Thanks to the greed, crassness and stupidity of NATO’s satrapies we are where we deserve to be, on the eve of destruction.

Despite the unfortunate assassination some days earlier in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand Carl Ludwig Joseph Maria of Austria, July 1914 was quieter than a mouse on cotton, as no one had yet realized the horrors that lay ahead. General Radomir Putnik, chief of the general staff of the Serbian army, was taking the waters at Bad Gleichenberg, where the Austro-Hungarians promptly arrested him. Helmut von Moltke, Germany’s chief of staff, was also holidaying, as was Erich von Falkenhayn, the Kaiser’s War minister. Though there was some war talk chatter in gallant little Belgium, her farmers were more preoccupied with their harvests and her townsfolk were much too busy working and downing beers to fret about such matters even though, on 29th July, Belgian Prime Minister Charles de Broqueville had ordered a partial mobilization of her army, only a few short days before Belgium would join the world war that had begun a day earlier, when Austria declared war on Serbia and shelled Belgrade before the Serbs even had time to consider their outrageous demands.

Would that we could return to that belle époque, the Old Continent’s lost era of cosmopolitan intellectuals and artists that died, like so much more, in the blood, grime and hell on earth of the following four years. But, perhaps, all that had to die, like what remains of it has to now die as a result of NATO’s no less outrageous demands on Russia and on those who speak Russian.

Here, in far away neutral Ireland, the war drums are far from mute. When I told a very well-known celebrity how to access RT, he was afraid he might get arrested for tuning in to it. Scoff though you may at his seeming cowardice or, if you prefer, his caution, but we live in an era where Masha and Mishka are legitimate targets and the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are torched in Kiev.

Now it is those delightful Russian children’s tales and those greatest of the greats of world literature. Then it was German shepherds having to be called Alsations, dachshunds being assaulted, Jewish butchers who looked German being torched and the Crown Catholics of Cork blackballing Kuno Meyer, the great Celtic scholar, because he was German.

The Crown Catholics of Cork, those loathsome princelings who made their fortunes kitting out the British Navy, have not gone away. Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney, one of their loathsome number, currently has a seat on the UNSC, which he uses to insult not only Russia but the referendums a number of Ukrainian provinces are holding to determine if they want to be a part of Russia or of Zelensky’s rump Reich.

Whereas Coveney, like the loathsome Crown Catholic that he is, considers this an abuse of democracy, I consider it, with regard to prior Irish precedents Coveney’s crew helped engineer, as the very epitome of Swiss-style democracy and, indeed, civility. Check out these maps to see how the British, with their Black and Tan terror gang, handed over the majority (non Crown) Catholic populations of Fermanagh, Tyrone, West Belfast, North Antrim, South Armagh and South Down to a gang of Famine Queen-worshipping Anglican fanatics who, when not popping Catholics, also cleansed the area of liberal or left leaning Protestants and the odd, uppity Jew.

Just as with the Ulster Catholics Cork’s loathsome Princes handed over to the Black and Tans, so also are the Russian speakers of Eastern and Southern Ukraine not children of some lesser God. They too have a right to live in peace and with dignity and, as NATO have deliberately reneged on Minsk 1 and Minsk 2, they are right to confederate with Russia so that they may enjoy the peace NATO denies them. No turkeys voting for Christmas with that lot.

Although I wouldn‘t publicly disagree with him in Kiev or Cork for fear of being strapped to a lamppost with my underpants strewn down around my shins, Nazi Reichsmarshall and Luftwaffe-Chief Hermann Goering was wrong to say the people do not want war. Large swathes of people crave war today, just as Coveney’s Cork Crown Catholics prayed for it and recruited for it in August 1914. There is, as any of the Coveney, Biden, Clinton, Zelensky or Obama families can attest, big money to be made from war. And, as countless American war criminals could likewise attest, there is adventure to be had, foreigners to be murdered, lives and communities to be destroyed and men, women, boy and little girls to be raped.

And then there is Hollywood, which made more money out of Vietnam than what it cost the Americans to wage that particular genocide. Just as Black Hawk Down made a hero out of child sex abuser John Stebbins and American Sniper made a hero out of serial killer Chris Kyle, so also does the war in Ukraine and the apocalypse it is dragging us all into afford Hollywood an opportunity to portray American mercenaries not as the villains they are but, as Truss and Biden (Joe) tell us, the harbingers of freedom, democracy and Micky Mouse apple pie Hollywood portrays them as.

CIA asset Matthew van Dyke would make an excellent Hollywood hero, as he has been a cold blooded mercenary for hire in Syria, Libya and Iraq, just as he is now a mercenary and, one better, an American in Ukraine. American transexual Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, who pumps out Ukrainian propaganda from somewhere within Zelensky’s rump state, could supply the love interest, not least because factual news is not America’s thing and no Americans are too interested in getting it, in any event.

But soon, it might all be moot. Israel is helping the Azeris annihilate the Armenians, whose only hope is Mother Russia, China is seeing that it cannot sit this conflagration out in hopes of windfall gains, Turkey and Saudi Arabia are the unlikeliest of peace intermediaries and, as Africans and Latinos have already seen that they are last in line when NATO dispenses fertilizer and other necessities, they best don their walking shoes and migrate in their hundreds of millions States-side or, at least to where there is food and some prospect of survival.

Those balmy, calm before the storm days of July 1914 have returned but with infinitely more menace than the scariest Hollywood horror movie could conjure. Ukraine will see Russian and allied hi tech pitted weaponry against NATO and allied hi tech weaponry and armies of women and children flee with not even the hope of better days to come to bring them solace. Though nobody admits to wanting any of this mayhem and I, who have seen it all before, certainly don’t, this is our end road all of those who voted for Trump, Biden, BoJo, Blair or Truss have thrust upon us all.

And when the war is over and if Westminster’s Parliament is still standing, Labour MPs will stand up and complain, as they did in 1919, about the Tories who made fortunes from this carnage and simpletons will cock ear to them, as they did in 1919.

But the reality is that those who voted for Trump and Biden, Blair, BoJo and Bush, Obama and Truss, Coveney and Zelensky, Hitler and Macron are as guilty as those German school teachers who encouraged Erich Maria Remarque and his chums to march off to their doom at Verdun, Passchendaele and the Somme to satiate the egos of the Kaisers, Kings and Tzars, who reigned atop that entire mess, just as our own plastic Kaisers, Kings and Tzars lord down at the slaughter they have visited upon us all from their mountains of money in Washington, Kiev and London.

If, as Cher sings, I could turn back time, it would make absolutely no difference. Russia and China gave NATO the benefit of the doubt in Iraq and millions were murdered, just as in Serbia. Ditto in Syria and the same again in Yemen and Libya, where NATO again committed all of the same war crimes NATO does best. This time, there is no turning back time, no more second Troys, no more second chances and that is Luke 16: 27-31 speaking, not me, not Putin, not Xi and not anyone else.

Luke is not the only one to tell us that NATO’s leaders pay no heed to the advice of the living or of the dead. Navy Admiral Charles Richard, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, has told us we are back in Dr Strangelove country, that “direct armed conflict with a nuclear-capable peer” such as Russia and/or China and with all it entails is now a real possibility. Former POTUS Donald Trump has declared that the Ukrainian conflict “should have never happened” not least because it might “end up being World War III.” And even the devious realist Henry Kissinger has repeatedly urged caution but all to no avail.

Today is Tuesday, 28th July, 1914. The hay is saved, our beer tankards are as half full and theirs are half empty, the World Cup looms and, thanks to the greed, crassness and stupidity of NATO’s satrapies we are where we deserve to be, on the eve of destruction. Though this mess could conceivably end in the return of the halcyon days of 27th July 1914, if nuclear annihilation is to be avoided, NATO must not only be made blink but must be totally and utterly decommissioned and disbanded. Don’t hold your breath.