Let me be clear from the start: we are not against sound defence of the realm. Nor are we against sober warnings of possible risks. What we oppose is starting wars (think Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya) or being pleased with them (Ukraine) and talking up the prospect of war for personal or ideological reasons, stupidity or megalomania. And we also pray to have a God-fearing nation which is actually worth defending.
Summary
I’m Stephen Green. In this video, we’ll look at who is talking up war with Russia and wonder why. We’ll ask if UK armed forces are even capable of such an exercise. We’ll hear from the top US general on whether Russia is about to invade the West. We’ll ask if it is a good idea in spiritual terms to confess the prospect of war.
We’ll ask whether ordinary people every want conflict, we’ll find out precisely how a country’s leaders persuade their people to go to war and we’ll ask if our lot are satisfying the conditions. We shall ask where in the world we find corroded and schizophrenic countries which start wars. Then we shall wonder whether, after recent history, we can trust our politicians and media to tell us the truth, about anything. We’ll look at God’s own job specification for leaders.
We shall hear our Lord talk of wars and rumours of wars and ask whatever happened to the peace dividend. We’ll trace back the Russia-Ukraine conflict to its roots, and find out just why Western politicians hate Vladimir Putin so much. Finally, I’ll call for prayer, invite your comments and I’ll thank you, if you stay the course, for watching the video.
The alarm of war
It was the prophet Jeremiah who was pained at his heart because he had heard ‘the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war.’ (Bible references below)
A NATO official, Dutch Admiral Rob Bauer, said last month that the West should prepare for all-out war with Russia within the next 20 years. He urged governments to be ready to mobilise ‘large numbers of civilians’. If Admiral Bauer was declaring that NATO policy is now war with Russia, that would mark a distinct escalation in its approach, which has hitherto relied on Ukrainians to do all the fighting on its behalf. (Links are coming: check back tomorrow!)
Next, Germany’s defence minister, Boris Pistorius, reduced the timescale, claiming Vladimir Putin ‘could launch an attack on NATO in less than a decade.’
UK politicians join in
The psalmist wrote ‘I am for peace: but when I speak, they are for war.’
‘They’ appear to be all the elite. His Majesty’s Foreign Secretary, David Cameron, chimed in, telling eager listeners at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday 17th January 2024 not to appease Russia with peace talks over Ukraine, making a parallel with Hitler’s Germany and Neville Chamberlain in nineteen thirty-eight.
Then UK Defence secretary Grant Shapps said the West had moved from a post-war to a pre-war world. Now, apparently, there could be war within five years.
Finally, the British Army’s Chief of Staff, General Sir Patrick Nicholas Yardley Monrad Sanders, KCB, CBE, DSO, quickly called for Britain to train a ‘citizen army’ ready to fight Russia. Other European nations were taking steps, he claimed, to put their populations on a ‘war footing’. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak did not deny the claim, merely denying there would be any plans for conscription.
War ‘will stay in Ukraine’
Our members will recall us reporting on Sir Patrick’s outburst in June 2022. Just four months after Russia’s incursion into eastern Ukraine, General Saunders claimed UK forces would soon need to fight a land war in Europe. Just like David Cameron today, he found similarities with the nineteen thirties.
Happily, United States Chief of Staff General Mark Milley slapped our man down. Asked by the BBC’s Sophie Rayworth on ‘Sunday Morning’ to confirm that ‘Putin’ was about to over-run Europe like Adolf Hitler, General Milley drawled: ‘There is no reason at all why this war should expand beyond the borders of Ukraine, where it is right now. … We want to contain the war inside Ukraine.’
Mark Milley retired only last year. Of course he knew all the Russian generals. He is a learned man with one masters degree in international relations and another in national security and strategic studies. He spoke with authority. And as Mark Milley with all his insider knowledge predicted, inside Ukraine is exactly where the war has remained.
UK Armed Forces
General Sanders heads a below-strength army with a recruiting crisis following widely-criticised ‘woke’ advertising. His army has never enough money. His real war is always with the UK Treasury. Meanwhile, the Royal Navy cannot put even one of our two expensive aircraft carriers to sea because the ships have no catapults, hardly any planes, no operational stores ship and no support fleet capable of defending them. The Navy now say they will send HMS Queen Elizabeth to the Red Sea, but she will rely on American warships to defend her and carry a few expensive US F-25B Lightning jump-jets.
The RAF admit: ‘The Lightning’s short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL) capability allows it to operate from the new ‘Queen Elizabeth’-class aircraft carriers.’ The cheaper, conventional Hornet cannot. It is embarrassing. The Navy is mothballing ships and deploying officers to equality and diversity. It has withdrawn its last serious ship defending the Falkland Islands, leaving a mere patrol vessel.
Having left off to take heed to the Lord, our leaders are prone to silly mistakes, lack of planning and plain stupidity. And General Sanders expects boys, and girls, to fight for a shower like that?
The Bible says: ‘Seek the LORD and his strength, seek his face continually… For the LORD giveth wisdom: out of his mouth cometh knowledge and understanding.’ In the spiritual dimension, talking up the prospect of war is a dangerous and foolish confession from those who lead us. Words have power. The Bible says ‘Death and life are in the power of the tongue’.
Generation Z won’t fight – and why
Naturally, the papers are discussing whether UK millennials, or Generation Z, will bother to join the ‘citizen army’ of General Sanders.
In the Evening Standard, Emma Loffhagen asked, ‘Why are my generation so reluctant to don khaki and buzzcuts for King and country?’ She went on:
‘Of course, some people think they know the answer. Young people are “easily offended” and they “lack motivation”, Major-General Chip Chapman told GB News. Do these stereotypes really explain such a huge generational shift in military attitudes? I don’t think so.
‘More important is that, for my generation, the Army is simply no longer seen as a moral endeavour. As a 24-year-old, the last war in my living memory was not a barnstorming defeat of the Nazis, but rather a series of wars and invasions in the Middle East, exposed as failures and widely thought to be based on lies. The belief held by older generations that the British Army is solely a force for good in the world does not stand up any more. As Gen Z would put it: the military propaganda is not propaganda-ing.’
Goering’s Principle
Seventy-seven years ago, Hitler’s Deputy, Hermann Goering, knew these realities. He admitted to a US psychologist outside the Nuremberg trials that ‘the people don’t want war.’ Goering shrugged: ‘Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back … in one piece?’
The Reichsmarschall went on to articulate what we now call Goering’s Principle. He said irrespective of a dictatorship or a democracy, ‘The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy,’ he said. ‘All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.’
Not being attacked
It worked here during Covid, but the problem our war-mongering leaders face now is that no NATO country is actually being attacked, except internally by jihadists, and our politicians won’t talk about that. Furthermore, there is simply no prospect of any NATO country being attacked. Russia is bogged down in a stalemate in its war in Ukraine, where General Milley says it will stay.
We don’t hear any desire to invade Europe voiced by the Russians. For all their sabre-rattling, the NATO establishment have just made assertions, not any kind of case based on evidence. They have botched Goering’s Principle at the first hurdle.
That is not say there are no parts of the world under threat. Israel is always being attacked, mainly by militias backed by the Iranian leadership (not necessarily by the Iranian people). The people of Taiwan are certainly threatened by China. It will take the grace of God to avoid war there, probably using a strong naval deterrent and a different US president. The involvement of Western trade interests in Taiwan shows it was even more of a strategic blunder, as well as a humanitarian catastrophe, for NATO to force Russia into the arms of China instead of keeping her closer to the West.
‘Corroded and schizophrenic’
Journalist Sherelle Jacobs, in yet another pro-war article in the Daily Telegraph, wrote: ‘What previous world wars teach us is that it is not confident and successful countries that start wars, but corroded and schizophrenic ones that both suffer from grandiose delusions and mortal dread of the future.’
Sherelle meant Russia, but that ‘corroded and schizophrenic country’ sounds much more like the United Kingdom, which over the last twenty years has helped start wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya. and is cursed with leaders having grandiose delusions and a mortal dread of the end of the world as we know it.
For Allister Heath, writing in the same paper, it is also the European Union, ‘condemned to death by its deluded, third-rate elites, incapable of recovering from its present economic, military and demographic crises’.
He went on: ‘There is no way back for a European continent that has embraced nihilism, post-Christian paganism, illiberalism and the politics of envy, that believes that saving the planet requires shutting down successful industries and impoverishing its people, that cannot face down Islamist extremism and anti-Semitism, and that won’t reform its welfare state.’
Credibility problem
Above all, our elite now face, not just Emma Loffhangen’s morality problem, but one of credibility. After the Covid gaslighting, the obvious follies of lockdowns, restrictions, masks and government and media psychological warfare, followed by the imposition of gene therapy drugs posing as vaccines, followed by the absurdity of the Great Reset, then the lies and stupidity of climate hysteria and Net Zero, the constant reference to chancers sporting male genitalia as ‘women’, we no longer trust our politicians or our mainstream media to tell us the truth about anything.
That’s more than a shame, because the Bible tells us leaders are ministers of God, but it also says they are to be men of truth, hating covetousness. That depends on them being God-fearing men. And it is essential for public confidence and the respect they should have.
Would it not be more righteous and lead to a blessing if His Majesty’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs was a force for peace in the world and the genuine trading interests of the United Kingdom, if he and Grant Shapps would ‘Depart from evil, and do good; seek peace, and pursue it’?
How the Ukraine conflict began
The Lord Jesus said we would ‘hear of wars and rumours of wars’ We should ‘be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom…’
This current mess arose because Western leaders now see geo-politics as a zero-sum game where if Russia, for example, does well, it must mean we have lost. They squandered the peace dividend, the opportunity presented by the fall of communism to build a cooperative world and reap the economic benefit of a decrease in defence spending. The trouble was, the peace dividend did not in any way benefit what U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower identified in 1961 as the ‘military–industrial complex’.
Their friends, including the Hawks in NATO, started saying we had ‘won’ the cold war, and Russia had lost, and needed their noses rubbed in it. The current war in Ukraine was sparked when the EU and the US helped by activists on the ground funded by George Soros deposed the elected but pro-Russian Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014 and installed the pro-Western Petro Poroshenko instead.
Where we are today
Since then, Russia annexed Russian-speaking Crimea and Ukraine has all but banned the Russian language, alienating the Russian-speaking Donbass region of Eastern Ukraine. Faced with calls to protect the Donbass and alarmed by the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO, Russia invaded. Russia sees NATO now not as the defensive force portrayed in our media, but as an expansionist aggressor.
Furthermore of course, Western politicians hate Russia because its president is pro-family and has banned gay pride marches, homosexual propaganda and George Soros. The Russians are also doing well building alliances and gaining trading partners in the Global South.
And so, in response to a demand from former secretaries of state for defence Sir Michael Fallon, Ben Wallace, Dr Liam Fox and Sir Gavin Williamson, Rishi Sunak has sent another £2.5 billion pounds to Ukraine to spend on armaments. The UK Government gave £2.3 billion pounds in 2022 and again in 2023. Nobody asked if every British working man and woman (33m of us) wanted to send £215 each to put Ukrainian and Russian young men in coffins and bereave mothers of their sons and young women of their husbands.
World Economic Forum
Last month, a day before David Cameron spoke at the World Economic Forum gathering in Davos, Ukrainian President Zelensky told the globalists what they wanted to hear, that his Russian counterpart does not want peace and is intent on expansion.
And yet, David Arahamiya, the leader of Ukraine’s ruling party, disclosed in November 2023 that Russia was ready to end the war and withdraw its troops in exchange for Ukrainian neutrality just a few months after the invasion began in February 2022. The offer was refused at least partly because ex-British PM Boris Johnson pressured Kyiv into continuing the fight.
Negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow were underway in Istanbul when Mr Johnson unexpectedly arrived in Kyiv on 9th April, 2022, telling Mr Zelensky that he ‘shouldn’t sign anything with them at all—and let’s just fight.’
Arms firms provide dinners
The ‘military–industrial complex’ are happy for the war to carry on. Armaments firms are making billions out of the Ukraine war. What is little known is that politicians are constantly rubbing shoulders with them at lavish dinners. According to Forces Watch, The arms manufacturers fund these gatherings under the ‘Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme’.
Forces Watch say: ‘The scheme involves MPs or Peers spending at least 15 days in a year with either the Army, Navy or RAF, visiting both UK and overseas bases. The optics of dressing up as service personnel seems to appeal to a militarised parliamentary politics – more than 90 parliamentarians … graduated between 2014-2020.’
The AFPS then hold a sumptuous ‘Graduation Dinner’. Clearly the aim is to ensure more MPs and Peers are sympathetic to the UK Armed Forces, to armaments and also to military action. Forces Watch say ‘over 50%’ of the ‘more than 90’ parliamentarians who graduated were Conservatives, which means just under 50% were not. Labour’s Toby Perkins and Liz Kendall even posted a picture of them posing in a tank at an arms fair. Defence Secretaries regularly don military uniforms. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has also appeared in military fatigues.
There may or may not have been a time for war, but from April 2022 it has surely been the time to beat those swords into ploughshares. It is a time to take the Lord’s advice through the prophet Jeremiah and build and plant. Somewhere in the world, secret negotiations are still going on. The Lord Jesus described the peacemakers as blessed and the children of God.
Read and Pray
READ: Exo 18:21; 1Chron 16:11; Psa 34:14, 120:7; Prov 2:6, 14:12, 16:25, 18:21; Eccl 3:8b; Isa 2:4, 3:12; Jer 4:19, 29:5-7; Micah 4:3; Matt 5:9, 24:6-7; 1Pet 3:11.
PRAY: We seem constantly to be praying for wisdom and against stupidity in our leaders, but let us remember to pray first for the Lord on high to send them a spirit of repentance, to seek his face in humility.
And if that is not to happen, pray for the good Lord to replace the warmongers, the fools, the delusional, the arrogant and the plain stupid among our leaders (and for that matter, those of other nations for whom we have a burden) with able men after God’s own heart. Pray the Lord will bless the efforts of the peacemakers, convict our leaders of their own need of the Prince of Peace and bring the Ukraine war to a swift end. Further afield, may Hamas be defeated and may Israel have peace. May Taiwan also have peace and stability.
WRITE: To your MP at House of Commons, London, SW1A 0AA or email him/her from the MP list at www.parliament.uk. Object to your money going to prolong the war in Ukraine and ask your MP to ask the Government to work for peace, and to let you know their reply.
Support us!
We appreciate your support; it enables our research and helps us inform your prayers.
So click below to support Christian Voice and stand up for the King of kings
Or fill in the form below to keep in touch:
Click on the social media links below to share this post:
