It may seem an odd title for a post regarding the Russian poisoning of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury but bear with me, as I’m hoping it will make sense.
I, like many of my generation, have struggled to understand the rising popularity of Jeremy Corbyn as a future leader of the United Kingdom. However, I have no axe to grind with those who support him as I believe that the individual votes for the candidate that they believe represents their views and positions the best. And it would be nothing short of arrogant of me to shout them down by implying that I am fully cognisant of their entire personal circumstances.
As I say though, I am pretty sure that it is a generational issue. I am of an age when I remember Corbyn’s unflinching support for the IRA, attending terrorist’s funerals and standing shoulder to shoulder with the very people who were bombing London, Manchester, Warrington and other UK cities and killing innocents as they went about their daily lives. I remember well his support for communist and left-wing regimes that sanctioned and conducted state-sponsored murder and executions of any opposition, real or imagined. Jeremy Corbyn seemed, to me at least, to hate the UK so much that he would leap at the first opportunity to embrace any cause that ran contrary to our national interests.
But that was all happening as I was growing up. Corbyn’s bedrock of support is sustained in no small part by the younger demographic. And the younger demographic will always seek to go against the trends and values of their previous generation as they always have. This is human nature and something we do almost without thinking. More significantly though is the fact that the younger generation who are championing Corbyn et al, grew to maturity in a very different time than people of my age.
Consider it for a moment: They grew up when the IRA were on a ceasefire and had signed up to the Good Friday Agreement. Not for them the daily grind of grim news reports of sectarian murders and bombs on British streets. They grew up after the Berlin Wall had been torn down. No sitting open-mouthed in front of the television watching as a couple were mown down by machine gun fire as they ran the gauntlet of razor-wire entanglements to reach the West. Yes, we have the dread of Islamic fundamentalist attacks as a feature in today’s society but these are franchised actions with amorphous links and relations to an ideology rather than an actual physical entity.
In short, they grew up without their country experiencing a definitive threat. They grew up without any exposure to an actual enemy. Because that is what both Russia and the IRA were to the UK; our enemies. That word sounds almost anachronistic even as I write it. A term discarded long ago as we seek to convince ourselves that in our new enlightened age there can be no such thing as enemies, that somehow any conflict or aggression can be solved with dialogue and political detente.
Which is great if the whole world follows this ethos. But of course, they don’t. But what they do, is exploit the good intentions and soft-skills approach to their own advantage. Russia has used our 16-year distraction in Afghanistan to develop and hone their asymmetric conflict tactics to great effect. Their mastery of information operations to subvert and sabotage smaller states and countries is actually well-ahead of most nations. We just need to look at Georgia and the Ukraine as past examples and the Baltic states as current ones where the Bear’s malign influence is being wielded.
And now we have the Labour leader in the UK categorically refusing to support the call for punitive measures against the country that has, to all intents and purposes, committed an act in contravention to NATO Article 5; a state-sanctioned, armed attack on a member country. By Friday, he softened his tone somewhat by declaring that he was willing to accept the possibility that ‘McMafia’ type criminals may have been responsible. What is encouraging is the way his own backbenchers have distanced themselves from him and are openly giving their support to the PM in defiance of their leader’s directive.
Yet still, we have a significant amount of people who, like Jeremy Corbyn, are pushing out the narrative that this was nothing to do with the Russians and even worse, that our own intelligence agencies carried out the attack in order to whip up national fervour and support for…well, your guess is as good as mine.
But here’s the point; Russian info-ops count heavily on the acceptance and support for their narratives and the subsequent spread on social media. And those who, like Corbyn, utterly reject the facts in favour of half-baked conspiracy theories, are assisting the Russians. Jeremy Corbyn’s pantomime performances in Parliament over this issue are edited and re-broadcast in Russia where the population there is led to believe that he is the last bastion of truth in a corrupt and feeble UK government. And the message to the people is clear; the Russian government had nothing to do with this attack and even the UK’s most popular politician is saying this.
Vladimir Putin just won another election term based on no small part on his strong stance on the international stage. The Kremlin’s aggressive foreign policies distract from the everyday suffering of ordinary Russians under Putin’s leadership and the narrative very cleverly controlled by the state media outlets. There is no independent outlet to counter these messages or broadcast the truth. Instead they take well-edited snippets from people like Jeremy Corbyn and mesh these with their domestic reports to create the illusion of international suspicion that the UK carried out these attacks.
Even now, the UK has deployed thousands of Service personnel to the Baltic states to provide a show of force and a deterrent to Russia’s recent aggression. And the reports are already coming back of Russian info ops setting up off-duty soldiers in PR coups and stings that are then reported as criminal acts against the Russian populations within Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Russia had almost succeeded in portraying Latvia as a failed state, just as they had achieved with the Crimea. Their next phase was obviously a physical invasion of the small country disguised as a ‘defence intervention’ on behalf of persecuted Russian communities in Latvia. Our deployment alongside that of our allies has, if nothing else, put the brakes on the momentum for this invasion if nothing else. But for how long is really anybody’s guess at this stage.
So when I read of people, especially those who should know better, repeating the Russian narrative, I get pretty annoyed. They are falling for the political equivalent of the ‘Nigerian Millionaire-Prince Scam’. But the impact here is far greater than that of an idiot being relieved of some cash. It is assisting a hostile foreign power who are murdering people in our own country to get away with it.
I’m not advocating that we should never challenge our government or our Security and Intelligence Services. I actually believe that questioning and challenging are healthy accountability processes that encourages these agencies to be as transparent and compliant as possible. But there is a giant difference between questioning and challenging and championing the Russian narrative. And those who do this are sleeping; keeping their eyes and minds closed to facts and reality. Sleeping through scientific reports that name and date the source of the poison. Sleeping through the very strange deaths of other individuals who have escaped their Russian masters. Sleeping through the ill-concealed pride and glee that the Kremlin is reacting to the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter with.
But they are not just sleeping, as their actions have impact beyond themselves. Their sleeping through fact and reason gives strength to the Russian cause. To the enemy cause.
Sleeping with the enemy.
