"TWO WORLD WARS AND ONE WORLD CU-U-UP"
The chant of Eng-er-land football fans whenever we play Germany. In stark contrast in intellect when Germany won the final of the European Championship in 1996, their fans were singing,
“It’s coming home
It’s coming home
It’s coming
Football’s coming home”
In English.
But it is telling that a brand of Englishman takes credit for winning the Second World War, despite the fact that 95% of them were not even born then. I have even noticed the same attitude among the 5% who were.
These, of course, will now be in their 80’s (at least) so their contribution to defeating Nazism is arithmetically implausible.
Take my father-in-law, for instance. He is 93. At the end of World War II he will have been 14 years old. What was his contribution to the war effort? As the excellent German comedian Henning Wehn points out (from whose telling of this my piece has been shamefully plagiarised) my father-in-law would have been in school, recipient of rationed foods etc – nothing more than a drain on the country’s resources.
Rather, as I delight in pointing out to him, effectively he was contributing to the Nazi war effort.
M.C. Newberry
Thu 5th Sep 2024 13:17
Mosley's Blackshirts never really caught on with the public at
large. What attention they got from their provocation in the
East End was at a time when Hitler's real intentions that became
"The Final Solution" was beyond any conception.. The public at
large gave them the same "Do us a favour mate" response they
adopted to persuade Karl Marx that his ideology was not fancied.
The man on the Clapham omnibus prevailed. We could do with
more of the latter these days!!