There's a scene in Doctor Zhivago, the David Lean film, which depicts a wretched and exhausted division of First World War Russian soldiers moving away from the front. They come into contact with a brigade moving the other direction, led by supercilious and stereotypically imperious officers. Those retreating tell those advancing to turn around -- the war is slaughter, they say. An officer then stands atop a wagon, intending to motivate them. "Ten miles up that road are THE GERMANS. And it's YOU who've let them in. Now they're coming for your country!" "YOUR country," one of the bedraggled soldiers heckles. Before he can respond, the officer trips and is shot by another soldier. The other officers are quickly pulled off their horses and beaten to death by what is by now a rampaging and uncontrollable mob. I could not help but think of that scene as I listened to Giga-Posho Jacob Rees-Mogg tell the working-class lads of Britain that they were going to have to fight. Of course, the difference now is that the Germans really were coming for the Russians in 1917, and eventually disembowelled the country. This time, though, the call is to fight for somebody else's borders even as our elites won't defend ours, and to fight for Our Values (the possessive in that phrase being much more personal and particular to a small subset of Britons than Rees-Mogg and Michael Gove perhaps realise). Yet the similarities remain. A working class that hasn't had a pay increase for almost two decades. Whose political views have been acknowledged in every election manifesto of the 21st century, and then ignored once the voting is through. Whose culture is being denied and atomised. Whose wives and daughters feel increasingly unsafe on their own streets. Whose ruling class has become unmoored from both the values of those they govern and, it often seems, reality itself. Now these people are being asked to offer themselves to be slain for values to which they do not hold true, against an opponent with whom many of them have no real quarrel. (Really, who cares which set of corrupt oligarchs controls the refuse collection in Donetsk, many would no doubt ask.) I do not think many people know how bad a civil war or a revolution would be. There's an annoyingly glib assumption among many of those who post in (righteous) dissatisfaction here that a revolution is just what we need, based on the assumption that their preferred political system and policies would rise from the ashes and take control. No. That's not what would happen. Revolution and civil war are the moment you lose control and open the gates for all the turpitude and iniquity of hell to flood into Britain. The groups and ideologies given power by the chaos and horror of civil wars and revolutions are not pleasant (read anything about the Jacobins or the Bolsheviks by way of proof). Real revolutions (unlike those of 1668 and 1776, which were as much a restorations) thus almost always leave countries much less civilised, much less kind, much less gentle places, leaving multigenerational scars of distrust, violence and penury. The ballot box and persuasion are the only ways to get the change you want. We must try everything in our power to avoid the alternative. But sometimes I worry, I really do. Listening to JRM demanding that the ignored, put upon average Brit goes to fight for the psychodrama in which the Yookay Elite seem to have become involved with Vladimir Putin makes me worry that our ruling class simply won't get their act together in time, this time. As a far greater aristocratic figure is supposed once to have said: "Good God, why should they mock poor fellows thus? The man that once did sell the lion’s skin While the beast lived was killed with hunting him. A many of our bodies shall no doubt Find native graves, upon the which, I trust, Shall witness live in brass of this day’s work."