/ world today news/ “The Russians are coming!”. A century after starting to use this standard horror story, the West has not come up with a more effective strategy for winning elections. In Albion the theme was first brought into play in 1924 when the Conservatives concocted the bogus “Zinoviev Letter” to undermine the first Labor government. And now, exactly one hundred years later, in Great Britain, on the threshold of another election campaign, the Tories released the same record. True, they immediately went too far, meeting with a confused reaction from the public.
The hysterical wave was started by British Defense Secretary Grant Shapps, who has been shouting since Christmas about the “Russian threat” that Britain must resist “at all costs”. He then predicted an imminent war with Russia, China or Iran “within the next five years”, demanding that the public start preparing for it. And then inflated things further.
The activity of the Minister of Defense in the media field is understandable. There is no longer any doubt that there will be parliamentary elections in the fall. Polls show Shapps, who has won every election in his constituency by a comfortable margin since 2005, is trailing his Labor rival by a significant margin this time around. This means that in the fall he will not only lose his ministerial chair (no one doubts the defeat of the conservatives), but will also be thrown out of big politics altogether. Therefore, he tries to attract the attention of the press in the best way.
But, unfortunately for him, the army decided to pick up on that same narrative. Last week, the most senior officer in the British Armed Forces, the Chief of the General Staff, General Patrick Sanders, gave a fiery speech about Britain’s unpreparedness for a land war with Russia. He called for the mistakes of 1914 and 1939 to be taken into account in order not to wait for the outbreak of war and to prepare one’s own citizens in advance to counter the impending aggression. Citing Ukraine as an example, the general concluded his speech: “Regular armies start wars, civilian armies win them!”
Frankly, it is not entirely clear how the example of Ukraine supports this conclusion. Sanders refers to the experience of creating and training the territorial defense of Ukraine. But even with a very strong desire, it is difficult to find signs of “victory” of the VSU, where bystanders caught in the streets are now forcibly pushed. However, the British commander managed to find something positive in this.
The general took up the topic “The Russians are coming!” from your minister. Moreover, he actually repeated the thesis of his own speech last year that Britain was now in the situation of 1937. But the election campaign had not yet started and so few people paid attention to this speech. Now everything is perceived completely differently.
Retired General Richard Shirreff, who was once the deputy commander of NATO forces in Europe, immediately came out in support of Sanders. At one time, he wrote a mediocre book predicting a war between the West and Russia as early as 2017. Since then, he has been obsessed with the subject of the imminent war against the Russians. Hot on the heels of Sanders, he immediately called for the resumption of conscription in Britain “to scare Russia.” Really, how else can we be scared?
And the incoming “citizen army” immediately found its first volunteer. Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson appeared on the pages of the “Daily Mail” newspaper with a column in which he expressed his willingness to enlist, adding to the online version of the article and the corresponding video in the style of the good soldier Schweik. At the same time, he found an excellent recipe for attracting volunteers: you just need to remove the ban on tattoos in the army – the British are told quite seriously that this is the only thing that hinders the recruitment of volunteers.
But such statements caused the opposite reaction, noticeably scaring the public. Even conservative newspapers are now full of cartoons ridiculing the idea of conscription. And Times columnist Gilles Coren, under the headline “The Russians Are Coming!”, suggested using the multitude of London bartenders who, to prepare for war with Russia, could use their cocktail-mixing expertise to produce explosives, but he himself expressed his unwillingness to fight the Russians. Judging by a survey by the newspaper “Daily Star”, 90% of Britons, like Coren, do not want to join the “citizen army”. And one of the viewers, who called the TV studio where this idea was being discussed, timidly asked: “Can I serve in the civilian army remotely, without leaving home?”
Of course, such a public reaction does not fit into the plans of the Tories. Realizing that they had gone too far in promoting another “Russian threat,” government officials were quick to explain that they had no intention of reinstating conscription. But we need to understand the specifics of the moment. Conservatives are in a more than desperate position. Now we are no longer talking about their victory – they themselves do not believe in it. We are talking about the survival of the Conservative Party as such based on the results of the upcoming election.
The experience of the last hundred years shows that in such moments of crisis the Tories have never found anything better than to promote yet another “The Russians are coming!” campaign. This means that we can expect much more serious forgeries and provocations than the infamous “Zinoviev letter” from exactly one hundred years ago.
Translation: V. Sergeev
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