Michael Fallon's recent claim that Britain under Theresa May's leadership would be willing to launch a preemptive nuclear strike confirms what many suspected - namely that the British people are being ruled by a clutch of certifiable fanatics who will get us all destroyed unless they can be reined in, and soon. The Defence Secretary's stupendously stupid statement came in the same week that the BBC's Andrew Marr asked Labour's Jeremy Corbyn in an interview if there were any circumstances in which he would launch nuclear weapons?
Both taken together suggest that the moral sickness that has long pervaded the country's privately educated elite, when it comes to unleashing wars against poor countries abroad and attacking poor people at home, has progressed into the realms of actual insanity. Have we seriously now entered an age when nuclear weapons are considered anything other than an abomination that no civilized country or non-sociopathic human being would ever contemplate using for more than a second?
If the likes of Michael Fallon and Andrew Marr are to be believed, yes we have.
The willingness to trigger armageddon is, in the run-up to the general election on 8 June, being used as evidence of the Tories' fitness to rule. In this regard, Mr Fallon wants us to believe that the British public are convinced that North Korea and Russia to be more of a threat to its security than than the Tories are. It really does bespeak ineffable arrogance, recklessness, and irrationality to wave the prospect of launching nuclear weapons as part of an electoral strategy. Within this strategy, the inference that Jeremy Corbyn is weak because he refuses to countenance a first-strike policy vis-a-vis Britain's Trident nuclear arsenal, is more confirmation of the upside down world that these people inhabit. It would be well worthwhile if Michael Fallon would spare a few minutes to watch the legendary monologue Charlie Chaplin delivered in his classic 1940 movie, The Great Dictator.
This passage is particularly relevant:
Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost....
Predictably, the Defence Secretary's fatuous boast of being willing to launch a preemptive nuclear strike did not go down well in Russia. Franz Klintsevich, a retired colonel and current deputy head of the Russian Duma, wrote in response that if Britain launched a preemptive nuclear strike against Russia "it will literally be erased from the face of the earth."
No one in their right mind could argue that Britain's complete annihilation in the event of a nuclear exchange with Russia would not be guaranteed. Russia currently has 7000 nuclear warheads, while Britain has 215. Russia also has some of the most advanced delivery systems of any currently in operation, while Britain can't even get its missiles to fire in the right direction, given what we know of the failed Trident submarine missile test that took place off the coast of the United States last year.
By now we are all aware of the malign role that Madrassas (religious schools) have played in places such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, and across the Middle East in radicalising young people with the inculcation of extremist ideology and fanaticism. In Britain we have our very own version of Madrassas. We call them public schools - institutions such as Harrow, Eton and Fettes where maniacs such as Michael Fallon, Boris Johnson, David Cameron, and Tony Blair are hatched, inculcated with a fanatical belief in British exceptionalism and imperialism.
With this in mind, surely a political priority for any future government must be to close these institutions down and reduce them to rubble. Indeed, nothing less than the survival of future generations depends on it.