The Poppies of 2014 – Goodbye to All That?

A slightly shorter version of this article first appeared in New View Magazine  #74 Jan – Mar 2015 And so we came to the end of 2014, the centenary  year since the outbreak of the First World War, the catastrophic conflict  which can be said to have opened the actual 20th century, which was a very short century and ended in 1989/90 with the termination of ‘the Soviet...
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日本の危機?好機?福島(福運の島)

来年で還暦を迎えると、私の日本で過ごした時間は人生の6分の1になる。日本は私にとって非常に身近な存在であり、その国土、社会、文化を思うと感謝の念をおぼえずにはいられない。
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A Seasonal Blog – The Christmas Truth, 1914 [External Link]

This is an interesting piece written by Gerry Docherty and Jim MacGregor on the Christmas Truce of 1914 and the current attempt by a British supermarket chain to cash in on the memory of the Truce, from Docherty and MacGregor's blog "Hidden History". Gerry Docherty and Jim MacGregor are the authors of the book Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War (2013), which investigates the activities of the Rhodes-Milner Group in the period 1890-1914 and their influence on British war-planning.
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BBC Radio The Christmas Truce 1914 & Syria 2014:

2 mini-masterstrokes of BBC propaganda this morning (9 Dec. 2014) on the BBC Radio 4 flagship programme “Today”connecting Syria and the 1914 Christmas Truce! The context was a recent UN call for rich countries to take more Syrian refugees (Britain has taken 90 so far – after 3 years of the conflict; Germany has undertaken to receive 30,000. But there are 3 million already...
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