Monday 9 August 2010

In The Air

Well, I was right. You won't admit it, nor does it give me any pleasure to say it. But I was right. The dismantlement of the Royal Air Force now proceeds apace. The Royal Navy and the British Army are also on the hit list. We are to have a single Defence Force, a dustbin for our least accomplished boys but which we will justify to ourselves by preposterously (and to the USMC or indeed the former Royal Marines, offensively) comparing it to the United States Marine Corps. That will be within a single EU defence "capability" under American command. All exactly as Tony Blair and David Miliband always wanted. But never mind, eh? At least there will still be Trident...

5 comments:

  1. Given that you don't actually want us to fight any wars (or does "anti-war" mean something else), why are you implying that all this is a Bad Thing? Surely beating all those swords into ploughshares and warfare states into welfare states (and then "Farewell to the State!") is all part of the wonderful pan-European social democratic Cameron-ite future that we're all supposed to be looking forward to! That "American leadership" you write about at the moment can't wait to hand Afghanistan over to the Taliban, and they would dearly love a Saigon moment in Baghdad as well. And surely everyone knows that Trident nowadays is about protecting British jobs rather than British lives.

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  2. "Anti-war" does mean something else. Look it up.

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  3. The term anti-war usually refers to the opposition to a particular nation's decision to start or carry on an armed conflict, unconditional of a maybe-existing just cause. The term can also refer to pacifism, which is the opposition to all use of military force during conflicts. Many activists distinguish between anti-war movements and peace movements. Anti-war activists work through protest and other grassroots means to attempt to pressure a government (or governments) to put an end to a particular war or conflict. [This is all from Wikipedia.]

    Perhaps you'd like to give a list of wars that you're not opposed to! (If you can't think of any real ones, perhaps you'd like to make some up!)

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  4. The Falklands. Although that doesn't excuse Thatcher's incompetent causing of the thing.

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  5. Fair enough! Those penguins weren't going to liberate themselves from rightwing papist imperialism, after all.

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