Journal ~ The Holier Than Thou Brigade

Journal

The Holier Than Thou Brigade

I’m often asked why entries appear with a current date, yet their position on the relevant platform’s diary might be a year or earlier.

Every country has its own HTTB ~ Holier Than Thou Brigade. One does not need to be religious in order to be sure that one will join this brigade’s obscure ranks. This is why I sometimes leave an article on its platform diary slot, even though it carries a current date. Live and let live.

There is a clear distinction between HTTB and the infamous “Morality Police” of extreme fundamentalist Islam and other violently repressive regimes. I look this week at the plight of women and girls in Afghanistan, living under the latest ferocious edict from the Taliban.

I look at the men and I see grotesque spiritual disfigurement, banal minds and physical repugnance. Likewise, I look at the covered forms beneath which are women, girls, wives, mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters, friends, cousins, strangers, now forbidden to even speak in public, or to speak only when men speak to them, and I am reminded of the ferocity of the infamous Nürnberger Gesetze ~ we know them as the Nuremberg Laws ~ of 1933 that eventually resulted in the Holocaust and also the wiping out of millions more of innocent people simply because they were deemed to be physically or mentally disabled, homosexual or bisexual, or who dared to resist that criminal regime.

This is the United Kingdom.

Fortunately, we are far removed from the concept of morality police.

But even here we have our moments when our guard is down. The Nazis had their brownshirts. We had our blackshirts. Americans had and still have their Ku Klux Klan. Some here would also welcome a form of morality enforcement ~ the middle class curtain-twitchers.

But those that desire to crush communities are faced, suddenly, with the loss of their coveted hooded anonymity. The ugliness of rioters - of all ages - reduced to mugshots following arrest and then experiencing the toughness of a free and democratic society, and those same mugshots appearing in the national newspapers. Now convicted, still reeling from the speed with which the Law Courts responded, the appointment of Judges to sit in the Crown Courts.

As regards Afghanistan and Iran, their actions are the Clarion blasts of extreme international danger. We have long ago passed the point where we could prevent calamity. Now, it seems only a matter of time.

How strange, to watch the US Secretary of State, Mr. Anthony Blinken, and the British Foreign Secretary, Mr. David Lammy in Kyiv, Ukraine yesterday. The usual media shots, the bonhomie, the smiles, the self-congratulation as they boarded the train. Nothing was out of place.

Nor was anything out of place amongst the bonhomie, the smiles, the self-congratulation 86 years ago in Munich, Nazi Germany in September 1938 ~ that which we know as the Munich Crisis.

By the time October 1938 arrived, the United Kingdom was already rearming, fully aware that the Munich Pact brought them a brief respite, only.

Quietly, swiftly, the country went onto a war footing. Eighteen months later, a nine-month sustained bombing campaign across the United Kingdom, saw reality hit the buffers at the line’s end for thousands of families.

The Imperial War Museum Archive affirms that 43,500 civilians across all four nations, alone, had been killed in that nine-month period. That excludes military deaths. It excludes those civilians and military wounded and injured; it excludes the thousands of families rendered homeless.

The frightening thing is that this was then revisited upon Fascism beyond imagining by 1945.

We have no excuse in sidestepping this, for this is not distant history. This is happening in Ukraine and in Israel-Gaza. We know the cost being paid in the Middle East and in Ukraine. We have quietly dismissed the cost paid by Syria, as a war that has no meaning for us. There are Middle Eastern Countries that want war. And Cyprus? I wonder if that tiny island, a potentially perfect aircraft carrier, might baulk if it looked at its increasing Russian holidaying population, especially in Limassol, if one whispered quietly to one side, Beware the Trojan Horse.

Sources
IWM Civilian Casualties 1940-41

12 September 2024
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© 2024 Kenneth Thomas Webb

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