PETER HITCHENS: If we don’t want death, blackouts, and busybodies in every corner of our lives, end this brainless march to war

Are we the bad guys? What if the war in Ukraine is just as stupid and wrong as the war in Iraq, but state propaganda has been more successful and almost no one has realized it… until now?

To this day, many people still think that the damaging and morally dubious Western attacks on Serbia and Libya were justified. Many still think that the bloody attempt to destroy Syria was a good thing. It took centuries for opinion on the war in Vietnam to change in the 1960s. And as someone who opposed the Iraq War, I remember all too well how many people (who now think they were against it all along) were fooled into supporting Sir Anthony Blair and George W. Bush.

The issue is becoming more urgent as generals and admirals warn that we must live in a militarized society and prepare for what they think is an inevitable war against Russia. They could have their way. If you continue to support these policies, you could be condemning yourself and your children or grandchildren to a world of war, deprivation and perhaps conscription.

Wars mean death and wounds. They mean shortages, rationing, power cuts, travel restrictions, meddling people interfering in every aspect of life, and much more power. Not to mention the danger: missiles today have an astonishing range. What exactly would this be for?

This is what I was never able to work out. We have a Defense Secretary, Grant Shapps, who has perfected the art of shouting loudly while holding a very small baton – thundering, belligerent declarations as our armed forces melt away thanks to neglect and poorly targeted spending. Perhaps, if the long-feared Russian invasion of Western Europe comes to pass, we can fend it off by sending our troops on the pernicious e-scooters and e-bikes that are this former Transport Minister’s main contribution to the nation.

Certainly, these vehicles are terrifying to those who don’t drive them. They almost killed me more than once. And piled in heaps, they pose formidable obstacles, as the people of London are finding out.

What Mr Shapps does not seem to understand is that Britain has become great by staying out of continental conflicts and letting others do the fighting. Even in the fight against Bonaparte, we paid our European allies to do most of the hard work.

Our greatness ended when bombastic moralism took over in 1914. We plunged, supposedly nobly, into a Russo-German war. Within two years we were bankrupt and robbed of the prime of our young manhood.

People still refuse to believe me when I accurately say that Britain has not paid off its huge 1914-1918 war debts (now worth around £40 billion) to the US. But I promise you it’s true.

Four years of terrible losses left the Russo-German problem unresolved and in 1939 we had to do it all again. Then we were even more bankrupt and had to ration bread in 1946, just like a desperate People’s Republic. But for many years afterward, we were largely ruled by adults who had fought in real wars and been injured, and seen death very closely, or endured bombings and a war economy. And so we largely stayed out of major foreign problems.

Defense Secretary Grant Shapps has perfected the art of shouting loudly while holding a tiny baton – thunderous, belligerent declarations as our armed forces melt away

But those adults retired and died, and instead a new generation, a kind of children’s crusade, took over. Strangely enough, they were not warlike in the traditional way.

It is known that Bill Clinton did not serve in the Vietnam War. Sir Anthony Blair doesn’t have a military muscle in his body. One of his defense ministers was a former communist from the invasion-prone Brezhnev era. Another was a “candidate member” of the International Marxist Group, a faction that used to shout “Victory to the IRA!” called out. So I guess that’s at least a little bit military.

George W. Bush spent the Vietnam War era at home in the Air National Guard, courageously defending Texas against Oklahoma, or something like that.

That other great war drum, future Vice President Dick Cheney, said of the Vietnam period, when he could have served in the armed forces, “I had priorities other than military service in the 1960s.”

Me, too. I can’t resist making a small comment here about my late brother Christopher, who became an outspoken supporter of US foreign wars after 2001. He made ingenious and successful attempts to escape the marching, shoe-shining and general boredom of the Combined Cadet Force at a school we both attended. It concerned a knee problem from which he later seemed to have fully recovered. I’m not complaining. I too managed to slip out, through the loophole he created.

But since the Yugoslav wars we have seen the following pattern. A foreign ruler is portrayed as a ‘new Hitler’, and generally as a ‘fascist’. This was said all the time about Saddam Hussein in Iraq, who in my opinion was just an ordinary third world dictator, with no political convictions other than the need to stay in power.

Slobodan Milosevic, the little ex-communist bully who came to rule tiny Serbia, was also compared to the powerful German dictator. People demonstrating in their hundreds of thousands against the war in Iraq were mocked by Blairites for trying to keep a ‘fascist dictator’ in power.

And anyone who said war could be wrong was also accused of ‘appeasement’ and equated with Neville Chamberlain, the man who caved to Hitler in Munich in 1938. I get this all the time when I oppose these wars, as I do. I am also accused of being like Lord Haw Haw, the Irish fascist William Joyce who broadcast pro-Hitler propaganda from Berlin during World War II.

Well, anyone who knows anything about Europe in 1938, or even Europe today (as I do), also realizes that these comparisons are pathetically misleading. But almost no one knows. The current cheerleaders for the war are all singing the praises of Ukraine, the brave, the powerful, the free, the democratic, while we insist on continuing the war and dismiss any form of peace as “capitulation.”

The war that bankrupt Britain has struggled to sustain has killed, maimed and disfigured unknown tens of thousands of young Ukrainian men, destroyed cities and devastated the Ukrainian economy. (Pictured: Military graves at a cemetery in Kharkiv)

The war that (in my opinion) the US has provoked in this region has been a disaster for the Ukrainian people. (Pictured: a destroyed apartment building in Donetsk Oblast)

Ukraine is in fact a corrupt and poorly governed state, riven by incompetence and waste, with little political freedom, weak media and no real opposition. In this respect it is very similar to Russia, except that Russia has oil and gas.

There are more flaws that I won’t go into here. And the war that (in my opinion) the US has provoked in this region has been a disaster for the Ukrainian people. This is highlighted in a report in the left-wing and pro-war New Statesman this weekend.

The eminent Ukrainian novelist Andrei Kurkov has given a clearer and truer picture of the state of the country he clearly loves than I have seen from any Western reporter. Mr. Kurkov is a Ukrainian patriot, loyal to his nation. And this ensures that he is honest.

Among many other notable things, he notes that “about 700,000 Ukrainians required for military service have crossed the border since the start of the war on February 24, 2022. This is more than the number of Ukrainian soldiers at the front. These male refugees are not coming home anytime soon.’

I hear many cheerful London media voices on radio and TV assuring me that the Ukrainians are still involved in this war. So why are they leaving the country in such numbers, sometimes dying along the way as they cross the closed border, rather than fighting in it?

The war that bankrupt Britain has gone to great lengths to keep going has killed, maimed and disfigured unknown tens of thousands of young Ukrainian men (the numbers of casualties are an official secret), destroyed cities and devastated the Ukrainian economy.

I have never known what British interest this serves and, perhaps more importantly, I do not see how Ukraine has benefited from it.

Can nothing stop this mindless march towards a new Great War?