Angry

I’ve long regarded hatred as a pointless emotion; wasteful of time and energy and blinding its practitioners to reason and negotiation. I see its progenitor, anger, as little better; a brief flaring of antipathy is a normal reaction to unwanted provocation, but full-blown anger seems to me to be a somewhat juvenile way of approaching the world. President Putin appears to be an angry man, lashing out at people who could be his allies and attracting all the wrong sort of reaction from others.

Sadly, anger is in no short supply and as fuses shorten, the sparks that threaten to ignite those fuses are flashing as if to a beat. Flash! There goes the apartment block. Flash! There goes the nuclear power plant. These acts of aggression appear to be fuelled not by any grand strategic plan, as Putin has just claimed, but by simple rage. Meanwhile, we in the west have little to be smug about. The world appears, more and more, to run on a heady mixture of anger, propagated from a growing list of grievances. Race, class, gender, you name it, somebody is very angry about it.

None more so than the EU Remain camp, still smarting seven years on from a referendum result they still cannot comprehend. Impervious to rational thought, every setback, every bump in the road, every perceived hiccough is directly attributable to the hated Brexit. The Brexit that is now directly attributable in their analysis to Bad Vlad. Even the fact that we could act more decisively and quicker than it took the EU to assemble some agreement is now, somehow, making them angry.

Give us one tangible benefit, they insist, and then, when event after event shows that the regaining of our sovereignty (albeit incomplete, as yet) has indeed restored a level of autonomy, they get angry. Angry about Brexit itself, angry about every supply chain let down, angry that we no longer get to have a purely cosmetic vote on EU matters. But even angrier when we manage to do something laudable outside the bloc. There really can be no pleasing these people.

And by these people, you know who I mean. Angry old deadbeats such as Anna Soubry, Dominic Grieve, Gina Miller, Andrew Adonis, Michael Heseltine, Femi-fucking-Mr-Potato-Head-Oluwole, Ken Clarke, Alistair Campbell and the laughable self-parody that is James O’Brien. All they ever do is ball their fists and stamp their feet, like small children denied treats. Like teenagers grounded, they thrash about, red in the face, pointing and pontificating and allowing their anger to boil over into true hatred.

These are not rational actors. And as post-Brexit Britain gets on with business, calmly calculating the best responses, engaging with the enemy and embracing friends across the world, all the Angry Brigade can do is spit and spout and vilify. Some of them flash up and lash out at the mere thought of Boris Johnson; the man could single-handedly bring about a ceasefire in Ukraine and they would still loathe him for doing it outside the EU.

And what this means for the rest of us, the normal majority who sit back and listen when we are not simply going about our business, is that instead of getting news and balanced views, instead of getting rational analysis of world affairs, we get invective. It is little wonder that people turn to social media for their news when the very people charged with doing it professionally are so fuelled by anger that they can’t see straight.

Don’t you just hate that? 

Putin on the Blitz

If the first victim of war is the truth, the Ukraine adventure must surely stand as an exemplar of that pithy maxim. Suddenly, all the Covid experts, the 5G conspiracists, the media and the general commentariat have become authorities on warfare, espionage, logistics and the inner workings of Vladimir Putin’s mind. I know we are hungry for information but are we so desperate that we consume the packaging rather than the comestibles and can’t discern the difference?

The last couple of years have really given me food for thought, especially about thought itself. Rather than the rich nourishment of haute cuisine I have learned that the teeming herds of data-grazing humans would rather ruminate on a constant diet of nutrient-free tabloid pap, highly processed and filled with fizzing sugars, than savour the more subtle, protein-rich steak which is expensive to buy and takes a little more effort to digest.

Enough of the lazy metaphor, let’s get down to business. Within minutes of the Russian advance the usual suspects were trotting out their pet theories about Brexit. So far I have seen articles and comments linking Putin to the overthrow of the EU since the day he came into power. Apparently, he ‘owns’ the Tory Party, pulls Tony Blair’s strings and was entirely responsible for Nigel Farage’s spectacular feat of bringing about our departure from that sclerotic Brussels cabal. Why, even the Prime Minister’s own name – Boris – betrays a sinister, subliminal Russophilia.

Give people like Carole Cadwalladr the tiniest opportunity and she can link everything back to Cambridge Analytica. Global warming, global cooling, oligarchy, autocracy, the subversion of democracy... whatever the current consensus, for her it all connects. Gender dysphoria, cancel culture, anything you like, there is nothing she can’t shoehorn into the plot. Me, I can’t wait for the movie; a summer blockbuster of brave, mild-mannered Clark Kents fighting globalist superpowers.

But we’re not in a movie, we are in the mundane. For every phenomenon that may have been deliberately constructed there are a thousand far more ordinary happenstances. In the same way that planned economies tend to fail, grand societal experiments are doomed to fall against the combined might of everyday people making everyday decisions. Sure, you bought the sugary cereal because your kids saw the commercial, but you wouldn’t keep buying it if the kids didn’t like it.

The demand for prurience seems coded into the DNA of humans. Don’t tell us the boring story of how we lurch indecisively from one fad to another. Instead tell us how we were manipulated, against our will to act against our own interests. Whenever I hear tales of great cunning, I try to remember that humans are ultimately motivated by the primal urges which ensured our species' survival: eat, fight, flight or fuck.

I have seen a couple of stage hypnotists. I’m not convinced at all. In the more scrutinised world of clinical psychology, hypnosis is recognised as a pretty much hit and miss affair and you can’t be hypnotised if you don’t want to be. But in the heat of battle – and the world of information is a constant battle for your attention – it is easy to get caught up in it all and be seduced by shiny, contrived plots instead of the dull action and reaction of boring reality.

Balls!

I have no idea what is going on in Ukraine. I certainly have no idea what Putin is thinking and I’m not sure I even care about that detail. What exercises me far more is the sudden hike in energy prices, the plethora of competing theories on the way the world works, and the absence of any unifying thesis regarding how we get back on track, if indeed there is a track. You can bang on about the World Economic Forum and the New World Order all you like; all I see are the normal human tendencies to seek profit where one can, and to see collusion where there is really only chaos.

This isn’t right

The case of the seventeen-year old Iranian Kurd refugee, beaten up in Croydon over the weekend is horrific. I hope the book is thrown at the attackers and the full weight of the law applied in denying them liberty; no punishment seems enough, somehow. But (and it’s a huge but) at least there is now another incident to add to the murder of Saint Jo Cox in the  desperate need to accumulate evidence of ‘the rise of the far-right’. Diane Abbott, arguably the largest of all the buts_[sic], has shown no hesitation in labelling it thus: “Sadly, this is not an isolated incident, but part of a sustained increase in hate crimes that this Tory government is yet to offer any effective response to.”

But lest they get too excited in their frenzy to prove that everybody who voted Brexit is, literally, Hitler, they might want to consider what they mean by the term ‘far right’. I’ve always believed that they are confined to a tiny fringe group, so rabid and unfocused their aims and so unattractive to breed from that they may as well be considered an endangered species. And in comparison to left-wing groups their numbers are insignificant. It is quite usual for groups like Britain First to be outnumbered by rent-a-mob counter demonstrators.

And, as if on cue, a gathering of the massed ranks of this fearsome band of supposed fascists barely managed to number 300 and typically it was the self-styled ‘Antifa’ activists who managed to do the most to provoke violence. The Guardian naturally labelled it, right on message, as an attempt to stir up islamophobia and the attack on Croydon Kurd played right into that hand. Except there is no evidence that white supremacists – Diane Abbott’s preferred variety of assailant – were involved. Rather it appears to have been a mixed assembly of young, druggy, pissed-up morons of various ethnicities... or as many would have it, typical Croydon youth.

As for islamophobia, it is a perfectly rational response to the ceaseless onslaught of this unruly and backward belief system on civilisation. Massed prayers, in displays of strength and disregard for authority, are pretty intimidating to indigenous host populations. But this form of ‘peaceful’ demonstration of their numbers is largely carried out by what are termed ‘moderate’ muslims, leaving the direct action to the more devout. Is it irrational for us to be afraid of islam? Perhaps we should ask Russia.

It was self defence...

The St Petersburg bombs yesterday may well mark a new chapter in the perpetual war between islam and well, everybody else. No more is it just a jihad against the west; now that Mother Russia has been hit all eyes are on Putin to see how far he will go to back up his openly declared hostility to any group threatening the safety of his people at home. This isn’t a race issue, it’s a battle for ideology. For a long time the Russians were our red menace, the so-called Evil Empire. Now they may be just about to become our greatest ally.