sirenianshores

An upcomming film about our civil war from 83 years ago took top honours at the Cannes film festival this week. I can’t wait to see this when it’s released here. There has been very few films made about this tragic part of our history, even though it dominated politics on this island for decades afterwards.

More from Reuters:

CANNES, France, May 28 (Reuters) - British director Ken Loach won the “Palme d’Or” at the Cannes film festival on Sunday with “The Wind That Shakes The Barley”, a drama about the Irish struggle for independence in 1920.

The Golden Palm, the highest cinema award outside the Oscars, went to one of Britain’s most respected left-wing film makers, and was a fitting choice for a festival where movies about and war and politics stole the limelight.

The 69-year-old Cannes veteran told Reuters in an interview this month that the Irish fight for independence against an empire imposing its will on a foreign people had resonances with the U.S. occupation of Iraq today.

After receiving the award at a star-studded ceremony in Cannes, Loach said:

“Our film is about, we hope, a little step, a very little step in the British confronting their imperialist history. And maybe, if we tell the truth about the past, maybe we tell the truth about the present.”

Cillian Murphy and Padraic Delaney star as two brothers who join the guerrilla war against British forces. But the men face harrowing choices when they end up on opposite sides of the conflict.

That might be a good start. Naturally the British Empire is perceived as a good thing in Britain and an immense source of national pride. History is taught very differently in British schools to the way it is taught here, with the empire described as ‘the greatest achievement in the history of mankind’, which it was indeed, but only in a military/imperialist sense and not in a moral way. In modern day Iraq, the old imperial justifications of ‘bringing civilisation to the native savages’ has been supplanted with ’spreading democracy and freedom’.

It must be said that while nobody comes out of the current Iraq conflict looking particularly good, and the honour of both the US and Britain is being dragged further into the mud with each day that passes, most (but not all) of the insurgents are basically terrorists and many on the American and British side are there because they sincerely believe they are helping to spread democracy and freedom (despite their leaders less than noble intentions).

On a side note: one of the most ruthless and effective IRA commanders during our War of Independence and subsequent civil war was a man by the name of Tom Barry. Barry joined the British army at age 17 and served in Iraq (or Mesopotamia as it was known then) around 1920 putting down an insurgency there. The training and combat experience he gained in Iraq was put to effective use back in his native homeland when he left the British army and fought against it during our war of independence. Interestingly enough, the British at the time had several hundred thousand more troops in Iraq than the Americans do now. Even allowing for advances in modern technology which allow armies to do more with less men, I think conclusions can be drawn about the American planning for the current war.