Not content with going to battle with those pesky Chinamen, our tough, hardened, powerful, almost super-heroic Foreign Secretary (even though he looks like the ‘last man picked for a football match’, or a reject from a school for failed accountants), has now started war on a new front. The Russian front. Hitler tried something similar in 1943; how’d that go? But this is currently just a war of words. Words of distrust. Words of accusation, words which basically are like pushing someone repeatedly to start a proper fight.

But Russia and China are joined by a common difference. They’re both ‘communist’. Which at one time meant something deeply political and somewhat noble in intention, if a little failed in the realisation. But now, what’s left of communism, in both of those fine (hmmm) nations is all the bad bits. The noble intentions went when the politicians did a deal for bulk buying Lamborghinis. The proposed ‘equality for all’ mantra gave way to a ruling elite who are neither questioned nor elected (in any significant sense of the people having ‘freedom’ to vote). Free speech went out of one window and returned as state propaganda machines. And with that came what both those nations see as their self-governed right to zero accountability. What’s good for China/Russia, as perceived by their dictator, is good for all. Even if it might appear to be bad for most.

Like Hong Kong. Like the Uyghurs. Like institutionalised athletic doping. Like sending hit squads to wreak vengeance in foreign countries using radioactive isotopes. And most recently and most damning, interfering with other countries internal politics (the Russians) and/or security (the Chinese). I won’t even mention Alexa. Not out loud anyway.

But what both these nations now specialising is is denial. They are so proficient at it that they have elevated it to levels so blatant, so at odds with evidence, so downright efficient that it needs no thought, no consideration, it just happens. It’s autonomic. Whatever is said; we didn’t do it. There film of it? Fake. Here’s the dead bodies you buried? Not us. The hackers all come from Moscow. Must be a different Moscow. In, like Alabama, maybe. And so on.

So its war with the communists. How awfully 1955.

Happy times

A xxxx