Macron’s Great War speech a timely warning of dangers in ‘raging nationalism’

President Macron of France, in his most recent speech, pointed out that the “raging nationalism’’ that led to the First World War in 1914 was in danger of being repeated in 2018 and beyond.

This may have been in part a dig at President Trump’s “America First’’ policies, but of course his observations were very apt.

Even in our own far-off corner of Europe nationalism has torn this small country apart. Look at the seeming compulsion to march and demonstrate, the obsessiveness, the one-issue-only-mat- ters politics. Look at the faces of some of the marchers and the demented flag-waving or at the rage-filled faces of those demonstrating on the streets of Fife when a rival politician tried to make a point. Look at the hate-filled messages sent by IT.

I cannot recall, in a relatively long life, our country ever being so divided. Not divided on the normal arguments of what are the best policies to move the country forward but instead to separate and create further division and strife.

The French president has every right to caution against this frightening trend to return to pre-first World War politics.

ALEXANDER MCKAY New Cut Rigg, Edinburgh

As I listened to David Dimbleby speaking to old soldiers at the Cenotaph yesterday morning, he said: “Let us think for a moment about what they achieved.”

The thought that went through my mind was that as generals and politicians on both sides plotted the course of the war they gave little consideration to the millions of people were being killed while they sat back, and for some notion of nationality they could think of no way to stop the hideous carnage.

A A BULLIONS Glencairn Crescent, Leven

How ironic that on the weekend we remember the suffering of two world wars we are in the process of withdrawing from an institution that was set up precisely for the purpose of avoiding such wars in the future.

We kick the European Union in the teeth out of a deluded sense of grandeur and selfimportance at the very time we should be maintaining and consolidating our ties to our neighbours.

Instead of looking to the past, we should be learning from it.

TREVOR RIGG Greenbank Gardens, Edinburgh

If anything sums up the utter absurdity Remembrance Sunday has come to, it’s the irony that I need a Peace Pledge Union white poppy just to be able to wear the armed services charities’ red one.

The old built-in pin was scrapped due to a preposterous health and safety diktat by Tony Blair (whilst simultaneously sending British troops to their deaths in pointless wars under false pretences for his “place in history”).

The contemporary feeble green plastic stem and optional pin combo never works – thousands who buy the wretched things annually lose them within minutes – and the only way I have found of keeping one in place is entwining the white poppy’s tougher metal stem around or threaded through the red one.

MARK BOYLE Linn Park Gardens, Johnstone