Ah, Hamish de Bretton-Gordon—a name that practically screams entitlement, even if he weren’t paid to write stupid propaganda for The Daily Telegraph. One can almost picture his ancestors surveying their estates, angry that the world was changing around them. The Gentry, once a legitimate and honourable order of men, had its end as a distinct order in the early 20th century. Those of it who stood against the growing managerial state and its monied backers were financially ruined, while the survivors kept their lifestyles by sucking up to the new order of things. They kept their nice houses and could afford the school fees for their increasingly stupid offspring, all while acting as a fig leaf for the New World Order.
Yes, the modern Gentry, if we can still use the term, has all the affectations of its forebears—an air of self-importance, the clipped vowels, the habit of barking orders at people who don’t work for them—but without the social function that once gave them legitimacy. They are house pets for the real ruling class, yapping on demand whenever their masters need a reassuring voice to tell the rest of us that everything is just as it should be. Mr de Bretton-Gordon’s ancestors may have commanded regiments and moved the borders of our Empire ever outward, but his purpose is to give respectable cover to the increasingly embarrassing strategic blunders of his betters.
Turning to the Ukraine conflict, it’s evident that the war has been lost—not just by the Zelensky regime in Kiev, but also by the British and American ruling classes who set out to bleed Russia to the point where it could no longer stand with China against their global ambitions. The people who rule us were convinced that a combination of economic sanctions, CIA-backed subversion, and a flood of increasingly obsolete weaponry would be enough to bring Russia to its knees. Instead, Russia dug in and shattered the Western-backed Ukrainian military. The dream of a world entirely subjugated for the extraction of unearned wealth by our ruling class will have to wait. It’s an abomination that so many lives were sacrificed, but perhaps, for once, they perished for a cause that served a just outcome, even if it wasn’t the one intended.
As for the article’s suggestion that Mr. Trump can dictate terms for peace, this is merely more Telegraph propaganda. It’s an attempt to convince its dwindling, aging readership that Russia hasn’t secured a decisive victory and that the Western powers can impose a settlement. The reality is that any forthcoming settlement will be entirely on Russian terms. Russia will take whatever it wants, leaving Ukraine as a neutralised shell. There’s even a chance that Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary will be offered some of the territories they lost in 1945. If Mr Trump has any sense, he’ll bow to Mr Putin’s terms, perhaps securing a token concession to show himself as a peacemaker operating from a position of strength. The Russians are always capable of that—even the Bolsheviks knew how and when to do that. But the truth remains: Russia has won, and our ruling class has been defeated.
And so, we return to the main issue: why are our masters so invested in this conflict? It is not as if Britain has any genuine strategic interest in Ukraine. The place is 1,500 miles away. It has no direct effect on the safety or prosperity of the people living in this country, except insofar as the ongoing war has driven up energy prices and worsened an already wrecked economy. The truth needs to be repeated over and over again. The Ukraine War, like every war of the last generation—at least—was pushed to maintain the global system of looting that allows the people who really run the West to skim wealth from the productive classes and park it in offshore accounts. It was never about democracy, or freedom, or the sacred borders of some historically fluid entity on the edge of Europe. It was always about money and power. War is a racket. It always was. It is even more so now, when the spoils aren’t even vestigially shared with those whose menfolk are expected to do the fighting and dying.
But it didn’t work. And now we have men like Hamish de Bretton-Gordon rolled out to pretend it was all some noble but failed endeavour, rather than one of the greatest crimes and the most ridiculous strategic failure of recent history. Iraq was nothing beside this. He and his friends will blame Russia, blame Trump, blame anyone but themselves and the masters they serve. And they will keep barking, keep demanding, keep pretending that they still matter. But the rest of us need to think seriously how to get to a world where no one cares what they have to say. And that will be a world without his masters and ours.
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Hugo Miller writes;
You say “Turning to the Ukraine conflict, it’s evident that the war has been lost..”
Depends what you mean by ‘lost’. It has made a lot of corrupt and un-deserving people very wealthy indeed. As that was the war’s objective, it can be counted as a success.
Idiots such as deBretton still pretend that we were fighting ‘to defend democracy’, while ignoring the fact that Z is ruling as an un-elected tyrant. His term of office expired nine months ago, and he is refusing to hold an election. As an illegitimate ruler, he cannot participate in any peace negotiations – a point that Putin has made many times.
Does the word “democracy” have any ideational content for the leaders of the EU? If it did, they would yield to the two plebiscites already held in the Donbas and Crimea, in which over 90% of the citizens there chose to be ruled by Russia.