Irish & Swedish neutrality during the Second World War

Ryle Dwyer

To University College Cork and a debate at the historical society about Irish neutrality during the Second World War.

Irish neutrality in the war was extremely favourable to Britain. Ryle Dwyer argued that Ireland made a positive and partisan contribution to the allied war effort, and this made it a phoney neutrality.

Geoff Roberts claimed Ireland could, and should, have done more, and Irish neutrality was favourable to Britain only for the same reason that Swedish neutrality was favourable to Germany. Namely a powerful neighbour. Indeed Swedish neutrality was considerably more favourable to Germany, which proves the point, he says. Irish neutrality wasn’t phoney or pragmatic, it was ideological and principled. Which raises the moral question that there was a right and wrong side in the war and Ireland failed to ally itself with the right side.

Swedish neutrality. Hmm. There's a big debate in Sweden about this (and rightly so says Geoff Roberts, and there ought to be more of a debate here in Ireland.) My cousin Tolle showed me warehouses near Luleå where the Germans kept supplies for their Norwegian garrison during the war. And once I was out walking in Stockholm with my aunt Inger, and she pointed up to a building and said “From that building we were ruled during the Second World War.” The building in question was the former German embassy.

When I'm in Stockholm this summer I must get a photo of that building and add it here.

... and here it is (July 2011, and yes that's me standing in front) ...

Snow trumps climate hoax

From an American climate newsletter Climate Progress, 

Koch Brothers: We deny global warming. Say otherwise and we sue.

Koch Industries, owned by Tea Party billionaires David and Charles Koch, is a carbon industry giant committed to climate change denial.  Now Koch Industries has filed a lawsuit in Utah to punish anonymous pranksters who pretended on the company’s behalf that it was discontinuing funding to climate denial front groups.

Their bizarre claim : “this has damaged our reputation.”

Full story on The Wonk Room

And here are my previous thoughts on the Kochs and Tea Party
.

"The first casualty of war is truth"

John Pilger in a justly famous New Statesman article headed “The real first casualty of war” (24 April 2006) wrote “The oldest cliché is that truth is the first casualty of war. I disagree. Journalism is the first casualty. Not only that: it has become a weapon of war, a virulent censorship that goes unrecognised in the United States, Britain and other democracies …”
 
So if it's a cliché, who first said it?

(1) Some say Aeschylus, the Greek tragic dramatist, 525 - 456 BCE. This claim is made by several people on the internet, but none has provided a citation, and I believe the claim to be false. The Wikipedia page of Aeschylus quotes flatly denies it. Moreover a classical scholar informs me that "casualty" is a modern word, which could not be directly translated from ancient Greek.  Also "Aeschylus uses the word for truth very rarely and not that I can find in a context that would translate thus."

(2) Samuel Johnson wrote in the Idler magazine no 30, 1758.  "Among the calamities of war may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages."

(3) In 1917 Hiram Johnson (1866-1945) a Progressive Party senator in California reputedly said "The first casualty, when war comes, is truth", referring to the United States entry into World War I.  However I have seen doubt cast on this, and a statement that the saying does not in fact appear in any of Johnson's recorded speeches.  If Hiram Johnson did say these words, had he read Samuel Johnson?  Hiram Johnson died on Aug. 6, 1945, the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. 

(4) Lord Arthur Augustus William Harry Ponsonby (1871 - 1946) was a British politician, writer, and social activist.  In Falsehood in Wartime: Propaganda Lies of the First World War (1928) he wrote "When war is declared, truth is the first casualty." 

So, interestingly, we still have not come to who first used the exact phrase "The first casualty of war is truth", or "Truth is the first casualty of war". We can imagine they had read Ponsonby, but we don't know.

“Cows do not belong in Fields”

Cuddly bovine image to encourage signing a
petition against factory farm in Lincolnshire

The disconcerting statement “Cows do not belong fields” was, it seems,  made in a BBC interview by Peter Wiles, the director of Nocton Dairies who propose a US-style mega-dairy in Lincolnshire.

Here's a Youtube clip of the interview, though it’s not clear to me what the source is.  A BBC local radio programme perhaps?  It’s one of those moments when you wonder if you're being subjected to an internet spoof.  
 
On the assumption it’s for real, Peter Wiles can consider himself a lemon (it says here) that’s been spotted for his ludicrous comment and giving his opponents one of the best campaign slogans ever. A number of American style battery farms are planned, essentially they apply battery farming methods to cattle and pigs.  Here's an online petition, if you like that sort of thing.  NB There are only 3 days left to sign it.

Here's a campaigning website.

Nocton wants to keep up to 3,770 cows as intensive milking machines in vast hangars with restricted access to the outdoors. To put this in scale, a typical dairy herd in the UK currently has anything between 70-120 milkers, spending half their year outside on grass.

Campaigners says that if the Nocton nightmare gets approved, the days of these traditional herds will be numbered because the arrival in the UK of US-style mega-dairies will make existing dairy farms hopelessly uncompetitive. 

And here's 38 Degrees,  an organisation I've not heard of before though perhaps that’s just because I'm behind the times.  It seems 38 Degrees is the angle at which an avalanche happens. They hope that in the UK, 38 Degrees will enable people to act together, to create an avalanche for change.

Oedipus Rex

Have now finished my story of Oedipus, which I've been working on for several weeks.  You can find it amongst my stories for children.  It bears little resemblance to what I first envisaged and I'm not even sure it hangs together with the other 6 stories I’ve already done.  But I'm quite proud of it all the same.

It will need more work doing on it.  And I haven't finished researching alternative versions of the myth.

A madman shouting in the marketplace

Dag Hammarskjöld

The madman shouted in the marketplace and no-one stopped to answer him. Thus it was confirmed that his thesis was incontrovertible.

This striking saying was written by Dag Hammarskjöld in 1957. I don't have the original Swedish but I guess it would be "Den galne ropade på torget, men ingen stannade för att svara honom. På det viset syntes att hans tes var oemotsäglig."

I came across the saying in an American blog deploring the Democrat losses in November's mid-term elections.  The blogger writes “The Dems did little to counteract the lies of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and whatever it was they did was ineffective,” and goes on to quote Dag Hammarskjöld and the madman shouting in the marketplace.

The source is Markings, published posthumously in 1963 in Swedish as Vägmärken, which literally means traffic signs.  The book is a sort of personal testament, from which it is clear that Hammarskjöld was motivated by a strong Christian faith.

Dag Hammarskjöld was the second Secretary-General of the United Nations, and his name seemed always on the radio when at the age of 7 or 8 or thereabouts I was becoming dimly aware of world events.

Hammarskjöld was a Swedish diplomat and economist. He served as Secretary-General from April 1953 until his death in a plane crash in September 1961. He is the only person to have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize posthumously, and the only U.N. Secretary-General to die in office.

There are grounds for suspicion that western intelligence agencies were implicated in the plane crash in which he died.  According to Wikipedia, former US President Harry Truman is reported to have said that "Dag Hammarskjöld was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said, 'when they killed him'."

At issue was the fabulous wealth of the newly independent Congo’s copper reserves, and western fears that Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba would nationalise them. Lumumba too was assassinated.