Why the phrase "We in the West" is simply a prelude to an avalanche of lies

Do 'WE' really want to be associated with such a group?

By John Burns

“WE in the West.” What a seductive phrase. It slides its arm around your shoulder and invites you to believe that the speaker is on your side.

But ask yourself this: by what measure am I part of any ‘we’ that includes the Whitehouse and the Pentagon, Lockheed and BAE Systems? In what way, are their interests my interests? What evidence do I have to suppose that the Whitehouse and the Pentagon or the Heads of the Armed Service here in Britain are remotely interested in anything I think?

“We in the West” is the smokescreen of bad faith actors and it is usually the prelude to a lie.

Take Defence Secretary Grant Shapps, who recently claimed that ‘we’ are now in the pre-war years of the next war, the one against Russia.

The pre-war he is invoking is the Second World War. It is always the Second World War. Anyone picking up a tabloid in the early 80’s would have read exactly the same guff; the current occupant of the Kremlin is akin to Hitler and I (the hack) am Winston Churchill, a far-sighted prophet who, alone among the appeasers and the Neville Chamberlains, has come to warn you of the danger.

It was rubbish then and it is rubbish now.

Churchill was the lone, far-sighted prophet in the Conservative Party, not the only one in the country. The entire Left had been warning about the rise of fascism for years.

And then there is the lazy comparison with Hitler. If the mainstream media’s version of Vladimir Putin resembles anybody it is Eleftherios Venizelos (below), but for the writers to invoke him, they would have to have some minimal grasp of history. Eleftherios Venizelos was the man who was going to carve a Greater Greece out of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, a dream which did not come true.

We are made to believe that Vladimir Putin thought he could conquer Ukraine in one fell swoop and that is also not coming true.

For the writer in Churchillian mode (see Max Hastings in The Times recently) the West has let itself become weak. It was our weakness in the late Thirties that emboldened Hitler. If only we had threatened Germany sooner, spent more on armaments sooner, Hitler would have backed down.

Go on then, Max. How much should we have spent? How about $877billion a year? What if we had spent $877bn and Germany had spent $86.4bn, that would have done the trick, wouldn’t it? These are not figure plucked out of the air.

The big number is what the United States spent on defence in 2022 and the small number is what Russia spent. Indeed, the US spends more on defence than the next 10 countries combined. And you are telling us the West is ‘weak?’ You – and your fellow hawks, scions of Sandhurst, Charterhouse, Oxbridge – you are standing there with a straight face telling us that Russia is a threat to that?

Russia is currently bogged down in war against one country. Why then, would it start another war with the 31 countries of NATO, three of whom are nuclear powers and one of whom has a defence budget 10 times its own?

The truth is that the “Russian Threat” has been doing the rounds since Kipling was in short trousers. In those days, it was called The Great Game and the fantasy was that the armies of the Tsar would climb over the Hindu Kush and seize India, the Jewel in our Crown.

In 1878, with Russia at war with Turkey, there were more strident calls for Britain to pile in on the side of the Turk, calls which gave birth to the word: jingoism. Disraeli resisted and Britain got what it wanted anyway.

The Russian threat re-emerged in the late 50’s as the Missile Gap, a phrase credited to John F. Kennedy. There was no missile gap. America had more intercontinental ballistic missiles than the Soviets, as indeed Kennedy was informed, but he carried on using it anyway. It was a handy stick with which to beat Eisenhower and it worked. Kennedy got elected.

After the interlude of sanity that was Détente, Ronald Reagan decided to restart the Cold War and the same old myths poured out of Fleet Street. General Sir John Winthrop Hackett wrote a novel called The Third World War August 1985. Extracts were serialised in the Press.

But the Soviet Union was in much the same predicament then as Putin’s Russia is now; outgunned and outspent by the USA and bogged down in another unwinnable war, this time in Afghanistan. All of which explains why, as some of the more eagle-eyed among you may have spotted, the Third World War did not break out a fortnight after Live Aid.

The reason the Russian threat is waved in front of us is because these people – Grant Schapps and General Sir Patrick Sanders (the one who wants to put your son in his ‘Citizens’ Army’) – know they can’t just come out and say: “We’d so awfully like to start a war.” They have to wrap their evil intentions in a lie. They are like boys driving full tilt at a brick wall who turn to their passengers and tell them that the brick wall is driving at them.

“We have to drive full tilt at the brick wall,” cry the warmongers, “or Western Values will be pushed back.” Oh, “Western Values”. Them again. Western Values are not to be sniffed at – democracy and the rule of law are wonderful things – but they are not why America fights its wars and they are not why the enemies of peace are slavering at the thought of having a go at Russia. Since 1945, America has never let Western Values get in the way of foreign policy.

Were Western values in play when Eisenhower signed off on the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, first democratically elected president of the Congo in 1961, only to replace him with the kleptocratic Mobutu Sese Seko (above), a dictator who ruled unmolested for 30 years?

What Western values were on show when Nixon and Kissinger signed off on the coup that overthrew the democratically elected Government of Chile in September 1973, replacing Salvador Allende with General Pinochet?

And if this is too cerebral, remember Phan Thi Kim Phuc? She was the naked nine-year-old girl running away after a napalm attack in Vietnam. Remember Abdou Hussein Saad Fadeh?

He was the hooded man being tortured in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. You have seen the pictures. This is where it ends. You start with the hifalutin language of Western Values, Liberty, Freedom yah dee yah dee yah – and it always ends up with something that smears excrement on those values. “We in the West.” Do you even want to belong to any “we” that can do such things?