En intressant krönika i Mail Online här nedan. Många säger att vi är vid 1938, men här är en som säger att vi är vid 1914. Det gäller att fundera på vilken metafor som är bäst, och varför man överhuvudtaget behöver jämföra.
"I ask you to think very hard about what the Prime Minister said in Kiev a few days ago: ‘If we’re paying in our energy bills for the evils of Vladimir Putin, the people of Ukraine are paying in their blood.’
Mr Johnson added: ‘We must keep going. We must show as friends of Ukraine that we have the same strategic endurance as the leaders of Ukraine.’
Must we? Till when? Is this either a conservative or a patriotic thing to say? Is it even sensible? Pause before you answer. War is often popular to begin with. But it has a nasty way of ruining the lives of those who once cheered for it.
By the middle of the First World War, Britain had bankrupted itself and the flower of our young manhood had been churned into the Flanders mud. Millions had paid, both in blood and wealth, a savage price for a war that almost all would one day agree was a mistake.
Lord Lansdowne, a veteran Tory and former Foreign Secretary, wrote to The Times newspaper to suggest it was time to make peace.
The Times refused to publish the letter. He was pretty much driven from public life. He was falsely derided as an unpatriotic defeatist, when he was the opposite.
If he had been listened to, we would have had no Russian Revolution, no Stalin, no Hitler, no Mussolini, and no Second World War.
Britain would have survived as a major power for many decades longer than she did. Almost all wars end in ugly compromise. We were only able to defeat Hitler because Stalin was on our side, and he exacted a huge price – including gobbling up Poland, the country whose independence we had gone to war to save." (se resten på
https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk)
