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Centenary of the Great War: Let the Spin Begin
Tristram Hunt on the Great War
I didn’t expect to find myself agreeing with Labour’s Shadow Education Secretary Tristram Hunt. But take a look at his Great War article “Bashing History,” and see what you think.
We’re going to be reading a lot of silly nonsense about the Great War in the next year or two, and Hunt’s preemptive strike is a salutary warning.
His piece recalls a poetic answer to Eric Bogle’s famous poem “Willie McBride,” written by Stephen Suffet in 1997:
Ask the people of Belgium or Alsace-Lorraine,
If my life was wasted, if I died in vain.…