Mark Chadbourn's Blog: Jack of Ravens, page 16

Trump: What Now?

Sometimes you don’t need words.

The expression on the face of President-elect Donald Trump – an entertainer who was only ever interested in being watched and adored – says volumes.  This is a man who has just had his first presidential briefing.  He’s heard about the bio-terrorism weapons about to be unleashed, the dirty nuke that’s slowly being put together on American soil, the rapid growth in Chinese militarisation and troop shifts towards borders, the anarchist hackers who are primed to shut down all safety procedures at US nuclear plants, the latest research that suggests global warming is now accelerating so fast it may already be ‘game over’…

This is the candidate who not only didn’t expect to win, he didn’t really want to win.

And now he has millions of lives in his hands.  Look at that expression. Does it say, I’m up to this?  Or does it show an existential terror about what he’s got himself into?

And then there’s the matter of symbolism.

We’ve talked here before about how symbolism is more important than facts in communicating with people – it drills deep into the unconscious.  And the President of course is as much, if not more, of a symbol than he is a political leader, particularly to the wider world.

It doesn’t matter that more Americans voted for Hillary Clinton.  Symbolism annihilates statistics.

To the rest of the world, Donald Trump now *is* America.  His beliefs are America’s beliefs.  His way of behaving is the way other countries expect America to behave.  His language is America’s language.

America’s image across the world was at an all-time low under the Bush administration.  Under Barack Obama, by almost every metric, it is at an all-time high.  That has made it easier for Obama’s team to forge alliances, to encourage trade, to persuade countries across the globe to invest in the US and thereby increase the prosperity of Americans.

And now?  How is the world seeing Trump’s America?

No doubt many of the President-elect’s supporters believe it doesn’t matter what the rest of the world thinks. The concept of American Exceptionalism produces a worldview that is easily dismissive. But in an era of globalisation, where everything is connected, it matters more than ever before.

Trump And Putin And The UK Right: The World Turned On Its Head

“My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever.  We begin bombing in five minutes.”

US President Ronald Reagan’s radio sound check joke in 1984 perfectly caught the mood of America-Russia relations throughout most of the twentieth century.  For Conservatives particularly, the Soviet Union was the ‘Evil Empire’, the antithesis of everything the US stood for, a threat to peace and security, an opposer of western values, and an enemy bent on world domination for its ideology.

For many in the West, again particularly Conservatives, it was a comforting worldview: you knew who wore the white hats, who wore the black.

But if you’re looking for a comforting touchstone in the massive disruption of the twenty-first century, politics is not the place to go.

Donald Trump, the candidate of Reagan’s Republican Party, praised Vladimir Putin as a “leader far more than our president” and has offered other words of support for the Russian strongman.  Trump, too, seems thoroughly happy that the Old Enemy’s hackers have interfered in US democracy.  Two days ago, the online version of the journal of the Hard Right in the UK, the Daily Mail, published a Russian propaganda piece as news.  (For US readers, the Daily Mail is a mainstream newspaper which, like many hard right publications, claims to be the voice of the ‘silent majority’ – it supported Fascism during the time of Hitler’s rise and proudly sported the front page headline, ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’.)  And Nigel Farage, the right wing former leader of the UK Independence Party and one of the architects of Brexit, has also waxed lyrical in his praise for Putin.

Now Russia is not the Soviet Union in terms of geography, but much at its core remains the same.  The UK and US military and security services still see Putin’s government as the single greatest threat to world peace.

The current UK Chancellor of the Exchequer and former Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said: “The rapid pace with which Russia is seeking to modernise her military forces and weapons combined with the increasingly aggressive stance of the Russian military including Russian aircraft around the sovereign airspace of Nato states are all significant causes of concern.

“We are in familiar territory for anyone over the age of about 50, with Russia’s behaviour a stark reminder that it has the potential to pose the single greatest threat to our security. Hence, continuing to gather intelligence on Russia’s capabilities and intentions will remain a vital part of intelligence effort for the foreseeable future. It is no coincidence that all of our agencies are recruiting Russian speakers again.”

For many who remember the last century, a Republican Party candidate for President praising a Russian leader over his own commander-in-chief is incomprehensible.

And yet, this is the world we’re in now and the explanation lies in one of the regular themes of these posts: that the widespread disruption of all areas of the twenty-first century has wiped away the familiar Left-Right basis of party politics.

The real divide now is those who are ready to accept the future and those who want to cling on to the past, and that crosses party boundaries.  It explains a big part of Brexit, and Trump and the formerly left, right and independent supporters of both.

Republican pollster Frank Luntz carried out a series of focus groups in the UK before the last General Election where he tried to understand the rise of the UK Independence Party.  When its members were asked to mention something they really loved about Britain, there was a long, long silence until someone ventured: “The past.”

Those who want to cling on to the past, or turn the clock back, admire authoritarians like Putin because that kind of Fascistic control is the only thing that might possibly halt the tramp of progress.

There’s a must-read piece by Andrew Sullivan in New York magazine about how America is flirting with Fascism at this election and how many mainstream commentators are afraid to call it for what it is.

That’s a mistake.

The choice at this month’s US election is stark, but there are many people still treating it as if it’s politics as usual.  It really isn’t.  And the Past or the Future is the only outcome.

If You Need To Get In Touch With Me

…the contact form here is borked so try Twitter (@Chadbourn) until I can get this fixed.

The New Counterculture Tarot

Hexen 2.0 (c) Suzanne Treister

There’s a rising spirit of rebellion in the air – and the whiff of repression – that seems very much like the sixties.  The parallels were driven home when I visited the excellent  ‘You Say You Want a Revolution?’ exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum.  It examines how a range of cultural activities combined with political activism across the globe to try to bring about epochal change near fifty years ago, but also, tellingly, links those times to today.

One aspect examined the resurgence of occult thinking during that time – as much a metaphor for spiritual transformation and advancement as it was magical thinking.

A key part of this section was the tarot designed by conceptual artist Suzanne Treister, a redesign of the traditional tarot deck and one that echoes other historic re-imaginings, say Aleister Crowley’s Thoth tarot deck.  It’s a fantastic piece of work that fully understands the psychological dimension of the tarot and links it to a very contemporary drive for change.

At the top you can see The Moon card from my own deck – the card for intuition, dreams and the unconscious – which here summon up transhumanism, techno-gaianism, futurology and more aspects of radical change thinking.

Hexen 2.0 (c) Suzanne Treister

The Hexen 2.0 deck’s alchemical drawings pick up the interconnected histories of the computer and internet, cybernetics and counterculture, science fiction and futurism, ideas of the control society, as well as philosophical, literary and political responses to advancing technology.

Here you can see Stewart Brand as The Hanged Man, creator of the Whole Earth Catalogue in the sixties and an associate of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters in the tarot’s traditional archetype of the spiritual thinker who accepts sacrifice for the greater good.  Treister recognises Brand’s key role in today’s digital culture.

Other cards feature The Control Society as The Devil, Aldous Huxley as The Fool, the wisest card in the deck, Timothy Leary as The Magician, Ada Lovelace as the Queen of Chalices, Quantum Computing and A.I. as The Star, and many more fascinating pieces that are well worth reflection in the true tarot spirit.

I’ve found this deck is actually influencing a lot of my thinking about this new world that we’re all moving into, and particularly the kind of response it needs.  Hexen 2.0 is available online in the V & A shop.

Why I Stopped Watching The Walking Dead

(Some minor spoilers here for the season seven premiere of The Walking Dead – no names, but some context.)

Halloween is just around the corner and like the coming of the Jack o’Lanterns a new season of The Walking Dead has launched.

AMC’s zombie apocalypse show has been a ratings juggernaut and a huge money-spinner.  I’ve watched it from the start because I like intelligent horror that has something to say about the world around us.  When the trappings of society are stripped away, humans become the real monsters and the survivors the real walking dead, well, that seemed like an interesting discussion to have.

The season premiere that aired in the US on Sunday and in the UK on Monday will be my last.

Some criticism has been levelled at the degree of violence in that episode.  While the series has always been gory, it’s generally been a fantasy violence, punctuated by the regular splitting of zombie heads.  But this episode stepped into a new arena of nastiness with the kind of brutality you could, in your darkest moments, imagine being inflicted on a loved one.  And the creators didn’t flinch from showing it again, and again.

And yet it wasn’t the physical violence that actually killed the series for me, as gut-churning as it was.  There was another form of brutality here.

I’m not thin-skinned.  I’m not afraid of violence, or death; I know both well.  I used to be a journalist.  I’ve seen dead bodies, murder victims, corpses brought out of fires.  I’ve watched an autopsy.  I’ve seen the wounds a gunshot makes, and an axe.  I’ve been in the centre of a riot, two actually.  I’ve watched my mother die.  And I stood beside my father a moment after his life ended.  That well of grief is hard to plumb.

That’s the point here.

This is the true failing of The Walking Dead: they disregarded the basic humanity of their viewers.

I imagine the show’s creators thought they were creating something sublime in this story.  Instead of wallowing in brutality for its own sake like the worst of the horror genre, they were going to show the true cost of violence, the humanity.  But they ended up doing the opposite in a ham-fisted attempt to make their point.

The death of a beloved character tells you everything you need to know about this world: that it is without pity, that survival is all, that some humans are nasty and venal and violent when pushed to their limits, and that others, the majority, are good and caring, that brutality is everywhere and that actions have consequences.

The death of a second beloved character, what does that tell you?  The same?  The same only louder?  What is the point – we already got that?

The gory murders of *all* the beloved characters, even if it’s only a vision in Rick’s head, does that tell you any more?  Does that provide a revelation as a reward for enduring emotional pain?  No, we understood everything we needed to know within the first five minutes.

Now it’s just torture.

But wait, there’s more.

An extended sequence where a father is put through one of the worst torments imaginable, to mutilate his own son to save the lives of others, what extra does that tell us?  That this world is *even more* pitiless, more violent?  If it’s not telling us anything new, there’s no point in it being there.

If it’s not telling us anything new, and it’s causing us emotional pain, it’s a betrayal of the viewer.  Sadism.  Causing hurt just because you can, and then walking away and thinking how clever you are that you have the power to manipulate the emotions of others.

One thing you learn as a writer is that you don’t need to show everything.  A look, the trace of a fingertip on skin, subtlety can be more devastating than every second shown in HD.  That’s because any work of fiction is a partnership: what the creators bring to it, and what the readers or viewers bring from their life experience.  And those readers and viewers are great.  They don’t need dollops of dumb because they have rich lives of love and suffering and anger and grief, and they access all those feelings with the merest hint.

They don’t need to see a beloved character’s eye hanging out, and then someone saying his eye is hanging out, and another shot of his eye hanging out.  They just need to hear the sound of the blow and they are distraught.

And just to keep labouring this point, in my homage to the creators of The Walking Dead, if you’re hungry and someone offers you a peanut butter sandwich, do you want a spread of the filling or do you want it six-inches thick?  Does using the whole jar of peanut butter, so it cloys and clags and chokes, make for a better sandwich?  Because there’s more?

It’s just a TV show.  Except it’s not.  Stories are fundamental to the human experience because they move things deep within us.  And for that reason they have to be used carefully, and thoughtfully.

I don’t advocate censorship.  The freedom to tell stories is paramount.  But I am happy to exercise my right to walk away when I feel that risks taken in that storytelling have not been borne out by the final result.

The season premiere of The Walking Dead was a callous manipulation of the true emotional lives of viewers.  It was nasty and relentless and caused unnecessary pain, a betrayal of the investment every viewer had made in it.  And that, for me, was where it ended.

Cancer Treatment On The Brink Of A Breakthrough

Some pretty astonishing research has been carried out at my old alma mater, the University of Leeds, but none more so than the latest ground-breaking work in treatment for brain cancer.

Susan Short, the Professor of Clinical Oncology and Neuro-oncology, says, “I tend to shy away from the world ‘cure’ but this is the most exciting potential treatment I’ve seen in my career.”

The Leeds discovery will revolutionise cancer treatment, and means, in theory, that brain cancer can be cured with a simple injection.  Professor Short is now leading the attempt to fund the final stage of the research from alumni.

The team’s approach utilises a virus to turn on the body’s own immune system to fight one of the deadliest forms of cancer and one which has seen very few advances in treatment in recent years.  It’s a deceptively simple theory.  Cancer hides from the immune system.  When the virus infects tumour cells (see the diagram above), the immune system recognises the virus and is switched on to fight the cells.

The key is to use a virus that’s essentially harmless to the rest of the body, but is toxic to cancer cells. This delivers a double blow to the cancer – the virus and the immune system both attack cancer cells.

Until now the only way to get these therapies into the brain was through surgery. But the Leeds breakthrough uses a simple injection into the bloodstream, which sends the virus directly to the brain tumour.

Leeds is the only UK university researching this treatment, and it has the experts and facilities in place to see it through to completion once the latest tranche of funding has been complete.  The alumni research fund can be found here.

The ‘Elite’ Should Speak Out

The debate rolls on.  Is the problem with Donald Trump that he’s a pretty terrible person, or is the problem not about Donald Trump at all – that there’s actually something rotten at the heart of America that he’s bringing out of the shadows?

Most of the attacks throughout this long election campaign have been directed at the candidate and not at the source of the unpleasant views to which he gives a face, the very root of his support.  Critics steer clear of making a fundamental challenge for a variety of reasons, but a big part is guilt, middle-class guilt (if you’re in the UK), the guilt of those who are doing okay in the world.

They’ve been branded the ‘elite’ and told they don’t have a right to speak out because they’re not poor and they’ve not been dealt a tough hand in the game of life so they don’t understand the hard choices that shape this ‘authentic voice’ of the downtrodden. And because the privileged – the university-educated, doing okay – tend to care about these things, and honestly feel a little guilty at their privilege, they go along with this argument.

Yet the attack is not directed at an ‘elite’ which is simply rich – in fact, it’s often people who are very well off who are using ‘elite’ as a pejorative.  No, ‘elite’ in this context means better educated, and the sub-text is: don’t come here with your facts, statistics and evidence – they might stop me voicing my deeply-held prejudices.

But there’s a warning here from the UK.

The attack on the educated was a fundamental part of the Brexit campaign by the Leave team who didn’t want facts getting in the way of their, shall we say, ’emotional’ appeals.  But in light of their victory, that worldview has now become mainstream and it’s being used to unleash a great deal of nastiness – racism, violent attacks, suppression of facts and those who speak out in opposition to their agenda.

Racist attacks on citizens have soared since Brexit, hundreds reported all over the country, mostly in white working class communities.  The Hard Right is now fighting hard to deny this as a myth, one started by those who wanted to stay in the EU, much like some of those shadowy people behind Trump claim many of the factual attacks on the candidate and his views are also myths.  “Mostly debunked.”

Trump has unleashed the same wave of unpleasantness in America, coming from a similar source, and it’s not going to go away when he does.

You can’t change things by example.  America elects a black president and racism increases.  Elect a female president and the problems women face are likely to be exacerbated too.  Because the unpleasantness that lies behind this is emotional and deeply-felt.

Some things are open to debate, and some things are just wrong.  Tolerance should only go so far.  Ignorance is not an excuse, and challenges need to be made.  If they don’t, oft-repeated views stop being beyond the pale.  They just become normal.

William Poundstone, the author of Head in the Cloud: Why Knowing Things Still Matters When Facts Are So Easy To Look Up, ran many surveys and interviewed a huge number of people.  One dilemma he posed was: would you throw your pet off a cliff for a $1 million?

About 7% of people said yes.  But the percentage was double that amount among the poorly educated.  Poundstone said, in an article in The Observer, that his findings showed, “the less informed are either greedier or less kind to animals.”  But it didn’t end there.  Those who didn’t know the name of their elected representative were more likely to say it was okay for businesses to post fake online reviews under fake names.  Those who can’t answer easy questions about dinosaurs have a poor grounding in science and can’t form good opinions about, say, vaccinations, even with Google to help them.

Poundstone says, “Knowledge is not wisdom, but it’s a pre-requisite for wisdom.”

If people aren’t told that they’re wrong, if they’re not pushed back at every turn, those unpleasant ideas take root and flourish.  The danger for the ‘elite’ is that by allowing themselves to be silenced, they will allow a worldview that they long thought defeated to become mainstream.

Being educated is not wrong, it’s a boon to society, and with it comes a responsibility that it needs to be used, in public, against the accusations of ‘talking down’, to create a society we can all be proud of.

The World Is Better Than You Think

Deep breath.  Look around.

Famine is being eliminated. In 2014, 850 million suffered from malnutrition, the lowest figure on record.  Meanwhile, 2.1 billion were overweight.  In 1918, Spanish Flu killed up to 100 million in a year, compared to the 40 million who died in WWI.  But in 2014, the Ebola outbreak – “the most severe public health emergency in modern times”, according to the World Health Organisation – was stopped at 11,000 deaths.  In the 20th century, human violence accounted for 5% of all deaths.  In the 21st century, it’s 1%.  In 2012 56 million people died, but war caused only 120,000 of those deaths.

All these figures are quoted from Yuval Noah Harari’s very highly-recommended book, Homo Deus – A Brief History of Tomorrow (review coming soon to this site).

Those historical harbingers of the apocalypse, war, famine and pestilence, are still far too widespread, but every indicator is improving, and here in 2016, improving rapidly.

Some people out there see an advantage in proclaiming how terrible things are, that all around we have only decline and degradation and that things were always so much better in the past.  Don’t listen to them.

We’re on the cusp of a golden age.

The innovations and advancements created by clever people – the ‘elite’, I suppose – are improving every aspect of our life.  Two days ago, a team at MiT took us a step closer to unlimited clean energy.  Breakthroughs in cancer treatment are coming so fast it’s hard to keep track of them.  Advances in food production techniques, and in health, and the consistently falling global poverty levels will push those Four Horsemen to the fringes.

But the danger now is that we sit back and wait for this new dawn to arrive.  That we foolishly think that everyone wants this better time that’s coming.  It’s going to be great, why wouldn’t they?

No.  Barriers lie everywhere.  Malign forces are working hard to ensure this golden age never comes about, people, and ideologies, who will find no place for themselves in this better world.

Putin has spoken publicly about how his plans for Russia are centred around stopping liberal western values in their tracks – he wants his growing empire to be a bastion of conservatism – and we’ve already seen how the prospect of a third world war is looming.  The global death cult ISIS may be suffering a set-back on its territory in Mosul, but it’s ideology won’t easily be destroyed and it’s committed to a medieval world-view.

And then there are the domestic forces that want to hold everything back – in the US and UK, in France, Germany and across the West, not just the people who are afraid of change, and they are many, but those whose power bases and belief systems are firmly rooted in the 20th century.

If you look at the electoral battles taking place, it’s easy to think this is politics as usual.  Same old parties, same old faces.  It’s not.  What we are now living through is an epochal battle.

This was all predicted in one of my favourite books of the last decade, The Meaning of the 21st Century by James Martin.  The former IBM staffer talked about the tech age back in 1978 in his book The Wired Society, and in this later work he looks at how the world will be changed by technology throughout this century.  But he insisted that it wouldn’t be plain sailing.  He described this process as a river, which plunges into a narrow ravine and becomes a hell of white water, before broadening out into a peaceful drift into a pleasant future.

We’re in that ravine now, and the turbulence is going to be great.  But if we want to come out the other side, we all have to work together to oppose those who’d rather see the whole raft sink.

Left and Right was a good way of defining the political struggle of the last century.  No longer.  Now, all over the West, party barriers are being transcended.

The true political battle of the 21st century is the past versus the future.  You have Left and Right on both sides, one tribe looking back to a perceived golden age, one looking forward, with vested interests everywhere tugging at sleeves.

There’s no room for sitting on the fence.  Our choice now is to stand up, argue, vote for the person or party that’s at least vaguely heading for the destination you want, even if they’re not your perfect choice.  (As an aside, there are no perfect choices in politics.)

I’m looking to the future – that’s where the world I want to live in exists.  You?

 

The Donald Trump Problem

A Wall Street Journal poll published yesterday (Sunday) revealed that more than half of American voters don’t care if their president is a sexual abuser.

That finding sent a shiver through the people of Western Europe.  You could feel the sense of bewilderment rolling out across social media, in texts and emails.  How could this possibly be?

We’ve long been told that Trump is the response to globalisation, disruption and industrial decline, a champion of people who are ill-equipped to deal with the 21st century.  This has become something of a global narrative – explaining the Brexit vote, the rise of Marine le Pen and the National Front in France and more.

But 53% of US voters believing allegations of Trump’s long-standing sexually predatory and abusive treatment of women shouldn’t rule him out of being the leader of the free world is not anger about lost jobs.  It’s not a response to declining prospects or the inchoate rage of the Left Behind.

This was a mirror held up to the face of America and it showed something particularly ugly.

The problem with Donald Trump is not Donald Trump.

Except there may be a different way of seeing it.

While the allegations against Trump have moved some voters into the Clinton column, there’s a hard core that seem unshakeable in their support, however horrendous the revelations levelled against the businessman-turned-politician.  The usual response is a kind of gallows humour and multiplying memes of what terrible thing Trump would have to say or do to get these people to flee, finally.

They never will.

The truth is, to them, Trump is not a man, he’s a symbol, and that makes him bulletproof.  Any allegation can be levelled at him and they will all be discounted because those allegations are about Trump the man, which is an irrelevance.  Trump the symbol of all that is wrong with someone’s life will always shine through, because symbols cannot be degraded.  They’re lodged in the unconscious mind, the secret language we all speak yet don’t realise that we do, where one symbol can contain behind it a library of reasons, thoughts, feelings, all tangled up.

The symbolic voter may not be a new phenomenon, but thanks to the Communication Age which has linked up so many disparate tribes, that bloc has now become connected, and organised.

This is not peculiar to Trump, or to America.

All the Remain campaigners who thought the public would swing against a Brexit vote once they were faced with the stark facts of the economic fallout were deluded.  They were fighting a completely different referendum from the people they were trying to convince.  The Leave side got it.  They just made stuff up to knock off a few Remain voters at the margins, knowing their core support came from symbolic voters who were not being engaged, even slightly, by the other side.

These people were wholly buying into the Liberation Myth, the idea that Brexit would result in a new-found freedom.  On the surface, this meant simply an escape from what was perceived as suffocating European laws.  But when you hear these Brexit voters speak about their decision – and there are many accounts online, – you realise it wasn’t about Europe at all.  Many were voting for a symbolic freedom that would reach down through all aspects of their lives, lifting them out of a stultifying job, an oppressive relationship, the poverty trap, wherever they felt constrained or beaten down.

As with many psychological drives, the people who succumb to them are sometimes just as bewildered by what they’ve done as the people who vote with their heads.

You can see the same response from some supporters of the UK Independence Party, which has gone from strength to strength despite mockery of its leaders and allegations of racism and sexism and recently a fistfight among its elected representatives which left one of them in hospital.

And with supporters of the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn who has proven so immune to attacks that some have branded his followers a cult.  Corbyn remains a prime draw for the symbolic voter, because, to many, he’s a tabula rasa.  His policies are so few and so high-level it’s possible for many to project all their hard-held beliefs into that void.

Symbolic voters break down into two groups: the victims, the kind of people who use the word ‘gatekeepers’ or engage with a whole range of conspiracy theories – they’ve tried hard but things aren’t working out for them, and because they know they’ve tried hard their failure can only be the fault of someone else/the system; and utopians, for whom it’s most important to imagine a better world at the highest level possible before delving down into the nitty gritty of how to get there.  Both are immune to facts, statistics, evidence, for different reasons, and both attach their political beliefs to symbolic figures.

These are usually gut people, not head people.  There’s no value judgment in that statement.  Psychology shows us people divide quite clearly along these lines (these aren’t binary choices – it’s a spectrum like most psychological states, but we’re looking at the fringes here).  Their response to a piece like this would be emotional – anger, contempt – not a reasoned argument.

Symbols are important – they speak louder than anything.  And as Brexit shows, they can crush puny facts and policies.  If their political opponents want to win, they need to engage the symbolic aspect rather than simply throwing more mud, or making more reasoned arguments, and that needs a good deal of lateral thinking.

Third World War: Two Steps Closer

Later today (Saturday) talks will take place in Switzerland between US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. The aim: to broker another ceasefire in Syria. Kerry has already said he doesn’t expect any positive results.

Why?  US-Russia relations have not been so poor since the Cold War, and they’re getting worse by the day, with potentially terrible results.  It’s easy to get distracted by all the other troubling events unfolding domestically and abroad – as many people have pointed out, there’s just too much “news” in 2016 (and Francis Fukuyama is probably getting sick of all the ribbing for his ‘end of history’ quote back in the 90s, rightly or wrongly) – but this should be demanding everyone’s attention.

Last night (Oct 14), NBC discovered the CIA is preparing an unprecedented cyber strike against Russia, one designed to “harass and embarrass” the Kremlin leadership. Because this is all keystrokes and screens, many dismiss this as not true warfare, or at the very least one that will not result in any deaths. That’s misjudging both the psychological state of Putin and his precarious position as the leader of a Mafia State where the rule of law is tenuous for people at the top and where the bullet beats the ballot.

Meanwhile, here in London, at the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has been talking up the likelihood of UK-US military action in Syria” “We can’t just see Aleppo pulverised…  We have to do something.  Whether that means we can get a coalition together for more kinetic action now I cannot prophesy, but certainly what most people want to see is a new set of options.”

This could only result in direct confrontation with Russia, which, under Putin, has wagered everything in support of Syria’s desperate President Assad.  At the moment, this might be considered sabre-rattling, to warm the blood in advance of today’s Swiss talks.  But, again, the psychology, the Mafia State..  Backing down is not an option for Putin.

There’s a growing sense that NATO sees Syria as critical.  If Putin isn’t stopped now, he will keep going – he will *have* to keep going to appease domestic critics concerned with a tanking economy.  But the West also senses that he’s vulnerable, and there’s a belief that the hard men around him might choose to act against the leader rather than risk a devastating confrontation with an unpredictable outcome.

Or not.

One thing’s for sure: when everything is so finely balanced on the brink of war, in the coming months and years, the West is going to need leaders that are a safe pair of hands.