Meaning, certainly when there is an election coming up and Greece still very much on everyone’s mind, it will not happen.
When asked to invest 1 trillion in the Ukraine economy, the EU basically said ‘we would love to, but we do not have the money, so it needs to come from the member states’. You would not think that, with a GDP for the whole of the EU of around 13.000 trillion euro and a bit more than 2.000 trillion for the Russian Federation, the Russians would hold the economic advantage, but that seems to be the case. There is also another Russian advantage: they already hold the gun of oil to the head of the west. The same holds true for the geographical distance in the mind: when people in the west are asked to estimate the distance from their country to Ukraine, they think the distance much further than it actually is. There is no denying that the Russian Federation is in geographical terms closer to Ukraine than the West. What if we in the West (NATO, EU) would attack now? This is the threefold advantage Russia would enjoy now: Because of pride (his predecessor, general Wellington, had never left a gun) and faulty communication, he did not see clearly enough that it would expose the charge on an attack from three sides. The charge was aimed at recovering these guns, at least that was what the general in charge wanted. Earlier the Russians had managed to drive back the British, forcing them to leave their guns behind. The analysis of the folly of the charge the light brigade is that it was an assault by very visible soldiers on a position that was already captured by the Russians. What lessons are there to learn from what happened before? I will make the analogy – as far as it goes – and then draw some conclusion for today, most of all aimed at the response of the European union and also in the light of the upcoming elections for the European Parliament. As it is true that in this single charge all the folly seems together of a war fought in a country no one at home cared about, fought in a way so clumsy that it has become an example of how not to attack.ġ60 years later, history is back in the Crimea, back in the Ukraine. Stories started to circulate that the charge was so disastrous because of faulty communication, which in turn was caused by a huge grudge by Cardigan and his senior officer. Fellow officers testified that right before the charge he had missed a wonderful opportunity for an effective charge, but that he had hesitated.
Right after this return to England rumors started to circulate that he had fled from the scene of the charge saved by his magnificent horse, not by his courage. History was kinder to him than ‘the Homicidal Earl’ deserved. After that moment he found himself a hero in the public eye. Until that moment the man who led the charge was considered a disgrace, with a record of foolishness, adultery, fighting and general arrogance. Lord Cardigan got his orders and said: ‘Charge!’ and in response his men charged, because, as Tennyson wrote: ‘theirs is not to reason why / theirs but to do and die’. His gallant charge was romanticized by the press and immortalized by a great poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson. Lord Cardigan was the one who send in the ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ on the Crimea, sending most of his 676 men and their horses to their death in 1854. Browsing through cardboard boxes on the third floor of a second hand bookstore, I found a biography by Saul David of lord Cardigan. We spent last summer in the Lake District, England. The parallel with what is happening today is too big to ignore. It is a story about folly and the fog of war. In order to make my point, I make an analogy with what happened a 160 years ago, during the Crimean war. This should be on the agenda of next European elections in May. Ukraine is important, but it is still no more than a flash point in chain of smoldering fires around us. The European Union is surrounded by unrest and conflict around all its borders.
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