RED FORGE

Apparently, the Pentagon has readied the 11th Airborne Division for potential deployment to "Minnesota."

Meanwhile, here's their fu***ng unit badge.

I know Minnesota can get chilly, but uh, you guys don't know of any, uh, Arctic destinations in the news recently do yez?

Alfred Hitchcock has discovered a handy solution.

*Originally he said this about insomnia which kind of changes the vibe but 🫠

That's a fu***ng Iron Cross 😂

According to UKIP, their new logo is "the holy lance, the Eucharist and the Cross Pattée."

However, it's still a fu***ng Iron Cross.

Charley's War, written by the legendary Pat Mills and illustrated by the equally legendary Joe Colquhoun.

Lots of praise is always given to anti-war literature. All Quiet On The Western Front, The Empty Drum, For Whom The Bell Tolls and so on. (They are all legitimately brilliant by the way, check em out.)

There's not so much praise for it in comic form though. Don't get me wrong, the people who know about the anti-war strain of graphic novels praise it to the heavens. But it's not as widespread, which is a tragedy because Maus by Art Spiegelmann is the equal of anything Hemingway had to say about war and man's blind indifference. (Check that out too.)

Anyway, Charley's War.

This gem first appeared in the old Battle Picture Weekly comic in the 1970s. It follows 16-year old Charley Bourne who lies about his age to join the big adventure in France in 1916. He arrives just in time for the Battle of the Somme and very quickly has his delusions about the nobility and glory of war shattered. Industrialised high-explosive slaughter is a hell of a thing, as Charley learns in his first few hours on the front.

What made Charley's War so different at the time, was that this media space was traditionally quite sanitised. Boy's adventure stories were generally sanitised in a not-dissimilar way to the old Napoleonic battle paintings. The dead had the decency to lie face down, the charges were glorious and everybody had a grand old time.

Whereas from the third page of Charley's War, dismembered limbs littered the trenches, skeletal corpses occupied shell craters and the poor bastards who were wounded and killed did so with expressions of pain, fear and regret on their faces. Joe Colquhoun's artwork still stands today as some of the most effective illustration ever seen in a graphic novel. It's truly horrifying, and some panels have haunted me since I first read it thirty years ago.

It's also unflinchingly honest about who it is who fights and dies in these rich man's wars. Because it ain't the fu***ng rich man. It's working-class kids like Charley and his unit, his sergeant who loses his mind during his time in hell, while the generals dine in comfort and safety miles from the fighting.

And why am I posting about a comic from the late 1970s? Because it might be fifty years old but its message is timeless. And as politicians and journalists and the warmongers of industry clamour for World War Three, it pays to take a moment to remember and revisit Charley Bourne and how all of the lies he was told about war died on contact with reality.

"Communism is great in theory but fails to take human nature into account."

How come that argument is never levelled at capitalist "democracies."

"Yeah, democracy is great in theory but fails to take into account that rich c***s will literally buy whoever gets elected."

Hey so when you hear about American-Cubans saying they'll be happy to go back to their homeland when Daddy Trump defeats the evil communists, don't forget that the reason their families fled in the first place is because they were the people responsible for the appalling conditions that led to a revolution in the first place.

10% of landowners owned 75% of the land prior to the Cuban Revolution. They let the population live in the most appalling poverty while they sold themselves and their country to the Americans.

Fu***ng gusanos.

This is a real person using their real name and you can't convince me this is a serious timeline we inhabit.

Tel Aviv Steve there with the kind of spectacularly bad take that requires a nose full of gak and a brain full of, well, f**k all really.

The reason people (and not just the left) are so upset about the murder of Renee Good is because we generally prefer our law enforcement agents to go after criminals and not, you know, fu***ng be criminals. How f**ked does your worldview have to be to think we shouldn't hold government agents to a higher standard than criminals?

And if Renee had been murdered by an illegal Somali ra**st, then Two-Foot Tommy The Tiny Tinpot Tit would be making fu***ng hay with it.

Every accusation is a confession and all that.

And Musk can get in the fu***ng bin and all, we're not taking lessons on morality from a fu***ng freak who sells AI software to nonces for the express purpose of creating child po*******hy.

After conducting careful and detailed material analysis of the US/Greenland situation, I've come up with what I think is the most likely reasoning currently going on in the White House and the Pentagon.

It's about flip flops.

See, the US has a rich and vibrant history of losing wars to teenagers in flip flops. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq - anywhere they've invaded and occupied, kids in flip flops have turned up and spent years blowing the bo****ks off American soldiers, until they f**k off out of it.

So Greenland, that's the Arctic, right? Cold as s**t. No flip flops. Ergo, maybe the US could actually win. That's it, that's the theory.

Gonna be fu***ng hilarious if there's an Inuit insurgency and they're all wearing whatever the Inuit equivalent of flip flops are. Imagine the terror of the US troops as an IED stuffed with fu***ng narwhal spikes detonates under their Humvee and they just see some Greenlander kid legging it behind a snowdrift with his fu***ng toes on show, laughing hysterically.