Mark Steyn: Good riddance, 2021!

It's New Year’s Eve at GB News. We’re live tonight as 2021 goes down the toilet of history. If you’re worried that it might claw its way back up to torment us for another three months, don’t worry Madonna is standing guard…

I’ve no idea why Madonna released a photograph of herself on the toilet for New Year, but at least she didn’t release a new CD.

At the Downing Street New Year press briefing, Sir Patrick Vallance and Professor Chris Whitty were asked by the BBC: “Should auld acquaintance be forgot?” And their advice is: Oh, definitely – even if your auld acquaintance is quadruple-jabbed, it’s just not worth the risk, forget about it…

The management cautioned me that under no circumstances am I to do a retrospective look-back at the last twelve months because everybody and his Auntie Mabel has done a retrospective look-back by now. So I thought we’d do a retrospective look-back at everybody else’s retrospective look-backs… Nah, just kidding. Instead of a retrospective on 2021, how about a retrospective on 1921? Bear with me on this…

The big news of December 1921 was the agreement between His Majesty’s Government and Irish republican revolutionaries to create the Irish Free State…

And somewhat to the surprise of London, Dublin and Belfast, that settlement has lasted, despite the best efforts of the IRA, for a century …until Brexit and Covid.

Boris Johnson’s deal with the EU moved the border into the Irish Sea, and, under cover of Covid, the Irish government has been hardening that border, in effect shrinking the Common Travel Area from the entire British Isles to merely the island of Ireland. And Boris Johnson, a man who two years ago said he wanted to be known not as Prime Minister but Minister of the Union, is letting his nation’s borders be redrawn by Brussels and Dublin.

Okay, enough of 1921, how about a retrospective of 1821? In 1821, James Monroe began his second term as President of the United States.

He’s the fellow who came up with the Monroe Doctrine, to end any further expansion in the Americas by other great powers and to regard any foreign interference in Central and Southern America as a threat against the United States.

Right now, Chinese money is hollowing out and buying up Latin America one by one – as it’s doing with the Commonwealth – and the dead husk that is Joe Biden is letting it happen, notwithstanding the Monroe Doctrine.

China has hypersonic weapons – that’s space nukes - so does Russia, and the Pentagon can’t seem to get it together on that front.

The Daily Mail reports that Chairman Xi is developing brain-control weaponry that can paralyze the brains of its enemies, and take control of them.

Seriously. This is happening at China’s Academy of Military Sciences. The brain-paralysis technology is in its early stages, but there are indications the Politburo have begun testing it on the G7.

Okay. So much for our retrospective of 1821, how about 1721? The big story in 1721 was the Great Plague Riots…

Yes, they had some sort of bubonic pandemic in Moscow, but the riots were caused not by the plague but by the government lockdown, and the enforced tanking of the Russian economy.

Of course, the Muscovites were a primitive people and didn’t know how to “follow the science”, so instead they followed it to the Kremlin and sacked it. That breaking news from 1721 has no relevance to our time. Don’t even think about it…

Oh, one more, from our retrospective of 1521, five hundred years ago.

In 1521, Suleiman the Magnificent, the all-powerful Ottoman Sultan who presided over the biggest expansion of the Islamic caliphate, launched the Siege of Belgrade.

Since then, of course, we’ve become far more enlightened, and understand that all Suleiman the Magnificent needed was a couple of months in De-Radicalization Class.