By now readers are probably aware that the shoddy ‘Russia did it!’ tapestry so giddily hot-glued together by Boris Johnson, Theresa May, and the London media establishment has unraveled, along with any hope for stability, let alone credibility, for the May government. It’s now clear that Yulia and Sergei Skripal have both made a miraculous recovery, an impossibility, we are assured by u.k. mouth pieces, since novichok nerve agent is reportedly 10x more deadly than VX nerve gas. The media keeps trying to tidy up, but Boris keeps trying to glue on the macaroni. Put the glitter down, Boris.

For god’s sake, you can’t make this stuff up. u.k. media reported that Skripal’s cat and guinea pigs died, it has been insinuate, because of the non-existent nerve agent. In reality, the poor fucking things died of thirst and malnutrition when police neglected them and sealed up the house.

It’s clear there was no nerve agent attack, no ‘Russia-did-it!’, and it’s not even clear that the May government wanted this charade to truly play out, just to take the media’s eyes off its horrific failings for a few weeks. Either way, the jig is up. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has begun its investigation and Moscow is cooperating fully, although the OPCW is by no means an objective party, it will not back this charade, especially since it has come late to the party and Boris Johnson’s already shit in the punch bowl. The world’s eye is on this farce, and it doesn’t look good for the west.

But stop laughing. The west is incompetent, they think you’re incompetent, and they’re going to blunder you in a fucking world war. The blasée attitude most leftists reserve for this incident as just another egg-in-the-face fuckup amidst a litany of such fuckups in recent years belies the gravity of one nuclear power fabricating what amount to charges of crimes against humanity against another nuclear power, one that is being increasingly isolated by western imperialism and singled out for possible military intervention.

It should alarm us all how utterly irrational moribund imperialism has grown, how like a sleepwalker it is on the precipice of annihilation, flippantly accusing world powers of gas attacks, launching invasion after invasion, drone-strike after drone-strike, unleashing economy-rocking trade wars from the comfort of twitter. Glibness and acerbic remoteness serve as a sort of common-sense defense mechanism, rationalizing the inherently irrational, reversing reality in the mirror of irony, chalking up to malice what in reality incompetence explains just fine. Don’t get me wrong, imperialism plots. Oh does it fucking plot. But its core, especially in this moribund stage, as the ground for imperialist redivision grows ever more fecund, is inherently unreasoning.

We may wish to rationalize this or that Trump or e.u. policy, but the truth is, they fear war as deeply as they need it. Very few among the imperial bourgeoisie, and virtually none of their political representatives, want world war. But they don’t know how to stop it. They don’t know how to go forward, and they now they can’t go back.

It’s time we reversed the algebra of the standard leftist response to recent events. Rather than remaining passive, become proactive. Understand that imperialism is irrational, but prosecute it for the deliberate crimes it commits. The anti-war movement is at its lowest point in decades, at a point when more people are displaced by war than ever before, all at the behest of imperialism. Reverse that too.