The aim of this blog is to amuse and entertain, and occasionally inform and educate. Sometimes that means being deadly serious, which doesn’t come naturally to me. However, today is one of those days. If you read No 224 you will know about my Ukrainian friend who works locally. I visited Hudson’s again today, as I do most days and she was looking tragically sad. Her daughter and family have decided to leave Ukraine but it is a hazardous and daunting journey that they face and who knows where they may end up. It seems even train journeys are dangerous, with the Russians quite prepared to attack innocent women and children. I wondered how Russian soldiers could possibly carry out such wicked acts against fellow russian speakers? She told me this story. “I have heard of a family of grandparents, with their daughter and grandchildren cowering in a basement when the Russians found them and dragged them outside. The officer in charge ordered his men to shoot them. In cold blood. The men refused, so the officer shot one soldier dead and wounded the other. The family were then shot dead. If you listen to the captured Russian soldiers” she explained, “they will tell you, if they disobey, they will be shot by their own officers”. Those who fail to learn the lessons of history, will merely watch history repeat itself. You hear so many people saying “how could this be happening in the 21st Century, in this modern, enlightened era”. What makes the 21st Century so special?! Henry VIII lived in a “modern era”. So did Gengis Khan, Alexander the Great, Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein. While the West enjoyed the so-called Peace Dividend and ran our armed forces down, Russia, China, North Korea and others have been spending our money on huge re-armament and expansion of their military might. To what purpose? Just to make them feel good? The comparisons with 1938/39 are obvious. For Germany, Italy and Japan read Russia, China and North Korea. The huge difference now is that all sides have massive nuclear capabilities. Regardless, can we any longer stand aside and let the barbarians do their horrific work? It now feels almost certain that we are staring down the gun barrel at a Third World War, incomprehensible as it may seem. Would it not be better to strike back now, before the bloodied killing fields of Ukraine are but the first step of further Russian expansionism? I genuinely believe that now is the time that NATO must act.
Our “leaders”, for want of a better word, had better understand quickly that we need to re-arm very rapidly indeed. That means spending perhaps 10% of GDP on defence; an emergency expansion of the army, navy and air force with huge expenditure on new armaments, weapons systems, aircraft and ships, not to mention personnel. It may already be too late but if we don’t act NOW, we are faced with a very bleak future.
To give you an idea of the uphill battle we face, this was the banner headline on the front page of The Sun newspaper yesterday, a tabloid rag with a large national readership:
Drunk Putin Drag Queen Banned from Bingo
With every other national newspaper showing ghastly pictures with stories of the unfolding horror in Ukraine, some genius at The Sun thought that was appropriate.
If we as a nation don’t wake up and smell the coffee right now, life as we have known it might be gone forever.
ADayInTheStrifeOf 