Sometimes my wife’s newspaper tricks me into reading it. I hate it when this happens, still more so when, as it did the other day, it reduces me to a state of apoplexy.

The story that enticed me was headlined: ‘I Went Off Grid At The End Of My Garden To See If I’d Cope After Armageddon.’ It was accompanied by a picture of the author in woollen hat and anorak, looking glum, superimposed onto a still from one of those post-apocalyptic movies where all the ruined tower blocks are now overgrown with weeds. Well, you can see why I was tempted…

What infuriated me was the very first paragraph:

The Russians have invaded. That’s the most credible scenario, though we can’t rule out a climate catastrophe, deadly pandemic or, indeed, nuclear Armageddon.

‘You bastard!’ I swore at the author, one George Chesterton. ‘You despicable traitor to the human race!’

Possibly this was unfair of me. Chesterton will have been given his brief - ‘Keep it light!’ - and probably thought he was just doing his job. It may well be that, being very likely of a Normie persuasion, he didn’t even notice what he was doing here.

But I noticed.

There is nothing remotely ‘credible’ about the ‘scenario’ of a Russian invasion of the UK. Nor, indeed of a ‘climate catastrophe.’ Nor yet, of a ‘deadly pandemic.’ As for ‘nuclear Armageddon’, for that to happen nukes would first have to exist as viable weapons of mass destruction, which I’m not at all convinced that they do.

Every conceit of that opening paragraph is a lie - and an abominable lie at that because each one of them reinforces in the public imagination a premise which has been designed by some very bad people, the worst in the world, to scare us, to manipulate us, and to exploit us.

This piece is a perfect example of why I so loathe and despise my old trade, print journalism. In the guise of innocuous entertainment, it reinforces our Enemy’s mendacious scare narrative.

People reading that article will have done so with their defences down. “Here’s a bit of fun,” they’ll think, as they approach it, recognising from the comical illustration and the positioning of the article not in the main body of the newspaper but in the lighter-read pull-out supplement that this is not to be taken too seriously.

When you’re relaxed you are much more vulnerable to subliminal messaging. The subliminal message here is: “Russia is a threat. Probably the main thing you should worry about right now. War with Russia is very likely. If it weren’t likely the Swedes wouldn’t have produced this booklet called ‘Om Kristen Ellen Kriget Kommer’ - ‘In case of crisis or war’ - which we are now promoting in this light-hearted piece. So when war with Russia comes, don’t say we didn’t warn you.”

What I find particularly objectionable about this - it’s probably the reason I got so cross - is that I’m still in the midst of reading Two World Wars And Hitler - Who Was Responsible? by Jim Macgregor and John O’Dowd. And what that book makes abundantly clear is that neither the First nor the Second World War started by accident. Both wars were orchestrated by the same kind of people - the Anglo-American Establishment, loosely speaking - who are now pushing us inexorably towards the hot stage of the Third World War, perhaps in the Middle East, perhaps in the Ukraine, using the same methods they used to promulgate the first two wars in their long-planned series of three.

Here, in case you missed it, is my long-read take on that subject.

https://www.jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Writing/Articles/how-to-murder-100-million-people-and-come-out-smelling-of-roses

Short version: none of us actually wants war because war is horrible and stops us doing all the much nicer things we’d prefer to do with our lives like having a family, making a home, and not having our friends killed or our limbs blown off. That’s why They - the Predator Class for whom war is a primary business model - can only get us to participate in Their wars through trickery and cajolery and subterfuge.

Subterfuge like that article I just mentioned above. It’s pretending to be a light, frothy, amusing read. But what it really is is pro-war propaganda.

Same goes for the cartoon the same paper - The Daily Telegraph - ran the next day. The cartoon showed someone in a rowing boat flying the white ensign of the Royal Navy shouting through a megaphone “We see you, Putin. We’re ready.” Meanwhile, beneath the waves, in a sinister submarine with some grabby claws at the front, lurks Putin, ready to destroy Britain’s puny defences.

If you went back about 175 years you’d see British newspapers running similarly unfunny cartoons, probably featuring a giant bear (with ‘Russia’ written on it) sneaking up on a lion or a unicorn or maybe a woman draped in a Union flag (with ‘Britannia’ written on her). Plus ça change.

I complained at the beginning about being ‘tricked’ by my wife’s newspaper into reading it. But quite often, if I’m honest, I don’t need to be tricked. As often as not, my incentives are a mix of morbid curiosity and masochism.

When I read the papers, especially The Telegraph where I worked for many years briefly as a specialist news reporter (Arts Correspondent) and mainly as a feature writer and commentator, I feel like a betrayed wife trawling her memory banks in search of all the instances where she should have noticed her husband was having an affair but failed to do so.

Like the injured wife, I now know that my former partner - the mainstream media - is not the decent upstanding chap I thought he was but a creature of monstrous depravity and evil. Indeed, I sometimes wonder whether the media isn’t more wicked than even Hollywood or the music industry. Without the media’s relentless lies and social conditioning, after all, we would not be nearly so susceptible to the machinations of our dark overlords. The press is what allows our enemies to get away with murder.

But I didn’t know this at all in the decades I spent working for it. And the question I often ask myself is: “How could I have missed what now seems so obvious to me?”

The answer, I think, is that as with the NASA space programme, only a handful of people need to be in on the secret. The vast majority of NASA employees, I’m sure, genuinely believed that they were sending men to the moon. The vast majority of mainstream media employees, I’m equally sure, believe (or at least have persuaded themselves) that they are speaking truth to power without fear or favour, getting to the bottom of what’s really happening in the world, being the first to ‘break’ ‘the news’, and so on. In both cases, the innocent dupes are so focused on the minutiae of their specific tasks they don’t have time to consider the bigger picture or ask questions like “But whose agenda am I really serving here?”

Consider the place where all the biggest lies are originally promulgated. The news room. If you’re the kind of person who reads my stuff you’re probably the kind of person who knows already that most of what appears in the news pages is literally fake news. “Terrorist” outrages, for example.

Just recently, there was a story all over the UK media - to which I paid little attention because it was all over the UK media - about some immigrant black person on a train going rogue and stabbing lots of people.

“Bollocks!” was my instant mental reaction when my one of my kids told me about it. Miri AF smells a rat too.

https://miri.substack.com/p/on-a-knife-edge

Let’s assume that our hunch is correct and that the entire story was fake, that the participants were all crisis actors, that it was yet another false flag devised by the intelligence services to ramp up fear, justify more state monitoring and regulation, and usher in the planned Nigel Farage/Reform regime… Surely that must make all the news reporters who wrote up the story complicit in the crime?

Well, no. At least not knowingly complicit. When a terror incident story breaks, the chances are that none of the news reporters who write it up initially will be anywhere near the scene. They will be stuck in the newsroom in London - and under pressure to get the ‘story’ out for ‘edition’, ie in time for it to appear in tomorrow’s print edition of the newspaper.

Therefore, in the first instance they will do little if any additional investigation of the story. They will take their stories from ‘the wires’, that is from the various press agencies, Associated Press (AP), Reuters and Agence France-Presse (AFP). All the press agencies are owned and controlled by the Cabal. Their job is to put out the official narrative, as dictated to them by The Powers That Be. But there’s no reason why the grunt hacks who take their stories from ‘the wire’ should know this. As far as most journalists are concerned, the Press Agencies are the gold standard, with bigger budgets, bigger staff, more access to information than anyone. No need to query their ‘facts’ either because all your competitor newspapers will be using the same information, which is all that really matters: consistency.

As the story develops there will be room for more active reporting: human interest stories about the experiences of the ‘victims’, a site trip to the location of the incident perhaps incorporating descriptive colour and the reactions of local people, etc.

But any independent reporting will be heavily constrained. Suppose, say, reporters had wanted to visit the Huddersfield train to see for themselves the blood-stained carriage. Well they wouldn’t have been allowed on board, most likely, because the police would have declared it to be a ‘crime scene.’ Same with access to the ‘victims’: it would be rendered impossible, for any number of reasons, from ‘too traumatised’ or ‘unwilling to speak’ or ‘being treated in hospital.’ So really, why bother? Why not instead do what news rooms do and rewrite stories from the wires….

This explains something I often noticed as a journalist but could never quite put my finger on: why disaster stories always felt slightly unreal and the reporting on them always a bit unsatisfactory.

I remember, for example, the incident in 2013 when a British soldier called Lee Rigby was supposedly beheaded in the streets of London by Islamist terrorists. This is quite an unusual and dramatic and frankly hard-to-pull-off thing to occur. How did they spot him if he was in civilian clothes? How come no one intervened as the baddies were busily chopping his head off? Why were the eye-witness accounts so mysteriously sketchy? Why wasn’t there more blood - I mean isn’t there LOTS of blood when you chop someone’s head off?

Neither on the day when I read the ‘news’ - nor in the subsequent follow-up reports, did I get any sense that what purportedly had happened really had happened. This didn’t mean that I discounted the story. For years afterwards, I trusted - because the newspapers wouldn’t lie, I thought - that there was a soldier called Lee Rigby and that he really had been beheaded in the street by two Islamic terrorists. But something about it just didn’t feel right and it was only years later that I realised why: that the whole thing was another bollocks, staged, false-flag operation.

When The Powers That Be are setting up fake news stories like this, one thing they are careful to factor in is repetition. That is, in order for the Big Lie to embed itself in the public consciousness it has to be repeated over and over again until even the very stupid people at the back of the class have taken the Big Lie onboard. One way the media effects this with news stories is to drip out new pieces of information each day, supposedly reflecting the diligent further inquiries of reporters, but really just reflecting how the lie narrative has been storyboarded: Day One: the sketchy, bare bone facts as the story breaks; Day Two: the shocked aftermath, prayers and tributes; Day Three: tales of heroism and tragedy from plucky survivors and grieving relatives.

With the Huddersfield train story, one of the ways they kept it alive was with human interest stories about passengers who had heroically fought back. A story in the online regional newspaper Nottinghamshire Live, later picked up by all the big league tabloids such as the Mail, told of a “Huntingdon train hero” who had been planning to watch his football team Nottingham Forest play at an away game in Austria. Cruelly and unforgivably, according to the story, the airline Ryanair had refused to refund his flight.

Further down the report is the interesting detail that ‘an online fundraiser via JustGiving’ has been created in the hero’s name ‘with the hopes of financially supporting him while he recovers from his injuries.’ Already, we learn, ‘more than £50,000’ has been raised.

I’d lay £50,000 that no reporters on any newspaper will have been there to examine the scars when he pulled off his bandages. As we journalists used to joke back in the day - and as quite possibly they still do - ‘never let the facts get in the way of a good story.’

Everyone who doesn’t work in the media assumes that everyone who does work in the media must be knowingly complicit in the lies that the media spews out every day. My contention, as a former insider, is that this ain’t necessarily so.

So who does know? I suspect by the time you get to the level of editor - or just before you are offered the job - that it is made clear to you what the deal is. Editors, even now that no one buys newspapers, get outrageous pay packages, often including perks like chauffeur-driven cars daily from their agreeable country homes. They also get to become figures of influence. It’s possible that shilling on behalf of evil Satanic elites and destroying their people and their country wasn’t what they signed up for when they started out as cub reporters/got fast tracked to the leader page editorial team thanks to their Oxbridge degree. But big money makes nasty conscience problems go away.

Lower down the feeding chain, it’s hard to say who is genuinely compromised and who is just a useful idiot of the corrupt system. But I’d say that the vast majority of hacks fit into the latter category. One reason I’m pretty sure of this is that I know journalists to be incorrigible gossips. In my day, a lot of them used to drink quite heavily too. What do you talk about over a pint? You talk about work. You trade inside information. And I can assure you that never once in my years as a journalist, including several years as a newspaper staffer, did I ever hear a news hack say anything like: “Well you realise that Diana was still alive and able to walk when they pulled her out of the vehicle. A Merovingian blood sacrifice, that’s what it was, orchestrated by Prince Philip” or “Head chopped off in the streets of Woolwich? You’re bloody kidding me, aren’t you? Everyone in the know knows that this was another MI5 false flag.” Nor, ever, did I hear a hack on the foreign desk intimate that 9/11 was an inside job.

The fact is that most journalists actually believe the crap that goes under their bylines. News reporters, certainly, because most news reporters don’t do any actual reporting. Rather they collate and lightly edit the information that has been handed to them by trusted authorities - the emergency services, the news agencies, etc. Their main sin - and it’s a venial one, not a venal one - is to be far too trusting of their sources. And too lazy - or time pressed - to make independent inquiries.

Because I was never myself a proper news reporter - being Arts Correspondent doesn’t really count because all it involves is going to theatrical first nights and writing about arts funding crises and such like - I don’t consider myself responsible for any of the disgusting Cabal propaganda the Telegraphran in its news pages while I was working for it.

But that doesn’t quite let me off the hook. Earlier I described the news room - though strictly speaking I should have said ‘editorial conference’ - as the place where all the biggest newspaper lies are originally promulgated. It’s the opinion formers, though, in the comment and editorial sections who do the worse damage, in my view. And since I was one of them, I feel I owe you an explanation. But that will have to wait till the second part of this piece…

I suppose I shall be wearing a poppy for my church’s Remembrance Sunday service. But only grudgingly and under social duress. What are we commemorating, exactly? What is the point of it all?

Probably if you asked people they’d come up with phrases like “honouring the glorious dead” or maybe even “fighting tyranny” and “dying for our freedom.” But this is all just cant, isn’t it?

Those phrases bear little relation to the truth of what happened in the two World Wars. There is nothing ‘glorious’ about being culled in a slaughter arranged at the behest of Satanic elites. Nor were they fighting ‘tyranny’; rather they were unwittingly fighting - very successfully as it turned out: just look around you - to entrench tyranny. And they definitely weren’t dying for our freedom either. They may have thought they were but that was just another lie.

Of course I don’t begrudge the war dead their two minutes’ silence. What I resent is the way the murder of these innocents has been twisted to serve the cause of the Cabal responsible for their deaths.

It perfectly well suits the Cabal that every year, on Remembrance Sunday, we mull on war and the pity of war; that in the weeks before we go through the ritual of fumbling for some change in our pockets (coins: remember them?) to give to a schoolboy cadet or someone in a beret with some medals so that we can buy a paper poppy without which we have been conditioned to feel naked and disrespectful; that in school English classes we are taught the war poets and in history classes we are taught the (mendacious) official versions of the Causes of the First World War and the Rise of Hitler. The more we focus on the irrelevant details They want us to focus on, the less likely we are to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.

The bigger picture, as I discuss in this much longer piece

https://jamesdelingpole.locals.com/upost/7252232/how-to-murder-100-million-people-and-come-out-smelling-of-roses

, is that all wars are bankers’ wars. Everything that mainstream historians tell you about the origins and nature of the First and Second World Wars is a lie because mainstream historians are merely the lickspittle scribes of the people responsible for those wars.

Until we understand this - all of us, not just a few conspiracy freaks - I’m really not sure that we’re doing ourselves any favours with this annual commemoration of our glorious dead.

It’s not enough that we should mark that they died. We also need to be aware of WHY they died.

Otherwise, the people who were really responsible for these wars will keep on getting away with their ritual murders again and again and again.

References:
https://www.jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Writing/Articles/what-is-the-point-of-remembrance-sunday

https://www.jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Writing/Articles/how-to-murder-100-million-people-and-come-out-smelling-of-roses

Before I left Moscow, I exchanged with Vlad one of those manly Russian bear hugs, and expressed my fervent prayer that never, ever should our sons have to face one another in battle.

This was partly because Vlad is a 6 ft 5 in Siberian who wrestles bears - I’ve seen the video - and keeps a pet wolf (a black one, which he reared from a cub), and if his six boys are anything similar I suspect it’s going to be an unequal contest.

And partly because - have you seen the size of Russia? Are you aware how many natural resources they have? Have you factored in a Sino-Russian alliance? Do you know how much practice they’ve had of late in the kind of war we’d be fighting? - I think it’s a battle we’d lose.

But mainly it’s because there is not a single good reason on earth why we should be going to war with Russia in the first place.

The Russians are not our enemy. They are, as white Christians, our natural allies and soulmates. The only reason that anyone in the West even thinks it makes sense for us to be fighting our brothers in the East is because they’ve been brainwashed into acting against their own interests.

And guess who is behind that brainwashing…

Yes. That’s right. Our true enemies are not the Russians but the people who are doing their damnedest right now to engineer a war between us and the Russians. Call these people what you will: the Cabal; the Brotherhood; the Illuminati; the Powers That Be; the Predator Class; the Rulers of the Darkness of This World. They’re all the same thing when it comes down to it and they all serve the same dark entity.

Of course these people want Christian Americans and Christian Europeans and Christian Australasians dying in their droves in a futile and unnecessary war with Christian Russians. Christians killing Christians is the devil’s wet dream. His servants know this, which is why they’re working overtime right now trying to turn a little local proxy war in Eastern Ukraine into a properly acknowledged World War III.

One of their main methods for achieving this is through the use of misinformation and disinformation. In Britain, as elsewhere, the populace has been bombarded so relentlessly with stories about how plucky and noble and saintly the Ukrainians are, how vicious and ruthless the Russians are, how heroic and principled and role-model-y Zelenskyyyyy is, how oh-so-like-Hitler-but-probably-worse-actually Putin is, that they have been shell-shocked into accepting a narrative - ‘the Russians are baddies and they’re out to get us’ - that a moment’s thought would have written off as ludicrous.

That’s how propaganda works, and why it is so effective. It bypasses the intellect by appealing, though endless repetition, to the subconscious.

Even people who I used to think were clever because we were at Oxford together or because they have high-powered jobs in law or the City or who are name columnists in influential publications have succumbed to this drooling ‘Russia is bad m’kay’ idiocy.

Again and again when I mentioned to people that I was going to Russia I got the same reaction.

“Are you sure that’s wise?” as one of them put it. Which was a polite way of saying: “What the hell do you think you’re doing going to shill for the evil Putin? I suppose after a week’s being fed caviar and vodka by his public relations stooges and oiled and massaged by his honey trap devotchkas you’re going to come back and tell us that you’ve seen the future and it works, like the bloody useful idiot you are?”

Here is the first piece I wrote about my trip to Russia. Unfortunately, it is paywalled but perhaps you can find a way round this. If you can’t you’ll at least get an idea from the provocative headline: “Believe it or not, Russia is great.”

Because I was writing it for a Normie readership in the Spectator, I did so with the assumption that it would go down with my audience like a cup of cold sick.

I was not wrong.

One or two readers got it.

It feels so refreshing to read an article grounded in real experience, observation and insight, instead of just parroting propaganda. Great job!

(Thanks: Salome Vatsadze!)

Good article and a breath of fresh air. I am ambivalent about the war in Ukraine, to my mind, the protagonists, including NATO, are as bad as one another. However, this belief, in the West, that the Western way is the only way needs a swift reality check. Compare our crumbling, delinquent cities to those countries with a personal morality in their society. Their refusal to bow to the self flagellation of Western Wokery and hairshirt repentance, engendered by the corrupted lefty intelligentsia, then countries like Russia, Poland and a lot of our Eastern neighbours can teach us a big lesson in self-esteem.

(You’re a man of discernment William James-Allison!)

But many of the comments below were more in this vein:

Why does this great magazine pay Delingpole to write for it? He is a buffoon as this article shows. Those who frequent the Orthodox church in Moldova belong to a different generation and of course they believe in the old ways. But they will be gone in less than 10 years. Who should the country accommodate, the future or the past? The election has just told us which way the country wishes to turn. A cursory glance at Wikipedia would have told him that the church existed in the Soviet Union. He does the Spectator a great disservice and it’s high time it ditched him.

and

You sound just like Tucker Carlson following his “guided tour” of Moscow, James.
He’s a (useful) idiot too.
Check out the footage from the Ukrainian town of Bucha and revel in the trademark barbarism and savagery of your new Russian friends - who were all awarded bravery medals by Putin for the rape, mutilation and slaughter of innocent civilians.
And just like your colleague and man-child Leith, you think you’re being oh-so funny and clever with your contrived contrarianism.
You’re not. You’re just a pathetic, attention-seeking plonker.

With regards to the ‘footage’ from the Ukrainian town of Bucha: which footage and from what sources?

I looked into that incident in April 2022 and came to the conclusion that it was more than likely a psyop staged by Ukraine and its Western backers to discredit the Russians. Here is the piece I wrote then.

And here is probably the best piece of investigative journalism you’ll read on the subject, by Christelle Néant.

It goes without saying that the kind of people who call me a ‘useful idiot’ and a ‘pathetic, attention-seeking plonker’ aren’t going to waste their valuable time reading such articles. [I’m heroically assuming that they are real people and not just part of the intelligence community which, realistically, a lot of them will be. 77th Brigade and other branches of the state disinformation apparatus infest the comment sections like a bad dose of genital crab lice]. They know what they think about Russia and Putler already and they’re certainly not going to let their views be tempered by exposure to inconvenient counterarguments or facts.

Instead, they’ll just say what they’ve been programmed to say on these occasions. That this is “pure Putin propaganda.”

Now I don’t doubt for a moment that the Russians put out lots of propaganda. They did, after all, invent the term ‘Maskirovka’ - and Pravda (in the sense of the complete opposite of the truth) - and they had the NKVD and then the KGB and now the FSB. So I’m not trying to present the Russian state as a blushing bride, far more sinned against than sinning, whose word on everything is to be trusted.

But one of the differences between people from the West and from the East is that people in the latter, having had first- or second-hand experience of life under communism, are instinctively much less trusting of authority.

There was a good example of this during Covid, recounted to me over dinner in one of the many excellent and buzzing restaurants off Bolshaya Nikitskaya, by my friend Ian who now lives in Belorussia, but who spent some time in Moscow during the height of the scare.

Russia was certainly no bastion of bodily autonomy rights, anti-Big-Pharma scepticism or personal freedom during Covid. [Edward Slavsquat has reported on this a lot: eg

https://edwardslavsquat.substack.com/p/sputnik-v-returns-to-earth?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web

During ‘Covid’, Russia was no better than anywhere, with the state doing its damnedest to bully and blackmail the populace into taking the locally made version of the Covid kill shot, Sputnik V. One way it tried to do this - as in Italy and France - was to make vaccine certificates a condition of entry to bars.

My friend Ian discovered this when he found himself being denied entry to a sports bar to watch a football match. What he noticed, however, was that the bar was almost empty. Muscovites preferred to be relegated to the terraces outside the bars than to take this dodgy injection their government was trying to impose on them.

So the government’s next move was to insist on vaccine-certificates for the terraces too.

This lasted for about a week. No one bothered going out any more. The bar and restaurant industry was dying on its feet.

Not long after that, the city of Moscow rescinded its vaccine certificate mandate and life went back more or less to normal.

If only people in Britain, and the West generally, shared this bracing scepticism towards authority we would be in a much better state than we are now. People may protest that they don’t believe everything they hear on the BBC or read in the newspapers and that they don’t trust politicians. But these are mostly the same people who queued up for a hazardous, experimental drug procedure for no better reason than that they had been told to do so by their government and by some random ‘experts’ on the news.

It’s something I always like to keep in my mind whenever someone accuses me of being a gullible Putin shill: chances are they took the jab (if not several), banged their pots and pans for Our NHS, hung a blue and yellow flag outside their home because a coke-snorting ex-comedian in a khaki t-shirt was hailed as a hero by politicians they know to be serial liars, believed that the world’s most sophisticated intelligence-gathering nation was taken by surprise on October 7…

Being accused of gullibility by these people is like being called ugly by the Elephant Man.

As for the ‘shill’ part, I have no interest in taking sides and I owe my allegiance to no one (save Jesus). I’ll just go wherever the truth takes me. I don’t buy into what I call the “Hitler/Dogs fallacy”. That is, if Hitler says dogs make agreeable companions I’m not going to take the opposing point of view just because Hitler said it. [Here’s my full length essay on this theme. It’s a good ‘un].

None of this would matter, of course, if opinions didn’t have consequences. I would love to live in a world where people like James Delingpole could be right about stuff and where the majority of people - aka Normies - could be wrong about stuff, but where none of it mattered one jot because, hey, we can all agree to disagree. But that’s not the world we live in, is it?

Unfortunately, the one we live in is where Satan is the prince of this world; where a tiny minority of unimaginably evil people set the agenda; and where the only earthly thing that’s going to stop these creatures getting their way is if the majority refuses to co-operate it.

Really, that’s all we need to stop the Satanic elite’s masterplan in its tracks. We are many, they are few. If we all just say “No”, then it’s over for them.

That’s why - a point made by Ole Dammegard on our recent podcast - They put so much effort into mind manipulation. They know that dictatorship doesn’t really work. In the short term, maybe. But not in the long term because oppressed people are inclined to resist. No, the only truly effective form of tyranny is the version in which people imagine themselves to be free.

When I began my journalistic career in the late 1980s I was conscious of how lucky I was to be living in a country which placed such high value on freedom of the press, where journalists could speak truth to power without fear or favour - and with no danger of being bumped off or arrested.

I knew this, mainly, because articles by commentators I looked up to and whose prestige I emulated kept telling me that this was the case. This is how journalism works, by the way. Leading commentators regurgitate what previous leading commentators have written before them. Eventually these received ideas acquire the authority of well-established facts.

Since then, of course, I have become somewhat more sceptical of the integrity of the British press. It is - and probably always have been - a lie machine for the elites, designed not to inform the populace but to frighten them, divide them and mislead them.

This is what our media (and the Western media generally) have been doing for the last few years in their coverage of the war - or Special Military Operation, if you prefer, as I do because it annoys all the right people - in the Ukraine. And to be fair, they’ve done a very good job. At least they have to judge by the number of ‘informed’, ‘educated’ types I meet who, I get the impression, would have absolutely no problem if their government suddenly announced that it had declared war on Russia.

Unofficially, of course, the NATO states have been at war with Russia for years. I asked a senior Russian politician whether the West had engaged ground troops. Of course, he said, somewhat testily - like it was my fault, which I thought was a bit unfair. All the missiles systems and artillery are controlled by the British, Americans, French et al. Our various special forces are heavily engaged. Also, adding to what the politician told me, I hear tales from my children that their young officer friends in the Army occasionally boast about going off for exercises in “Poland”, with great emphasis on the inverted commas.

The Russian politician said: “Sometimes you will read obituaries of British, or Canadian or American generals who died in a skiing accident. They did not die in a skiing accident.”

Did any of us vote to go to war with Russia? Was it ever debated in parliament? What about the stipulation in the Bill of Rights that a declaration of war (other than to defend British possessions overseas) is constitutionally not Parliament’s to give away?

These are important questions, don’t you think? The kind of questions that any half way serious person ought to be asking if they wish to show themselves morally and intellectually fit to venture their opinions in the public square?

But none of our opinion-formers and opinion-relayers is asking them. They don’t even seem to be capable of answering more basic questions, like: ‘What’s in it for us?’

I mean, war is quite a big deal, right? And the kind of war we’d be committing our boys to fighting in Ukraine is especially horrible: like the worst of the World War I trenches combined, say, with that Tom Cruise future war sci fi movie Edge of Tomorrow.

The war has been transformed by drones which hover in their tens of thousands over the grey zone - the vast stretch of no man’s land between the Russian and Ukrainian front lines - where the bodies often lie unburied because it’s too dangerous to retrieve them. Any military asset of consequence - be it a tank or a concentration of infantry - is likely to be destroyed as soon as it tries to advance. Impersonal and relentless, the humming of the drones shreds the nerves of men on both sides. One veteran told me that he only has to hear the sound of a lawnmower to trigger his PTSD. Your life as an infantryman now depends on how quickly and accurately you can wield a shotgun to bring down the suicide drone before it explodes on top of you. A new kind of fighting has evolved, known as ‘trickle warfare’. Units advance in groups of no more than three men at a time, often riding electric motorbikes. Tanks are almost obsolete, only capable of moving if shielded by impenetrable drone cover.

Now this isn’t the kind of environment I’d choose for my sons spend their last days. Nor anyone else’s sons, for that matter. I think it’s tragic enough that Russian and Ukrainian boys are being fed into this meat grinder, perhaps a million of them dead, so far. But the idea that we in the West should add to that tally but throwing our own children (and brothers and fathers) into this overegged border dispute cum Cabal proxy war is depraved beyond measure.

Since when did we hold the lives of our people so cheap? Has anyone conducted any kind of cost benefit analysis? What exactly would we be hoping to achieve by ramping up a Third World War? What would our war aims be? What manner of existential threat does Russia pose to us that we should contemplate such drastic action?

And if it’s being done for ‘moral’ reasons, where is the evidence that we are the goodies? And given that thanks to our propagandising media and our lying politicians we are so pitifully ill-informed about the nature of the war and its origins, how could most of us form a worthwhile judgement?

The more astute reader may have spotted at this point that although this piece is ostensibly about the Russia/Ukraine ‘war’, what it really is is another variation on that endlessly frustrating theme: Why are Normies so incredibly ****ing stupid?

They really are, though, aren’t they? Yes. I know it’s unhelpful and demeaning and divisive lumping the mass of humanity into this contemptuous category. But nonetheless it is true and cannot be stated often enough.

Anyone in the West who think it’s in their interests to go to war with Russia has been taken for a ride by the propaganda of the Cabal. The Cabal loves wars. It needs them to perpetuate its disaster capitalism/fractional reserve banking business model.

See, eg, this summary of G Edward Griffin’s The Creature From Jekyll Island:

5. War Profiteering Through Central Banking Central banks enable wars by providing governments unlimited funding through money creation, removing the natural restraint of taxation that would make citizens resist military adventures. The Rothschild Formula perfected the technique of funding both sides of conflicts, ensuring massive debts that generate interest payments forever regardless of who wins. Without the Federal Reserve, America could not have financed its involvement in World War I, World War II, or the endless Middle Eastern wars—all of which enriched bankers while impoverishing nations. Every major war since the creation of the Bank of England in 1694 has been made possible by central bank funding that hides the true cost through inflation rather than honest taxation.

But the Cabal’s interests are not OUR interests. The Cabal are Satanists. They rape, torture and murder children in homage to their dark gods. They loathe God and His creation, which is why they are so dedicated to poisoning, killing and enslaving us. Their most especial enemies are Christians who, thanks to the Bible and the teachings of Jesus and the Church, are most attuned to the nature of the spiritual war being played out before us and now seeming to approach its apogee. So if these Satanists manage to engineer another scenario in which millions of Christians go to war with millions of other Christians - as They successfully managed in World War I and World War II - it represents a massive victory for them and their dark lord.

The West’s proxy war in the Ukraine against Russia is worth not an ounce of our treasure nor a single drop of our blood. The Russian people are our natural friends and allies, not our enemies. And though I really hate to say this and it’s a terrible way to end a piece and I promise that I’ll never do this again…

Sting was right.