Pardon

After the success of the Shot At Dawn campaign, posthumous pardons seem to have become rather fashionable. Thanks to inside information from my stolen MOD soft drinks dispenser, I am happy to be able to report the planned pardon of around twenty five thousand people who were wrongly executed for being German civilians on the night of February 15th, 1945.

“It seems that those killed in Dresden may not have been Filthy Nazi Huns after all, but actually a large number of men, women and children, including refugees and wounded combatants.” A Brigadier told our reporter, whilst fiddling in his pocket for small change to buy a can of Idris Ginger Beer.

“Of course, it was a more brutal time back then. But it seems that we might have been just a little hasty in deciding that they should all be incinerated in an attempt to terrorise the nation into surrender. Of course, we had been reluctant to overturn the earlier decision. We used over five hundred Lancaster bombers and dropped almost two thousand tons of bombs on the place. Obviously when you’ve committed that much material outlay into a precision operation you want to jolly well make sure that your viable targets aren’t needlessly declassified as human beings.”

However, further executions may be re-examined in the light of our new found spirit of enlightenment. According to a highly respected Jewish scholar, it is possible that the events of the Passover may need to be re-examined.

“It seems that God might have been a teensy bit hasty in slaughtering the first born son of all Egyptian families. So we’ve asked God to consider granting them a posthumous pardon. There are one or two amongst us who think it might be a tiny bit distasteful to celebrate and glorify what some lefty types are describing as a human tragedy, so we’ve asked God to mediate.

“Effectively, if God agrees that he was maybe just a little bit out of line to slaughter those children for the crime of being Egyptian, he should give us some sort of sign. Nothing drastic. A simple display of power such as the inhalation of every Arab on the planet would suffice.”