English did not make the biggest sacrifice

AS Dennis Coughlin mentions me in his letter (Western Mail, August 21) please permit me to respond.

He quotes George Orwell (19031950) regarding nationalism as if he is the world’s all-time acknowledged expert on it and therefore has the last word on the matter.

I don’t believe this for a minute. I much prefer to rely on my authoritative Concise Oxford English Dictionary, which tells me that there are two kinds of nationalism.

One is essentially patriotism, ie, the benign, harmless nationalism of, for example, Switzerland (not involved in any conflict for over two centuries) that is not, in the least bit, menacing to any other country.

The other is expansive and couples patriotism with aggressive, menacing, jingoistic adventures to conquer, occupy, exploit and grossly oppress other countries – in many parts of the world in the case of England.

I have met very many Welsh nationalists over the years and can testify that – like me – none of them subscribes to the second, despicable variety.

He criticises me for “harking back to medieval history”.

My dictionary states that the medieval period extends pretty precisely from AD 1000 to AD 1453, whereas three of the four events quoted in my letter of August 19 happened more than two and a half centuries later.

I mentioned 1922 (the formation of the latest version of the UK) – less than a century ago – when Lloyd George’s government belatedly acquiesced to independence for most of Ireland. However, it imposed the outrage of partition – not only of Ireland, but of the province of Ulster too. The criterion used to determine the partition was a blatant example of gerrymandering. The six counties of Ulster retained by the UK were large enough to command a comfortable Protestant/Loyalist majority, with the remaining three Ulster counties of Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan being allocated to the new Irish Free State. This devious manipulation created the Loyalist majority in the new political unit misleadingly called Northern Ireland (it is actually the north east of Ireland).

Mr Coughlin then states that “the English made the biggest human sacrifice to save us from fascism”. He need not take my word for it – a simple Google enquiry demolishes this complete nonsense. In World War 2 the total number of civilian and military deaths suffered by the Soviet Union was 24 million, with the corresponding figure for the UK being 450,000, so that Soviet losses were more than 50 times those of the UK. Moreover, the UK losses were far from being all English. Gwyn Hopkins Llangennech, Llanelli