Former BBC Newsnight diplomatic editor Mark Urban covered wars in Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. He has written books with titles like ‘Generals: Ten British Commanders Who Shaped the World’, ‘Rifles: Six Years with Wellington’s Legendary Sharpshooters’ and ‘The Tank War: The British Band of Brothers’. He has also served in the Royal Tank Regiment and the Territorial Army.

In other words, on questions of war, diplomacy, pacifism and the mystical power of unconditional love, Urban is entirely neutral.

We would do well, then, to take stock when Urban expresses concern on related matters. Last month, he wrote on X:

‘Disturbing: new survey shows that 41% of 18-27 year olds would not fight for the UK under any circumstances, only 11% say they would defend their country.’

‘Disturbing’? Marvellous? A glimmer of hope that humanity might finally awaken from ‘the nightmare of history’?

A similar survey in 2004 had found that 22 percent of 18–27-year-olds said they would fight and only 19 per cent said, ‘I would not’.

Thanks to social media, Urban, who now writes for the Sunday Times, is no longer entirely protected from criticism. Carole Hawkins nudged him in the direction of reality:

‘Cannon fodder for corrupt establishments – we’ve seen the homeless ex military personnel, we’ve read and heard the stories of soldiers who have lost limbs/eyes etc and the fight and hoops they have to jump through to get compensation that is tiered so why would anyone want to enlist – it doesn’t make sense’

Tim Spencer noted wryly:

‘I would be right behind you on the front lines, making sure you do your duty’

Clearly piqued, Urban replied:

‘not sure of your point Tim. I did serve in the army and had a reserve obligation until I was 35 IIRC [if I recall correctly]. I’m over the age that they’d take now, but in a national emergency would try to help out. Wouldn’t you?’

A ‘national emergency’ ‘to help’ a Rishi Sunak? Or… a Boris Johnson? Or even a Liz Truss?! Of course, we can lose ourselves in glorious memories of the past, but are these political hillocks we are literally willing to die on?

This month, prime minister Sir Keir Starmer commented on a European ‘peace plan’ for Ukraine:

‘The UK is prepared to back this with boots on the ground and planes in the air, together with others.’

Interestingly, the prospect of UK boots and planes in Ukraine was precisely Russia’s claimed motive for its invasion… sorry, its ‘full-scale’, ‘unprovoked’ invasion. Even former BBC journalist Andrew Neil, in a fiercely pro-Starmer piece, observed of Putin: ‘In some ways, that is his worst nightmare.’

So, for British soldiers and British civilians facing a conventional war and a potential thermonuclear exchange, the question arises: Are you willing to fight and die for Sir Keir Starmer?

After all, the Roman poet, Horace, famously declared:

‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.’

In translation:

‘It is sweet and fitting to die for the homeland.’

No doubt, some of the 172 US and UK troops who died in the full-scale, unprovoked, illegal, 2003 US-UK invasion of Iraq would have been greatly impressed by then US under-secretary for arms control, John Bolton. With his beetling white moustache, tough guy demeanour and pro-war rhetoric, Bolton was a fixture on US media and UK programmes like the BBC’s Newsnight. As the US mobilised for war in September 2002, he said of Iraq:

‘You don’t have to wait for a mushroom cloud before you take appropriate action.’ (Bolton, quoted, Ian Traynor, ‘Kremlin gives short shrift to US hawk over Iraq’, The Guardian, 12 September 2002)

In reality, US-UK government officials knew that Iraq had no nuclear weapons, not even a nuclear weapons programme; the claim was a complete fabrication.

Bolton was Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser from 2016-2018. Last year, Trump described him as ‘an idiot’, ‘a nutjob’, supplying some context:

‘And every time I had to deal with a country when they saw this whack job standing behind me, they said: “Oh man, Trump’s going to go to war with us.” He was with Bush when they went stupidly into the Middle East.’

Were Bolton, George W. Bush and Tony Blair people worth dying for?

Ian Kershaw noted in his biography of Adolf Hitler that in the early part of the Second World War, when challenged on the loss, thus far, of 200,000 German lives, Hitler‘s response was that ‘he had enlarged the German nation by 2 ½ million, and felt justified in demanding the sacrifice of the lives of a tenth’. (Ian Kershaw, ‘Hitler: Nemesis’, W.W. Norton, 2000, p.404)

If that sounds harsh, consider the underlying Weltanschauung informing Hitler’s demand:

‘Life is horrible (grausam). Coming into being, existing, and passing away, there’s always a killing (ein Toten). Everything that is born must later die. Whether it’s through illness, accident, or war, that remains the same.’ (Kershaw, p.404)

Was this person, cause and cod philosophy ‘worth the healthy bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier’?

Critics might argue it is grotesque to compare the merits of fighting for totalitarian Germany to those of democratic Britain. But in the 1930s, the anarchist writer Rudolf Rocker warned against patriotic complacency in asserting the unique virtue of the nation we happen to have been born in:

‘…the continued glorification of a man’s own nation to the derogation of all others affects one as utterly silly and childish, provided one still has feelings for such things. Let us think of a man who misses no opportunity to parade himself as the very paragon of wisdom, talent and virtue, and while thus burning incense to himself disparages all others and treats them as inferiors. One would certainly take him for a vain booby or an imbecile and treat him accordingly’. (Rocker, ‘Culture and Nationalism,’ Michael E. Coughlan, 1978, p.441)

And indeed, we would do well to reflect on the fact that Hitler’s great inspiration for his Third Reich was the British Empire.

In June 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, launching an out-and-out race war intended to create ‘lebensraum’, or ‘living space’, for the German people at the expense of local people deemed sub-human ‘Untermensch’. Kershaw wrote of Hitler:

‘His inspiration for the future rule of his master-race was the Raj. He voiced his admiration on many occasions for the way such a small country as Great Britain had been able to establish its rule throughout the world in a huge colonial empire. British rule in India in particular showed what Germany could do in Russia. It must be possible to control the eastern territory with a quarter of a million men, he stated. With that number the British ruled 400 million Indians.’ (Kershaw, p.401)

Contemporaries of Hitler described his vision:

‘Russia would always be dominated by German rulers. They must see to it that the masses were educated to do no more than read road signs, though a reasonable living standard for them was in the German interest.

‘The south of the Ukraine, in particular the Crimea, would be settled by German farmer-soldiers. He would have no worries at all about deporting the existing population somewhere or other to make room for them…

‘German peasants would live in beautiful settlements, linked by good roads to the nearest town. Beyond this would be “the other world” where the Russians lived under German subjugation.’ (Kershaw, pp.470-1)

Hitler declared:

‘What India was for England, the eastern territory will be for us.’ (Kershaw, p.402)

‘If Thou Gaze Long Into An Abyss…’

The Second World War is, of course, offered as the ultimate case for the argument that we should agree to kill and be killed for our country. Since 1945, barstools the world over have hosted the same counterargument:

‘If we had all refused to fight between 1939-1945, würden wir alle Deutsch sprechen, because Hitler would have conquered the world and destroyed civilisation. Sometimes, people just have to step up to the plate, make the sacrifice and defeat Evil.’

In fact, if everyone had refused to fight, Hitler would have cut a lonely figure rambling around Europe on his own. But anyway, to what extent did the sacrifice of 50 million lives in the Second World War actually contribute to the defeat of fascism, violence and ‘Evil’?

The historian Howard Zinn, who fought in the war, pointed out that while the Allies certainly defeated Hitler’s regime, they did not defeat fascistic militarism:

‘Yes, we were right to celebrate. Hitler was dead, the Japanese military machine was destroyed, Mussolini was hanging in a town square. But, looking at the world after the war, was Fascism really defeated? The elements of Fascism —totalitarianism, racism — were still alive all over the world. Was militarism defeated? No, there were now two superpowers, armed with thousands of nuclear weapons, which if used would make Hitler’s holocaust look insignificant. And after fifty million died in World War II, was this the end of war? No, wars continued over the next decades, and tens of millions of people died in these wars.’ (Zinn, ‘Howard Zinn Speaks: Collected Speeches, 1963-2009’, Haymarket Books, 2012, p.197)

Moreover, as Zinn noted, the resort to total war to defeat fascism gave birth to a post-war, Western military-industrial complex with a deep investment in war and yet more war:

‘I came to the conclusion that war, even a victorious war over an evil enemy, as in the war against Fascism, is a quick fix, like a drug, which gives you a rush of euphoria, but when it wears away you are back in the depths and you must have another fix, another war. Yes, war is an addiction that we must decide to break, for the sake of the children of the world.’ (p.197)

As Zinn noted, fighting Nazism had the ironic effect of deeply embedding militarism and violence in Western societies:

‘Examine the wars fought by my government, the United States. In Korea, three million people dead, after ferocious bombing and the use of napalm. In Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, another three million dead.’ (Zinn, op.cit., p.198)

The insanity has continued to this day, with devastating wars of first resort against Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. The West did everything it could to provoke a devastating war with Russia in Ukraine and has armed and supported Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. British historian Mark Curtis summarised the aftermath of fighting fire with fire in the Second World War:

‘Since 1945, rather than occasionally deviating from the promotion of peace, democracy human rights and economic development in the Third World, British (and US) foreign policy has been systematically opposed to them, whether the Conservatives or Labour (or Republicans or Democrats) have been in power. This has had grave consequences for those on the receiving end of Western policies abroad.’ (Curtis, ‘The Ambiguities of Power – British Foreign Policy Since 1945’, Zed Books, 1995, p.3)

Nothing captures the irony of post-war history better than Friedrich Nietzsche’s observation:

‘He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.’ (Nietzsche, ‘Beyond Good and Evil’, Dover Publications, 1997, p.52)

The fascist political systems the Allies defeated were indeed ‘monsters’, but the ‘good guys’ have spent subsequent decades fighting wars for resources, primarily oil, which look like they will literally cost us the Earth.

Allied soldiers in the Second World War could not foresee that they were fighting for a state-corporate system that would feature senior oil company executives deliberately hiding the fact that, in the 1970s, their own company scientists had fully understood and warned of the dire threat of climate change from the burning of fossil fuels. Noam Chomsky argues that the ‘Drill, baby, drill!’ mentality of the fanatically climate-denying US Republican Party, currently the US Government, makes it ‘the most dangerous organisation in human history’. Chomsky expanded:

‘I don’t know what word in the language – I can’t find one – that applies to people of that kind, who are willing to sacrifice the literal… the existence of organized human life, not in the distant future, so they can put a few more dollars in highly overstuffed pockets. The word “evil” doesn’t begin to approach it.’

How much of a ‘Just Cause’ was it to kill and be killed for a political and economic system that would send the entire species hurtling into the environmental abyss less than 100 years later? Hitler killed millions in the name of Nazism; fossil fuel executives may kill billions in the name of capitalism.

The idea that we should lay down our lives for the state stretches back at least to Plato, who put our supposed obligation to the state into the mouth of Socrates:

‘In war, and in the court of justice, and everywhere, you must do whatever your state and your country tell you to do, or you must persuade them that their commands are unjust.’ (Zinn, ‘Collected Speeches’, op.cit., p.187)

The Indian mystic Osho provided a useful cut-out-and-keep argument for anyone likely to face such an injunction:

‘In my final years in the university, in India, a law was imposed on all the university students that everybody had to take army training. I went to the vice-chancellor and said, “I cannot follow this law. If there is any punishment, I am ready for it.”

‘“But,” he said to me, “you have a responsibility towards the motherland.”

‘I said, “Don’t talk nonsense to me. The whole earth is mine, so why should I have responsibility only to this small piece of land? And on what grounds have you divided it? Who are you to divide the earth into lands and then impose the idea of responsibility?

‘“I am responsible towards existence. I am not responsible to any nation, to any political division… I don’t have any responsibility for any piece of land. And you have to prove on what grounds and on what authority I have any responsibility to any part of the land.

‘“Just a few years before, I was responsible to the land which is now Pakistan. Now I am not responsible to it. It was my mother country; now it no longer is. Bangladesh was my responsibility; now it no longer is. So what guarantee is there? – I may die for this land, and tomorrow it may not even be my motherland?”’

If we like, we can give ground and say, ‘Even if it was uniquely right to fight to stop Hitler in 1939, we have to subject every other alleged “just war” to careful scrutiny.’

And when we do, we find that essentially all of the alleged ‘threats’ and ‘just causes’ of our time, of this time, are deceptions generated by a deeply corrupt, profit-driven, Western war machine functioning on automatic, selecting ‘leaders’ who are, in fact, followers whose prime purpose is to sell The Lie to the public. Empire Files journalist Abby Martin captured it exactly:

‘For my entire life, I’ve watched the corporate media sell us war after war, always telling us who our enemies are, which countries need saving, and which governments should be overthrown. And every single time, it turns out they lied.’

Lies are not worth dying for.

---