As the BFD’s Cam likes to say, we are #ledbydonkeys. The concatenation of failures, fuck-ups and jaw-dropping foolishness that has been our “leadership” over the last three years, who could doubt otherwise?
Remember, these are the global elite who believe themselves to be our meritocratic “Guardian” class, envisioned by Plato. When Jacinda Ardern witters that “We will continue to be your single source of truth”, she is telling you that you’re too stupid to make up your own mind. When Hillary Clinton sneered at “deplorables”, she was talking to her fellow elites: “See? We’re just better than them!”
But are they, really? Could any shmo unburdened by an Arts-Law degree and a Guardian subscription have stuffed up anywhere near as bad as our leaders and their teams of “experts”?
At every step of the way over the last two years, our leaders have been at pains to tell us how unprepared they are for these crises. The Covid pandemic was ‘unprecedented’ – we’ve heard it a thousand times. Now, the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine is ‘unthinkable’ – the word is repeated again and again in television news bulletins, on social media, and in print.
We’ve heard that word, “unprecedented”, used to describe every bushfire and flood, too. Even a cursory search of old records and newspapers shows that is simply not true. But that isn’t reckoning for the goldfish brains of the elites.
And yet, few things have more precedents throughout history than plagues and wars. Our unpreparedness is an indictment, which led to rushed decision-making, massive Covid policy failures, and a scramble to arm Ukraine when its vulnerability had been obvious for years.
Why so many members of our ruling elite were ‘surprised’ that a pandemic hit us is genuinely baffling. A global pandemic has been the eventuality atop every Western government’s risk matrix for at least the last fifteen years; widely recognised as a more significant threat than terrorism or Global Warming.
With greater connectedness through globalisation, it is just too obvious. Pandemics were always going to happen, as they have a thousand times throughout history, often with far more severity than Covid.
The same Boomers who waxed hysterical about Covid should also have remembered the Hong Kong Flu pandemic of the late 60s, which was everything they’ve tried to convince us Covid is. Yet, none of them do. They can remember Woodstock, but not the fact that it took place during a deadly pandemic.
Only a historical illiterate could ever say that plagues and pandemics are ‘unprecedented’ […]
Here in Victoria, Daniel Andrews has justified his cack-handed and authoritarian response to Covid by repeatedly saying there’s no ‘play-book’ for a pandemic. This is another Andrews lie.
In fact, we had play-books for a global pandemic. Play-books decades in the making, building on the accumulated experience of everything from AIDS to Swine Flu and Ebola. They were all chucked in the bin as soon as Covid hit, and politicians and bureaucrats rushed to do everything, from lockdowns to mask mandates, that the play-books had said not to.
As with pandemics, so it is with war. Why should we be surprised? […]
Since the 17th century, the Russian tsars were called the rulers of Great, Little, and White Russia (Little Russia referring to modern-day Ukraine). Ukraine, and its capital Kyiv, has always been vital to Russia’s quest for identity.
Even if leaders didn’t know this, the Russian annexation of Crimea and the war in the Donbas region have clearly telegraphed Russian intent in Ukraine for the best part of a decade. War there is tragic. Yet, unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last ten years, it is no surprise.
The “progressive” elite have been living in a cave: the Plato’s Cave of their own conceit and ideological tunnel-vision. Under the spell of globalism, the elite convinced themselves that we had reached “the end of history”. Both Ukraine and Russia had McDonalds: therefore, war between them was an impossibility: globalism said so!
The last two years have demonstrated the futility of Utopian thinking founded upon the arrogant notion that we are the first generation in all human history to be able to tame not just ourselves but also pathogens: those tiny war-mongers.
Spectator Australia
Sadly, history also demonstrates that faith in Utopian thinking springs eternal for the educated idiots of “progressivism”.
LedByDonkeys, indeed.