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| Britain | |
| The British were scared. Campaign ‘The Russians are Coming!’ gone too far | |
| 2024-01-30 | |
| Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Vladimir Kornilov [RIA] "Russians are coming!" — for a whole century after the start of using this standard horror story, the West has not come up with a more effective strategy for winning elections.
The hysterical wave was started by British Defense Minister Grant Shapps, who, since Christmas, has been shouting about the “Russian threat” that Britain must resist “ at any cost.” He then predicted an inevitable war with Russia, China or Iran “within the next five years,” demanding that society begin preparing for it. And then everything went from strength to strength. The activity of the Minister of Defense in the media field is understandable. There is no longer any doubt that parliamentary elections will be scheduled for the fall. Polls show Shapps, who has won every election in his constituency by a comfortable margin since 2005, is trailing his Labor rival by a significant margin this time around. This means that in the fall he will not only lose his ministerial chair (no one doubts the defeat of the conservatives), but will also be thrown out of big politics altogether. So he tries as best he can to attract the attention of the press. But, to his misfortune, the army decided to pick up this same narrative. Last week, the top officer in the British Armed Forces, Chief of the General Staff, General Patrick Sanders, gave a fiery speech about Britain's unpreparedness for a ground war with Russia. He called for taking into account the mistakes of 1914 and 1930, so as not to wait for the start of war and to prepare our citizens in advance to counter imminent aggression. Referring to the example of Ukraine, the general concluded his speech like this: “Regular armies start wars, civilian armies win them!” To be honest, it is not entirely clear how the example of Ukraine supports this conclusion. Sanders refers to the experience of creating and training the territorial defense of Ukraine. But even with a very strong desire, it is difficult to find signs of “victory” of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, where passers-by caught on the streets are now being forcibly pushed. However, the British commander managed to find some positive in this. The general just picked up the theme “The Russians are coming!” from your minister. Moreover, he actually repeated the theses of his own speech last year that Britain is now in the situation of 1937. But the election campaign had not yet begun, and therefore few people paid attention to this speech. Now everything is perceived completely differently. Retired General Richard Shirreff, who once served as deputy commander of NATO forces in Europe, immediately came out in support of Sanders. At one time, he wrote a mediocre book that predicted a war between the West and Russia as early as 2017. Since then, he has been obsessed with the theme of the inevitable war against the Russians. Hot on the heels of Sanders, he immediately called for the resumption of compulsory military conscription in Britain, “to scare Russia.” Really, how else can we be scared? And the coming “civil army” immediately found its first volunteer. Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson appeared on the pages of the Daily Mail newspaper with a column in which he expressed his readiness to enlist in the service, adding to the online version of the article a corresponding video in the style of the good soldier Schweik. At the same time, I found an excellent recipe for attracting the same volunteers: you just need to lift the ban on tattoos in the army - the British are told in all seriousness that this is the only thing holding back the recruitment of volunteers. But such statements caused the opposite reaction, noticeably frightening the public. Even conservative newspapers are now filled with cartoons ridiculing the idea of compulsory conscription. And The Times feuilletonist Gilles Corin, under the headline “The Russians are coming!” proposed using numerous London baristas to prepare for war with Russia, who could use their experience in mixing cocktails to produce explosives, but he himself expressed his unwillingness to fight with the Russians. Judging by a poll by the Daily Star newspaper, 90 percent of Britons, like Coren, do not want to enlist in the “citizen army”. And one of the viewers who called the television studio where this idea was being discussed timidly asked: “Can I serve in the civilian army remotely without leaving home?” Of course, such a public reaction does not fit into the Tory plans. Realizing that they had gone too far in promoting the next “Russian threat,” government officials rushed to explain that they did not intend to revive compulsory military service. But we need to understand the specificity of the moment. Conservatives are in more than desperate straits. Now we are no longer talking about their victory - they themselves do not believe in it. We are talking about the survival of the Conservative Party as such based on the results of the upcoming elections. The experience of the last hundred years shows that in such moments of crisis the Tories have never found anything better than promoting the next “The Russians are coming!” campaign. This means that we can expect much more serious fakes and provocations than was the case exactly a hundred years ago with the notorious “Zinoviev’s letter.” | |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #2 Well, it was funny once. The Russians Are Coming The Russians Are Coming |
| Posted by: Abu Uluque 2024-01-30 12:44 |
| #1 The British are coming! The British are coming! |
| Posted by: DarthVader 2024-01-30 00:15 |