society

A war memorial is to be erected in a town which has not lost any military personnel in conflict, writes Dick Skellington

Bradley Stoke in South Gloucestershire is a new small town close to a major Ministry of Defence base (Abbey Wood) and many service families are taking up residence there.  Plaques inscribed with the words 'we will remember them' will be empty of names when they are placed on the two pillars at the entrance to the Willow Brook Shopping Centre. The organisers, the local Scout Group, believe it is best to be prepared for future deaths of local servicemen and women.

Bradley Stoke is close to Filton airfield, once home to the Bristol Aeroplane Company (BAC), who produced aircraft parts at a frantic rate during the Second World War. The base needed to be protected from air raids. Savages Wood (just opposite the Willow Brook Centre, the location for the memorial) spent some time as a decoy airfield for Filton, complete with pretend landing lights. But because of its newness Bradley Stoke has so far been spared the human loss of conflict.

Katherine Robinson, the Scout group leader and one of the organisers, said the memorial was to "pass on the tradition" of remembrance to the next generation and be a "visual focus for the town".

"I fully appreciate that Bradley Stoke is a new town and it was just green fields and farmland when the first and second World Wars were being fought," she said.

"But we know unfortunately that conflicts aren't just consigned to these wars but are ongoing and so we're thinking about the future as well.

"So although Bradley Stoke did not exist physically during the wars, I think it's very important that we do have this in the town."

There will be an official dedication ceremony (date to be confirmed), but the Scout Group would very much like to know if anyone has someone they would like considered for inclusion in the roll of honour on the memorial.  There are a few restrictions on inclusion, and they would be happy to consider those who fought and died, fought and survived (and have now passed away) or civilians involved in conflicts past or present. Suitability of candidates will be decided by the Friends of Bradley Stoke War Memorial. You can submit a written response to: Management Suite, Willow Brook Centre, Savages Wood Road, Bradley Stoke, Bristol, BS32 8BS or via email to  FriendsofBSWM@gmail.com

Next year will see the nation mark the centenary of the First World War, the 'war to end all wars'. Bradley Stoke shows us how futile that hope was. The new memorial will be unveiled at the town's inaugural Remembrance Parade on November 10 this year.
Dick Skellington 17 July 2013 

The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.

Cartoon by Catherine Pain

The ghost of an Armenian captain threatens Turkey's attempt to subvert the forthcoming 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, writes journalist and honorary OU graduate Robert Fisk. 

Confronted by the chilling hundredth anniversary of the genocide of one and a half million Armenian men, women and children at the hands of the Ottoman Turks in 1915, Turkey's Government is planning to swamp memories of the Armenian massacres with ceremonies commemorating the Turkish victory over the Allies at the battle of Gallipoli in the same year. Already, loyalist academics have done their best to ignore the presence of thousands of Arab troops among the 1915 Turkish armies at Gallipoli – and are now even branding an Armenian Turkish artillery officer who was decorated for his bravery at Gallipoli as a liar who fabricated his own biography. In fact, Captain Sarkis Torossian was personally awarded medals for his courage by Enver Pasha, Turkey’s war minister and the most powerful man in the Ottoman hierarchy.  

The greatest hero of Gallipoli was Mustafa Kemal who, as Ataturk, founded the modern Turkish state. But in view of the desire of some of Turkey's most prominent historians to brand Torossian a fraud, the word ‘modern’ should perhaps be used in inverted commas.

Now these academics are even claiming that the Armenian army captain invented his two medals from the Enver.  Yet one of the most the outspoken Turkish historians to have fully acknowledged the 1915 genocide, Taner Akcam, has tracked down Torossian’s family in America, met his granddaughter, and inspected the two Ottoman medal records; one of them bears Enver Pasha’s original signature.

Turkey, as we all know, wants to join the European Union. I also, by chance, happen to think it should join the EU. How can we Europeans claim that the Muslim world wishes to stay ‘apart’ from our ‘values’ when an entire Muslim country wants to share our European society?  We are hypocrites indeed.  Yet how can Turkey still hope to join the EU when it still refuses to acknowledge the truth of the Armenian genocide – and symbolises this denial by a scandalous attack on a long dead Ottoman officer?  Does Dreyfus’ phantom hover over such a moment?  For however much the Turkish government bangs the drum at Gallipoli in 2015, Captain Torossian’s ghost is going to haunt those 1915 battlefields.

His memoirs, From ‘Dardanelles to Palestine’, were first published in Boston in 1947.  Ayhan Aktar, professor of social sciences at Istanbul Bilgi University, first came across a copy of the book 20 years ago and was amazed to learn – given Turkey’s attempt to annihilate its entire Armenian population in 1915 – that there were officers of Armenian descent fighting for the Ottomans.  The eight month battle for Gallipoli – an Allied landing on the Dardanelles straits dreamed up by Winston Churchill in the hope of capturing the Ottoman capital of Constantinople (today’s Istanbul) and breaking the trench deadlock on the Western Front – was a disaster for the British and French, and the mass of Australian and New Zealand troops (the ANZAC forces) fighting with them.  They abandoned the beach-heads in January of 1916.

In his book, Torossian recounts the ferocious fighting at Gallipoli and other battles in which he participated – until, towards the end of the Great War, he found his sister among the Armenian refugees on the death convoys to Syria and Palestine.  He then turned himself over to the Allied forces, meeting but not liking T.E. Lawrence of Arabia – he called him a mere “paymaster” – and re-entered Turkey with French forces.  He eventually travelled to the US where he died.

The gutsy Professor Aktar, however – noticing his colleagues’ unwillingness to acknowledge that Arabs and Armenians fought in the Ottoman Army – decided to publish Terossian’s book in the Turkish language.  Initial reviews were favourable until two historians from Sabanci University took exception to Ayhan Aktar’s work.  Dr Halil Berktay, for example, wrote 13 newspaper columns in ‘Taraf’ to declare the entire book a fiction and Torossian a liar, a view that came close to what Aktar calls “character assassination”.  “It is a ‘trauma document’ of an integrationist Armenian officer who fought in the (first world) war,” Aktar says.  "But his family were deported to the Syrian deserts in spite of the fact that Enver Pasha (the Turkish war minister and the most powerful man in the Ottoman hierarchy) had clear orders to the local governors not to deport officers’ families.”

Lower-ranking Armenians in the Ottoman army were disarmed and later massacred amid the genocide, in which women were routinely raped by Turkish soldiers, gendarmerie and their Circassian and Kurdish militias.  Churchill referred to the massacres as a “holocaust”.  Taner Akcam, the Turkish historian who discovered Torossian’s granddaughter, was stunned by the reaction to the Turkish edition of the book;  one critic, he says, even claimed that the Armenian officer did not exist. “This book, along with Aktar’s introduction, pokes a hole in the dominant narrative in Turkey about the Gallipoli war being a war of the Turks.  As Aktar shows in his introduction, not only Torossian and other Christians played an important role in Gallipoli, but some of the military units were also composed of Arabs.”

Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu spoke at Gallipoli two years ago and gave a perfectly frank account of how Turkey planned to define the Armenian genocide on its hundredth anniversary.  “We are going to make the year of 1915 known the whole world over,” he said, “not as an anniversary of a genocide as some people claimed and slandered (sic), but we shall make it known as a glorious resistance of a nation – in other words, a commemoration of our defence of Gallipoli.”

So Turkish nationalism is supposed to win out over history in a couple of years’ time.  Descendants of those who died among the ANZAC troops at Gallipoli, however, might ask their Turkish hosts in 2015 why they do not honour those brave Arabs and Armenians – including Captain Torossian – who fought alongside the Ottoman Empire.
Robert Fisk Posted 12 July 2013

Robert Fisk of the Independent was awarded an Honorary Degree by The Open University in 2004. This article originally appeared in the Independent on Sunday on 12 May and is reproduced here with kind permission of Robert and the Independent. 

The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.

 

Cartoon by Gary Edwards

Steven Primrose-Smith calls himself The UniCyclist as he pedals 31,000 kilometres around 50 European cities while studying for two OU degrees with little more than a solar-powered laptop and a tent. From Belarus he sent Society Matters this exclusive post on dictatorship and democracy. 

It's taken for granted that democracy is the most desirable political option available. Although Britain pretends otherwise, it doesn't actually have a democracy. It has representative democracy and this falls a long way short. Ask anyone who voted for the LibDems to scrap tuition fees, only to discover later that they helped push through a threefold fee increase. 

A true democracy, where the population has a say on every issue, as in ancient Athens, is now a real possibility. If we combine Estonia's ability to have an e-election with your typical Saturday night X-Factor voting system, it's feasible. But no politician is going to suggest this because, first, it would reduce their own power but, more important, they don't trust us. And with good reason.

The problem is that a lot of us don't know what we're talking about. Even when we do, we vote, as you might expect, for what's in our personal interests rather than what would be best for humankind. Representative democracy gets around the issue of our political ignorance but not our selfishness.

Recently I was in Belarus, famously Europe's last dictatorship, and it occurred to me that there are certain problems coming our way that democracy won't be able to solve but a dictatorship, in theory, could. Let's put aside the fact that Belarus's regime is a brutal and selfish system that looks out for Luckashenko and his cronies and think about what could be achieved if a dictatorship were benign.

Let's take a single example of a problem heading our way: our planet is finite and yet the only thing for which every political party is striving is growth. Growth means more money for you – it's a vote winner. But at some point in a finite system, no more growth is possible. When we reach this point as a planet – and the West is already massively exceeding its fair share – there will be a horrible collapse and blood will be split as people scramble to retain what they have. Much better and ultimately less painful would be to manage our decline. Stop growth. Reverse it even. Shrink the economy, but do it in the least painful way possible, which is, unfortunately, still going to be bloody painful.

In a democracy, the managed decline cannot happen. Imagine a politician saying, “Vote for me! I'm going to make you and all your friends much worse off.” Another party would jump in, pretend the collapse wasn't happening and steal the votes. In a democracy, parties have to keep everyone sweet. In a dictatorship, a single party could force through necessary decisions without the worry of being voted out.

Freedom is very important to me and, if history is any judge, a dictatorship is always more about lining the pockets of those in power than creating a better world. So what is needed is a non-democratic system – one where the current regime cannot be voted out – but where no single party has ultimate power. Impossible?

The current political system in Britain is adversarial. The three main parties fear each other and future upstarts. Each party must always offer an immediate good deal rather than the better option for everyone in the long run. I have a suggestion. The three parties could come together and determine which issues were so important that on these they cannot be divided, such as working towards the best possible managed decline rather than impossible perpetual growth. All other policies, however, would be decided by the party in power. Despite modest gains in local elections by Greens and UKIP, there still seems little alternative to the Big Three, a democratic tyranny (the word 'tyranny' wasn't originally negative) with, yes, less democracy than we currently have but without actually having a dictatorship. 

Perhaps we wouldn't notice much difference. Since 1855, no party has ruled Britain other than the Conservatives, Labour or Liberals, or their predecessors. But within this new system, difficult, long term decisions could be made and adhered to with The Big Three working together rather than against each other. An improvement or a dictatorship under a different name?
Steven Primrose-Smith 10 July 2013

You can access Steven's regular OU blog here or visit his website.

The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.

Cartoon by Gary Edwards