Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 224
August 4, 2014
A Final Riposte to Mr 'P' on the Battle for Ukraine
Mr ‘P’ has now become so prolific and incessant here that he is almost a cottage industry.
He incorrectly asserts that ‘the entirety of Mr Hitchens' theme focusses on claim, opinion, interpretation dressed up as fact. ‘
This simply isn’t the case. I ceaselessly present facts, both historical and contemporary.
And he charges ‘Essentially Mr Hitchens argument is "Any fool can see I'm right"’.
Far from it. It takes quite a clever person to fool himself on such a simple and rather blatant matter.
My argument is to present the facts of an objectively-measurable geographical aggression by an eastward-expanding power into neutral territory bordering a declining and diminished power. I also present the facts of an objectively demonstrable removal of a lawful, legitimate government by unconstitutional means - in defiance, again objectively demonstrable, of that country’s own written constitution.
This document prescribes a system of lawful impeachment for the removal of a President rather than handing over the process to the largest and most vociferous multitude (I hope this term is dispassionate enough for Mr ’P’. See below) which can be assembled.
I also point out that this unconstitutional, and therefore lawless, action overrode the democratically-expressed wishes of Ukraine’s voters in electing, in an undisputed poll, President Yanukovych. I make no claim, for I have no way of knowing, how representative Mr Yanukovych was of his divided nation *as a whole*, before, then or later.
Though I do point out (and elaborate below) that Mr Yanukovych faced a very difficult and contentious decision which would affect many people in his country in many different ways, not all of them good. It is Mr ‘P’ who repeatedly asserts that the multitude spoke for the whole of Ukraine’s people.
I also point out that this process undoubtedly involved severe violence against the stability and order of the state. This is once again objectively shown by the undisputed deaths of at least 20 police officers. The deaths of larger numbers of demonstrators, likewise undisputed (though we have yet to have an investigation into that) provides supporting evidence.
There are also disputes as to who started the violence. Even so, most serious persons accept that legitimate authorities are legally entitled to defend themselves against unconstitutional attempts to put pressure on the government.
This view is not confined to despotisms. Washington DC was placed where it is, and designed as it was, to ensure that the Supreme Court, Congress and President should not be besieged and put under pressure by multitudes. Likewise, the Sessional Orders which prohibit large gatherings in Parliament Square in London, during Parliamentary Sessions, are there to avoid MPs being besieged during law-making by multitudes in a manner they might interpret as threatening.
The presence of a large and hostile multitude close to the seat of legislation and government is a serious matter, as any who have experienced it will know. Some might describe it as encouraging to those who agree with the demonstrators. Some might describe it as discouraging, even intimidating, for thsoe who do not agree with them. Again, I am being careful to take Mr 'P' into account in naking these points.
Rather than properly acknowledge these points or grasp their significance, Mr ‘P’ seeks to make our disagreement about Ukraine a matter of language. In evading the question of whether he would support a people power putsch in his own country, he complains about my use of the word ‘mob’ to describe the multitude which appeared in the heart of the Ukrainian capital.
He says ‘ “mob rule” is a pejorative expression. It condemns itself the moment it is uttered, intended so by the utterer.’
He then says: ‘A mob was set loose on the democratically elected government, a mob orchestrated from the watercoolers at the EU by sinister bureaucrats. It's absurd. Wikipedia has it thus.... "The suspension of the association agreement signature initiated a wave of protests that would ultimately overthrow Viktor Yanukovych and his government." And.... "Viktor Yanukovych and his government were removed from their post by parliament after the 2014 Ukrainian revolution in February 2014."'
(I am amused by Mr ‘P’ using Wikipedia, that minefield of contention, as an impartial umpire in matters of judgement. Alas for himself, he also seems to have garnered (From ‘Wrongipedia’?) the idea that Britain was part of a Triple Alliance with Russia and France in 1914. The fact that Britain *wasn’t* in any such alliance has of course always been the hinge of arguments about why we entered the war anyway. What do they teach them in these schools?).
I’ll leave aside the use of caricature by Mr ‘P’ to misrepresent and so ignore my points about EU aid to NGOs and Civil Society organisations in Ukraine, clearly recorded by the EU’s own websites, and its general long-term efforts to make itself beloved there, by the use of other people’s money . I’ll only say that to attribute to me the formulation ‘a mob orchestrated form the watercoolers at the EU by sinister bureaucrats’ is unserious and unresponsive. Such a formulation would indeed be absurd, had I said it. But I did not. I first quoted a pro-EU writer on the subject, Matthew Omolesky, who said ‘Some might take issue with the rather grandiose claim that Europe cannot endure without Ukraine, but the European Union has long had designs on it. Brussels funnelled some 389 million Euros to Ukraine between 2011 and 2013 alone and distributions were made to a host of civil-society NGOs…
‘...The 2014 protests, touched off by Yanukovych’s rejection of a European Union association deal, constitute the natural and immediate consequence of groundwork undertaken in Brussels, much to the Kremlin’s chagrin’. I then published the EU’s official response, and then produced, with the help of others, substantial evidence of long-term EU spending rather greater than that alluded to in the EU response. But I didn’t say anything like what Mr ‘P’ attributes to me. Those who complain about pejorative language in others should be more careful in their own writings.
Right, then, let’s proceed in the most neutral language I can find, and see if we can establish agreement over that. I have emphasised some points in this narrative:
1: Ukraine declared independence from the USSR in 1990.
2. Ukraine remained economically and culturally close to Russia.
3.Russia made no attempt to compel Ukraine to return to Russian rule
4. Russia has repeatedly made it clear throughout this period , with increasing force and clarity, that it believed Ukraine should stay out of Western European alliances, and that Russia believed it had had an assurance to this effect from the USA at the time of dissolution of the Warsaw Pact.
5. After these warnings were ignored, Russia eventually sought to bring Ukraine into an eastern mirror-image of the EU (See below, item 16 and following)
6. Political dialogue between Ukraine and the EU began in 1994.
7. Ukraine first expressed a desire for associate membership of the EU in 1998
8. In 2002, EU Commissioner Guenter Verheugen said membership was a possibility
9. The then President, Leonid Kuchma responded by saying Ukraine wanted to sign an association agreement by 2003, and would meet all membership requirement by 2011.
10. In November 2005, Commissioner Olli Rehn said the EU was ‘full’ and should avoid overexpansion
11. The ‘Orange Revolution’ of 2007 accelerated demands from parts of the Ukrainian elite for closer links
12. The subsequent collapse of the Orange revolution coalition weakened this pressure, and several EU states, including Germany, were said to be against commitments to bringing Ukraine into the EU.
13.By 2008, an Association Agreement was said by president Yushchenko to be ‘months away’.
14. But in December 2009 the European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said ‘our Ukrainian friends need to do more if they want us to help them more’ and ‘enlargement is not possible in the current situation.’
15. New attempts to reach an Association Agreement were begun under Viktor Yanukovych in March 2012, but were delayed largely thanks to the trail and imprisonment of Yulia Tymoshenko.
16. In December 2012, President Yanukovych was in talks with Russia over a customs union with Belatrus, Kazakhstan and Russia.
17. On 25 February 2013, the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso said ‘One country cannot at the same time be a member of a customs union and be in a deep common free-trade area with the European Union’.
This is absolutely crucial (and makes it clearer than ever before that the EU is a political power, and one which cannot tolerate any rival interest in what it regards as its territory, or in territories as yet outside its control, to which it now lays claim).
From this point it is clear that, for whatever reason (and the exploration of this reason would be most interesting), the EU has finally set aside its long-held and highly justified doubts and hesitations about Ukraine’s economic, political and governmental readiness to be an Associate of the EU. These doubts are based on Ukraine’s appalling economy, its raging unchecked corruption, its administrative incompetence and on the politicisation and corruption of its law-enforcement and judicial systems, none of which have been addressed or put right in all the preceding years. It is these doubts among EU members and officials, not Russian opposition, which have until this moment delayed the EU’s moves towards and Association Agreement. The EU has never paid the slightest attention to Russia's views on the matter, from 1990 till now.
It is also clear (from Mr Barroso’s statement) that this is a contest between Moscow and Brussels, that this is a zero-sum game in which one side must lose all and the other must win all. The EU is specifically and explicitly on the record as not being prepared to view Ukraine as neutral, non-aligned or shared territory. No compromise is to be discussed. It recognises as political the moves by Moscow to bring Ukraine into a Eurasian customs union, and implicitly recognises as political its own moves to bring Ukraine into EU association. It must be one or the other.
It is my contention that this was the moment at which the process became a severe diplomatic conflict between the two power-blocs, a conflict which those who began it must have known was likely to lead to violence, and possibly even war.
Let us be coolly arithmetical here:
Ukraine, having been part of Russia’s empire and sphere of influence, is now free of its empire but not of its influence. Nor is that influence small, insignificant or easily set aside. Ukraine’s economy (especially its advanced weapons factories inherited from the USSR and still integrated with Russia’s defence industry, which are seldom, mentioned in this context, for some reason) is still heavily influenced by Russia. So is its culture, through Russian language and media. And in Crimea, Ukraine still contains that great anomaly Sevastopol, Russia’s principal warm-water naval port, vital to Russian interests in the Near East. Ukraine is very heavily dependent on subsidised Russian gas, and this is probably the only reason why Sevastopol remains in Russian hands, the allegedly pro-Russian Putin puppet Viktor Yanukovych having used the status of Sevastopol to squeeze a highly advantageous gas-price deal out of Moscow, to the fury and resentment of Vladimir Putin.
This is the background to President Yanukovych’s last-minute decision to back out of the Association Agreement. This Agreement will expose Ukraine’s economy to a hurricane of free market ‘reform’, very likely to destroy a lot of jobs and squeeze agriculture. It will put in doubt some of Ukraine’s most successful and stable remaining industries. It will put in doubt cheap Russian gas. It will put in doubt (because of its military and political implications - the agreement commits both parties to promote a gradual convergence toward the EU's Common Security and Defence Policy and European Defence Agency policies) the lucrative agreement over Sevastopol, and quite possibly cause grave conflict in the medium-term over the ownership of Crimea, already a complex and volatile dispute. It is accompanied by rather small promises of aid, compared to much larger promises of credit from Moscow . Nor is this surprising. The EU is in a serious banking and economic crisis, to which no end is in sight. It has no money even to solve its own problems. Russia is a major oil producer with big cash reserves.
It would therefore be perfectly reasonable for any Ukrainian head of state ( especially one then under heavy pressure, as he certainly was, from both Moscow and Brussels, and presumably form Washington DC as well) to hesitate over such an agreement, and to seek instead a compromise between Ukraine’s two suitors, perhaps by seeking from the EU something rather less momentous than the Association Agreement, which would have allowed him to retain some ties with Russia and avoid a confrontation over Sevastopol.
But Mr Yanukovych’s decision to do so was followed by the appearance of very determined and well-organised multitude in Ukraine’s capital. This was presented by some naïve reporters as an uprising against Ukraine’s corruption and a desire for the (alleged) wonders of EU rule. I have no doubt that every citizen of Ukraine would like to web rid of the kleptocracy which rules over them,. But the idea that either faction in this battle is wholly clean is absurd beyond measure. Indeed the untruth of this naïve belief was shown almost immediately by the rapid fading of the star of the West’s pin-up, Yulia Tymoshenko. I think any serious observer must accept that the cause of the multitude, and its uniting purpose, was the Association Agreement. If Mr Yanukovych was corrupt, he was corrupt long before the multitude gathered. And if the multitude’s main concern was corruption in government, then I suspect it ought to be assembled and in full voice, in the heart of Kiev, right now. President Poroshenko is refreshingly unusual among the Ukrainian super-rich, in that he actually made his own fortune. But many of his associates and allies do not, er, have the same distinction.
I think I have demonstrated, in the above, that this is an aggression, and that it took the form of an unconstitutional putsch.
If these things are so, then it seems to me to simply wrong to blame Russia’s President for responding to the aggression (after many years of patient forebearance) with defensive measures, nor to put the blame on him for being the first to step outside the rule of law. You might as well call Britain the aggressor in the Falklands in 1982. I shall return later with some thoughts on the Great War, its outbreak, significance and outcome.
August 3, 2014
More about the EU and its activities in Ukraine
The excellent Richard North, co-author with the wondrous Christopher Booker of the indispensable book 'The Great Deception', has kindly drawn my attention to another EU website on Brussels disbursements in Ukraine.
It can be found here
http://ec.europa.eu/budget/fts/index_en.htm
By calling up 'Ukraine' in the relevant box at the top left, and choosing any year in which you are interested , you can obtain figures which seem to me to be slightly different from the ones supplied to me in the other EU link (skilled website users and arithmetical geniuses are invited to contribute here).
When you've done that, you may click on 'recipents', you will find all kinds of groupings listed, concerned with children's rights, bicycling, political studies, science, space law, citizen journalism, transparency(!) , human rights - plus various impenetrable initials, Ukrainian names which alas I cannot translate, or actual educational institutions. The sums are not vast, but would look generous to most Ukrainians living as they do at far lower levels than Western Europeans.
What do these payments add up to for the period 2007-2013? It seems to me, at first glance, to be more than the 31 million euros cited in the EU statement, though that covers 2004-2013. Perhaps it's a different method of calculation. I shall pursue.
Referring to the EU's own recommended website,
http://eeas.europa.eu/delegations/ukraine/projects/list_of_projects/projects_en.htm.
another correspondent has said to me:
'Go to Case Studies on the left hand side and you will see just how astonishing the amounts the EU have given to the Ukraine are. Rebuilding schools and nurseries and providing school buses, all helpfully emblazoned with EU stars, paying for doctors and then rebuilding agricultural storage plants - it's amazing that any one person could be found to vote against closer partnership with the EU after all that.'
These vainglorious fools will march us into another inferno
This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
A century ago, stupid and vainglorious politicians dragged us into war. We started it as a great, rich empire and ended it as an indebted husk.
Soon afterwards, America’s President Woodrow Wilson told aides he would wipe Britain ‘off the face of the map’ in another ‘terrible and bloody war’ unless we ceded our naval supremacy.
And US Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes raged and shouted at Britain’s ambassador in Washington, Auckland Geddes, that America had saved Britain’s bacon and we had better be grateful from now on.
In a voice rising to a scream, Mr Hughes declared: ‘You would not be here to speak for Britain – you would not be speaking anywhere, England would not be able to speak at all!
'It is the Kaiser who would be heard, if America – seeking nothing for herself but to save England – had not plunged into the war and won it!’
These little-known but important facts should be borne in mind as we look back on this dreadful episode. I for one have had enough of war poets and trench memoirs. Let’s have some proper history – who did what to whom and what it cost.
As Simon Heffer explains on the previous pages, the war was the greatest event in modern history, its aftershocks still persisting even now.
By the way, we didn’t even go to war to save Belgium. The Cabinet had already decided on war before a single German jackboot had crossed the Belgian border.
The rape of Belgium – which we weren’t actually obliged to defend – was a pretext invented afterwards to soothe readers of The Guardian.
Have our leaders learned anything from this episode of folly, mass death and waste? Absolutely not.
They still reach for war at the slightest opportunity. Everyone knows now (I did at the time) that our Iraq adventure was stupid and wrong, and that we had no business in Afghanistan.
But I can well remember being told off sternly for not supporting David Cameron’s war in Libya, supposedly waged to prevent a fictional massacre and some fictional rapes. Only a few weeks ago I was still being told the same story.
Well, Libya is now in flames, British Embassy staff are fleeing the country and the place is far too dangerous for anyone to go there and report on it. Massacres can proceed with impunity, and refugees head unhindered to Italy – and eventually here – in their thousands.
Let me remind you that Mr Cameron was quick to claim an easy triumph. He told the Commons on September 5, 2011:
‘Some people warned, as Gaddafi himself did, that the Libyan people could not be trusted with freedom; that without Gaddafi there would be chaos.
‘What is emerging now, despite years of repression, and the trauma of recent months, is immensely impressive.’
Compare and contrast what I said here that same week:
‘Just because existing regimes are bad, it does not follow that their replacements will be any better… The test of any revolution comes not as the tyrant falls, but two or three years later, when the new rulers have shown us what they are really like.’
I warned that our Armed Forces were aiding ‘a farcical yet sinister army in pick-up trucks whose aims we don’t even know’.
You might note that, at the time, hardly a voice in so-called mainstream, grown-up media or politics was raised against the Libya folly.
Few (but happily, enough) spoke or wrote against Mr Cameron’s even madder scheme to overthrow the Assad government in Syria.
If we had supported that, we would have found ourselves on the same side as the Islamist fanatics of Isis, now murdering, persecuting and mutilating their way across the Middle East to the terror of all.
It might just be a good moment to wonder if our united national leadership, utterly wrong on every foreign policy issue they have ever faced, are also wrong now, as they march towards what may well end up as war with Russia.
People still don’t grasp how dangerous the conflict in Ukraine already is, or how powerfully Russia believes it has been wronged by an arrogant, aggressive West.
Ukraine’s armed forces, like Israel’s in Gaza, are ruthlessly using artillery and bombs on densely populated areas and will soon be fighting in the million-strong, close-packed city of Donetsk.
The UN estimates 800 civilian deaths and 2,000 civilian wounded so far. The region is riven by the sound of guns, the Guns of August thundering yet again.
It is no mere skirmish. It is a war in the making. Do you really want to join in? This is a dangerous time of year. It will be less dangerous if we refuse to trust our leaders.
Let us have no more moves towards conflict with Moscow without a full recall of Parliament. And let us pray that our MPs are reading some history on their holidays.
Don't paint over Rolf's crimes
I can see why people might want to destroy or blot out paintings and murals by Rolf Harris. But they shouldn’t. Wiping out evidence of past mistakes makes us more likely to repeat them.
Communists do this – the wonderful Café Sybille in East Berlin still preserves half of Stalin’s moustache, which is the only remaining trace of an enormous statue of the monster that was smashed to pieces by order of the state when he fell from favour.
Better by far to remind ourselves that we idolise our fellow creatures, in politics and show business, far too easily, and that the fashions of today often look worse than stupid a few years hence.
Some railway companies are shamefully abandoning quiet carriages, where mobile phones are banned, ‘because they cause rows’.
They cause rows because such companies have always been feeble about enforcing them. Now they use their own feebleness as an excuse to give up altogether.
Perhaps, if they could make us pay for peace and quiet on trains, they might actually see that the rules were observed.
Does the Tory Party still exist? Subscription income is now lower than Ukip’s. They haven’t published up-to-date membership figures.
My information is that so many have quit in disgust at David Cameron’s liberalism that in many seats there will be no troops to fight the General Election.
Good riddance. I could carve a better party out of a banana.
As a cyclist, I can’t wait for all cars to be driverless. Even the wonkiest driverless car would be safer for the rest of us than the thousands of vehicles whose homicidal drivers are texting or yammering on their mobiles, while the useless police look the other way.
If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down
August 2, 2014
I reply once more to Mr 'P'
I just wanted to say how astonishingly, breathtakingly, hilariously unresponsive and Olympically obtuse the latest response from Mr ‘P’ is (on the ‘Secret War in Ukraine’ thread).
It is ludicrous for him to object to me countering his case with detailed arguments, with strange allegations about a ‘Gish Gallop’. Here, I think even most of my opponents will concede, the whole point is that arguments are met with arguments, and facts provided to support them.
He says I am ‘drowning [my]opponent in such a torrent of small arguments that [my] opponent cannot possibly answer or address each one in real time’
Twaddle. First of all, ‘real time’ in this case is limitless, as we are arguing in writing, not in verbal debate. He knows perfectly well that he can write here as often as he wants, and that normal word limits will be suspended to allow him to respond at full length. If he finds my arguments overwhelming, then that is not because any attempt has been made to ‘drown’ or swamp him. It is because I have taken time and trouble to rebut his arguments properly. He has all the space and time he desires to respond.
He copes with the facts by pretending not to understand the operation of modern public relations and manipulation in the overthrow of the Ukrainian government, and refusing to see that power can be exercised by other means than open force.
An example of this is his teenage question ‘Will Mr Hitchens please name and shame the EU units sent into Ukraine to 'overthrow the legitimate Ukrainian government using violence and menace?'.
Also he ceaselessly speaks of ‘Ukrainians’; as if they are one body of one opinion, when the very election of Viktor Yanukovych (close but undisputed in a tight contest) demonstrates that the population have strong political divisions and cannot be cited as a unity on this or many other issues.
The statement that ‘Ukrainians had for twenty years seen EU membership to be in their interest’ simply cannot be made by any informed and honest person. Some had. Some had not. The President had not, so far as I know, been elected on any mandate obliging him to sign an Association Agreement with the EU on any terms. He was elected to take such decisions.
Mr ‘P’ says I am ‘refashioning EU machinations, mischievous though no doubt many of them are, into an equivalence to tanks and missiles, enabling him to style EU economic politics as "aggression"’
Well, that’s a start. But why is it ‘twisting my case to limits tantamount to self-delusion’ by saying so. Nor does ‘equivalent’ as he seems to think , mean ‘identical’ ( a distinction which would help him overcome his principal mental block to understanding what is going on, if he would let it). Why is it ‘absurd’ ? This is just abuse. I am more and more persuaded that he has not properly studied the article he attacks.
Power in modern times is ceaselessly projected in this way. The Anglo-American putsch against Mossadeq in Iran proceeded by way of hired mobs and suborned newspapers. The entire ‘Arab Spring’ is a prominent example of the manipulation of crowds by external or internal forces. So was Georgia’s ‘Rose Revolution’ and so was the overthrow of the Marcos regime in the Philippines, which had lost the confidence of Washington at the time. Nor is this new. Nobody, not even Hitler or Stalin, uses tanks unless he has to. Hitler took the Saarland with a referendum, and Austria without tanks, and forced President Hacha to extinguish Czechoslovakia without tanks. What was the Sudeten German movement but the 1938 version of a ‘Civil Society Organisation’, demanding the democratic will of Czechoslovakia’s German-speakers? Stalin took Czechoslovakia in 1948 without firing a shot, but manipulated crowds in Prague were vital in the process.
And this is not ‘economic politics’, any more than the ‘Common Market; was a free trade association. Nothing to do with the EU is unpolitical. The Association Agreement has a political and military character (once again, as stated clearly by the pro-Kiev Michael Mosbacher in quoted material - why does Mr ‘P’ repeatedly force me to repeat points that are not in dispute, by pretending he is unaware of them? Why can he not debate seriously?).
Mr ‘P’ described a ’20-year process of EU membership negotiation’ being ‘almost at an equitable conclusion’.
Really? Is this a purely factual description of a far more complex situation? Why did it take so long, if it was so simple and continuous a process? The history of the Association Agreement is far from smooth. Was it just that they were finalising details of tariffs on tomatoes all that time? It has always been about the internal balance of power in Ukraine, and would have happened long before if the government resulting from the ‘Orange Revolution’ (another example of Civil Society manipulation of sovereign states) hadn’t turned out to be just as corrupt as what it replaced, and so fallen to bits?
The Euromaidan was an attempt to rerun this, spookily similar to the Orange Revolution, only with added violence and menace, plus the open participation of EU and US politicians, after the Tymoshenko bubble had burst, and Ukraine’s voters had annoyingly put Mr Yanukovych back in power with an undisputed national majority, nuisances that they are. Democracy, I ask you.
Does Mr ‘P’ truly, honestly think that corruption in Ukraine is only to be found among the so-called pro-Russian side? (I have explained here in the past, while Mr ’P’ was asleep, that Vladimir Putin loathes Viktor Yanukovych, especially for the very hard bargain he drove – now cancelled - over the Russian Navy’s access to Sevastopol, so calling him pro-Russian is justa sign that you don’t know what’s going on).
I mean, does he? Really? But of course, he has to believe this absurd thing, for otherwise, the (transparently false) contention that the Euromaidan was a protest against corruption cannot stand. The politicians raised to power by the Euromaidan are in general no cleaner than those laid low by it. Therefore (here it comes, as it so often does) the corruption must be the pretext, not the reason.
So his tedious fact-free moralising about President Yanukovych’s alleged personal motives for rejecting the EU plan, is just that.
Mr ‘P’ asks : ‘A twenty-year process of EU membership negotiation is almost at an equitable conclusion when the Russian-leaning Yanukovych accepts a bribe on behalf of Ukraine from the Russians (and not a small commission for himself it is speculated) and promptly junks the EU scheme in the face of Ukraine national astonishment, a national astonishment that leads to a popular uprising. Who, whom or what does Mr Hitchens take us for? Complete simpletons??’
I am not sure why simpletons would be needed or required here. I do not require any, thank you. I take readers of this blog for open-minded persons capable of following an argument. My descriptions of events (despite my undoubted and unconcealed partiality in the matter) seem to me to be more accurate and dispassionate than those of Mr ‘P’. Surely simpletons would be more impressed by Mr ‘P’ and his partisan description of events than would thinking persons? And is that enough question marks???
So in Planet ‘P’, EU offers of aid are just offers, made without political purpose or strings, out of pure disinterested love of mankind. Russian offers of aid, on the other hand, are a ‘bribe’. Wouldn’t it be more honest to admit that both sides were bidding for favour? But Mr ’P’ cannot, for any admission that the EU wants something undermines his (comical) case that the EU, which plainly has nevr had any jurisdiction in this contested region before) is not the aggressor. Without any evidence, let alone proof, he blithely accuses President Yanukovych of personal corruption in the matter, knowing that his claim can never be investigated or disproved. And he describes as ‘national astonishment’ what can with equal (if not greater) fairness and accuracy be described as foreign-funded, foreign-supported and foreign-directed *sectional* rage over a divisive issue.
But here’s an interesting bit
Mr ‘P’ says :’*The Ukrainians 'overthrew' their government by 'extra-legal' means, and by all accounts it was aggressive in part*.’
I love that ‘in part’. (‘The Germans marched into Belgium and by all accounts it was aggressive in part’).
We must all rejoice over this admission, wrung from Mr ‘P’ after weeks of wrestling. He has now formally admitted that the action he so doggedly supports was a lawless and violent overthrow, though his mouth is crammed with meal as he says it.
But then, very curiously, he accuses me of trying to change the subject, saying : ‘But we have now switched from EU 'aggression' to Ukrainian popular 'aggression'. Will Mr Hitchens please stay with the topic under discussion.’
But I have done so. It is the same subject. I have repeatedly, laboriously and with much supporting evidence argued that the supposed outbreak of Ukrainian public opinion was in fact manipulated from beyond Ukraine’s borders, through NGOs and Civil Society organisations. I think I have now said this enough times for even Mr ’P’ to have noticed it. He has not sought to contradict me. We know, because it is beyond dispute, and happened on TV, that significant figures from the USA and the EU, Victoria Nuland, John McCain, Catherine Ashton, Guido Westerwelle, came personally to the Euromaidan to show their support.
So the subject is the same. My claim is that the EU used ‘people power’ to overthrow a government that stood in its way. This action was intended to lad, and did lead, to the unconstitutional overthrow of the elected President as a result if organised foreign pressure. Would Mr ‘P’ like this to happen to his own country? I really think it is time for him to answer this. His own fellow-citizens of wherever he comes from might like to know that they have a Jacobin putschist in their midst. If not, then why is he happy to license it in other people’s countries? Presumably because he is some ghastly ‘might is right’ merchant who thinks that , if he and his friends don’t like the way your country is run, they are entitled to overthrow its government. It just never occurs to him that what he wills for others might one day happen to him. If he did, he might be less blithe about wishing it on others.
Mr ‘P’ blusters on ‘Seeking the overthrow of corrupt individuals and/or regimes is not the same thing as sending in tanks and sponsoring insurgence with the supply of weapons. Mr Hitchens is at considerable pains to have us see this as equivalent, but it simply won't and can't wash.’
Why can’t it? First of all, flinging in the word ‘corrupt’ is a bait-and-switch trick. Almost any sovereign government could be brought down if corruption were accepted as a justification for so doing.
Most of the countries in the world are corrupt to some extent. China’s is famously so, but I see no sign of the EU or the US trying to overthrow that one Why. I’m told the many old-established EU countries are not immune from political scandal, or so one reads in le Monde, the Irish Independent the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and La Stampa. I’ve heard it whispered that some British MPs aren’t wholly above board, and someone once told me that campaign finance in the USA wasn’t all that it might be. ‘Corruption’ as a charge, in such circumstances, is worthless.
And of course it’s not *the same thing* as sending in tanks and sponsoring insurgence with the supply of weapons. Who said it was? This is a straw man. But it is very, very similar, in that it results in a lawless and unconstitutional transfer of power desired and achieved by foreign agencies. As I was careful to say above, ‘equivalent’ is not the same as ‘identical’ , as Mr ‘P’ seems to think. To say something is not *identical* is not to say it is not *equivalent*.
And in such putsches, once you have the state power, you have the weapons. That is why it is so wrong that the power is transferred by lawless and violent methods. Those weapons are supposed to be used on behalf of the whole people by a constitutional and lawful authority, not in the hands of a violent and unscrupulous faction.
The rest of the contribution of Mr ‘P’ is so non-responsive that I must refer him, for the answers, to previous posts of mine, which he plainly has not read with any care. But I do respond to some of his other ‘points’ below:.
On ‘voluntary’ accession to the EU, those defeated nations who sign peace treaties can misleadingly be said to do so ‘voluntarily’, provided their actions are divorced from the circumstances that brought them to the table in the first place. Nobody puts a pistol to their heads.
Likewisse,the ‘voluntary’ surrender of small European nations to EU hegemony (weak and poor after years of Communism, faced with the choice of total economic and political isolation, exclusion from subsidies offered to their neighbours and competitors, etc) is a similar admission of reality. No force is needed.
Yet power is transferred. The nation does not join a club of friends. It cedes (non-negotiably) huge packages of sovereignty, over law and lawmaking, frontiers, currency, taxation, defence, foreign and trade policy. It accepts that it has a very small part in the decision-making process which controls these things, and certainly lacks any veto or ability to obtain exemption. And it accepts that other members of the EU, notably Germany, have a far greater role in these decisions. Who, Whom? Eu, Eum?
And the pressure of isolation and poverty is not the only reason why no force is needed. All of Europe knows in its bones ( and its ruins and its cemeteries) what happens when Germany’s will is frustrated. And Helmut Kohl is always available to remind anyone who forgets, with one of his nice speeches against the sin of ‘nationalism’. Failing that, slow learners, such as Serbia, find that the EU has not in fact abolished war in Europe after all. And that it is actually quite relaxed about secession, provided it is secession in the ‘right’ direction, ie, out of countries which are giving the EU trouble.
Mr ‘P’ asks (as if I hadn’t repeatedly answered this and then answered it again in marshalled detail on this very post, in the links to which it drew especial attention and in recent posts on the same subject quoting the pro-Kiev Matthew Omolesky, how ‘civil society’ organisations have been deployed by the EU and the US to influence events in Ukraine (the European Commission office in London has yet to respond to a request I made some days ago for details of EU support for such civil society organisations, but I live in hope)).
I did not realise there was any dispute over the obvious fact that the demonstrators in the Euromaidan used violence and menace to remove president Yanukovych (anyone with access to TV or newspapers saw it happen. The demonstrators made it repeatedly clear that they would not cease their threatening occupation until they got their way. There was undoubted violence against the legitimate forces of the legitimate state. At least 20 police officers died ) ; nor that his removal was unconstitutional and lawless (even the wondrous Mr Jaremko has now conceded that the constitutional impeachment process exists, and was not followed, whatever excuses he may give for this dereliction).
EU assistance to Civil Society Organisation in Ukraine
I have received the following response (from the European Commission ofice in London) to a question on EU funding of civil society organisations in Ukraine. It contradicts a figure I have quoted and I publish it to set the record straight:
Dear Peter
The figure you quote from American Spectator of 389 million euro was distributed to a host of civil society is incorrect --- probably it has been ‘mixed’ with the total of EU assistance given to Ukraine (including budget support, technical assistance, etc.)
In fact, the actual figure is considerably lower. During 2004-13 the EU made €31million available to civil society in Ukraine for programmes covering issues such as the fight against human trafficking, protection of asylum seekers, protection of children rights and other vulnerable groups, anti-discrimination, the prevention of torture and ill treatment, as well as electoral support, strengthening civil society oversight functions and governmental accountability.
All EU financed projects were approved by EU member states representatives (including the UK) within the management committees of the European Neighbourhood Partnership instrument
A dynamic and competent civil society is crucial in any democratic system. Its organisations have an important role to play in making sure that countries are governed transparently and governments are held to account and why the EU, along with international actors such as the United Nations, support civil society organisations in the Ukraine.
Background:
An overview of the EU-financed projects in Ukraine can be found here: http://eeas.europa.eu/delegations/ukraine/projects/list_of_projects/projects_en.htm.
Most of the programmes that support civil society organisations are to be found in the first sector, on “Governance, democracy, human rights and support for economic and institutional reforms” but there are examples in other sectors as well.
Britain's Vast Unpaid Debt to the USA
I’ll have a lot more to say about the Great War of 1914-18 on Monday, but amid the verbose sentiment and piety about that ghastly and disastrous episode, I’d like to introduce a cracked, yellow note of, well, scepticism. Readers here will know that I regard the War as a catastrophe, and amongst other things as the point at which this country stopped being a creditor and became a debtor.
I learned , while I was making my BBC Radio 4 programme about the ‘Special Relationship’ about the dreadful stripping of Britain’s life savings by the USA in the early months of World War Two, the secret gold convoys, the sell-off of British investments in the USA, and the transfer of negotiable securities to Canada.
I didn’t have time to explore the background to this, which was American fury at Britain’s 1930s default on its enormous First World War Debts to the USA . In fact, it was this fact which led partly to America’s sourly anti-British Neutrality Act of 1936, forbidding all loans to belligerent nations. This, amended by subsequent legislation, was the basis of the ‘cash and carry’ system under which the USA vacuumed British gold across the Atlantic in 1939-41 in return for those weapons and supplies we could carry away in our own ships.
The amount is colossal, though difficult to calculate realistically in modern terms . According to this reliable source (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4757181.stm)
‘In 1934, Britain owed the US $4.4 billion of World War I debt (about £866 million at 1934 exchange rates). Adjusted by the Retail Price Index, a typical measure of inflation, £866 million would equate to £40 billion now, and if adjusted by the growth of Gross Domestic Product, to about £225 billion’.
A British government spokesman is quoted in this article as saying : ‘The UK Government's position is this: “Neither the debt owed to the United States by the UK nor the larger debts owed by other countries to the UK have been serviced since 1934, nor have they been written off.”’
This is all true, and no doubt our debtors let us down. But the wretched fact, that this country is in fact one of history’s greatest debt defaulters, rather contradicts our assumed reputation for probity and solidity. Those who blithely hustled us into war at France’s side 100 years ago have so much to answer for. Can they even have begun to imagine what far-reaching effects their actions would have?
July 31, 2014
The Secret War in Ukraine
You may have thought that the furious little war between Russia and the EU had gone away, or that the area had disappeared into a timewarp or black hole, and ceased to exist.
It hasn’t.
Here is some news, as it were, from nowhere.
As a defender of Russia’s reaction to undoubted EU aggression in Ukraine, I have always been careful not to fool myself. I do not pretend that ‘my’ side is blameless, or that its activities are saintly. I also do not pretend that Russia is not directly aiding the rebels with advice, equipment , intelligence and manpower, though I await any sort of independent, verifiable proof of claims (accepted as fact by many western journalists) that large weapons are being brought across the border from Russia into Ukraine A recent UN report ( poorly covered in western media) which can be found here
http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Countries/UA/Ukraine_Report_15July2014.pdf
denounces the secessionist pro-Russian militias in eastern Ukraine for kidnapping large numbers of hostages and torturing them, both disgraceful and indefensible actions. But it also criticises the Ukrainian armed forces for using heavy weapons in built-up areas (I have read elsewhere, in newspaper accounts, that they have used ‘Grad’ rockets, one of the most indiscriminate forms of artillery known to man).
I would not dream of mentioning the one evil without mentioning the other, as I believe that atrocities are committed by both sides in war, and that this is one of the main reasons to avoid war where possible. This view lies behind my condemnation of the EU’s resort to lawlessness and force, which licensed lawlessness and force by Russia and turned a diplomatic conflict into an undeclared war of great severity, whose horrors have also been visited on the innocent and uninvolved passengers and crew of MH17, and on their devastated families.
But I cannot see why the estimated 800 deaths of Ukrainian civilians in the war-ravaged East( and the 2000 wounded) should be taken any less seriously than the deaths of those aboard MH17.
In fact, there’s a disturbing moral calculation to be made here. I have said of Israel’s attack on Gaza that the civilian deaths caused by shelling and bombing populated urban areas are so predictable and so inevitable that they cannot really be described as accidental, even if they are unintended. They occupy a middle zone between deliberate killing and accidental killing. By contrast, the incompetent use of surface to air missiles (though indefensible) was actually not as likely to cause innocent death (though on this occasion it did) as the shelling or bombing of inhabited residential buildings. I am not defending any violent action here. I am just urging you to be careful, when being outraged, that you do not confine your outrage only to the death that are caused by those of whom you disapprove.
I do urge you to read the whole thing.
Here are some extracts:
‘The current intense fighting using heavy weaponry in and around population areas, has devastated towns and villages, demolishing residential buildings and killing an increasing number of their inhabitants.
More than 86,000 have fled their homes
‘After the ceasefire ended on 30 June, the [Ukrainian] Government mounted an intense offensive, recapturing territory including the main strategic base of the armed groups in the Donetsk region - the city of Slovyansk - and stating it had regained control of the Ukraine-Russian Federation border areas that had previously been under the control of the armed groups. But the price was high with at least 30 civilian deaths, many wounded, and a great deal of destruction to the recaptured villages, towns and cities. And the control was tenuous, as evidenced by the continuing attacks by armed groups that have killed and wounded soldiers and many civilians.’
‘…there has not been sufficient precaution taken to preventing death and injury to civilians’ (My emphasis)
Interestingly, the UN says 103 protestors and 20 police officers died during the ‘Maidan’ protest which eventually overthrew the lawfully elected president last winter. I really cannot see how 20 police officers could have died if the protest had been entirely peaceful, and the demonstrators unarmed.
In a fascinating aside, the UN report notes : ‘It is believed that some suspects could be involved in the security operations in the east, hence the unwillingness to carry out meaningful investigations at a sensitive time’.
This draws attention to the widespread belief, little–examined in the Western Press, that militant Ukrainian nationalists from Western Ukraine, prominent in the Kiev putsch, have now been armed and formed into units alongside the official Ukrainian armed forces, and are fighting directly against militant Russian nationalists from the East. I find it hard to believe that such individuals could have been sufficiently trained in such a short time, to be considered as disciplined troops. And I wonder who really commands them.
A search for the word ‘mongoloid’ in the UN document might also be instructive for any who think that the Ukrainian February revolution is made up entirely of Guardian-reading multiculturalists.
Some of you might also be interested in this demonstration of the new Euro-Ukraine’s commitment to political pluralism, filled as it is with paradoxes for veterans of the Cold War. The Ukrainian Justice Ministry is said to have been trying to ban the country’s Communist Party.
I have so far been unable to find out how the case went. Perhaps it is still being heard. Some of you may remember the unpleasant scenes in the Ukrainian Parliament in April when the Communist leader, Petr Symonenko, was physically seized while speaking by two deputies from the ever-charming ‘Svoboda’ party. They objected to his opinions.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/08/us-ukraine-crisis-parliament-idUSBREA370K520140408
Finally, I’d like to share with you the following two completely fascinating links, which I found by serendipity.
I have myself printed out both documents and spent some time reading and re-reading them. They contain some very interesting claims. I cannot vouch for their truth or accuracy, though they use many sources and don’t have the strained urgency of conspiracy literature; in fact they are written in measured, sceptical and sometimes humorous tones. The author, Steve Weissman, is an interesting veteran of America’s sixties New Left about whom I’d like to know more.
If what he says is so, then surely it is time for those who rightly draw attention to Russian involvement in the eastern separatists, to draw attention to US involvement with the Euromaidan. They might also wonder fi that involvement has since ceased, or intensified. I offer them purely as a stimulus to discussion, and would welcome especially any factual contributions which throw light on their accuracy or otherwise.
"Short Breaks in Mordor" now has 38 favourable reviews
My new e-book ‘Short Breaks in Mordor’ has now garnered a combined total of 38 favourable reviews (the great majority with five stars) on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.
It is the sum of almost all my travels, Burma, North Korea, China, India, Bhutan, Africa, the Middle East, Russia, Ukraine:
You can read about Vladimir Putin’s creepy ‘Nashi’ youth movement, set up to combat any attempts at ‘People Power’ in Moscow, or how about Israel’s little-known, much-misunderstood Arab population – including Bedouin who used to fight in the Israeli Army but seldom do so now?
Here's a sample: ‘The service entrance to Hell must be something like this. On one side the two squat chimneys of a power station poke above the sandy hills. On the other a chemical factory exhales nameless filth into the hot sky. A few melancholy camels stand about waiting to be milked (or eaten), and flocks of sheep hunt for rare blades of grass.
The village, in reality a scattered, untidy archipelago of sordid, cramped hutments and tents, is crisscrossed by power-lines but has no mains electricity. Water is supplied via a feeble one-inch pipe, for several hundred people.
Ibrahim al Afash, the village headman, tells me an immensely long story of injustice, unfairness and mistreatment stretching back almost 60 years, before pausing for prayers in a Spartan mosque made of corrugated iron.
His complaint is made worse by the fact that the Bedouin Arabs, unlike their city-dwelling brothers, served willingly in the Israeli army.
They mostly do not do so any more.
The old man, who looks strikingly like Osama Bin Laden, said: 'I served in the army. They told me that if I did so I would receive all the rights given to any other Israeli. I did not receive a single one of those rights. My children saw this and drew their own conclusions.' Actually, while most Israelis concede that the Bedouin have been foolishly mistreated, it is not that simple. Here, unlike in any Arab country, a Bedouin gets a real vote in a contested election and has freedom of speech and thought. A minority of Bedouins live a great deal better in 'recognised villages', though nothing like as many as should do.
But this is the general problem of Israeli Arabs. By Arab standards they are well off.
By Israeli standards they are abominably mistreated. Some Israeli Arabs told me in private that of course they would not want to live in an Arab country, let alone in the West Bank or Gaza.
A plan to shift the border so a group of Arab towns in central Israel could be switched to Palestinian control was rejected with haggard horror by Arab leaders in Israel. They all ritually praise the Palestinian cause, but none wishes to live under its lawless rule.
One Arab journalist told me he had been asked by friends in the West Bank if he knew how to get them Israeli passports.’
Want to read on? You can.
You do not need an e-reader to read it. If you have a computer, it's available to you in a matter of seconds.. You can download it through the Kindle Cloud Reader on to any device:
See here :
You can find the book here:
and
http://amzn.to/T6wyZJ (USA)
July 30, 2014
The Daft Non-Logic of the Supporters of Bombing and Shelling Gaza
Gaza continues to be the most pressing and violent issue on the planet. It has two interesting competitors for this position, in Tripoli and the area of Eastern Ukraine around Donyetsk, but most journalists simply dare not report from these places, even if they could get in, so we hear less.
And for the moment I feel I need to rebut or reply to readers’ opinions on the Gaza issue. This is frustrating, because so many of those comments are unresponsive and useless for debating purposes. Telling me I’m wrong in some general, unspecified way is useless.
Telling me that I know nothing without saying what precisely it is that I don’t know, since none of us is omniscient, and lack of knowledge is only important when it can be clearly shown and is relevant to the issue, is useless.
Telling me that other people with whom I disagree on other issues, agree with me about this, does not in any way shake my position. I do not care. If what I say is true and right, it does not matter if the same position is held by people with whom I utterly disagree. It will still be true and right. If what I say is false and wrong, it does not matter if I have the support of people I like and generally agree with. It will still be false and wrong.
Telling me there are tunnels from Gaza into Israel has nothing to do with it. This is surely no surprise. There have been scores of tunnels into Egypt from Gaza for years (I’ve seen them and written about them). They are not a secret. Hizbollah used tunnels in its northern border war against Israel. So Israel’s Army and security service (Shin Bet) would have had to be hopelessly incompetent not have been watching for such tunnels between Gaza and Israel for years. (Why, such a tunnel was shown in the BBC thriller series 'The Honourable Woman' last Thursday, though I have to say I suspected the author of this scene wasn't very hot on Israeli geography. But if a BBC scriptwriter coudl imagine it, then surley Shin Bet could).
I’d be amazed if they aren’t already wired for sound, and mapped.I'd be amazed if they hadn't been known about for ages. They aren’t interrupted because any normal army would wait for his enemy to attempt to use such tunnels, and then trap him in them in the hope of catching useful prisoners for interrogation. Are we supposed to believe Israel doesn’t possess or know how to use equipment for detecting such things? How does the supposed discovery of these obvious threats justify bombing populated urban areas? Again, those who say that it does justify it are asked to explain why, precisely, as I genuinely cannot see the connection between these tunnels and killing women and children with high explosive.
Once again there’s a great gaping chasm in the logic of the defenders of this operation. Please, please explain to me, any of you, how shelling and bombing Gaza will prevent the digging of tunnels and the firing of rockets by Hamas?
Just one attempt to explain the connection would be nice, instead of repeated emotional assertions that it is so, as if it were self-evident. Actually, it’s self-evidently false, in the short and medium term.The rockets have continued during the attack. And they (and the tunnels) have not been prevented by the previous attack six years ago, either. Only a re-occupation of Gaza (politically unthinkable and verging on mad) might stop them. In the long-term of course, the political damage done to Israel by this carnage is far, far greater than the military damage done to Hamas and Gaza by the Israeli armed forces. And that damage is Hamas’s aim.After all, it really isn’t possible to claim that Hamas’s rockets have done much major damage to Israel, and the number of human casualties resulting from them is pleasingly small. This operation is simply not saving lives in significant numbers. No doubt it is terrible when you are the victim of a Hamas rocket, or when your family is the victim. But such victinms are mercifully few.
Meanwhile, Israel is losing a significant number of young soldiers *only* because it has launched this attack.
Hamas certainly doesn’t mind civilians dying on its own side, as it knew would happen when it began its rocket campaign. Many Hamas militants don’t mind dying themselves. As its Al Qassam brigades have said : ‘From the Al-Qassam Brigades to the Zionist soldiers: The Al-Qassam Brigades love death more than you love life.’ This is why applying European, secular concepts of deterrence to this confrontation is so mistaken. If your enemy loves death, and he says he does, then threatening him with death isn't going to deter him.
Then there’s the utterly bizarre behaviour of certain critics of Israel, such as Mr Gribben, who use my criticism of Israel as an opportunity to argue that I don’t criticize Israel *enough* . This has its amusing side, as it wings towards me while I am fending off exasperated condemnation from fellow-Zionists who regard me as little better than a traitor for my condemnation of the attack on Gaza.
But the whole point and purpose of what I am now doing, and the raesonn why I did it, and the reason why I persist in it, is that it has more validity, precisely because I am not part of the powerful well-financed choir for whom every Israeli action is wrong under all circumstances. Likewise I am not part of the other choir, nearly as well-financed, for whom nothing Israel does is ever wrong.
And I was careful to set out my logic for my reluctant but unshakeable acceptance of the case for a Jewish state in control of its own borders and immigration, as the last resort for Jews fleeing the murderous persecution which appears to be the unavoidable, unpredictable but effectively permanent threat under which they live. I have not got myself into any kind of tangle, as alleged, in explaining why Israel must have its specifically Jewish character, and in explaining why this is not racial bigottry, but a defence against it.
It is a necessary response to the undeniable and ineradicable existence (even in the most civilized parts of the world) of a potentially murderous Judophobia. I really do not know how to explain this more clearly. I must ask those who glibly reject the idea of a Jewish state as racist to imagine yourself as the reluctant star of the following personal melodrama:
You are living in happy but modest prosperity in, say, Frankfurt-am-Main in 1932, as a normal German Protestant. Not long before the National Socialists come to power, documents are uncovered (perhaps unearthed by accident, perhaps by a business or professional rival. Who knows? These things happen) which show that you have Jewish ancestry previously unknown to you. You have not changed. Your beliefs, culture, everything about you, remain the same. But a file containing incontrovertible facts about your ancestry has, though you do not realise it yet, condemned you to death.
Being well-informed and prescient, and having studied the speeches of Herr Hitler and his colleagues, and read their books, you immediately seek to emigrate. Nobody will take you. SO Sorry. Soon, the problem grows more serious. Hitler comes to power. The Nuremberg laws are promulgated. You continue to seek emigration as the persecution intensifies and the world darkens. But there is nowhere to go, not even the British colony of Palestine , officially ‘A National Home for the Jews’, where tight limits have now been placed (by the British government) on Jewish immigration. You know the end of this story. You and your family will be first starved and made miserable, then taken away and murdered, by the state, because an official document says you are a Jew. As far as I am concerned, if you do not actively wish that end, then you must see the sense in there being a Jewish state which will take people in your position, unconditionally.
By the way, it needs to be stressed again and again especially when people complain that the West Bank 'settlements', in reality towns, are exclusively Jewish, that Israel itself is not exclusively Jewish, but contains a large number of Arab citizens, about whose complicated status I have written a great deal. There areplaces where they live alongside their jewish fellow-citiznes, but usually in circumstanes of urban anonymity ( much as happens with Black and White Americans in the still-infrmally-segregated USA).
Israel's Arabs are better off by a mile than their neighbours living under Arab Muslim rule, though you won't often get them to say so publicly - both in material terms and legal and constitutional terms. But those who attack Israel for being an 'aparteid' or 'racist' state really do need to take a look at the treament of Jews, when they are permitted to live there at all, and of Christians, in the Arab Muslim world. There is no possible excuse for this. Talk about mote and beam. Yet Israel's critics, voluble on Israel's alleged bigotry, are silent about this.
My point is quite simple. I recognise and condemn the undeniable wrongdoing involve in the establishment of Israel. I recognise the diplomatic cynicism involved in its foundation. I condemn terrorist actions whoever does them, rather more consistently than most people do. I refuse to pretend that wrong actions were right. But I point out that no nation, old or new, is free from dispossession, blood and pain in its foundation, and so it will always be. So to condemn Israel into non-existence for this reason is absurd. Rather than using this past grief as an excuse to destroy, and to tear up a settled existing society, we should use it as a guide to minimising suffering in the future.
I’d also like to answer one particular charge made agaibnst me by people who imagine theyu arehelping Israel by defending this idiotic attack.
I am told ‘You are playing into the hands of the anti-Israel bigots’
I reply *** ‘In what way?
Those bigots are certainly glad of this opportunity to portray Israel falsely as a bullying Goliath in a region where it is in fact a tiny enclave, surrounded by tens of millions of Arabs whose governments and peoples (often subject to unceasing official propaganda against Israel from childhood onwards) are hostile to its very existence, and unwilling to recognize that existence at all. One might also point out that the Arab and Muslim world is enormously rich, thanks to oil, and very well-armed (especially in the case of Saudi Arabia and Egypt), having been helped in this way by enormous financial and technical aid from the USA. There is even an Islamic bomb, in Pakistan. There may well soon be others, though I personally suspect that Saudi Arabia is more likely to go nuclear than Iran.
I condemn Arab brutality to Arabs, as well as Israeli brutality to Arabs. Readers of my column and blog, for instance, will have known for many years of the Assad government’s 1982 attack on Hama, at least as brutal as anything now taking place in Gaza, and in my view much more so. The oldest reference to this in my writing that I can find goes back 12 years , to 2002, long before Assad-bashing became fashionable, as I pointed out in this posting:
I also condemn Western brutality to Arabs, as I did during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which I (again unfashionably) opposed from the start. The fashionable people all found that they opposed it later after it was obvious even to them that it was (like the Israeli attack on Gaza) a stupid and self-damaging disaster. At the time I got letters telling me I was a ‘traitor’.
As I wrote from Cairo in April 2003: ‘The elderly man in the Al Borsa coffee shop, a pleasant, friendly, airy place near the majestic Hassan mosque in the vast, dusty wilderness of southern Cairo, asked me: 'Are you proud to be British right now?' I could not honestly tell him that I was. For him and almost everyone in the Arab world, Britain is now one of the countries killing innocents in Iraq, in what they all see as a crude colonial venture that will do no good to anybody.
‘While our TV stations show the guns firing and the missiles being launched, the ones here concentrate far more on what happens when the shells strike and the missiles land. Footage of dead and dismembered babies, too horrible for us to see, is ruthlessly screened. Nobody much cares that such things are accidental or unintended and they do not believe our claims to be liberators.
‘Fury, bitterness, resentment, impotence, wounded pride and trampled dignity all boil together in the minds of Arabs. And when they see bomb damage and casualties in Arab towns, they see landscapes, streets and houses almost identical to the ones they live in. They see people who look and speak and think and worship and eat precisely as they do, and hope for and fear the same things. They can understand the screams of the mourning women.’
I added; ‘All in all, it is amazing that here I have encountered nothing but politeness, consideration and generosity - with one alarming exception that I will come to later. Each person I have spoken to has been utterly courteous, but frantic to press on me that the war is a serious mistake which will damage Britain in their eyes for decades to come.
If those in the British newspaper industry who noisily and militantly support the war looked at their counterparts in the Egyptian Press, they would see their own methods used to achieve exactly the opposite effect. Whole pages are given over to pictures of dead and wounded children, wrecked homes, weeping parents. They have faces, unlike the British and American soldiers, who appear as distant, dehumanised figures in helmets and goggles.
The headlines in the Cairo papers say: 'Horrible massacres of civilians', 'Mosques, holy shrines and hospitals bombed'. Yet another picture of blood-encrusted infant bodies carries the caption: 'Victims of brutal aggression as a result of the random bombing of civilians'. Another says: 'Anglo-American frenzy cost this child his eyesight'.
Every page of war coverage in Al Akhbar bears the words: 'A war against international law'. A columnist sneers that the slogan of the Coalition forces is: 'Please allow me to kill you so that I can liberate you'.
It would be a good deal easier to take if there was not so much truth behind it.’
Likewise, I have condemned the horrors of Arab terror against Israel, such as this from my column in April 2002 : ‘In Israel, it seems, we must treat the world's goriest terror organisation as the equal of an elected, lawful government. In Israel we do not hunt down terror. There, we talk to terror and feed it sweeties.
‘What is wrong with my trade? Why do so many reporters, all doubtless supporters of the battle against Osama Bin Laden, fall for the grotesque propaganda of the Palestinian terrorists?
‘Did you know that the Muslim gunmen who cynically hid in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem shot the locks off the door to get in? Did you know that they were offered food, medical supplies and a doctor by the Israeli Army? Did you know that Arab Christians in the area are persecuted by Yasser Arafat's Fatah organisation but are, of course, too scared to say so … And did you know that on March 17, a Palestinian gunman deliberately fired into a crowd of children leaving a school in an Israeli town, killing a girl aged 17 and injuring others?
‘If you didn't know any of these things, ask yourself why. The reporting of the Middle East is a disgrace.
The bias and ignorance of many of those who do it is appalling. They should be ashamed of themselves.’
The fact that I, and the anti-Israel bigots, both tell the truth about what is now happening in Gaza does not make me an anti-Israel bigot. At least, if it does, I would love to know how. As it happens, I also attacked Israel’s last assault on Gaza, which wasn’t as sustained as the present one. Yet (to my surprise at the time) I did not get much criticism. I don’t know why.
July 28, 2014
Still Clueless in Gaza - Six Years Later
I’ll devote this post to general points about Gaza, many of them arising from letters I’ve received or points made here. First of all I’ll just dispose of a couple of comments that stand out.
John Edwards writes ‘When discussing Ukraine nobody talks about "the Slavs of the region" but Peter Hitchens still insists on referring to the Palestinians as "the Arabs of the region". Why are Palestinians, uniquely, denied their national identity and a link with a geographical place? Perhaps because someone else wants their land.’
***Even I, who argue that Ukraine does not properly exist as a sovereign nation, readily recognize that there is a Ukrainian language and culture . The trouble is,and I thought we had got past this by now, is that neither language nor culture is universal among the people in the current version of ‘Ukraine’, which has simply inherited the largely meaningless borders of Stalin’s and Khrushchev’s Ukrainian SSR (Soviet Socialist Republic). Many of the citizens of Ukraine, especially in the East, are to all intents and purposes Russian. Many are mixed, speak both languages and have family which is Ukrainian and family which is Russian. The only part of the country which is pretty much wholly Ukrainian is the far West, much of which used to be part of Austria Hungary and then of pre-1939 Poland.
I explained in a recent posting here
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/07/some-thoughts-on-the-use-of-the-word-palestinian.html why I am reluctant to employ the term ‘Palestinian’, believing its careless use to a be a propaganda victory for a cause with which I do not sympathize.
The idea of a ‘Palestinian’ nationality is a propaganda invention of the 1960s and 1970s, which (amongst other things) cast Israel as a dominant majority overpowering an Arab minority. Until then, Israel had been seen (to its great propaganda advantage) as a tiny Jewish state surrounded by hundreds of millions of mainly Muslim, mainly Arab enemies.
But by separating the local Arabs into a ‘Palestinian’ nationality, this was overcome. David became Goliath and Goliath apparently shrank to become David. Leaving aside the lack of evidence of the use of the term ‘Palestinian’ by the Arabs themselves before about 1970, I have not heard of any notable distinction between the culture and language of Arabs in the West Bank and of the non-Bedouin Arabs in Jordan, both of whom are descendants of inhabitants of the original ‘Palestine’ mandate. On the other hand, I think the Arabs of Gaza probably have more in common, cuturally, with their Egyptian neighbours than they do with the Arabs of the West bank.
’Jim New’ writes : ‘Palestine was never in any shape, form or stretch of the imagination, a British Colony’
***This is an extraordinary statement. I would love to hear more of his justification for it. It is true that the official designation was a ‘Mandate’, but it had all the trappings and appurtenances of a colony and was governed as such by the Colonial Office. My father, a naval officer, was rather surprised, in 1936, to find himself in Haifa putting down Arab riots, when he was supposed to be patrolling the South Atlantic aboard HMS Ajax. If Mr ‘New’ had told him that Mandate Palestine wasn’t a colony in any shape, form or stretch of the imagination, I rather think my father would have laughed.
Anyway, now we’ve got past that, and I’ve duly infuriated any pro-Arab fanatics who read this blog, I must return to infuriating the pro-Israel fanatics. Oddly enough, they didn’t pay much attention to my last essay on this problem, back in December 2008. The internal politics of Israel were slightly different, but otherwise it was more or less exactly the same controversy.
You can read it here
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2008/12/clueless-in-gaz.html
Its central point could have been written today : ‘ Even though all the usual suspects, the Judophobes, the diplomats, the gullible liberals, say that what Israel is doing now in Gaza is wrong, it really is wrong.
My position, as a strong supporter of Israel in general, is that Israel's action is wrong morally and gravely mistaken politically. Attacks from the air always kill innocents. It is no good pleading that you regret such deaths, when you knew perfectly well that your actions were bound to cause them. This was equally true of our own adventures in Iraq and Serbia, and is true of American bombing in Afghanistan. Israel's moral position is seriously weakened by the deaths of these innocents, and also by the flanneling and evasion of its spokesmen over this.’
Now let me turn to a comment from ‘John Main’ , who asks : ‘The fate of Israel will not be decided in people’s minds by people like us watching TV. We watch TV all the time, we disagree with much that we see, but we are powerless to decide anything. Why should the fate of Israel be an exception to that rule?’
***The answer is actually very simple. Israel has from its beginnings depended on powerful sponsors in democtratic countries who are very much influenced by what people watch on TV, and what they make of it.
The original ‘National Home for the Jews’, (not a state as such) in Mandate or Colonial Palestine, existed under increasingly reluctant but actual British sponsorship, upheld and sustained by British imperial power. Arthur Balfour’s decision to make the declaration had been made at a very bad moment in the First World War, where it was thought that it would weaken Germany and Austro-Hungary (similar belies led to the Allies’ endorsement of Czechoslovak independence).
When Britain began to fear that Arab resistance to Jewish immigration threatened her standing among the Arabs in the entire Middle East, British support for the ‘National Home’ cooled very fast . I personally don’t think it misleading to say that many British officials in the 1920s and 1930 worked quite actively to encourage Arab opposition to the National Home. The (British) appointment of the committed anti-Zionist Haj Amin al Husseini as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, over the heads of the local Arab hierarchy, in 1921, might have been designed to undermine Balfour.
When Britain eventually pulled out of the Twice-Promised land in 1948, leaving behind an impossible contradictory mess caused by its own policies, it was only Harry Truman’s strong support for Israel which allowed its successful creation as a state (plus the temporary willingness of Czechoslovakia to provide arms). Without those sponsors, Israel would not have survived , and without American sponsorship it would not have survived the long and difficult period of economic hardship and constant danger which then began.
The importance of the sponsorship is not just military and economic, though of course these things matter hugely.
Israel’s very nature runs against much of the dogma of the modern world. Enemies of Israel describe it as a ‘racist’ state, an extraordinary and almost total inversion of the truth, which si that it is *A state born out of the racialism of others*.
To my amazement, there are still people in this world who think that being Jewish is about religion, a matter of individual choice like Baptism or Unitarianism, and even people who think that Judophobia arises out of religious quarrels.
The people who hate Jews ( and there is no reasoning with such people, who are in often in all other respects perfectly rational, and even charming or humorous, but in this matter quite beyond the edge of sanity) couldn’t care less about religion. It’s Jews they don’t like, and that’s that. Many Jews are atheists, or just non-religious. Neither the Tsarist Black Hundreds, nor Hitler, nor Vichy France, could have cared less about what people believed. It was their bloodlines they wanted to check on, not their religious opinions.
The single most blatant example of this will always be the late Edith Stein, a prominent Roman Catholic theologian and Carmelite nun, German born, who was vindictively dragged from her convent in the Netherlands in 1941, and hauled off to Auschwitz to be murdered, because she had Jewish blood. I do hope this is clear.
It is because people were prepared to do things like that, on logic of that kind, that Israel was founded – to be a place where people could go when other people wanted to kill them because of their blood.
So to say it is a racist state is not just a slander. It is the opposite of the truth. But, given the general unwillingness of the civilized liberal democracies to take in more than a very few rich prominent Jews (and a small number of children, cruelly separated from their doomed parents, on the famous Kindertransport), Israel was determined that it should be able to hold its doors open for the foreseeable future to all people in that position.
The scheme, though not exactly utopian, was certainly idealist, and had all the ruthlessness of idealism. We now know, mainly thanks to Israeli historians who refused to allow the truth to be buried any longer, that the birth of Israel was achieved at the expense of many thousands of innocent Arabs, driven from their homes.
This is horrible, but, as I’ve said before, the USA, Australia, the Caribbean, and many other modern countries arose out of similar brutal drivings out of existing populations. This sort of thing is not unique even in the 20th century, which saw similar horrors (though much greater in scale) in the ‘exchange of populations’ between Greece and Turkey in the 1920s, and in Eastern Europe and India during the Potsdam deportations and the Partition, in 1947 and 1948. My point here is that the other comparable actions are forgotten and nobody seeks to reopen them, and one must ask those who wish to reopen the 1948 expulsions why they ( and the UN) concentrate on these, and these alone – and why they don’t take the view generally held in Germany, Poland, the Czech and Slovak lands, East Prussia, India and Pakistan, that no good purpose would be served by reopening such a wound.
But in these complex and unlovely origins lies the increasingly widespread claim that Israel, like South Africa , is an ‘apartheid state’ and so not deserving of UN or US sponsorship. This is not confined to small and sordid corners. The former American President, the much-admired Jimmy Carter, has used the word ‘apartheid’ to describe Israeli action in the occupied West Bank.
This is not as bad as those who suggest that Israel’s actions are comparable with those of the Nazis. But it is surprising how powerfully this obviously false, rather dangerous and hysterical claim (There is not the slightest evidence that Israel has any sort of exterminationist policy towards non-Jews. I put this refutation as mildly as I possibly can) gains acceptance in the minds of those who have decided that Israel is an evil racial state.
Actually the ‘apartheid’allegation (which I attempt to rebut here) http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/02/apartheid-a-few-notes-on-the-use-of-this-word.html
Is probably more damaging, because it has gained acceptance well outside the ranks of the swivel-eyed and the hopelessly bigoted.
And it is because of its power and implications that Israel’s current policy in Gaza is so very dangerous.
I’ll come to that, but first I must deal with a claim repeatedly made by defenders of Israel’s attack on Gaza.
It is that in some way shelling and bombing Gaza ‘protects’ Israel from Hamas rockets.
But it simply doesn’t. Days of shelling have not stopped the rockets in the short term. Weeks of shelling will not stop them in the long term. Just as the 2008 shelling failed to stop the 2014 rocket attack, the 2014 shelling will not stop the next rocket attack from Gaza in – let me guess – 2017? Hamas will actually have gained both recruits and international support as a result of this week’s events, when it was losing both before them, and the Gaza Strip is not, and never will be so closed off that the making of rockets will be impossible.
I might also mention that Hamas’s rockets are inaccurate, carry small warheads (not to mention the fact that Israel has a seemingly effective anti-missile shield which deals with many of the Hamas rockets before they can hit their targets) and have, I’m glad to say, done remarkably little damage and killed and injured remarkably few people despite the length and extent of the bombardment. This is no comfort, I know, to those who have suffered – but on the other hand, there is absolutely no evidence that Israel’s attack on Gaza has prevented a single Hamas rocket from flying, or will do so in the future. To characterize this attack as defensive is just misleading.
I really don’t see why it’s so shocking to suggest that Israel would have done better to endure this attack. It’s often wiser not to be provoked. Franklin Roosevelt wouldn’t allow himself to be provoked by German attacks on US Navy ships (especially the Reuben James) during the undeclared convoy war from 1939 to 1941. Was he weak or wrong? I’m sure there are other instances of the strong not allowing themselves to be provoked by the weak into doing what the weak wanted them to do.
But the propaganda effect on Israel’s public standing, resulting from the scenes of civilian death in Gaza, is enormous and longstanding.
Readers here will know that I do not accept excuses from anybody for the killing of innocent civilians in bombing and shelling of populated areas. Only three generations ago such behaviour would rightly have been viewed with utter horror. Gazans I spoke to directly (who live in what is virtually a police state) were privately horrified when Hamas set up missile sites near their homes, but dared not protest. We cannot blame them, or view their death, injury and ruin as just punishment for their failure to protest – because in the same circumstances we too would not dare to protest.
But this is, as Talleyrand once said in another context, not just a crime. It is a mistake. Israel, back in 1967, had a huge credit balance in the propaganda war, not least in Europe where it has now almost wholly lost it. Bit by bit, it has let that drain away, relying increasingly on the reeking tube and iron shard of unrestrained force, its supporters given to macho statements about how they don’t care if no-one likes them, they will defend themselves. Support remains strong -for now -in the USA - but for how long can this endure unless Israel gets a *lot*more clever?
In modern diplomacy, small and unpopular countries have to have enough friends simply to stay alive.
As I say above, I absolutely reject the claimed parallel between Israel and apartheid South Africa.
But others do not. And their realistic and achievable aim (an aim, alas, much advanced by Israel’s crass flailing in the past two weeks) is to isolate Israel, diplomatically, economically and culturally, as South Africa was isolated, until all the weapons and tanks in the world cannot save it from the pressure form within and without, and from signing itself into non-existence through acceptance of a ‘right of return’ or a ‘one-state solution’, which would end the Jewish state for good. This is a very real danger. The USA is changing very fast, and it is time Israel's overconfident supporters understood just how fast.
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