Western political establishments want to stop public challenges to misleading elite narratives, but Trump and Farage have now taken aim at their pet Ukraine project.
An article recently appeared in the UK’s Daily Telegraph written by a former commander of the British Army’s 1st Royal Tank Regiment. The burden of the article is that Nigel Farage was wrong to assert, as Donald Trump has also recently done, that NATO or the West provoked the Ukraine War with Russia. The idea is that this will, and should, cause Nigel Farage and Reform to lose support.
The claim that NATO provoked the war is distinct from, but related to, Trump’s correct claim that NATO could end the war tomorrow, but instead wishes to prolong it. The Telegraph writer implies that the war should continue even though there is no realistic way for NATO to prevent a Russian victory, at least by conventional means. He presumably understands this. Below is the modified text of my response to a friend inviting me to comment on the article.
“The writer skates over the history of Western provocation over thirty years, and pretends not to realise that Russia has in fact been winning in Ukraine. The West cannot do a thing about it, except start a mutually assured destruction nuclear exchange, which I hope the Pentagon won’t allow.The writer used to be an officer in a tank unit. He will be aware that the UK’s Challenger tank, like the other Western Leopard and Abrams tanks, has performed poorly in the Ukraine, as have NATO weapons in general. Many of Britain’s remaining Challengers are inoperable - some will have been cannibalised for parts. The factory which made their gun barrels has been closed. It is entirely possible that his former unit has next-to-no combat capability. It could melt away in a matter of days in Ukraine.
The author wants more defence spending. But these NATO equipment deficiencies are the result of a system under which NATO outspent Russia until recently by ten times. The excess has apparently been mismanaged or plain skimmed away by our deep state masters. More spending is unlikely to be the answer, especially given the West’s fragile industrial bases.
There seems to be no room for introspection or reflection with these people – Western officials. The West insisted that Ukraine would join NATO and refused to give assurances to Russia that US troops and nuclear missiles would not be stationed there. The Russians said that they would use force to prevent this unacceptable outcome. Then the Russians intervened. Duh?
I would bet heavily that if China proposed that Mexico form a joint military alliance putting Chinese missiles and troops on the Rio Grande then NATO, the US, and the writer of the Telegraph would all see that as provoking war. Somehow the West’s ‘Rules Based Order’ does not apply to the West itself, a point that global opinion completely understands and resents.Tell me something. If the purpose of NATO is supposed to be protecting Europe and preventing war, how did extending it into Eastern Europe, which the West explicitly promised Gorbachev in writing that it would not do, achieve these objectives?
I forbear to comment on the article’s mischaracterisation of the Russian leadership. It would be none of our business even if it had some basis in truth, which it doesn’t.Look at what has happened. The Russians proposed a permanent peace and security settlement in late 2021. NATO couldn’t be bothered to respond to them, maybe because any settlement would have made NATO redundant.The Polish president recently gave the game away recently when he said Russia should be broken up into 200 pieces, which is anyway only a reworking of the US think tank Rand Corporation paper on breaking Russia up.
That is not exactly a defensive ambition on the West’s part. NATO does its own opinion polling. Reportedly, it has known for over a year that two thirds of Eastern Europeans and around half of Western Europeans lean towards Russia rather than Ukraine. The percentages supporting the Russian narrative will only have increased since then.
The Telegraph article reflects palpable fear in the elite that their self-serving Ukraine narrative will be busted publicly by politicians who they have always been desperate to marginalise, precisely to conceal their (the elites) incompetent if not malign stewardship of the West.
It’s all falling apart.I am happy to talk about these things, or we can agree to differ. The Ukraine narrative, like Covid and Climate, is an attempt to weaponise your own goodness and humanity against yourself.
The elites tell you that as a good person you must make sacrifices by giving up both prosperity and liberty to tackle these non-problems. I don’t see the globalists at the top of the pile giving up their private jets. Do you?”
In my letter to my friend, I don’t address the assertion, mentioned in the Telegraph article, that Nigel Farage will damage Reform’s electoral prospects in the current General Election campaign by challenging the establishment’s anti-Russian narrative. The Daily Telegraph is the principal Tory ‘quality’ newspaper. One would expect it to try to deter wavering Tory voters from defecting to Reform. The newspaper may even believe that the British population is pro-Ukraine, or at least can be intimidated into acquiescing to the cost of deliberately prolonging the Ukraine war. I rather doubt it. Time will tell.
More and more people have woken up. They have come to the understanding that the Ukraine story is yet another misleading and dishonest elite scam, along with Climate, Covid and Immigration, and indeed the underlying myth that the State is concerned about to the wellbeing of British people. These narratives justify harm to the population at large. Reform publicly challenges them. It opposes WHO membership (Covid), Net Zero (Climate), uncontrolled immigration and now the Military Industrial Complex Ukraine story.
Does a clear majority stand with Reform on all these issues? I do not know. Thanks to the censorship policies supported by the Tory/Labour Uniparty, it is hard for anyone to know, a fact that may yet come to bite the Establishment in the ass. I suspect that a very sizeable share of the electorate is fed up, keen to punish the Tories, and looking for someone to care about their views.
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