Ignored... the secret evil of the Great War

THE saddest event of modern history, the First World War, is once again portrayed on film in the new version of Journey’s End, first performed on the stage in 1928. Its pessimism and sense of futile loss are astonishing. To this day, nobody could successfully film such a drama about the Second World War, which is still regarded as a good and noble conflict, though I wonder how much longer that can last.

The other thing that strikes me is that Journey’s End is set on the eve of Germany’s last frantic offensive on the Western Front. Yet it never even mentions the reason for this terrible, savage battle, in which the Germans came within inches of victory.

It followed the most cynical foreign policy action ever undertaken by a supposedly civilised power. Germany, funnelling gold through the sinister middleman Parvus Helphand, financed and organised the Bolshevik putsch in Russia which has ever since been wrongly called the Russian Revolution. They even arranged for the maniac Vladimir Lenin to travel to Russia.

Russia (as almost everyone forgets) was a democracy at the time. Lenin crushed that freedom with Germanfinanced bayonets. The German government cared nothing for the fate of the Russian people, whom they casually condemned to 70 years of state-sponsored murder and oppression. Berlin simply wanted Russia out of the war so that they could send 50 divisions of soldiers westwards, to attack and defeat us. And it very nearly worked.

I am still waiting for the BBC to mark and examine this centenary properly. They probably haven’t heard of it, or perhaps they still believe (as many media folk do) that the communist takeover was ‘progressive’.