King Charles III is going to Washington. Why? He is our Head of State and by visiting the United States he will be seen as validating English complicity in the evil being perpetrated by USrael. The majority of ordinary people in England would not vote to support rapacious genocide, and yet…
Starmer (apparently a Human Rights Lawyer and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom) is under pressure because of his weakness in being forced to appoint Mandelson as Ambassador to the court of king Don, who is now threatening the status of the Falkland Islands. Is the PM hoping CIII can charm a charmless fat man who falls asleep in front of the world’s press in his own office?
In the delightful fable “Love Actually”, Hugh Grant’s PM stands up to Billy-Bob Thornton’s bullying President - and the film plays on television here every Christmas. Reality is, and always has been, very different. The USA has been hostile to England ever since it sent the Red Coats a-running, and especially since 1812. English arrogance resulted in Bessemer’s process making American steel dominant. English arrogance triggered a war that destroyed its, and its European competitors’, empires. English arrogance is now evident in the belief that England still matters.
I would respect Starmer and the Westminster élite if CIII told the fat man in Washington to remove all his military and quasi-military assets from our territory. No US military, NSA or CIA aeroplane, ship or boot allowed here until after the trials at the Hague are completed and the perpetrators of genocide hung. It would help if others did the same - no more intel from Cyprus or Pine Gap, Diego Garcia or the Azores…
Won’t happen though. It is not the same Washington that Mr Smith went to. President Trump is the image of the new amerika doing in plain sight what the old fictional version, that Norman Rockwell captured so comfortingly, kept well out of view.
The power of propaganda is such that I grew up happily believing that the USA was a generous democracy founded on peace and goodwill to all men. The Americans that I knew were all friendly, comfortable people. They were better educated than me, they lived in a detached five bedroom house on a big green lot in a university city. They believed in all the virtues we are told the USA was founded on. I loved American films, especially frothy romantic comedies, the Wizard of Oz, 1930s gangster films with Cagney atop an exploding gas tank, 1950s noir with Dick Powell, Greg Peck in ‘Twelve o’clock High’ and ‘Roman Holiday’.
The film that really stopped me in my tracks was ‘Mississippi Burning’. That one film forced me to realise that I had always been aware of this dark side of the American psyche - it is there in plain sight in Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Mocking Bird and every literary and filmic occasion where the servants are not the same colour as the masters. Twenty years before seeing that film I had been told about a race riot in our sleepy little market town. It occurred outside the ‘The Chequers Inn’ in Bridge Street in 1943. The man who told me had been there at the time but I thought he was probably exaggerating. Pubs, even in my experience, could be unruly at chucking-out time.
I later revisited that memory and sought to verify it. A racial disturbance had occurred at that time and place. The Chequers was a popular place for American servicemen from the ammunition handling depot in the malthouses by the railway on the other side of the river. The trouble was caused by US airmen from the base on the other side of town being unwilling to share their drinking space with the ammunition handlers from the malthouses. It was only then that I discovered that the airmen were white, and the ammunition handlers black, Americans. The townspeople liked both lots of Americans and resented the airmen’s prejudice. Twenty-five years later local people still remembered how different reality was from the celluloid version.
I was brought up to believe that America saved us from the Germans. The Lend-Lease deals of 1940/41 certainly ensured a bankrupt Britain didn’t sink. What saved us was the German’s Napoleonic invasion of Russia in June 1941. It was the USSR that defeated Germany. The American contribution was to stop the Red Army from reaching the Atlantic, and then help them in the partition and subjugation of Europe.
It is a couple of weeks short of eighty-one years since Germany surrendered. Russia has been forced back beyond the high-water mark of its Imperial ambitions but Putin seems to want to push forward again - the only question is ‘how far?’ As long as Russia presents no direct threat to the global ambitions of the USA it seems very unlikely that any President would risk forcing Russia into a nuclear exchange.
How important is Europe to Washington? Spain already refuses to support US military ambitions being launched from its territory. Even spineless Starmer is beginning to quake as the fact that the UK has actively supported attacks on Iran cannot be hidden. Does USrael need the active support of UK involvement? Probably it does, logistically. especially runways and continuing intelligence feeds.
If CIII’s visit is greeted with the full Barnum and Bailey ceremony of parades and marching bands and overflights of a thousand warplanes trailing streamers of the red, white and blue then USrael really needs us (though maybe not the rest of Europe quite so much). If the US President falls asleep or waddles off for a comfort break in the middle of a State Dinner, then we are nothing more than a convenient piece of real estate - a small island off Europe with a few useful outposts with runways and arrays of antennas forever listening…
Having that "unpleasant" man and his gang in charge of our country is depressing and terrifying. This is not the America I know and love. It's shameful. The regular people are struggling to make ends meet while the billionaires are taking everything they want for themselves...our country is sick with a vast gaping hole that will never be filled, a disease of greed and power hunger. I wish the king would not lower himself to sit at the same table with that madman or with any of the traitors who enable him and his agenda.