THE DIPLOMAT IS DEAD

written four or five months before Comrade Vlad Putin was ‘elected’ to power in Russia.... 

THE STRUGGLE OF THE COLD WAR existed as long as it did, and did not degenerate into world war three-four-and-five all-in-one, because of the diplomacy on both sides of the ideological iron curtain.
International diplomacy is invariably made up of outward-looking trade and economic interests, generally overt, but also exists to protect a country's own customs, trade and economic advantages for, but also over, it's own people. This latter focus is largely covert, or remains largely unexpressed in international diplomatic circles.
Without doubt, without diplomacy, east would only ever have met west on the battlefields of world war three.
We would not have known about it.
America's military hype had convinced itself and it's nation that war was good, and even better if we have the biggest meanest nastiest weapons of all.
It was for a long time convenient to forget to tell the people that these, our biggest meanest nastiest weapons would, if employed upon even our furthest enemy, disrupt the global environment to such a degree that we, that is the people of the United States of America, would probably become radioactive roughly five million times the safe level in a matter of months, and consequently, once we'd shed limbs and braincells and spermatoza at a little more than an alarming rate, we too, we the greatest nation to rape the planet, ever, would cease to exist.
Fortunately, the fear of self-destruction scared some granules of sanity into the nation's leaders, and even one or two military megalos, enough to have them restrain their lust for death (of the other guy) to two nuclear bombs.
Ex-strategists, ex-advisors and ex-high-ranking military men (yes, funnily enough- men, all men) left over from WW2 now speak openly about the unnecessary use of the atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945.
Germany was a spent force, Hitler dead, and Japan was as good as dead in the Pacific. Her economy was running on watered-down Saki and her troops overseas on coconut milk and whatever else they could extract from the natives of the southern Pacific Islands.
Further military actions were yet needed in some zones, but effectively the expansionist threats from uncontrollable fascism were, by the combined allied forces, well under control.
Diplomats, particularly from the USA and the UK were working overtime to end the bloodshed.
Their enemy was not only fascism however.
Backstabbing was rife in the planning and war-rooms of Downing Street and the White House. When it was clear to the west's aristocratic financiers (from all points west of Vladivostok), who really started the first and second world wars to scotch British and European left-wing political parties from moving Human Justice forward on the popular wave of Russian Communism, and demanding major land reforms throughout the west, rather than make a serious assassination attempt on Hitler, or nuke Berlin, they plotted to include the Communists to stop their mad buddy Adolf.
Well, that's a verbose and slightly inaccurate retelling of history, but to the dollar-bigs, and Deutsche-mark mega's, Hitler was a bad blue on their behalf. Never-the-less, being as cunning as the landocracy are, they turned Hitler's psychopathy to their own advantage, and asked Moscow for their help.
It was to their advantage because they were then able to open channels of communication between the capitalist west and the evil Communist empire of Russia.
As with every "noble" capitalist (small-n, small-c), they set to immediately and corrupted the Russian diplomats, mainly with the good old Yankee dollar-in-a-silent-Swiss-bank-account trick, and thence began gas-axing the iron curtain from the other side.
Typically of course, naturally and so, they even sold the Commies the oxy-torches! Typically of course, naturally and so, for a massive profit.
So, the enemy was not only fascism. Their new allies the Russians were indeed the bigger worry, both to the aristocracy and to the Oh! Hello! Roman Catholic Church. Well, we'll leave the micks out of this for a chapter or two, apart from saying that their interests were also (funnily enough) in preserving the enormous tracts of land they'd seized over a brief two thousand year plunder-burn-sack-and-pillage-spree across the greater part of western Europe. So the Catholics, and for that matter the Protestants were quite happy to have the war against their Nazi allies stop where it did, while they still had the people of all-points west of the Urals, in their sacramental alms bowl.
However, while the western diplomats were going hell-for-leather tricking the Communists, a bigger-meaner-nastier- more genocidal monster was growing right there back in their own backyard!
The allied war-machine had developed into a self-perpetuating juggernaut of it's own, and threatened to consume or nuke anything and anyone who dared to say "STOP!"
This juggernaut, larger and better financed than ever before (by the aristocratic landowning, and capital interests!), had become self-perpetuating, profit-driven and of size enough to enormously influence the largest national economies, primarily of course, of the United States of America.
So, for most of the twentieth century, the world's diplomatic emissaries have been negotiating a rhetorical war between not one ideological nation and another, but between their own profit-and-employment-driven departments of war, and the materially powerless Humanitarians of both sides of the ideological divide.
Lo! What better reason for X-number of spies to become counter-spies and counter-counter-spies, etc?
How could one possibly not become the ultimate cynic, on seeing this ludicrous, and wholly ignoble lusting by the "monied", first hand.
To add to this disgusting (because it is true!) scenario, is the fact that every "diplomat" ever to have worked on the international stage in the last one hundred years has been, when compared to the larger percentage of spies, an intellectual dwarf.
Why?
Spies, or people best suited to such work, are by nature retiring, reclusive, private people. People who have a natural talent for being relatively anonymous. Yes they curry quite some favour, especially with those they are trying to extract secrets from, or those they are working solely to destroy, but their talents lie in being accepted. Behind all this of course, is their Master talent of being ice-cold and ruthlessly Intelligent. They are capable of seeing the way things are, that is the way both sides are thinking, planning and acting, at the briefest glance, and then can interpret the situation (into a minimum of three languages) both accurately and where necessary quite inaccurately, depending who they must inform. Or, who was paying the most.
But, to be fair, they were not all greedy, heartless rogues. Some used their sway to bring about quite subtle yet most effective redirections of national and international policy, for the Greater Good, or at least their perception of It, from both sides. Some times at the same time! And the tragedy is that we usually never know of their magnanimity and benevolence.
Again however, their perception was by far and away closer to the best, in the circumstances, than any politician, financier or diplomat could offer.
Usually there were at least two reasons why these quiet achievers avoided coming into the limelight.
One was their preference for the intrigue of being an agent or double or triple, "for the play of it all!" A second was their general detestation for diplomats. Three was the "perks" of the undercover job, of not having to answer to a hostile public, government or foreign minister, should one be spotted with the foreign secretary's wife, of the nation’s enemy! But four was the rigid fear held by the diplomats, foreign affairs ministers, aristocracy and government that they'd show them all up for being wholly idiotic, pompus and right-up-themselves frauds!
So it suited almost everyone with some vestige of power to cling to, to keep the undercovers undercover.
The only people who would have voted unanimously for a spy as their benevolent dictator, were they to know of the spy's broad political genius, upfront-ness and charisma, were, the people. The masses. The vast majority of punters who never come within a bulls-roar of meeting or reading about the nation’s most intelligent citizen (albeit that he or she held several passports at any one time).
Another reason they were kept in the closets of the back rooms, was that most politicians and diplomats, especially of the west, were in large part, in reality, bumbling fools.
Fools who were so self-centred because of their privileged upbringing. Fools because it was necessary to keep their job. Fools in that they simply could not keep abreast of the deeper issues affecting politics in the international arena, in-the-main because it created too much of a conflict of interests, both in their own overly indoctrinated heads and out in the world of balancing acts between financiers and voters.
Fools also, (how foolish can they be?) because all the real brains were in the foreign office, or the enemies foreign office (unbeknown to the enemy of course), and fools because, that's precisely the kind of person the powers-that-be want as diplomats.
Why?
Does anyone really still think that the wealthiest five percent who're running the world marketplace are out for the good of the people???
Does anyone still really think those right-royal-rear-ends want everyone to live in True Peace and Harmony with their neighbours???
Does anyone still really think that those r-r-r-e's would give up their unjustly obtained territories and endless wealth by putting an end to the most profitable pastime since Adam ate the apple??? War, my darlings, WAR! That's what makes their world go round and round and round!!!
Certainly, even some of the top five percent concede war is not conducive to Happiness, which is the singular reason why they get into corporate affairs, mostly of a global scale, because anyone who is not a politician knows, don't we, that business is just a gentrified version of war.
Zo!
The one talent the diplomat is allowed to have, is charisma. In fact, in order to make up for the total absence of everything else, they are required to have overly-bloated doses of kkk-arrr-eesmah! darlink!!
Of course all charisma really requires is a hefty portion of self-confidence.
One does not need good looks, or height, or even a Henry Kissinger deep voice. Look at Madelaine Albright! But what a confident force to reckon with! (Frightening M’dear, Frightening!)