Dear Sir,
Lord Kitchener, the great World War I recruiter,
is to be the new face of the £2 coin.
Like so many of the statues of military men to
be found around Westminster, Kitchener is a reminder of the days of industrial
warfare and of the military and political leaders who made huge blunders
costing millions of lives.
This was a case of 'lions led by donkeys' as has
been described by several historians of World War One.
Shouldn’t 2014 be about remembering the
monumental folly of war?
A different, progressive choice for the £2
coin could have been a war poet, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, or Siegfried
Sassoon. Or better still Vera Brittain, showing the female side of service and
loss and working for a better world.
Instead they chose Kitchener – a man whose
driving force was putting a million men more in the field than the enemy –
knowing they were machine gun fodder and regardless of how many came back.
We really ought to be commemorating the end of
World War I and not the beginning.
Yours sincerely,
Andrew Cooper
Yorkshire & Humber Green Party
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