Last updated at 8:57 AM on 02nd August 2009 How strange it is to be marking the death of Harry Patch, the last straggler of the First World War, in the same week that we see yet another sad procession of coffins come home from Afghanistan. And not only coffins. The return of the grievously maimed is in many ways harder to cope with – as is the Government’s shameful attempt to wriggle out of its obligations to them. Note this. The millions of Great War dead and the casualties of Helmand are all victims of Left-wing idealist governments, blundering into war out of weakness and vanity. Herbert Asquith’s Liberals were militant constitutional vandals – like New Labour – and pioneers of the welfare state. Like New Labour, they fooled the country into a disastrous war whose end they could not see. How strange it is to be marking the death of Harry Patch in the same week that we see yet another sad procession of coffins come home from Afghanistan I am now quite sure that we would have been better off staying out of the 1914 war, that it ended our Empire, handed over world leadership to the USA, greatly advanced the misguided cause of socialism and the power of the state, nearly bankrupted us and wiped out the brightest and best of all classes in a way that still affects us. And yet it is also the greatest single demonstration of selfless sacrifice in the modern world. No wonder the sound of the Last Post still makes us weep. It is the contrast between the clean, upright, honest courage of the soldiers and the mean, small-minded trickery of the politicians that makes the whole thing so hard to bear. How is it that men such as Bob Ainsworth, a trade union plodder whose official spokesperson recently told me on the record that Mr Ainsworth attended meetings of the revolutionary International Marxist Group in his 30s (but refused to elaborate), end up in charge of the best men and women in Britain? The answer, alas, is that we have a political system under which we allow ourselves to be bribed by mountebanks with our own money. Good, wise, competent and patriotic people steer clear of this haunted swamp, or are destroyed if they try to enter it. Year by year, it brings more and more sordid, trivial and unworthy people into Government. Perhaps it could have worked if so many potential leaders, teachers, scientists, engineers, poets, thinkers and good family men had not volunteered for early death in 1914, or been compelled into the trenches in 1916. Maybe it might have survived if we had not wrecked our state education system. As it is, we are in a process of decline so steep that one day we will look back on Bob Ainsworth and Gordon Brown with nostalgia. Some unfortunate children are being subjected to an Atheist Summer Camp. I hope it rains and rains and rains. But they have another problem. Professor Richard Dawkins is said to be in favour of this. Yet Professor Dawkins said recently: ‘What I really object to – and I think it’s actually abusive to children – is to take a tiny child and say “You are a Christian child” or “You are a Muslim child”. I think it is wicked if children are told “You are a member of such and such a faith simply because your parents are.”’ Why then is it all right to tell a child it should be an atheist?Harry Patch didn't go to war so Plodder Bob could give the orders
More from Peter Hitchens...
I hope it rains on Professor Dawkins’ atheist summer
Read more:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1203668/PETER-HITCHENS-Harry-Patch-didnt-war-Plodder-Bob-orders.html#ixzz0N0sp1EG5
Sunday, 2 August 2009
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