OpEd - SubScribe14

The commentators 05-08-14

...on First World War centenary

Britain’s commemoration of the Great War has lost all sense of proportion. It has become a media theme park, an indigestible cross between Downton Abbey and a horror movie. You cannot walk down the street or turn on the television without being bombarded by Great War diaries, poems, scrapbooks and songs. The BBC has gone war mad.
- Simon Jenkins, The Guardian

We should have stayed on the sidelines, and let the Germans, French, Russians and Austrians fight it out. Even if, as most historians believe, the Kaiser had then won the war, the prospect of a German-dominated Europe would surely have been better than what actually happened — the Russian Revolution, the rise of Stalin, Hitler and the Holocaust.
- Dominic Sandbrook, Daily Mail

What is the exact point of this grand fuss acknowledging the First World War’s horror when the remaining news headlines prove that not one iota about the unspeakable pointless carnage of war had been learned.
- Grace Dent, Independent

As we mark the start of the First World War politicians tell us we must learn the lessons it taught, but they seem determined to do the opposite. No lessons were learned from that war or from the Second World War. The Allies stumbled into the horror of 1914-18. No one at the time had any idea that millions would die. They must have had a clearer idea in 1939 but it still happened. Now in 2014 the familiar cause is here again: a dispute about "a faraway country of which we know little," in this case Ukraine.
- Peter Hill, Daily Express