Call of Duty

‘No Russian’

I can’t find it.

Like the clichéd middle aged, middle class Englishman I am, I feel right at home in the Military History section of my local Waterstones. I’m no scholar but I’ve read my share of Antony Beevor, dabbled with James Holland, and thoroughly enjoyed my time with the wonderful N.A.M Rodger. I’ve even skimmed a little Carl von Clausewitz.

But recently, I’ve felt compelled to return to Sun Tzu.

2500 years ago Sun wrote the original ‘How To’ guide for every would-be general, wannabe warlord, and aspiring male Girl Boss, The Art of War.

The book which inspired everyone, from Michael Douglas’ character Gordon Gekko (super subtle nominative determinism there) in 80’s Wall St movie, er… Wall St, to anyone who ever wanted to be a bit like Gordon Gekko in the 80’s Wall St movie, Wall St.

Now after spending a little time mouldering away in Naff Corner, along with Ugg Boots, Burberry, and David Cameron, Sun Tzu is suddenly back in vogue.

Proper journalists like Dan Hannan see his influence in the decisions of leaders like China’s Xi Jinping. Apparently Xi has aspirations to take Taiwan

‘without fighting-Sun Tzu’s definition of the ultimate military skill’

So if world leaders have returned to the master strategist, I thought it might be worth dipping back in myself. To maybe get an insight into the thought processes behind some of the complex moves currently taking place, in the 4D chess game, that is global politics.

We live, after all, in interesting times.

Like Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, quagmired in Ukraine, appears to be taking Sun Tzu’s advice. He is following the dictum

‘sow division amongst your enemies and wait for their resolve to crumble’.

Something which is clearly happening amongst Zelenskyy’s increasingly reluctant American and European quartermasters.

But as much as I look, I’m struggling to find the bit in The Art of War where Sun Tzu suggests the winning strategy

‘hand $10 billion of free money to your mortal enemy’.

Money which that enemy is then free to spend funding Middle East terrorist groups, and their attacks on your shipping, in the Red Sea.

Enough cash to ‘make it rain’ for Hezbollah. So it can, in turn, rain down rockets on your ally, Israel.

Or funds that could perhaps be spent building a nuclear bomb.

I’ve just double checked my Sun Tzu. And it is definitely not in there.

Which is weird because that’s exactly the strategy which Joe Biden’s government is pursuing. It has just handed the Iranian regime, sworn enemy, let’s not forget, of the Great Satan, $10bn. And that’s on top of the $6bn it handed over in September.

It’s not a great plan.  A quick check in the Military History section under ‘Chamberlain’ might have reminded American Secretary of State Antony Blinken, that appeasement is not always a winning strategy.

I can’t help but think, Antony Blinken, is a Blinken’ idiot.

Iran clearly spent some of Biden’s money on the drones which were used to attack an American base in Jordan. Killing three US servicemen.

And so the White House immediately sprung into action, and like a teetering drunk, spoiling for a fight outside a Cardiff kebab shop, spent the next week putting up its dukes, swaying about ineffectually, and promising that it was about to definitely, certainly, unquestionably and most assuredly, do something.

Eventually it did do something, and dropped some bombs on Iranian forces in Syria and Iraq.

Which is great news. At least for fans of watching the globe descend into the fiery apocalypse of World War Three.

And that’s not me scaremongering. They’re all saying it. Donald Trump. Joe Biden. Some British guy.

And Admiral Bob Bauer. A senior NATO security official who counsels that we should prepare for all out war with Russia in the next 20 years.

The good news of course, is that if the world really is about to go full Oppenheimer, then there is no longer any need for the Net Zero hair shirt.

We can give ourselves a break, stop tediously sorting our rubbish into green bins and blue bins, buy ourselves a new patio heater, and leave the diesel ticking over outside a primary school. Happy days.

Relax snowflakes! It won’t come to that.

The military geniuses in charge have already come up with a master plan.

Rishi Sunak is going to allow America to station nuclear missiles on UK soil for the first time since 2008. ‘As the threat from Russia increases’. 

This cold war just got hot.

Reaching for the nukes might seem like an unnecessary escalation, a way to paint a target on the backs of every UK citizen, but it actually makes a lot of sense. After all, our armed forces certainly can’t protect us.

There are currently more people in British prisons than in the British army. 93,000 vs 76,950.

But let’s not jump to conclusions.

Maybe having such a woefully inadequate army is actually a good thing. After all, it just means our government has taken all the money we would have otherwise wasted on protecting British borders,  British interests and British kids, and spent it on more worthwhile projects instead.

Like a high speed railway line to Manchester which will now only go to Birmingham. Slowly.

Or eight hundred much needed diversity officers for the NHS. (I mean I don’t know if you’ve been to a NHS hospital recently. But it’s frankly embarrassing, those places are whiter than a weekend at Centre Parcs. )

Or the £8m a day we’re spending on keeping illegal immigrants in three star luxury, at some of the nation’s top, mid price hotels.

The truth is, after we’ve paid for all these necessities, plus the £13 billion in foreign aid we shovel out the door each year to pay for essential, life giving, Salsa lessons in Chad.

And taken into account the cost of putting up Michael Gove in a £25 million grace and favour home to which he isn’t entitled.

There’s not an awful lot left to fight off the Ruskies.

Also, for some reason, our armed forces are failing to attract new recruits.

There have been loads written about the current recruitment crisis.

Articles puzzling why a country which is disdainful of its own history, trashes its own identity, and insults its own people might have trouble recruiting young men to fight for it.

And others wondering whether the armed forces we do have, are too interested in wokist navel gazing, to constitute a credible fighting force.

So let’s not retread the same ground here.

Instead let’s go back to basics, and question why Britain needs an army in the first place.

Supposedly Vladimir Putin, neck deep in Ukrainian gore and German Euros, has taken time out from his busy schedule, riding topless on stallions, singing duets with teenagers and sending thin men to die in the Donbas, to cast his covetous eye over Britain.

He’s gazed at our streets full of American Candy Stores, charity shops, and boarded up banks. Drug addled homeless, gangs of Eastern European pickpockets, and mobs of flag waving anti semites chanting for bloody genocide verdant parks full of peace loving families, demanding an end to Israel aggression, and thought to himself.

‘Dah! I’ll have some of that’.

Really? Compared to a full on Russian invasion, Omicron was a credible threat.

Russia can barely contain Ukraine. The idea that Russian troops are going to land on Brighton beach or parachute onto Oxford St is pure fantasy.

Don’t get me wrong, Putin is certainly an enemy of the West. I’m sure he delights in  taking every opportunity to destabilise our economies, weaken our military, and undermine our security.

He’s just not about to march across Europe so he can occupy the London Eye and plant the Russian flag on the roof of Hogwarts.

Some people on the right, seem to have a sneaking admiration for Putin, I’m not one of them.

He’s an evil man who looks like a sad egg that’s had too much Botox.

[Note to self. Best avoid Salisbury Cathedral for a while.]

Putin isn’t sending the Spetsnaz to invade us, he doesn’t need to.

The Kremlin’s tactic in Finland is to weaponise the migrant crisis, sending hordes of African men across the Finnish border, on Russian bought scooters and bikes.

Russian ally Belarus, is doing much the same to neighbours Poland and Lithuania.

Clearly the idea being to destabilise those countries, drain their coffers, and soak up valuable resources which would be better spent guarding the border against an actual Russian invasion force.

Here in the UK we can’t blame Putin for an ever growing fifth column of hostile troops.

We ourselves are responsible for importing thousands of fighting age men every year, often from Middle Eastern countries, which have values, attitudes and aspirations which are antithetical to the interests of this nation, and the peaceful, law abiding, regular people, from all over the world, who live here.

Although to listen to the BBC, or the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, you might be led to believe that most are simply fleeing Middle East regimes which are incompatible with their unflinching Christian passion for women’s rights, LGB rights, and Israel’s right to exist.

Considering the armed forces recruitment crisis, it has been suggested that we could ask new arrivals from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq to join the army. But it could be a tad embarrassing if they inform the recruiter that unfortunately they can’t, because they are already in an army.

I’m not saying that everyone arriving here by assault dinghy is a foreign combatant or terrorist. Absolutely not. But they don’t need to be.

In 2022 we welcomed (yes, welcomed) 44,000 undocumented, and largely anonymous, illegal immigrants onto these shores. We have no idea who most of them are, or where their allegiances really lie.

Let’s not assume that 10% are wrong ‘uns, nor even 1%. If only half a percentage were planning on murder and mayhem, that is still 220. A year.

And 220 people can cause an awful lot of carnage.

Just think, with less than three times that number of MPs, our parliament has managed to drive an entire country off a cliff.

Of course we’ve knowingly been hosting terrorists groups for years.

And overall it’s been fine. We’ve hardly had any buses explode, tube trains bombed, children blown up,  gay men stabbed, commuters run over, or soldiers beheaded, at all.

Home Secretary James Cleverly spent last month bigging himself up for finally proscribing Jew hating jihad enthusiasts, Hizb ut-Tahir.

Mere months after they were filmed calling for genocide on the streets of UK. And barely 20 years after Germany, and even Pakistan (Pakistan! Retirement home of Osama bin Laden let’s not forget) banned their anti semitic rantings.

This Cleverly guy does not hang around.

And our government cannot claim it did not know who they were, or what they stood for, after all we’ve been paying their wages for years. Up until five minutes ago, their leader, Wahid Shaida, worked for the NHS, as a GP.

(He’s since been suspended. Which has left me with mixed feelings TBH. Because even now he’s still managing to undermine the UK, this time by helping make the NHS waiting list just that tiny bit longer)

And yes I’m sure that many members of  Hizb ut-Tahir are British born nationals. I get it. But I’m equally sure that  Hizb ut-Tahir didn’t start out life as the especially spicy off shoot of the Basingstoke Bridge Club.

The existential threat to western democracy doesn’t come from foreign dictators like Vladimir Putin, but from a liberal, progressive, segregationist ideology which seeks to systematically dismantle the building blocks of our society, and render us impotent, divided and weak.

Putin is not responsible for the creeping authoritarianism of our censorious government. And the self defeating, immiserating nature of its policies. It’s the one thing our bosses have managed to achieve all on their own.

Our elites have surrendered our economy to China, and the nonsense of extreme environmentalism. Sacrificed our culture on the altar of ‘Diversity’. And our kids to a lifetime of debt, and worse, state sanctioned, sexual exploitation.

Our elected representatives have handed our sovereignty to hostile international bodies like the EU, the UN, the ECHR and the WHO.

They have exchanged the rule of law for a partisan justice system, and two tier policing.

Our leaders have swapped reason for group think. And exchanged our freedoms for a Potemkin, figmental brand of ‘safety’.

If we somehow avoid World War Three, and the incoming (Incoming! Incoming!) nuclear conflagration, we’ll be left with the economy of Argentina. The health service of the Yemen. The social cohesion of Lebanon. And the authoritarianism of Canada.

Sun Tzu says ‘the opportunity of defeating, the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.’

Russia doesn’t need to defeat Britain.

Britain is already destroying itself.

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