Wednesday 16 February 2022

No Apocalypse Now

Well, here we all still are. This must have been how the Jehovah's Witnesses felt in 1975. I am thinking of turning my hand to production and direction. In Act One, Vladimir would speak entirely in Russian, and Estragon in Ukrainian, neither of which I can speak, but how Post-Postmodern would that be? Naturally, in Act Two, they would swap languages. No spoilers, please.

The war that was never going to happen has never happened. Now we wait for the next time that it is never going to happen. And the time after that. And the time after that. And the time after that.

100,000 military age males had not been murdered in Kosovo. The attacks of 11th September 2001 had not come from Afghanistan. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Therefore, those weapons were not capable of deployment within 45 minutes. Saddam Hussein had not been feeding people into a giant paper shredder. He had not been attempting to obtain uranium from Niger.

A genocide had not been imminent in Benghazi. Gaddafi had not been feeding Viagra to his soldiers in order to encourage mass rape. He had not intended to flee to Venezuela. It was not an undisputed fact that Assad had gassed Ghouta. Sergei and Yulia Skripal were not dead, as announced on the front page of The Times on 12th March 2018. 40 people in Salisbury had not required treatment for nerve agent poisoning, as claimed by The Times on 14th March 2018. There is no Iranian nuclear weapons programme.

And there has never been any Russian plan to invade Ukraine. Yet the fear of one is going to whipped up over and over again, to con or browbeat us into this, that or the other. But only if we allowed it to be.

2 comments:

  1. Laughter echoes around the world as each of these deadlines comes and goes.

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    Replies
    1. And these people could survive many things, but not being turned into figures of fun.

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