Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 212

Neither Five Nor Three - why dogmatists don't like arithmetic. Etc.

Mr ‘John Toe’ , using the ‘er’, opening usually favoured by people pretending to be tentative while stating the blazingly obvious, tumbles headlong into a deep pit.

 

I assume he is responding to my statement that :’Such an enormous transfer of territory from one power to another as took place between Russia and the EU after 1989 is, as far as I know, unknown in history, except as the result of humiliating defeat in actual war.  I simply cannot think of another example of such an event having taken place without such a defeat. ‘

 

 

He writes: ’Err, what about the dismantling of the British Empire Hitchens? And you give moral equivalency to a tyrannical dictatorship and democracies, fatally undermining your arguments.’

 

Well, yes, what about the British Empire, Hitchens? First of all, its dismantling was not a transfer from one power to another. Each constituent part of it became a sovereign nation. None of these parts, to my knowledge, joined any other empire or became provinces or possessions of another rival empire. Even poor put-upon Canada still has an enforced border under its own control, a currency, a legal system and its own foreign policy, all distinct from the USA.  No member of the EU boasts all of these, and some boast none of them at all. 

Secondly, it is quite possible to argue (and I often do) that the collapse of the British empire was indeed due to a humiliating defeat, specifically, the surrender to the Japanese at Singapore in early 1942, after which Britain ceased forever to be a credible military or political power in Asia. More subtly, one could also argue that Britain’s defeat in 1940 at the hands of Germany, while leaving our home islands unoccupied and technically still at war, left us so weakened in the eyes of the world, and so subjected to the wishes to the USA for ever after, that we could not hope to maintain the empire we had. As for our national bankruptcy in 1916...

 

This of course raises the other question, of it being a different kind of empire. Having the good fortune to be defended by several crucial miles of deep sea, Britain has not in modern times acquired territory for defensive purposes, as most continental powers have done and still do. In fact the British empire was always a defensive burden, requiring the maintenance of an enormous navy to keep hold of it.  The only possessions we have which are in any way comparable to Russia’s glacis territories (or Germany’s) are Scotland, Wales and Ireland, which had to be secured by English power to prevent our continental enemies from using them as bases from which to harry and destabilise us, as they have many times tried to do.

 

It could be argued that England is now losing these territories, and it could equally be argued that they are passing under the control of a rival power, the EU. And it could be argued, and is by me, that this state of affairs is the result of defeats. Alas for our understanding, these defeats (the War of National Bankruptcy (1914-1918) and the War of Submission to the USA (1939-45), plus the Surrender to the IRA of 1998) are still viewed in this country as triumphs. This could only be so in a world where arithmetic had been largely forgotten as a skill. Arithmetic is also vital in understanding the Russo-Ukraine question, as I showed in an earlier posting. But people don’t like it, because it mucks up their dogmas.

 

As A.E. Housman memorably and correctly stated: ‘To think that two and two are four, and neither five nor three, the heart of man hath long been sore – and long is like to be.’

 

The power of propaganda is beautifully illustrated in a posting form ‘Elaine’, who has become the leading spokesperson of soppy conventional wisdom on this site:

 

 ‘ Mr. Bunker If it was really a conflict between NATO and Russia then the logical compromise would be that Ukraine agree to never join NATO. They offered back in March after the annexation of Crimea. Why didn't Russia pursue that? I actually think Mark Jaremko's theory makes sense; that what they really fear is not just a prosperous Ukraine but one with better governance, because then their own corrupt system of governance is threatened.’

 

I must admit I cannot recall any offer from Ukraine to ‘never’ join NATO. This may be my fault. I am not encyclopaedic, or even Wikipaedic. Who made this offer? To whom? What was the wording of it?

I was able to find this http://en.interfax.com.ua/news/general/198372.html statement by Andriy Deschytsia, acting Foreign Minister of the putschist Kiev regime which seems to me to be a sort of non-committal ‘we have no plans to do so’ statement of the kind politicians make to gull the simple-minded. The naïve will think ‘no plans’ means ‘ we aren’t going to do it’. What it actually means is ‘We’d like to do this, but currently have no plans to do so formally drawn up, but we might later’. These formulations are intended to quiet speculation which is unwelcome to the politician involved, and should be treated with care. Please read the Interfax-Ukraine report of what Mr Deschytsia actually said:

 

 

"We are considering all options regarding the strengthening of our security and collective security. But we must stick to the existing legislation of Ukraine," he said at a press conference in Kyiv on Saturday.

The official noted that in accordance with the Ukrainian legislation Ukraine is a non-aligned state.

"But the issue whether to change this legislation depends on the Ukrainian parliament. The program of the new Ukrainian government does not contain the intention of becoming a member of NATO," he said.

Deschytsia added that Ukraine supports an intensive dialogue with NATO and is discussing different forms and ways of cooperation.’

 

I can well imagine some gullible western media organisation reporting this to suggest a pledge ‘never’ to join, But it plainly is no such thing. Note, however, this confirmation (from a  Ukrainian putschist source, not from some Putinite coven) of my repeated contention that Ukraine is(or rather was until it signed the EU association agreement which contains clearly political and military clauses) a non-aligned state.

 

Anyway, NATO has said NATO membership is an option, and the new Ukrainian government now says it’s a ‘priority’ http://www.rferl.org/content/ukraine-parliament-coalition-agreement/26703123.html

 

It was Mr Yanukovych who in 2010 said Ukraine was not aligned – a status the new government seems determined to overthrow http://itar-tass.com/en/world/747206

 

I plan to return to the NATO issue in another post. But why do people think, after the experience of such countries as Bulgaria, and Romania (to name a few) that EU membership automatically brings an end to corruption, or provides economic prosperity? If that's so, what are all thse Poles, Bulgars and Romanians doing in Britain? 

 

In the meantime, I note the contribution from Mr ‘Paul M’, who courageously declares from behind this pseudonym: ‘Mr Hitchens stop trying to deflect the appalling behaviour of the press towards Christopher Jefferies onto the police. You no doubt failed to defend him because you agreed with your journalist pals.’

 

I cannot prove that this isn’t so, you’ll have to take my word for it. It hadn’t occurred to me that I would need to prove that I had behaved badly.  Interesting question - was it morally worse for me lazily to believe the rubbish advanced against Mr Jefferies after the murder, or *not* to believe it and to chicken-heartedly say nothing in public, which is what I actually did?

 Even so, it is true that the press has been severely punished for what it did, by large payments which will certainly deter this sort of behaviour again and, in two cases by severe condemnation for contempt of court. A general slide, both by media pushing the boundaries of the presumption of innocence, and by judges feebly failing to enforce them, was halted by this case. The police, on the other hand, have not in any way been similarly chastened and I think it important to point this out. It seemed to me to be one of the lessons of the dramatised account of the case  to which I was referring.

 

In answer to Mr ‘P’, whose quarrel with me has now become so obscure that I don’t know what it is, and I suspect he doesn’t either (since he knows all my facts are correct). It seems to have something to do with Wikipedia's interpretation of Ukraine's desire to join Ukraine (which Mr P thinks has the status of holy writ) , versus mine, though this isn't even an issue for me.  

 

I've only ever stated, as is borne out by facts beyond doubt, that for Ukraine to cease to be non-aligned to and associate with the EU is a major political and diplomatic change, to the advantage of the EU and the disadvantage of Russia, and to expect Russia not to care is plain stupid. I've also maintained, and shown it be the case, that intervention by EU and US politicians, and the lavishing of EU largesse, preceded this move and could reasonably be seen to be part of the casue of it. And finally that the change, when it took place, was achieved through lawless violence and lawless breaches of constitutional rules. 

 

I have never said the EU’s expansion is ‘malevolent’. German expansion eastwards, as long as Germany exists, is a natural phenomenon which will continue as long as it is unrestrained by other forces. You might as well describe the Matterhorn as ‘malevolent’. Of course it's not.

 

It would be silly to climb the Matterhorn in shorts and a t-shirt on a winter's night, but you couldn't blame the mountain for what followed, only the silly people who ignored obvous dangers. 

 

The outcome of EU expansion itno Ukraine through the Association Agreement will undoubtedly be, and is already proving to be, highly dangerous, as it raises existential questions for Russia, which is also a natural phenomenon and currently has ‘no plans’ voluntarily to dissolve itself.

 

What puzzles me is why people such as Mr ‘P’ do not see that it would be wiser to restrain it, as NATO did when it was a proper alliance. The even deeper mystery is why anyone in Britain thinks that EU eastward expansion is something this country needs to or should support. What’s in it for us?

The Arithmetic of Alleged Aggression

Phoney outrage over Russia rumbles on. So I thought I would set out some facts on the issue:

 

Bear in mind that before it lost huge portions of its contiguous land empire, Moscow was not defeated in war, and in fact (with some small exceptions probably inspired from within the KGB) barely lifted a finger to retain its control.

 

Compare this with the Chinese People’s Republic, which engaged in a severe massacre in its own capital, followed by widespread repression,  rather than relax its rule, in the same period, and which despite this still enjoys warm diplomatic relations with the NATO powers. China could also be accused of severe aggression in Tibet.

 

Such an enormous transfer of territory from one power to another as took place between Russia and the EU after 1989 is, as far as I know, unknown in history, except as the result of humiliating defeat in actual war.  I simply cannot think of another example of such an event having taken place without such a defeat. 

 

I might add that both Manfred Woerner, then in charge of NATO, and James Baker, then US Secretary of State and spokesman for the entire Western alliance, gave undoubted assurances to Mikhail Gorbachev, at the time that NATO would *not* extend its jurisdiction eastwards. I think it fair to say that it was on that understanding that Mr Gorbachev peacefully dismantled the Soviet empire. Without those guarantees, it would not have been so peaceful. yet they have been utterly broken.

 

There can be no doubt that this understanding has been broken. There can be no doubt that Russia has complained clearly about this for years, while refraining from any action. President Putin said in Munich , at a major security conference, in February 2007, seven whole years before the February 2014 revolution in Kiev : ‘It turns out that NATO has put its frontline forces on our borders, and we continue to strictly fulfil the treaty obligations and do not react to these actions at all.

 

‘I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernisation of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them. But I will allow myself to remind this audience what was said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Manfred Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: “the fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee”. Where are these guarantees?’

  

NATO forces now exercise close to the Russian border in the Baltic states

 

http://www.stripes.com/news/nato-wraps-up-major-exercise-in-poland-baltics-1.252512

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/10802516/British-troops-fly-to-Estonia-as-tensions-with-Russia-rise.html

 

 

Aggression generally means advancing your force and power into the territory of others, or (and this is important in this case) into non-aligned and neutral territory bordering rival countries.  Ukraine, since 1991, had been non-aligned, retaining economic and political links both with both Russia and the EU bloc.

 

 

Aggression is not always achieved by direct military intervention. It can be done by economic pressure, by sheer menace, by stirring up ethnic or other discontents in the territory of the targeted country (examples, Germany’s overthrow of the Russian provisional Government by employing the Bolsheviks in 1917, the Anglo-American overthrow of Iran’s leader, Mohammad Mossadeq, by a stage-managed putsch in 1953).

 

I fail to see how it was anything but an act of aggression to encourage Ukraine ( a bankrupt, corrupt, ill-gverned and poorly-defended state which in normal circumstances would not be considered for membership of these bodies for an instant) to dream of EU and NATO membership.

 

THis was done, as can be dmonstrate easily by recourse to published figures and reliably reported facts, by scattering EU largesse in hundreds of millions of Euros across Ukraine

 

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/08/04/EU-millions-paid-for-Ukrainian-groups-behind-Yanukovych-overthrow

 

, plus the active intervention on foreign soil of prominent NATO and EU politicians.

 

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-victoria-nuland-wades-into-ukraine-turmoil-over-yanukovich/

 

 

http://eastbook.eu/en/2013/12/uncategorized-en/two-days-in-the-hottest-scene-catherine-ashton-visits-ukraine/

 

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/10518859/John-McCain-in-Kiev-Ukraine-will-make-Europe-better.html

 

 

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/12/04/uk-ukraine-idUKBRE9B20BV20131204

 

Ukraine was thuis encouraged to  seek EU association, and then accepting the resulting unconstitutional regime change as valid, and accepting the resulting government as a legitimate negotiating partner, could possibly be described as ‘defensive’, or ‘passive’.  

 

IN any allegation of assault, self-defence is generally regarded either as a mitigation or as an actual full defence against the charge.  In this case, the expanding power, aggressively pushing its desires, ignores protests made over a long period, and overrides a peaceful attempt by Russia to resolve the quarrel.

 

It may then be reasonably assumed to have taken more serious, perhaps covert steps to reinforce its earlier encouragement

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/14/john-brennan-kiev_n_5147799.html

 

 

Arithmetic again: Just before the Kiev putsch Ukraine had asked for €20 billion (US$27 billion) in loans and aid. The EU was willing to offer €610 million in loans, one 16th of what Kiev wanted.  Russia offered $15 billion in loans plus cheaper gas prices, far closer to what Kiev was asking for.  In addition to the money, the EU required major changes to the regulations and laws in Ukraine. Russia did not. Thus the EU sought power over Ukraine which it had previously possessed, in return for wholly inadequate financial promises.  Russia offered a large bribe to maintain the status quo, under which Ukraine remained non-aligned.  It was hardly unreasonable or irresponsible of President Yanukovych to decide that the Russian offer was preferable.

 

 

The Arithmetic of Alleged Aggression:

 

 

Territories and populations in Europe which have ceased to be ruled from Moscow since 1989 (NB, these figures are approximate, and do not include Central Asia or the Caucasus, in which case they would be much larger):

 

Former Warsaw Pact

 

GDR 16 Million people 41,800  sq m

Poland 38 million 128,000 sq m

Czechoslovakia 15.6 million 49,300 sq mi

Hungary 9.9 million 36,000 sq mi

Romania 20 million 92,000 sq mi

Bulgaria 7 million 43,000 sq mi

 

Former USSR now in EU and NATO

 

Lithuania 3 million, 25,000 sq mi

Latvia 2 million, 25,000 sq mi

Estonia 1.3 million, 17,000 sq mi

 

Former USSR now non-aligned

 

Belarus 9.5 million 80,000 sq mi

Ukraine 48 million 238,000 sq mi

 

Thus, Moscow has lost direct control over roughly 180 million people, and roughly 700,000 square miles.

 

The EU (and its military wing, NATO) have in the same period *gained * control over more than 120 million of those people, and almost 400,000 of those square miles.

 

How many times is a sovereign power, clearly the defensive and losing force in this change, expected to watch its protests being ignored, and former agreements being broken, before it is entitled to respond?

 

I thought we were all supposed to believe that appeasement in the face of threats and force was a bad policy, to be despised and mocked? Yet, not merely do we condemn President Putin when he refuses to appease the ‘West’ any further and says, after many clear and patient warnings ‘thus far and no further’.  We actually accuse him of aggression.

 

I am accused, in this debate, of being an apologist for Mr Putin, or of ‘siding’ with Russia. I have even been slandered by people claiming I take money from Russia in some form. This is not so.  I regard Mr Putin as a sinister tyrant, and am happy to repeat this ad infinitum, because it is true. But it has absolutely nothing to do with the rights or wrongs of the Ukraine dispute. The blindness of so many commentators to the extremely nasty side of the Ukrainian elite and its allies is a symptom of their infantile view that there are ‘good’ and ‘bad’ countries and that we should pick our side on this basis. Such babyish views always lead to exaggerating the ills of the one, and concealing from yourself the wrongs of the other.

 

I think the same (sinister tyranny) is true ( as I shall explain in a later post) of our NATO ally Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, and of the Chinese Politburo. My response to tyranny abroad is to defend liberty and law at home where and when I can, not to imagine that I am some sort of caped crusader who can go round the world biffing despots.

 

My engagement in this conflict is simply an attempt to set the record straight. This seems to me to be justified when I read unhinged calls for *us* to threaten Russia with sanctions or military action, to halt Moscow’s wicked aggression.

 

As we have learned several times in recent years the recruitment of the ignorant populace into such crusading fantasies is the first step towards actual war. Much later, the duped and deluded shouters of ‘tough’ slogans  realise that they have been humbugged by politicians, and pretend they never supported the wild adventures for which they once cheered.

 

But by that time, the bereaved, here and there,  have been forgotten, the mounds of rotting human corpses have been bulldozed into the mass graves by men in  gasmasks, the ruined towns clumsily rebuilt,  and the limbless, blinded  children have graduated to adult begging.

 

It is the truth I support in this conflict, and it tells me that this country and its people have no reason to support a historically-tainted and dangerous interference by outsiders in a part of the world where it is very likely to do serious harm. At the very least, Britain has no reason to support this adventure. And if we stand aside, we make it less likely that it will turn into a full-scale war. Otherwise….

Corrupted and defeated by our own shameful cruelty

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

There is nothing more dangerous in the world than a man who thinks he is doing good. Such men are capable of the most dreadful horrors. 

And it was such men who allowed and carried out the shameful torture which we now know for certain was inflicted by ‘our’ side in the great unending battle against ‘Al Qaeda’ or ‘ISIS’ that we are constantly told we are fighting.

This is why – as a patriotic Christian conservative from a Service family – I strive so hard to puncture and mock the ridiculous rhetoric of the ‘war on terror’.

The truth remains that it is more likely that an eagle will drop a tortoise on your head from the sky than that you will be affected by terrorism in your entire life. And in any case Mrs Theresa May and MI5, MI6, the CIA and GCHQ can’t protect you from either of these remote dangers.

If we continue to believe this self-righteous anti-terror rubbish, we will in the end be destroyed by our own hypocrisy.

If we, the self-proclaimed apostles of liberty and justice, freeze men to death, chained on concrete floors, or torment them into absurd confessions of non-existent crimes, or cram them without trial into maddening dungeons, then we will become the very thing we claim to fight.

And we will have been defeated by ourselves.

I know many do not like it when I say this. When, back in January 2002, I attacked the treatment of captives at Guantanamo on this page, my postbag and my email inbox seethed with angry denunciations.

I had written: ‘If you loathe terrorist murder and support the righteous use of force, then you ought also to feel queasy about the sight of a fellow creature grovelling in chains before his armed captors.’ The letters I received all said roughly the same. The shackled, kneeling prisoners ‘deserved everything they got’. In vain I wrote back to point out that we had no idea if they had actually committed any crimes. The righteous mood was so strong that revelations of torture – at the time – might well have met with cheers and applause.

But it’s at the time that you have to stand against these things. That is why each of us needs to rediscover the idea of absolute rules, rules we have no power to change, which simply prohibit some actions.

We think of temptation in terms of too much chocolate, or sex, or whatever it is that most makes us want to stray. But the temptation to do cruel things – or to witness them and approve – is in almost all of us, and has to be curbed.

Torture is not just invariably wrong, it is also useless and worse than useless. People will say anything to stop the pain and fear.

Waterboarding as my late brother Christopher discovered for himself in a courageous experiment, is much worse than it sounds, much like drowning only with deliberate malice added on.

The ridiculous dispatch of troops in armoured vehicles to Heathrow in 2003 – militarilyworthless posturing – followed the invention of a ‘plot to attack the airport’ by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who just wanted the agony and misery of waterboarding to stop. He would have revealed a plot to blow up the Moon if he had been asked to.

But I’ll add this: as far as I’m concerned, even if the information was right, torture is never, ever justified. It corrupts the society that allows it, and incidentally fosters endless hatred among the victims, which may return to harm or destroy us decades hence.

Evil is always evil, and always begets more evil.

An innocent man deserved my help and I failed him

One of my great regrets is that I did not stand up for Christopher Jefferies, the eccentric teacher falsely accused of the murder of Joanna Yeates.

I felt at the time that the treatment of this man was utterly wrong. I was amazed that members of my trade were breaking what I had been taught were absolute rules to uphold the presumption of innocence. But I never wrote a word.

I waited for someone else to stop it. And nobody did.

So – reminded of the whole ghastly thing by last week’s powerful ITV dramatisation – I offer my personal apologies to Mr Jefferies for failing to come to his aid when I had the power to do so.

I suspect that I may be a bit of an eccentric myself, and will become more of one as the years go by, and can easily imagine falling into the same pit of unjustified suspicion that so nearly engulfed him.

It was a disgrace. But the newspapers involved were severely punished for it. I doubt it will be repeated.

The police, on the other hand, seem to have got away without much scrutiny.

Their pursuit of Mr Jefferies was blatantly stupid and left a killer free to kill again for many precious days (thank Heaven he didn’t). We also have to ask if officers fed damaging rumours about Jefferies to media friends.

The drama’s portrayal of the police’s creepy friendliness as they humiliated an innocent man and single-mindedly propelled him towards a life sentence made me shudder for the state of justice in our country.

Amid all that DNA-testing, fingerprint powder and fingertip searching, there was not one ounce of the presumption of innocence on which all our freedoms depend. One of today’s uneducated teenage juries could easily have sent Mr Jefferies to prison on a majority verdict. He could still be there.

There is only one way to fix schools

How many politicians have now pledged to fix our state school system, having wrecked it in the 1960s and 1970s? The list of them stretches back in a roll-call of failure – from Shirley Williams to Michael Gove.

Time and again they have resorted to bludgeons, the national curriculum, the Ofsted terror, the GCSE, and the current modish fixit kit – ‘Academies’. None of them can change the simple fact that comprehensive schooling just doesn’t work. Without selection there can be neither discipline nor rigour. And ability is the only fair way to select.

Hence this week’s tragi-comic Ofsted report, which classified as ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ many schools that politicians wouldn’t send their children to (notably Burlington Danes in London, spurned by Mr Gove even though he lives practically next door).

It actually admits that 400,000 (out of 3.2 million) secondary schoolchildren go to schools where behaviour is so poor it is hard to learn at all. More than 170,000 are now in schools that even Ofsted says are ‘inadequate’.

We claim to be keen on freedom and democracy in the Arab world. In the name of this cause we have plunged Libya into a dark night of chaos, and devastated Syria.

In that case why (when we can barely defend our own coastline any more) are we opening a naval base in Bahrain, a nasty, repressive state which punishes doctors for treating wounded protesters?

Here’s a clue. We couldn’t care less about freedom or democracy, but we do like to suck up to Saudi Arabia, which hated Libya’s Gaddafi, hates Syria’s Assad, and is Bahrain’s close friend.

To comment, please click and scroll down

How to find a Secondary Modern School in Today's Britain

The stupidest objection to restoring Grammar schools (and there is stiff competition for this title) is the argument that people who think they want Grammars back wouldn’t want to have Secondary Moderns back.

Secondary Moderns can’t ‘come back’ because they never went away. In fact there are more of them than there were before 1965, imposed on more poor people each year on ‘National Offer Day’, when the offspring of the poor and disadvantaged are crammed willy-nilly into bog-standard ‘Comprehensives’ .

 

Earlier today I placed on Twitter Hitchens’s guide on how to find a Secondary Modern school in Today’s Britain.

 

I repeat it here

 

Step One: Find an alleged ‘Comprehensive school’

Step Two: Locate a Labour or Tory politician living in catchment area of said ‘Comprehensive’.

Step Three: Show the school to the politician.

Step Four: Stand back as politician a) wangles child into covertly selective state school miles away or b) goes private.

You’ve identified the local Secondary Modern.

 

Never fails. If you can’t find a politician, almost any noisy media liberal will do.

 

 

 

  

Are We Going Down the Gurgler? An Exchange with an Optimist

If you click on this link 

http://www.brightblue.org.uk/The_Progressive_Conscience_Winter_2014.pdf

and scroll down to page 20, you will find an exchange on the state of the nation between me and Ryan Shorthouse, who is the director of sonething called 'Bright Blue'. It was their idea

 

 

 

 

Who Whom? Who Actually Started the Aggression in Eastern Europe?

Below I respond to various comments on the Russophobia’ posting (my comments are marked ****):

‘Mike B’: ‘Mr Hitchens talks about blindspots, but he appears to have one himself when it comes to Ukraine. He talks about the horror and evil of the Soviet Empire, but does not mention the specific horrors inflicted on that country by Moscow (and I speak of the source of the power, rather than the provenance of its leaders). In particular, I would mention the Holodomor, the great famine, in which several million, perhaps as many as 7.5 million Ukrainians perished. It was certainly caused by the Soviet leadership and was likely a deliberate plan by Stalin to undermine Ukrainian nationalism.

 

 

****I respond. There is no question that Stalin deliberately created a famine which killed appalling numbers of Ukrainians. The difficulty with the concept of the ‘Holodomor’ is that the same famine also killed huge numbers of Russians and others, in Russia itself and in North Kazakhstan.  I think any careful reading of history suggests that it was a Communist act of class war against independent peasants, not an act of racial murder. This does not make it any less appalling. It just alters its significance and, in my view,  reflects poorly on those who promote the idea that it was a racial murder, comparable with the Shoah or Turkey's Armenian genocide.

 

 

Mr ‘B’ adds: ‘As for the EU, it is Ukraine which is seeking membership of that organisation, not the other way round.

 

****I respond. Technically, this is true. But if you insist on examining this whole controversy at face value, you will (as so many do) repeatedly miss the point of it.  Before you apply, you ahve to consider that your application wiol be taken seriously. In 1962, the then Common Market wouldn't even consider Britain as a member. Now it propsoes to admit Ukraine, one of the most bankrupt and corrupt states on Earth?

 

Even in the decade after the end of the Cold War, the idea of Ukrainian membership of the EU or of NATO would have been considered absurd. It was 2004 before the major Warsaw Pact countries joined, plus the Baltic states. And that was under American pressure. So the real force behind the application might reasonably be stated to be neither the EU nor the applicant states, but the USA. The USA’s purposes are political. They are part of its policy originating in 1916, but frustrated by subsequent events until 1945, of stabilising Europe by federalising it. This policy is also (as I shall discuss below) the revival of the German liberal scheme for a ‘federative empire’ involving limited sovereignty for its members, dating from 1915.

 

Soon it really will be impossible to argue this any more with anyone who has not read Adam Tooze’s book ‘The Deluge’, which I have so many times recommended here as essential for an understanding of what is happening. I must especially urge my persistent automatic critics, such as Mr ‘P’, to read this book. They really would learn something from it, and would at least be able to disagree with me intelligently, rather than regurgitating stuff they have got off the web, or from Conventional Wisdom Weekly.

 

&&&&&

 

‘Horace’: ‘But why do you keep trying to justify Russia's invasion and occupation of sovereign Ukraine territory today? No one is threatening Russia;

 

 

***I reply: that surely depends what you mean by ‘threatening’? Russia, being a land power without natural borders, follows the normal policy of land powers (though unknown to sea powers and islands), of caring very much about the state of its immediate neighbours. Some of the people who lecture Russia about its interest in Ukraine should talk to Canadian politicians about their relations with the USA.  If the USA thought for a moment that Canada was incapable of defending the Arctic approaches to North America, it would step in to Canadian affairs directly.  And I hate to think what would happen if Mexico acquired a pro-Iranian, Moscow-friendly,Chavez-style government.

 

Russia is particularly sensitive about the Baltic states (because they control air and sea access to its former capital  and highly strategic major city, St Petersburg, and indeed provide the classical land invasion route used by western invaders of Russia in the past ),  and Ukraine, because much of Ukrainian industry is still closely integrated with Russian industry, especially military industry.

 

Russia is also interested in Ukraine because of its obvious strategic importance, and access to the Black Sea, Crimea and its much-valued naval station at Sevastopol.  It is perfectly reasonable for Russia to be concerned. Because the incorporation of the Baltic states into NATO and the EU was achieved at a moment of historic weakness, Russia has accepted this and has made no move to attempt to reverse it, though it could easily do so by following the example of the EU and the US, and stirring up ‘colour revolutions’ among the Russian populations of these countries, and by other covert means well known to all modern diplomatic and secret services.

 

Likewise, Russia has accepted Ukrainian independence, Ukrainian blackmail over Sevastopol (the supposedly pro-Moscow Yanukovych (this claim is so funny to anyone who knows the region)  used Russia’s desire to keep a foothold in Sevastopol to drive a very hard bargain over energy supplies).

 

Russia has however warned repeatedly and clearly that it is no longer prepared to accept any more of the repeated humiliations imposed on it since the collapse of the USSR. It has not sought to reopen existing settlements. But it has said that enough is enough.

 

In February 2007 Mr Putin warned at a Munich conference in a widely-reported speech that he regarded the eastward march of NATO as a ‘serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust’. He reminded listeners of what the NATO general secretary, Manfred Woerner, said in May 1990 ‘the fact that we are not ready to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee’. Where are those guarantees?’ For of course the armies of Poland, the Baltics, the Czech Republic etc are now NATO armies, all weell beyond the borders of Germany, andthey conduct exercises with NATO forces close to the Russian border.  

 

I might insert here the well-known exchanges between Mikhail Gorbachev and James Baker, then the USA’s Secretary of State, In Mr Baker’s own account of his 1990 conversation with Mikhail Gorbachev, he wrote :’NATO, whose juris[diction] would not move eastward’, plus the letter Baker wrote at the time to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, also saying he had offered the USSR ‘ assurances that NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward from its current jurisdiction’.

 

Since 1989. Moscow has yielded control over roughly 180 million people, and 700,000 square miles of territory (in Europe alone), without fighting or losing a war or firing a shot. This is the aggressor?

 

All Western diplomats and governments were aware of these warnings, many times repeated by Mr Putin over many years. They were also free to ignore them. But they knew that if they ignored them, they might provoke a reaction. They did ignore them.  Whose responsibility, then, were the events which followed?

 

As long as Ukraine remained non-aligned, Russia would not act. When an attempt was made to align Ukraine with a rival alliance, Russia used all its diplomatic and economic power to prevent it, a clear sign that Moscow intended to resist the change. When Moscow succeeded, and Yanukovych  said he would not sign the Association Agreement, the ‘West’  continued to press for Ukrainian realignment. Once again, whose fault was it that Russia responded? Who was pushing his pwoer into teritory where it ad not opreviously been, the classic definition of aggression? 

 

No reader here can be in any doubt of the involvement of Western governments, though cash subsidy and personal endorsement, in the pro-EU demonstrations in Kiev. No-one can deny the violence of these demonstrations, as it is beyond doubt (103 protestors and 20 police officers died according to UN figures). No-one can deny the lawless and unconstitutional method of the overthrow of Yanukovych’s government, for it is also demonstrable.  The lawful impeachment process set out in the constitution was not followed.

 

How then can anyone claim that the only ‘aggression; in this dispute came from Moscow?

 

 

‘Horace’ continues: ‘ Nato is a defensive alliance only’.

***I reply: Only if you are astonishingly literal-minded.  NATO has extended its ‘defensive’ guarantee over a huge swath of territory, once Soviet-controlled, later non-aligned, which it previously was not pledged to defend and out of which it had promised to stay. The expansion of a defensive guarantee is surely an assertion of power, where power was not asserted before. If a patch of land lay between your garden and your neighbour’s, which had previously belonged to you but had then (thanks to your financial troubles) been mortgaged, and your neighbour then bought it and put up large signs on the fence saying ‘Keep Out or Else!’, who would be the aggressor?

 

 

‘Horace continues’ : ‘ Russia must be forced out of Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova one way or another. It has plenty of its own land. Strangely it does not support separatism within its own borders, yet initiates a bogus 'insurgency' in Ukraine. The sooner Ukraine joins both Nato and the EU, the better it will be for them and for peace in Europe.’

 

***I reply ‘Must’? Why ‘must’? Who says? For whose benefit? Better for whom?  Is ‘Horace’ prepared to die, or for members of his family to die, in this cause? Is he ready to send other people’s sons, brothers, fathers and husbands to die in this cause? For what end? To prove that history repeats itself?

 

 

 

 

Mr ‘Bunker’  writes: ‘Of course there is no Greater Germany today (but I know what Mr Hitchens means), only a much Lesser Germany integrated together with 27 other countries into the EU. And it is a democratic country that has little to do with the terrible events prior to 1949 except in the memories of those old enough to have been alive then. For the vast majority of Germans today, that is all "history". They have to come to terms with it, but that is another matter entirely, and, I claim, has little, if anything, to do with present-day relations with Russia.’

 

****And I reply : Nations, unless destroyed, remain much the same. They still need food, land on which to grow it, labour, raw materials, markets, access to the sea. Germany, much the same shape that it was in in 1914, has the same needs and the same obvious solutions to them. These solutions were dreamed up by civilised liberals much like those who rule Germany today. I would imagine most Germans, like most British people, are poorly informed about the real nature of politics. It that does not mean that these impulses have ceased to exist. They are just expressed, in ways clearly prefigured by Naumann and von Kuehlmann, through the means of the EU. I have dealt with this question again and again, notably in this article: http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/06/some-thoughts-on-german-domination-of-the-european-union.html

 

 

‘The Wiki Man writes:  ‘And if you say the EU is not 'aggressively expanding' you are deemed to be a 'denier'. If you say that Russian tanks rolling over the border is in fact aggression you are deemed to be an ignoramus of history. Apparently Ukraine's sovereign statehood and membership of the United Nations in that capacity is as nothing compared with Russia's 'legitimate sphere of influence'. And if you say that the corrupt Yanukovych was ousted by a revolutionary groundswell, the pro-Russian faction on this blog become all precious about the meaning of 'legitimacy'. Never mind the hundreds of 'illegitimate' revolutions in history that have unseated intolerable regimes and gone on to establish presumably illegitimate democracies. The American Revolutionary War was one of them. ‘ 

 

****And I reply: Well, if the Wiki Man (whom I have never called a ‘denier’) paid any attention to the facts I ceaselessly adduced, and could learn to tell propaganda from fact, he wouldn’t have so much trouble. He may redefine legitimacy any way he likes.  He won’t get round the fact that the current government of Ukraine came to power following a lawless unconstitutional putsch, and- whatever you think about that – simply cannot be portrayed as the shining vanguard of law-governed democracy. One or the other. Not both. I might point out that the American Revolution derived its legitimacy form its accurate complaint that the 13 colonies were taxed by Westminster, but not represented there. The violent putschists of the Euromaidan overthrew a government elected in what even its enemies concede were free and fair elections.

Berlin versus Moscow - the real, enduring conflict of our time

The posting by the Wiki Man, asserting amazingly that ‘The EU only in recent years decided that Ukraine had met the criteria for membership. The route to membership was clear and open with only signatures to the appended to documents and parliaments to ratify agreements’,  was so amazing that it made me think it was time to re-examine the Russian question.

 

How the Wiki Man can imagine that the EU thought or thinks that the Ukraine has qualified for *EU membership*, I really do not know. Perhaps he has been consulting Dodgipedia, that well known source of duff information. Daft as the EU can sometimes be, it is not that daft. The eastern regions of the EU do indeed pulsate with herds of lipsticked pigs, nations whose enormous failings in economic mismanagement, corruption etc disqualify them from EU membership, yet which have been admitted.

 

But Ukraine is so hopelessly corrupt, lawless and bankrupt, as well as being huge, that even the EU’s most breathless expansion enthusiasts know that membership is a distant dream, at best. There is not enough lipstick in the world to change this.

 

Now, I have tried to explain many times that the real issue here is an abiding conflict between Russia and Greater Germany, dating from the early years of this century.

 

In its original form, this took the shape of Austria and Germany (helped by Lenin and others willing to accept subsidies) stirring up national feeling in the areas now forming part of Ukraine.

 

Some of what is now Ukraine was already then in German (well, Austrian) control, notably the parts around the Austrian city of Lemberg, which later became the Polish Lwow, then was Sovietized and so Russianized as Lvov under the Stalin-Hitler pact, then was seized back by Hitler (I’m not sure what it was called during this period) , then returned to the Soviet prison as Lvov, where it was close to a major centre for jamming Western broadcasts (the electric lights in Lvov are said to have been noticeably brighter after the jamming stopped, so much power did it use), and finally renamed Lviv after Ukrainian independence in 1991.

 

Those who think this area is straightforward, and that the entire ‘West’ is on the same side in an uncomplicated freedom versus tyranny alliance might want to read this interesting account of a recent controversy on the subject in Poland.

 

http://www.economist.com/blogs/easternapproaches/2014/10/poland-and-russia

 

Gosh, doesn’t Mr Sikorski get around a lot? Amazingly he once belonged to Oxford’s famous Bullingdon Club. And it seems to be bad form to mention that he is married to Anne Applebaum, the prominent and influential American journalist and author, at least, hardly anyone ever does mention it, either when writing about him or her.  But he is.

 

Anyway, I’d add that, whatever most of Ukraine is or was , the area round Lviv/Lvov/Lwow/Lemberg, known as Galicia,  is historically quite German and quite Polish, and also, as it happens, the seat and centre of the most militant Ukrainian nationalism. Perhaps this is because it is the most contested.

 

In any case, until Bismarck unified Germany around Prussia, I think it fair to say that this part of the world was predominantly Slav and, with the exception of Galicia, looked more towards Moscow than towards Berlin (though of course Poles, seeking liberation from their three neighbouring oppressors, Russia, Prussia and Austria, tended to look to Paris and even Washington for the hope of liberty).

 

Berlin’s interest grew as Germany grew more powerful and ambitious. Some readers here must be tired of my mentions of Friedrich Naumann’s liberal nationalist concept of ‘Mitteleuropa’, and of Richard von Kuehlmann’s discovery of what would become the concept of the EU – an empire that didn’t look like an empire, that gave the political classes of its member states the trappings of office, but not the reality.

 

As Adam Tooze puts it in in his ‘The Deluge’ (p.113), what Germany sought in 1917 was a ‘zone of German hegemony in central Europe, based on some kind of federative imperialism’.

 

‘‘Once Tsarist power collapsed in 1917 and America entered the war, it was obvious to the more intelligent strategic thinkers in Germany that there was no better means to dynamite the Tsarist Empire than for Berlin to espouse the demand for self-determination’.

 

I stress this forgotten but fascinating and educational era partly to avoid being accused of a thing I don’t do, namely equating modern Germany with Hitler. This would be both hysterical and wrong. Germany had a much more intelligent expansionist policy when it was run by civilized Edwardian liberals. The similarities between the Naumann and Hitler policies arise from the fact that both saw an eastward expansion as being in Germany’s long-term interests, in terms of natural resources, population, labour pools, and long-term, access to the Near-East (by which I mean Asia Minor and the Middle East ).

 

Hitler was stupid and crude where Kuehlmann and Naumann were cunning. Hitler , apart from being distracted by his dogmatic obsession with the mass murder of Europe’s Jews, sought crude conquest by force, made no effort to enlist the local populations,  and lost what he gained in a few years.

 

If Germany had won its 1918 offensive in France (and it very nearly did) it would to this day be ruling Ukraine, the Baltic States and Poland, and probably the Caucasus too, in a ‘federative empire’ made up of nominally independent vassal states claiming to be exercising self-determination.

 

The Austro-Hungarian Empire, still wheezing picturesquely on, but in truth entirely run from Berlin,  would form part of this federative empire, so relieving us of any need to wonder about such states as the Czech Republic , Slovakia or Hungary, which wouldn’t exist in their current form, or about the Balkans, which would have fallen inevitably into the Berlin camp.  There would have been no Versailles, no Trianon. Instead, perhaps, a Treaty of Potsdam with very different implications.

 

The only questions would be about the extent of this ‘federative empire’ and the sort of Russia which would have survived on its edges; and also of its relations with whatever Turkish state survived the process. A German victory in France in 1918 would have prevented the carve-up of the Levant and Mesopotamia by Britain and France, so altering history in even more unpredictable ways.  It would also have left the USA in a rather awkward position, having backed the wrong horse.

 

Anyway, things turned out as they did ( and as they might have turned out in 1914 had we had the sense to stay out of it) , and now, about 100 years later, under American patronage, the European continent has finally implemented most of what Naumann and von Kuehlmann sought in 1918. Except that Russia won’t accept defeat. Britain is no more, France is no more. The USA has decided that von Kuehlmann’s federative empire is the best road to stability( perhaps wrongly)   Berlin and Moscow for the first time face each other in a direct, unmediated confrontation.

 

I shall shortly explain a couple of aspects of that confrontation which are now forgotten or neglected, arising from Peter Hopkirk’s ‘The Great Game’, which I recently finished, and Richard Pipes’s ‘Russian Revolution’ which I am currently reading.  The first may explain Britain’s often rather silly view of Russia. the second may explain why it is rather hard, even for Germanophiles such as I am, to forgive Berlin for its actions in Petrograd in 1917.

Why I Still Go to the Cinema

Two of the best films I have seen in the past few months have been very old.  One was silent. One was in German. The third was in black and white and in a foreign language, and so felt quite old, even though it’s new.

 

They were ‘Ida’, ‘The Battles of Coronel and the Falkland islands’ and ‘M’.

 

People sometimes ask me, after I have excoriated some silly film, why I go to the cinema at all, since I seem to dislike almost everything I see there? Well, first of all, I live in hope.  It’s perfectly possible for modern directors to make good films with modern techniques (I am thinking of ‘Blade Runner’, ‘Witness’, ‘Groundhog Day’ , ‘3.10 to Yuma’ , ‘Walk the Line’, ‘True Grit’ for example, and I’m very fond of ‘Galaxy Quest’ which ought to have attracted more attention when it was first released). I even quite enjoyed ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’, though I suspect it’s only interesting for those of us who can (just) recall the bleak era it portrays.

 

Secondly, I just like the experience. I must have mis-spent many long winter afternoons in the Gosport Ritz, the Gosport Criterion, the Odeon North End and the Essoldo in Portsmouth, and what was once the Scala in Oxford ( scene of a hilarious moment in Tariq Ali’s young life when he was called a ‘fascist!’ and pelted with rubbish for standing up during ‘God save the Queen’  and is now renamed the Phoenix

 

Later on there were the Hampstead Everyman, the Academy in Oxford Street (to which I once rode 60 miles on a motorbike in the rain to see ‘Ulysses’ after it was refused a certificate in Oxford)   and the Curzon in Mayfair, and numerous American movie theatres from Texas to Chicago. I even have memories of the ‘Cosmos’ in north Moscow (such hard seats) , and of various French cinemas where I have watched English-language films in ‘version originale’ (i.e English, undubbed), with French subtitles, so that I now know the rather disappointing French equivalent of the rudest insult in the American swearing lexicon, a four-syllable word imputing incest.

 

I love the whole business, the entry into another world through a magic portal, the often wonderful décor, the needless curtains, the censor’s certificate, the trailers and advertisemnets going on so long you often forgot what you’d come to see (still a problem)  the unhealthy refreshments (‘ an hour from now, you’ll wish you hadn’t had one’, as the Hot Dog ads nearly said , or the unalluring , richly-coloured films of the full meals available in the cinema’s actual restaurant – still unbelievably in being in the Oxford ABC in the late 1960s,

 

 This was also the last place I heard the national anthem played at the end of a film, in this case the 1968 version of ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ . I didn’t stand. Most people did. But in the spirit of the times, the practice vanished round about then. I can’t recall if there was any centralised decision by the cinema chains. But it seems incredible now that it happened at all. And what happened to usherettes, who used to guide us to our seats with shaded torches, and on occasion expose people who were canoodling or otherwise  misbehaving in the dark?  I can remember them surviving well into the 1970s.

 

Anyway, as to the three that I’ve recently seen, the ‘Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands’ (recently restored by the British Film Institute) is a portrayal of two naval clashes which happened almost exactly a century ago (Coronel on 1 November 1914, The Falklands on the 8th December) . The acting’s all right, and the major characters – Admirals Sturdee and Graf von Spee, First Sea Lord Jackie Fisher, Winston Churchill) are played by remarkable lookalikes. There’s even a  farcical interlude in the Falklands which might well have been the original inspiration for Dad’s Army – a shambling platoon of greybeards preparing to take on the Kaiser (the Isles of Scilly play the Falklands) . As they muster to face the foe, one is seen to have turned up without his weapon. ‘Where’s your *$*?*@*%  rifle?!’ shouts the subtitle, as the old loon hares off to fetch it and the German battle fleet looms ever larger on the horizon.

 

It’s almost a 19th-century naval conflict. And it is full of the sort of chivalry that died for good after 1939. At a dinner to celebrate his victory at Coronel, von Spee refuses to drink a toast to the defeat of the damned English, saying they are courageous foes.  And so they are. Poor Christopher Cradock, von Spee’s opponent at Coronel, knows before he decides to fight that he is hopelessly outgunned by the German squadron, knows that the outcome will almost certainly be his defeat and death,  but believes it his duty to try to damage the Kaiser’s ships before he dies. Admiral Ernest Troubridge's disastrous failure to intercept the German ships Goeben and Breslau on their way to Turkey (a knife-edge episode wonderfully described in Barbara Tuchman's 'Guns of August') may have been on his mind. Troubridge, similarly outgunned by the powerful Goeben, decided not to risk his poorly-armed ships and, though acquitted in a court martial of any technical wrongdoing, never recovered his reputation.

 

For his part, von Spee knows well that Britain will not forgive him for what he has done, and will send a mighty force to kill him and destroy his ships. A fascinating segment at the heart of the film shows Fisher and Churchill furiously pressing the Devonport dockyard to prepare the punitive fleet. There are haunting scenes of dockyard workers streaming aboard the chosen ships in their hundreds, to fit them out for war, which summon up the older Britain of hard manual work and old-fashioned skills better than almost anything I’ve seen.

Those who love the sight of warships, as I do, will rejoice at many shots of naval leviathans at speed and at sea.  I think ( an expert will tell me) that one of the British battlecruisers is played by the beautiful 1914 battleship HMS Barham, whose tragic end in 1941 was also filmed, a clip which remains one of the most shocking and distressing images of warfare ever recorded. It is comparable to the sinking of the Austro-Hungarian dreadnought Szent Istvan in the First World War, but far, far worse for many hundreds died horribly in the Barham, and many were appallingly injured too, whereas the casualties in the Szent Istvan were few.   

 

Special effects, no doubt good for the time, now look hopelessly weak, and some of the film is backwards (as you can see from the cap-band of a German sailor). But it’s a compelling and fair account of a forgotten era, often rather beautiful, very unselfconscious and so very truthful.

 

‘Ida’, a Polish film made in 2013, is about a novice nun in late 1950s Poland, who is told by her mother superior to go and visit her aunt before she takes her final vows. Her aunt turns out to be a sardonic and despairing Communist apparatchik, with a thirst for vodka and a habit of driving her car into ditches – yet one of the most attractive and interesting characters I’ve seen in a film in a long time. Her ghastly funeral (yes, she dies in the film, I won’t say how or why)  is a marvellously bleak Godless ceremony, of the kind now becoming common here, attended by potato-faced Communists and enlivened only by the playing of a scratchy record of the ‘Internationale’ (favourite funeral song of so many Blairite heroes and heroines).

 

She introduces Ida to the modern world, of sex and jazz, but also reveals to her that she is in fact a Jew, and that the rest of her family was murdered by a neighbour in the weary, sagging, miserable village which is her place or origin.  It’s the usual complicated occupation story, a bit of heroism, a bit of betrayal, a lot of greed, and now a fear that she will come back and claim what the killer has stolen from her. There’s one exhumation scene of great horror, though no actual charnel-house nastiness is shown, and a terrible moment when the aunt and the would-be nun arrive at an abandoned and weed-grown Jewish cemetery, a place so dark and full of misery and tragedy that you almost expect the very trees to groan out loud, to bury what they have found. These will stay in my mind, as will the sarcastic aunt’s conversation with the village barkeeper (roughly as follows).

Aunt: ‘I’m trying to find out what happened to some relatives who used to live here’.

Barkeeper : ‘Ah. Jews, were they?’

Aunt: (finishing third or fourth large glass) ’No, Eskimoes’.

 

The best thing about it, and there are many good things, is the fact that it does not resort to the usual cliché in such films. You’ll have to get hold of it yourself one day to find out exactly what I mean. But anyone who sees it will be changed, and will be a more complete person than he or she was before.

 

Third is ‘M’, Fritz Lang’s brilliant film about the pursuit of a child-murderer in a great city of the Weimar Republic.  I saw it first many years ago, and there’s now a new and much-restored print. It has everything – police procedural, social commentary,  a ( very unorthodox) trial, a chase. On top of this are repeated glimpses of normal life in a Germany before Hitler, both modern and very old-fashioned, which almost amount to a documentary in its own right. As you watch it, you will see where dozens of subsequent film-makers have got their ideas from.  

 

That’s why I keep going to the cinema. It still has an intense  power to move, inform and captivate. Anyone with any standards is bound to be disappointed most of the time, but not always.  It would have been a great pity if the much-inferior form of TV had (as many predicted in my childhood) put cinemas out of business. 

Is Devolution a Moral issue?

I was pleased, but faintly surprised, to be asked last week to discuss devolution on the BBC Radio 4 Programme 'The Moral Maze'. 

 

This is the result, kindly provided for me by a reader

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV6IPcfRcVM

The Perils of Russophobia

I promised to write about why Britain can’t see Russia straight, and why it is hard to forgive Germany for what she did in Petrograd in 1917.

 

Here goes. I shall start in the high, waste paces of the earth, where the Great game was played, because it helps to explain a general British blindnesson this subject, one from which I used to suffer myself.

 

Having been to Kashgar, Tashkent, Teheran Samarkand and Peshawar, and been overwhelmed by the sheer delight of being in these places, I loved almost every page of Peter Hopkirk’s ‘The Great Game’.

 

You see, to me, much of this part of the world always seemed to exist really only in the world of myth. I had seen faded gravure pictures of it in antique copies of ‘The Children’s Encyclopaedia’, with which I would shut myself away in the disused pantry of a holiday house we used to take each year in the then unknown village of West Wittering, later to be made famous by Keith Richards and Marianne Faithfull.

 

The very names, as George Macdonald Fraser once pointed out, sound like magic spells, especially Samarkand. I can still misquote at will from James Elroy Flecker: 'Sweet to ride forth at evening past the wells, where shadows stretch gigantic on the sand, and, softly in the silence, beat the bells, along the Golden Road to Samarkand. We travel not for trafficking alone. By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned. For lust of knowing what should not be known, we take the Golden Road to Samarkand’.

 

Flecker was a pretty odd fellow, who seems to have lusted quite a lot for knowledge of what should not be known, but goodness! He could evoke the Englishman’s idea of the East, remote, swept by hot unfriendly winds, above all a long, long way from Bromley, Solihull or Maidenhead, and likely to stay that way.

 

That was the way it looked, in the Encyclopaedia in those fuzzy old pictures, tightly sealed in a box marked ‘far away’.

 

To be pitched into it, pungent, dangerous and hot, was something of a surprise, especially since this happened because I had gone to live in Moscow and had only dimly appreciated that the Soviet capital was an easy gateway to the unknown wilds of Central Asia.  Of all my travels, I still tend to think that my visit to Samarkand was the most exotic and overpowering I have ever undertaken.  It wasn’t very safe, it wasn’t very clean, it was an explosion of odours and colours more intense than I had ever seen before. Even then, it was still the edge of the known world. To this day, I can be pretty sure that in any group of people I will be the only one who has been there.

 

I shan’t, I fear,  ever get back to Samarkand, not while Uzbekistan has its present government, and so will never get to Bokhara or Khiva at all, which I shall always regret. And while part of me longs to go once more to see if the Chinese have left anything of Kashgar

(which they were busy wrecking when I was last there http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1233439/Special-Investigation-PETER-HITCHENS--Blood-fear-Happiness-Street-China-threatens-obliterate-ancient-culture.html )

... I somehow doubt it, though the old vineyards at the edge of town, dating from the time of Christ, may yet survive, and the unearthly stone hills, which lie to the West of the railway for some miles, will be there long after the Peking regime has passed into myth. Perhaps I'll go again one day. 

 

It is a great and uplifting journey, especially on the astonishing imperial railway which Peking has built to Kashgar.

 

But the point about all these back-of-beyond places is that we once believed that they were a battlefield between the British and Russian Empires, and a possible invasion route down which the Tsar’s Cossacks would one day come to steal the Raj from us. Read Peter Hopkirk’s book (the Great Game)yourselves to see what you think, but I am more or less sure that this was a phantom fear. If you read his accounts of the adventures of brave, wild men from both sides who first penetrated this lawless, mapless region, you will see that such an invasion was an almost impossibly hopeless task. Any Russian army that reached the Khyber, or Quetta, would be so exhausted, ill-equipped and half-starved that a well-led defensive force could have blown it to pieces.

 

Russia certainly wanted to own central Asia and to dominate Persia. It had quietly seized large chunks of China which are going to very troublesome in the years ahead. But what it really wanted (and would certainly have got, under secret agreements duly signed and sealed,  had the Tsar survived until 1918) was Constantinople. And it used its theoretical ability to threaten India as a counter-tease to Britain, when Britain got in the way of its plans to take over the mouth of the Black Sea.

 

Russia wanted Constantinople for its own purposes, to secure its southern flank against attack. An intelligent British government would have recognised this, rather than imagining that St Petersburg, as it then was, had a global plan to chuck Britain out of Egypt and deprive us of India.  This phantasmal fear was largely to blame for the futile war in the Crimea, whose only lasting benefit to anyone on either side was to improve the standard of hospital nursing. I have a feeling this could have been achieved without a bloody war.

 

Prominent among those spreading wild Russophobia was none other than The Times newspaper, which still continues in the same tradition today, though in a less direct and appealing way. It's interesting how often that great newspaper is wrong.

 

In 1838, long before Rupert Murdoch got hold of it, that organ was roaring: “From the frontiers of Hungary to the heart of Burmah and Nepaul…the Russian fiend has been haunting and troubling the human race, and diligently perpetrating his malignant frauds…to the vexation of this industrious and essentially pacific empire"(original spellings retained).

 

In 1842, after the self-inflicted catastrophe of the First Afghan War and the destruction of an entire British army, ‘The Times’ sought to blame St Petersburg, ‘whose growing influence amongst these tribes first called for our interference’. The Thunderer stressed that Russian agents were ‘examining with the greatest care’ the passes leading into British India . And it was suspicious that one of the first to be killed was the British political officer Sir Alexander Burnes  ‘the keenest antagonist of the Russian agents’.

 

In retrospect it is fairly easy to see that these suspicions were not really justified. How much  is written today about Russia by our media which will look just as thin 100, or even ten years hence?

 

There’s something about Russia – its different alphabet, its troublesome consonants,  its bearded intellectuals, its frozen climate, its ferocious vodka,  its onion-domed, oriental architecture and its deep dark forests and Siberian vastness, which makes most Western observers throw up their hands in bafflement and (in some cases) wrongly–assumed superiority.

 

Most Russians are pretty unhappy about their own country’s politics. But they understand all too well how it is that their choices are so limited. Indefensible frontiers make a country put security first and liberty second, authority first and law second, and it would be interesting to see how much English liberty there would be if our small culture had sought to survive on the banks of the Volga or the Don (or come to that the banks of the Loire or the Danube or the Rhine) .

 

Of course, if people wouls stop attacking Russia, it might develop more towards the liberty and law model (see below) . But it gets few chances to do so. 

 

I am very glad of the sea, which has served Britain so well over so many centuries. But it is not a virtue for which we , the British, can claim credit. It is just a piece of good providence, which the poor Russians don't share. The only thing we can claim to have done is built a Navy to ensure that nobody else controlled it, but now we have abandoned that security, there’s nothing to boast of at all.  I think the general British inability to understand continental politics, and to mess up interventions on the continent most of the time, stems from this simple, total inability to understand that, without a deep wide saltwater moat, your life is entirely different from that of someone who lacks this treasure. I am increasingly nauseated by people who sneer at the French for collaborating, who would themselves have collaborated just as swiftly under the same conditions – but just lack the imagination to see that.

 

When I came to know individual Russians, I began to admire them for their humorous stoicism in the face of a harshness of life, from the moment of birth, which would have shrivelled the vitals of most English people I know.

 

So perhaps we might consider it possible that Russians are like us, but cursed with different circumstances. And so to consider those circumstances a bit more intelligently.

 

And so to Richard Pipes.

 

My edition of his ‘The Russian Revolution 1899-1919’ has a clever joke on its cover, which only the assiduous reader will discover. It shows a scene of panic and violence on the streets of Petrograd

No obvious danger is visible, but it is full of terror. People are lying prone, perhaps dead, perhaps taking cover. Others are running. Hats lie abandoned among the tramlines. Great buildings, erected by authority and order, stare down on an alarming chaos. Soon, you sense, they may be in flames. And nobody will be coing to put them out. 

 

On page 429, the picture is reprinted in the text. But here we learn that it is not what most people think of as ‘The Russian Revolution’, of October 1917. It is a scene from the failed Bolshevik putsch in July of that year, which collapsed because its leaders, principally Lenin,  lost their nerve,

 

The actual ‘October Revolution’ was not significantly violent at all. Sergei Eisenstein’s 1927 film ‘October’, scenes from which are often quite wrongly used in ‘documentaries’ to illustrate the Leninist coup d’etat , is a work of fiction. The alleged ‘Storming’ of the Winter Palace did not take place. The building was not really even defended by the time the Bolsheviks walked in. The event portrayed in Eisenstein’s film is a pantomime with almost no basis in fact.

 

The truth is far, far less romantic and much more squalid. Lenin was an agent of the German government, who had transported him to Petrograd and who (by clever means described in the Pipes book) channelled very large sums to the Bolsheviks in the justified hope that they would overthrow the Provisional Government and take Russia out of the war, freeing them to begin their ‘Federative Empire’ in the East at Brest-Litovsk ,and defeat Britain and France in a  final one-front offensive in the summer of 1918 (as they almost did) .

 

There had been a real revolution, a vast convulsion and moral collapse of the old order, in Petrograd in February 1917. This had created, for the first time, a free and potentially law-governed modern Russia, which might have become a normal country. Alas, despite being warned, and despite being offered the support of the army to put down the Bolsheviks when it would have been easy, by the interesting and far from Tsarist General Lavr Kornilov , Russia’s Provisional Government and denocratic socialists failed to save themselves and fell needlessly to a feeble, foreign-backed putsch – so condemning the country to nearly 80 years of hell. Looking at the events of these few months in Petrograd, it is as if all the good people have been hypnotized by the Bolshevik cobra.

 

They knew that the Bolsheviks planned a coup. They had already seen them try and fail.  They had real information which could have allowed the arrest and execution of the Bolshevik leadership for treason. Perhaps they simply did not believe or understand - as few did then – that so much evil could follow their failure. But they would never have faced this danger without Imperial German gold and scheming.

 

This intervention by Germany must surely be one of the worst actions ever committed by a civilized nation.

 

By comparison with the conspiratorial overthrow of the last best hope of Russian freedom, using a man of boundless evil to accomplish it, invading Belgium seems to me to be a minor sin. How strong must the historic impulse have been to persuade liberal, civilized men in Berlin to hire the merciless bladder of hate, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, and his Bolshevik pirates, to smash a beacon of hope and replace it with the world’s biggest prison camp? And all this was done to secure victory in a warwhich Germany had herself started in 1914, in the hope of defeating and destroying Russia. 

 

What baffles me is why people are so uninterested in the origins and nature of this tragedy, and why they still seem so relaxed about Germany’s repeated efforts to prevent Russia developing as a modern and prosperous country. Of course, this is a reasonable self-interest up to a point.  A powerful,  rich and stable  Russia would not necessarily suit Germany’s needs (read 'the needs of the European Union') and would be an annoying rival for resources and access to the sea in central Europe, Ukraine and the Caucasus.  

But how many times must the rest of us be drawn into this, let alone asked to approve of it, and - worse - frowned on and slandered as apologists for tyranny when we criticize it?

If there is to be peace in Ukraine, and surely we must hope for it above all as Christmas approaches, it would help if we learned a little history, used a bit of arithmetic and stopped blaming the victim for defending himself.  How strange that a retreating, shrinking power should be accused of aggression, and an advancing, expanding one not even acknowledged to exist, let alone criticised or restrained.

 

Still, a world that can use Eisenstein's fiction as documentary footage for 70 years can believe practically anything.