[Robin McAlpine Blog] Britain can’t defend its territory – when’s the inquiry?

[ALBA-Bot]

Britain can't defend its territory – when's the inquiry?

A few years ago Britain’s military chiefs ran a simulation of Russia invading Britain. According to those same military chiefs it "was not a pretty picture". So how is a decrepit economy about the size of Italy’s which is way over a thousand miles away able to subdue us with such ease?

To give you a hint, here’s a tangentially-related story; John Swinney is going to send the troops of an independent Scotland to Ukraine. Which begs the question – how? Eurostar? There isn’t a viable SNP proposal for how this could actually be done.

There are two words that you can say to a journalist that reduces their IQ by about 30 per cent and they are ‘national security’. John Swinney thinks he’s meant to say he’ll send troops to Ukraine and the media reporting him think he’s mean to say he’ll send troops to Ukraine so whether this is a fantasy or not goes unexamined.

It is a minor example but it is still a reliable guide to how the UK media covers the military – dictation. No-one ever seems to ask if what a general or spook says is true or not, it is taken as fact. There is significantly greater scrutiny of what the Pope does than there is of the UK military establishment, and he’s just doing what god tells him. There is a single, unquestioned security orthodoxy.

The result of that orthodoxy? While there is always good reason to take militarist scare stories with a very significant pinch of salt, if it is anything like true that the UK can’t defend its borders then we have observed a failure of quite massive proportions, and the security orthodoxy is to blame.

Indeed there are those (not me) who would argue that the first duty of government is to ensure we can defend ourselves. Can we? I very much doubt it. We just assumed it wouldn’t happen if we stood really close to America. At least since the 1960s when we begged a reluctant US to give us missiles to deliver a nuclear payload (because we’re failed to produce our own), we have sacrificed our ability to defend ourselves for an extended programme of sycophancy.

We have a track record of not taking steps to defend ourselves mainly at the behest of a foreign nation which did not want its hegemony challenged

We have posed and preened and pretended. We have nuclear bombs but no autonomous way to deliver them. We have two aircraft carriers that cost a fortune with nowhere to go with them. Their purpose is to sail a few yards behind the Americans and yell ‘yeah, what they said!’, purely for the purpose of covering over the fact that we can’t defend ourselves.

And oh my goodness does the British establishment and media love this stuff. No questions asked, ever; we are a nuclear power with military projection ability and a first rate army and there is definitely no need to check if this is true.

Want to know how dumb all this gets? Three years ago they gave Stewart McDonald the Best Scot at Westminster award at the Scottish Politician of the Year awards. Stewart fucking McDonald? For what? For reading out MI6 briefing notes? Again, no questions asked.

This doctrine – don’t prepare to defend yourself, just fake it and hope for the Americans – appears to be lifted from the Great Eared Nighjar, a bird which has developed an elaborate routine that makes it look scary when in fact it is nothing of the sort.

The long and short of it all is this; there isn’t a single military power in Europe capable of putting up even a half-arsed defence of Ukraine. It isn’t just Britain who betrayed its own national security, it is the whole continent. Europe was supposed to have given up its imperial dreams in favour of being a self-reliant continent, but in fact it gave up on its own territorial defence to keep the imperial dream alive.

The imperial dream? Not necessarily that you will conquer the world – just that you could if you wanted to. This consistently and reliably makes white people feel better about themselves. We don’t say it, but it is a key component of why deep down we believe ourselves to be superior to ‘the other races’.

And that is why those same journalists and that same establishment is so committed to Nato. Peace around the globe relies on the power of white people to bomb people who aren’t white. That has been a given almost across the entire spectrum of ‘mainstream’ politics. It’s total rubbish, but it’s part of that big ideology which must not be questioned.

That ideology is Atlanticism and, at this point in time, I think there is a reasonably good case to argue that, far from being patriotic, it was treason. I’m quite serious; we have a track record of not taking steps to defend ourselves mainly at the behest of a foreign nation which did not want its hegemony challenged.

It was the Atlanticists who left Europe as an irrelevant, decrepit mess which needs to call Donal Trump ‘Daddy’ so he’ll not abandon them to the Russians

The end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union ended the need for this entire set-up. What the US did not want was for Europe to forge real peace with Russia and develop itself as a serious, autonomous military power base. With Britain leading the way, Europe complied.

Europe chose to be wholly reliant on the US for its defence because it was heavily lobbied by the Americans and the route through which that happened were the Atlanticists, the ideological clique who run foreign policy. It was the Atlanticists who left Europe as an irrelevant, decrepit mess which needs to call Donal Trump ‘Daddy’ so he’ll not abandon them to the Russians.

Now imagine a group of people had been taking significant resources from Russian sources to undermine the nation’s autonomous defence and tell me what would happen. Prison sentences, that’s what would happen.

So looping back to the beginning, Britain’s inability to defend itself is a national crisis, so where are the difficult questions? We know who is responsible – the Generals, the defence manufacturing companies, the US-linked think tanks, the sort of media who take trips paid for by the US State Department, the politicians who prioritised the interests of others.

They are the ones responsible for what some would argue is the biggest single national failure since the Second World War. They sold out the people of this nation. The vast majority of them have never been near a battlefield, yet it is their ineptitude that means they are now discussing our children having to go and fight – to cover up for their failure.

Where is the response to this? Where is the political demand of an inquiry? Where is the media outrage? Where is the mea culpas? Where is there a sliver of a hint that reality is finally going to intrude into Britain’s narrative about itself as a military power? Who is being held to account?

We all know who these people are – Scotland’s Atlanticists include Douglas Alexander, Stephen Gethins, Michael Forsyth, Alyn Smith, Danny Alexander, the afore-mentioned Stewart McDonald and all the media folks who wrote sympathetic pro-defence industry stories. Where are the difficult questions for them?

In fact why do they get to say ‘we can’t [whatever] because our defence is inextricably tied up with the US’ as if that is an answer and not the question. It is the question; why, as a modern nation state, is our defence entirely reliant on another country?

Here’s the reality; there is an entire class of person who is totally bought into a defence strategy which has at best let us down badly and at worst actively betrayed us – and no-one has lost their job. The same people are now demanding more money to fix their own mistakes.

I will keep asking these questions because they’re not going away. Why can’t Britain defend itself? Why can’t we defend Europe? Who is responsible? And why are they still in post? Just don’t hold your breath for the inquiry. It turns out there is such a thing as good treason after all.

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