There Is No Excuse

The last Corbynite on Fleet Street, and possibly the only one that there has ever been, Peter Hitchens writes:

What is it about war that makes people so unimaginative and thoughtless? As the long-heralded Ukrainian offensive against Russia’s invading troops seems to have begun, I notice that much of the media writes rather impersonally about it, as if it is just an event on a map far away. There is no excuse for this. Large numbers of young men on both sides, scared out of their wits, will be dying horribly, or being terribly wounded in ways which will affect them for the rest of their lives.

I looked at archive newspaper reports of the great battle of the Somme in July 1916, likewise intended to repel the German invader from French soil. (In case your school didn’t teach this sort of history, it failed, utterly, by the way).

One account, in The Times of July 3, proclaimed ‘Everything has gone well, our troops have successfully carried out their missions, all counter-attacks have been repulsed and large numbers of prisoners have been taken’ .The main headline trumpeted ‘Forward in the West’, and the reports said (no doubt truthfully) that there were large numbers of enemy dead. I am not here sneering at what these people wrote and what their editors published. Nobody really knew, except the soldiers themselves, the ghastly horror of modern warfare when one huge army throws itself at another, which has dug into strong defences. They thought they were still writing about Victorian wars of dashing charges and noble combat.

But there is no excuse for any such illusions now. We know the truth. If anyone is in any doubt about the grisly misery of modern war, please read John Harris’s marvellous book Covenant with Death. While they still lived, Harris interviewed surviving veterans of the Somme, and turned their memories into a novel of extraordinary power.

President Biden knows this war will end with negotiations. He said so back in June 2022, using these words ‘It appears to me that at some point along the line, there’s going to have to be a negotiated settlement here.’

If he wants such talks, he can obtain them, beyond doubt. Ukraine can fight only as long as Washington wants it to. But a whole regiment of army-barmy politicians and teenage scribblers, who mostly have never seen a dead body or heard a bullet fly, urge war to the end, and the young men are once more ground into the mud and slime, for the pride and vainglory of others far away.

And:

When I first saw the haunting pictures of New York City in a red smoky haze, I thought the legalisation of marijuana there had finally got out of hand, and the whole metropolis was hopelessly stoned. It turns out just to be woodsmoke from Canada. I know which sort of smoke worries me more.

And: 

Am I supposed to be pleased that my daily commute is fuelled by recycled cooking oil - news now plastered over the actual locomotives of Chiltern Railways? Will the nation’s railway lines, tunnels and stations come to smell of old fish and chips instead of diesel? But if this stuff works, I have an idea – steam engines, fuelled by fatbergs dug from the drains – picturesque, green and a perfect way of keeping the sewers from blocking up.

And:

Why is Julian Assange still in a maximum security prison? There is no justification for this treatment. We should refuse to extradite him in any case, as the charges are obviously political. But there is no excuse for holding him in such conditions.