Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

It is delightfully appropriate that Vincent Browne publishes a weekly called Village because he is a true parochial. He demonstrated this yesterday by using his column in the Sunday Business Post to attack those who would commemorate the dead of World War I with poppies and parades. As he prepared to reduce the conflict to the level of his own hamlet, Browne threw cheap quotation marks around 'the Fallen' and then got up on his soapbox:

"There was nothing honourable about that war, no just cause. It was despicable from the outset and no individual bravery or heroism could dignify it. That war deserves to be remembered in infamy, not renown. Those who died on all sides were victims of evil, victims of empire."

Having dealt with the big issues, Browne then called up the ghosts of John Redmond, Roger Casement and the 1916 Rising as he viewed the "Flanders bother", to paraphrase Patrick Kavanagh, through his green prism. But beyond the confines of the village, World War I is interpreted differently. In his brilliant "Rites of Spring : The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age", Canadian scholar Modris Eksteins points out that many Germans fought World War I believing that theirs was the first modernist nation, pre-eminent in engineering, music, philosophy and, especially, theoretical and applied science. They regarded materialism, hypocrisy and banality as English traits and were convinced that the British were fighting to maintain a political and social order that represented the conservative status quo. That made them contemptible in the eyes of the modernists.

Out of the ruins of World War I, came European fascist and communist movements that were equally modernist but much more murderous, and their hatred of bourgeois values knew no limits. Millions upon millions were to die as a result. But when today's European sit back in comfort to enjoy the bourgeois benefits of prosperity and prepare to revel in the Christmas spirit, they should spare a thought for those who died at Flanders. Most of the Fallen remembered in yesterday's ceremonies were the products of the Victorian bourgeoisie and the values they died believing in do not look that contemptible now. It is not all relative, unless one is a village idiot, of course.