Johnson wrote an opinion piece for the Times newspaper this week in which he said he believed that “diplomacy can prevail” to prevent mounting tensions over Ukraine from escalating into a full-blown war between the US-NATO military bloc and Russia.

This was while Johnson announced that Britain was planning to deploy more Marines, fighter jets and warships to Eastern Europe. Britain has already taken the lead among European NATO members in sending weapons and special forces to Ukraine in what is claimed to be a defense against “Russian aggression”.

What Johnson is proposing this week is deploying more British forces to Poland and the Baltic states in what he calls a show of Britain’s “immovable” support for Europe. This is cynical grandstanding to burnish Britain’s image as some kind of noble power.

France’s President Emmanuel Macron was in Moscow this week for substantial talks with Russian leader Vladimir Putin on efforts to deescalate tensions over Ukraine. Next week, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is also to visit Moscow for talks with Putin.

Then we see London seeming to do its utmost to make sure diplomacy fails by wantonly raising military tensions with Russia.

Johnson and his Foreign Secretary Liz Truss have been busy issuing dire warnings to Russia that it faces bloody carnage if it dares invade Ukraine. Moscow has repeatedly denied it is planning to invade. Nevertheless, Truss has been photographed in British news media donning military body armor while riding atop a tank. She is due to visit Moscow in the coming days for talks with her Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov. It promises to be a frosty meeting. One wonders why the Kremlin is even entertaining such an incompetent and disingenuous British envoy.

London, as usual, is doing Washington’s bidding. Since the United States launched the propaganda campaign nearly three months ago accusing Russia of aggression against Ukraine, Britain has been vocal in amplifying Washington’s message of alleged Russian aggression.

Propaganda and media psychological operations are one realm where the decrepit British empire retains some dubious skills. Presumably, the prevalence of anglophone mass media gives the Brits an innate advantage.

What London seems good at capitalizing on is animating the ready and willing inherent Russophobia of Poland and the Baltic states. The recent British military deployments have been concentrated in these Eastern European states, as well as in Ukraine. This move has served to pump up the hysteria of Russian aggression.

It is significant that last week Johnson was in Kiev meeting Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky on the same day as Polish premier Mateusz Morawiecki. Morawiecki has been among the most vehemently Russophobic Eastern European voices demanding more drastic sanctions against Moscow.

Johnson is reinforcing these calls for a unified NATO and European position on preemptive sanctions against Russia “if it invades Ukraine”. Johnson said the sanctions should be “ready to go” and should include the termination of the Nord Stream 2 gas supply pipeline between Russia and the European Union.

Notably, Germany and France – the two largest economies of the European Union – are reluctant to talk about terminating Nord Stream 2 in the event of escalating tensions. Berlin and Paris are discernibly more disposed to find a diplomatic way out of the impasse between the US-led NATO bloc and Russia.

Here’s a bitter irony: Britain quit the European Union after its Brexit referendum in 2016. Boris Johnson was a leading public figure pushing for Brexit with the mantra of “taking back control” from the European Union.

Yet while Britain is now formally out of the European bloc, it is still able to exert tremendous sway over the EU in its relations with Russia. London is mobilizing an axis of hostility towards Moscow by militarizing the Russophobic Eastern European states, as well as Ukraine, and by pushing sanctions to destroy strategic energy trade with Russia.

Indeed, arguably Britain is deliberately inflating its international importance by stoking dangerous tensions with Russia.

The crisis over Ukraine has been artificially pumped up by Washington aided and abetted by London. Dictating Europe’s energy and foreign affairs with regard to Russia, and also China, is the tacit objective for Washington and its trusty British minion. And in pulling that objective off, Britain has cynically exploited Eastern European Russophobia to land itself an outsized role in interfering with the European Union’s affairs, a bloc which it officially left after Brexit.

Russia’s security concerns should be rationally and calmly negotiated through diplomatic means. Moscow’s objections about Ukraine joining NATO are entirely reasonable.

But there is little chance of diplomacy prevailing when the likes of Boris Johnson and other Cold Warriors in London are fueling war tensions with provocative supplies of weapons to Eastern Europe amid fantastic distortions about “Russian aggression”.

A further bitter irony is Britain’s nefarious historical role in inciting wars in Europe. Contrary to the conventional propaganda version of the Second World War, it was London that covertly mobilized Nazi Germany to attack the Soviet Union, thereby sacrificing its nominal “ally” Poland and others in the process. Today, London proclaims it is defending Europe against “Russian aggression” while paving the path to war against Russia.

Political leaders from around the world are experiencing the lowest approval ratings in recorded history. Emmanuel Macron in France, Boris Johnson in the UK, Justin Trudeau in Canada, and it seems the entirety of the Australian political class are all widely despised by the electorates in their countries. It is also the case in most European countries as huge demonstrations protest the increasingly Draconian and transparent Covid restrictions. Few now doubt that the absurd, incompetent and unscientific response to this Scamdemic is about more than just the Flu. Vaccine mandates are the cause of an immense pushback against what is now seen as a poorly disguised move towards totalitarianism.

Obvious to all but the willfully uninformed is that the political class are advancing the interests of an entirely different constituency that that of the people they purport to represent.

The Pharmaceutical giants and the control they exercise over the political system and all its institutions have been exposed. Public trust in the institutions that govern have eroded to an extent that it may never recover. To be sure, this political class are not the real power, they don’t rule, but they do govern. They have been exposed as little more than frontmen for the real power structure. They are unprincipled and lie with impunity even when they know they are not believed. They continue to act against the wishes and best interests of the public even after their lies have been exposed. They no longer promise a better future, all that they have left to offer is fear. Covid, Russia, China, all evils that they vow to protect us from.

While the political class relentlessly bombards us with fear porn, they reassure us that we are on the side of the righteous. Western values they proclaim are what makes us better than the evil Russians and Chinese. Never explained or elaborated upon, these values are those of a Neo-liberal democracy, we are assured. This apparently should be enough to satisfy and increasingly unsatisfied populace that all is well with the system. However, these values are neither new, liberal or democratic, Neo-liberalism is Corporatocracy. The corporate charter defines only one objective, maximise shareholder value (profit) to the exclusion of any other considerations. No concern for consequences or the human cost are to be figured in the profit calculus. If corporations are as they are legally recognised, “people too”, they then are sociopaths. To speak of corporate values is a contradiction in terms, there are none.

Sociopaths represent about 2-3% of the male population, less in women, about 1 %. It is a spectrum, not all sociopaths are serial killers. Defined by an absence of empathy and consequence for their actions, a sociopath will do or say anything that furthers his ambitions. They lie with impunity even when they know they are not believed. If this sounds like a politician you know, it is probably because they are indeed a sociopath. Corporatocracy requires sociopaths to run their sham political systems. There is a name for it, Kakistocracy, define as rule by the worst, least qualified. Difficult to dispute is that it is exactly what now governs the Western world.

Sociopaths are wildly overrepresented in certain professions. Senior executives at multi-national companies, especially CEOs, Law enforcement, the Medical profession and Politics. Another characteristic among sociopaths is their ability to be able to identify each other. This is a useful tool for those that select and groom these aspiring, flawed human beings for influential roles. Klaus Schwab, the sinister head of the WEF at Davos has been running his school for sociopaths for several years. Innocently titled the “Young global leaders program” he has been turning out some of the worst, least capable political figures in recent memory. Macron (France) Kurtz (Austria) Tony Blair (UK) Angela Merkle (Germany) and Jacinda Ahern (NZ) are all graduates. The European Union is overrun with them, including president Jean-Claude Juncker. America also has many of Schwab’s prodigies exercising power and influence. Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Chelsea Clinton and California Governor Gavin Newsome. To name but a few, none of whom could even be charitably described as decent human beings.

The unity which Governments around the world have followed the absurd Covid response has illuminated the power that this sociopathic managerial class wields. Even as the Covid lie and its attendant evils falls apart they continue to “double down” and strip people of their freedoms and grant themselves new powers they were never entitled to. We can be assured that while these particular Sociopaths continue to lose any credibility they had, a pipeline of fresh graduates await their turn to follow their master’s voice. If history teaches us anything, it is that those who want power, and the last people who should ever be trusted with it.

The public bear some responsibility too, the French should know better than to elect a Rothschild banker like Macron. And the British – an Oxford graduate and serial liar such as Boris Johnson. In defence, it should be pointed out that electing leaders from within the existing political establishment will only produce more of the same. The faux left, right paradigm is just political theater, a distraction, the same power structure controls all sides of the political divide. Choice without options is no choice at all.

We may look back on the Covid era has a turning point in history. We are at the point where the masses are seeing through the lies of the ruling class and their political lackies. Progress can only be achieved when the people reject the options presented by the ruling class and chose leaders from outside the control of the parasitic corporate elite. Covid has exposed many villains, but it has also produced genuine heroes who have courageously stood on the truth. Robert Kennedy Jr. for example. It is essential that decent, brave and principled people are pressed into political service. If people continue to settle for the lesser of two evils, no change can be expected and the west will continue to be governed by the worst, least capable among us. 

When politics fails, try geopolitics. To British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who is drowning in scandals at home, that means shifting the focus from London to Kiev.

Ukraine doesn’t know how thankful Johnson is to the country for providing a welcome distraction. And he couldn’t let the opportunity pass. Over the weekend, and late at night at that, he got his Foreign and Commonwealth Office to do an uncommon thing: announce to the world a Russian plot to place a pro-Moscow leader in Ukraine. More like an Anglo-Saxon plot.

Washington didn’t wait a second to back up the British insight into Kremlin thinking, having itself “sighted” another plot on Jan 14. We have been here before. When former British prime minister Tony Blair and former American president George W. Bush found the politics in London and Washington too hot to handle, they had geopolitics in mind, too.

But geopolitics, then and now, has to have a plot. So Bush and Blair thickened it with a lie: Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction. Is Johnson and Joe Biden doing the same? Watch this space.

Bush and Blair have not been made to pay for their sins, yet Britain and the United States are onto another plot. Is there any truth to the British “insight”? Well, this is a nation that made the world “see” what wasn’t there in Iraq. The Bush-Blair public relations exercise to convert a lie into “truth” is now legendary. Another is now in the making.

Once a nation lies so publicly that much credibility must be discounted. Old habits of telling lies die hard. Blair or Johnson makes no difference. Besides, there is nothing to “see” this time. It is the Kremlin mind that is being talked about now. Let’s be blunt. The Kremlin mind is no British or American mind. It is far too complex. Let’s be blunt again.

We are talking of the mind of President Vladimir Putin. Neither a British nor an American mind can read him. It is elementary, Mr Johnson. A planned misreading is more like it.

Sure, Russia has amassed more than 100,000 troops along the border with Ukraine. This could mean one of two things: threat of invasion or a protection of Russia’s borders. What does London and Washington expect Russia to do when the US and the UK keep arming Ukraine? Not to mention the West issuing unending threats. Wait for it to attack Russia?

Supplying weapons isn’t going to solve Ukraine’s problem, just as it won’t solve problems elsewhere. Getting rid of symptoms never undid geopolitical problems. Solving root causes do. And the root cause everywhere is the meddlesome West.

Regime change or forcing Western values down the throat of others is the problem, not the solution. End the meddling in the affairs of others and the muddle will undo itself.

Kay-Achim Schönbach, the German navy chief until Saturday, may have been closer to the truth, when he suggested that the Ukraine problem would undo itself if Putin is treated as an equal by the West.

“It is easy to give him the respect he really demands — and also probably deserves,” he was quoted by the BBC as saying in a talk delivered in India on Friday. What a strange world we live in. You tell lies, you get to keep your job. You tell the truth, you lose it.

nst.com.my

By Seth THÉVOZ

The old dictum is truer than ever that stoking conflict in some distant land is an effective distraction from domestic political woes. But in the case of British prime-minister Boris Johnson, the ruse descends into farce.

Johnson is counting the days until his Conservative party finally gets rid of this train-wreck of a leader. Lies, incompetence and scandals ooze from Downing Street under his watch. Even Britain’s Tory press has given up on its loyalty to Johnson who is now seen as an irredeemable election liability for Conservatives.

That’s why Johnson’s “warning” to Russia this week of “severe consequences” if it invades Ukraine sounds downright comical. His attempt at showing political spine abroad is belied by the image of his reputation at home resembling a wobbly jelly.

Johnson claimed with a straight face that the British intelligence was “clear” that Russia is planning to invade Ukraine and install a puppet regime in Kiev. He went on to say that Britain was “leading” the way among NATO allies for inflicting dire economic costs on Russia. This is in spite of the ropey British story being rubbished as not having a shred of credibility.

By way of lending credibility to the latest claims, Britain’s Foreign Office has begun evacuating diplomatic staff from its embassy in Kiev. This can be seen as the British deliberately trying to escalate the tensions between NATO and Russia over Ukraine by fomenting an atmosphere of imminent conflict. Evacuating embassy staff tends to lend credibility to otherwise baseless allegations that Russia is planning to invade Ukraine.

The Americans and Australians then followed the British lead. It seems significant that Britain’s foreign and defense ministers were visiting Australia at the time of the embassy order.

For Boris Johnson to affect a portentous air of Churchillian statesman is more parody than politics. We are expected to believe that Johnson is leading the “free world” in standing up to alleged Russian aggression towards Europe.

This is while the crumpled-suited Boris is facing the sack for overseeing a never-ending nightmare of scandals on Downing Street.

Johnson’s predilections for boozy parties in No 10 during the Covid pandemic lockdowns have caught up with him like a big cream pie in the face.

This week it emerged that he had a birthday party in the prime minister’s residence last year when many Britons were grieving the death of loved ones to whom they couldn’t even say their final goodbyes because of lockdown restrictions. The public outrage over Johnson’s feckless behavior has reached a boiling point. Once upon a time, Bumbling Boris was seen as an amiable character and a vote-winner. Now his public image of a lying buffoon is viewed more clearly with disgust and contempt.

On top of that, Britons are faced with spiraling living costs and fuel bills just when the Conservative government is planning to introduce tax hikes that will hit working people the hardest.

Johnson’s political future is hanging in the balance. The usually Conservative-supporting British media outlets have turned decisively against him. The Daily Telegraph (also dubbed the “Torygraph”) predicts that Johnson will be unseated as party leader and thus prime minister “within days”.

It’s against this backdrop of dirty and desperate domestic politics that Johnson and his loyalists are grasping at the “Ukraine crisis”.

Downing Street has given the go-ahead for RAF cargo planes to deliver tonnes of lethal military aid to Ukraine.

The British have put “assault brigades” on standby to fly to Ukraine in order to help evacuate remaining diplomats in the event of a Russian invasion.

There is, however, a weird reality disconnect in the British media. They are generally reporting on the Ukraine situation with suitable credulity. Russia is portrayed as a malign actor and Britain as a noble defender of Ukraine’s sovereignty. The accusations against Moscow are reported on at face value without any skepticism.

There is hardly any questioning despite repeated, vehement denials by Russia of harboring any threat towards Ukraine. Moscow’s plausible claims of NATO-backed militarization in Ukraine and the threat to peace are barely reported on, never mind given proper analysis in the British media. Boris Johnson’s posturing as Churchill is strangely given credence by the media when it comes to him pontificating about Ukraine.

Yet the anomaly in this image-projection is that the same media have lost their tolerance for Johnson’s domestic antics. They have called him out as a charlatan and an incompetent clown who has zero moral authority.

How amusing then that this same clown on Downing Street is somehow taken seriously by the British media when it comes to him posing as an international statesman “standing up to Russian aggression”.

Down through history, there are many examples of where domestic political problems provide the impetus for military adventures overseas as a way to avoid accountability at home. This cynical maneuver is by no means unique to Britain. But in the present case, Boris Johnson attempting to start a war with Russia partly over an illicit birthday party is a descent into deplorable and gutless slapstick.

When Donald Trump won the US presidential election while lying about almost everything, Boris Johnson expressed deep interest in his success. “He was fascinated by it,” an official in constant contact with Johnson at the time told me. “He kept asking how on earth Trump had got away with it.”

Johnson required no tuition in mendacity since he had practiced it continually throughout his career, but he was nevertheless impressed by Trump’s expertise in selling falsehoods.

Johnson’s own record of duplicity in word and deed is, in my view, unrivalled in British politics: “He has mastered the use of error, omission, exaggeration, diminution, equivocation and flat denial,” wrote Rory Stewart, who was a minister at the Foreign Office when Johnson was foreign secretary, last year. “He has perfected casuistry, circumlocution, false equivalence and false analogy. He is equally adept at the ironic jest, the fib and the grand lie; the weasel word and the half-truth; the hyperbolic lie, the obvious lie, and the bullshit lie – which may inadvertently be true.”

Time after time, in recent weeks, we have seen the threats and rhetoric ramped up by “weasel” French President against Boris Johnson and his government. Whether it is the rights of British fisherman to be in their own waters or more recently the migrant crisis which captured the headlines when 27 asylum seekers attempting to cross the Channel perished when their boat was unable to sustain what is believed to be a wake left by an oil tanker.

But how much longer can Boris Johnson stay at the helm when faced with the outright threatening manner of Macron? The French president doesn’t seem to stop with the machine gun narrative which is always aimed at harming the British economy, its post-Brexit freedoms and its inevitable future as a vibrant independent economy. The latest insult by Macron calling Johnson a “clown” surely went over a line. Isn’t it time that Boris put on the gloves and faced this cowardly French president head to head? In the words of John Major, surely now is the time for Boris to deliver the ultimatum to France and its two-faced President to “put up or shut up”

Two-faced because, in reality, Macron is no friend of the British, but sees them as an adversary both to France and his own Presidency. A thriving UK is a threat to the status quo of Macron and France’s role within the EU itself. But Macron can’t help himself with the threats, games and skulduggery which comes with a hefty price for the British.

We should not be taken in by the theatre of what is being put on for our benefit to fool us into thinking that Macron really cares about the Calais Jungle and the record numbers of migrants now arriving on our shores. The recent calls by him that he needs more cooperation from Boris Johnson’s government is folly. In reality, he simply wants more money. Blackmail is always a game which never ends. It only has a beginning and the victim never stops paying. And this is precisely what Macron wants from the UK.

If Macron genuinely wanted to help resolve the crisis he could easily propose new, tougher laws aimed at the smugglers themselves, break up the camps completely and properly use France’s navy to stop them boarding boats in the first place. He could also initiate a new policy whereby French police would no longer watch migrants get into their boats, while they merely watch and gloat and even take photos on their phone. And perhaps more importantly, he would allow British police officers to act as watchers, to work hand in hand with the French, to stop the smugglers. How is it that the UK accepts armed French police in their London Terminal of the Eurostar – to help the French intercept criminals before they even leave the UK – but are not allowed to have their own police simply work as spotters on French soil?

Macron’s concerns are entirely disingenuous and it’s high time that Boris manned up and accepted the French president’s stunts for that they are: fake and politically motivated aimed at creating a political hullabaloo to bring down a Brexit government and to make an “example” of the UK for the rest of the EU.

But Macron is not the only one who is faking it.

It’s a similar story with the EU’s announcement that it will send a plane to monitor the boats crossing from France to the UK. Don’t believe a word of it. The plane will no doubt seem to do its job but it’s all part of a ruse which in reality punishes the UK for Brexit. If the EU was serious about helping with the migrant crisis, it would create a multimedia PR campaign and pay for advertising space on TV, radio and mainstream media in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and other countries like Somalia showing the darker side of the route to the UK – and use the tragic deaths of those who recently perished. Most people in the UK never even knew that most of what they saw on their TVs when Britain was in the EU, from mainstream media was financially subsidised by the EU itself to the tune of hundreds of millions of euros each year. If the EU has that kind of cash for fake news, why can’t it use some of it to inform people on the edge of Europe that the path to the UK is fraught with danger? Given that the migrant crisis is a direct result of the EU’s own failed immigration/asylum policies, one would have thought this would be a natural path for Brussels to follow.

But Brussels doesn’t do ‘Mea Culpa’.

Boris needs to stop allowing Macron to continue with these games and show him that Britain can get tough on the migrants and the French. He needs to work much more closely with the Royal Navy and give it the greenlight to tow the boats back to France and do the job of the French navy. If the legal boffins argue that the British are not allowed to “dump” refugees in French waters, surely the counter argument is that this is precisely what the French are doing.

Boris should also play hardball on defence and security cooperation and threaten France that it will remove British troops from Mali where they are risking their lives specifically so that French nationals can work there and French companies can make money, under the hilarious auspices of a UN peacekeeping mandate of fighting terrorism. Macron wants a bigger defence and security cooperation deal with Boris as France’s defence budget is smaller than the UK’s but if Boris can’t get any cooperation on immigrants in the Channel whose numbers alone are posing a threat to the UK’s own stability, why should Boris keep British soldiers in Mali? The last time in history the French navy posed a threat to Britain by doing nothing was in the early months of WWII where Churchill could see that with the Germans advancing rapidly towards Paris, they would inevitably take full control of the French navy and use it to attack the British. The French refused then to cede to Churchill’s demands that the ships were destroyed, rather than fall into the enemy’s hands. In the event, it was the British who destroyed them. Will Boris have to reinvent this historical moment and similarly take bold decisions which once again affect France’s battleships which are unable to stop literally thousands of immigrants from crossing the channel?

The con-job that is Boris Johnson looks to have run its course as the British Conservative party draws the knives to get rid of this bungling prime minister.

The griping and backstabbing from Tory parliamentarians is shredding Johnson’s leadership authority. Even normally supportive British media have become openly derisive about his increasingly shambolic performance.

For several weeks now, Johnson has been making one gaffe after another with more frequency than his usual casualty rate. He is embroiled in a seemingly endless scandal over his Tory party being up to its eyes in corruption and sleaze with the leader of the party himself – Johnson – also implicated and turning a blind eye. Several lawmakers in the Conservative party have been earning more salaries double-jobbing as lobbyists for private firms than they do as parliamentarians.

Other more conscientious Tory MPs are rebelling against a government that is seen as aloof and callous amid economic misery and Covid pandemic mishandling. Johnson’s messy hairstyle looks less like that of a rakish wag and more like that of a tired old scarecrow who doesn’t impress any more.

He’s even admitted recently to giving “car crash interviews” to media and a Downing Street spokesman was obliged to assure reporters this week that the “prime minister is well” which only fuels further speculation that Johnson is undergoing a personal psychological implosion.

The latest sign of mortal political trouble was Johnson’s cringe-making speech in front of British business leaders. He was seen by the embarrassed audience verbally stumbling all over the place during his address, making incoherent noises and – for a squirming 20 seconds – not being able to remember what the point of his rant was. He fumbled through his notes, cursing under his breath.

Then the nadir in nonsense came with Johnson’s eulogy for a cartoon character, Peppa the Pig, which he cited as supposedly epitomizing the dynamism of British business. Can you imagine Russia’s President Putin referring to Masha and the Bear in one of his set-piece speeches and how Western media would scoff at that?

Such cartoon-referencing is, however, this British prime minister’s stock-in-trade flippancy on otherwise sober occasions where his rhetoric sounds downright corny. But the latest star-turn in unintentional comedy by Johnson – precisely at a time when Britain is looking for statesman-like leadership amid turmoil – betrays someone who is completely out of his depth in understanding issues or of having any self-awareness. In British slang, he is seen as a stupid git with a posh accent.

Back in September, when Johnson stood at the podium of the United Nations General Assembly, he delivered a supposedly earnest appeal for global action to mitigate adverse climate change. Delegates were astounded to hear the British leader invoke Kermit the Frog from the American cartoon series The Muppets in a speech imploring the need to “go green”.

Then during the massively hyped COP26 climate summit at the beginning of this month, hosted by the United Kingdom, Johnson tried to convey the urgency of international action by comparing the task for humanity to “James Bond defusing a doomsday bomb”.

After a while, this vaudeville act by Johnson goes beyond mildly funny to tedious, and then subsequently becoming – as it is now – alarmingly imbecilic. As one senior Tory politician told Conservative-supporting The Times this week: “This is amateur hour at the London Palladium.”

The 57-year-old British premier was formerly a columnist for The Telegraph and Spectator, both rightwing Tory-supporting publications. Former colleagues relate how Johnson was an inveterate laggard who always missed his weekly work deadlines. He would make up for his incompetence by spinning colorful columns at the last minute that sailed close to the wind of outright lying. As a Brussels-based correspondent, Johnson fueled anti-European Union politics in Britain – which culminated in Brexit – by peddling outrageous claims of the EU overrunning British sovereignty and independence. The irony is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson – his full name – is a scion of European aristocracy who played the British populist card for his own political aggrandizement.

He became the British Foreign Secretary in the government of David Cameron. It was Johnson who took the lead in propagating the Skripal-Novichok affair in 2018 as an alleged assassination attempt ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Moscow has repeatedly dismissed the claims as preposterous. Johnson then went on to ludicrously compare the 2018 Football World Cup in Russia to the 1936 Olympic Games in Nazi Germany.

Capitalizing on this elite upbringing and education at Eton College and Oxford University, Johnson has a knack for covering up his dubious intelligence by reciting quotes in Latin and references to ancient Roman or Greek philosophers. But the pseudo-eruditeness is all part of the con-job that is Boris Johnson.

This is a prime minister who equates world affairs with cartoon characters because he is virtually one himself. Johnson seems to think it’s jolly good fun to order British warships into Russian and Chinese territorial waters as a supposed display of modern “Global Britain”. He has no awareness of the grave dangers from such puerile saber-rattling. Yet at the same time, this buffoon in 10 Downing Street seems to arrogantly assume that his reckless provocations can be easily set aside as piffling matters when needs be. In spite of Britain’s offensive military conduct he presumes he can cut big trade deals with China and Russia.

The problem for Johnson is that his foibles and fables were something he could capitalize on when he was a rising star as a journalist and during the Brexit campaign five years ago. But now as prime minister and leader of the Tory party, his irredeemable clownish antics are being seen as an election loser. He may have won the last general election in 2019, but since then his grandiose promises have been shown to be a charade.

Britain’s Conservative party is notoriously ruthless when it comes to pushing lame leaders out the window. Margaret Thatcher – the Iron Lady – who won three elections as Tory leader (1979-1990) was swiftly dumped by her party when she came to be seen as a hate-figure by most British voters.

Boris Johnson is heading for the same brutal exit.

Europe should give up supplies of natural gas from Russia and instead defend Ukraine and Poland. That’s the plucky advice of Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson who counts wartime leader Winston Churchill as one of his political heroes.

Addressing a City of London banquet this week, Johnson warned Germany, France, Italy and other European governments: “We hope that our friends [in Europe] may recognize that a choice is shortly coming between mainlining ever more Russian hydrocarbons in giant new pipelines and sticking up for Ukraine and championing the cause of peace and stability.”

Note the pejorative use of the word “mainlining” which implies Europe’s trade with Russia for gas is a sordid addiction, rather than a mutual commercial partnership.

Johnson also pointed to British troops being deployed to Poland helping that country construct barbed-wire barriers for halting the flow of refugees from Belarus as an example of “defending Europe”.

In the facile, elitist world of Boris, whose slapstick hairstyle is a reflection of disarray in the grey matter beneath, he has an “easy” solution for Europe’s energy supply shortages and soaring prices. That is, cut off potentially abundant, affordable exports of natural gas from Russia – which will plunge European households into freezing conditions and ramp up consumer inflation.

But don’t worry about that grim hardship. Boris’ noble defense of Poland and Ukraine against alleged Russian hybrid warfare and aggression will likely start a hot war that in turn will spiral into a thermonuclear conflagration engulfing the continent of Europe. That’s one way of “solving” freezing conditions, we may suppose.

Johnson’s advice to Europe is like listening to a clown smoking a reefer near a gasoline spigot.

His rosy British war history paints Poland and Ukraine as victims of aggression. The current scenario is contrived to evoke memories of Britain declaring war on Nazi Germany after the Third Reich invaded Poland in September 1939. Never mind that Britain and Poland’s fawning over the Fuhrer in the run-up to the Second World War was a major precipitating factor in eventually igniting that war.

Johnson’s cartoon-history speech at the City of London banquet implies that Russia is the contemporary incarnation of Nazi aggression. Those horrible Ruskies are supplying Europe with up to half of its natural gas fuel which is keeping European homes warm. How utterly fiendish of the Ruskies! So, in Boris’ logic, we must cut off this nefarious gas “weapon” used by the Russians to stop Europe from freezing.

While we’re on the subject of freezing, it is the Polish military with the help of British troops who are drenching hapless refugees in the middle of winter with water cannons to prevent them from entering the European Union from neighboring Belarus. The predominantly Middle Eastern refugees are in Belarus largely as a result of criminal wars waged by the United States, Britain, Poland and other NATO members over the past two decades.

Britain and its NATO partners have weaponized Poland and the Baltic states to antagonize Belarus, as well as Russia. While the Polish military erects razor-wire fences against freezing, huddled women and children, it is barbarous acts like this that evoke the heinous memory of fascism and aggression in Europe. Poland, the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and Ukraine are steeped in complicity with past Nazi crimes, despite their obdurate denials. The cruelty being meted out to refugees today is shockingly consistent, although dimwits like Britain’s Johnson arrogantly pronounce on history with an upside-down distortion.

It’s not just Johnson though. European Union leaders are decrying Russia for “masterminding hybrid warfare” with Poland, the Baltics and Ukraine. When it is the EU that is funding the rolling out of barbed wire concertinas and militarization of borders across Europe. This effete cowardice and duplicity of Europe’s political class have echoes of the past too in the face of fascism.

France’s President Emmanuel Macron this week reportedly warned Russian leader Vladimir Putin that NATO will defend Ukraine if the latter is invaded by Russia. Such hypothetical hyping is insulting.

Russia has no intention of invading Ukraine or any other European country. Where’s the evidence? Where’s the reasoning? This shrill scenario is entirely dreamt up by NATO propaganda and Russophobia.

The Ukraine has been a NATO spearhead for aggression towards Russia ever since the U.S.-led military bloc backed a coup d’état in Kiev in 2014. The Kiev Neo-Nazi regime is waging a low-intensity war against the ethnic Russian population of Southeast Ukraine. NATO is arming the regime to the teeth, the latest weaponry including attack drones from Turkey.

The U.S. and other NATO members are also increasingly conducting war drills in the Black Sea on Russia’s border. The tensions with Russia are compounded by the militarization of the refugee crisis between Belarus and Poland and the Baltic states.

If an analogy is to be made between the Second World War and the present it is that Russia is once again being subjected to aggression. Instead of the Nazi Wehrmacht over-running Poland, the Baltics and Ukraine it is the U.S.-led NATO axis.

Clowns like Britain’s Boris Johnson and France’s Emmanuel Macron are fanning aggression and the danger of war with fatuous speeches about “defending” Europe.

As the saying attributed to Karl Marx goes: history repeats itself first as tragedy then as farce. Another axiom cited by Boris’s hero Winston Churchill is: those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Lamentably, we are living in such a time.