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From: CAP
Date: 16 Oct 2010
Time: 19:26:30 -0500
When it comes to 'rationalising' cuts in public spending - ther arts budget is miniscule to the defence budget in any case. Zealous talk of cutting 'waste' would be better directed at the pointless loss of life and attrocities inflicted by British troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. How many billions has that cost the tax payer for... what? - 9-10 years now? Has it 'defeated Terrorism?' If they were serious about saving the public purse forget the role as number 1 lapdog to the Yankee fundamentalist empire and bring the military home where they can concentrate on D E F E N D I N G the country, not invading another. Do they seriously think there can be a military solution in Afghanistan? Has the history of Britain's own fallen empire taught them nothing? The North West Frontier IS A BLACK HOLE militarily! I am old enough to have had a grandfather who served as a Captain in the Rajputana Rifles, based in Quetta, and forlornly patrolled that sad barren hinterland on a little train, expressly built for the purpose. EVEN IN THOSE DAYS military wisdom was that "Alexander The Great could not beat these ****s - they live to fight, and when they fight, they are ready to die. There's no beating that kind of sacrifice". All the training and all the cruelty the British army can muster from the desperate little bottom feeders and losers that resort to enlisting, is never going to match that - without eradicating the entire Afghan population - if they could ever be comprehensively rounded up, which is also impossible. The Russians tried to tell the Americans "Man, forget it, that place is death by a thousand cuts..." Meaning a slow accrual of losses rather than any decisive battle or skirmish, and an endless fragmenting of ties and loyalties, infinite treachery at so many levels. But no - let's fritter public money away on a grand scale just to underline the decline and fall of the Amerikan Empire, with just a sly wink to an earlier more embarrassing precedent. In Amerika no one really believes in the public or the government anyway, everything is about lobbying, secret loyalties and purchasing power. But Britain was supposed to have divested itself of these vestiges of elitism (fascism) sometime in the middle of the 20th century. Actually we're still paying for it, even when there's nothing left but denying ourselves the freedom to maintain a native culture, with what little savings we've made.