Marseillaise at Wembley

Politics can make strange bedfellows. I'm reluctant to agree with anything in The Independent, and even this article's argument is incomplete and misguided in some respects, but he has a point. The Marseillaise is a rotten anthem, celebrating the most calamitous event in history prior to the even worse 20th century, whose lyrics glorify watering furrows with "impure blood" and slander legitimate monarchs trying to restore decency as "tyrants." It might be pointed out that if Tsar Alexander III put up with it in 1894, anyone can, but in retrospect the Franco-Russian alliance was a tragic mistake that paved the way for the apocalypse twenty years later. We cannot fight 21st-century terrorism by extolling 18th-century terrorism.