How The West Was Lost

Taking a drive into town on Sunday morning, I heard someone on the radio campaigning for animal rights. This was not just the right to painless euthanasia, or a life free from cruelty, but actual rights. It caused me to imagine a dog in a pearl necklace going into a restaurant, flashing its vax pass and sitting down with friends for dinner. It also made me incredibly depressed. At the moment where Ukrainians are literally fighting for their lives and liberty, we are – still – focusing on things that really, really do not matter.

When you have grown up, as I have, with parents who actually experienced war, you never really lose the horror of it, but for most people alive today, war is just something that happens in movies. Just look at our esteemed prime minister, 41 years old, who seems to think that the invasion of Ukraine is, for her generation, their first experience of war. She was alive during the Balkan war, the War on Terror, the Iran/Iraq war, Rwanda, Libya, Syria, Myanmar, Afghanistan… but according to her, they weren’t really wars. She sums up a very prevalent attitude in the Western world today – wars are things that only happen to other people.

But now there is war in Europe. Again.

Because the West has enjoyed a long peace when wars were things that only happened in far-off lands, we have made the mistake of thinking it could never happen again, if we thought about it at all. So we focused on a lot of things that are relatively speaking unimportant – gender pay equity, gay rights, trans rights, colonialism, critical race theory, destroying people for speaking the truth and other things that have no basis in real life, but give us something that we can choose to worry about.

Did we really have nothing else to worry about? Really?

The idiocy continues. John Kerry is worried that the focus of the world will be on the war in Ukraine and not on climate change, and that the emissions from the war will be very damaging. With oil tanks on fire in in Vasylkiv, he may be right. Does he really think Vladimir Putin gives a toss about emissions at this point in time? Ukraine isn’t worrying about emissions right now either. They are focusing on survival.

I read that some British university students find themselves unable to sleep because one of the buildings at their college was funded a couple of centuries ago by a slave trader. Dare I suggest that, at this moment, they might want to think about their comrades in Ukraine, also unable to sleep, not because of long dead slave traders but because of bombs raining down on their houses. It seems we have lost all perspective on what is important, because life has been far too comfortable for us all for far too long.

Yet many of us knew it would happen. Those of us who were alive in the 1960s grew up under the shadow of nuclear war, and that fear never really goes away. But our children, and their children, never knew such fears. The nukes are still there, but no one believed, after a space of 75 years, that they would ever be used. They may be used in the war in Ukraine. Never underestimate Vladimir Putin – those nukes are not just expensive ornaments. He has them for a reason.

The West is partly responsible for the invasion of Ukraine. Putin has watched Western powers get weaker and weaker, giving in to woke ideology and Critical Race Theory. Female fighter pilots or trans-gender marines are fine, so long as they have the same training as everyone else, but when you hear stories of military training indulging in ‘stand-downs’, where normal training is suspended in favour of workshops on the perils of white supremacy, you have to wonder how well our forces will stand up in a conflict. We may find out soon enough.

Let us not fool ourselves into thinking that Putin has not taken advantage of Western weakness and, particularly, a weak US president. The war in Ukraine has found us wanting, showing up the perverse stupidity of identity politics, and found us navel gazing while others take advantage. Putin has timed this attack deliberately, because he sees his true opponents as weak and inward looking. In other words, he sees them as no opponents at all.

In the meantime, to all of those who think climate change is more important than national sovereignty, or who are thinking of allowing 5-year-olds to begin gender transitioning, spare a thought for Ukrainian nationals standing on street corners with RPGs or Ukrainian children afraid that the Russians will kill them all. Think of the Ukrainian couple who brought forward their wedding and then went out on the street armed with AK-47s. Life is cruel at the moment in Ukraine. But here’s the ‘thing’, as Joe Biden would say. We all live in a cruel world. It is just that most of us can’t look up from the hashtags or the faux outrage to see it.