The anti-hunters have been reluctant to acknowledge the depth of attachment felt by their opponents. The pro-hunters have fought a disastrous campaign, and have been counter-productively obdurate to the end Both sides have played up class divisions The Prime Minister has dithered in between But finally, by imperfect means, democracy has worked Cheer Move on.. Words of wisdom sometimes have the unlikeliest of sources. Of all people, it was left to Luis Aragones, the coach of Spain’s national football team, to reflect that the uproar over the racism that seems endemic in Spanish football is England’s way of “covering up flaws in its own society”. Five years ago, we were wringing our hands, pondering how we could confront the newly discovered adversary of institutional racism.Now we feel assured enough to pontificate on the racist ills that bedevil other nations. Are we really so faultless that we can censure, denounce and criticise another European country for a transgression that was, until recently, commonplace in our own culture? Only months ago, Ron Atkinson was discharged from his television duties after passing judgement on a black player in language that might have sprung from the lips of a 19th-century slave owner.How long had he been using the word “nigger” and other racist shibboleths? Imagine the company he keeps: television personnel, managers, players.

In such circumstances the rule is “Shoot first and ask questions later” – and always has been.Embedded cameras have allowed us a peek into this brutal world Our liberal civilian instinct is to reach for the courts. However, such bureaucratic niceties have little place in the mind of a frightened young man clearing a house full of suicidal Islamic fighters, dangerous as snakes in a pit Battle is legalised killing. For this is the endgame of battle, the brutal teamwork by small groups of soldiers trying to kill their enemies at close quarters without getting killed themselves, a bloody mayhem of screams, smoke, explosions, terrifying noise and, above all, bowel-watering fear. Who knows when a wounded man may rise up and fire into the backs of the advancing troops? Who knows when a wounded man may roll over to reveal a lethal grenade and kill his rescuers? FM 7-8 is clear: “Treatment of casualties normally begins at the conclusion of the engagement…” But who decides when the fighting is “concluded”?We have already entered the lawyers’ pedantic clutches in the issuing of little yellow cards to soldiers setting out their “rules of engagement” on what a soldier may or may not legally do. A moment’s indecision can spell mutilation or death.And when the objective has been taken, it must be “consolidated”. While all training manuals are agreed that an attack takes in several phases, “fighting through the objective” is by far the least well-defined, even by the US Infantry’s Field Manual 7-8. They have forced us to confront the key problem of battle: at what point does the “fighting” end? It is a very grey area.

Military reaction has generally been one of defensive embarrassment.The propaganda victory for the enemies of the coalition is theoretically immense.And yet we have seen nothing new. The military realises that the presentation of combat is far too important to be left to the media, even though it has no control over what goes on in the editing suite.The irony is that, by revealing the awfulness of the legalised killing that we call combat, the networks have done us a favour. For centuries men have been casually slaughtering each other on a thousand battlefields. What is different here is that for the first time since Vietnam we can see the reality of war via the “embedded” front-line cameras of both commercial news teams and military combat cameramen.

Civilian reaction has been mixed from “disgraceful” to “what do we expect in a war?”. The machine gunner finally raised his hands in surrender: “Kamerad!”
“Too late, chum!” replied the enraged Australian infantryman as he plunged his bayonet into the German’s stomach.The above story – apocryphal or not, it has the ring of truth – has been taught to generations of graduates of the British Army Staff College as an object lesson in three things: first, how difficult it can be to surrender; second, the realities of men in battle; and last, the niceties of the law of armed conflict.This issue has been brought sharply into focus by the extraordinary camera footage of what appears to be a US Marine shooting a wounded Iraqi. The Spanish may well retaliate with a command that we peer into our own souls. Perhaps the denunciation of others is a zigzag road to redemption for sins that are uncomfortably like our own.Ellis Cashmore’s book ‘Tyson’ is published on Friday by Polity. He is Professor of Culture, Media and Sport at Staffordshire University. The advancing infantry fell down before the murderous fire until finally the survivors hurled themselves against the sandbags.

The German machine gunner blasted away at the Australians. Sanctimoniously, we have responded with indignation, demanding condemnation as well as punitive sanctions. This from a nation that, only five years ago, was tormented by a vision of institutional racism on its cultural landscape. People are animated by ethnic affiliations; they see themselves as Basque, Catalan, Galician or part of one of the other many clusters that distinguish themselves by language, cuisine, patterns of worship and other cultural indicators.