Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 225
July 28, 2014
A Radio Interview with PH on Ukraine Crisis
I gave this interview to Fubar Radio on Saturday. It gives me a largely-uninterrupted opportunity to explain my position on the Ukraine crisis. I suppose I'll just have to put up with their inability to spell my name.
July 27, 2014
That's Really Cool - how we got from 'State-Sponsored Terror' to here
I’d like to recommend this typically wise and nonconformist article by Simon Jenkins, in today’s ‘Guardian’. If only he was as nonconformist about drugs as he is about foreign affairs.
I’d also draw attention to the very muted coverage of the resignation of Ukraine’s Prime Minister, surely a rather significant event just now, partly because he has lost the support of the unpleasant ‘Svoboda’ party, discussed here in the past.
And to a BBC reporter’s use of the phrase ‘February Revolution’ to describe the overthrow of the legitimate Ukrainian Government earlier this year (chapter and verse to come later).
And to what seems to me (this could be a fault in my search skills, I’d be grateful for any other sightings) extraordinary paucity of coverage in British media of the US Intelligence briefing which I discussed at length here, and whose existence was revealed to Radio 4 listeners by BBC reporter Aleem Maqbool:
...apart from this glancing reference in today’s Daily Telegraph
‘Mr Antonov [Russian Deputy Defence Minister] said US intelligence experts had claimed they could "prove the guilt of the [pro–Russian] militia and almost Russia itself" and were in possession of technical data and satellite photographs to back up their accusation.
‘"So where is this evidence?" he asked on the Rossiya–24 channel. "Why is it not presented to the public? Is it, if I may say so, still being finished off?" Barack Obama, the US president, said earlier this week that flight MH17 was brought down by a surface–to–air missile that was fired from "territory that is controlled by Russian separatists". Samantha Powers, the US ambassador to the UN, went further, adding "we cannot rule out technical assistance from Russian personnel in operating the systems".
‘US intelligence officials appeared to backtrack somewhat later, saying they had no definitive evidence about who exactly fired the missile, or about Russian involvement. However, the officials said it was implausible that Ukrainian forces fired the missile, and that they still believed that separatists were likely to blame.’
(So do I. I have from the start. I didn't need satellite pictures or intercepts to work it out, either).
I'd just add one small thing. I have now contacted the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) at their Vienna HQ, and tracked down the civilian figures for casualties in the UKraine conflict, which have not had much play in Western media, though RT and othrs have of course made much of them.
They are not, I stress, OSCE figures. Their report here makes it plain that this is what they heard from credible sources in Lugansk
http://www.osce.org/ukraine-smm/121431
They cannot be verified (very little can be verified, in war zones). But here is an extract (SMM is 'Special Monitoring Mission') :
'The situation in parts of Luhansk and Donetsk regions remained tense with on-going fighting around the city of Luhansk. While patrolling the city centre of Luhansk, close to the occupied building of the Regional Administration, the SMM heard the sound of a shell hitting a garage, located about 200 metres away. Within two minutes the SMM arrived at the scene and found one man killed lying on the pavement; the garage and a car were totally demolished.
'On 17 July, the SMM met with four members of Luhansk emergency first aid brigade. They reported that the day before, the first aid team responded to a call after firing in Luhansk had taken place, but before they were even able to see the patients, firing resumed and they had to run to a basement. One paramedic was injured by shrapnel. The doctors said that in June and July alone there were 250 killed and 850 wounded in the Luhansk region. (my emphasis, PH) The doctors also informed that on 16 July alone three persons were killed and 30 were wounded in Luhansk city. This last number does not include civilians killed in close vicinity of combat zones outside of the city and causalities among combatants. They also claimed that increasingly more people were being killed by booby traps and mines.'
This seems to me to be quite serious. I think we should hear more about it, especially as it results from a surprisingly vigorous assault on the rebels by a newly-invigorated Ukrainian Army, which a few months ago was decrepit and demoralized. Whatever has happened? have they taken up Pilates yoga, or is it vitamin pills or the Alexander technique? Or is it possible, whisper it not, that they (like the rebels) are getting outside help?
ITV examines Christianity
I make some brief appearances in this ITV 'Tonight' programme ‘Is Britain Christian?’, broadcast on Thursday 24th July at 7.30, the usual tiny snippets out of a lengthy conversation, which of course I knew to expect. Some interesting reflections on Church schools whose pupils are predominantly Muslim, and Zoe Williams her usual ineffable self on how religious people mustn’t ‘impose’ their views on the non-religious (as if secularists never impose their beliefs on the religious). There’s also some footage from one of the new Godless assemblies, but their enthusiasts are not asked very much about what idea they actually wish to communicate. The principal interviewee is a Lancaster sociology professor, Linda Woodhead (alongside whom I debated the subject last year, though more as loosely-linked allies than close comrades). No surprise there. Christianity is now a sociological or even anthropological peculiarity. Actual adherents, especially conservative ones such as me, are exhibits rather than participants.
https://www.itv.com/itvplayer/tonight/series-19/episode-19-is-britain-christian-
I think you may have to register with ITV Player to watch
Shades of Black, Shrines and Sinister Chains
'...One of the most articulate and intelligent people I met in Iran was a young schoolteacher, the mother of a young child. It was clear that her relationship with her husband was that of an equal. Yet as we discussed propaganda in the classroom, I was greatly struck by her extraordinary, medieval, night-black robes, so intensely sombre that they darkened the well-lit room in which we sat and so emphatically, ferociously modest that they represented an unspoken, passionate argument against secular modernity and all its works.
Much less persuasive or sympathetic was the bearded, taciturn man in an Esfahan ironmonger’s shop close to that lovely city’s tourist arcades of carpets, beaten copper, and spices. This man’s wares were not so picturesque. Displayed on his shelves were the sharp, grey zanjeer chains employed by Shia zealots to lash themselves bloody during the fierce, miserable festival of Ashura. This marks the great defeat of Shia arms at Kerbala more than 1,300 years ago. Also on display were other, heavier chains with an equally disturbing but secular purpose. These are used as weapons and threats by the Basiji, a sort of pro-government Islamic militia that is deployed to intimidate any public expression of opposition, much as similar “people’s militias” were used by Warsaw Pact states to ensure the Communist Party’s rule went unchallenged.
I was also unpleasantly surprised, during an evening stroll through Mashhad, to encounter a shop entirely devoted to the sale of chadors, the enveloping black shroud favoured by the mullahs. Especially disagreeable were the tiny child-sized models ranged in the window. I had just been marvelling at the near-European normality of the surrounding district, its busy cinema with its mixed clientele, its wedding shops and bookstores, its bold, regulation-defying young women. And here was this reminder of how this place remains anything but normal in many important ways.
Even less normal is the holy city of Qom, headquarters of the ayatollahs, for many years the home of Khomeini himself. I was urged by some Iranians not to go there. “It is Arabia in the middle of Persia,” warned a bookseller in Esfahan who had just shown me some rather rude but very beautiful prints featuring wine and young women not wearing chadors. Others just said that a sort of darkness seemed to hang over it. And yet, like so much of Iran, it was paradoxical.
I went to Qom by way of the strange shrine of Jamkaran, especially favoured by President Ahmadinejad, where the fabled Hidden Imam is widely believed to be most likely to reappear. It is a rather desperate, dusty, and angry place, beloved by the very poor and the very fervent, who slog to it on foot for many miles. But in Iran such things are part of life in a way almost forgotten in the American and European world. The worldly and the otherworldly, the commercial and the spiritual, mingle happily and unselfconsciously. The modern highway that leads from Tehran to Qom is a 21st-century construction in a partly medieval land. It has electronic speed-check cameras every few miles, alternating with official signboards bearing quotations from the Koran. Devout drivers recite them to keep awake on long night journeys. Imagine I-95, or the M4, overhung with signs proclaiming, “I am the way, the truth and the life” interspersed with advertisements for Howard Johnson’s or MacDonalds.
At dusk, the half-built mosque of Jamkaran glows greenish, like a cooling spaceship on the jagged Martian landscape of the region. But beside it sparkles a garish row of shops selling the local sweetmeat, a sugary brittle made of pistachio nuts, without which no pilgrimage is complete. Picture Washington National Cathedral or Westminster Abbey surrounded by stalls selling cotton candy, illuminated in primary colours, and nobody at all surprised or concerned, and you may get some impression of the effect.
The outer suburbs of Qom, likewise, are anything but holy in appearance. Hardware stores, candy outlets, and religious emporia selling the Koran at 40-percent reductions crowd the busy streets. There are parking lots the size of modest counties for pilgrim cars and coaches. Over it all towers the floodlit gold dome of another great Shia shrine, with an entire wall of mirrored glass, shining into the warm, windy night and the green flag of militant Islam floating above. Little by little, the visitor becomes aware of the enormous number of mullahs, all bearded, all in coffee-coloured robes and white turbans. There are mullahs climbing off buses with briefcases, mullahs driving cars, mullahs on motorbikes, rigidly clutching the handlebars…’
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PETER HITCHENS: Israel’s bloody assault on Gaza is a dream come true for Hamas
This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column
Israel exists only because quite a lot of people hate Jews for being Jews, and sometimes that hate turns into murder.
It is a place where Jews can go when other people want to kill them for being what they are, not for what they do, and when nobody else will take them in.
But it also exists because we in Britain set up a Jewish ‘national home’ in what was then our colony of Palestine, though we spent the next 30 years trying to go back on our word.
And it also exists because when we were too poor to hang on to our empire and quit Palestine in 1948 – leaving it in bloody, unfinished disarray – the USA backed the Jewishstate that emerged from the mess.
It may all have been a terrible mistake. I’m not sure what choice there was back then. But it is there, like many other lingering injustices done in the 1940s, in India and centralEurope, and it seems to me that wise and civilised people should try to accept it and make it work.
The alternative is endless blood and screams, stretching for miles and for years.
I made up my mind some years back, after many visits to the region, very much including the West Bank and Gaza, that the only honest position a British person could take was absolute defence of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. It must be that, or it cannot serve its grim ultimate purpose as a refuge against hate. And that once that is accepted, everything possible must be done to improve the position of the Arabs in the region.
It’s not always easy. Israel’s government and army have done and still do many wicked and stupid things. Its small elite is not really up to the huge responsibilities it faces. But I’m not budging.
And it is from that position that I say Israel’s attack on Gaza is idiotic, wrong and probably fatal to the future of the state its leaders claim to be defending.
Hamas, still clinging to its increasingly unpopular rule in Gaza, is overjoyed by Israel’s moronic, babyish response. It is all they dreamed of.
The world’s TV screens are full of pictures of dead and wounded women and children, weeping, gore and rubble – exactly what Hamas hoped to provoke.
Israel may bray that it did not intend to do this. I’m sure it didn’t. But if you shell and bomb a confined space such as Gaza, it will happen, and shame on you if you pretend that it’s not your fault when it does.
It is ludicrous to claim that this action, which makes future conflict certain, protects Israel in any way.
The fate of Israel will be decided in people’s minds, in countries like ours, and on TV screens, not by bullets and high explosive. Each episode of this kind makes that future more doubtful.
It is an illusion that a violent toughness is the only answer to threats. The really strong and brave man knows when to hold back.
Just as it would have been more sensible to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza when they captured them in 1967, it would have been far, far better to let the Hamas rockets fall, to shelter from them and to let the world see how much better Israel is than its aggressive despotic neighbours.
But the chance was missed, and it may, alas, have been missed for ever.
Having lived all my life in a world that was largely sensible and reasonable, I sense that the bad times are on the way back.
Peaches: poisoned by pious rubbish
Did you help Peaches Geldof to die? Quite possibly. Everyone who lazily accepts the conventional wisdom about drugs played a part in this and many other similar tragedies.
Many years ago, we decided to treat heroin abuse as an illness. We wouldn’t punish those who did it. Instead, we ‘treated’ them, in many cases by mugging taxpayers to give them free drugs.
Most people still agree on the idea that the drug user is a victim. The main problem with it is that it’s not true. The next problem is that it makes it much easier for people to become drug abusers.
I don’t believe in ‘addiction’, but I’ll leave that for another time. Even if I did, it would only strengthen my point. If it really is true that once you start taking heroin you can never stop again until you die, shouldn’t we be devoting huge efforts to making sure nobody ever starts?
And wouldn’t a severe deterrent law, one which (for a change) we actually enforced, be the best way of doing that? A few examples work wonders in changing people’s behaviour, as we found when the breathalyser and seat-belts came in.
If we’d very publicly locked up a few famous heroin abusers in the 1960s and 1970s, there’d be many fewer of them – famous or obscure – now. Because we didn’t, there are plenty more of these cases to come, plenty more ruined lives, plenty more orphans and plentymore pious rubbish.
So what’s boosted Ukraine’s army? Yoga?
I'm pleased to see that the wild, simple-minded anti-Russian hysteria of last weekend has cooled a bit, as the complicated truth has emerged and the intelligence briefings have calmed down.
I trust our Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon, has had a moment to lie down in a darkened room with a cold compress, reconsidering his outburst about ‘state-sponsored terror’. He’s probably found out by now that his colleagues have scrapped or sacked most of our Armed Forces, making his belligerence look funny to anyone in the know.
By the way, I am quite sure that Russia has been helping the rebels in Ukraine. It’s obvious.
But it’s also fairly obvious that Ukraine’s revolutionary government, which came to power in an EU and American-backed mob putsch in February, is getting help too.
Who from? Perhaps they’re doing yoga or taking vitamin pills, but your guess is as good as mine.
A few months ago, they were a decrepit shambles. Now they’re fighting and winning a violent battle to regain Luhansk and Donetsk. And it is very violent. Credible sources (local doctors) believe that 250 civilians have been killed and 850 wounded in Luhansk alone, during June and July.
Much of this is the result of the shelling and bombing of populated areas (just like Gaza) by ‘our’ side.
If you have any moral outrage left over after last week, you might want to expend it on that fact.
***
What I don’t understand is why it is supposed to be good for British politicians to humble themselves in the White House before whoever happens to be President of that foreign and not specially friendly country.
I suspect that the first party leader to say he doesn’t want such a visit will win the hearts and minds of the British people.
If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down
July 24, 2014
And Another Thing. Mr 'P', 'People Power' and the Rule of Law
I must just quickly ask Mr ‘P’ why he is so unable to see the importance of intent in an action. Well, I know he won’t reply responsively because he almost never does. He long ago shut his mind to inconvenient facts and arguments. So my responses to him (marked thus***) are really for the benefit of others, not of Mr ‘P’.
I take the view that if you desire war, you must take the blame for the horrors that inevitably follow when you get war. Indeed, this is the basis for my argument that the EU, through its deliberate attempt to co-opt a non-aligned country into its sphere of influence, launched after years of repeated diplomatic warnings and clear demonstrations of displeasure from Russia, has ultimate responsibility for the horror of MH17.
But that is a separate subject from the point that there is a difference between *deliberately* destroying a passenger aircraft in flight, something Middle-Eastern terrorists of various kinds have done, and *unintentionally* destroying a passenger aircraft in flight, as the US Navy has done in a conflict zone, and as Ukraine’s armed forces are accused of having done in 2001 during peaceful military exercises (Siberian Airlines flight 1812).
There has been some attempt to say that undeclared wars are not wars, but that came to a pretty abrupt end after it turned out that even Britian does not declare war before opening fire any more. There is a war in Ukraine (and a very vicious and under-reported one, now raging in Donyetsk and causing uncounted civilian casualties). It was in that war that someone, presumably a Russian separatist, shot down MH17. Had he destroyed a Ukrainian military plane ( as I think this person intended to do, and as has happened several times without major outrage in the past few weeks) the action would not have had the same character.
Some contributors have mentioned the IRA, while busily missing the point about intention. If the IRA had shot down a passenger plane, it would ahve been blamed for a terrorist murder. But that was because the IRA was a terrorist organisation and it would have done so - had it done so - deliberately. As it happens. the IRA never did this (though not, I believe, out of any moral scruple).
The IRA never targeted passenger airliners, working as it was in a mainly British and American environment where such actions would have lost it support and gained it no influence. This wasn’t because the IRA held back from murdering innocent people – it was always ready to do so and often did so, despite some modern attempts to claim that it 'always gave warnings' etc etc. Oh no it didn't.
It was just tactical wisdom. Certain types of ‘collateral damage’ were acceptable in the USA and the Irish Republic, or the IRA would not in the end have won the active support of the Washington and Dublin governments in forcing the British capitulation agreed in Belfast in March 1998.
But Middle Eastern terror groups more or less invented this method of warfare - hijacking, seizing and murdering hostages, blowing planes up in mid-air and crashing packed planes into buildings in suicide attacks.
Mr ‘P’ also chooses to take me up on the issue of ‘People Power’. I have said no more than that this is a modern weapon, and that its use is just as potent and interventionist as invasions by tanks and attacks by planes. In fact in the mdoern world it is rather more effective as it is deniable, can be portrayed as genuine popular outrage, and does not have the same rather worrying diplomatic implications as does an open military assault. That was my only point – that the fact that there were no tanks or troops or planes do not mean that there had been no intervention.
See the ‘Orange Revolution’ in Ukraine , the ‘Rose Revolution’ in Georgia, the failed ‘White Revolution’ in Moscow in the winter of 2011-12, the failed ‘Cedar Revolution’ in Lebanon and the disastrous ‘Arab Spring’ in which governments were (with the exception of Syria) successfully overthrown without serious consideration about what would replace them, And, going further back, see the overthrow of the Marcos regime in the Philippines, the first try-out of this method in modern times.
Rather than concede this blazingly obvious point Mr ‘P’ (typically) blusters, thus:
First quoting me "Backed by the USA, it used the post-modern methods of ‘people power’ which long ago rendered tanks obsolete in such matters.", Mr P continues, turning up his sarcasm button to ‘full’, he says:
‘Democracy rendering tanks obsolete. Who'd have thought it possible?’
*** So democracy equals the mob? A crowd trumps the ballot box? As I said to Elaine, do his neighbours know he believes that lawful governments can be unseated by crowds?
He then asks ‘Does not the Daily Mail spend its working life whipping up 'people power' in order to gets all manner of perceived wrongs righted, wrongs which would not otherwise be righted? ‘
***I think this is missing the point. The ‘Daily Mail’, for which I do not work, is like other newspapers in that it seeks to influence the outcomes of elections, and between elections it seeks to influence the lawful actions of duly constituted governments. But it does not seek to substitute itself for government or overthrow constituted authority.
Mr ‘P’ then asks ‘ And if 'people power' is the 'way forward' in international intrigue, why did not Mr Putin avail himself of it?’
***But he did. Has Mr ‘P’ already forgotten Mr Putin’s creation of ‘Nashi’,a Russian youth movement controlled by Mr Putin, designed to deter an ‘Orange Revolution’ in Moscow. And surely Mr ‘P’ would not argue that the demonstrations in favour of annexation by Russia in Crimea, or those in favour of a breakaway in Donyetsk, Lugansk, Kramatorsk, Slavyansk etc., were wholly spontaneous? I certainly don’t. One major difference between him and me is that I don’t pretend that my ‘own’ side is perfect, and so can observe and acknowledge these manoeuvres when each side makes them. It’s obvious that both sides have done so.
Why the tanks? Why the surface-to-air missiles?
**Indeed, and if Mr ‘P’ can show for a fact that Mr Putin has supplied such things to the rebels, I’d like to see his indisputable evidence. I am sure the GRU has been and is very active in helping and equipping the separatists, but I doubt very much they would risk supplying them with such large, easily traceable items of equipment, especially given the Ukrainian Army’s habit of fleeing from its decrepit ill-maintained bases and kindly abandoning such equipment to the rebels, equipment which is of course very similar to that possessed by Russian forces, though often older and more backward.
Mr P asks ‘ Why does not Mr Hitchens call it 'mob power' if it is the power of the mob to which he refers? ‘
***Because it is generally called ‘people power’, just as armoured land-cruisers are generally called ‘tanks’. Personally I think ‘mob power’ a better name, but Western media generally favour it, and people power’ sounds all nice in a San Franciscoish, flowers-in-your-hair sort of way.
What’s more I find that the more you repeat it, and explain its uses, the sourer the expression sounds, which is certainly my intent. (Philip Sington does something similar with the phrases ‘Workers’ and Peasants’ State’ and ‘Actually Existing Socialism’ in his brilliant novel set in East Germany, ‘The Valley of Unknowing’;)
Then Mr ‘P’ withdraws his complaint, having only just made it:
‘But no, he (me) calls it, and probably correctly, 'people power'. This is because the people-in-collective to which this expression applies are considerably larger in number than that which would qualify for a mob.’
***Really? Whence this definition? We are in Humpty Dumpty territory here.
Mr 'P' :'Mobs cause trouble, for sure, and are relatively easily dealt with by the legal authority, but the people en-masse which comprise 'people power' can and do cause, if denied constituted democratic process, governments to fall. What is wrong with that?’
***Quite a lot. This amazing blindness to the foundations of law and government explains why Mr ‘P’ cannot grasp the aggressive enormity of the EU’s behaviour in Ukraine. Once you abandon constitutional legality, you abandon it, and license others to do the same. It depends entirely upon general consent to constitutional authority,. Once you have withdrawn that consent, you cannot ask or expect others to give it. You have declared a war of all against all which will inevitably be resolved by force, a war which you have brought into being (and which may cause all kinds of hell).
The problem is even greater . If the ballot is sacred (and on other occasions I am sure Mr ‘P’ would say it was) , how can a crowd be used to deny its verdict? How can a crowd, so easily manipulated, so capable of mad violence, be a better measure of popular will than a vote?
Mr ‘P’ then elapses into cliché, verbal and mental:
‘The bottom line to all this is that the EU's lights are way brighter than Mr Putin's Russia's. Virtually all the former Soviet satellite states think so, and have acted upon that fact.’
**Again, this completely ignores, and does not even try to answer, my attempt to explain the lack of choice available to the former provinces of the Soviet empire. It is also economically illiterate. The EU is struggling to prop itself up after the disaster of the single currency, and Ukraine might well be devastated by IMF diktats being applied to its tottering, hopeless economy. Far from being brighter, its lights might go out altogether. Those who wish to see the joys of EU membership are advised to visit the less lovely parts of Poland ( Katowice?) , or they might ask the many Poles now in Britain why, if EU Poland is such a paradise of prosperity, they have come here to live six to a room for wages so low that few British people would accept them. The EU has no magic power to create prosperity in the devastation which is the former Soviet Empire. It is a cruel illusion to suggest that it will be so.
Sunday Morning Live
I'd have posted this before but it took some time to appear in the BBC iplayer and won't be there much longer.
It' s a recording of the BBC1 programme 'Sunday Morning Live', on which I appeared last Sunday, in the morning, (more or less)live.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04bn2x1/sunday-morning-live-series-5-episode-5
... in which I make interventions, on women in the Church, Gaza and putting God before sport.
Find me at about 10 minutes 45 seconds, 19 minutes 15 seconds, 26 minutes 40 seconds, briefly at around 36 minutes (twice) and at 54 minutes.
NB: Those who automatically accuse me of 'constantly interrupting' on the air, if I so much as breathe a word out of turn, should note that I seethed with impatience (but refrained from expressing it or pushing in) after the first exchange on women and the alleged glass ceiling.
I had in my view been been cut off before I could finish the point that lifetime careers *must*, not thanks to human will but by the nature of life and work, be affected by the fact that women bear children and in many cases wish to stay at home to raise them, not just for the first few months but for many years.
As a result many older women, with vast knowledge of life and work, are kept out of the upper reaches of the professions because they made this (in my view laudable and right) choice. Meanwhile those who decided to put career before children rise to the top on a tide of feminist fashion. This does not favour *women as a whole*, but *only those women who prefer career to children*. I would like to see some way found of ending this unfairness. We lose a great deal of wisdom and experience because of it.
Warning: The programme is available only for a short time.
Where East really meets West - and you can stay in the Hotel Bug
'…Travel a few hundred miles further east, though, passing through the latest version of Poland, and you come to the curious, accidental country of Belarus, which might have been invented for educational purposes.
Such a place never existed before and probably will not for much longer. It is independent of Russia only as an unintended side-effect of the break-up of the USSR at the end of the Gorbachev era. They broke it off and forgot to stick it back on again.
Its independence from Moscow lacks conviction. There is in reality no proper border with Russia, whose citizens can slip in and out at will. But there is certainly still a border with ‘The West’, a phrase that still means something here.
But there is certainly still a border with “The West,” a phrase that still means something here.
And what a border it is. After nearly a thousand miles of passport-free travel, from the English Channel to Warsaw, the voyager is abruptly required to produce his documents, visa and all, properly stamped, just as in the old days. Trains cannot even cross without having their wheels removed, for long ago the Russian empire adopted a wider gauge to prevent a rail-borne invasion.
Here at Brest on the River Bug—travellers who wish to rest overnight may stay in the Hotel Bug—stands the final frontier of the European Union, an abrupt and total stop to that strange, postmodern empire of deliberately forgotten history, bureaucracy, and subsidy. The EU may dream of one day incorporating Ukraine and even Turkey. But Belarus? I don’t think so. The place is too troublesome and unpredictable. An inhabitant of Brest—provided he was on nobody’s death list and was generally lucky—might have lived in five different countries in one century without so much as moving house.
In this disputed city, just by the Polish frontier, are the ruins of the mighty fortress of Brest Litovsk, built by the Tsars, acquired by Pilsudski’s Poland in 1921, taken back by Stalin in his pact with Hitler in 1939, conquered by Hitler in 1941, retaken by Stalin in 1944, the property of an independent Belarus since 1991, and who knows what next?
Brest provided the backdrop to a nightmare joint victory parade by the Red Army and Hitler’s Wehrmacht in the autumn of 1940. Pictures still exist of this queasy event, but there is no sign of any cheering crowd.
Within the smashed walls of its citadel lies the shell of the old White Palace, scene of the “forgotten peace” of Brest Litovsk, the very spot where a petulant Leon Trotsky stormed away from the table as Bolshevik-ruled Russia was humiliated and dismembered by the Kaiser’s ungrateful Germany. An almost identical humiliation, driving Russia back to eerily similar borders, was imposed on Moscow by an equally ungrateful Washington after Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin ended the Cold War.
As for Belarus itself, a flat and defenceless territory on the main invasion route between Paris and Moscow, its fertile soil is watered with blood and full of bones—Russian, Polish, French, German, and, of course, Jewish. No wonder its people are keen on all the tranquillity they can get. Currently, they get quite a lot.
This is thanks to the extraordinary Alexander Lukashenko, an inexcusable and increasingly unbalanced tyrant whose enemies often disappear mysteriously, if they are not beaten up by his police or flung into his prisons after travesties of trials…’
Want to read on? You can - by reading my new e-book ‘Short Breaks in Mordor’ , which now has 20 favourable customer reviews on amazon.co.uk (19 of them five-star, one four-star) and six on amazon.com (all five stars).
You do not need an e-reader to read it. If you have a computer, it's available. You can download it through the Kindle Cloud Reader on to any device:
See here :
You can find it here
Amazon.co.uk: http://amzn.to/1lCF9OM
Or, if you are in the USA, here
Amazon.com: http://amzn.to/T6wyZJ
July 23, 2014
The Official Rhetoric Cools - as I said it should days ago
As I listened to the radio this morning, some favourite lines from Hilaire Belloc’s unmatched Edwardian Masterpiece, his ‘Cautionary Tales for Children’, came to mind, as they so often do.
In this case it was the poem about ‘Jim, who ran away from his nurse and was eaten by a lion’. The bit that swam into my memory describes the moment when a portly zoo-keeper (‘though very fat, he almost ran , to help the little gentleman’) instructs the lion, Ponto, to stop eating the boy Jim, who has foolishly slipped away from his nurse, and found something worse, during a visit to the zoo.
‘The lion made a sudden stop. He let the dainty morsel drop - and slunk, reluctant, to his cage, snarling with disappointed rage’.
Perhaps you can work out why I was reminded of this passage by a report from the BBC Washington correspondent Aleem Maqbool in an item in Radio 4’s Today’ programme at 6.37 this morning, often a good time of day for the listener to be alert. For the next few days you can listen to the whole thing at roughly 37 minutes in, here
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b049ysn8
Here’s my own transcript. I may have left out a few ums, ers and y’knows.
Sarah Montague introduced this hugely significant story (with which - in my view - the programme should have led its bulletins) saying :’Senior American intelligence officials say they have no evidence of direct Russian involvement in the shooting down of the Malaysian airlines plane over Ukraine.’
Mr Maqbool then said : ‘We were expecting something quite different when we heard that intelligence officials were going to be briefing journalists and what we got was a statement saying that it was believed that rebels had shot down this plane but they had done so by mistake, and that we were also told that there was no empirical evidence that Russia was directly involved, the Russian government was directly involved.
‘And that’s all fine of course, except over the previous days we have been told quite different things, it felt, certainly the tone was very different, from officials in Washington over the weekend, Secretary of State John Kerry gave a whole raft of interviews where he very firmly pointed the finger of blame at Russia and he talked about all kinds of evidence that had appeared on the Internet, for example, what Ukrainian officials had been talking about where they apparently had seen surface to air missile launchers being moved soon after the crash from Ukraine into Russia and things like that - and we were told that we were going to see that evidence in coming days . As I say, it’s fine if they haven’t found that evidence, but that’s not the impression that we were given before.’
Sarah Montague then interjected : ’There was also a suggestion that actually rebels couldn’t have been able to fire these weapons without Russian military expertise.’
Aleem Maqbool responded: ‘Yes, I mean, they’ve always said that ultimately in terms of expertise, in terms of training in terms of hardware, that may well have come, that is likely of course to have come from Russia and that is still the line but, as I say, it feels like a ratcheting down of the kind of rhetoric that we have heard from Washington in recent days and the question then is why, and it perhaps points to the fact that when Secretary of State Kerry was saying these things, when President Obama was pointing the finger at Moscow, the next question that they were asked was “What are you going to do about it? If Russia is directly involved then what are the consequences that Vladimir Putin is going to feel?”
‘And of course that's a very tricky question for the whole world, not just America, because Russia is so intricately linked in so many diplomatic processes around the world and so there are a lot of countries around the world saying well, we can’t afford to isolate Russia so, if the United States, if others come out with this empirical evidence that Russia is involved it could actually be quite problematic because the question of course that everybody will ask is “What are you going to do about that?”'
**
I particularly loved ‘we were expecting something quite different, and ‘that’s all fine of course’ , which seemed gloriously peevish to me. What I also much enjoyed was the suggestion that Washington was withdrawing from its previous position not because the evidence for its previous claims isn’t there - but because Russia is not a pushover and the truth is therefore inconvenient or unwelcome. Of course this is not impossible, though Russia is no more tied in to global diplomacy and trade than it was when very senior persons were raising the temperature to boiling point at the end of last week. Nor is Russia’s importance on the world chessboard a secret. Indeed, most of the anti-Kremlin lobby are busy exaggerating Moscow’s importance. So the 'let's not tangle with the evil bear' explanation lacks a certain something.
There’s an alternative explanation, which fits rather better with Washington’s recent record in intelligence matters. It is that people may have believed last week what they wanted to believe, and so given the impression they knew things they didn’t.
I was personally most impressed by the speed and power of Ukraine’s propaganda machine on the day of the atrocity. Kiev set the agenda from the start, introducing the word 'terror' into the coverage very quickly, and by Sunday most normal people in the West pretty much believed that Vladimir Putin was some sort of terrorist murderer, or at least a sponsor of terrorist murder. The far more likely explanation, that an incompetent moron had shot down the passenger plane by mistake, which is horrible but simply doesn’t have the same significance as a deliberate action, was much less politically useful, and harder to moralise about.
By the way, I’d just like to make a small comment about an article by the Mayor of London, Al 'Boris' Johnson, in the Daily Telegraph of Monday 21st July. It seeks to deal with the comparison some people (including me) made between the MH17 atrocity and the shooting down of an Iranian civil airliner by the USS Vincennes in 1988.
Mr Johnson (who is or was a US citizen by right of birth – he once said he was planning to renounce this privilege after a tangle with the US immigration authorities) , said in this article
‘I will not pretend that the Americans were perfect in their handling of the Airbus tragedy. They never made a formal apology to Iran, and for some (incredible) reason the captain of the USS Vincennes was later awarded the Legion of Merit. But the first and most important difference was that when America erred, there was no significant attempt to deny the truth, or to cover up the enormity of what had happened. An inquiry was held, and it was accepted that there was absolutely no fault on the side of the Iranian plane. It was concluded that the bridge crew had essentially made a disastrous error in thinking the plane looked hostile, and this was ascribed to "scenario fulfilment", whereby people trained to respond to a certain scenario (attack by air) carry out every detail of the procedure without thinking hard enough whether reality corresponds to the scenario.’
Harrumph. I will here quote from the Wikipedia account of the event which is seriously sourced (if you have time it is well worth reading the entry and following the notes) :
‘Three years after the incident, Admiral William J. Crowe admitted on American television show Nightline that the Vincennes was inside Iranian territorial waters when it launched the missiles.[34] This contradicted earlier Navy statements. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) report of December 1988 placed the USS Vincennes well inside Iran's territorial waters.[35]’.
Whether this flexibility about Iranian territorial waters was a ‘significant attempt to deny the truth’, I will leave it to readers to judge.
I will make one other small point, given the way in which the charnel-house horror of the crash site at Grabovo has been depicted over the past few days. in 1988, the Airbus and its passengers and crew fell into the sea, not on to land, and while we need have no doubt the debris and the human carnage were as horrible as any in Ukraine, there are, as a result, no images of this event to compare with those at Grabovo, which is perhaps one of many reasons why the Vincennes episode is largely forgotten. I’ll only say that this and other comparable incidents confront all of us, and all governments, and anyone who ever controls a weapon, with severe moral problems. They fill me with a horror of war which has grown greater all through my life, the more I have known about war.
An Article about the First World War for the American Spectator
Some readers may be interested in this article in the current uissue of the American Spectator
http://spectator.org/articles/59563/foul-tornado
Readers of the final paragraphs might note that I wrote it several weeks ago.
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