Monday, December 04, 2006
I guess you call this progress
The BBC is reporting that the army is going round schools in deprived parts of Wales to find recruits sorry raise awareness. Quite why the army cannot appeal to heart of patriotic english men at Eton or other less famous public (ie public for the extremely rich) schools is beyond me. Would it per chance be that the scions of the modern plutocracy have bigger plans for themselves than getting shot?
Back in the Forst World War the son of the Liberal Prime Minister H H Asquith was killed in the trenches of the western front. Would such a thing happen today. Not likely. With a small volunteer army the armed forces need fewer recruits and with pay levels that are not stunning for the risks that they sometimes run the well connected steer clear of military service, only the royal family is carrying on this tradition and it appears this is for ceremonial duties only despite the protestations of the young prince's that they want to go with their troops.
This reminded me of two things. Firstly the fact that no US congressman has a one of their kids in harms way in Iraq and second an argument in a book called Virtual War by the Canadian thinker and now Liberal MP Michael Ignatieff which argued that with all this modern technology in military equipment used by advanced western counties the risks they were running were now reduced so that war to the West especially the western publics was more like a video game
Instead of the mechanised slaughter that we saw in the first half of the last century we are in a time when war is fought in distant lands by, for political leaders at least, other peoples flesh and blood. It's almost reminiscent of the old fashioned imperialism the machine gun against the sharpend mango fruit but now we have laser guidance.
I guess this is what they call progress ¶ 11:15 am
Back in the Forst World War the son of the Liberal Prime Minister H H Asquith was killed in the trenches of the western front. Would such a thing happen today. Not likely. With a small volunteer army the armed forces need fewer recruits and with pay levels that are not stunning for the risks that they sometimes run the well connected steer clear of military service, only the royal family is carrying on this tradition and it appears this is for ceremonial duties only despite the protestations of the young prince's that they want to go with their troops.
This reminded me of two things. Firstly the fact that no US congressman has a one of their kids in harms way in Iraq and second an argument in a book called Virtual War by the Canadian thinker and now Liberal MP Michael Ignatieff which argued that with all this modern technology in military equipment used by advanced western counties the risks they were running were now reduced so that war to the West especially the western publics was more like a video game
Instead of the mechanised slaughter that we saw in the first half of the last century we are in a time when war is fought in distant lands by, for political leaders at least, other peoples flesh and blood. It's almost reminiscent of the old fashioned imperialism the machine gun against the sharpend mango fruit but now we have laser guidance.
I guess this is what they call progress ¶ 11:15 am
