“The Charge of the Light Brigade“ was about the arrogance of the aristocracy and military stupidity, a combination that inevitably spells tragic results.
In 1854 during the Crimean War, the light brigade under the command of Lord Cardigan foolishly charged an entrenched army of Russian artillery, and were cut to pieces. Cardigan was a bully and a brute, and an incompetent officer to boot, but because he was also an earl, such behavior was tolerated.
With only a couple of hundred dead, it would have been forgotten as yet another in a long line of military blunders, except for one thing: Lord Tennyson wrote a poem about it which immediately vaulted the incident into the legion of brave-but-disastrous battles that the British so love to enshrine.
It is ironic that today’s equivalent of arrogant disconnected aristocracy, the Green/Labor latte sipping intellectuals in Canberra, are at it again. Gillard and Brown are forcing Australian businesses and families to charge ahead, alone in the world with the only industry-wide carbon tax and against their will, into the cannons of global economic and scientific reality. It is a stupid and utterly pointless act of bravado in a war on dangerous man-made climate change that no longer exists.
