The Old Feudal Spirit

We are used to Her Majesty's Government invoking Churchillian rah-rah at any and every opportunity; and of course the People's Haystack is a nearly ideal modern analogue for the magniloquent race-baiter whose record of sanguinary incompetence stretched from Gallipoli through Norway and Dieppe to the year-long dither and delay over the Second Front. Since germ sounds a bit like German, the coronavirus pandemic has brought a rhetorical escalation of the kind hardly seen since the last time Her Majesty's Government started to thqueam and thqueam and thqueam at the beastly Euro-wogs. Of course this is not to deny certain wartime parallels, notably the Government's initial blithe inaction at the prospect of large civilian casualties and the shaking of assorted magic money trees to provide calming injections of cash for panicky profiteers. The latest example is slightly foreign, but still instructive: in 1914 Tsar Nicholas II, a spineless nincompoop whose policy at any given moment was whatever someone else had just advised him, had a happy inspiration. To keep his troublesome social inferiors from inconveniencing him with their vulgar noises about not wishing to starve, he would send them off to war against the German Empire, which was merely the strongest and most modern military state in Europe and possibly the world. Nicholas, by contrast, could call upon God and the Russian people, which together brought him a quasi-mediaeval rabble of some fifteen million men, some of whom had to share rifles. Evidently the People's Haystack, whose Ottoman ancestors famously gave Churchill's brave boys that nasty kick in the Dardanelles, is relying on a similar strategy; and we can only hope that it meets with appropriate success.