There comes a moment in the life of any self-respecting nation when its leaders, having exhausted the usual repertoire of excuses for incompetence, discover that nothing quite concentrates the public mind like the prospect of sending other people’s sons to be blown to pieces. Britain appears to have reached that moment with the quiet efficiency of a man discovering a forgotten bottle of sherry and deciding it will do for breakfast.
The decision, we are told in the more elevated tones of Whitehall, has already been taken somewhere in the digestive tract of the British establishment: direct conflict with Russia is on the cards. The only remaining task is to frighten the rest of us into regarding this as either a jolly good idea or, at the very least, the sort of weather one simply has to put up with.
It is the old march to 1914, only this time the brass bands have been replaced by solemn briefings and the recruiting posters feature fewer moustaches and more PowerPoint slides. Then, as now, a surprising number of those who once called themselves the left will discover an unexpected fondness for the national colours. Patriotism, it turns out, is the last refuge of the progressive who has run out of progressive things to say.
They will go along to get along, muttering about solidarity while the generals, the arms manufacturers and the perennial products of Eton prepare to play their favourite game: the one in which young men from the housing estates and the schemes are invited to demonstrate their civic virtue by becoming pawns.
These young men, it must be conceded, have been admirably prepared for the role. Looking out from their estates upon a future that consists largely of the absence of one, they present the authorities with a ready supply of willing volunteers—or, if willingness proves insufficient, of young men who can be persuaded that refusal is somehow unpatriotic. Conscription, whether formal or the softer kind that arrives by way of economic desperation and relentless messaging, has always relied on this convenient coincidence of hopelessness and hierarchy. The system that has created far more problems than it could ever solve now finds itself in need of a war to keep the lid on.
Eduardo Galeano put it with characteristic economy: the marketplace of fear requires a steady supply of monsters. Putin’s Russia has been cast in the role with all the subtlety of a pantomime villain. Once upon a time parents warned naughty children that the bogeyman would come; now the same service is performed by politicians who assure us the Russians are coming unless we do as we are told.
The enemy without, of course, is useful chiefly for the control it offers within. It is not Moscow that truly keeps the establishment awake at night so much as the low, persistent murmur of domestic discontent. War fever has the great advantage of turning that murmur into a more manageable roar of martial enthusiasm.
We have been here before. They lied to us about Yugoslavia. They lied to us about Iraq. They lied to us about Libya. They lied to us about Syria. The pattern is so consistent that one begins to suspect it is less a series of unfortunate errors than a governing principle. To believe the current version of events requires a capacity for selective amnesia that would be impressive in a goldfish.
Siegfried Sassoon, who knew something about the difference between the recruiting office and the trench, described war as the hell where youth and laughter go. The observation has not aged. The fight that matters now is the one that prevents the youth of this generation from being packed off into the same hell that claimed the youth of his.
Conscription—whether by legal instrument or by the quieter coercion of narrative and necessity—is the mechanism by which that packing is achieved. It takes young men who have already been short-changed by the economy and invites them to settle the remaining debt with their lives. The generals will speak of duty; the manufacturers will speak of readiness; the politicians will speak of inevitability. The young men themselves will be expected to speak very little at all.
There is a certain dry comedy in watching a political class that can scarcely organise a reliable train service suddenly discover the moral clarity required for continental war. The comedy, however, is of the sort that ends with someone else paying the bill. Never again is not a slogan for the history books; it is a practical instruction for the present.
The young men on the estates and the schemes have already been offered a future of no future. They should not be asked to improve upon that offer by dying for it.