[Robin McAlpine Blog] Is there anyone more stupid than the ‘wise heads’ of war?

[ALBA-Bot]

Is there anyone more stupid than the 'wise heads' of war?

A dumb American president is telling lies about weapons of mass destruction so he can bomb a Middle Eastern country. A Labour Prime Minister is echoing those lies because he is miles beyond complicity and has no morality. And John Swinney is leading the SNP and trying to force the party to align precisely with British foreign policy so it can show ‘what a good boy’ it is.

Pick the year; it could be 2003 or it could be 2025 and not a word of this would be inaccurate either way. For get the moral bankruptcy of the West, it completely non-solvent in the irony stakes as well.

What I want to show here is that every single person who has had a dig at people like me for not being ‘pragmatic enough’ about war crimes is the reason why we’re staring at a potential world war. These patronising fools think people like me can’t think for ourselves, that if you haven’t sold your soul then you’re not serious. It is, of course, entirely, completely the other way round.

I am and have always been the pragmatist. When the war hawks were screaming for further escalation in Russia I promised them that there was no need to worry, that they’d get it, that it wouldn’t help but would make things worse, and that the belligerence would spread and others would follow the western ‘burn it down and ask questions later’ lead.

So tell me, who was right? Is Russia vanquished? Is Ukraine free? Has military escalation made the region safer? Has the ‘snow globe’ fantasy worked, the one where the Western allies pretend they’ve placed a bell jar over their actions such that it won’t spread or contaminate others? Is the world a better place to be right now?

I am and always have been the pragmatist. I do silly things like look at past experience and learn what worked and what didn’t work. I waste my time on frivolous efforts like reading the outcomes of inquiries into wars that failed massively and think of them not as historical curiosities there to be sniggered at but lessons to learn from.

I’m not a wise head like the wise heads who said that the only difference between Ukraine winning and losing was us allowing us to fire the missiles we’re supplying deep into Russia. So we escalated further, allowed it, and now the war is over and everyone is living in peace. Oh, hold on…

If there is one thing we all know it’s that the way to prevent powerful people from doing terrible things is not to mention it

I’m the sort of daftie who wastes my time understanding statecraft such that you can’t ask someone to negotiate, then bomb the meeting at which they are preparing for the negotiation, killing their negotiators – and then say the route to peace is negotiating. It’s just old-fashioned things like not saying ‘come out with your hands up’, shooting everyone who comes out with their hands up and then saying ‘right, the rest of you, come out with your hands up’.

That just doesn’t seem….. pragmatic to me. Or wise. Or logical. Or moral. In fact so unwise does it seem, so immoral that if I were an observer I’d be inclined to say so. But that would of course be lacking in pragmatism, because if there is one thing we all know it’s that the way to prevent powerful people from doing terrible things is not to mention it.

By not ever mentioning genocide, Biden and now Starmer put themselves in the best place to prevent it, say the wise heads. You can tell because it worked so well. It’s the same strategy they used to prevent Trump starting a global tariff war and to prevent him bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities. In fact so effective has cowardice been in preventing bad things that Starmer is ramping up his cowardice to entirely new levels.

So let me repeat the first rule of life – if you cross a red line, you have no red lines. Compromise? Sure, that is the way of life. Capitulate? That leads to only one path. After you’ve sold out once, the next one is inevitable. And when you have two sell-outs then the third just makes sense numerically.

Trump is a moronic wannabe fascist and if you ask me the US seems beyond redemption just now. It is so capable of terrible things which bring no consequence to anyone that is really just another authoritarian regime. Starmer is a thoroughly unpleasant character. He is so clearly a product of the UK security services that he is like a parody.

He has no morality. He is patently racist, openly anti-Muslim, tells lies with such ease that it is mind-boggling. His minions are at it too. If only Iran had negotiated… If only Iran had stuck to the previous deal… If only Iran hadn’t pursued a weapons programme… They know all these things are lies and we know all these things are lies, but lying is what wise people do.

Wise people lie through their teeth in a democracy in pursuit of war crimes – and then congratulate themselves for it. And then, when people get sick of their lies, disillusioned by their pretence of democracy, they ban protest. Starmer’s Labour is beneath my contempt.

And yet there is a sort of perverse honesty in their crimes. And at least the useful idiots in the pro-Nato liberal media can be given some leeway because of their learning difficulties. That’s what it is, right? It’s learning difficulties. It’s failing to learn after two decades of destructive and utterly illegal wars across the Middle East that the West is not the upholder of a global rules-based order.

It goes in waves of course. There aren’t many of them writing about how we must flock to Nato to prevent further global disruption from illegal conflict at the moment. At the moment they’re hoping you don’t remember when they were gushing about spies and bombs and the moral superiority of white-majority nations.

No, right now my contempt is direct at the SNP. I am watching it take its inevitable path to being McStarmer. At the weekend chief ‘wise head’ pushed an unamendable motion at National Council which sounded like something David Lammy had concocted – you know, calling for deescalation but with the only country actually criticised being Iran which the wise head is certain must be prevented from building a nuke no-one actually thinks they’re building. 

The ‘wise head’ is Stephen Gethins and he’s no wise head at all, just another mediocre centrist hack, a functionary for the British State who has a reputation for being clever because that’s what you get called for being a functionary of the British State. Apparently having no critical faculties is worth an extra 20 points on your IQ – but only if you concur with the British Prime Minister and the US President.

One of the little gang of Nato place people who have been betraying the legacy of their party for coming on for two decades now, they now own and control the party. They will say that it is sad what is taken place in Gaza but only on the understanding that they will under absolutely no circumstances do anything about it.

If you believe in a word of good and order and law and justice, when you see a war crime it is your solemn duty to speak out

While the party’s leaders trick their members into thinking they’re moral, they’re actually meeting the Israeli ambassador reassuring them it’s all for show and they’re good Nato allies like the rest of them. Because that’s the grown up thing. Builds your settlements; we promise not to do anything at all to hamper you. Just understand that we have to pretend in public…

And of course when people like me said that this was 100 per cent the thing that was going to happen when the SNP sold its soul for Nato, the wise heads said ‘we appreciate people feel strongly about this but it’s just emotional and people like us understand this better than people like them’. Just as long as none of you have the cheek to ask me to vote for you.

See how clever you are Keir? You’re handing the UK to Reform because you have no morality so if we’re voting for a moral vacuum, why would we pick you? See how clever you are John? Nothing an indy supporter like me can do, eh? We don’t matter. Not like you pragmatic people. You pragmatic people understand all.

Well I trust you’re pragmatic enough to understand that you’re finished. We’re all just waiting for you all to fuck off somewhere, anywhere. We don’t want you, we have no interest in you and we’re not going to vote for you because you’re pointless. Literally, an empty chair would achieve the same results.

Here’s pragmatism. If you are so quick to act as judge and jury on Russia’s invasion (because it is clearly illegal), why not Israel’s genocide (which is clearly illegal) or America’s bombing of protected nuclear sites (which is categorically, no-interpretation-needed a breech of the Geneva Conventions and a tier one war crime).

Because if you want to know what my pragmatism means having learned it over decades of observation; moral grandstanding is optional and sometimes you’re as well holding back. But you need to have red lines, and if war crimes isn’t one of them then there’s something wrong with you.

And then, if you believe in a word of good and order and law and justice, when you see a war crime it is your solemn duty to speak out. Only that will ever create the conditions for a just world. Only that is a foundation for anything other than perpetual war.

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