Now that our service personnel are safely home, it is time to ask whether they were right to allow themselves to be used as propaganda tools.
Conceivably that is what captured service personnel in peacetime are now meant to do, but it is certainly the very opposite of what we were expected to do in World War II.
Indeed, had any one of us won our freedom by fawning on Hitler to this degree - or to any degree at all - we would have been more likely to be welcomed home by a firing squad rather than a popping champagne cork.
Captured servicemen were expected to maintain a stiff upper lip and to give only their name, rank and serial number. Now, it seems, tearful expressions of gratitude are the order of the day.
Arguably this is progress, symptomatic of a gentler age: and
|
|
|
  |
|
Peregrine Worsthorne
 |
|
What message does this new trembling-lip approach send to Britain’s ill-wishers
|
|
|
|
just think of the wonderful relief for the parents and families etc. Counselling beckons.
A little loss of face on the part of the Royal Navy was a small price to pay for such a humanitarian gain. On the other hand, surely it is also necessary to ask what message this new trembling-lip approach sends to Britain's ill-wishers.
I remember President Nixon once saying to me in an interview that he felt it was his duty "to make sure that America was feared, not loved". Maybe those days are over.
But if humanitarianism is the way of the future, then there really should be a change of policy about renewing Trident - a hideously inhumane weapon of no possible use in this un-brave New World. Loincloths spring to mind rather than thermo-nuclear weapons; Gandhi rather than John Bull. 
FIRST POSTED APRIL 5, 2007
|
