Keyboard worrier

Sunday, February 20, 2022

The real battle, by Sackerson

Why Ukraine? Why now? Why at all?

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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