Over-reaction to the Chinese 'spy' balloon is truly dangerous, because it shows how a trivial incident can propel two nuclear-armed superpowers measurably closer to a military confrontation 📧 Read Patrick Cockburn's latest newsletter
. Yet the fear of betrayal from within repeatedly destroyed careers, brought down governments and divided countries. The fabricated antisemitic accusation that a Jewish army officer, Alfred Dreyfus, was a German spy, split France in two at the end of the nineteenth century.
The visit of President Volodymyr Zelensky to Britain last week struck me as a sign, not of solidarity, but of how far the situation has deteriorated. The Russians today have half a million soldiers in or close to Ukraine according to Ukrainian intelligence, more than double the number that were there last year. Perhaps the Russian army will be routed or the government in Moscow collapse, but short of that, Churchill’s “terrible ifs” are accumulating.
Ninety years ago, FDR famously said in his first inaugural address that we had “nothing to fear, but fear itself.” This time around we have plenty to fear – and we are not fearful enough.William Shawcross’ review of the Government’s anti-radicalisation programme, Prevent, was published this week. This is dubious stuff: many of those who stormed the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 might describe themselves as “populist conservatives” and there are plenty of people with a similar ideological bent in the UK.
Prevent might detect the odd crackpot, but would not have stopped any of the mass terrorist attacks by Islamists in the UK and US over the last 25 years. These were generated primarily by wars and rebellions in the Middle East and North Africa, which created the conditions in which al-Qaeda and Islamic State, groups whose policy was to carry out “terrorist” operations in the West, were able to flourish and find recruits.
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