A century of sacrifice and betrayal
Posted by admin978 on November 14, 2021 · Leave a Comment
This year marks the centenary of the Royal British Legion’s poppy appeal, and most H&D readers will once again have bought a poppy to remember the tragic sacrifice of so many lives in the wars and terrorist conflicts of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Yet this year we have more reason than ever to remember betrayal as well as sacrifice, and the less than noble role sometimes played by the British Legion itself.
On 18th October 80-year-old Dennis Hutchings – already terminally ill – died in Belfast after contracting Covid-19. He was buried last week in Plymouth.
Pallbearers from the Life Guards – Mr Hutchings’ former regiment – were allowed by the Ministry of Defence to take part in his funeral, but his last years were marked by relentless efforts to prosecute him for doing his duty.
Despite his illness, Mr Hutchings boldly stood up to defend not only his own record, but those of countless comrades whose sacrifice is now traduced for today’s political convenience.
Just like the victims of the Birmingham pub bombings – whose families have yet to obtain justice even though the British government knows full well who perpetrated the crime – those who like Dennis Hutchings fought the scourge of terrorism as far back as fifty years ago, are considered disposable by our lords and masters.
This is nothing new: long before the renewal of the IRA’s terrorist campaign in the late 1960s, another ruthless band of killers brought a campaign of death and destruction to Britain’s streets, and it soon proved politically convenient to forget their crimes. These were the Zionist Jewish terrorists of the Stern Gang, Irgun and Haganah. One Stern Gang terrorist who planted a bomb in Central London has continued to escape prosecution for more than seventy years! Robert Misrahi bombed a servicemen’s club just off Trafalgar Square, then escaped to France where he became an eminent academic and still lives in Paris aged 95, untroubled by any request for his extradition.
No such luck for Dennis Hutchings or the many other British servicemen now facing prosecution – not for carrying out terrorist crimes, but for fighting the terrorists!
Tony Martin – himself an ex-serviceman and now chairman of the National Front – will lead the NF’s traditional Remembrance Day march to the Cenotaph today: a tradition that was begun by the NF’s founding chairman, A.K. Chesterton, who won the Military Cross on the Western Front in 1918.
H&D readers will pay their respects at memorials around the UK. But without illusions.
It has become a cliché to write that British soldiers in the First World War were “lions led by donkeys”. Sadly it was much worse than that. They were (and remain to this day) lions led by traitors.
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
Rudyard Kipling, Recessional, 1897
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England’s foam.
Laurence Binyon, For the Fallen, 1914
