Dred Tory writes:
Mere days after the Allies had rained nuclear catastrophe upon two of his cities, Emperor Hirohito announced to his subjects his decision to surrender not by saying that Japan had lost the war but that "the war situation [had] developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage".
Last week, NATO coalition forces announced their surrender to the Taliban not by saying that they had lost the war but by admitting that "when all is said and done, the Afghan jihadist movement—in one form or another—will be part of the government in Kabul". The Vietnam analogy so often applied to this lamentable enterprise has thus finally been vindicated, with our grovelling, abject request for quarter occurring after almost eight years of war (roughly equating to the time-span of major U.S. operations in Vietnam) and a mere two weeks after Kabul suffered its own humiliating Tet Offensive.
Canada has just lost its first war, after having dragged over a hundred of its bravest souls into futile slaughter, without having earned a single battle honour worthy of being affixed to any of our regimental colours, and without being able to promise those on whose behalf our fallen gave their lives a future measurably better than the one to which they were sadly resigned in the year 2000. It shall take us a while, I think, before we fully grasp the depth and magnitude of this catastrophe. Western military impotence has not been this luridly exhibited since Augustus lost three legions in a German forest.
If we Canadians had remaining to us even the smallest dregs of pride at the bottom of the tankards of self-loathing phlegm our élites have been serving us for generations—if our collective spinal column had not been sloppily extracted decades ago and chopped into a bloody pile of soggy toothpicks by the civic evisceration of continentalism and the nihilism of swinish consumerism—we would be taking the news of our utter rout with something slightly more engaged than the bored, unblinking catatonia that has marked our public reaction so far. In fact, if we had enough moral capacity to weigh rightly the full extent of the Afghan tragedy, our menfolk would this hour be joyfully parading down Sussex Street, in review order, brandishing the severed heads of our political and military leadership stuck high upon pikes, with our women dancing and throwing garlands before the throng.
But there shall be no bloodshed. Instead, we shall celebrate the conclusion of our shameful part in America's latest Third-World misadventure by self-conferring all the traditional sacraments of suburban banality whilst praying for the intercession of Saints Blockbuster and Facebook. For we are civilised.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Interesting post. Perhaps, in addition to consumerism, the problem is that, with the professionalization of the armed forces, the general population does not feel any connection to the war?
ReplyDeleteWhen you have a professional, all-volunteer army like Canada and many other countries, most of the burden of the war falls on military families. Everyone else can tune out the war with greater ease because they don't have to worry about whether their son is going to be killed or injured.
Although I am not arguing for the return of conscription, I think the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are revealing some of the downsides to professional, all-volunteer armies that many people may not have thought about previously.