United Nations Day

 Oh valiant hearts, who to your glory came

Through  dust and conflict and conflict and through battle flame;

Tranquil you lie, your knightly virtue proved,

Your memory hallowed in the land you loved.

Proudly you gathered, rank on rank, to war;

As who had heard God's message from afar;

All you had hoped for, all you had, you gave

To save mankind, yourselves you scorned to save.

 

Those lovely lines were written by Sir  John Stanhope  Arkwright and presumably published in his collection of poems, "The Supreme Sacrifice," in 1919.  We shall be singing them to a haunting tune on Remembrance Sunday in a couple of weeks time.  They are,of course, all lies.

Over 100 years later thousands of troops are currently gathering "rank on rank" to wreak havoc in the Gaza Strip and Russian and Ukrainian boys and now girls, men and now women, are lying tranquilly or otherwise, in Eastern European soil, having already given "their all."

 Except of course that they didn't "give" it: for the most part they are and were conscripts who had and have no choice.  Their lives were and are being taken because of a failure of politics

 Someone will write nice poems and songs or their equivalent in Ukrainian, Russian, Hebrew,  Arabic or whatever  to sanitise the deaths so that their elders, relatives and friends can think of them as clean and noble.  But they won't have been; they well have been slow and agonising and frightening..

 Many soldiers left to die horrible deaths on the No-man's Lands of the First World War of which Arkwright wrote cried out for their mothers, in German, French or English, as appropriate.

 Today is United Nations Day, to celebrate the world's second attempt to say "never again,"  But it stands by impotent as the  leaders of the "Great Powers" look over their shoulders at the lowest instincts of their electorates. A simple motion to demand access for aid to Gaza was vetoed by the Americans.  Acting independently, the UK bravely "abstained." 

Two letters in today's Guardian call for grown-up leaders to emerge.  One, from a Prof Jeremy Holmes, asks "...what if Israel had not met horror with horror?"  Another, from a John Stone, calls for the "rules of war" to be replaced by the "principles of peace."  

Another article claims that, before the land invasion of Gaza has even started, a child is killed every 15 minutes by the aerial bombardment.  And the slaughter in Ukraine grinds on, no longer front-page news.

Prof Stone points out that Nelson |Mandela rose above the instinct of retribution and brought apartheid to an end.  We desperately need statesmen of similar calibre who are capable of harnessing our better natures.

I hope that when they appear we are prepared to support them, and that the next generation enjoys a new and refreshed United Nations.

 

PS.  As reported in the Guardian 25/10/23 the UN Secretary General " tells it like it is...."

Guterres said the 7 October attacks by Hamas were “appalling” but did not happen in a vacuum. “The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation,” he said. “They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing.”

 

The Israeli authorities rush to condemn him.  Now lets hope the "leaders of  the West" flock to his support.