Monday, June 09, 2008

Humbug Goes Fabuuuulous!

Prepare for hysteria: a senior Army officer has just slagged off gays.

Oops no - turns out its the other way round. Phew - guess the police can cancel the alert. Still, he does have a point - everyone knows real courage is slagging off your opponents while hiding behind hate crime laws.

But let's not let the obvious humbuggery of his position blind us to the deeper humbug. True, things have gone wrong in British military culture - see the frightened 15 for further details - but just who is it who spent years claiming that this whole 'warrior' thing was just a myth conjured up by a conspiracy of straight white males so they could keep all the defence money for themselves ?

Indeed, in so far as Everett displays both complete ignorance about the military, and a determination to lecture the troops nevertheless, he might just be the perfect pin-up boy for the liberal attitude to the Armed Forces. To paraphrase Ann Coulter, it's not like Royal Marines spend a lot of time commenting on West End shows, but the favour is never returned. Instead, the post-1997 Armed Forces have been given the Year Zero treatment and re-engineered along liberal lines, with all that that implies (see here for the latest example). At the same time, real soldiers have been defamed as thugs or idiots, or worse.

Hey, this isn't a hard thing to grasp: operate the Army under the same rules as HSBC, and end up hiring a load of bankers.

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