Gordon Brown yesterday said that it was our “patriotic duty to stay in Afghanistan”. Having that sniveling, ignorant little shit tell me what my patriotic duty is, is unacceptable to me. My patriotic duty is to punch Gordon Brown’s lights out. Brown is the halfwit who once claimed that we “British” (British? I am English mate, and I’m sure my Scottish, Irish and Welsh friends would have a similar reaction) should salute the Union Jack just as the French salute the Tricolore or the Americans salute the Stars and Stripes. He completely failed to grasp that France and the USA fought bloody revolutions for their democratic rights, and their countries were reborn as hard-won modern democracies… Our flag, on the other hand, has a history of cynical imperialism, as does the word “Britain”. We have a brain-dead monarchy and no written constitution. Salute that? No fear. Besides, I’m not British, I am English; I come from the land of Shakespeare, in the tradition of Blake. I need no flag or anthem to tell me who I am, I have one of the richest artistic cultures in the world to tell me all I need to know about that. I feel England in my bones. Gordon Brown, how very dare he…....

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A kid whom my mother’s neighbours used to babysit was killed in Afghanistan last week. His name was Robbie Laws. He’s been in all the papers, he was the first of 15 British casualties in the last ten days.....

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I’ve always had very limited sympathy for people who put on a uniform and blindly do as they are told, by people who are themselves blindly doing as they are told. However, I have every sympathy for the army’s current plight, at least their plight as I, and I think many others, now recognise it. I’m not talking about the Taliban. I’m talking about the fact that the chain of command goes all the way up to a top level of people who don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.....

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Firstly, they are trying to democratise a tribal country. Afghanistan hasn’t read Plato’s Republic, ie. The Script, and has instead developed it’s own traditions over thousands of years. What is it with the West? From the native American Indians, to the Australian Aborigines, to China, Africa, Cuba, Ireland, South America… we just have to fuck everyone over don’t we? Such are the egos of the US and the UK political leaders. You don’t see Finland or Belgium becoming targets of international terrorism. And who pays the price for our politicans’ outrageous, disgusting, immoral foreign policy? It isn’t Brown or Bush or any of the scum in parliament. It’s people traveling to work on the Tube, people working in tall buildings when the planes hit, and kids like Robbie Laws.....

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Secondly, they are fighting an insane enemy, people who think that getting themselves killed is the fast track to paradise. By giving the Taliban a fight they’re actually giving them exactly what they want. You cannot reason with the mental illness of religious zealots. Even the might of the Soviet Red Army called it quits after a decade in Afghanistan.....

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And what has been achieved so far? Have Bin Laden or Mullah Omar been caught? Have the coalition forces managed to keep the Taliban out of Pakistan? Is Benazir Bhutto still alive? Has the Afghan heroin trade been stopped? Are we safe from religious extremists yet? The answer to all of these, and more, is a resounding “no”. So what has been achieved in the last 6 years, aside from hundreds of military and tens of thousands of civilian deaths? Absolutely nothing.....

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“They” are saying that the current spate of British casualties in Afghanistan has actually increased support for the war. Who are “they”? Did they ask you? Because they didn’t ask me, or anyone I know apparently. “They” are the faceless government PR machine that is trying to dissuade us from the creeping, appalling recognition of the truth; that the British and American governments are throwing away the lives of these kids for nothing except their own inability to admit to an error of judgement.....

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Meanwhile, they are passing LAWS that tell us we have to be tolerant of religious beliefs. Frankly, it never occurred to me to be intolerant of them until now. But it seems kind of obvious to me that in order to achieve peace on Earth we have to get rid of both religion and greed.

Hmm. I seem to have unwittingly made a case for Communism. Not quite what I meant to do, but if the shoe fits… No, we need to get back to Plato’s Republic. We have both the means and the technology to completely dismiss with partisan politics. Every tinpot reality TV show canvasses the nation for an instant consensus at least once a week, generating huge revenues in the process. That’s democracy. That’s economically sound. Why don’t we do that? We’re already living in a fucking Ray Bradbury novel anyway.

Its ten years today since Adrian decided, on a whim I have always believed, to meet his end.

If you stand on Beachy Head for long enough, eventually you jump. You can't help it, the call to jump is too strong. It has nothing to do with a death wish, nothing to do with suicide or depression or the voices or the weather. Mentally, Adrian had constructed his own Beachy Head and stood at its existential edge for a long, long time. I knew this about him at least seven years before it finally came. It took so long to come that I was even shocked, because I'd known it for so long that I'd kind of forgotten that I knew it.

But man, it still hurts, even when you knew it. My one consolation, as I've told myself over and over for a decade now, is that Adrian Borland was actually too good for this world. Certainly he deserved a lot better than he got. I don't know if we deserve what he gave us, and I'm not sure that he thought we did either. All feelings that I understand frighteningly well. One thing I do know, we must carry on, the word must be given, and the voices never silenced...