Death to Iraqis, not to foxes
There is a point here which needs to be clarified, and has been
in America. Much derision has been heaped there on the
‘chicken-hawks’, the neoconservative ideologues of the Bush
administration who became such middle-aged enthusiasts for waging
war, having gone to the greatest possible lengths to avoid military
service when they were of an age for it. It has been said in reply
that such service is not a prerequisite for political leadership in
wartime: Lincoln and Roosevelt, the greatest war presidents (in
President Bush’s favourite phrase), never wore uniform. But, as a
correspondent to the Washington Post has said, that misses the
point. The accusation against those chicken-hawks is not one of
strategical incompetence, but specifically ‘an accusation of
hypocrisy and cowardice’.
That goes for our own Labour armchair warriors also, who have no
objection to war, but wouldn’t dream of fighting themselves. The
rest of us might reflect a little harder on that contrast. To be
ruled by bullying humbugs and corrupt spongers is one thing, but to
be ruled by cowardly warmongers is another matter. What do we make
of a parliamentary Labour party whose hands are dripping with the
blood of innocents, and which thinks it can wash that blood away by
banning someone else’s pastime?
There is now talk of legal challenges to be mounted against the
Hunting Bill, but the poison has already infected public life and a
horrible political wrong has been done. In a quite different context
70 years ago, the historian Sir Robert Ensor put it in words which
exactly apply today: ‘Any idea of using a Commons majority for such
a purpose meant ignoring the deeper foundations on which alone
democratic constitutionalism can rest — respect for minorities and
for the subtle boundary which divides government by freedom and
consent from that by dictatorship and violence.’
Emotional instinct is hard to assess precisely, but I believe
that for many people, far from all of them fox-hunters, the hunting
ban crosses that subtle boundary, and that if hunting is ended by
force, we shall feel as patriotic Frenchmen did under the Vichy
regime. We shall continue to obey the law and to pay taxes, but
because we are frightened of the coercive power of the state, and
for no other reason. We can’t say quite why, but this won’t be our
country any more.
That Sassoon dust-jacket rang a bell, and I remembered another
poet, of the next war. Keith Douglas was killed in Normandy in 1944,
which is to say doing something no Labour politician would now do
and making a personal sacrifice for his country. In North Africa the
year before, he had written a poem called ‘Aristocrats’, inspired by
the death in action of Lieutenant-Colonel J.D. Player, who left
£3,000 to the Beaufort Hunt in his will, as well as a direction that
any incumbent appointed to the living in his gift should be ‘a man
who approves of hunting, shooting and all the manly sports which are
the backbone of the nation’.
‘How can I live among this gentle obsolescent breed of heroes,
and not weep?’ Douglas wrote. How could he not have wept for this
country today? ‘It is not gunfire I hear, but a hunting horn.’ We
hear gunfire from our rulers now and not a hunting horn. What a
shameful contrast it is.
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