🧵 Happy Sunday THREAD about the fragility of modern civilisation.

I've been feeling shivery and feverish since Friday night (better now) so I decided to watch Band of Brothers again. It's a wonderfully produced, directed, scripted and acted series, and it's must watch for...1/n
...anybody who hasn't seen it. I had to turn it off, though. It wasn't the horror of the battle scenes -- the death, the jaws ripped open by shrapnel, or the amputations by 105mm mortar round -- that got me. It was the liberation of Eindhoven. It shows in that scene the...2/n
...rank moral degeneration war causes on all sides, much of which is tragically necessary for military operations, but a lot of which is forced on populations who must survive through it. In Western Europe, we have been lucky for the last 80 years that we haven't seen any...3/n
...serious war. For 45 of those years, we were frozen in peace, because war between the two superpowers was too unthinkable to ever happen, and until the late eighties, we were largely ruled by a governing elite who had been tempered by total war, or at least their fathers'...4/n
...experiences of it. Well, not anymore. I don't think we'll have a war, but the blasé way in which the Western Intelligentsia treats war is sickening: throwing us into the Middle East as if it was a trifle; blunderbussing around Eastern Europe as though the people who have...5/n
...real, serious and centuries long security interests in that part of the world -- and have rather formidable martial capacity -- might not feel alarmed by it all. We've known that Russia was nervous about our policy there for two decades and, for at least the last eight...6/n
...of those years, that they had the military wherewithal to do something about it. But did we engage to find a stable settlement? No. We were too busy telling ourselves and everybody else how Right we were. And now we're whipping ourselves into a hysterical frenzy because...7/n
...they've concluded that they will never get us to the negotiation table without credible threats.

We knew for at least a decade we would likely see a global pandemic, but were we well prepared? Nope. We were lucky that it was COVID. We also know that we'll see another...8/n
...Carrington Event; but how much hardening of the grid and electricity supply have we done? I'll bet hardly any. So when one hits, and we lose electricity for a significant number of months (years?), what will happen to society? The Band of Brothers scenes that show...9/n
...liberated and German cities offer a glimpse. It's not pretty. Given how fragile our comfortable civilisation is (which we wantonly shroud, lest we have to think about it), it's easy to look at our incompetent, massively conceited ruling class and worry. A lot.

Happy Sunday

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More from @admcollingwood

Feb 3
Saturday Night Spaces -- 7pm

🗣️#SueGrayDay
🗣️Peter Hitchens supports Johnson shock
🗣️The #Saville Attack
🗣️DEBATE: We should NOT #DefundTheBBC
🗣️DEBATE: Reassessing Appeasement and Neville Chamberlain

✅Set a reminder
✅Retweet
✅Join
✅Have your say

twitter.com/i/spaces/1gqxv…
Do join -- but bring your debating chops. Last week, after our weekly politics chat, we had quite the debate on abolishing the police. I wonder if @calvinrobinson would like to explain why we should defund the BBC (and then likely crush my conservative argument for keeping it)?
Read 5 tweets
Jan 24
🧵A while ago, I wrote a thread, 'the Hypernormalisation of Britain'. Surprisingly, it has been received well, with almost 450 retweets so far.

This is a THREAD about the Agents of #Hypernormalisation in Britain. It will try to explain how we reached our current state. 1/n
Our story centres on three events in 1955-56. Two are barely known and the third is misunderstood, but they created modern Britain. The first event was the publication of The Future of Socialism by Anthony Crosland, the Oxford academic and Labour MP. No book has had more... 2/n
...influence on postwar British society. In it, Crosland argued that the Labour Party should stop focusing solely on economic policy as a means to achieve its socialist ends: there was more than one way to skin a cat. Instead of attempting to control the commanding...3/n
Read 39 tweets
Jan 24
🧵 WHY YOU ARE TOO BLASÉ ABOUT WAR 🧵

For the last 20 years, the Western Alliance has focused its warfighting capacity on Counter Insurgency Warfare. Driven by reckless engagements in the Middle East, the Hindu Kush and North Africa, our thinking, equipment procurement...1/n
...force organisation and training has been focused on this type of war. Often, it involves fighting in urban or mountainous environments, but always in small scale, low intensity engagements against a lightly armed enemy, while having total air, informational and EM...2/n
...dominance. Armour isn't much used, and artillery is static and used for fire support against outmatched opponents. Mechanised, high-intensity, combined arms warfare is an entirely different matter. It requires a great deal of training in mass to be able to manoeuvre...3/n
Read 8 tweets
Jan 24
🧵
A brief thread of essays and blogs that can provide a thinking person an overview of the forces at play in Ukraine.

The first is Peter Hitchens (@ClarkeMicah) on NATO expansion, in a post on his blog in 2017.

1/4

hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2017/02/lemmin…
The second is an extraordinarily prescient essay from 1997, written by Rodric Braithwaite, Britain's last ambassador to the Soviet Union. 2/4

prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/bring…
The third is a superb piece from Rob Lee (@RALee85) on the current military buildup on the Ukrainian borders and what might come next. I also recommend following his Twitter feed, which is cataloguing the build-up in real time.

3/4

fpri.org/article/2022/0…
Read 4 tweets
Jan 19
Saturday Night Space: the unfolding Russo-Ukraine situation.

🌐Grand strategy
🇷🇺🇺🇦What forces are at play?
🇺🇸Can US negotiators strike a deal?
🇪🇺What of Macron's EU offer?
🇬🇧What are Britain's interests?

++Set a Reminder
++Retweet
++Join
++Have a say
twitter.com/i/spaces/1yoJM…
The below thread is the sort of thing we might talk about, for instance.

People might also like to take ten minutes to listen to the below podcast, which offers an insight into Russia's vulnerability to sanctions, and thus Western leverage.

Read 6 tweets
Jan 19
Oh my. Macron offers Russia talks about new security deal with EU. The pieces on the chessboard are moving so quickly.

reuters.com/world/europe/m…
Some random thoughts about this.

🇪🇺 This is the sort of 'strategic autonomy' Macron (and many in Brussels) want: deciding European issues to the exclusion of the US. It's exactly what they *should* be doing if that's what they want.
🇷🇺 If not handled carefully, it might...2/n
...allow Russia to triangulate and weaken everybody's negotiating position.
🇪🇺 It must have infuriated the EU that the US was deciding on the affairs of the EU's near abroad but excluding Brussels, Paris and Berlin.
🇪🇺 This is likely to help France cleave closer to Germany...3/n
Read 6 tweets

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