Was Henry V A War Criminal?

Henry V is written into the English soul as its greatest hero – the victor of Agincourt, the conqueror of France, immortalised by Shakespeare and popularised by the actors Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh in two blockbuster films.

Recently, however, Henry’s reputation has been challenged, and he has been accused of being a war criminal.

The slaughter of the POWs
The main case against Henry has been that, after the battle of Agincourt in 1415, he ordered the murder of the French prisoners of war. 

Shakespeare tried to blur the atrocity by linking it to a French attack on the English baggage train, in which they killed the disabled and the boys who had been left out of the battle; Henry’s order to kill the prisoners is therefore presented as an act of righteous anger.
English historians, also, have pointed out that there were so many French prisoners that there were not enough English soldiers to guard them – and that, when Henry gave the order, it seemed that the defeated French were trying to mount a late counter-attack.

In 2008, however, a conference of French historians at the Medieval History Museum in Agincourt openly accused the English of ‘acting like war criminals’.  Museum Director Christophe Gilliot said Henry V had allowed notably horrific acts including placing prisoners in a barn and setting it on fire, and killing the Duke of Alencon when he was trying to surrender.  ‘There were numerous heroic acts by the French on the field of battle, but they were met with barbarism by the English’, he commented.

Then, in 2010, a Mock Trial, held in Washington before two real judges of the American Supreme Court, rejected Henry’s pretend-defence – although an audience vote previously had been tied.

To be fair, it was common practice in those days to kill ordinary prisoners after a battle – especially if they were wounded.  What shocked medieval writers about Henry’s action was that he ordered his men also to kill the French noblemen (who would normally have been treated well and ransomed). 

The starving of the Hungry Mouths
The second main accusation against Henry concerns his treatment of the ‘hungry mouths’ at Rouen in 1418.

During a siege, it was normal for the defending soldiers to put out the 'hungry mouths' – all the women, children and old men who could not fight in the defence.  Normally, they made their way to friends in neighbouring villages and waited until the siege was over.  But when the defenders of Rouen put out their hungry mouths, Henry refused to let them pass through the English lines to safety.  Instead they were trapped in a ditch between the two armies, where they slowly starved to death.

Today, Henry would be convicted of ‘crimes against humanity’.

Even the English soldiers at the time were moved.  John Page, an English soldier who wrote a poem about the siege, commented that ‘hyt was pytte hem to see’, and described how ‘oure men gaffe them of oure brede, and harme unto them dyd they non’ … although, interestingly, he laid the blame entirely at the door of the French (since, when the hugry mouths tried to go back into the city: ‘The cytte wolde not lete them yn, thereof I wote they dyd grete syn’).

Conclusion
So – what do you reckon?  Was Henry V no better than a war criminal and a barbarian?  Or was he – as many English historians have argued – merely an 'unrelenting warrior' trapped by circumstances? Or – as a number of bloggers openly stated – is it just a case of French ‘sour grapes’ after the event?

Before you come to a conclusion, I suggest there are a few things we need to sort out first:
* Firstly, are we going to judge Henry by the standards of our times, or the standards of the Middle Ages?
* Secondly, are we going to judge Henry by the theories of war and what ought to happen, or are we going to compare him to the realities of actual war and what does happen?
* And, thirdly, can we trust ANY of the facts given by the medieval chroniclers?
   

Edward I - Hammer of the Scots

There is a lot of rubbish talked about Edward’s invasion of Scotland, so I am going to tell you the facts before you start.

An uncertain succession

The story starts in 1286 when the king of Scotland, Alexander III fell from his horse and died.  The only heir was a child – ‘Margaret, Maid of Norway’ – but she too died, on the sea voyage to Scotland.

By this time there were 13 claimants to the Scottish throne and in 1291, to avoid a civil war, the leading nobles of Scotland (who were called ‘the Guardians’) asked Edward I of England to judge between them.

Edward started by making all the Scottish nobles swear homage to him (which they did), and then, in 1292, he chose John Baliol (who, to be fair, probably did have the best claim).  Edward then, however, proceeded to bully and humiliate Baliol, treating him – not as a fellow king – but as one of his nobles.

Baliol bites back
By March 1296 the Scottish nobles had enough.  With (or without) Baliol’s agreement, they made an alliance with France and invaded England.

Edward was ready.  He marched north and sacked Berwick, massacring the inhabitants.  By October 1296 he had defeated the Scots, symbolically torn the royal coat of arms from Baliol’s coat, and forced 2000 Scots nobles to do homage; ‘a man who gets rid of a shit does a good job’ he is said to have remarked.

 
William Wallace

The nobles were defeated, but not the Scottish people.  In May 1297, according to the chronicler, ‘William Wallace lifted up his head’.  Inspired by his rebellion, the Scots rose up, defeated a rather incompetent English force at Stirling Bridge (September 1297), and even invaded England.

Edward raised another army, and marched into Scotland again, defeating Wallace at the battle of Falkirk in July 1298.  But – with all the Scots in open revolt – the reconquest of Scotland proved a long and difficult affair. 


A long and difficult war

It took Edward seven years to regain control, 1297-1304.  Slowly, the English recaptured the castles, but the countryside round about was controlled by the Scots and the English garrisons were as good as prisoners in their own castles.  Meanwhile Edward was at war in France and Wales.  He was desperately short of money; and his attempts to levy taxes caused a crisis in England in July 1297.  Even as late as 1303, a part of his army was ambushed and defeated by Wallace at the battle of Rosslyn.  In the end, Edward was forced to adopt a ‘hearts and minds’ policy, telling his officials to win over the ‘middle sort’ of Scots with good government and fair laws.

But the Scots, too, were stretched to the limit.  After seven years of war, in 1304, they surrendered.  Wallace was captured and executed in 1305.


Conclusion
These are the facts of the matter, as far as I am able to tell the tale.

How you interpret this story, of course, is another matter and will depend, I suppose, to an extent upon whether you are 'Scottish' or 'English' in your sympathies.

Who was to blame for the Cold War?

If you type: 'Who was to blame for the Cold War' into google, what you mainly turn up is dozens of online essays of dubious quality, many of which simply rehash what you have already learned from my website! My strong advice is to avoid them like the plague, and make up your own mind.

By far the best link on this topic (and the liveliest) , if you haven't already found it, is the BBC audio-byte, which takes the form of a debate (you can read a transcript of the debate here). There is also a pretty shoddy list of points-for and points-against on the projectgcse website, which you may find of help if you have been asked to write the essay (which will have to take the form of 'on-the-one-hand ... on-the-other ... conclusion).

In the end, this is a subject where you will also have to show that you are aware of the historiography - what past historians have written on the subject. There is a simple summary of this on the BBC Bitesize site, and my more detailed account here.

So - what do YOU think!! As the BBC audio-byte demonstrates, this is a contentious and controversial subject, so you ought to be able to have some fun debating it here...

Versailles Verdicts

• Adolf Hitler hated it. The British diplomat Harold Nicolson called it 'neither just nor wise'.
• The British economist John Maynard Keynes prophesied it would ruin the world economy.
• Lenin declared of it: 'This is no peace, but terms dictated to a defenceless victim by armed robbers.'

Where contemporaries led, historians have followed. 'The unwise thing about Versailles was that it annoyed the Germans yet did not render them too weak to retaliate,' declared the British historian Norman Lowe. Pupils in Michigan, USA, are taught that the Treaty was: 'flawed to the extent that instead of preventing future wars it made a future war inevitable'.

Yet is any of this FAIR?

The peacemakers faced a Europe which had fallen apart - there was no question of just calling it a day and going home. THREE empires, comprising most of central and eastern Europe, had collapsed in revolution and bankruptcy. The peacemakers formed nation-states and drew boundaries which, more-or-less, have survived until today. If their attempts to establish peace and disarmaments only lasted 20 years, they DID invent the principle of 'collective security' to which still, in the United Nations, we look to prevent war between the nations. And the diplomats of Versailles constructed this peace, without chance to rehearse, assailed by a maelstrom of lobbyists and pressures, amidst revolutions, famine and Spanish flu, whilst at home, war-weary publics were demanding revenge.

• Margaret Macmillan, great-granddaughter of the great David Lloyd George, says: 'It is my own view - and a number of historians who have been working in this area for some years - that the treaty was not all that bad.'
• British politician and historian Neil Stonehouse believes that 'in a devastated and newly complex continent no better attempt could have been made'.
• Historian and schoolteacher Richard Jones-Nerzic argues that the peacemakers 'did a remarkably good job'.

What is your opinion of the Treaty of Versailles? What do you think -- for example - about these questions

1. Was it fair or unfair?
2. Was it successful or a failure?
3. Was it a crafted peace, or a botched compromise?
4. Did it help to lay the foundations of the future, or leave behind a legacy of hate?

Use the following webpages

• Verdicts on the Treaty
• How did the Treaty establish peace?

and have your say!

How to blag a poem in the exam

Dear Alan,

Many pupils go into the Literature exam with heavy hearts because they don’t know all the poems, and they’re worried that they will get caught out by the questions – and they despair in the exam when they are!

Don’t worry. Anybody with half a brain can blag a poem in the exam, even if they haven’t seen it before. You just have to know the rules, and there is plenty of time to make a decent stab at it in the exam, without any preparation!


Comparing two poems
If I were comparing two pupils, I might say: ‘Well, Peter has black hair; by contrast Alicia has fair hair. Peter is intelligent, and similarly Alicia does well in her studies.’

I have chosen two categories of comparison (hair-colour and brain-power), and systematically compared them. You will notice the key comparison-terms ‘by contrast’, and ‘similarly’.

This is all you need to compare two poems, except that your comparison categories are:
• Content
• Feelings
• Structure
• Language

You will simply write your answer in four sections:
• Poem 1 is about … by contrast/similarly … poem 2 is about …
• In poem 1 the poet feels … by contrast/similarly … in poem 2 the poet feels …
• The structure of poem 1 uses … by contrast/similarly … poem 2 has the structure …
• The language of poem 1 includes … by contrast/similarly … poem 2 uses …


What can you write?
OF COURSE you are going to miss some of the more sophisticated points if you have not studied/revised the poem beforehand! But if you simply keep your head and look for the basics, you will be easily able to make a number of sensible, simple points.


Content
Easy! Read the poem. Unless you are totally thick, surely you can say what it is saying.
Start with a sentence saying what the poem is about in general terms (‘war’, ‘an argument’ etc). Put a suitable comparison term (by contrast/similarly) and say what your second poem is about. Thus will be particularly easy, because the exam question has almost certainly told you what topic you had to choose a poem about.

Then, simply go through the poem, briefly summarising what it says (‘It starts in stanza 1 by talking about …, then next it reminds…’ etc.) Don’t take too long, but make sure you address the whole poem. Then put a suitable comparison term (by contrast/similarly) and summarise your second poem.


Feelings
Easy! Read between the lines and infer what the poet feels about the poem. What words and phrases show you that they feel this way? Write about the poet’s feelings, quoting (and explaining) the words and phrases which show this. Then put a suitable comparison term (by contrast/similarly) and do the same for your second poem.


Structure
This, also, is a lot easier than you might think if you just keep your nerve.
Remember also that, as well as recognising a feature, you need to explain the intended effect – why did the poet use this feature and what effect did they want to have on the reader?

Here are some of the things to look for:

Stanzas
How many, of how many lines? Are they regular (the same number of lines) or different?
Poets often use different stanzas for different aspects of the poem – stanza 1 is about…, whereas stanza 2 talks about...’ etc. Explain how the poet has used the structure of the poem to display its content.

Line length
Short and powerful, or long and reflective? Regular or different?

Rhyme
Describe the rhyme (if there is one) using the normal notation (aa-bb etc.).

Rhythm
It should be obvious if the words have no rhythm. As for the others, try to remember iambic (di-dum) and trochaic (dum-di) – they are the basic (some say the ONLY) two patterns. If you see a rhythm, see if the poet has used it for a reason – a poet will often mirror the thing he is describing in the rhythm of the words he is using (for example, by using a diddly-dum rhythm to describe a train).
Even if you get it wrong, it is worth having a guess at this – the sentence-scaffold is: ‘the poet uses the ??? rhythm to suggest…’.

Enjambment
This is another feature which is really easy to see. Just pointing it out and giving examples will earn you brownie points, but it is worth also trying to suggest why the poet has done so.
The effect of enjambment is to create a pause after the word of the line before, and to emphasise the first words on the next line.
So can you think of any reason the poet would want to pause there, or a reason why he would want to emphasise that word? Again, even if you get it wrong, it is worth having a guess at this – the sentence-scaffold is: ‘the poet uses the break to…’.

Irregular features are used in modern poems, to give the idea of a ‘stream of consciousness’ – a poet just musing down a line of thought he is sharing with the reader. Older poems are regular more often, and the author uses the form to make it more formal, and to create a certain effect (just say what the feeling of the poem is – sad, military etc.).


Language
This, also, is a lot easier than you might think if you just keep your nerve.
Remember also that, as well as recognising a feature, you need to explain the intended effect of the poet – why did the poet use this feature and what effect did they want to have on the reader?

Here are some of the things to look for:

Images and metaphors
It doesn’t matter if you don’t know the difference – the words are almost interchangeable.
Can you see anything in the poem which creates a strong visual impact in your mind’s eye? Write about what the phrase makes you ‘see’, and have a stab at explaining why the poet used this image. It is ALWAYS to make his point more powerful/ more impactful.

Similes
Again, easy! Look through the poem and see if you can find the words ‘like’ or ‘as’. Say you have found it, and try to explain why the poet used this image; again, it is ALWAYS to make his point more powerful/ more graphic.

Alliteration
Again, easy! Look through the poem and see if you can find two words beginning with the same letter. Say you have found it, and try to explain why the poet used this; again, it is ALWAYS to make his point more powerful/ more graphic.
Some of the more common ones are:
• Explosive sounds (p, b, m) give the idea of surprise, impact, shock.
• Warm sounds (w, s, h, l, r) give the idea of gentleness and calm.
• Nasty sounds (k, g, t) give the idea of cruelty and violence.
But really, you can work backwards by thinking what effect the poet wanted to create and simply saying that that is the effect!

Repetition
Are any words or phrases repeated? This is just to emphasise the point.

Onomatopoeia
(Where a word sounds like it is – ‘woof’.) These are really hard to see, but if you find one, mention it, and say that it is to emphasise the feeling of the line.

Words
And finally, just look through the poem and choose some powerful words. Any words that ‘leap out’ to you will do!
Again, poets use words in different ways:
• Specialist words give a poem authority, and make it feel ‘real’/ 'there'.
• Simple words can make it sound childlike or ‘normal’.
• Nasty words can convey hatred or violence.
• Gentle words convey calm or pleasant.
But you need not worry too much about ‘getting it right’. Simply mention the word and explain how it makes YOU feel – the sentence-scaffold is: ‘when I read this word it makes me think of… and it makes me feel…’.

There are other language devices that poets use – personification to ‘bring something to life’, clichés to make them seem humdrum – but the above are the main ones and the easiest to find.



Writing the answer
So, if you find yourself in the position of being asked about a poem you have not studied, do not panic. Simply spend a short time reading it and look for:

• Content – what is it about/ summarise it.
• Feelings – how does the poet feel about this (prove with quotes and explain).
• Structure – look for stanza, line length, rhyme, rhythm and enjambment (illustrate with quotes and suggest the poet’s intentions).
• Language – look for images, similes, alliteration, repetition, onomatopoeia and specific words (and illustrate with quotes and suggest the poet’s intentions).

This is SO much easier than you think, and you might want to choose short poems from the Anthology and have a few practices.

A Crib on Rhythm, Metre and Rhyme - II

An EASY way to click a few marks to be able to talk about the poem’s Rhythm, Metre and Rhyme.
You will need to be able to say what the Rhythm, Metre and Rhyme are.
And you will need to say what the effect is on the poem’s register (how it sounds).
DO NOT EVEN TRY to remember the effects of the different approaches on the register of the poem – it is too difficult, and it changes from poem to poem anyway.
All you need to do is to think what the register of the poem is (steady, worried, military, plodding, thoughtful etc.) … and then you say that the poet has selected the rhythm, metre and rhyme to achieve that effect (you can be sure they have).


METRE
Here you need to count the ‘feet’ – the number of times the rhythm comes round in a line:

This children’s assembly hymn is trochaic, but can you see that it has THREE ‘feet’?
Have you / heard the / rain-drops?

And this children’s assembly hymn is trochaic again, but can you see that it has FOUR feet?
Aut-umn / days when / grass is / jew-ell’d

The two you need to know are:
Tetrameter = FOUR FEET and Pentameter = FIVE FEET

Which of these is an iambic pentameter, and which is the trochaic tetrameter?
If music be the food of love, play on!
(by William Shakespeare)
There he sang of Hiawatha
(by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
Mary had a little lamb
(Nursery rhyme)
And treat those two imposters just the same
(Rudyard Kipling)


RHYME
Some poems do not rhyme – where they do, you can express the rhyme by using a letter of the alphabet to indicate where the different rhymes occur.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall (a)
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall (a)
All the king’s horse and all the king’s men (b)
Couldn’t put Humpty together again (b)

Is an aabb rhyme.

Can you identify the rhyming pattern of these famous poems:

Bid me to weep, and I will weep
While I have eyes to see;
And having none, and yet I will keep
A heart to weep for thee.

Mary had a little lamb
its fleece was white as snow;
And everywhere that Mary went,
the lamb was sure to go.

Doctor Foster
went to Gloucester
In a shower of rain.
He stepped in a puddle
right up to his middle
And never went there again!

It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

There was a young man from Darjeeling
Who boarded a bus bound for Ealing
It said on the door
Please don’t spit on the floor
So he stood up and spat on the ceiling.

I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water'd shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these,
Because my love is come to me.

Roses are red
Violets are blue
Some poems rhyme
But this one doesn’t

(Answers: abab, abcb, aabccb, ababcb, aabba, aabb, abcbdefe, unrhymed)

A Crib on Rhythm, Metre and Rhyme - I

An EASY way to click a few marks to be able to talk about the poem’s Rhythm, Metre and Rhyme.
You will need to be able to say what the Rhythm, Metre and Rhyme are.
And you will need to say what the effect is on the poem’s register (how it sounds).
DO NOT EVEN TRY to remember the effects of the different approaches on the register of the poem – it is too difficult, and it changes from poem to poem anyway.
All you need to do is to think what the register of the poem is (steady, worried, military, plodding, thoughtful etc.) … and then you say that the poet has selected the rhythm, metre and rhyme to achieve that effect (you can be sure they have).


RHYTHM
There are four main rhythms you can learn to recognise:

Iambic
The most well-known rhythm is iambic.
This goes ‘di-dum’ (or ‘i-am’) where the second syllable is stressed:
e.g. The boy / stood on / the burn- / ing deck
e.g. I wish / I were / a fur- / ry worm
Here the poets have selected the iambic rhythm to make the poems sound jolly and funny.

Or here, in Seamus Heaney’s Follower:
e.g. An ex- / pert. He / would set / the wing’
where Heaney has used the iambic rhythm to make the poem plod along like a ploughman.

Trochaic
The opposite of iambic is trochaic.
This goes ‘dum-di’ (or ‘troch-ee’) where the first syllable is stressed:
e.g. If I / were a / but-ter / fly, I…
e.g. All things / bright and / beau-ti- / ful, all / crea-tures / great and / small…

(One poem by the famous poet Samuel Coleridge Taylor runs:
Trochee trips from long to short…
Iambics march from short to long. )

Dactyl
Another famous rhythm is dactylic.
This goes ‘dum-di-di’, where the first syllable of the three is stressed.
e.g. oom pah pah / oom pah pah / that's how it / goes…
and the most famous example of all, The Charge of the Light Brigade:
"For-ward, the / Light Brig-ade!"
Was there a / man dis-may'd?
Not tho' the / sold-ier knew
Some-one had / blun-der'd:

Anapest
The opposite of the dactylic the anapest
This goes ‘di-di-dum’ (or ‘a-na-pest’).
e.g. ‘Twas the night / before Christ- / mas and all / round the house
e.g. 'Tis the voice / of the lob- / ster I heard / him de-clare
e.g. Like the leaves / of the for- / est when sum- / mer is green

Is Roots Wrong?

In his 1976 book, Roots: The Saga of an American Family, author Alex Haley created one of the classic stories of slavery. The TV mini-series which was based on the book affected the way a generation felt about slavery and the slave trade. It was published as non-fiction, and purported to be the result of Alex Haley's quest to discover his ancestry.

But how truthful is Roots?

Roots NEVER claimed to be 'the whole truth'. Haley called it 'faction' - fiction based upon fact. Haley explained that he had discovered his family's genealogy, but had 'woven' imaginary content - e.g. what the characters said - and other information from history around his family 'facts' to create a realistic narrative story.

However, it is now accepted that not only were the 'story' elements of the narrative 'fiction', but that the 'facts' on which Haley based is story were also not true - i.e. that the whole story was fiction from beginning to end.

Genealogical Errors
Haley's search started with a family tradition about a proud and rebellious slave ancestor who - although he had been given the slave-name of 'Toby' - was always proud of his African name 'Kintay' along with a few remembered African words supposedly passed on down through the family. Haley tracked 'Toby' to the slave plantation of John Waller (named, for some unknown reason, 'Reynolds' in the TV miniseries - see here for a long list of differences between the TV miniseries and the book), he used the few remembered African words to track down Toby's birthplace to The Gambia in Africa, and he even found the ship - called the Lord Ligonier - which he believed had brought Toby to America in 1767.

The book ends when Haley, having gone back the village of Juffure in The Gambia, visits a local oral historian - a 'Griot' - who tells him of one Kunta Kinte who was captured by white men in the woods and taken as a slave. It is a thrilling and moving moment. Through that moment, not only Alex Haley, but millions of other Black Americans learned to value their African lineage - at the time, it was a significant moment in the Civil Rights movement, and part of the raising of Black awareness.

But Haley was not a professional historian - he wrote for Playboy magazine - and when they began to check his genealogical research, family historians Gary Mills and Elizabeth Shown Mills found LOTS of mistakes. One of the worst was that the 'Toby' on the Waller estate came to America, not in 1767, as Haley claimed, but in 1762 - so he could not have gone across on the Lord Ligonier.
Worse still, 'Toby' died eight years before Alex Haley's great-great-great-grandmother Kizzy (who Haley said was Toby's daughter) was born - so he CANNOT have been Haley's ancestor.
Other historians, including a BBC documentary, have shown that the 'griot' who Haley met in Juffure was not a griot at all, but a 'nice old man' who had been pressurised by the Gambian tourist board into saying what Haley wanted to hear - certainly Juffure has profited from the tourist trade generated by Haley's book.

Roots still has its supporters, but nobody nowadays tries to claim it is true - they argue instead that perhaps Haley's ancestors didn't come from Juffure and maybe weren't the people Haley thought - but they MUST HAVE come from Africa, and they WERE SURELY captured and brought as slaves on a slave ship - so the story is true in spirit, even if the names are wrong.

Setting Errors
But is it true in spirit? Even then, how fairly does Roots portray the slaves' experience of the slave trade?

In his book: The World and a Very Small Place in Africa, Donald R Wright (2004) points out that Juffure was far from the quiet idyllic backwater it appears as in Haley's book - it was a busy commercial centre, a few miles from the British slaving port. It was part of a western Africa regularly swept by famines, wars and slaving raids.And although in Roots, Kunta Kinte is captured by white 'toubobs'; in reality he would almost certainly have been sold by Black Africans as part of a commercial business deal.
And - most controversially of all - it has been suggested that even the depiction of the Middle Passage in Roots might be overdrawn. Although it is fairly certain that everything that happened to Kunta Kinte DID happen to some African slave at some time on some ship, it is arguable that slave ships as brutally cruel as Haley's Lord Ligonier were rare - it was in the interests of slave traders to keep their cargo strong and healthy, records show that a greater proportion of sailors than slaves died on the Middle Passage, and most of the classic horrors of Middle Passage turn out to be abolitionist propaganda.

The final nail in the coffin was when it came to light that Haley had accepted out-of-court that he had copied large chunks of Roots from The African by Harold Courlander (Haley paid Courlander $650,000), and that his editor at Playboy (Murray Fisher) had written large sections of the book - not even the fictional part of Roots was reliable!
In 1993, Philip Nobile went through Haley's notes for the book, and labeled Roots: 'a hoax, a literary painted bird, a Piltdown of genealogy, a pyramid of bogus research.'

Nobody denied it. Roots remains a wonderful and thrilling story, and debunking it does not justify the slave trade, or its lasting legacies of racism and economic and political damage to Africa. But the fact is that Roots is to the slaves' experience what Braveheart is to William Wallace and that it is - in the words Black writer and New York Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch - 'phoney baloney'.

When you have stripped away all the errors and from Haley's story, all that remains that you can say was undeniably true is the things that happened to EVERY slave:

An unknown ancestor of Alex Haley lived in
Africa. He was sold by slave traders, marched to the coast, put on a
slave ship and transported to America. When the ship docked in
America, he was prepared for sale, auctioned and given a new
name.

The key question is whether the ‘bits that remain’ (‘the pink bits’) are enough to argue that Britain should apologise and pay reparations – given that this was the shared experience of 3 million African people?

Why did the League Fail?

The League was perhaps the most exciting social and political experiment of ALL TIME, and its failure was a major setback in making the world a better place.

So why did it fail? The British politician Jack Straw, during a debate on whether Britain should go to war with Iraq (February, 2003), said he knew why:

• The League (of Nations) failed because it could not create actions from its words. It could not back diplomacy with the credible threat and, where necessary, the use of force. So small evils went unchecked, tyrants became emboldened, then greater evils were unleashed. At each stage good men and women said 'not now - wait, the evil is not big enough to challenge'. Then, before their eyes, the evil became too big to challenge.

If you know anything about the events of the 1930s, you have to say that he has a point ... but then, he was saying this during a debate in which he was trying to convince MPs that they ought to go to war!

You will need to study the website - http://www.johndclare.net/league_of_nations8.htm,

and you may want to read - http://www.johndclare.net/league_of_nations1_Answer.htm - to get the views of different historians.


Why do YOU think the League failed?

Think about the different ideas, and consider the factual evidence which might be produced to support each one....

And then have your say here...

the Gr8 APPEASEMENT Deb8

In January, The Greenfield Year 10 pupils debated the rights and wrongs of appeasement.

Feel free to add your own comments.

(If you are interested, you can see the comments made by a previous year group, or read another debate on appeasement here.)