24th September

Today in 1877 a rebellion of Japan's samurai was put down by the government. You've probably seen the story filmed as The Last samurai with Tom Cruise. It's not bad historically, except that the country offering military advice to the Japanese government was Germany, not America. The idea was that the samurai were an armour-wearing anachronism, whose code of Bushido ( the way of the warrior) was hopelessly out of date. Why was it then that Bushido was still there in the 1940s which explains the appalling brutality meted out by the Japanese to British, Australian and Dutch prisoners of war? And why has Japan's 'enlightened' government never apologized for that?

In other news ...
Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian Chancellor, came out with one of his great bon mots today in 1862. 'The great questions of the age,' he said, 'are not settled by speeches and majority votes, but by iron and blood.'

Right on, Otto. The result? Germany 0; Rest of the world 2.

8th June

Edward of Woodstock, the Black Prince, died today in 1376, possibly of the plague. A brilliant soldier and a tough nut, his death paved the way for the reign of his son, Richard II. who started well by confronting peasants on the rampage in London when he was fourteen. After that it was downhill all the way until he lost his throne, his horse and his life to Henry Bolingbroke.

In other news ...
Today in 1969 General Franco closed the frontier between Spain and Gibraltar hoping to ruin its economy. He clearly hadn't noticed that Gib. could be supplied by sea indefinitely, so how was that going to work? It got me thinking, though, about who owns what and how it should all be given back. Britain belongs to the Celts (that's the Welsh, Irish and Scots) so the English can go home. Where's that? Well, some of them have to go to Denmark, Norway and Sweden and others to North Germany. And don't get me started on how the Americans are going to cope.
It is time, however, that we returned the Elgin Marbles to Greece. Their return alone would restore the country's economy overnight.

28th April

This was the day when the Allies got it wrong at Versailles in 1919. Britain, the USA and especially France demanded that Germany (who wasn't even called to the negotiating table) pay £6,600 million for having started World War One. Four things to note:

1. Germany didn't start World War One - Gavrilo Princip did.
2. Germany was broke and couldn't afford to pay reparations.
3. Woodrow Wilson the American President and John Maynard Keynes the economist wanted a much more affordable reparation settlement. They were ignored.
4. Georges Clemenceau - 'the tiger' - was a vengeful reprobate who consigned his own country to defeat and occupation twenty years later.

In other news ...
Benito Mussolini became yet another in a long line of dictators - Julius Caesar, Maximilien Robespierre, the Ceausescus, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Simon Cowell  (oops - typo! sorry!) - to meet their end stickily. It was 28 April 1945 and Il Duce and his mistress, Claretta Petacci, were shot, kicked, spat at and hanged upside down for the benefit of the Italian mob and the cameras.