Are we the baddies? What if the Ukraine war is just as stupid and wrong as the Iraq war, but the state propaganda has been more successful and hardly anybody has realised… yet?
Many people to this day still think the damaging and morally dubious Western attacks on Serbia and Libya were justified. Many still think the gory attempt to destroy Syria was a good thing. It took ages for opinion to swing on the Vietnam war, back in the 1960s. And, as one who opposed the Iraq war, I remember only too well just how many (who now think they were against it all the time) were fooled into backing Sir Anthony Blair and George W. Bush.
The issue is more pressing as 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?
This is what I have never been able to work out. We have a Defence Secretary, Grant Shapps, who has perfected the art of shouting loudly while carrying a very small stick – thunderous, belligerent declarations while our Armed Forces melt away thanks to neglect and badly targeted spending. Perhaps, if the long-feared Russian invasion of Western Europe takes place, we can fend it off by dispatching our troops on the pestilential e-scooters and e-bikes which are this former Transport Secretary’s major contribution to the nation.
Certainly these vehicles are terrifying to those not riding them. They have nearly killed me more than once. And, piled up in heaps, they make formidable obstacles, as the people of London are finding.
What Mr Shapps does not seem to grasp is that Britain became great by staying out of continental conflicts, and letting others do the fighting. Even in the battle against Bonaparte, we paid our European allies to do most of the hard work.
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.
Bill Clinton famously did not serve in the Vietnam war. Sir Anthony Blair does not have a military muscle in his body. One of his Defence Secretaries was a former Communist from the invasion-prone Brezhnev era. Another was a ‘candidate member’ of the International Marxist Group, a faction which used to go about shouting ‘Victory to the IRA!’ So I suppose that is at least a bit military.
George W. Bush spent the Vietnam war era at home in the Air National Guard, courageously defending Texas against Oklahoma, or something.
That other great beater of war drums, future Vice-President Dick Cheney, said of the Vietnam period, when he could have served in the forces: ‘I had other priorities in the 60s than military service.’
Me too. I cannot resist here a small note about my late brother Christopher, who after 2001 became a vocal supporter of the USA’s foreign wars. He made ingenious and successful efforts to escape from the marching, boot-polishing and general tedium of the Combined Cadet Force at a school we both attended. These involved a knee problem from which he later appeared to have completely recovered. I do not complain. I too managed to slither out of it, through the loophole he had created.
But since the Yugoslav wars, we have had the following pattern. A foreign ruler is denounced as a ‘new Hitler’, and generally as a ‘fascist’. This was said all the time about Saddam Hussein in Iraq, who in my view was just an ordinary third-world dictator with no political beliefs except that he should stay in power.
Slobodan Milosevic, the minor ex-Communist bully who came to run tiny Serbia, was likewise compared to the mighty German dictator. People who demonstrated in their hundreds of thousands against the Iraq war were sneered at by Blairites as trying to keep a ‘fascist dictator’ in power.
And anyone who said that war might be mistaken was also accused of ‘appeasement’ and equated with Neville Chamberlain, the man who gave into Hitler at Munich in 1938. I get this all the time when I oppose these wars, as I do. I’m also accused of being like Lord Haw Haw, the Irish fascist William Joyce who broadcast pro-Hitler propaganda from Berlin during the Second World War.
Well, anyone who knows anything about Europe in 1938, or indeed about Europe now (as I do) also realises that these comparisons are pathetically misleading. But hardly anyone does know. Today’s cheerleaders for war all sing the praises of Ukraine the valiant, the mighty, the free, the democratic, as we urge the continuation of war and dismiss any sort of peace as ‘capitulation’.
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. Mr Kurkov is a Ukrainian patriot, loyal to his nation. And this causes him to be honest.
Among many other striking things, he notes ‘around 700,000 Ukrainians liable for military service have crossed the border since the war began on February 24, 2022. This is more than the number of Ukrainian soldiers at the front. These male refugees are not coming home any time soon.’
I hear lots of chirpy London media voices on radio and TV assuring me that Ukrainians are still committed to this war. So why then do they leave the country in such numbers, sometimes dying on the way as they cross the closed border, rather than fight in it?
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?
