I read a post on Comment is Free just before Christmas, and figured I'd leave it alone just then as I didn't want to do anything to interrupt the build-up towards peace and goodwill. The post is not of any great significance in any case, but I like it for the neat illustration it provides of a mindset in which, when it comes to issues of war and peace, the assumption is fixed in stone that there is only one viable point of view and that the writer is in possession of it and everyone else but the malign forces of government would share it with him were they not being duped by those malign forces.
The post in question is by George Chesterton, who laments what he calls 'the militarisation of popular culture'. He does begin by giving their due to our '[d]edicated servicemen and women', but after that it's simply assumed that they should not be or have been in Afghanistan:
[I]t is our fault we allowed our politicians to send them to conflicts that served little purpose other than to cling on to some amorphous notion of national power. Now the debate about why they are still dying - and killing - in Afghanistan has disappeared from public life. Instead, an acceptance that the military is an agent for good has become the norm...
Note 'served little purpose' and deprecation of the notion that the military might be an agent for good. Note also, in what follows, his thought that 'we are being chaperoned [my emphasis] down this path amid economic gloom' and that 'the public have been taught to love [mine again] those who fight but not to hate the fact that they are still fighting'. Finally, there's the conclusion, 'it is our responsibility to stop the government sending them out to die in the first place'. What, regardless?
Reading this piece, it isn't just that one might disagree with him on certain points - as I do. It's his self-contained certainty that there's nothing to weigh on the other side of the question, nothing at any rate that merits being registered in order to supply an answer to it. The guy doesn't mention that Britain first went into Afghanistan in response to the attacks of 9/11 and did so with considerable public support; that one consequence was the overthrow of Taliban rule in that country, which has had some benefits for its people; or (at the end) that sometimes going to war is justified and necessary. The whole thing is framed as if George Chesterton just knows the truth and everyone else would be with him in recognizing it had they not been mistaught and mischaperoned.
