Parallel Insanity
In this world there is a country ruled by a bland, single-minded politician who demands ever-mounting sacrifices by the population in order to keep in place a privileged oligarchy. The daily needs of ordinary people are mostly ignored while huge expenditure goes into maintaining a military presence completely out of proportion to the size of the country, and the world beyond its borders is firmly shut out while the population is fed a continual diet of lies by a tame media and given little opportunity to question their masters.
No wait – there are two such countries. One is North Korea; the other is the United Kingdom. It’s amazing how close the parallels run, barring a few pounds of surplus lard.
The world is getting to be a dangerous place, where migrants slosh about everywhere and half-witted, brainwashed lunatics run around with guns, bombs and a grudge against pretty well everything. So what’s the British plan to keep us safe? Ah yes. Withdraw from the security of a large group of countries willing to help each other in times of need, and bankrupt ourselves by rebuilding a nuclear weapons system designed to deter Nikita Khrushchev from invading our glorious land.
Hello there… is anybody with a functioning brain at home? This is 2016, not 1952. Perhaps you didn’t notice that the threats against the UK now come either from people who have no desire to invade or from those who can’t be deterred because they want to die anyway. And who don’t live in Moscow.
Have you not also noticed that there are 27 or so European states without nuclear so-called “deterrents”, none of whom have been invaded by anyone except people trying to escape from non-nuclear wars. Or Britain.
And do you not realise that although we may be able to reduce Moscow to rubble the consequence would be the immediate annihilation of our entire country, guaranteeing the deaths of all in it, including yourselves.
Of course it won’t happen, not because there’s been an outbreak of common sense but because our weapons-building capacity is down at a fraction of what it was in the Cold War. As has recently been demonstrated we can’t build Navy vessels that work for more than 5 minutes without calling in the men in blue overalls. And while we’re wasting billions on foolish toys that can’t be used even when they’re not in the repair shop, all our foes (that’s getting to be most of the world these days) are busy developing underwater drones that will whip away the invisibility cloak submarines have up till now enjoyed, allowing them to be easily picked off one at a time.
It’s not even clear who or what Britain is any more. We have a referendum coming up in which the turkeys seem likely to vote for Christmas under the delusion that we have friends out there to bail us out when the going gets tough (as it will). After which the Sensible Scots, too canny to troop into the slaughterhouse with us, will follow our example by voting to leave the Union, then tell the MOD to pack up its toys and take them elsewhere. Did you know that Faslane, the home of Trident, was the biggest construction project in Europe? Ever? Where in hell will rUK (that’s the rest of the UK) recreate it? On the English Riviera (bye-bye Falmouth and most of south Cornwall)? And who will pay for this, on top of the cost of the submarines themselves, currently expected to be well over £100bn and rising fast? We can’t even keep our hospitals and schools running. And all for toys that will be long obsolete by the time they get deployed – if ever.
So what’s the English-dominated government’s response to all this? Insults. Anyone who doesn’t agree with them is unpatriotic. That’s about as far as their limited intellect will take them; any balanced discussion about security, who we are defending ourselves against and the consequences of firing off nuclear missiles is dismissed by these asses as trivial details. Of course their mission is to screw the rest of us by extracting every penny that can be found and giving it to their corpulent, corporate friends. Even the Labour Party, with the honourable exception of Corbyn, McDonnell and a few others, seems to live in a parallel universe where they have the support of the majority of the British people, completely ignoring the slight inconvenience of last year’s election result.
So there we have it. Government of the brainwashed by the demented. North Koreans would feel right at home.