Fascist. This is a word with sinister connotations. To mention it musters images which represent the darkest side of humanity. It brings to mind the jackboot, the goosestep and the gas chamber. Fascism is an ideology of hate which reached its peak in the 1930’s and, through a war which cost over fifty million lives, faced its destruction in 1945. At its height fascist flags flew over Hitler’s Berlin , over Franco’s Madrid and over Mussolini’s Rome . It is popularly believed that fascism was a European phenomenon, with Britain ’s only involvement being in its destruction. However, on Sunday October 4^th 1936 over 300,000 people of London’s East end rose up, stood fast and defeated the British Union of Fascists in what became known as the Battle of Cable street.

I’m not a man who loves his nation, I’m not really patriotic, I don’t get teary eyed when I hear the national anthem, I don’t really care if Britannia rules the waves, and given the choice between living in a republic or under a royal family… well I’ll even clean the guillotine for you. I am of course one of those wishy-washy-johnny-foreigner-loving-liberals which the Daily mail loves to demonise. However even I was impressed when, for ninety minutes at least, we all became Scottish.

Allow me to explain, for as long as I’ve followed any British team in any sport I’ve recognised that we all secretly accept and long for failure.  Why else would hordes of middle class half-wits spend days queuing to watch Tiger Tim at Wimbledon? We seem to have a mentality that as long as “we put up a good show” or show a “stiff-upper lip” then we’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. For the British, or perhaps I should say English, watching sport is like reliving the charge of the light brigade, or listening to the band playing and drinking tea as the Titanic goes down. Yes we’re going to lose but no we’re not going to let it get us down. I’ve long accepting that this is a key part of supporting a British side, I’m fine with that, in fact that’s usually why I end up supporting someone else. That said, even I was somewhat taken aback by what must be a new low in British sport, yesterdays European 2008 qualifiers.

Here’s the scenario, due to a fantastically pathetic performance in previous games England’s chances of qualifying rested on a match thousands of miles from our own shores between Israel and Russia. If Russia beat Israel then England stay at home, wouldn’t go to the tournament in Switzerland next year and we'd all be spared another year of build up and inevitable disappointment, probably at the hands of a penalty shootout. Simultaneously Scotland were playing World cup winners Italy, and could have gone through into the tournament for the first time in the memories of most fans. So, English fans were left with a dilemma. They could support another country, Israel against Russia, in the hope that they gift England a place at the ball or give up centuries of blind nationalistic aggression and support Scotland.  For those Englishmen who have tattoos of Wayne Rooney, and think Churchill was a hero disliking the Scottish comes in just after hating the Germans and hating the French as a hobby. However, as Scotland were the only team who looked like going to the tournament they ceased to be Scottish and all of a sudden we believed they were British we invited them into the fold, we joined the tartan army and suddenly we’re all in it together.

To me this just all goes to show how bizarre, and ultimately pointless nationalism truly is. Let us make this clear, by nationalism I mean defining who you are by working out who you aren’t. For example the English know they are English because they know they aren’t French. The French on the other hand know who they are because they are quite sure they aren’t German. Since the creation of nation states we’ve been encouraged to define ourselves this way. The fact that we can chop and change this to suddenly be English if we’re playing Scotland, British if we’re playing Italy, or European if we’re playing America shows what nonsense it all is. George Orwell once wrote that international football was “like war without the guns” and this is how we are encouraged to view it. This tends to be why when it comes to international sport I don't start flying the flag of nationalisti...

On the 11^th hour, of the 11^th day of the 11^th month the guns of the western front fell silent, and so ended the most brutal conflict the world had yet witnessed with over eight million men left dead and forgotten.   This weekend the queen will dutifully lay a wreath of poppies as the military bands play, the flags will be lowered and those who died to preserve and defend this pomp, this ceremony will be lionised for another year.  

In the trenches of France, the landing fields of turkey, the great plaines of the Russian steppes and the deserts of the middle east the world sacrificed an entire generation on the alter of imperialism. The two main combatants, Germany and Britain lost 1,773,700 and 908,371 men respectively, and that’s before the crippled, the missing or those who would carry the scars of war internally for the rest of their lives are counted. These deaths are one of the great scandals of history, eight million men butchered and damned in the name of imperial greed. If we truly wish to remember their sacrifice then it is crucial that we understand the true reasons why they were sent to die. In the process we must abandon the glorious rhetoric, the war memorials and the marching bands whose only purpose is to camouflage mass murder under a cloak of jingoism.

Traditionally we are taught the rosy narrative of war, we’re taught of the stiff upper lip approach to the trenches, of the football matches at Christmas and of brave British “Tommys” doing their duty for King and Country. Believe this and believe that Britain was standing alone against Prussian militarism, defending plucky Belgium, bashing the heathen Turk and liberating the French, albeit with some late in the game assistance from the Americans. Here war is quaint, it’s a sport, and it’s an opportunity for glory.  The true horror is lost amongst the poetic prose or metaphorically transformed into the rugger pitches of Eton.  As always, the reality was very different.

 When war broke out in 1914 the first British forces to be deployed were not into Belgium or northern France but into Iraq. The Dorset regiment was deployed into the Iraqi town of Basra to join fifty one other British military divisions, positioned in the desert to safeguard and defend the oilfields, needed to service the ever growing dreadnought fleet.  Where is the Dorset regiment in the glorious narrative? Where are the troops deployed into Archangel and Vladivostok to fight and lose to Lenin’s Russian Bolsheviks?  Where are the infamous black and tans, deployed to Ireland to savage the population into submission? These men, fought with the same steely conviction and courage as their comrades at Ypres or the Somme, it would simply be too difficult to remember them or the dark motivations of their paymasters.

This perhaps leads us to the greatest myth of the War, that it was inevitable. No war is inevitable, it is a human construct and it takes men, conscious of their actions to create the conditions and issue the orders. Soldiers don’t simply turn up to battlefields; war require...