One afternoon in July 1976, I swallowed four packets of over the counter painkillers in my Ladbroke Grove bedsit flat, and lay down to die. If I hadn’t washed down each packet with a pint mug of orange juice, I wouldn’t be writing these words now. At the time I was disgusted with myself, but in retrospect, waking up covered in vomit was better than not waking up at all.
A shade over seven years later, on August 26, 1983 to be precise, I stood on Richmond Bridge in South-West London, and tossed a coin. How I got there from Ladbroke Grove, via Manchester, Leeds, Bradford and – the day before — Margate, is a long, convoluted, and for me, painful, story. As the coin neared the ground I called audibly “Heads”. Fortunately for me it landed tails, and I didn’t jump in the river, which in view of the shin length steel toe-capped boots I was wearing would have meant certain death, even if I had been able to swim.
At the time of my first suicide attempt, I was just shy of my twentieth birthday; next month I will be fifty-four years old. Though not a great age, it is one I had never expected to see. Like most people of my age, I have regrets, more than most. One of my biggest regrets is that my genes will die with me. I didn’t have to die childless, I had my chance, a big chance, and like so many of my other chances, I blew it. In the first half of my life I achieved nothing. Well, as a junior I did win a county chess championship, although even that was only because all the really good players were playing in the national championships at Eastbourne.
Although my personal life — such as it is — has continued to be empty and lonely, I’ve grown used to solitude. I can’t really call my researching and writing my professional life because I’ve made precious little money out of it over the space of more than twenty years, but I can say without reservation that it is something of which I am immensely proud, because I have done many things others haven’t. Due to the current political situation and more particularly the stranglehold our enemies have over the Western mind, I have received little in the way of recognition, but fifty or a hundred years from now — if Man still exists – I will be judged far more kindly than by the creeps and liars who currently control our media.
I am thankful for the second half of my life, even though since a neck injury in October 1988 followed by a back injury resulting from a politically motivated serious assault on November 28, 1993, I have not had a day entirely free from pain for the past twenty-one plus years. I am thankful for the friends I have had, because although they have been few in number, their friendship has been worth more to me than all the tea in China, than all the gold in King Solomon’s mines. Having had such friends as Chris Tame and Morris Riley (now both deceased) and others, living, whom I will not name for fear of embarrassing them, I consider myself to be richer than Bill Gates. For me, the second half of my life has been worth all the pain of the first half, but the thing that truly saddens me, is that young men, many of them less than half my age, better men than I am, better men than I could have ever aspired to be, will not now have the chance to do what I will do next month, sit in my garret flat and “celebrate” my fifty-fourth birthday alone.
Today, July 1, USA Today reported that fifty-nine American servicemen had been killed in Afghanistan last month. Over three hundred British service personnel have now been killed in this senseless conflict, and countless more wounded, some of them suffering truly horrible injuries and disfigurements, including lost limbs, none more so than the men whose task it is to neutralise roadside bombs. Way back in 2001, after America and the world had recovered from the initial shock of the atrocities of the four hijackings and resultant mass murders, we all knew something had to be done. Many of us were skeptical about the claims that were made about the involvement of Saddam Hussein, but Afghanistan was, or sounded, different. We knew the Taliban had seized control of the country, that this was a régime and an ideology that was not only a travesty of Islam, but one that was intent on taking the world back to the Dark Ages. There was also no doubt in many people’s minds — including my own — that there was a direct link between Afghanistan and September 11, and that Osama Bin Laden himself was directly responsible, he had either bankrolled the hijackers, or it was his game plan, very likely both. It wasn’t necessary to swallow any of the more patently ludicrous nonsense that was being peddled such as that about a secret underground fortress, or in the words of Donald Rumsfeld “and there’s not one of those, there are many of those”.
We knew Bin Laden was both an extremely wealthy man and a sworn enemy of the West — although he hadn’t always been the latter — that may not have been proof positive, but it was certainly extremely strong prima facie evidence, and when later he claimed responsibility for the attacks, what further proof was needed?
As the truth sunk in about Iraq, many of us still thought Afghanistan was a necessary fight. During the Presidential campaign, then Senator Obama said that if he were elected he would withdraw from Iraq and deploy more troops to Afghanistan. I agreed with this one hundred percent, although if I’d done my homework, I wouldn’t have.
Much nonsense has been peddled and continues to be peddled about Afghanistan; it has been called the graveyard of empires; Alexander the Great is said to have come unstuck there; the British came a cropper twice in the 19th Century, and of course, within living memory it became the Kremlin’s Vietnam, so why should we have imagined Britain and/or the United States could subdue this enigmatic nation?
The Soviet experience is misleading; what is conveniently forgotten is that the Mujahedeen as they were then known — the good guys — were well armed by the West, so this was in fact a proxy war, the best sort of war for the Americans really, as none of their own servicemen were placed at risk, and as it was said at the time, they were prepared to defend the country to the last Afghan.
But can the mighty United States and the British Army really be taken on by a bunch of ragbag ragheads? How can the Taliban have inflicted such terrible casualties on our soldiers?
Afghanistan is not just a backward country, it is feudal, Mediaeval in places. If America, Britain, even France, were fighting a war against Afghanistan, we could literally wipe it off the map. For one thing we could simply nuke it; failing that we could bomb it back to the Stone Age; the British firebombed Dresden; the Americans firebombed Tokyo. We could simply exterminate them. The Afghans have no answer to our firepower. The only problem with that scenario is that we are meant to be the good guys, so indiscriminate mass murder is out. Let’s leave that to the Israelis in Gaza.
At this point, let me ask a slightly off-beat question: how do you hunt sharks? When fishermen catch sharks, they go out to sea in big, well equipped boats; sharks can be caught on a line, they can be netted, they can even be shot, but no one in his right mind would pursue sharks wearing a wet suit and flippers armed only with a Bowie knife.
The situation in Afghanistan is akin to a diver hunting sharks. First of all he doesn’t know where they are; secondly, he exposes himself to surprise attacks which the predators can mount both at random and at will; thirdly, even if his knife could be said to be equal to or superior to those fearsome jaws, would anyone in his right mind willingly tangle with a shark on such terms when he could sit comfortably on a boat and pursue his prey at no personal risk?
Our soldiers are not fighting a war in Afghanistan, they are swimming in a sea of sharks that can attack them at random and at will. And as a result of this, they are dying and are being maimed both needlessly, and with total impunity. If instead you prefer a military analogy, compare their position instead with Northern Ireland. All right, you can call that a war, but it is not a war in that sense. Chess is a war, an argument is a war of words; soldiers on patrol in Northern Ireland were no more fighting a war than they are in Afghanistan. You can call it a police action; you can call it a struggle to win hearts and minds, but at the end of the day they are sitting ducks, fish to be shot in a barrel. Remember the case of the Washington Sniper? John Muhammad and Lee Malvo murdered ten people in three weeks. Now imagine you have a dozen or a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand hit teams like that, how would you track them down and neutralise them without the FBI or even a police force worthy of the name? That is what our soldiers are facing in Afghanistan, none more so than the bravest of the brave, the men who defuse roadside bombs.
Sure, they are saving lives, they are winning hearts and minds, albeit slowly and surely, but none of these saved lives and not one of these won hearts is worth the life of another soldier, British or American; white, black, or Jewish for that matter.
Back in 1972, Randy Newman recorded a song called Political Science; cynical and satirical in equal measure, its conclusion was that America should drop the big one, nuke not just its enemies, but the entire world, with perhaps the exception of Australia, which could be turned into an amusement park where Americans pass the time watching kangaroos.
Light-hearted or not, that song contains more wisdom in its less than two and a half minutes than the entire American and British foreign policy portfolios of the past twenty, fifty or a hundred years. Here are relevant extracts:
“No one likes us, I don’t know why
We may not be perfect, but Heaven knows we try…
We give them money, but are they grateful?
No, they’re spiteful and they’re hateful…
They don’t respect us, so let’s surprise them
We’ll drop the big one and pulverize them…
They all hate us anyhow
So let’s drop the big one now…”
You can argue — and I would — that much if not most of this hatred is due to indoctrination by leftists and their incessant and for the most part vacuous carping on about the evils of racism and Imperialism. But at the end of the day, these people simply hate us. They hate because — debt-ridden that we are — we are richer than them; they hate us because we have the one thing they can’t have — white skin. They hate us because we are occupying their countries, even though countless millions of their countrymen have invaded and are occupying ours where our lunatic governments under pressure from left wing morons and Zionist Jews have made the slightest criticism of this occupation a criminal offence. They hate us for all manner of perceived reasons, some of them legitimate, most of them not so. Or they simply hate us.
As Newman said the best part of four decades ago now, they hate us anyhow. Let’s though not drop the big one, let’s simply bring the troops home, pull up the drawbridge, and let them get on with it. If they want to kill each other, why should we care? Let the United Nations sort it out, or the Chinese, or all those hordes of leftists who are forever telling us how wicked we are because we want our grandchildren to look like us. Those of us who have grandchildren. Just let them do it with their own resources and their own money.
Surprisingly, not absolutely all of them hate us. Ali Abbas doesn’t hate us, even though he has every reason to. We destroyed his country and his family home. We murdered his father, his pregnant mother, his brother and thirteen members of his extended family. And just for good measure, we took away his arms. So what does he do? He moves to England.
True, many people, American, British and other have shown him great kindness, but there is not enough kindness in the world to compensate him for a fraction of the things he has lost in exactly the same way there is not enough darkness in the world to extinguish the light of one small candle.
All manner of rationalisations were given and continue to be given for these lunatic wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and if the lobby we all know doesn’t really exist gets its way, Iran. If Tony Blair truly believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, he was a fool; if Gordon Brown truly believes there is a direct link between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda cells operating in West Yorkshire, he is an even bigger fool. So why are our soldiers in Afghanistan in particular? Why are they dying there now?
The simple fact is they are not dying to liberate Afghanistan from its oppressors; they are not dying so the women of Afghanistan may vote in elections or so Afghani girls may go to school. They’re certainly not dying for democracy, when the government of Hamid Karzai is one of the most corrupt anywhere on Earth, from the rigged election to the untold millions in Western aid — taxpayers’ money — that is skimmed off into private bank accounts or simply disappears.
Our servicemen – the finest flower of our youth – are not dying for capitalism, for Imperialism, oil, or big business; they’re not even dying for Zionism. In a nutshell, they’re dying for nothing. This is not our war anymore, assuming it ever was. It’s time to bring the troops home now, not in four years or whatever timetable Call Me Dave pulls out of a hat, but now, so that half a lifetime from now, the bravest of the brave can celebrate what I will be celebrating next month, hopefully with the grandchildren I will never have.
[The above article was first published by MajorityRights on July 2, 2010.]
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