Veteran journalist Peter Hitchens has a piece in the Mail warning that the mounting hysteria over an impending war with Russia (or whoever) will make the Covid lockdowns and restrictions on our lives look like a free-for-all at a hippy festival:
Generals and admirals warn we must live in a militarised society and prepare for what they think is an inevitable war against Russia. They could get their way. If you go on backing this policy, you could be condemning yourself, your children or grandchildren to a world of war, privation and perhaps conscription into some sort of military service.
Wars mean death and wounds. They mean shortages, rationing, electricity blackouts, travel restrictions, busybodies interfering in every bit of life, and with much more power. Not to mention danger – missiles have astonishing ranges these days. What exactly would this one be for?
Hitchens thinks part of the problem is that the grown-ups of the post-war generation who had seen the destructive effects of conflict have largely died out:
Our greatness ceased when bombastic moralising took over in 1914. We flung ourselves, supposedly nobly, into a Russo-German war. Within two years we were bankrupt, and bereft of the flower of our young manhood.
People still refuse to believe me when I say accurately that Britain has not paid off its huge 1914-18 war debts (now worth about £40 billion) to the USA. But I promise you it is true.
Four years of terrible loss left the Russo-German problem unsolved and we had to do it all again in 1939. After that we were even more bankrupt, and in 1946 had to ration bread, like some desperate People’s Republic. But for many years afterwards we were largely governed by grown-ups who had fought in actual wars and been wounded, and had seen death very near them, or endured bombing and a war economy. And so we largely stayed out of major foreign trouble. But those grown-ups retired and died, and a new generation, a sort of children’s crusade, took over instead. Oddly, they were not warlike in the traditional way.
The new breed of leaders, most of whom have never seen a gun, let alone fired one, have been enthusiastically involving us in unnecessary and misguided new wars, he says.
Ukraine is, in fact, a corrupt and ill-governed state, riven with incompetence and waste, with little political freedom, weak media and no real opposition. In this, it is very like Russia, except that Russia has oil and gas.
It has other faults I won’t dwell on here. And the war which (in my view) the USA provoked in this region has been a disaster for the Ukrainian people. This is brought home in a dispatch this weekend in the Left-wing and pro-war New Statesman.
The distinguished Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov has given a clearer and more truthful picture of the state of the country he plainly loves than I have seen from any Western reporter (Kurkov: “Around 700,000 Ukrainians liable for military service have crossed the border since the war began on February 24th 2022. This is more than the number of Ukrainian soldiers at the front.”) Mr Kurkov is a Ukrainian patriot, loyal to his nation. And this causes him to be honest.
The war which bankrupt Britain spends so much effort on keeping going has killed, maimed and disfigured unknown tens of thousands of young Ukrainian men (casualty figures are an official secret), devastated cities, and wrecked the Ukrainian economy.
I have never known what British interest this serves, and – perhaps even more important – I cannot see how Ukraine has benefited from it either.
Can nothing end this brainless march towards a new Great War?
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Writing in the Telegraph, Daniel Johnson says it may already be too late for the West to avoid a war with Russia.
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