[The first letter below was sent to the Guardian and to the Belfast Telegraph on 17th January 2005 by Pat Muldowney. The Guardian ignored it, while the Belfast Telegraph printed an emasculated version on 21st January, cutting out the quotations:]
Prince Harry
Prince Harry has been wrongly castigated. His Nazi uniform was entirely in keeping with the "Colonials and Natives" theme of the party. The successful, and hence generally uncondemned, British colonial genocide in Australia and North America, included the following incident: "[The] final extermination [of the Tasmanians] was a large-scale event, undertaken with the cooperation of the military and judiciary ... Soldiers of the Fortieth Regiment drove the natives between two great rock formations, shot all the men and dragged the women and children out of fissures in the rocks to knock their brains out" (Moorehead, The Fatal Impact).
Hitler's unsuccessful project was based on, and copied from, the British method: "The talk about the peaceful economic conquest of the world was possibly the greatest nonsense which has ever been exalted to be a guiding principle of state policy. ... England [is] the striking refutation of this theory; for no people has ever with greater brutality better prepared its economic conquests with the sword, and later ruthlessly defended them, than the English nation."
Britain was Hitler's accomplice and supporter until it turned on him in late 1939 when it felt its imperial pre-eminence was threatened by the ambitions of its former friend. (It was mistaken in this, as indicated by approving statements such as the above from Mein Kampf.) And Hitler was defeated by his intended victims in Eastern Europe—Russians and others who, unlike the populations of Australia and North America, understood modern warfare.
So why castigate Harry while his brother William gets off unscathed—though he was adorned in the garb of the bloodsoaked colonials?
[The following letter by Pat Muldowney was published in the Irish Independent on 31st January:]
Genocide
On Holocaust Memorial Day President McAleese declared on RTE Radio that we in Ireland have many things to be ashamed of in our conduct during the genocidal slaughter of innocent people. Her remarks were confirmed in the same radio programme by Professor Dermot Keogh of Cork University who demanded that the Irish Government should make a formal apology.
It behoves us to reflect, and indeed make amends, for favouring a power which engaged in genocide on a world-wide scale, involving us in a de facto alliance with a monstrous evil which, despite all the bitter lessons of the past, is currently rearing its ugly head in the world yet again. The savage methods by which this criminal power sought and achieved world domination are a matter of record:
"The subject races ... whom we cannot utilize we exterminate"—Gilbert Murray (Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, died 1957);
"There is only one sane and logical thing to be done with a really inferior race, and that is to exterminate it"—H.G.Wells (in his book Modern Utopia);
"The final extermination was a large-scale event, undertaken with the co-operation of the military and judiciary. ... Soldiers of the Fortieth Regiment drove the natives between two great rock formations, shot all the men and dragged the women and children out of fissures in the rocks to knock their brains out"—Wilhelm Ziehr (in Hell in Paradise) describing an incident in Britain's extermination of the Tasmanians.
Is it not time to challenge those people who seek to align us with this genocidal force?
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