On this of all days, let us consider a comment which has been placed on an earlier post: that unless British soil were ever actually invaded (as might happen again in the Falkland Islands, but probably won’t), there is now a de facto pacifist majority in Britain, so that Britain will never participate in any war after Afghanistan and Iraq. What do people think?
I’ll start us off with the suggestion that such a majority does in fact exist, but that, as the Iraq War illustrated and illustrates, the Political Class couldn’t care less, and therefore needs to be replaced in its entirety.
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I think you are very wrong. I hope that British people wold defend freedom and act against brutal murderers. There is a case for liberal interventionism and I would not want to see the British or American population standing idly by in a situation that a mass murderer ceases power in a regime or attempts to overrun a militarily weaker sovereign entity.
ReplyDeleteMichael
"There is a case for liberal interventionism"
ReplyDeleteThere are none so blind...
But my point stands: this majority does now exist in Britain. It just needs to clear out the "liberal interventionist" (ha! ha!) Political Class.
Actually, I'd go further than my interlocutor who held that only an invasion of British soil would ever now move the British People to war again. If a sizeable number of our people, or a country with which we had especially close ties (most obviously a shared Head of State) were attacked directly, then we'd go to their aid, of course.
But that really is pretty much it.
Isn't it?
So you are now accepting that the British would go to war to defend Canada and Australia and other commonwealth countries as well as British dependent Islands including the Falklands, Bermuda, Gibraltar etc.
ReplyDeleteSurely if the Germans tried to overrun France, would you not think that the British would go and support the French?
When the Serbs massacred the Bosnians, the Brits came to the aid of the Bosnians and rightly so.
The free world must defend freedom. We should not put up with tyranny and should not display weakness in the face of aggression. Winston Churchill had the right idea.
Michael
"So you are now accepting that the British would go to war to defend Canada and Australia and other commonwealth countries as well as British dependent Islands including the Falklands, Bermuda, Gibraltar etc."
ReplyDeleteI have always "accepted" this. Such places are not foreign, anyway. Some of them are British territory, and all of them are part of our one family headed by the Queen.
"Surely if the Germans tried to overrun France, would you not think that the British would go and support the French?"
That would depend on the British national interest at the time, just as it did on the last three occasions when it happened: Britain did intervene on the second and third such occasions, because it was in her interest to do so; but not in the first, because it wasn't.
"When the Serbs massacred the Bosnians, the Brits came to the aid of the Bosnians and rightly so."
That simply was not what happened at all, as has now been found in court. Why are you siding with black-shirted Wahhabi led by a Saudi-backed rabble rouser who had been a recruitment sergeant for the SS?
"Winston Churchill had the right idea."
What, carving up Eastern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean into British and Soviet spheres of influence, allied to each other? He nearly split his own party over that one, even while the War was still going on.
One of those who abstained rather than back him went on to be Foreign Secretary, then (briefly) Prime Minister, and then Foreign Secretary again as late as the Seventies.
On this and on a number of other matters, folk memory has been rather kind to a man who, after all, was thrown out as Prime Minister by the electorate before the War had ended.