nourishing obscurity

It’s a pity there’s no tradition of military songs in our country, apart from WW2 numbers like Lily Marlene. We’re not a militaristic nation, we don’t fly the flag on holidays and we we don’t have a “Day of the Defenders of the Fatherland” which the Russians have on February 23rd [also my birthday celebration].

There are plenty of songs about war and the military but they tend to be negative and even the great Eric Burdon got into this with Sky Pilot [good though the music itself was]. There are plenty of anti-war films, such as Twilight’s Last Gleaming but not much in the way of celebrating what our military do on our behalf.

In Russia, in 1996, you couldn’t go down the main street without hearing Любэ blasting out with Kombat or Солдат [soldier - the song above]. There are Victory Parks and the consciousness of the country and the people who defend it is [or was until about the year 2000] very strong, even among the women who tend not to be enthused about things military.

This is no flag waving chauvinistic patriotism but heavily based on the ordinary men and women who fought, suffered and died. I wish that feeling was more universal in our country. It exists in some sectors of society but not universally.

Why would I run a Russian military song at the start of this post? For two reasons – firstly, there are no good British or American ones in the rock/pop genre and secondly, the things those boys are experiencing in that clip are exactly the same as we do on this side of the fence.

A soldier is a soldier wherever he is and whichever army he is fighting for. As I looked in their eyes in that clip, I could see my own mates in my military days. The reality is not quite as dire as anti-war people make out but nor is it the gung-ho Custer’s last stand.

My greatest fear, as a subaltern, was always making an error and leaving us exposed and that was far greater than personal fear, intense though personal fear is. The food rations were quite good really and the boots solid – that was in the days when the military was still equipped properly.

As the offensive gets underway in Helmand and casualties are taken, it’s a very mixed feeling that this blogger has. I curse the day I discovered who was behind sending us off to a pointless war, underequipped because my anger at Them looks to the more queen and country thinker like anger against the soldiers themselves, which is absolute rubbish.

This terrorism beat-up is the same as the climate warming beat-up. The politicians in Westminster, in thrall to the European malcontents, allowed the danger to come into our country in the first place and that’s also a cause of great anger. Our parents suffered greatly to keep the Nazi nastiness out, my own father paid the ultimate price years later, even Maggie saw the dangers of giving the country away, then Heath and Wilson actually did give it away.

Soldiers don’t play politics and tend to need the picture to be clear. They have to do this in their heads because how else can they put their lives on the line if they think the war is unjust or that the enemy is not the enemy? How can one tell them that the enemy is right inside the country now, in offices, in city centres, in clubs, all over the place? That there is more than one enemy, jostling for supremacy over the minds of the people?

They’re not going to understand Rene Mathis in Quantum of Solace who said:

But I guess when one is young, it seems very easy to distinguish between right and wrong but as one gets older, it becomes more difficult – the villains and the heroes get all mixed up.

So, the best thing to say is that while we can do our bit back home to sink the villains, at the same time, we should bear in mind what is being done on our behalf over there.

Filed under: Politics & economics