Published by
The Bangkok Post
The Bangkok Post
The geopolitical views of my grandmother, Florence O’Driscoll, could have been summed up in seven words: the Germans have war in their blood. Even as a child I suspected that the world must be more complicated than that, but I never contradicted her. She came by those views the hard way. Most Irish Catholics of her time hated England, but she reserved her hatred for Germany because half the young men she had known were killed in World War I. She had to make sense of why Newfoundlanders were being killed by Germans thousands of kilometres from home, and that was her answer. During World War II …