i'm not a stranger to war i served in afghanistan which was itself a particularly brutal conflict
but it is like a bar fight compared to what can happen if the nuclear powers escalate the war
which is currently playing out in ukraine it feels like the most dangerous situation
in my lifetime a nuclear threat a threat to everybody is very apparent it feels like we're
teetering on the edge of that and yet we have people who seem to be viewing it as a kind of
football match who are painting their faces and cheerleading where all kinds of particularly war
horny takes have been emerging about no-fly zones about different forms of intervention
it would be a cinch dawn to take them out you send in the raf it would take them an
hour and a half particular sets of journalists are always fairly war horny they have an ambient
level of war horniness because they think war is glamorous and cool absolutely bang that's
the day-to-day bringing you another tear on the face of the world's mother you're both at each
other's throats you're backing yourselves up with arms what are you gonna do about it
mr hawtry let me give you a hint bang you'd like me to say it i want you to say it yes you want the
word the word war war gentlemen i'll put you on hold that's it chris it's war war has broken up
this is war that's it yes it's war war is appealing for some journalists particularly
the journalists who haven't experienced it because with war can go a particular boost to your career
a higher level of attention more twitter followers more likes on twitter and i think that is a bad
metric by which to measure the the need for war i can remember people talking about donald trump
how he could start a nuclear war on twitter many of those same people of the blue tick species
are using the platform to lobby for a no-fly zone that could lead to nuclear war the kind of people
who would formulate themselves as the grown-ups in the room are treating the risk of nuclear war as
if it is just a kind of tit for tat in westminster or in washington dc this is not just labour source
says this is not just handbags in the house of commons this is not that this is bigger nuclear
war doesn't mean anything good for the world you could survive potentially but you wouldn't want
to we actually had some training about this when i was in the army we have to get talked up in our
nbc nuclear biological chemical warfare suits with respirators and we'd be made to run up and down
and occasionally would be cs gas and we'd be told how to survive a nuclear apocalypse the slogan
was used in the videos which were all from the 80s would survive to fight so you survive the nuclear
apocalypse the positive blast wave comes and you will lay down assuming you see it coming and then
you stay down for a bit because then the negative blast wave comes back and that passes over you
and then you are alive to fight and all i could think about during these training processes was
fight over what fight over the mutant wastelands become [ __ ] mad max and cut around in your
nissan micra or a ford escort with a gun on top what is there left that's the notion of mutually
assured destruction that everybody is destroyed i mean that's the underpinning thing everybody dies
the problem with twitter and twitter war hysteria and all the social media stuff guides you towards
just rapid urgent reaction it's very often a kind of appeal to emotion that something must be done
instantly and clearly things need to be done because people are dying in ukraine but i do think
we need to be cautious we need to be exercising reason rather than emotion i understand why there
are a set of people who are kind of like let's bomb the 40-mile convoy i understand why that
is an appealing idea that we can just go and stop that happening but we need to steer away from the
immediate emotional payoff and be reasoned doing that is an act of war on top of the war that's
already going and it would potentially escalate this it would bring into conflict one nuclear
power with another nuclear power and there is a bigger picture the biggest picture of all which
we have to consider here world war one kicked off when one guy was murdered and that led to 20
million deaths because it triggered a series of events which led to gigantic slaughter when you
look at wars historically there are domino effects and there are so many moving parts in the conflict
in ukraine and each part has its own range of moving parts so we have to be extremely careful
when we're talking about how we intervene and what can be done in our search for clarification
and clarity it may be the case there's more to be learned from the cold war warriors than
there is from the kind of keyboard warriors it's definitely worth revisiting what people
said who are involved in the periods of extreme tension between the old soviet bloc and the west
to preserve our civilization in this modern age a nuclear war cannot be won
and must never be fought i'm absolutely down with the ukrainian right to resist invasion it's a war
of aggression russia have invaded it's not their country and they should get out and i respect the
ukrainian right to resist i think we have to i think that's the moral position the russians
should go and leave the ukrainians decide their own future of course it's more complex than just
that there are lots of different moving parts nato has expanded east that for putin is used by him
to say nato is kind of pushing into our swear of influence and he talks about buffer zones at
the same time that does not justify what putin does and he doesn't justify the putin regime
we've heard a lot of stuff about that as of battalion and the national guard neo-nazi elements
to some degree were integrated into the ukrainian armed forces but the idea espoused by some on the
left that because they're a neo-nazis in ukraine somehow everyone in ukraine is in neo-nazi is
just wrong there are also other forces in ukraine there are various anarchists and progressive left
libertarian militias who resist russian occupation and fascist forces in ukraine i think if we're
interested in people's safety and security i think we have to look past this seductive thing
to kind of look to nato or look to russia and try and find on the nato side of kind of liberal
democratic values or on the russian side anti-imperialist or anti-fascist thing i think we
have to look for another narrative which doesn't internalize nato good or russia good i have to
have a much more sophisticated analysis of what's going on here i have no illusions as some census
commentators do that nato is kind of referendum or fbpe with guns and missiles it's not what it is
nato's interest is stability in the sense that it's stability for western capitalism the bosses
club wealthy nations who are the original founder members and then increasingly it's other countries
who've sought nato membership if they're countries which are in the kind of what would have been the
soviet sphere of influence i understand i can understand their rationale for wanting
to be involved in that because they've been occupied by the soviets but again i find myself
just increasingly calling for kind of nuance i have the dubious honor of having a nato medal
it's a little thing with a blue ribbon and it says in english and french in the service of peace and
freedom and always jumped out at me because i left it with my little cousin with my granddad's medal
which is a great war medal which says the war to end all wars and in both cases um that's not very
accurate my experience of nato is in afghanistan i was involved in the early stages of the nato
mission in afghanistan i understand and recognized nato's part in bringing huge amounts of violence
in afghanistan against afghan people i have comrades particularly who served in the royal
air force who were in italy attaching bombs to the fighters which would fly over and bomb libya
and destroy libya we can see the results in both those countries of nato's mission i suppose i find
myself in a weird position where i'm not a fan of nato and of putin's regime i don't see the need
to pick between these two polls while everyone's posturing and virtue signaling and doing their
uptakes on twitter the people who are dying here are working class russian conscripts and members
of the ukrainian military and ukrainian civilians that's the tragedy and all this there's an element
almost of smugness like brits and americans of all the people on the planet brits and americans
are kind of smugly looking on going oh he's going to get bogged down he's going to get bogged down
in the country get caught up in insurgency with people who don't want him it's like why are you
laughing about this you've literally just done this the kabul airlift was last year to 20 years
when you got booted out and historically this has happened all over the world so i'm not sure why
you're being so smug about it condoleezza rice was asked if you invade a sovereign country it's a war
crime when you invade a sovereign nation that is a war crime i mean i think we're at just a
real basic basic point there well it is certainly against every principle of international law and
international order you've done all those things yourself and never been held accountable and yet
you can just go on tv and say that at the level of just sheer neck to do that i guess part of
it is how these people have been reconditioned we kind of saw it with george bush where now he's a
harmless old man who just paints a bit rather than a war criminal we see with aleister campbell out
there tweeting away about how terrible vladimir putin is and he helped make the case for iraq
and it astonishes me that these people are still allowed on television and are not pariahs they
can just kind of nod along like they didn't do the same thing themselves easily within living memory
but this is happening in a civilized part of the world but this isn't a place with all due respect
um you know like iraq or afghanistan that has seen conflict raging for decades you know this is a
relatively civilized uh relatively european i have to choose those words carefully too a city where
you wouldn't expect that or hope that it's going to happen how could this happen here this is not
a developing third world nation this is europe but there's no reflection on like why in those places
which are uncivilized why there is conflict there or war there why there is authoritarianism and
dictatorship there and in many cases it's because they were colonised government were imposed
because they've been brutally oppressed because different sides have been played off against each
other funded by foreign powers i find myself in a strange position of of liking something before it
was cool being anti-war and now all of a sudden loads of people who've never uttered a word about
yemen or palestine or afghanistan are invoking like tony ben type speeches responsibility we
have too for our fellow citizens and for the human race wherever the war takes place and now we're on
the eve of nuclear warfare and that would be the end of the human race it could be a kind
of entry point for people to question wars more generally because the things which are happening
in ukraine now were done in iraq in some cases worst things over a much longer period i mean
we're six seven days into this illegal invasion by a foreign power and that is what happened in iraq
we had a weird spectacle of some very mainstream media channels almost celebrating how do you make
a molotov cocktail in five easy steps really glad you're able to join us because we want to
show you something that's pretty extraordinary actually they've sort of grated the styrofoam
and they're now putting it into the bottles the styrofoam works to make the molotov cocktail
sticky to help it stick to vehicles to other targets as well you can see them grating it it's
really quite extraordinary i have friends who are from derry in northern ireland and they're doing
that kind of you know that kind of monkey meme where it's awkward like people who lived through
british occupation who would be out throwing molotov cocktails and rocks at occupying troops
who were like oh this is cool now and i think you could take that lesson and extrapolate it and you
could look at palestine you could look at people resisting occupation in afghanistan and iraq and
a lot of those people are like what this is why was it not okay with where we did it and i think
that it's a fair point to make why is it that now it's celebrated in what our news pieces why it's
suddenly tolerable even good and moral to do that hello yeah we've come to um to join the ukrainian
army or whatever they're called what are they called tom we've seen a steady procession of
characters turning up at the ukrainian embassy jim bros with no military training going i want to go
and fight in ukraine fight putin for the insta for the instagram likes but i don't know maybe
like i understand there are other examples in the past of people going to spain to fight franco i
understand the motivation i would suggest if you have no military training it's probably a bad
idea i would stay at home and do like your back and buyers or whatever and there's a
broader point i think there to be made about i really agree with the solidarity that people are
showing ukraine i approve of them kicking russian teams at champions league i'm kind of down with a
lot of the sanctions and stuff but i can't help but question where that was for iraq where that
is for yemen where that is for palestine there's someone we really need to stop and and look at
there about why these degrees of solidarity and sanction are being applied applied to russia they
never tried to do that with tony blair and george bush in the iraq war and i think we have to have
a little bit of self-reflection about why that is we've seen it just in the last seven days the
lack of nuance and the presence of misinformation one-sided media and it's more important than ever
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