Robert Fisk: When propaganda turns out to be fact
[Robert Fisk is a British journalist and is Middle East correspondent for The Independent.]
What happens when myths turn out to be true? I'm talking about the "myth" of the German army's atrocities in little Belgium in 1914, the raped nuns and the babies spitted on Prussian bayonets. "Hun barbarism" was the powerful propaganda tool to send the British Tommies and the French poilus – literally, "the hairy ones" – off to the killing fields of the Somme, Ypres, Passchendaele and Verdun. But now, thanks to the analytical, brilliant, horrifying work of Alan Kramer, a history professor at my own alma mater of Trinity College, Dublin, it all turns out to be – well, let's speak frankly – true.
He's not the first to catalogue Germany's war crimes in the 1914-18 conflict – Germany's own academics got their hands on the military and political archives proving that the massacre of civilians in Belgium really happened at the start of the war – but Kramer has gone a stage further; he has traced an undeniable pattern of atrocities not only in Belgium but in First World War Italy and Russia too. The Nazis, it seems, were marching in the footsteps of earlier German war criminals.
Maybe it's hypocritical to dwell on these long-ago war crimes when our own illegal invasion of Iraq may have culled a million Iraqi lives, not to mention Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki – readers can fill in the extra names – and it's true that New Zealand troops murdered German prisoners in the First World War (on 15 September 1916, to be precise).
So did Canadian troops. And Brits. But slaughtering prisoners on the battlefield is one thing. Shooting down rows of innocent civilians is quite another. Kramer's new book has a suitably academic title – Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War – but its contents freeze the blood...
Read entire article at Independent (UK)
What happens when myths turn out to be true? I'm talking about the "myth" of the German army's atrocities in little Belgium in 1914, the raped nuns and the babies spitted on Prussian bayonets. "Hun barbarism" was the powerful propaganda tool to send the British Tommies and the French poilus – literally, "the hairy ones" – off to the killing fields of the Somme, Ypres, Passchendaele and Verdun. But now, thanks to the analytical, brilliant, horrifying work of Alan Kramer, a history professor at my own alma mater of Trinity College, Dublin, it all turns out to be – well, let's speak frankly – true.
He's not the first to catalogue Germany's war crimes in the 1914-18 conflict – Germany's own academics got their hands on the military and political archives proving that the massacre of civilians in Belgium really happened at the start of the war – but Kramer has gone a stage further; he has traced an undeniable pattern of atrocities not only in Belgium but in First World War Italy and Russia too. The Nazis, it seems, were marching in the footsteps of earlier German war criminals.
Maybe it's hypocritical to dwell on these long-ago war crimes when our own illegal invasion of Iraq may have culled a million Iraqi lives, not to mention Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki – readers can fill in the extra names – and it's true that New Zealand troops murdered German prisoners in the First World War (on 15 September 1916, to be precise).
So did Canadian troops. And Brits. But slaughtering prisoners on the battlefield is one thing. Shooting down rows of innocent civilians is quite another. Kramer's new book has a suitably academic title – Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War – but its contents freeze the blood...