A Chapter that bangs on about the Middle East for a bit

That winter was as cold and dismal as May’s Florence speech had suggested it would be. The Beast from the East that set the snowdrops back six weeks was nothing compared to the frost that had settled on Britain’s desire to return to the Constitutional status quo, or undivided sovereignty. Bozzer had given a speech which was all hot air about global Britain, looking outward and then May had delivered another load of vomit inducing stuff about ‘security cooperation’ at the Munich Security Conference. Virginia imagined a Munich Security Conference. Its attendees would be German bouncers in black uniforms rallying in beer halls, and May would be there in her dirndl skirt and corset, swanning between the tables offering round little shot glasses containing the blood of British servicemen and the ancient liberty of the British people to these grandsons of the Gestapo, to add a little spice to their otherwise dull lager.

But nothing Virginia did, in the diabolical way, seemed to have any effect. And even trolling was getting difficult. Virginia knew she must be quite well out on a limb, politically, when her comments started to be removed from Breitbart London. But it was in March the real fun and games started.

A former Russian agent was poisoned and almost died in Salisbury. His daughter was also affected and also nearly died. The former Russian agent, Skripal, had requested herbs from his homeland, from a native visitor, who had agreed to carry them to him, when she visited, but instead a different woman brought them, whom this first had met on the plane. This visitor worked in a medicine factory, in Russia. The former agent had requested bay leaves and buckwheat from his homeland which, of course, Virginia laughed, must not have been available in the Salisury branch of Holland and Barrett. Anyway, this acquaintance of his friend from Russia had delivered the ‘herbs’ to him and later, after eating out with his daughter, he fell ill, and soon she did too. They displayed what appeared to be all the same symptoms as those addicts displayed who had taken ‘Zombie Spice’. Virginia was used to seeing the victims of that drug in the centre of the Cathedral city near her home, Lincoln. Amazingly an army first responder was the first person on the scene in Salisbury. Presumably they weren’t used to ‘Zombies’ in that city’s Cathedral quarter, Virginia had certainly never seen any kind of a first responder on the scene when bodies had been strewn about Steep Hill. Virginia thought of the double agent Lyalin whom Peter Wright had saved with his ‘antidote kit’ a roll, like a tool kit, given to him by a Dr at Porton Down, containing antidotes to all the known poisons used by the KGB. Did individual agents still have antidotes in their safes? Or was the Army First Responder straight from Porton Down itself? The British did not allow the Russians any access to the supposed nerve agent, Novichok, which had zombified the Skripals, as they might have under article IX of the Convention on Chemical Weapons.

But it seemed nobody was allowed to express any opinion on this matter, in the comments sections, except to say “Ooh how shocking, those pesky Russians, up to no good again”. Any mention of the former MI6 agent, who had produced the dodgy dossier on President Trump and his supposed Russian connections was banned, the man had been connected with Skripal. Comments were removed faster than Virginia could dream up new ways of casting doubt on the matter. But they were never removed instantly, by algorithm, they were removed after dozens of other comments had appeared underneath, accusing Virginia of being both a troll and a traitor for not accepting the narrative as it was being written by the state. Virginia knew that some of the commentators under the line at the Telegraph were dull but basically honest and simple, old school, desperate to believe a Conservative Government and the British security services were pure and decent, but surely there were only one or two like that who bothered to read or write comments? Not tens or dozens of them, waiting to pounce on any comment that suggested the whole thing was murkier even than it looked.

And why was it a loner in his Leicester bedroom that was left to pull together all the footage and evidence that supposedly proved Skripal and his daughter were survivors of an assassination attempt carried out by a pair of incompetent goons, working for Putin? And why was this weirdo then given a suite of posh offices and lots of staff and why had he become officially employed by the state and even by the Yanks? Virginia had read Spy Catcher and she knew a lot of murky nonsense when she saw it. She had a nose for devilry, after all.

Virginia liked a good conspiracy theory, but she didn’t think this business was an example of one. Good conspiracy theories were satisfying, like good ‘Whodunnits’. They tied up loose ends, they made things complete. This mess was more like the kind of dull response non-believers came out with, in relation to the whole idea of conspiracy theories: ‘life’s not like that, nobody is controlling things, it’s much more ‘cock up than conspiracy’. Yes, this was a big cock up alright, followed by a crappy clearing up operation that made things worse, like handing a dishcloth to a small child when it had spilled flour and oil and poster paint on the table-top. The trolling of the trolls online was part of that making things worse, you didn’t persuade people like Virginia they must be mistaken by making them paranoid.

Virginia would have much preferred to live in the conspiracy theorists’ world than the real one. In this real world there was her kind of mischief making, which only seemed to work on some occasions, and which could not be put to positive good use, but only teaching lessons which were probably just coincidences. Then there was the much worse sort of evil, that could be put to work creating great harm. Then there was massive incompetence, nobody taking responsibility and people earning vast amounts of money as a reward for cocking everything up every verse end. The best one could do in this real world, was pray to God, who worked in mysterious ways and liked to have a laugh sometimes, such as when he had sent the country Theresa May, after the referendum, when Virginia had specifically asked him to send them someone capable and competent. Whereas in Conspiracy Theory World there was someone in charge, who was a bastard, but nevertheless got things organised and one only noticed when his organisation impinged on you and yours so negatively that it began to feel personal, or if a little chink of light showed through the fabric of the big scheme, leading people to grow suspicious.

The Skripal business was Virginia’s first taste of how the state was so desperate to control its deceitful narrative and drive its agenda that it was prepared even to infiltrate the comments sections in the papers, removing and manipulating comments. The next dose of medicine of that sort was dished out in April.

Supposedly President Assad of Syria had dropped Chlorine gas on his own citizens in Douma and the West had responded by bombing Assad’s forces. Virginia was suspicious right from the start. Way back in 2013, she could remember some reporter on the Today Programme, or some other Radio 4 news programme explaining that the Al Nusra front were the good guys, in Syria, despite admitting in the same breath they were linked to Al Qaeda. Of course Western forces had soon stopped admitting that these Sunni extremist groups were the ‘rebels’ they had decided to back against Assad, and once IS had come into being they had to pretend they had never been in favour of Sunni Islamic extremists of that sort, but Virginia had a long political memory. All the reports on this supposed chemical bombing came from a group who worked exclusively with these Islamist extremists and whose individual members made no secret of their support for extremist Islamist ideology.

Anyway, Virginia just did not believe in the chemical attack. It was an instinctive feeling she had about it as much as anything and part of it was bound up with Assad’s having been an eye surgeon. Someone who had trained as an eye surgeon in England could not use chemical weapons against little children. Of course, there had been cases of murderous doctors, employed by various evil states, throughout history, but an eye surgeon seemed different. The specific desire to preserve a person’s ability to see, to prevent blindness simply could not be part of the same mind that wanted to cause harm with an invisible, poison gas. A man who wished to preserve the windows into other people’s souls was not the man to order the particular kind of vile death that came about as the result of the use of chemical weapons.

Anyway it was the Skripal case, all over again in the comments sections. The Spectator removed the comments of everyone who did not defend Britain’s instant retaliation for the alleged attack. The comments of anyone who called for hesitancy, or consideration were removed. Of course, Boris had been a Spectator man, now he was Foreign Secretary, with the power to order the kind of long distant bombing he had so much admired the results of when he’d been reporting on the actions of Blair, in Iraq. So no criticism was allowed at the Spectator, one’s comments and those of others, which appeared before one’s eyes, disappeared the next moment, as if black magic were at work.

At the Telegraph, where Boris had had a regular column until his appointment as Foreign Secretary it was worse. One’s comments were altered. The system at the Telegraph was that one was allowed one a minute to edit your remarks, then the system timed out. Virginia had become suspicious, during the Skripal business, so she had taken to carrying out a lengthy process of commenting. Firstly, she wrote her comments on her notepad which spell checked them and highlighted punctuation errors and so on. Once she was sure they were absolutely what she wanted to say, she posted them, then copied them and pasted them back, underneath the original, in her notepad, immediately, so that it could be seen the algorithm that sought out swear words etc had passed the comment . Then she took a screenshot of her posted comment as it appeared immediately under the line and also a screenshot of her two identical notes in her notepad, to show all were identical. On one occasion Virginia went and had her morning bath, and when she came back from it and checked her comment it was full of embarrassing typos and misspelled synonyms. Of course, the troll bots had then piled in and insulted her comment as being illiterate and therefore from the mind of an ignorant, unpatriotic know nothing. Virginia could not prove what had happened, to any of her critics, but she had her photographs with time and date stamps and the original notes and the photographs of the comments as they appeared in the first moment in the paper. She could prove it to her family, who had been jeering and suspicious and had considered her a conspiracy theorist.

This was difficult territory for Virginia, she was a troll. She owned that. She self-identified as a witch and a mischief maker and trouble causer. But she needed to know who her enemy was, in order to retaliate in kind. Her enemy couldn’t be a system, it wasn’t an algorithm, it was a person, or people, employed by someone connected with the state to cause exactly the sort of mischief the state accused its enemies of causing online. They somehow had access to the comments sections in the online editions of the daily papers and weekly magazines and were not allowing any criticisms of the actions of the state. Discovery of who this enemy was, would come a little later, but with hindsight Virginia regarded this moment of realisation that the state itself was a troll, a witch, a mischief maker, even when a Tory Government was in power as a turning point or Damascene conversion in her thinking.

Virginia did not know what to do. There was no little act of trouble causing, no voodoo that could make things right in the Middle East or prevent feeble politicians in the West throwing their weight about to try and impress their electorate, because their domestic policy was useless. All one could do was pray.

Things had been bad in the Blair years, the business with Allister Campbell, Blair himself and the murder of Dr David Kelly, as Virginia thought of it, had been dreadful. But online trolling was not a thing in those days, and what could one woman’s feeble voodoo do, on behalf of justice and good and right? But that evil time had been like a much worse version of the Labour Party closing the pits and the village schools. When they did it, it was just like their idiocy and one should expect nothing less from such pygmies and short-term thinkers and in Blair and Campbell’s case Devils. But when the Tories did wrong Virginia had no response, except the argument she jeered at Communists for making - ‘that’s not real Communism, real Communism has never been tried’. Well this business of destabilising the Middle East was not real conservatism. And Virginia had no taste for defending it. The Sunni Islamist rebel forces that Cameron’s government had backed those ‘Al Nusra guys’ whom the BBC reporter had tried to reassure them were alright really, despite being linked to Al Qaeda, had soon drifted and joined up with IS. And when the ancient statues and temples were being blown to pieces in Palmyra and other places you could not get a cigarette paper between the ideology of one group of destructive Islamist extremists and another. Assad, the eye surgeon had recognised and preserved the beauty which the eye could behold. Whatever his faults he had believed in the preservation and repair of what it was possible to preserve, had known how to hold fast to that which was good and ancient. And he had employed experts in museums to preserve collections and artefacts. Whereas the ‘Conservative’ government in Britain, in league with other forces of ‘liberal democracy’ had armed and trained men who believed in absolute destruction, year zero, in order to achieve year 650 AD in the 21st Century.

And yet this desire to champion these ‘rebels’ was supposedly a desire to champion democracy. The very thing she wished the bastards would champion at home. It was all such bollocks! All such hypocritical, unforgivable bollocks!