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| Castrated |
When Britain withdraws from Afghanistan in 2015, the Treasury will be knocking on the door of the MoD with a very big hammer – there will be a substantial reduction in troops numbers leaving an Army with a strength of circa 80,000. We will be moving into an era of sharing capabilities with our European allies. The days of being able to do everything are long gone.This is the lowest since the reign of George IV–and then we had a navy capable of seeing off any possible combination of forces. What galls me more is that the Coalition thinks that cooing over how it's time for us to give up our independence to our European
Welcome to Britain: Three main political parties, none of whom back their own country.
5 comments:
Is this 2011- or 1931?
What I'm hearing is unilateral disarmament as a "path to Eternal Peace". All that's missing is some lot of academic balloon-brains resolving that "this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country", as Oxford Union did in 1933. (Yes, I'm reading Churchill's "The Gathering Storm" right now.)
Well, it's true that "Eternal Peace" can be achieved this way. But it's the eternal peace of the grave. Maybe that's what the "enlightened ones" really want.
Or maybe they're just hoping that the "brutal Others" will get rid of the rest of us, so they can display clean hands once it's all over. Because of course those Others will never, ever hurt the "elite'"- they'll recognize the elite's innate superiority, bow before them, and beg them to run the Brave New World.
Won't they?
cheers
eon
A kind of solipsism, I think, eon. I have lived among the Big Brains Tribe since grad school, and I think, have started to earn its trust. I believe that the thinking is: "The only reason he is armed is he fears my weapons. If we were to reduce our weapons to say, one pea shooter apiece, we would have just as much mutual deterrent capability (not that we'd ever use it), and could spend the money on other things. Like Planned Cities. And Light Rail." The only thing wrong with this, of course, is reality.
Peace in our times! Hurrah!
Sergej;
Hm. That was exactly the reasoning that Baldwin, MacDonald, and Chamberlain used to not modernize the armed forces in 1931-37. "If we have no more than Germany, Germany will not build up." And Churchill became their least favorite person by constantly pointing out the fallacy of the theory on the floor of Commons.
Germany pointed it out to them even more emphatically in France in May and June of 1940.
cheers
eon
Really? I'll admit that the only clowns whose sayings I keep at the front of my mind are the Three Stooges, so I did not know that this kind of thinking has such a distinguished pedigree. Chamberlain himself, huh?
Sergej;
The whole point of the Baldwin-Macdonald-Chamberlain menage's attitude toward defense spending was that if everyone else "drew down" to where Germany was left by the Versailles Treaty in 1919-20, war in Europe would become impossible- and they'd have all that lovely tax money to spend on social programs, which Chamberlain openly said was Britain's "path to true greatness".
Which was why he resisted any efforts to modernize the RAF or RN until it became unavoidable after Czechoslovakia- and even then, he was spending far less on RAF upgrading than he claimed, which he got away with until some high-rankers started "talking out of school".
The result of course was Lord Swinton being "officially" sacked as Air Minister; the real story is that he resigned because Chamberlain was telling him to lie to Commons about what was actually being spent (about half what Chamberlain was claiming in official reports).
Pacifism always has the same dogmas. And they always end up causing a lot of innocent people to end up dead, at the hands of not-so-innocent people who aren't pacifists.
cheers
eon
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