It was my birthday on the
19th, and a couple of hours into the 20th Iraq was 'rocked', according to the
BBC. This further reinforces my growing conviction that the world really does revolve around myself, and that everything in it exists for my entertainment.
In this respect the war in Iraq is fantastic, and I applaud my government and that of the United States for allowing me to experience a proper, full-blown assault. I was too young to comprehend the Falklands War, bored stiff by the Gulf War, unmoved by the whole Balkans thing - both of the latter consisting of days of aerial bombardment followed by the news that we had won - but this war seems to be shaping up into something special. It has actual ground combat, with soldiers. The news footage of Baghdad in flames is visually stunning; the digital video making the multi-coloured smoke resemble special effects, like clouds of paint hanging in water. The green-tinted shots of soldiers driving through the desert will define war for a generation, and for children of the Cold War, we have final and absolute confirmation that Russia's influence on the world has evaporated away.
I was fortunate enough to grow up in a country which has generally been on the perpetrating side of war, rather than being a victim; neither Marxist guerrilla groups nor corrupt dictators blighted the UK during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. At no point did the LTTE kill me, and UNITA never burned my parents. (although I'm sure there are snobbish Trots who will argue that Margaret Thatcher was worse than Idi Amin - because of her corrosive pervasiveness, see, and for ensuring the survival of British Telecom - and that the Khmer Rouge are unfairly maligned, and so forth. I have no time for these people. George W. Bush is a terrible public speaker and he comes from Texas and he's common, but as far as I am concerned anybody who annoys Gore Vidal is a hero) I am both too unfit and too old to join the armed forces, and I suspect that I would be a rubbish soldier.
Consequently, my only experience of war during my formative years came from comics such as 'Warlord', 'Commando' and 'Battle', and from 'Kelly's Heroes' on the television. I learned to read so that I could read the 'Star Wars' novels, and even today I have a soft spot for books about moustachioed men stuffing damp socks in their armpits, and shitting in full view of other men, in DPM. War, for me, is entertainment. It's something that other people do, and then a few years later they write books about it, and some battles catch the public imagination, and some do not. Fads and fashions in historical fiction swell and fade; Bernard Montgomery was a hero in the UK during World War Two, but is now just a footnote, whilst for decades nobody in the West cared about the battles of Stalingrad and Berlin, until Anthony Beevor wrote chunky blockbusters about them. There hasn't yet been a book or film about the first Gulf War that's captured and moulded the public imagination; there were only a hundred hours of ground warfare and the coalition never lost a battle, never came close to losing.
So far, in the second Gulf War, four servicepeople have been confirmed lost in action, whilst almost twenty have been lost in helicopter accidents. In either of the World Wars that would have been an astonishingly low casualty rate for a single day, and helicopter crashes don't really count, as they happen all the time. Flying a few feet off the ground, sometimes in close formation, at night, in dust storms, it's a surprise that there aren't more. As for the Iraqi casualties, I didn't know or care about them when they were alive, and I certainly don't want to know them now that they're dead. Besides which, they might have grown up to be Hitler, in a future world, in which case it's a good job we killed them. And in any case I live in London, and people are killed on the street all the time, for their wallets, because they looked at somebody the wrong way, because they were in the wrong place. People get away with murder. Human life isn't valuable at all. It's no tragedy when civilians die; it happens all the time. In wars since time immemorial, except for a few hundred years before the 20th century, civilians have died like flies whenever there's a war. They're even had wars of their own. It pleases God to kill them. They do it to themselves.
The war itself has had the positive effect of causing the Left to lose its cool; for the first time in a generation they have shown themselves for what they are, a simmering ball of hate, an unreasonable, unthinking mob. Like those sci-fi killer robots that carry on fighting a war for centuries after their creators have died; like a chicken which carries on walking after its head has been cut off, the left wing have not yet realised their game is up. This will dent them, tarnish them, for a generation which has grown up with propaganda from the real axis of evil - the BBC, the EU, and the UN. Iran, North Korea, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, most of Africa; these countries are openly, obviously evil. They love it, and don't care who knows. They find it amusing that we pay them to continue to be evil. Unlike the aforementioned left-wing institutions they don't pretend to be an impartial force for good.
I don't know what form the Labour party will take after the war, but it's not going to be pretty. The mask of sanity it has worn since 1997 is slipping. As a child of all the above, and of the 80s, I can feel the shadows of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher falling over the land. We should embrace their darkness.
~
Just for fun, though, let's deconstruct the left-wing perspective on two pertinent issues:
Oil
1. The Earth's resources belong to all humanity;
2. Wealth and resources should be managed and distributed so as to be allocated to those most in need;
3. We in the West need oil more than Iraq, because we have more cars;
4. Therefore, by invading Iraq, we are simply redistributing the oil to those who need it most. If the Iraqis don't like this, they should adopt renewable energy sources, such as solar or wind power. Problem solved.
George Bush is stupid and also a bully
1. 50 Cent is both stupid and an actual, bona fide criminal;
2. He's also extremely rich and successful, and people listen to him when he says something. He's even more successful than the bullies you've looked up on 'Friends Reunited' who are managing IT projects in the Canary Islands;
3. Therefore we can conclude that ruffians make the world go around. If you aren't a ruffian yourself, you'll be crushed by somebody who is. And that will be the end of you and your viewpoint.