Somewhere between the dark and the dawn, usually around the darkest hour, is when I see the world in crystal clear clarity. Sometimes it takes a moment to adjust, as I escape from yet another bizarre dream and gratefully realise that it wasn’t real, but then the world begins to take shape.
If I am in a good place, I can think good thoughts about how good the future can be, but sometimes the world I see, in HD quality, is a place I would rather not see.
I woke this morning believing we are poised for World War III, if it hasn’t started already. And that’s without taking into account the middle east madness that’s beginning to make our world smaller by the year. For the person wanting to work, travel and live abroad, the options are narrowing. And even nearer home, the options will begin to narrow once we begin to leave the EU.
Vladimir Putin was the happiest man in the world when the UK voted to leave the EU. The right wing Bruges group and various Tory leavers were even supported by Kremlin money. He can’t believe his luck. The man who is nothing more than a KGB thug is barely having to divide and conquer with the rest of the world doing his work for him.
The sight of the Russian elderly naval fleet steaming through the Med should fill us with anxiety and fear. This was not so much sabre-rattling as directly inviting us to engage, talking like Harry Callahan. “Do I feel lucky?” Well, do ya, punk? Navies all over Europe sent out their warships to shadow the Russians. Once or twice, I am told by MOD friends, that Putin’s navy tacked towards landfall in the English Channel, then quickly away again. Hundreds of miles away, high in the sky, but well within range, was Russia’s air force. They wouldn’t, would they? The truth is we didn’t know.
Russia has already shown its true colours in Ukraine and now does so in Syria, assisting Assad’s vicious assault on Aleppo, verging on genocide. How far do Putin’s ambitions go?
We don’t know, but our government does, our defence chiefs know. Many of our troops are not quite on stand by, but they know they might be somewhere else at Christmas.
There are reasons for this secrecy because whilst there are military movements, there are also top secret talks. You don’t think our top security, military and political chiefs are merely sitting by whilst a quiet escalation of a new cold war, and more, bubbles away in the background and now, perhaps, in the foreground, silhouettes in the shadows?
We have no political giants in this less than golden age. The governing party is led by a desperately overrated ambitious opportunist, the main opposition by a lifelong career backbencher with no previous ambition for the top job because, we now learn, he has nowhere near the ability to hold it either. There is no giant, like a Churchill or a pre Iraq Blair. Few towering intellectual giants in a sea of political mediocrity.
Maybe I have one too many dreams and my fears and increasing beliefs are deluded or misguided. Maybe Putin is a good guy after all? I doubt it, though.
I am not sure where we are in terms of war, whether we are already at war, albeit in a very different way to the not-so-great wars of the past.
It couldn’t happen, could it? It’s too ghastly to think about. A World War carried out on a Play Station 4, but with nuclear weapons in the hands of the one superpower that remains (the USA), us, France and the likes of Russia, Pakistan and North Korea. It might not last all that long.
Ukraine, Syria – they feel like, maybe are, early skirmishes. I’m really worried about this. It keeps me awake at night.
