105+Y Decolonization in Progress
"The truce is a significant event in the Decade of Commemorations. Reflecting on the truce, which was agreed 100 years ago, it is appropriate to recall how the people in the streets of villages, towns and cities hoped and prayed for peace," Irish President Michael D. Higgins is quoted by the Irish Times.
Further on, "Decade" journalist Ronan McGreevy states the following on memory politics: The centenary of the truce had been earmarked as the only occasion for State commemoration for the War of Independence, but no event has been scheduled.
Was sagt dies über den Stand europäischer Erinnerungskulturen, nicht zuletzt der diesbezüglichen Erinnerungskultur der Europäischen Union aus?
105+? COUNTING THE 2016 EASTER-Rising (1916) Centenary plus five years
Partition & Division
June 7, 1921: First meeting of the Northern Ireland Parliament. Two weeks later, the Parliament is opened by the English King. The June 22, 2021 royal speech is written by Jan Christian Smuts (see below), the former Head of the British Imperial Delegation in Paris, 1919 (!) and now South Africa's prime minister. Unter the lead of Smuts, the conquerer of German South-West Africa, this Delegation dominated the first month of the conference which went far beyond the capacities of US president Woodrow Wilson. Four weeks after its blatantly colonial and imperialist beginnings, the internationalist travelled home just as David Lloyd George, Britain's secret conference leader. Friend and foe in Europe, that is Paris and the rest of the continent, had to wait. At the same time, the Irish bid for a seat at the conference table was denied by David Lloyd George's and Smuts's Delegations. Presently, this fasces of imperialism and subimperialism at a so-called peace conference is a story untold, which has been perpetuated during the recent anniversaries of the First World War. Now it was neither a Briton nor an Irishman, but Smuts who wrote the divisionist "divide et impera"-speech of June 22.
M. Portillo. TV documentary about "the world-war front is coming to town and countryside". Resource: Irish Times, Century 1919.
The "Oranje" View
Through Brexit (2016-2020), i.e. the United Kingdom's cancellation of EU membership, the European movement was separated from one its four historical orange countries France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The government and people of the United Kingdom chose to turn back the clock and connect to the first post-war decades. In 1973, Britain became a member of the European Community.
Who was Jan Christiaan Smuts?
On June 28, 1919 the former general signed the Treaty including his British Imperial Delegation's design for a virtually aborted "League of Versailles" (Swiss nickname).