World War 3!!?? No, no. Too silly. Too expensive - but bring your own jetpacks and don't forget the flags, love Big Dog
World War 3!!?? No, no. Too silly. Too expensive - but bring your own jetpacks and don't forget the flags, love Big Dog
Boris Johnson’s latest pointless gesturing and dog-whistling involves upgrading the level of “troops” that he’s considering sending to Eastern Europe.
Several months ago, you’ll remember the crisis at the fuel pumps - as spoken about here.
Of course, the answer - in Johnson’s eyes - was to ‘send the boys in’ to deliver much-needed fuel to pumps; all 150 of them.
Prior to this, you’ll also remember the crisis of an understaffed, overworked and beleaguered NHS and their respective volunteers being tasked with testing Britain at the height of each coronavirus wave of infections.
The answer, again, in Johnson’s eyes was to ‘send the boys in.’
Asylum seekers and migrants crossing the English Channel, recently, is another issue that has involved ‘sending the boys in’ - hilariously, to the chagrin of racists everywhere who were concerned and perplexed by their pledge to abide by international legal obligations.
Flooding in Yorkshire? Send the boys in.
Guarding supermarkets? Send the boys in.
Help building hospitals? Send the boys in.
But why do it?
Well, the obvious answer is that it gives the Daily Mail an excuse to publish a pointless story on their front page for the small few who probably still support Boris Johnson at this point.
It galvanises the support among those who still pride themselves on the concept of ‘Empire’ - even though according to Professor of Applied Economics Patrick Minford in his book, ‘Reconstruction and the UK Post War Welfare State: False Start and New Beginning’ - Britain was left in a state of economic ruin following our apparent triumph over the Axis forces.
And despite being one of the beneficiaries of the Marshall Plan following the war, Senior Lecturer in International Relations Barbara Emadi-Coffin asserts in her book ‘Rethinking International Organization: Deregulation and Global Governance’ - that Britain has been in a slow but relative economic decline for decades.
Victory in Europe, appropriated by Vote Leave/Leave EU and others as ‘Victory over Europe’ following the Brexit referendum, carried with it all the jingoism for the short-term benefit of a greiving nation that has ultimately lost its sense of national identity and pride.
And with that, often, come the military attachments, too.
Naturally, tapping into the fervour of both Brexit and its supporters’ fascination with the military, Boris Johnson will utilise the optics.
Even if, it turns out…
…The military don’t take him seriously, either.
More Ghosts
This page has spoken several times about the concept of ‘Ghosts’.
Brexit, really, was the lynchpin that resurrected the spirits of a bygone and long-deceased age; a regression to a perceived ‘more simple’ and ‘less complicated’ time.
It wasn’t a coincidence that Nigel Farage evoked these ‘spirits’ when the Brexit Party launched their 2019 ‘Big Vision’ rally to the tune of air-raid sirens while alluding to ‘the blackout’.
Naturally, some will ascribe a certain reverence of nationalistic fervour to the military. They seek stories and myths - a new World War arc.
New memories; not fragmented rosy retrospection to a time many of those who rattle their sabres never probably experienced for themselves.
These people need a war.
Problem is, these same people genuinely believe Boris Johnson to be some kind of reincarnation of Winston Churchill; as though he has the ability to lift a nation’s spirits through the medium of Peppa Pig while chuntering rhetoric about what lies ahead for the Russians - who are no doubt sleeping with one ear to the sky, terrified in wait for the inimitable sound of a Merlin XII engine circling above - if World War 3 will be anything like how the Daily Mail wants it to be.
The concept of AI, for instance, of cyber and electronic warfare, even of robots, drones, biometric data recognition and hypersonic technology - or basically, the things China and Russia are good at - is alien to these same people - and why defence secretary Ben Wallace would face criticism when it is this same government - in spite of its posturing - that pledges to cut military personnel by almost 10,000 by 2025.
For better or worse; to keep up with the advances of perceived ‘threats’ such as Russia or China who’d arguably spend more time clicking buttons and sending dirty memes of Boris Johnson to some hacked Facebook algorithm, and switching off lights and internet service providers than it would lob mash potato grenades at their enemies in trench warfare.
But at least Britain has its own jetpack now, even if Elizabeth Truss can’t say what we’re going to do with it, can’t work out what’s going to happen or what our role in Ukraine is supposed to be.
“Best since Churchill…”
One of the depressing side effects to Brexit is that everything - the Conservatives feel - can be wrapped in a Union Flag and sold to the British public; be it via the pseudo-Churchillian war rhetoric of nurses on the frontline fighting an invisible enemy, or towards this crisis in Ukraine.
Indeed, while China was dealing with the initial outbreaks of coronavirus, Boris Johnson - according to Dominic Cummings, in an excellent article, by the way - was focussed on whether The Sun would get behind a campaign to support “The Big Ben Bong.”
Vanity snaps of distracting policy and pointless [needless] expenditure; “monuments to him in an Augustine fashion”, Cummings says; big media announcements - Royal flagships that are both not-actually-Royal and ultimately useless, and unlikely to be built; bridges from Scotland to the North of Ireland that wasted nearly £1 million in research alone, paint jobs on RAF jets - recently in the news because Elizabeth Truss spent £500,000 travelling to Australia in it.
A cost-of-living crisis fast approaching [if not unfolding before our eyes] and the government - or Boris Johnson, specifically - seriously expects us to believe that they’re “considering” sending in the boys when he can’t even afford to decorate his own flat without the use of spurious funding.
It’s just ludicrous.
The whole wretched thing is ludicrous, absurd and depressing in equal measure that even if we did go to war with Russia tomorrow and ‘the boys’ go from being stationed outside your local Tesco Express to Estonia, it’s worth remembering that we still have Boris Johnson in charge of the whole thing.
A man who attempts to distract Red Wall voters with apparently new pledges as part of the so-called ‘levelling up’ agenda even though what he is promising now was a part of the Spending Review from November last year where Rishi Sunak said that there was:
“no new money.”
And yet the Conservatives, for whatever reason, maybe the reasons I’ve discussed previously on this page, think we cannot change leaders now before or during wartime, like Thatcher with the Falklands.
But we can… also like Thatcher after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.
Going further back, Herbert Henry Asquith was “sacrificed” during World War I. Neville Chamberlain was famously deposed prior to World War II and even the venerable Winston Churchill never saw the end to World War II as Prime Minister.
But alas Johnson, through some prism of jingoistic and pseudo-nationalist facade believes himself to be somehow exceptional - as he always has, protected by both his implementation of ‘the boys’ and ‘the flag’.
A famous quote oft-paraphrased and attributed to Einstein goes:
“I don’t know what weapons might be used in World War III. But there isn’t any doubt what weapons will be used in World War IV - Stone spears.”
I disagree. World War 3 will be more ridiculous than that.
Russia will send the Night Wolves biker gang to fight in the trenches in full-on leather daddy-bear regalia that is better suited to Old Compton Street than the Great Gate of Kyiv.
Britain, meanwhile, will send Tommy Robinson fresh from his most recent bankruptcy and “doing his bit” picking unseasonal British strawberries in the absence of foreign workers to power his bio-diesel jetpack on the Eastern front - all in the name of the Spirit of the Blitz.
While they’re off doing that, Putin will be jumping into lakes to catch sturgeon with his teeth and Boris Johnson will be painting palm trees in Marbella.
Still, I suppose it’s better to be sat at home laughing while the whole absurd thing unfolds into a jingoistic, nationalistic apocalypse, eh?
And even then we’d still be waiting to read the Sue Gray report, “Boris”.