Another Crimean War Would Be the Death Knell of England
Pakis Matter More than Russians
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British troops shiver in muddy trenches outside some Russian town with a name unknown West of the Dnieper until last month, hearing the boom of heavy siege guns they hope and pray are directed at the trenches of the enemy rather than their own. Looking to their left, they see the red, white, and blue tricolor of the French; looking ahead, across the mud-churned and snow-covered fields, they see the hated Russian tricolor, a different variation of red, white, and blue standing, to them, for tyranny, territorial grabs, and anti-liberal government. Or, at least, that’s what the media said when whipping the public into a war fury. The shivering troops then look out of the trenches to their commissary, knowing with dread their officers to be incompetent, their food to be subpar, their wages to be minuscule, and their weapons to be outdated encumbrances. Sighing, they try not to freeze to death in the cold for which their leaders failed to plan while they wait for those same leaders to decide upon a campaign objective.
Such was the situation in 1854, when British and French troops landed in the Crimea to fight the Russians. Then, that war against a Christian country occurred for the benefit of the Ottoman Turks, the longtime enemies of Christendom and traders in white slaves who Gladstone the Liberal thought it would be a good idea to defend from the Russians, even as the Russians tried liberating Christian subjects of the Turks. Emperor Napoleon III agreed, and the Fleet Street media hacks did their best to stir up public hatred of the Russian Christians and love for the Ottoman Turks. Which led to unprepared, poorly equipped British troops being deposited in Russian territory. The story of the Light Brigade’s needless charge and the fact that troops starved and froze despite the quite mild Crimean winter tell the tale of how well that expedition went.
Now, Britain’s rulers seem poised to make the same mistake, only with far more dire consequences on the horizon.
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Buoyed by the spiritual successors of the Fleet Street hacks, far-left English Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron are, in fact, agitating for sending troops to Western Ukraine as “peacekeepers”1 who will, presumably, serve as bait for the Russians to trigger NATO’s Article V provision and again draw American troops into a European war. Or, if not, they will attempt to fight the Russians on their own.
That hackneyed “coalition of the willing,” as Starmer calls it, will ostensibly serve as a bulwark against the Russians despite England having only a few dozen operational tanks2 (a dramatic decrease from the over 1000 that it alone could field in 1990),3 an anemic defense budget,4 a hollowed out defense industrial base that can’t supply units with the equipment they need,5 and a government that is widely unpopular to the point of being hated by native British.6 Regardless of its army being minuscule and underequipped despite its small size, Starmer continues to bang on about how England will send troops and air cover for them to Ukraine.7
That idea is delusional.
England was the world’s preeminent nation in 1854, a global empire constantly increasing its wealth, industrial power, military might, and population. So, it could afford to make mistakes in Eastern Europe; even if they cost lives, a tragedy, it was unlikely they’d be disastrous to the point of impeding England’s prospects, and containing Russia might aid them. Not now.
The Human Cost of a Monumental Mistake
Now, as implied by England’s inability to even field half an operational tank regiment,8 it is a declining power beset by domestic problems that could undo it at any moment. Namely, it is riven by the blessings of diversity, which mainly consist of Muslim immigrants who hate England and her traditions overtaking its major cities9 (London is now only 30% English),10 protesting within them,11 and committing unspeakable crimes against young English girls.12
Of course, the increasingly decrepit pensioners13 and mobs of menopausal women14 eager to send the sons they never had to die in some muddy trench in Donetsk ignore how unlikely it is that young English men will line up to fight for a regime that aids15 grooming gangs16 and arrests men for trying to defend women from murderous, Muslim rapists.17 In fact, the English are already showing they have no intention of dying for Zelensky.18
Even if young men could somehow be convinced to volunteer or press-ganged into service using Ukrainian draft-enforcement tactics, their country couldn’t afford to lose them: the fertility rate is so low that casualty rates typical of the Russo-Ukraine War so far would bleed the country of its last real resource, its future citizens.
In 2023, for reference, there were a mere 591,072 live births in England and Wales, the lowest number since 1977. That year also saw TFR plummet to 1.44.19 As England and Wales make up the majority of the population, nearly 60 million out of the 67 million total, it is really that birth rate and live births number that matters.
The situation is even more dire than those numbers indicate, as the Muslims and other non-British minority groups living within England have far higher fertility rates than the native British.20 So, even without a cataclysmic war, England’s youth are becoming steadily non-white and approaching the point where only half of school-aged children are British.21 Already, only two-thirds of kids in England are English. Thus, of the under 600,000 live births, perhaps only 380,000, or perhaps even fewer, are actually British. In short, Britain is quickly becoming non-British,22 and a war would only accelerate that trend.
The problem is yet worse because those non-British migrants have made it clear that, while they’re willing to leech on welfare benefits afforded the native British,23 they have no intention of fighting for the country if it finds itself in a war abroad.24
So, what a war would mean for the British is that native men, and perhaps even women, would be sent off to die in their thousands for a corrupt oligarchy abroad that is currently losing a war it has no real hope, even with their sacrifice, of winning. They haven’t the equipment to properly fight and so would likely lose far more than the 300 casualties a day the relatively well-equipped American armed forces expect to incur in a similar scenario.25 The Ukrainians, for reference, have received most of what good equipment the West has to offer and have so far incurred, as a conservative estimate, perhaps 100,000 dead and half a million wounded by the summer of 2024.26
The real number is likely far higher, as it was estimated to already be 100,000 dead in the summer of 2023.27 At that rate, the current British army of 152,000 personnel could be annihilated in a year.
Meanwhile, those immigrants who don’t want to fight, which is to say all of them, could remain back in Britain, abusing English girls and sucking up welfare resources while British men died in droves for Zelensky. As war’s casualties are concentrated amongst those in their twenties and early thirties, which is to say those who would be having children, the result would be catastrophic for the English people: its remaining best, those who can fight, would die abroad, the last of their bloodlines, while migrants replaced them at home.
Suffering the same casualties as the Ukrainians, which seems likely if Britain enters the conflict and it escalates, would wipe out years of native British births at the same time as the invading migrants rapidly increased their numbers through both births and immigration. That would, to put it simply, mean the end of Britain, the turning of the entire country into the multicultural hell that now is London.
The Economic Cost
And while the potential human toll of an intervention is staggering and perhaps irreversible, the potential economic cost is similarly awful. Intervention in Ukraine could lead to World War III. This is why Trump is skeptical of continued American involvement; he sees the risk. While the human toll of that is described above, the economic toll would likely be nearly as bad.
Remember, how did the world wars, particularly the second, treat England? It lost not only its empire, prestige, and future generations but also the relatively free economic system that created its prosperity.
Before the wars, it had relatively low taxes, little regulation, and a strong private sector.28
Taxes for the First World War meant death taxes rising to 40%, increasingly painful income taxes, and mounds of regulation as the state got used to market intervention during the war.
Then, with Churchill’s dogged involvement in the Second World War, death taxes soon rose to 90%, income taxes to over 95%, and the key elements of the Industrial Revolution — the iron and coal mines, the steel mills, and the railroads — were nationalized by the government.29 Further, the economic base of British social life was destroyed, as its famous country manors were appropriated by Churchill’s government and left ruined by the troops and agents of the government housed within them, often without compensation to the owners.30
So, the World Wars meant that not only were Britain’s best massacred, with Britain’s oldest families suffering losses at nearly 150% the rate of the rest of the country in the First World War31 and the losses falling disproportionally on the brave men who volunteered, but also the obliteration of the economic basis of its preeminence. Through taxes, nationalization, and confiscation, it lost everything that had made it such a global economic titan.
Starmer, as shown by his plans to tax British farmers out of existence32 while sending the tax dollars reaped by the destruction of their farms to farmers abroad,33 would obviously have no compunctions about enacting similarly confiscatory taxes to pay for his bloody adventure in Ukraine. In fact, for him, taxes, confiscation, and regulation are the goal rather than even being a distasteful byproduct.
The Passing of Britannia
When British troops landed in the Crimea and proceeded to fight like lions led by donkeys for not the last time in their history, they did so on behalf of a government that they supported and in the context of an empire that could afford to make mistakes. Though far too many men died (over 22,000),34 those losses were bearable given how many children the country was having.35 Similarly, though the war was financially expensive,36 that cost could be borne given the ever-increasing and ever-more profitable private sector
Now the opposite is true. The country isn’t having kids, with the problem particularly bad for the native British. Every year more migrants swamp their shores, have more kids, and displace more native British. Further, those migrants refuse to fight. So, war would mean the further demolition of the British people, with casualties far lower than those suffered by the country in the First or Second World War causing catastrophic demographic damage.
Meanwhile, the billions that would be spent on such an excursion would be borne by an already overtaxed, overregulated, and anemic economy that can’t support the expense. Far from being a prosperous titan, England is now a rotten husk of its former self, and even slight pressure, much less the catastrophe of war with Russia, would cave it in.
So, a Crimean War Redux would be a disaster for the British. They can’t afford it in any sense of the word, and might be permanently disabled by such an irresponsible venture.
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Featured image credit: By Kirsty O'Connor / No 10 Downing Street - Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer arrives at Number 10 Downing St, OGL 3, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=150058496
This is described in painful detail by Tinniswood in his Noble Ambitions: The Fall and Rise of the English Country House After World War II
I’m praying for you all in Britain.
Perfect and complete summation of the risks of military, boots-on-the-ground support for Ukraine.