The British author and journalist Simon Jenkins has written a strongly worded comment article in the Guardian saying that the centenary has been seized as a military propaganda opportunity, and that lessons learned have been ignored or forgotten.
In the article, he wrote: “Britain’s commemoration of the Great War has lost all sense of proportion.”
He went on: “A Martian might think Britain was a country of demented warmongers, not able to get through a day without a dose of appalling battle scenes from past national victories… The repetition of virtually identical “stories from the trenches” becomes banal, a nightly pornography of violence.”
There were over a 1,000 comments after the article – some supporting Jenkins, others criticising his stance.
One comment argued: “Many people in Britain have ancestors who fought and/or died in the war: I have. It’s perfectly sensible to want to remember them”.
Simon Jenkins is a former Editor of the UK Times and the London Evening Standard.
To read the full comment article in the Guardian, click here
In January 2014, Simon Jenkins wrote an article apologising to the Germans for what he described as Britain’s “sickening avalanche of First World War worship”.
Posted by: CN Editor