TRIGGERNOMETRY INTERVIEWS PETER HITCHENS: “We Live in the Age of Delusions.”

At the conclusion of the clip, Hitchens tells his interviewers:

Intelligence chiefs keep coming out and saying we have to prepare for war. Russia is a great threat.

Well, you can believe that if you want, though I find it a struggle.

I always remember going to Moscow—I think it was in 2008. It was the first big parade of the new Russian Army. They had decided they were going to restart the Red Square parades. I’d watched the last one back in November 1990.

My office said, “Why don’t you go out and watch it?” So I watched it with my old friend Igor, whose father had been a Soviet nuclear submarine commander who really knew his military stuff. We stood on the balcony of th hotel, watching it from as close as we could get.

I enjoyed the parade as much as the rest. But at the end of it, Igor turned to me and said, “What did you think of our great display of strategic scrap metal?” [laughter]

And he was quite right! The big new weapons—they probably only had two or three. Most of the stuff they were able able to put on display was probably old, much of it dating back to the Soviet era.

We knew—and we still know—that the Russian military is fantastically corrupt and incompetent, and the training of its soldiers is a disgrace. It’s a terrible army. After four years, they still haven’t managed to take Kharkiv, 20 miles from the border.

So to turn this into a great bogeyman which is supposedly about to arrive at Dunkirk with its tanks pointed at the British coast just doesn’t seem to me to be realistic.

But the intelligence people, retired generals, ex-defense ministers, and NATO chiefs are constantly trying to prepare us for war. The last thing I noticed was some suggestion that we should all start hoarding food and medicines in case there was a war.

There is a real attempt to get the British people to become war-minded, and I think that can only end sadly.

Obsessing over the Russians “about to arrive at Dunkirk” is a great to ignore who is crossing the Channel: Iran smuggling agents into UK as Channel migrants.