Victory Matters

Why we need to get back to winning

(Churchill and FDR on board HMS Prince of Wales on August 14, 1941)

In our complacent societies, victory has become an abstraction.

At ceremonies we talk about generations of veterans, now overwhelmingly gone, who fought bravely for our basic freedoms. We remember two world wars and one cold one, when ways of life were in jeopardy. Yet few today were eyewitnesses to the heart-stopping jubilation and relief of victory.

We mostly fail to grasp how much of what we as societies have achieved or see around us today is owed to decisive military defeats of past aggressors.

The 7/7 bombings happened twenty years ago today. Three tightly-sequenced suicide attacks in the London Underground left 56 people dead and almost 800 injured. It was the UK’s highest death toll from terrorism since the 1988 Pan Am bombing at Lockerbie, which killed all 243 passengers and sixteen crew.