It’s not about fighting Communism - the battle against the
USSR was won in the 1990s.
Or are we to be persuaded by racialism? It’s worked before: see the WWI US recruiting poster by Harry Hopps, where a drooling monster ape in a German Pickelhaube helmet holds a despairing young woman – boobs out, lads, look! – under the title ‘Destroy This Mad Brute.’
Today the target is not the Hun but the Slav, appealing to what Peter Hitchens has just called ‘the ridiculous cartoon idea that Russia is like Mordor in Lord Of The Rings, an utterly evil country ruled by a Dark Monster.’ https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2022/02/peter-hitchens-granny-gets-her-gun-from-a-bunch-of-shamelss-neo-nazis-not-that-the-bbc-would-ever-te.html Do Slav lives matter?
Our propaganda may be as crude as that of a century ago – see
last Friday’s Mail article describing President Putin as a ‘Snarling rat backed
into a corner’ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-10525223/Vladimir-Putin-snarling-rat-backed-corner-writes-IAN-BIRRELL.html - but the quality of our politicians actually seems to have declined.
Think of our Foreign Secretary, who can’t distinguish between the Baltic and
the Black Sea https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/vladimirputin/video-2604297/Video-Liz-Truss-confuses-Baltic-Black-Sea-700-miles-apart.html
and goes into a meeting with Mr Lavrov unaware that Rostov and Voronezh are
Russian regions https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/kremlin-cites-truss-error-evidence-west-doesnt-understand-ukraine-conflict-2022-02-11/
If she wishes to channel Mrs Thatcher she should imitate Maggie’s diligent preparation.
Perhaps our representatives are counting on the dumbing-down
of a populace whose imagination has been fed by the fascistic violence of Marvel
comic heroes and a secular religion figureheaded by an autistic teenage
activist I call the Swedish Frightingale or Joan of Aargh.
Are we fighting for democracy? Let’s not look too closely at
how the current regime in Ukraine was installed. For that matter, is the EU a
democracy? If it is, why did we leave?
Is the UK a democracy? Actually, no; we have a constitutional
monarchy and are subjects not citizens. When John Dunning proposed his 1780
motion to curb the influence of the Crown https://libquotes.com/john-dunning/quote/lbj9i1o
he may have thought that Parliament was belling the cat; instead, power has
simply passed down to the Privy Council, of which the PM and all the Cabinet
are automatically members. Tony Benn, a socialist but a Parliamentarian to his
bootstraps, warned many years ago - and I'm sorry not to have found a link -
that our freedoms could be swept away in an afternoon by Order In Council. PM
Blair knew this very well, for one of his first acts in government (3 May 1997)
was to use the Council to make the Civil Service subordinate to spin doctors https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/247039/response/605821/attach/3/3%20May%201997%20Civil%20Service%20Amendment%20Order%20in%20Council%201997.pdf?cookie_passthrough=1.
The Opposition in Parliament is our safeguard against
tyranny, but it has failed. A touchstone for this is the way that on 19 October
last year Parliament renewed the extraordinary powers of the Coronavirus Act
without so much as a division. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/watch-mps-extend-the-coronavirus-act-without-a-vote
The Covid episode has taught the State that there is almost nothing it cannot
do to the people, provided the Opposition colludes in the hope of getting their
turn soon and the Fourth Estate sings loyally from the State’s hymn sheet. We
see this again in Canada, where Prime Minister Trudeau has invoked emergency
powers merely to deal with trucker protests he himself has provoked by his high-handed
Covid mandates.
Even the American Presidency is tending towards autocracy –
remember how back in September Biden, speaking to his country about the Covid
vaccination program, said ‘this is not about freedom or personal choice… my job
as President is to protect all Americans… we’ve been patient, but our patience
is wearing thin.’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7chQfQ67SM
There as here, government has invaded our daily life so far that the new wine
of super-power threatens to burst the old skins of restraining constitutional
arrangements; for example, President Biden’s role is set down in Article Two of
the Constitution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_States_Constitution
and there his protection was defined in military, rather than medical terms.
If the US were committed to genuine democracy, the
Republicans would not find so many ways to make it harder for the underclass to
participate in elections – redrawing constituency boundaries into fantastical politically-motivated
shapes, siting polling stations far from left-voting population centres and so
on; and the Democrats would not be turning a blind eye to, if not encouraging, an
influx of poor immigrants whose ballots they hope may be counted on for a
generation, or even allowing non-citizens the right to vote. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/09/new-york-allows-non-citizens-vote-controversial-law
It is hard to escape the conclusion that the real theme of
what is happening domestically and internationally is simply the acquisition,
concentration and retention of power. Former President Carter’s foreign policy
adviser Zbigniew Brzeziński reflected on this in his book ‘The Grand
Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives,’ https://www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/36/36669B7894E857AC4F3445EA646BFFE1_Zbigniew_Brzezinski_-_The_Grand_ChessBoard.doc.pdf
published in 1997 - five years after the
Soviet collapse. In this work, the term ‘freedom’ appears ten times, ‘democracy’
25 times but ‘hegemon/y’ 56 times; what he calls ‘the game’ is played out using
a string of ‘perches’ for American forces around the globe.
Brzeziński worried that the EU might become more independent
of US influence, even friendly with Russia:
‘… any ejection of America by its
Western partners from its perch on the western periphery would automatically spell
the end of America's participation in the game on the Eurasian chessboard, even
though that would probably also mean the eventual subordination of the western
extremity to a revived player occupying the middle space.’
Well, here we are, 25 years on.
In playing this real-life board game – more like Risk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_(game)
than chess – I think our leaders have lost the plot. What good will it do us?
For it is ‘the economy, stupid.’ After a decade (the 1950s)
in which the Soviet economy had been growing twice as fast as Britain’s, PM
Harold Macmillan wrote (December 1960) to President Kennedy:
‘What is going to happen to us
unless we can show that our modern free society – the new form of capitalism –
can make the fullest use of our resources and results in a steady expansion of
our economic strength… If we fail in this, Communism will triumph, not by war,
or even subversion, but by seeming to be a better way of bringing people
material comforts. In other words, if we were to fall back into anything like
the recession or crisis that we had between the wars, with large-scale
unemployment of men and machines, I think we would have lost the hand.’
- Quoted in ‘Macmillan: The Official
Biography’ by Alistair Horne (Macmillan, 1988)
For me the word that stands out there is ‘new’; capitalism
old-style and protected by a very limited franchise was what fuelled the
indignation that threatened to tear apart our ‘free society’; Lloyd George was
forced to emasculate the House of lords in order to advance even his relatively
modest welfare reforms.
Despite universal adult suffrage in the UK (still awaiting
its centenary) the economic strains have begun to return as Western elites gave
globalist bankers and traders their head. The tensions this has created at home
are now being contained with high-handed government and unprecedented data-driven
spying on and suppression of the people, abetted by an Opposition whose
principal concern is its own welfare, and a complaisant mass media.
It’s not the Russians we need to sort out.
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