Boer War Silk Ribbons - 1899 - 1901

The taking of Pretoria, then considered the most important event of the war, produced three ribbons shown on this page.

The military logic of the time was that once the British Army captures the two Boer capitals of Bloemfontein and Pretoria the Boers would give up and the war would be over. The Boers didn't see it that way, deciding to let the British occupy the big cities and towns while they ran freely about the countryside, attacking a wagon train, or sabotaging a train, blowing up a bridge, or ambushing a troop column. The British never knew when or where they would be hit, or how hard...

Fast Forward to 2008 - It's happening all over again in Afghanistan, with the Canadians - this time the foreign occupiers - hunkered down, not only in Kandahar City, but behind miles of wire, tellingly close by the airport so they can - à la Saigon - make a quick exit by air if pressed too hard.

They don't dare go out of the city anywhere without massive armoured and air support. The Taliban, like the Boers before them, totally control the countryside of their own homeland. In the spring of 2008 even President Karzai admitted that the Taliban control more of Kandahar province than do the Canadians - whose job they claim is supposed to be to provide security for the region! Understandably they have their hands full, just protecting themselves from attack.

But then isn't that what you'd expect if you were shooting up someone else's country, half way around the world? And repeatedly killing civilians in the process... And this from a group that claims to be a training force... What, training guerrillas?

The ribbon says, honestly, that the Boys served the Queen (read upper class British imperial industrial and commercial elites). But that would have been right over the heads of the Boys most of whom were in their late teens or early 20s.

Among the rarest of the rare - and a very early silk ribbon - celebrated the return of the 7th Regiment to London, Ontario, after being part of General Middleton's North West Field Force sent to quell the Riel Rebellion/Resistance in Saskatchewan.

This belonged to Capt. Dillon, famed Canadian rifleman, who went west.

Go to Captain Dillon

The earliest battlefield ribbon we've been able to find is the one celebrating the most costly British and Canadian victory of the entire war, the ten day Battle of Paardeberg, where Boer men, women, and children, were surrounded in a huge wagon park and pounded into submission with guns and shells.

There's another take of the same event published on the ribbon script. So who's right?

Heroes or Villains? - In 100 years little has changed, with Afghans and Canadians sharply disagreeing about what Canadian soldiers are doing, once again shooting and shelling in a foreign land. Celebrated as heroes, by some at home, they are angrily denounced abroad, as repeat offenders in killing babies, children, women, and civilians in Afghanistan.

Three months after the Battle of Paardeberg, the British Army captured Pretoria, the capital city of President Paul Kruger's Transvaal Republic. It was the high point of the entire Boer War; the victory seeming complete, and peace assuredly just around the corner.

And hey, the sleepy town of Campbellford, Ontario, had two representatives there! Local pride like this burst out in hundreds of towns across Canada. And the Boys would soon be coming home! Everyone got ready their welcome ribbons right and below.

In 2008 the same Canadian populations are bitterly opposed to what Canadian Forces are doing in Afghanistan. The flag waving Boer War parades are nowhere in evidence; only mournful vigils as a hearse a week carries another soldier's body back to his hometown, a gift from the Government and politicians of Canada.

Another young life squandered to please corporate America. Leaving a wife, a son or daughter, to grow old without him... Well at least they have the Government's assurance that his death was worth it... whatever...

Anglos on the March - The names on the ribbons do not really reflect Canada as much as the British Anglo community (English, Scottish, Irish) which mostly saw the whole war as a racial confrontation between the superior Briton who must prevail over the inferior Dutchmen who must fail to challenge the hierarchy of racial merit.

Go find names of other Canadian groups: the Ukrainians, Swedes, Icelanders, Danes, Norwegians, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Germans, Austrians, Poles, Greeks, Russians, or French - we could go on - on any of these ribbons...

In 2008 the Afghan War is a similar racial conflict pitting a Coalition of the Willing to do the Killing, made up entirely of white "European" Christians, targetting exclusively non-white Muslim victims.

It's called the March of Civilization... And the Canadian Government, and politicians of every stripe don't want to be left behind...

This is also the only celebrity ribbon we've found, featuring as it does the young artillery lieutenant John McCrae.

Some dozen years later he would become Canada's most famous poet when he penned "In Flander's Fields" which became perhaps, the signature poem of World War I. This time John went as a healing doctor not a warring pup as before. It brought him a premature death anyway, as it did to millions of others, in one of the more useless wars in history.

The most gaudy silk ribbon was made to honour the lads from Scarboro. It features photo portraits of four local volunteers in an attached pinback.

The Maple Leaf backdrop was already well established as a Canadian hallmark during the 19th century.

The Boer War's First Contingent's helmet badge was a maple leaf, which in the 1960s would become the central motif of Canada's new flag.

This, an uncommon"Send Off" ribbon, was produced by the local volunteer firefighters of St. Catharines, Ontario, to honour local volunteers who joined up as things were getting desperate for the British in South Africa in the early months of the war.

In Black Week, in December, the British had suffered three catastrophic defeats. As a result the commander-in-chief was replaced. And in St. Catharines, eager young men were willing to forego the drudgery of farm labour or dull office work, to lend the Queen a helping hand in far-off exotic South Africa, for pay and all expenses paid....

This peace silk was published to celebrate the peace everyone expected after the Pretoria, the last Boer capital fell. Lord Roberts above and many British troops, including most of the Canadians, went home.

In fact the longest, and the worst part of the war, was still to come as the local Boers resorted to guerilla tactics to fight a superior and better equipped enemy on their own ground and their own terms.

Only by turning on the women, children, and old folks, putting them into concentration camps - where they died in the tens of thousands - to prevent them helping their guerilla husbands, fathers, and sons, with food and clothing, were the British generals able to win the final victory. Faced with 26,000 dead women and children - and more to come - the Boer guerillas gave up.

The military practice of targetting women and children of the enemy has been wildly successful ever since, in World War II, Iraq, Lebanon, and continues to wreak destabilizing havoc in Afghanistan.

"They make a Desert and they call it Peace". - Tacitus

The last ribbon brings home the true tragic irony of all wars - the Dead are Losers.

They lost it all for themselves, their families, but especially for their country. They can never contribute to personal, family, or community growth and prosperity, on any level, ever again...

The living are celebrated on these ribbons, with their names, so we remember them a century later, while only one ribbon gives a throw off to Canada's "Dead Heroes." Their names - while the heroes are hardly cold in the ground - are already consigned to the dust bin of history.

And the gals, fiancees, and widows? After a suitable period of mourning, they all go off to marry someone who made a better life choice...

Anglo Canadians believed they were honouring Canada; French Canadians knew they were not. And what about all the other ethnic groups, who stood aside?

Today most Canadians - again led by the vast majority of French-Canadians - believe the Canadian Forces are in Afghanistan not to serve the Queen - let alone Canada - but George Bush and his Big Oil business cronies.

Likewise there are also precious few Canadians who believe that what the Canadian Forces are doing in Afghanistan is honouring Canada by any stretch.

Which is why the vast majority of Canadians have, for years, wanted the troops brought home from the killing fields of Afghanistan.

But corporate Canada has a lock hold on the politicians of every stripe in Ottawa, and it is not going to let them change, anytime soon, their policy to support the shooting war their American business partners want to pursue there.

Collateral Damage - Then & Now - While some 30,000 Boers (mostly women, children) were killed in the Boer War, in our day, hundreds of thousands of Muslims (women and children again, probably more than men) have been killed by the American led "Coalition of the Willing to do the Killing" in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Palestine.

There is another difference...

Then, Boer women and children died in concentration camps through genocidal neglect; today, Muslim women and children are being killed overwhelmingly in their own homes and neighbourhoods, by deliberate and targeted high-precision missiles, bombs, and gunfire.

Today you cannot use the excuses of Lord Kitchener's day of accidental negligent homicide.

The "Coalition of the Willing to do the Killing'" is using the most sophisticated and most accurate computer controlled and satellite guided killing machinery ever devised by man.

Pentagon publicity videos and Discovery Channel programs proudly publicize the pinpoint accuracy with which Judaeo-Christian technology can aim missile delivered bombs, from hundreds of miles away, to within a few feet of the desired target. Every week these high precision murder weapons seek out targets in cars and homes, in Gaza, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia.

Let there be no mistake - the high-tech precision gunners and guided missile launchers know exactly who they have in the cross-hairs, and why...

Hopefully Muslim men will "learneth their lesson" of the high cost of opposing the will of white Judaeo-Christian Crusaders...

If the Boer War taught military men anything it is that targeting the women and children of fighting men offers the best guarantee of final victory. Carpet bombing German women and children in Hamburg and Dresden sealed the victory in Europe in World War II; atom bombs obliterating Japanese women and children at Hiroshima and Nagasaki did the same in the Pacific theatre.

It is also why, though the Coalition of the Killing claims to be fighting the Terrorists, Taliban, Al Qaeda, insurgents, whatever, Muslim women and children are being killed in stunningly huge numbers... For all the mock apologies, it is not an accident, because it has brought success before.

It is a historical fact, that, in spite of the self-righteous Judaeo-Christian hype about modern military chivalry and increasing morality and civility in the conduct of war, at no time in warfare in the past several hundred years previous to World War II, have "European" military men (German and Allied) killed more civilians, especially women and children, during the conduct of their work... Their policy is continuing in the current war against the Muslims. (In their defence we acknowledge it is true the current victims are not white or Christian peoples.)

Hillary Clinton, that heroine of modern American womanhood, said, as part of her run for the US Presidency in 2008, that she was prepared to "obliterate Iran," presumably with atom bombs, as part of her foreign policy initiatives, if need be... Even in the 21st century, a half century after Hitler, American university trained women are willing to consider mass genocide against non-white Muslim men, women, and children, if it would benefit American special interests in one way or another at home... And millions more so-called American feminists applauded her...

It is a truism that the more educated white elites have become, in the 20th century, the more they talk about morality, and how decently they conduct warfare - compared to their enemies - the greater have been the number of women and children they have killed. It escalated in World War II and it certainly did not end with the death of Hitler... In the Middle East it has never stopped since...

Simply put, officers of the British Victorian Army would be appalled at how their successors - modern military officers - have skewed the conduct of war away from confronting professional fighting men, to targeting, instead, directly and indirectly, their women and children...

The Boer War taught them that nothing succeeds like success...

And lest you think this can't be so, you have the word of Canada's top General, Hillier who loudly barked at a press conference that "our job (the Canadian Forces) is to be able to kill people" namely "the detestable murderers and scumbags" in Afghanistan.

And then killing is, also, much more face-saving than diplomacy - having to talk to people of a colour and religion which you clearly despise...