BY JOHN NASH
The civilised world is up in arms because, according to the English translation of the leaked Spanish edition of Prince Harry’s ghost written book, Spare, and of course according to whoever wrote it, Harry said that in six missions as a donkey walloper (Cavalryman, but riding an Apache gunship) in the Afghan Graveyard of Empires, he killed 25 enemy fighters.
“It wasn’t a statistic that filled me with pride but nor did it make me ashamed. When I was plunged into the heat and confusion of battle, I didn’t think about those as 25 people. In truth, you can’t hurt people if you see them as people. They were chess pieces taken off the board, bad guys eliminated before they kill good guys. They trained me to ‘other’ them and they trained me well.“
Oh, dear. That went and done it, Dear Reader, I can tell you. It hit the woke fan big time. The emotional pygmies hidden in the social media rhubarb patch went into mach-3 hysteria. We fully expect our nation’s self-hating fifth column, the BBC, to take the side of the Taliban, especially if a bit of ovary-warming daytime TV scandal-mongering is involved, but crikey – even bits of the army came over all snowflakey, too. You see, killing people doesn’t sit well with civilians or with modern UK Army recruiting campaigns trying to recruit women (because not enough blokes are signing on) to become modern, civilised, woke soldiers – an oxymoron in uniform.
It’s not that difficult to figure out. Civilisation is our human cave in which we nurture our kind, protected from the violence and competition of nature outside. Imagine it as a large capital “C” with a doorway on the right.
C
While there are no rules outside in nature or on a battlefield, inside the human cave of civilisation we have rules and the first rule of civilisation is, “Sharing and fair exchange without violence”. Outside, extensively in nature, there are no rules and things run by means of evolution’s unforgiving competition – part of survival of the fittest.
We need resources to nurture ourselves inside our cave, so we send people called primary industries and the military out of the cave to compete for the resources we need and defend the cave. Those who go “outside” go into the natural competitive environment in order to compete in uncivilised ways and win. When back home in the cave, they tend to congregate on the right, near the doorway, ready to go out again in response to opportunities and threats.
Resources – everything we need to live – are carried back into our cave where we use them to nurture our kind and provide us with a standard of living. The sharing out inside our cave is cooperative and civilised and why we need indoor rules to share the rights and responsibilities involved. The more civilised the people inside the cave become, the further they move to the left away from the door. Positive left side people try their best to share out fairly the resources available flowing from the right. Negative left side (woke) people are critical and resentful of this evolutionary flow and try to destroy the “unfair” right wing, cutting off the hand that feeds them, explaining why Critical Theory and extreme socialism always end in starvation and death.
There are two very different environments involved – the outside uncivilised environment that is competitive, where resources are won and the objective is to win. Then there is the inside civilised environment that is cooperative where those resources are more subjectively consumed and the objective is to balance. It is then a simple metaphorical step to describe the competitive “outside” activities as “male” and the cooperative “inside” activities as “female” – that’s the way we evolved over millions of years and why there is a powerful statistical connection with both gender and division of labour.
It also explains the difference between the police and soldiers. Police operate inside our cave and their job is to balance the two sides and prevent violence. Soldiers, on the other hand, have to go out of the cave and, when required, to use very uncivilised methods in order to win, then return and become civilised once more. It explains why young men make useful combat soldiers and why the modern “equal opportunity” military have so many problems with the abuse of fragrant females in the services by hairy-arsed blokes. Because of the problem, they try to make the services more female-friendly, but in doing so, find that male recruitment drops off. Surprise, surprise.
Technology will allow more women to fight in the military by remote control, but boots have to hit the ground eventually and then a bayonet replaces the joystick and someone has to do the gutting. What the upstairs shiny-bums don’t realise is that our enemies see wokery and “inclusion” as weakness and are encouraged to have a go. Soldiers, like people in all other primary industries, are, underneath the spit and polish, predators and hunters. All primary actors kill stuff, directly or indirectly with gun, bulldozer, chainsaw, plough or dynamite and they all have to objectify their prey, making it a “thing” in order to manage and harvest it. Hopefully, in the case of soldiers, they only do it to enemies, during combat, on the battlefield.
And that is precisely what poor Harry, the unfortunate Duck of Sussex, apparently said. He went out as a flying Cavalryman, onto the “outside” battlefield, objectified the enemy, competed with them, and won the engagements by bumping off a couple of dozen. That was his job. If he looked at them through civilised eyes as humans during the action he couldn’t kill them as objects. After the action, he returned to “indoor” civilisation and became civilised again. He’s not a psychopath – off the battlefield, Harry would surely find it as difficult as anyone else to kill humans.
Military engagements are very uncivilised at the time of battle. During the actual engagement and competition, the enemy becomes just that – a “thing” called the enemy. Hence the rude objectifying descriptions in all wars – “krauts, nips, rag heads, slopes, chinks, jungle bunnies, towel heads, Terence (Taliban), fuzzies” and so on. However, civilians and combatants who are no longer capable of logistics or fighting or who have surrendered, are notionally “off the battlefield” and thus “indoors” once again, so become fellow humans and should be treated as people rather than “things”. Necessary behaviour “outside” becomes prohibited behaviour “inside”, and vice versa.
It follows that civilised people, who have never experienced combat, inside the cave, often don’t understand the “outside” competition and the objectification that feeds and defends them. It also means that further left they move inside the cave, the less they understand and the more likely they hate competition that they see as unfair and uncivilised. None of this is difficult to understand if you see both sides of the story.
Yet retired-commanding officer Colonel Collins apparently commented, “That’s not how you behave in the Army; it’s not how we think. He (Harry) has badly let the side down. We don’t do notches on the rifle butt. We never did” As he spoke, one imagines he wiped himself down furiously with soft civilian toilet tissue to remove the smell of Harry’s military action. It’s a little strange coming from an iron Rupert like Collins who, in 2003, addressed the troops in Kuwait thus:
“… I expect you to rock their world. Wipe them out if that is what they choose….The enemy should be in no doubt that we are his nemesis and that we are bringing about his rightful destruction.…Show them no pity…But be magnanimous in victory.”
Obviously civilian life has rotted his memory or lowered his testosterone. Either that or he never read Harry’s words and was commenting on some crafty media mischief – Harry said his kill tally was just a fact, a body count from the gun cameras, not a trophy and neither a matter of pride nor shame. Harry’s words may have upset the wokerati, but they were exactly how soldiers should think.
Meanwhile, a more level head, ex-army officer Col Richard Kemp, who was sent to Kabul in 2003 to take command of forces in Afghanistan, told the BBC it was unusual (what happens on the battlefield stays on the battlefield because of civilian sensitivity) but he did not have a problem with Prince Harry revealing his kill number.
Predictably, a Taliban leader, Anas Haqqani, tweeted:
“Mr Harry! The ones you killed were not chess pieces, they were humans; they had families who were waiting for their return”.
Yes they were humans, Anas old cock, but not while they were in battle. In battle, they are simply the enemy, targets. Haqqani might be your typical mediaeval misogynist, but he’s as cunning as a rat. Although his message was a load of goat droppings, it was aimed straight at our civilised indoor residents and therefore gleefully publicised by our woke media. It’s a pretty rich complaint coming from the damn Taliban – according to Amnesty International, the Taliban killed most of the civilians who died during the wars, and still do, committing heinous crimes by targeting civilians and killing “impure” rape victims, teachers and midwives, abducting aid workers and burning school buildings. We know their record on LGBT and women’s rights and the use of rape as a weapon, too – they are simply uncivilised but that doesn’t stop our Critical woke media from publicising their garbage.
Right side people prefer to conduct competitive military action against a military force outside the cave of civilisation on a battlefield – weapons followed by hearts and minds. Revolution, on the other hand, is preferred by left wing people who try to destroy the culture inside the cave, hearts and minds followed by weapons. If you stand at the right, at the doorway of our cave, looking outwards, a left wing enemy is already inside, behind you.
Whatever his faults, Harry’s military service is beyond reproach, but now all you folks whose job it is to provide the materials, energy, food, and defence of this great country and culture of ours, are fighting a neo-Marxist revolution indoors whose primary weapons are emotion, resentment and wokery.
Like Harry, it must be driving you “spare”, too.
John Nash grew up in West Cornwall and was a £10 pom to Johannesburg in the early 1960’s. He started well in construction project management, mainly high-rise buildings but it wasn’t really Africa, so he went bush, prospecting and trading around the murkier bits of the bottom half of the continent. Now retired back in Cornwall among all the other evil old pirates. His interests are still sustainable resources, wildlife management and the utilitarian needs of rural Africa.