Anti-War, Pro-Military

Because the point of the Armed Forces is to prevent wars.

By deterring them.

And, of course, to fight them if anyone nevertheless does start them against us.

The point of Armed Forces is not to be sent, by those who would never dream of sending themselves or their families, to war against people who pose no threat whatever to us, and might even be our more natural allies than the alternatives in their own countries.

Such less natural allies (to say the very least) include those who have taken over Iraq since the removal of Saddam Hussein, witting or unwitting Protector of the Church. And they include either the Communist Party of the Russian Federation or the National Bolsheviks, the only alternatives to Putin and Medvedev, guardians of Biblical-Classical civilisation and now even funders of the building of Catholic churches (initially in Tartarstan, but the line has been crossed).

And wars are not conservative.

They cost taxpayers vast sums of money. You might argue that the taxpayers should simply have been able to keep that money. Or you might argue that it should have been spent on fighting want, ignorance, ill health, idleness and squalor. But either way, you cannot argue for spending it on wars instead, if at all avoidable.

They create new enemies (and entrench or embitter old ones), and thus create future threats.

And they are morally and socially disruptive. Everything to do with the Swinging Sixties started during the War. Just ask anyone of that generation. My late father always made that point in the Eighties, when Margaret Thatcher was on about the Sixties: she was right (not that her own policies did anything to help matters, to say the very least), but it really all went back to the War.

Now these things are being said openly, in television documentaries and in newspaper interviews with aged figures: the epidemic of venereal disease during the War, how London's and other cities' parks were turned on VE Night into giant outdoor orgies worthy of (indeed, surpassing) anything to come in the summer of 1968, and so much else besides. We all laugh at the old ladies from whose bedrooms the Normandy Landings were allegedly launched, and such like. But it was no laughing matter.

Sometimes a war is inescapable, such as when our territory is invaded. But we are neither fighting nor facing any such war today.