Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2014-04-16-Speech-3-023-000"
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"en.20140416.4.3-023-000"2
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"Mr President, let me congratulate Danny Cohn-Bendit on a typically bravura performance. Even if as usual – and he would be shocked if I did – I did not agree with a word of it, it was as usual magnificently delivered and I am sure we will miss his speeches in this Chamber.
Walter Tull was a particular hero of mine because he was also a professional footballer, albeit for Tottenham Hotspur. He was only the second black professional footballer in the entire English League which of course reminds me of the famous story of the 1914 Christmas Day truce that perhaps best sums up how humanity can shine through even the darkest days. Ordinary people putting their differences aside and meeting on the football pitch in no-man’s-land instead. History does not recall who won that game, but I am sure the Germans won on penalties!
As we head into an election campaign where all of us will be straining to highlight every difference and to demonstrate all of our divisions, events like this actually serve as a useful reminder to all of us that sometimes what unites us far outweighs what divides us. And since the chain of events that began in Sarajevo 100 years ago, we have learnt that when we have differences we can find peaceful ways of resolving them. It is one of the greatest achievements of Western civilisation that must never be taken for granted. It is the legacy of all those who have suffered during the 20th century, and in my view it is a legacy that we should honour to this day.
It is perhaps appropriate that what may be the last contributions of Mr Daul, Mr Swoboda and as we heard, Mr Cohn-Bendit, should be in a solemn debate to reflect on the past. Whilst we have many political differences which I am sure we will continue to argue about in future forums on future occasions, I think I would like first of all to put those aside today to express my respect for their work and for their contributions to life in this Chamber.
Politicians are all too easily and frequently criticised, as Mr Farage is finding out in the British press this morning, but I believe there is nothing more noble or honourable than devoting a life to public service and seeking to create a better world through robust, democratic, argument and debate about ideals sincerely held, even if they are not necessarily ideals which I hold. So I would like to pay tribute to them today for the work that they have done.
The First World War was, in the words of Fritz Stern, the first calamity of the 20th century, the calamity from which all other calamities sprang. The sheer cost in terms of human sacrifice mean we should be obliged to remember in our private thoughts, in our public words, all those who gave up so much in that struggle – their lives, their health, their families, their property, their way of life.
The First World War may not have been the first industrial war, nor was it the first global war or even the first civilian war, but it was all of those things on a previously unimaginable scale. Its impact and reach were of a new magnitude: looking at the numbers of dead, the casualty rates, the 54[nbsp ]000 soldiers remembered at the Menin Gate at Ypres, whose bodies have never been discovered.
It is hard to comprehend now the full impact of that war on society in those days, but behind all the numbers of course are the human stories. Each of those 54[nbsp ]000 had a mother, a father, many of them a wife, and many of them children. The First World War touched farming families in India; it touched factory workers in Australia. The First World War shaped our modern world today, and in many respects we are still living in its shadow.
But even now it is possible that some countries still refuse to learn the lessons. They try to get what they want by force, by threats, by creating a false sense of grievance to whip up domestic opinion and to provide a pretext for military action. Tactics that we had hoped never to see again deployed in our continent are being used right now just beyond the frontiers of some of our Member States.
In 1914 it was not clear what the democratic world wanted, what it would accept and what it expected of others, and what it was prepared to do to defend those ideals. These are mistakes that we must not repeat again. But as we reflect on the horror of the First World War we can also in my view take inspiration from some of the individuals who in tragic circumstances pointed to a better world.
I am thinking of people like Edith Cavell, the nurse who helped soldiers on all sides and was eventually executed for helping a group of Allied soldiers to escape. She became an inspiration for women’s rights. I think of the first black soldier to command white soldiers in the British Army, a man called Walter Tull. An action that would seem normal to us today was truly revolutionary in those times and helped take some of the first tentative steps towards a new era of equality."@en1
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