Sir, Jon Miller (letter, Nov 2) seems bored with remembrance and feels it is time we moved on. He also fails to understand the significance of the poppy. It is not worn as a badge of honour. It is a particularly poignant reminder of those men and women we never knew, who fought for the freedoms we enjoy today.
Three of my great-uncles, scarcely out of their teens, returned from the First World War with broken minds and bodies. As with so many others, the country they fought for offered no help and they ended their days as down-and-outs. I never knew them, but there is a place in my heart for them, and I buy a poppy to make a contribution to the appeal and to remember them. When I see other people wearing their poppies I know that we are together in this act of national remembrance and that they have their own special memories.
The BBC has swung from one bizarre extreme to the other, first banning the wearing of poppies then obviously compelling anyone who appears in front of a camera to wear one. This is all wrong. People can choose whether to remember or to forget. They can choose whether or not to wear the poppy. That’s the point.
“There has been striking success in the past few months in the attempt to improve security, defeat al-Qaeda sympathisers and create the political conditions in which a settlement between the Shia and the Sunni communities can be reached. This has not been an accident but the consequence of a strategy overseen by General David Petraeus in the past several months. While summarised by the single word “surge” his efforts have not just been about putting more troops on the ground but also employing them in a more sophisticated manner. This drive has effectively broken whatever alliances might have been struck in the past by terrorist factions and aggrieved Sunnis. Cities such as Fallujah, once notorious centres of slaughter, have been transformed in a remarkable time.”
It goes on to explain the encouragement to be found in the statistics of success.The Times is not viewing Iraq through rose-tinted spectacles, it explicitly acknowledges the grave errors made in the initial post-liberation responses from the Coalition of the Willing:
“There are many valid complaints about the manner in which the Bush Administration and Donald Rumsfeld, in particular, managed Iraq after the 2003 military victory. But not to recognise that matters have improved vastly in the year since Mr Rumsfeld’s resignation from the Pentagon was announced and General Petraeus was liberated would be ridiculous.”
In addition the newspaper warns that just because the Iraqi government and its allies are currently enjoying success, continued improvement is not inevitable.Indeed it stresses that this very success could be the catalyst which generates great atrocities:
“None of this means that all the past difficulties have become history. A weakened al-Qaeda will be tempted to attempt more spectacular attacks to inflict substantial loss of life in an effort to prove that it remains in business. Although the tally of car bombings and improvised explosive devices has fallen back sharply, it would only take one blast directed at an especially large crowd or a holy site of unusual reverence for the headlines about impending civil war to be allowed another outing.”
So why do we not hear more about these successes?Why is the good being done by the Iraqi government, our armed forces and those of the other constituent parts of the Coalition not being trumpeted?As usual, when you’re not being told the full story, you must ask in whose favour the spin is playing.Cui bono?The Times offers a suggestion:
“The current achievements, and they are achievements, are being treated as almost an embarrassment in certain quarters. The entire context of the contest for the Democratic nomination for president has been based on the conclusion that Iraq is an absolute disaster and the first task of the next president is to extricate the United States at maximum speed.”
So there you have it.Until the Democrats in America and the left-wing media in the UK have got over their wish to see us mired in “another Vietnam” you won’t be told the full story.In the meantime, as ever these days, do some digging outside the mainstream media yourselves and you will find the real news.
So it seems that Gandhi would never have defended Gordon Brown’s big government welfare programs, even if the poor would be the beneficiaries, but was more of a libertarian.The ends of poverty relief would not justify the means of subjugating free will.
The successful global expansion of BBC Worldwide, the corporation’s commercial arm (New channels galore, October 29), highlights the increasing absurdity of a compulsory licence fee in a multichannel televisual market.
The BBC’s high-quality programme output does not deserve to be protected from the full impact of market forces, but neither does it need to be. The revenues generated by the corporation’s flagship productions, such as Doctor Who and the Teletubbies, should persuade even the most ardent supporter of the Beeb that an enforced annual subscription of £135 is ananachronism.
A wider concern must be the apparently limitless proliferation of BBC channels. This doesn’t provide the public with the sort of programming that isn’t available elsewhere, but makes it harder for independent channels to compete.
The BBC has the reputation, the personnel and the expertise to stand on its own feet. It needs to be broken up into sensible constituent parts and encouraged to do so.
This sort of training course teaches them debating skills, media skills and how to campaign. It may sound dull to those not involved in the political process, but this sort of thing is vital for young people from all parties if they are to acquire the skillset to become our politicians of the future. Some people believe we’d be better off without political parties at all, but whenever I speak at these sort of events I leave feeling very optimistic about our political future.
“But war, in a good cause, is not the greatest evil which a nation can suffer. War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war, is worse.
“When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people . A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice – a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice – is often the means of their regeneration.
“A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
“As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.”
“Gentlemen, the present parliament, by law, must soon expire; and no dissolution was evermore earnestly wished for by an injured people. Your most sacred rights have been flagrantly violated by your representatives, your remonstrances artfully rejected, yourselves treated like a handful of disaffected persons, and your complaints silenced by pursuing the same conduct which raised them. Such is your condition, and if such it continues, the little liberty which is yet left you, must soon be extinguished: but the time for redress is now approaching, and it is in your power to obtain that justice you have so many times craved in vain.”
Despite being written in 1774 the words are incredibly prescient to our situation in Great Britain today.
Sir - I think that many of the votes that have deserted the Tories have, like mine, fled, not to socialists or Liberal Democrats, but to the None-Of-The-Above (Nota) party. I use my vote as an instrument of punishment, small and puny though it is.
The Power Inquiry showed that most people are not apathetic, as politicians would have us believe, but feel that voting is pointless in our debased political system.
However, the threat to our civil society from Gordon Brown’stotalitarianintentions suggests that Nota members must swallow whatever distaste they have for the current Tory party and rally to it.
The President of Columbia University has come under a lot of criticism for inviting Iranian President Ahmadinejad to speak to students. He said he believes in free speech and he would have given a platform to Hitler!
Here, however, you see maybe why he was so keen to invite Ahmadinejad. In the Iranian Presidents’ presence, he delivers this astonishingly direct introduction to his guest. It is well worth watching.
Sir: Have we at last got a political leader who is both good and brave enough to speak his mind and act on it? Maybe I am naive, but the independence and courage of Brown to stand up against the thug Mugabe, in whose country I lived for 20 years until 2001, brought tears to my eyes (”It’s him or me, says Brown“, 20 September).
At last perhaps we have a prime minister of integrity who will hopefully bring all other European leaders in with him for a mass boycott of this summit. If Mugabe thinks he can turn this to his advantage by screaming, yet again, “conspiracy”, then so be it; that is not the point. What thinking person cares about what Mugabe thinks or says any longer? The point is that for perhaps 20 years, since the Matebele massacres in 1985, good men have stood around and said nothing. And that has been all it has taken for this evil to prevail.
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