the Israeli military.

The editor of the Middle East new desk is Raffi Berg. Another, a former Head of Policy was a member of the Labour Friends of Israel and swore that only an Israeli-friendly agenda would be permitted at the BBC.

I pointed out these aspects of the BBC’s policy when interviewed on PressTV, along with my own experience of being denied freedom of expression when jailed for twelve months in a British prison. My main point was that just about any group can be lampooned, ostracised, ridiculed, insulted or simply have the piss taken, except one ... that’s right, the Jews.

I recall an article in a copy of ACTION in the early 1960s. A passage in it said something like this: “There is only one thing more absurd than the idea that the Jews are responsible for all the evil on this earth and that is the idea the Jews can do no wrong and are perfect”.

There are people who do subscribe to one of either of those viewpoints and they would both be wrong.

The Charlie Hebdo incident brought out all these people, the great and the good, the ordinary people and those without any stake in society. The sloganising began immediately and the loudest was FREE SPEECH! The March of Unity was to be about free speech and the world would join together in order to celebrate it. What a load of rubbish.

When Jews stop regarding themselves as above criticism and their view as sacrosanct; when this nonsense about the mildest form of criticism regarding Israel and its Jewish population being ‘anti-Semitic’ is exposed for the sham it all is, then we all may be on the path towards a kind of freedom. The evil, I claim, is Zionism. It is the root cause of so much trouble in the world today, especially in the Middle East. When the United States frees itself from the grip of the Jewish lobby and stops siding with Israel at the UN then there is hope, my friends. Until then, the suffering goes on while the world does nothing.

copyright©2015 Robert Edwards

BABY KILLERS! The war crimes of the Israeli IDF in Gaza

BABY KILLERS!

by Robert Edwards

(published in ESA No 54 November/December 2014)

Under International Law, every people under an occupation has the right to resist that occupation by any means.

This fact seems to elude the leaders of all governments in the West when it comes to Gaza. Hamas is morally superior on this issue of the armed struggle for Palestinian freedom and its defence of the people of Gaza has been truly heroic. They are freedom fighters while the Zionists are oppressors. It is as simple as that.

Israel, on the other hand, has shown itself to be criminally indifferent to the world’s condemnation (apart from America and its craven satellite states in the West) and has again attacked a population already crushed and without any decent means of dignified survival. The blockade of Gaza is illegal under international law but that is the least of the problems of Gaza. We have an occupying power in the form of Israel that not only denies the Palestinians the basic necessities for rebuilding their country but will continue to deny them statehood, while playing the stop/go game of “peace negotiations”.

The fact is, Israel has no intention of reaching a peace accord and will never accept Palestinian statehood ... the two-state solution or any other solution.

Like their partners in crime, the Americans, the Zionists prefer perpetual war as a matter of state policy. Like the Americans, the Israelis think of themselves as exceptional, above the rest of us, and therefore above international law.

Look at the Americans today, invading the air space of Syria and carrying on with their interference in world affairs. Let President Assad have full control of the situation and the psychopaths of Islamic State will be crushed. Stop supporting opposition to him.

In Israel we have elements within the coalition government who regard, not only Palestinians, but all Arabs as less than human. Is that surprising?

The late American performer, Joan Rivers, stated not long before her death that all Palestinians deserve to die. This was said during the terrible bombardment of Gaza. She advocated genocide, in fact.

A rabbi called for the killing of all Palestinian women so that they would no longer breed “snakes”, as their babies are dubbed.

The main photo on this front page may prove shocking to some and you may say it is in bad taste. Well, for the more sensitive among us, the bullet through the head of a foetus is a fact and reality of what goes on when the Israeli Defence Force “defends Israel” and goes on the rampage against innocent and defensive people in Gaza, their main target being women and children ... in this case, the unborn, too. What brutal, cowardly and savage “soldiers” brought up from the cradle to believe they are the Chosen People and all Gentiles deserve to die.

This was no accident but the result of a policy of extermination that began in 1948. Killing women and children goes even further back to the Books of Moses, in Deuteronomy, when the God of Israel commanded the Israelites to take whatever the God of Israel tells them to take and to slay everyone who was there previous to this land grab. Biblical prophesy used as a form of supremacist propaganda by a system founded on political secularism: Zionism.

The rabbis hold sway within this policy of terror. It is not unusual for rabbis to call for the complete extermination of the Arabs. This was the view of the  late spiritual head of the Shas party in the Israeli government, recently accorded a state funeral with Netanyahu on his knees in grief. This rabbi repeatedly called for the liquidation of the Arabs while his party was part of a coalition in Israel.

A failure to condemn often implies approval.

America’s open support for Israel’s incursion into Gaza and the multiple atrocities committed there is simply the other side of the same coin.

The shooting of women was carried out under orders from the Israeli military, in turn given instructions from high ranking members of the government. Shooting pregnant women was an integral part of this policy, killing two living bodies in one go. Saves bullets.

Make no mistake, a large section of Israeli society supported all this. In Jerusalem, mobs of Jews ran through the streets shouting, “Death to Arabs!”.

While the Western media ignored most of the atrocities committed by the IDF, the Russell Tribunal on Palestine met in emergency session in Brussels quite recently to study the war crimes perpetrated by Israel and the IDF in particular. America, all along, backed Israel against accusations of war crimes. Well, they would, wouldn’t they?

The Russell Tribunal on Palestine heard testimonies from eye witnesses, along with contributions from the professions ... physicians and legal experts. A jury of twelve good men and true completed this tribunal. This consisted of intellectuals of considerable repute. The tribunal’s raison d’être was very straightforward; it was to put Israel on trial for its crimes against the Palestinian people.

The list was long: war crimes, crimes against humanity, crimes of murder, extermination and persecution and incitement to genocide. All of them extremely serious.

The journalist David Sheen produced evidence that incitement to genocide pervaded all of Israeli society including genocidal rhetoric from the highest echelons.

Another journalist, Max Blumenthal, produced evidence of “grisly executions” during a five day ceasefire in Gaza. IDF soldiers were under instructions to execute men in Gaza upon discovering they spoke Hebrew. There were also executions of civilians and paramedics.

The only Gaza-based journalist, Mohammed Omer, who managed to get out of Gaza for the tribunal hearings, gave evidence of daily life in Gaza whereby summary executions and kidnappings were a common occurrence, as well as using Palestinian children as human shields.

The Egyptian military dictatorship under Mr CC prevented others coming through the Rafah Crossing to testify, including the director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Raji Sourani, obviously on the request of the Israelis.

Dr Mads Gilbert of Norway presented graphic evidence of the injuries received by the Palestinian population when he was volunteering in the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.

There was no doubt intentional destruction of Gaza and the “deliberate systematic attack on the Palestinian civilian society” was at the forefront of the objectives of the IDF.

The atrocities were on such a scale that not only incitement to genocide occurred but indiscriminate murder was the main purpose and result.

In their final ruling, the judges gave this statement:

“In light of the clear escalation in the physical and rhetorical violence deployed in respect of Gaza in the summer of 2014, the tribunal emphasises the obligation of all states parties to the 1948 Genocide Convention ‘to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide’.

“It is recognised that in a situation where patterns of crimes against humanity are perpetrated with impunity, and where direct and public incitement to genocide is manifest throughout society, it is very conceivable that individuals or the state may choose to exploit the conditions in order to perpetrate the crime of genocide. We have a genuine fear that in an environment of impunity and an absence of sanction for serious and repeated criminality, the lessons from Rwanda and other mass atrocities may once again go unheeded”.

During the Israeli military assault upon Gaza in the summer of 2014, more than 2,000 Palestinians were murdered, including over 500 children. The aim of these periodic assaults is to change the demographics of that area so that a Jewish majority emerges. Not only was Gaza left desolate but entire farming communities were wiped out.

The Russell Tribunal on Palestine was the only serious attempt to bring Israel to book for its many crimes. The jury at the tribunal found Israel GUILTY of war crimes, crimes against humanity, crimes of murder, extermination and persecution and also incitement to genocide.

The evidence being overwhelming.

Israel continues to clamour for war against Iran. The Zionist state possesses hundreds of nuclear warheads, the sole nuclear power in the Middle East, yet Iran wishes to harness nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. There is no evidence at all that Iran wishes to create nuclear weapons.

Isn’t this a case of double standards and rank hypocrisy? Iran is a peaceful and highly advanced society, demonised by the West as a threat to Western interests. Russia is also lined up for attack by the United States (under the guise of the “international community”) because America will not tolerate other larger nations standing up for themselves.

America wants complete global domination and this is at the core of the problem. It spends more on defence than most countries combined, although Russia has now in its possession more nuclear warheads than the United States ... for the first time. America’s nuclear arsenal is now in a very poor condition and has been depreciating at an alarming rate for that country. Yet the American tax payer still forks out billions in military hardware for Israel.

This military might is used for only one purpose at the moment ... to attack a defenceless population that had lived on that land for centuries, long before the Ashkenazi Jews had robbed the Palestinians of their birthright.

It is feared the Israelis will get away with more war crimes and incitement to genocide, all the while America shields them.

copyright©2014 Robert Edwards

EDITORIAL - European Socialist Action No 54

Why is America Soft on 'Islamic' State?

September/October 2014

American air strikes have proven futile in terms of halting the mercenary terrorist group going under the moniker of Islamic State. Why? Because the Americans do not really want to halt Islamic State or ISIS, the acronym to which it is referred.

ESA No 45, March/April 2013
We said it then ...

I will cut to the chase. Like Al-Qa’eda, Islamic State is an invention of the CIA and other intelligence agencies. Terrorists run by the CIA are not new. They were used in Libya and elsewhere. The Americans used Osama bin Laden as a CIA operative in Afghanistan when pushing out the Russians.

They say Islamic State is financially supported by Qatar and one or two other despotic Arab states. In fact, a few wealthy people in Qatar partly bankroll it but the real control comes from the United States. They set it up in the first place as part of the opposition to President Assad of Syria.

The threat of Islamic terror is a lie from the very beginning and it is at the heart of the United States agenda of conquest and perpetual war ... war without end.

Britain and other countries in the European Union are little more than occupied states, press-ganged into a military/political alliance called NATO. In fact, NATO has become the military wing of an American-led Europe, right up the borders of Turkey and Syria.

We are all under the cosh from a foreign super power that is driven by a desire to enslave every country in the world ... the final and complete Americanisation of the globe.

The elite that runs the United States wants control of every drop of oil on the planet because it is the life blood of the American Empire. This has been proven time and again.

They pretend to wage war against evil. This is the greatest irony. The fact is, the United States uses evil in order to pursue American interests.

All the jihadist groups with titles like Islamic State, ISIS, Al-Qa’eda and Al-Nusra are not only creations of the CIA but they are used and manipulated by the United States in order to de-stabilise states of which they disapprove.

Up to the border with Russia, the CIA created false flag destabilisation in Ukraine by setting up a violent and armed neo-Nazi opposition to a democratically elected president there. They tried to blame the shooting down of flight MH-17 over East Ukraine on the Russians. That was before an investigation had even began. It was a CIA false flag operation.

The American imperialists supported the brutal attack on Gaza, blaming Hamas. The murder of three Israelis teenagers was blamed on them. It cost the lives of over 2,000 Palestinians. The United States said nothing.

Wherever the Americans have been involved in regime change (illegal under international law) the subsequent chaos is perpetuated. Not one of these states has been rebuilt as a stable democracy. That’s the last thing the Americans want.

They know there is no such thing as democracy. The political and financial elite in America is the very antithesis of rule by all the people. It is the rule of wealth and of power.

The beheading of a few Americans and British by Islamic State is used by the United States as an alibi for massive military intervention in Syria and Iraq. Before these recent beheadings, Syrians were beheaded on a regular basis by the same terrorist groups for years, openly encouraged by the anti-Assad West. The media was very silent about it then.

The reason Islamic State is not being pushed back is because the Americans do not want their own terrorist foot-soldiers stopped. They want to use them to not only topple Syria but to go further towards Iran later. Terrorists and death squads now replace American boots on the ground.

The worst thing about all this is that the masses of the people believe the distorted version in their papers and on TV. The awful truth is that the United States and our government only pretend to wage war on evil because it is an evil that they created themselves in order to bring more misery upon the world.

Henry Williamson: A Dreaming Youth in the Crucible of War

HENRY WILLIAMSON:
A DREAMING YOUTH IN THE CRUCIBLE OF WAR

by John Roberts 
(ESA No 53, July/August 2014)

John Roberts is a long-standing member of the Henry Williamson Society

This is his contribution to the centenary of the outbreak of war in August 1914

‘Henry Williamson: Nazi sympathiser’. As recently as the 1990s, a Times Review referred to the great English writer as such. An indication of how brain-washed and fundamentally narrow-minded the British literary establishment and their cohorts can be.

Henry Williamson

Somehow, this made me into a Henry Williamson sympathiser; I instinctively divined that here was a misunderstood man, there was an immediate empathy. Williamson was an outsider. I’ve always felt something of an outsider myself; maybe one of the reasons Robert Edwards has me on his staff as one of the writers for European Socialist Action! I’ve never been an unreasonable individual but somehow that doesn’t count. They know we are different, so they take against us. So we look elsewhere. In my case, ESA.

Henry Williamson had a good devoted family, good friends and, most of all, good wives (although maybe he did not treat them as he knew he should). Yet he remained an outsider to the Establishment.

I became a member of the Henry Williamson Society in 2005. The society has a few hundred members world-wide and produces two excellent publications each year; a newsletter in the spring and a literary journal in the summer. In 2006, I joined a tour of the battlefields of Northern France. The Lochnagar Crater, Thiepval Memorial, Delville Wood, Beaumont Hamel, Cambrai, Orival Wood Cemetery, the Sambre Canal, Serre Road 11 cemetery and the Arras Memorial. We paid tribute to other poets and writers, often buried in small walled cemeteries in the middle of fields. There was evidence of the ‘Iron Harvest’, shells at the roadsides awaiting disposal. Every year, hundreds surface on fields being ploughed by farmers. Sometimes there are deaths and injuries through these devices, even though they are nearly one hundred years old.

Half a century ago (could it be so long?) the BBC broadcast a landmark documentary series whereby soldiers and civilians who had survived the First World War shared their personal experiences. Clearly someone at the BBC recognised that this would be the last real opportunity to hear a substantial number of experiences from these gentlemen.

Thousands of soldiers responded to appeals to take part in the original series. In total, seventy hours of interviews were filmed, of which 55 hours survive, having been kept in the Imperial War Museum. Julia Cave, the researcher who conducted the original interviews at Ealing Studios, said, “It has always been said that they didn’t talk about the war but there were a lot who did want to do so”.

As over a million feet of film were made, inevitably for logistical reasons a process of editing had to take place, condensing the footage to a manageable though substantial 26 one hour episodes.

The men, in their late sixties at that time, but still spry and looking dapper by today’s standards, dispassionately describe the fear, filth and noise of death. Their detachment makes it all the more affecting. Henry Williamson was among these men.

In March this year, a programme was shown on BBC2, I Was There: The Great War Interviews. 85 per cent of those shown in this had never been seen. This cache of previously unseen testimonies were deemed too emotional for broadcast in the 1960s with the Second World War relatively fresh in the public’s mind. The programme makers of the time preferred to concentrate on the more traditional history of the conflict.

Late 1982: I was 25. An 18 month relationship with a girl four years younger had broken up. I embarked on a relationship with Lucy, a divorcee woman in her late thirties (she lived at Moseley in Birmingham, somewhat ironically); we both knew that this was just a fling and was not meant to last. I was working on British Rail as a trainee engine driver. The irregular hours were starting to wear me down. I was also getting fed up with the canteen politics.

Some years previous, I had read short stories and essays by D H Lawrence. Lawrence had an outsider status with which I could indentify, although he was still vilified by the mainstream literary establishment. One day, browned off with the mess-room politics, I took a stroll into the concourse of Leeds City railway station. I dropped in on John Menzies’ newsagent shop and something caught my eye. A paperback of Dandelion Days by Henry Williamson. A new reprint with a detail of ‘A Cottar’s Garden’ by Edward Kingston Brice; roses in the foreground, a brick farmhouse barn in the middle distance and fields stretching beyond to blue remembered hills in an azure summer afternoon haze. Here was a find.

‘Second in THE FLAX OF DREAM sequence’, it stated below the title. Now, this was something fresh and intriguing. I had heard of Tarka the Otter, although I had never read it. I had seen the film; it was the only film that actually made my younger brother, Mark, cry. I never forget that. The film was actually made at the time of Henry’s death in 1977.

As time went on, I saw the odd article on Henry Williamson. I still have a pair of clippings from the 1990s; one a review from The Times about a BBC Radio 3 programme called The Trials of Henry Williamson.

Although basically favourable, the reviewer can not resist the title, “Was he an otter fool?”. Under HW’s photograph it says, ‘Henry Williamson: a lifelong conservationist and popular author with Nazi sympathies’.

The review goes on: “Known to most of us only as the creator of Tarka the Otter, Williamson was a life-long conservationist, alert to the need for husbanding of the earth’s resources as far back as the 1920s. Conservation was also a theme of the Nazis, a connection to Williamson which is more than coincidental”.

It then goes on to say how HW died in obscurity in 1977 and how his ‘lack of recognition in this country owed something to his support for Hitler’. Williamson refused to moderate his views. You could say HW comes with form or baggage.

Later, through my membership of the HW Society (founded in 1980; an excellent website), I obtained a blue cloth-bound copy of The Flax of Dream one-volume sequence. As this was a pre-war edition, it still had these words in the foreword: “I salute the great man across the Rhine whose life symbol is the happy child”. Words which would seal his fate and make him a hostage to fortune as far as his reputation went. Yet The Flax of Dream is dedicated to “All who fought for freedom in the Second World War and are still fighting”.

Of course, hindsight is wonderful and Williamson was far from alone in believing it. Yes, it did seem that Germany was rising from the ashes, hopefully, firmly and in full employment, whereas in England the heroes of the First World War lived in slums and some men had never worked since the war.

HW’s pre-war friendship with Sir Oswald Mosley has not been forgotten nor forgiven. Henry once painted the BUF flash symbol on the wall of his Norfolk farm at Stiffkey where he farmed despite the agricultural depression of the time.

He later referred to Hitler as a Luciferic figure; a Fallen Angel. In spite of this, his reputation became clouded. He called World War II ‘The Hitlerian War’.

I ignored these attempts to besmirch this man and proceeded to investigate both man and writings.

Indians of the sub-continent (both participating and otherwise) name The Great War the European Civil War. There you have it, in one.

Henry Williamson died unhonoured in his eighties. With the exception of Tarka the Otter (found today, if you are lucky, in the junior section of most libraries) he is only read now by a faithful few.

He could not come to terms with the deadly phenomenon of incited patriotic fervour, with its power to drive men into a hell of other men’s devising .... Like many others who survived the test to destruction, he could not adjust to peace.

In 1928, having found some peace in the countryside of Devon, he reported the Cenotaph ceremony for the Daily Mirror: “For us the wreaths are a symbol for all poor men of The Great War. The dead are of no nation”.

Henry won the Hawthornden Prize for Tarka in 1928. Henry was hunted by the fame of the book, as Ted Hughes said. As if he had never written anything else.

Hughes explained there was another Henry, hounded by the memory of war.

“In Patriots Progress we see that spirit of Tarka - a wild super-sensitive creature - hurled into the dreadful world of modern history .... It is one of the best records of trench warfare and it describes one of the key experiences of Henry’s life”.

The Henry Williamson Society hold a study day early each spring at the Swedenborg Hall in Holborn, London. This year featured a talk by Peter Bunton entitled “Tarka as an analogy of World War One”.

A Daily Telegraph review referred to “the intolerable genius of Henry Williamson”.

A Chronicle of .... resurrects the past with extraordinary intensity. HW had an unsurpassed sense of social history. A Chronicle .... has a breadth, a scope which makes it truly the history of a period rather than merely personal.

Ted Hughes spoke of the ‘radiance’ of HW’s writing. Someone unfamiliar with HW saw him speak on the March BBC documentary on The Great War: “Mesmerising” was the word used.

HW was a man of prodigious creative and spiritual energy. He knew Brocard Sewell of Aylesford Priory, a man in sympathy with Henry in all aspects. Personally, I feel Henry would  have made a very good Roman Catholic. He wrote articles for the Aylesford Review, a literary and theological quarterly publish by the Carmelite Order. 

He always refused payment.

Ted Hughes, in his address at St Martin-in-the-Fields on December 1st 1977, said of Henry: “He was untamed and he was free. A full, clear flame, as D H Lawrence would have said. He was always different, emotional, outrageous, amusing. It was Tarka - still wild, alert, open to everything, ready for anything. It was what pulsed through the best of his writing. It was genuinely him and it was beautiful”.

Henry Williamson was an extraordinarily sensitive child, nervous and highly strung. Always frightened of doing the wrong thing and getting into trouble. He was “born unhappy”. Early photographs show a small boy with vast luminously anxious eyes. He was frightened of his father, William Leopold Williamson - a typically stern and withdrawn Victorian man, also described as a remote, irritable and “neurotically fastidious” figure.

Williamson had two sisters who enjoyed the softer approach afforded to young girls. He was irritated by his ‘fey’ mother who was “always fearful; and that feeling upset others”. She did not “click or fit” with her husband and, in his adolescence, HW did not feel she stood up to his hectoring father.

Henry Williamson’s daughter-in-law remarked that his ‘fascism’ is part of his Romanticism. “Early fascism with its belief in national renewal through sun-bronzed youth had its utopian aspects”. Discuss? We might well!

Williamson is sometimes excused his ‘naïve’ flirtation with fascism. His so-called ‘failure to recant’ is not. HW remained faithful to the ideas of Oswald Mosley all his life. What is not recognised is that fascism as a political idea was all but dead by 1945. Oswald Mosley had moved on; HW appears in a photograph at his home (Ox’s Cross) in the 1950s reading The European.

Williamson wrote The Flax of Dream, a quartet brilliantly evoking the peace of England between the great wars and the unspoiled innocence of the Devon countryside. But, as we know, in the 1930s the shadows lengthened. Williamson was deeply troubled by international trends. He saw it all happening again .... another brothers’ war, no less.

In the early 1920s, HW moved to Devon, renting a thatched Cob cottage at Ox’s Cross, Georgeham, on the coast near Appledore.

Henry Williamson gave, in the Patriots Progress and his Chronicle .... novels, the most accurate account of the 1914 Christmastide truce in the trenches of Belgium. The chief character in the Patriots Progress is an ordinary ‘Everyman’ named John Bullock. The book title and ‘John Bullock’ are a nod to John Bunyan’s A Pilgrims Progress. Not a hero - an ordinary English bloke.

Here is what he wrote in a pencilled letter home dated December 26th 1914. A small Union Jack was pinned to the top of the page:

Dear Mother,

    I am writing from the trenches. It is 11 o’clock in the morning. Beside me is a coke fire, opposite a ‘dug-out’ (wet) with straw in it. The ground is sloppy in the actual trench but frozen elsewhere. In my mouth is a pipe presented by Princess Mary. In the pipe is tobacco .... in the pipe is German tobacco. Ha Ha, you say, from a prisoner or from a captured trench.

    Oh dear, no! From a German soldier. Yes, a live German soldier from his own trench. Yesterday the British and Germans met and shook hands .... and exchanged souvenirs. Yes, all day Christmas Day .... Marvellous, isn’t it? This is only for about a mile or two on either side of us (so far as we know). On Xmas eve both armies sang carols and cheered and there was very little firing. The Germans (in some places 80 yards away) called to our men to come and fetch a cigar and our men told them to come to us. This went on for some time, neither fully trusting the other .... a bold Tommy crept out and stood between the trenches and immediately a Saxon came to meet him. They shook hands and laughed and then 16 Germans came out. Thus the ice was broken.

    Our men are speaking to them now. They are Landsturmers or Landwehr, I think, and Saxons and Bavarians (no Prussians). Many are gentle looking men in goatee beards and spectacles, and some are very big and arrogant-looking. I have some cigarettes which I shall keep and a cigar I have smoked. We had a burial service in the afternoon, over the dead Germans who perished in the last attack that was repulsed against us. The Germans put “For Fatherland and Freedom” on the cross. They obviously think their cause is a just one. Many of the Germans here, are or were, waiters. Thank Efford for his chocolate, Auntie Belle for the cigarettes .... my toes are frostbitten now .... working all night at digging .... sleeping in wet and mud. Where we are billeted (8 of us in a cottage in a town which is shelled now and again) we have a good time ....”

Unknown to Henry, his father arranged to have this letter printed in the Daily Express, the first known published example of HW’s work. I was a little surprised that the letter got through the Field Censor but it obviously did.

From this experience came his life-long and passionate belief that wars were created through misunderstanding.

The foreword to the one-volume edition of A Flax of Dream goes thus: On Christmas Day 1914, the author of this history had a conversation with a young soldier of the 133rd Saxon Regiment in no-man’s land, in front of the  Bois de Ploegsteert. Although he did not realise it at the time, that experience altered his entire conception of the world.

Yes, football matches did occur but these were played behind German lines, “I said to a German, how can you be fighting for freedom? You started the war and we are fighting for freedom. The German replied, “Do not let us quarrel on Christmas Day”.

“Come on over, Tommy, come over”, someone said. Very soon we were exchanging gifts. Williamson recalled: “The whole of no-man’s land was grey and khaki. There they were smoking and talking, shaking hands, exchanging addresses to write to one another”.

The truce lasted four days before an order came round that fraternisation had to stop.

The Germans sent over a note saying senior officers were visiting that night and that they would have to fire their guns but would do so high.

“We crept out, trying to avoid our boots ringing on the frozen ground and expecting any moment to fall flat with the machine guns opening up. And nothing happened. And within two hours we were walking about, laughing and talking”.

In 1964, HW went with Kerstin Hegarty and a press photographer to France. It was the fiftieth anniversary of World War I. Henry had been commissioned to write a series of articles for The London Evening Standard.

Hegarty writes, “This was a strangely moving experience - one that is difficult to convey in words. The atmosphere of that sombre, sad part of France and Flanders, although so orderly and peaceful now was still blood-soaked. The articles were called ‘Return to Hell’ .... we first went to Vimy Ridge and in the final paragraph of the first article he wrote, “Now, after nearly fifty years, I find myself upon these ancient battlefields to report on - what? In me there lives the ghost of my young self, compassionate, estranged, accepting all things with clarity”.

“We went to the German graveyard, ‘The Labyrinth’ .... acres and acres of black crosses: a very different place from the beautifully kept British and French cemeteries.

Plugstreet Wood: in the middle of what seems a haven for nature lies a small British cemetery: gentle, very rural and not too immaculate. Tender, young and wild. Sadly, so much youth has perished there.

How quiet it is. A nightingale is singing. “Summer, summer, summer, the soundless football in the grass”. Gossamers drift. Faraway in the depths of the wood a dove is moaning .... dappled shadows fall on these quiet headstones within the mason’d walls. These oaks must be eighty years old at least. How did they survive that frightful bombardment in April 1918, during the Germans’ last drive for the Channel ports?

Look at this one, please.

5500
R. Barnett
The Rifle Brigade
19th December 1914, Age 15

Below, carved the Star of David. He was of Stoke Newington in London.
The eyes drop their tribute salt.

The Arras memorial includes Driver Frith of the Machine Gun Corps. Driver Willis-Frith died in June 1917 aged 20. Driver Frith was a member of Henry’s platoon, listed as the cold shoer for the company’s mules.

In April 2006, John Gregory, who writes publications for the HWS, including re-issues of Henry’s magazine and newspaper articles, read a poignant passage from one of Henry’s books, documenting the tragic ending of Driver Frith and his gallant and ever-loyal mule.

A highly emotional few minutes. Henry’s words by the Arras memorial.

My regard for the HW Society is immense but if I am being honest I do have a small quibble with them. They make the disclaimer that the society is ‘non-political’. Why is it really necessary to say that? They are often at pains to point out that HW was ‘never a fascist’. One would never say  that the Jane Austen, Bronte or Oscar Wilde literary societies are ‘non-political’, would you? Methinks they ‘protesteth too much’, to quote a well-used phrase of Jane Austen.

In 1973, his documentary BBC The Vanishing Hedgerows introduced him to many more; it will take a series based on The Flax of Dream or The Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight to purge the contempt and re-establish his reputation. Anthony Powell’s ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’ (a huge Proustian series tracking the early and mid-20th century) was made into a television drama; so why not HW’s masterpieces?

Ted Hughes, a good friend of Henry and reader of a tribute at his funeral, could call a deserved truce:

“If one ignores the superficial errors of judgement he might have made in trying to adjust his ideas to the practical world of politics and instead look into the heart of his books .... one sees a consistency. He was blessed with an intense vision of the world and a genius for expressing it .... He added some  masterpieces to the literature of this country”.

I attended a HWS study day a few years ago; on display was a fascinating collection of memorabilia relating to Henry. Including his BUF membership card. Politics was of importance to him. It seems disingenuous to suggest otherwise.

Disingenuous and one sided. How many writers, artists and indeed, ‘mainstream’ politicians have had a dalliance with communism, a creed which produced monsters who make Adolf Hitler look like an angel in comparison. Yet their reputations are intact; just a wee risqué. Flirtation, that’s all it was. Not so for Henry Williamson.

Anthony Burgess, the novelist, was a fan but, again, he writes, “In the later volumes (by HW) a pro-fascist tone prevails, an almost manic bitterness, far from acceptable”.

I felt I had to cut through thickets of prejudice to discover the man himself. The semi-biographical saga A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight, the 15 books of which received scant attention, give a marvellously detailed picture of suburban life on the outer rim of London over the turn of the 20th century; the encroachment of town on country; the decay of the old order. Not for nothing has he been named ‘The English Proust’.

Personally, what I divined about Williamson was a gravitas; one I had previously felt with Lawrence.

This was no English sentimentalist; this man was truthful, sincere and he was not playing games. He was, to use boxing parlance, a heavyweight and he had a seriousness of intention.

If you are looking for the lightweight, the frivolous, then do not look at HW. There are dozens of other writers in the canon of English literature you can go to.

For years, if you said the words Henry Williamson, people would reply ‘Tarka the Otter’, then some would mutter ‘fascist’ or ‘pro-fascist’, friend of Mosley, very possibly.

The Radio 3 documentary ‘The Trials of HW’ was sensitive. Tim Pigott-Smith played HW as a young man and Michael Gough the old man. Henry was devastated when his 80th birthday passed by without a Queen’s Honour. Dishonoured.

Henry Williamson was a romantic but not a sentimentalist. Becoming a farmer in Norfolk during a severe agricultural slump “when only fools bought land”, he was well aware of what farmers were pitted against. He was practical man as well as a dreamer.

Henry Williamson joined the London Rifle Brigade (5th City of London Regiment) as Private 9689. He trained at Crowborough camp in Sussex. In May 1915, he obtained a commission as an officer, becoming 2nd lieut. 10th Service Battalion in the Bedfordshire Regiment. He had periods of medical discharge (notably for dysentery) but on 23rd October 1916, for example he was passed fit for Home Service and training re-commenced. On the 1st November he was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant with the Machine Gun Corps and also became a transport officer in the Albert/Arras area, working with horses and mules (Spring of 1917).

Henry was demobilised from the army in September 1919. He felt lost; the army had been his whole adult life. He was 24 at this time. Civvy life had been a “shadowy and diminished sphere steadily dissolving since 1914”. He roamed the streets of Sydenham (his birthplace) wondering what to do.

At last, he went to London to visit some of his wartime haunts. “But I might have been a ghost, I drank beer alone, yet with imaginary comrades”.

He was paid his army gratuity and a disability pension; he started writing at night and loafed around during the day but spiritually and emotionally the war never left him. It was to be a number of years before he could psychologically deal with opening up his wartime experiences through his writing.

Henry has been called the English Proust, for his writings recall in vivid detail time now lost.

The Great War was the backbone on which all his subsequent writing hung. His experiences were a crucible that marked everything he did, felt and wrote during the rest of his life. “The shy, almost diffident man Henry always remained had a hidden strength within him which gave him rare courage”, Diana Mosley later wrote in a tribute.

The titles of the individual components of HW’s magnum opus A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight have a mesmerising, almost supernatural or mystical quality, yet they relate directly to the subject in the books. A Test to Destruction (the latter days of The Great War), The Golden Virgin, The Gale of the World, How Dear is Life, A Fox under my Cloak, The Phasian Bird, The Innocent Moon, The Power of the Dead, Love and the Loveless and Lucifer Before Sunrise. The Flax of Dream, the title of his tetralogy, has an almost mystical sensory power.

The First World War has encompassed five volumes of Henry’s masterpiece A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight, acclaimed by many critics as the finest writings on the war, as well as the earlier books The Wet Flanders Plain and The Patriots Progress. Having endured four years of a catastrophic, suicidal war, HW’s main objective was crystallised in his resolve to do his utmost to show the futility of war, the stupidity of its causes and to try to educate the world through the medium of writing and ensure such a war would never happen again.

For us readers of ESA, it is pertinent to sum up Henry’s political views here. Henry Williamson endured. He fought for his country. He was a patriot, above all.

This is epitomised in a letter Henry Williamson wrote to Captain Sir Basil Liddell Hart written from his Norfolk farm on July 9th 1939, immediately before the outbreak of the Second World War.

Williamson, referring to their mutual friendship with T E Lawrence, wrote to invite Liddell Hart to a BUF meeting to take place on the evening of Sunday July 16th at the Earls Court Exhibition Hall. This letter contains the clearest statement in existence that Williamson’s belief and only intent was purely and solely to maintain peace and to prevent another war: 


.... It may be that I suffer from illusions but every experience in The Great War, every thought and feeling I have had since, every word I have struggled to write, finds its meaning and aspiration in the ideas and hopes (still in the pioneer stage) of British Union; and I can not  help believing that in the course of time it will be the means of bringing the truth to our land and people and Empire.

At present it is like Cairo to TEL in 1916 and can not be proved. An idea. 
Please forgive this intrusion if you are busy or disinclined but the way to a peaceful Europe is so different from the usual conception, which seems to be leading direct to war.

Yours faithfully,

Henry Williamson

T E Lawrence would have come to this way of seeing things, I believe, had he lived.

copyright©John Roberts 2014