29-08-2015, 07:05 AM
I have no doubt he believed what he was saying at the time. Throughout history men and women have shown a remarkable ability to believe what is convenient for them to believe. The parable of the Emperor's New Robes perfectly explains the Iraq War. People are hardwired by evolution to believe what the rest of the tribe believes, irrespective of whether it makes sense. And they are perfectly capable of disbelieving the evidence of their senses to do this.
I remember a friend of mine around the time saying out of the blue, We've got to do something about Saddam Hussein, we can't let this go on any longer.' I looked at him aghast. Since when had he been thinking thoughts like that? The answer I knew was since everybody else started thinking them, i.e. in the past three months. In the rest of his previous existence he had never spared Saddam Hussein a second's thought.
It takes a communal epiphany for the tribe to change the beliefand then they all do like a shoal of fish changing direction. Such an epiphany took place with respect to Jimmy Savile after the Newsnight programme. Prior to that you would have been roundly scorned for suggesting we were ruled by a paedophile elite who tortured and murdered children. As everyone here knows, you would have been dismissed as a crazy moonbat conspiracy theorist. Now the tabloids and plodding cops routinely discuss such notions.
Add to this the fact that this was the moment the soldier had been waiting for all his life. Everything had been preparation for this, all those essays at Prep school on Caesar's Punic Wars, all that training in the officer's cadet force at public school, all those lectures on military ethics at Sandhurst… This was the one time in his life when he got to put it all into practice, to kill some bad guys in order to save the wider commonwealth and go down in history as a heroic liberator. After all, as Solzhenitsyn wisely observed, in order to do evil men must first believe they are doing good. You can't possibly send men into battle if you think they are doing it to safeguard the oil supplies on behalf of the world's ghastly paedophile elite. You can only do it if you are able to convince yourself that you are carrying the torch of truth and justice into the night and rescuing the poor common folk of Iraq from their tyrannical oppressor. No doubt he expected his men to be showered with flowers when the battle was over. Oh dear. I guess he should have read his military history with a more circumspect eye.
I remember a friend of mine around the time saying out of the blue, We've got to do something about Saddam Hussein, we can't let this go on any longer.' I looked at him aghast. Since when had he been thinking thoughts like that? The answer I knew was since everybody else started thinking them, i.e. in the past three months. In the rest of his previous existence he had never spared Saddam Hussein a second's thought.
It takes a communal epiphany for the tribe to change the beliefand then they all do like a shoal of fish changing direction. Such an epiphany took place with respect to Jimmy Savile after the Newsnight programme. Prior to that you would have been roundly scorned for suggesting we were ruled by a paedophile elite who tortured and murdered children. As everyone here knows, you would have been dismissed as a crazy moonbat conspiracy theorist. Now the tabloids and plodding cops routinely discuss such notions.
Add to this the fact that this was the moment the soldier had been waiting for all his life. Everything had been preparation for this, all those essays at Prep school on Caesar's Punic Wars, all that training in the officer's cadet force at public school, all those lectures on military ethics at Sandhurst… This was the one time in his life when he got to put it all into practice, to kill some bad guys in order to save the wider commonwealth and go down in history as a heroic liberator. After all, as Solzhenitsyn wisely observed, in order to do evil men must first believe they are doing good. You can't possibly send men into battle if you think they are doing it to safeguard the oil supplies on behalf of the world's ghastly paedophile elite. You can only do it if you are able to convince yourself that you are carrying the torch of truth and justice into the night and rescuing the poor common folk of Iraq from their tyrannical oppressor. No doubt he expected his men to be showered with flowers when the battle was over. Oh dear. I guess he should have read his military history with a more circumspect eye.