Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 241

What if Quebec cosied up to Russia?

A few more thoughts on the Crimea, Ukraine, Russia, on precedents and on who has title to the disputed lands West and North of Smolensk.  

 

On precedent, I feel, increasingly that one has to look at Turkey’s 1974 invasion of Cyprus. I’ve no doubt that Turkey had a case for this, and that it was popular with Turkish Cypriots, and I can quite see why the USA never took serious action against Turkey about it. But the fact that Turkey is a NATO member, and remains one, has not been frozen out of this body ( a much more  coherent and significant gathering than the G8) and has not been subject to sanctions, knocks all the stuffing out of the objections to Russia’s seizure of the Crimea. You simply cannot condemn one without condemning the other, or excuse the one without excusing the other. The parallel is made all the stronger by the fact that Turkey imprisons far more journalists than Russia, holds political show trials, is aggressive to its neighbour Syria, fomenting rebellion there,  kills anti-government demonstrators, is spectacularly corrupt, and has an increasingly autocratic head of government.

 

This doesn’t diminish the significance (in the blatant hypocrisy league) of the Iraq invasion or the Kosovo secession. I’d also add another interesting sideline, a consequence of Iraq. The invasion created a de facto breakaway Kurdish state, so-called Iraqi Kurdistan (whose most significant characteristic is that it is not Iraqi)  so altering agreed borders by force. It’s true that nobody has yet attempted to get this recognised, but without US military intervention, it wouldn’t exist. And while it may not yet have any legal existence, it is absolutely real, has 20 so-called ‘consulates’ in its capital, and gets more real every day. If this is right in principle, how can Crimea be wrong in principle?

 

Now, back to title. A lot is made of the internal borders of the Soviet Republics which preceded the break-up of the USSR, and how Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states(in the West) follow those borders and declared independence from the USSR using these borders.

 

True enough. But those borders were purely internal, and were predated by the sovereignty of the Russian Empire, legitimate, stable and recognised by all civilised states before 1917. It was also our ally against Germany from 1914 to 1917, and Paris would ahve fallen in September 1914 if Russia had not fought. I haven’t been able to check details of the internal government of that empire, but those borders were only violated, in modern times, by the armed forces of the German Empire (I was studying, only the other day, interesting pictures of German Imperial troops marching into Riga in 1918).

 

The point I’m making is that Moscow’s sovereignty over these areas did not derive from the dissolved and unmourned USSR, but from the former laws and borders of pre-Communist Russia, which we once recognised.

 

This, one might consider, would be the legitimate territory of any post-Communist, post-Soviet state.  The only powers that ever disputed those borders in modern times were Germany and Austria-Hungary, in discredited and disgraceful wars of aggression.

 

Now, while Russia has, wisely and rationally, abandoned any claim to bring these territories back under direct Moscow control, and has recognised their independence, is it not even so entitled to question attempts to bring them into alliances whose specific purpose is to remove them permanently from Russian influence?

 

I have just had an amusing brush on the telephone with the American politician Frank Gaffney, on to whose US radio programme I was invited, for reasons best known to him and his producers. He was so amazed when I suggested that Russia might have a case that he began to talk over me, to such an extent that I suspect about half our encounter (which seemed to me to end very abruptly)  is going to be very difficult to make out,  if it is broadcast.  

 

I do not think he much wanted to hear my parallel, in which an independent Quebec joins a Russian alliance, so I did not manage to go the full distance, giving my Montreal scenario in which Quebec, having become independent from Canada, finds it has Russian politicians appearing amid an anti-government mob in the centre of Montreal, handing out blinis and red caviar to the crowd, urging the overthrow of a pro-American government and its replacement by one which favours links with Moscow. Nor yet the final bit, in which Quebec joins the Eurasian Union and signs a military treaty with Russia involving the stationing of Russian troops, ships and planes in Quebec.

 

Do you know, I don’t think Washington would like that one bit.  I’m not even sure that the theoretical new Quebec government would survive all that long if it permitted such things to happen. Why then are people surprised that Moscow doesn’t like what happened in Kiev?

A Debate on Drug Legalisation

Prospect magazine invited me to take part in an exchange with Baroness Meacher on drug legalisation.

You may read it here:

 

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/the-duel-should-the-uk-legalise-drugs/#.UzP-P6h_t8F

An Encounter with Frank Gaffney

And here is the encounter with Frank Gaffney which I wrote about yesterday:

http://securefreedomradio.podbean.com/2014/03/26/pete-hegseth-diana-west-peter-hitchens-jim-hanson/

 

You have to keep going a bit,  to 28 minutes 51 seconds. I am not sure I am comfortable with the coupling of the two words  'Secure Freedom'. I have to say that either my memory is at fault or the bits where we, er, talked over each other a bit, have been edited.

Have we Stigmatised Stigma? - A BBC Radio 4 programme

Some of you might like to listen to this BBC Radio 4 programme, presented by me, which will go out at 8.00 this evening (Greenwich Mean Time)

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03yn83q

After transmission I expect it will be available on the internet for some time

Owen Jones is right about Libya

Having criticised Owen Jones last week for his daft claim that the BBC is biased ‘to the right’, it is only fair that I should praise him this week for an excellent account of the mess we have made of Libya, and of the subsequent silence of so many of those who supported this intervention at the time. 

 

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/24/libya-disaster-shames-western-interventionists

 

 

More Thoughts on Michael Gove's School Choice

The real nature of Michael Gove’s personal education policy is still trickling out, bit by bit. You’ll have to wonder why he’s largely got away with it. Most of the media have been merciful about his decision to choose an elite girls' school, Grey Coat Hospital, instead of the next-door comp which he has himself praised many times in public.

 

They have stuck to the (perhaps questionable) story that he is the first Tory Education Secretary to send a child to a state secondary school . I gather Gillian Shephard, Education Secretary under John Major, sent her step-children to state secondaries, which seems to me to count, especially as she was both a former teacher and a former school inspector. I’ve no details of the schools involved, though Norfolk, her home county, has some excellent state secondaries.

 

And also you might wonder why the searchlight of criticism, which was rightly directed at Harriet Harman when she got a child into Grey Coat Hospital, and at the Blairs, when they got a child into the Oratory, has passed Mr Gove by.

 

This is particularly striking when you recall that Michael Gove had been so keen on his own local Comprehensive, Burlington Danes, in so many newspaper articles and speeches. If it is so good, if academies are so good, then why not send his own child there? Yet, apart from me, the Independent and a piece by Libby Purves in The Times, there's been hardly a peep about this strangely contradictory behaviour. I should add that , as I have often mentioned here, I like Mr Gove and regard him as a friend. But this - as I'm sure he's aware - would never have prevented me from criticising actions bearing on his public office, which I thought questionable

 

Anyway, I was amused and heartened by the piece below, which appeared in the latest Independent on Sunday, by Tom Hodgkinson. It deals rather neatly with the strange contortions of the liberal middle classes when it comes to religion and schools, and is also interesting about Burlington Danes, the school Michael Gove praises all the time, which is very close to his home, and which is also a Church of England school, but which he spurned in favour of an elite girls-only Church school when the moment of choice arrived.

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/schools/call-this-a-comprehensive-grey-coat-hospital-could-hardly-be-called-inclusive--unlike-the-local-secondary-michael-gove-has-passed-up-9188027.html

 

A Few Responses and Further Thoughts on the Power Struggle in Ukraine

I thought I’d try to reply to the many interesting responses to my recent articles about the Ukraine crisis. I think this is by far the most important and interesting event taking place at the moment (though the hideous overcrowding of our prisons seems to me to be gravely neglected).

 

So I make no apology for dealing with it at length. It raises fascinating questions about national motives and interests, the true nature of title to territory, the existence or non-existence of international law and justice, the power of myth in history, and the weird willingness of peoples to be led towards wars which, when they happen, will ruin their lives to an extent they currently can’t imagine.

 

I’m not actually that keen on the much-praised novel ‘Old Filth’ and its sequel ‘The Man in the Wooden Hat’  by Jane Gardam. There’s something unsatisfactory about them that I can’t quite put my finger on, though I think it’s partly the very large amount of hindsight in their descriptions and characterisations of actions taken in a very different past. But in them there is one passage about the immediate aftermath of the start of World War Two in Britain, or at least the real war once the invasion scare got going. It’s the disappearance of simple pleasures, symbolised by the empty, plundered chocolate machines on railway station platforms, with their empty drawers hanging open, which somehow symbolise the immediate huge drop in everyone’s standard of life, a drop that would in fact last for 15 years of rationing and austerity.

 

I now know about the stripping of national wealth that was taking place at the same time, and of course we all know about the hecatombs of deaths and maimings which are about to follow. But the penury and privation of war, even for non-combatants in unoccupied, uninvaded countries, are hugely miserable. To the end of her life, my mother (who lived through the 1939-45 war as a young woman) could not throw away an egg-shell without running her finger round it to remove the very last of the white. And when she bought Mars Bars for me and my brother she would always cut them up into several small portions, unable to get used to a plenty in which such things were available, all the time, to everyone . 

 

One reader objects to my dismissal of Ukraine as a ‘made-up country’ and says : ‘Surely if you actually believed that you would be calling for Northern Ireland to be given to Ireland, as it is a 'made up country' (a term you never define, simply using it as a slur…’) .

Actually I have never supported the existence of Northern Ireland as a separate state or even province. I have many times said that I think the establishment of the Stormont Parliament was a mistake, that it arose out of the British establishment’s unspoken desire to abandon the six counties when they got the chance, and that Northern Ireland should have been governed from London from the start.

 

As for what I mean by a ‘made-up country’, I suppose I mean one that could not sustain its existence unless powerful outside interests allowed or encouraged it to do so, or deterred nearby powers from suppressing it.

 

‘Travis’ offered a careful and thoughtful counter to my long posting on ‘Between the Crisis and the catastrophe’.

 

He said : ’.. now that Russia itself has invaded and annexed part of a sovereign state, he [that’s me, PH] has put himself in the ludicrous position of defending this act of blatant aggression and expansionism by claiming that it is an act of self-defense. Yes, eastern Ukraine has a large population of ethnic Russians, a great many of which support assimilation into Russia. Yes, Ukraine is considered the heartland of Russian and Slavic culture. Yes, the Ukrainian state is "made up", in the sense that it exists more as a state than as a nation. But Ukraine is also an independent country, which has just had its sovereignty grossly violated and its territory dismembered without provocation. There was no threat, spoken or implied, made by Ukraine to Russia.’

 

**I respond. I don’t use the ‘heartland’ argument, regarding it as essentially sentimental. Nor am I especially interested in the Russian ethnic minorities. Provided their language and culture are respected, and they are not second-class citizens, their existence is not a pretext for outside intervention. Frontiers will inevitably trap some people in the ‘wrong’ place and civilised states have to accommodate this.

 

But I disagree that there was ‘no threat, spoken or implied. The threat does not come from Ukraine, which couldn’t threaten its way out of a wet paper bag, being a military and economic weakling. It comes *from those who use Ukraine*.

 

Many, for instance, rightly lament the plight of Ukrainians, governed by corrupt and incompetent oligarchs( a feature of both the major factions which have tussled for power and spoils in Kiev since independence). They then make a huge logical leap, perhaps hoping nobody will notice it, of assuming that the signing of an association agreement with the EU will in some way end Ukraine’s corrupt and squalid governance. Why would that be so? What is the process by which the EU would place incorruptible youth at the prow of Ukraine.

 

It may have been bliss in that dawn to have been alive,  and to have been young may have been very heaven, but the Orange Revolution (which was much nicer than the more recent armed putsch)  foundered with amazing speed on the rocks of reality. Ukraine is completely broke, and what wealth it has,  has mostly been stolen. What economy it has is far more compatible with Russia than with the EU, and has suffered through separation from Russia..

 

And then there seems to be this belief that EU membership automatically makes a country free, law-governed a prosperous, supported by claims that Poland is a tremendous success.  Come now. Poland is such as success that it exports hundreds of thousands of its young people in the search for work, and its early years in the EU were marked by a violent riot amid Warsaw’s new shiny shops, staged by coalminers from Katowice (no western paradise when I was last there) who saw it as threat to their jobs. As for Romanian and Bulgaria, does anyone really think they’re anywhere near the levels of transparency achieved in the more advanced parts of the EU?

 

Anyway, these former Warsaw pact countries, plus the three Baltic states,  did not undergo the full 74 years of Bolshevism. They were independent and had rational economies until the outbreak of World War Two. They had recent, living memories of non-Soviet life and thought. They did not undergo the Russian Civil Wars or the Great Purge. The visitations of the NKVD/MGB/KGB were terrible, but not as terrible as what had already happened in the actual pre-1939 USSR.

 

Ukraine ,with the tiny (and important and telling) exception of the small area round Lemberg/Lwow/Lvov/Lviv, and of sub-Carpathian Ukraine, did by contrast undergo the complete Bolshevik package from soup to nuts, and from Lenin to Gorbachev. The EU has never attempted to incorporate any other territory which has had thus experience.  Believe me, it makes a difference. The Bolsheviks never succeeded in creating Homo Sovieticus, but they did a lot to destroy civility and honesty in human life, and it will take a century or more to recover, if it ever does.

 

So let us forget any stuff about the benefit of Ukrainians. That’s propaganda. The EU association agreement, like all EU agreements with possible members, is political. It is about power, EU power if you insist (though I tend to think that is a polite way of expressing something else) , but power nonetheless.  And if you insert your power into a country which is in someone else’s sphere of influence, you challenge, and seek to diminish, the power of  someone else.  In that case, that someone else is Russia. It was a threat. I say it again. The EU is the reverse of Clausewitz. It is the continuation of war by other means.  In this case it is the heir to Friedrich Naumann’s liberal German plan to establish ‘Mitteleuropa’, a German sphere of mixed political and economic control, extending across Ukraine to the edge of the Caucasus. Naumann is the direct political ancestor of the German liberal party, the Free Democrats, whose luminary Hans-Dietrich Genscher pursued a subtle and clever eastward policy during the closing years of the Cold War, and whose heirs still sit in the Berlin Foreign Ministry which now stands on the corner of Underwater Street (Unterwasserstraße) and Werderscher Markt in that fine city.
 
‘Travis’ adds : 'Peter might say that the western powers "provoke" Russia by attempting to draw Ukraine into the EU sphere of influence, but given what has happened, this just doesn't hold water. It wasn't Britons or Americans or Germans who packed into Kiev's independence square to fight for Yanukovych's ouster: Ukrainians did that.
 
***I answer this point above. Ukrainians may have thought that was what they were doing. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they all had it right. The keen and well-organised involvement of Svoboda and Pravy Sektor, who rightly viewed the whole thing as an anti- Russian exercise and have never hidden this, suggests that some of the demonstrators knew very well what was really going on. The rest (as has been the case on every demonstration in which I have ever taken part, either as sucker or manipulator, or which I have ever seen) were filled with vaguer utopian or idealist  aspirations, and were being used.
 
 
Travis adds: ‘And to say that an uprising among the Ukrainian people against a Ukrainian government is nothing more than a western attempt to make Russia vulnerable’
 
***Ah but I don’t say it was 'nothing more than that'. I am happy to concede, and have done on RT, that many of the demonstrators may have believed that they had higher motives, and indeed had them. That does not  alter the fact that those purposes were hopelessly impractical, and that they were being used by others who did have aggressive power-seeking motives.
 
I do not know who if anyone organised the demonstrators, arranged for their tents and feeding, advised them that you can camp on a paved square if you lay down styrofoam blocks etc (who’d have known that?) . Maybe it was spontaneous.  Coincidence theorists will doubtless argue so. I am not so sure. But the presence on the ‘Maidan’ of Victoria Nuland, Guido Westerwelle, John McCain and Cathy Ashton cannot be attributed to accident, and I am interested that the defenders of this episode never try to explain or defend this gross interference in Ukrainian national sovereignty. 
 
In what normal, proud, patriotic country would a crowd welcome the blatant interference in their internal affairs of foreign politicians? If this quartet are so interested in fighting for liberty and against corruption, oligarchy  and injustice, on the borders of the EU, why haven’t they been in Taksim Square in Istanbul, a country far closer to EU membership than Ukraine? And leaving aside the EU, why haven’t they been in Tahrir Square in Cairo, inveighing against the monstrous , violent and repressive military junta, which seized power in Egypt through a blatant coup, whose true nature they have mostly yet to admit?
 
‘Travis’ must really learn to penetrate the rather crude disguises in which power advances itself. Anomalies of this kind (why are they in A, but not in B and C where the same conditions apply? Why do they object to Y when X does it, but not when Z does it?)are often the best clue.
 
 
He says the burden of my argument ‘is to completely dismiss the sovereign agency of the Ukrainian people themselves.’
 
I think I have explained above why this isn’t so.
 
Then he asks : ‘ Does the Ukraine itself, as a sovereign state, not have the right to chart its own course, even if that course takes it into alignment with the EU?’
 
**To which I reply, I am not sure what he means by ‘the right’? Does Texas have the ‘right’ to secede from the USA? Does the South Tirol have the ‘right’ to demand reunification with Austria and the end of Italian rule? Does Flanders have the ‘right’ to demand unification with the Netherlands, and the breaking of the shackles of Belgium?
(By the way, when I mentioned the reluctance of Italy or Spain or France top permit secession by various minority peoples the other day, some contributors wrote in about a poll in Veneto on this subject . This was not an officially sanctioned poll and had no legal force. Nor is any such poll likely to happen, unless local terrorists , supported by the USA, force Rome to concede one (as happened in Northern Ireland) ).
 
In these and many other cases, the question is decided by common sense, the desire to avoid (or alternatively to create) war and conflict . If we decided that frontiers were about ‘rights' and 'justice’, it is hard to think of a frontier that could not be opened to question, and an interference that could not be allowed. If Mexico or Canada sought the ‘right’ to join an alliance with Russia or China, I imagine the USA would have something pretty stern to say about that, and I have a feeling that the government involved would not last many months after expressing such an intention.
 
So the answer to the question is that it might have such a ‘right’ in the abstract. But in reality it might well come at the expense of dangerous conflict. Does ‘Travis’ believe he or anyone has the right to take such risks?
 
It is only this widespread view that Russia is not a country, but a threat, which allows people to treat its legitimate desires so lightly. Why is it, I ask again and again, that Russia of all countries is denied the courtesies allowed to others, many of them just as bad if not worse in their internal governance? It’s an anomaly, a warning that what you see is a disguise, a mask, not a true face.
 
The row with Russia is about something else.
 
Travis rightly criticises Russia’s crude propaganda about protecting its people.  In agree with him. I thought it false and needless, and here condemn it unequivocally. I am not writing about ‘loyalty to one’s kin’, but about national sovereignty, a wholly different thing.
 
As for the comparison to the Anschluss (it makes a change from the Sudetenland) , quite a lot of open minded people would have said (before Hitler and the National Socialists came along) that the post-Versailles ban on Germany and Austria uniting was one of the stupidest clauses of Versailles. I note it has now been quietly reversed by Schengen and the Euro, and the Anschluss has been achieved, quietly, by the EU.
 
‘Steven’ opines that  ‘Mr. Hitchens's desperate attempts to equate the military invasion by Russia of the territory of a neighbouring state with what he calls a "bureaucratic, economic and legal invasion" by the EU are not remotely credible. He can't comprehend that the European Union is an entity that has obtained its powers not through military aggression but through voluntary and peaceful transfer of sovereignty by the democratically elected governments of its individual member states. Countries are not obliged to join it and are free to leave it any time they want (Article 50 TEU).’
 
***Are they  ‘desperate’? The European Union’s accretion of powers has not been done very openly (all of them in fact irreversible by any act short of secession ,and what does ‘Steven’ reckon are the chances of any country that seeks to exercise this supposed right?). He should read ‘the Great Deception’ by Christopher Booker and Richard North. Most members of the EU have been ushered in, by the decision of their own elites, themselves under considerable pressure to do so. It is only alter that they find out what the vast inheritance of the ‘Acquis Communitaire’ means in practice for their freedom of action. Of course, the less free and independent a country is in the first place, the easier it will be for it to undergo this process. But I think the description offered by ‘Steven’ is disingenuous.
 
He then says : ‘The sad fact is that Mr. Hitchens's hostility and contempt for the European Union is now so acute that he can openly declare, repeatedly, in public, that he "likes" Vladimir Putin. Is this dignified behaviour for a respected and seasoned reporter of foreign affairs? Why not just remain aloof and objective, and concede (as many of us do) that both sides are at fault in this confrontation, that both sides are guilty of cynical power politics? Is it really worth sacrificing your impartiality just to cling to the out-dated concept of the "nation state" (whatever that is) and a forlorn hope of returning to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia?’
 
Well, I am a journalist and a reporter, but one who happens to believe that people in my position should be open about our opinions, rather than trying to influence others by stealth under a false pretence of impartiality or 'objectivity'. I am surprised and discomfited by my own opinions on Russia. But I openly profess them because they *are* my opinions, and because I hold them as a result of experience and thought, rather than prejudice.  I hated the USSR and had little time for Russia (wrongly thinking it synonymous with the USSR) when I went to live there. I learned otherwise in the years that followed .
 
After witnessing the KGB attack on the Vilnius TV Tower in January 1991, I was for some months afterwards filled with a righteous anger against the Soviet system, and an irrational hostility to individual Russians,  which I had to fight to hide. This lifted like a fog in August 1991 after the failure of the KGB putsch in Moscow itself, which I also witnessed first hand. I was then flung into a mental turmoil about the whole subject of Russia’s future (for some time I was beguiled by Boris Yeltsin, a folly I now deeply regret)  from which I have reached my current position.  
 
I have no idea why the concept of that nation state is ‘outdated’ . It is not a sausage or an egg, and does not decay with time.  People must really get out of the habit of assuming that because something has existed for a long time, it must be wrong, or that because something is new it must be right. Hasn’t experience cast some doubt on this view? Nor do I see why the nation state requires inverted commas. It is the largest unit in which it is possible to be effectively unselfish, loyalty to it permits sacrifice and generosity on a large scale, and is the foundation of tolerance. If ‘Steven ‘ is against the nation state, perhaps he should say why, and what he thinks should replace it, rather than appealing to fashion as his argument. I cannot see why it is a ‘forlorn hope’ to return to the common sense and wisdom which were so dearly bought at the Peace of Westphalia. The whole point of having a historical memory is that we avoid repeating our stupid mistakes. What exactly has happened since 1648 to invalidate the wisdom of that treaty?
 
‘Paul P’ says ‘Mr Hitchens is wont to compare Nazism with Communism, that is to say Hitlerism with Stalinism, as if they were of equal evil standing. But that is not the case. While Hitler and his racial theories of supremacy drove Nazism to evil almost without bounds, Stalin was merely routinely brutal in his communism - as brutal as any Genghis Khan or any Pol Pot. It was of the same order of disinterested brutality of the animal kingdom in general, and to this extent it marked Stalin down as a de facto animal - to be dispatched with as little pity as he showed others.’
 
This may not even be true. Stalin was in many ways a violent racialist and persecuted, to the point of murder, several ethnic groups. Had he lived, he would have pursued a severe pogrom against Soviet Jews. I am not sure in any case why extermination on the basis of class or opinion is less evil than extermination on the basis of ethnic origin.  And I am not sure that killing people through grief, callousness, starvation and exhausting slavery in dangerous places is in any moral way less reprehensible than gassing them. I think a lot of this results from the fact that there are no films of liberating armies throwing open Stalin’s death camps and revealing the skeletal victims and the piles of corpses. That is because they were never liberated, but were maintained by our main ally and then closed as secretly as they had been operated.  
 
He also writes, rather obscurely ‘We at last saw darkness descending and found the necessary fortitude. There were to be no more 'Czechoslovakias'. It happened to be Poland, and so Poland it was. "Churchill was indeed a great man, but his achievement was to secure our bare survival, which came at the desperate cost of our national wealth and our empire." The operative word here, and of the only interest given the circumstances of the time, is 'survival'. It equates to victory in war over the Nazis. Victory in peace, albeit a peace fraught with the threat of Armageddon, over the abominable Soviet regime would be secured at minimal cost over many years.’
 
I’m not sure what point he seeks to make. What was it to us what happened to Poland or Czechoslovakia? If the fates of these countries *are* important in the argument, then surely the fact that the country we chose to ‘save’ went down into the pit has some bearing on the case for war? If it doesn’t matter, then what did we go to war for?
 
If it was for our own benefit what benefit was that? Having gone to war, we either had to make terms with Hitler, or to fight to the end. Had Hitler defeated Stalin in 1941, we would have had to make terms anyway, as all serious historians recognise. There was no automatic American rescue coming, despite the widespread delusion that the USA was our warm loving ally. If we had not gone to war for Poland , we would not have been in that trap. Nor would France, for without us she would never have declared war in 1939.  We could have (like the USA) have used the period to retain an armed neutrality while we rearmed, and (like the USA) entered the European war when it suited us. We would also have compelled Germany to retain large forces on its Western frontier, in case we attacked.   But once we were in, it was a choice between hanging on to the end (even if it led, as it did, to bankruptcy and the loss of empire) or making disgraceful terms.
 
For what did we put ourselves in this dreadful position?  Who was saved, helped, or otherwise benefited by this decision? I’ve never understood, and would be grateful if someone could explain.
 
A brief divergence to deal with ‘Abbasong’, who writes ‘Peter. Re Liberal Crime Policies. This seems to be an oxymoron in that one cannot have liberal crime policies - a reluctance to imprison offenders - whilst having prisons full to bursting.’
 
No, This is wrong. Liberal crime policies are a sop to the voters. Liberals only maintain prisons because it is politically necessary. They only retain prison sentences because it is politically necessary. They would close all the prisons tomorrow if they thought they could get away with it. But even if they try desperately hard not to use prison, or to send anyone there (and so they only do so when they have already become experienced recidivists) , they end up with bursting prisons, because their policies encourage so much crime that they are forced to go through the motions.  I agree that the policy is itself mad, but once you have understood that, it makes perfect sense.
 
Geoffrey Warner and others object to my equation of Neville Chamberlain at Munich and Winston Churchill at Yalta, both giving way to appeasers.
 
Of course it is true that Stalin took Poland and Eastern Europe. But so did Hitler take Czechoslovakia and Austria.  Both the Munich and Yalta conferences contained the same delusion, that we could do anything about it. At Yalta, we had the sense to give Stalin what we had to give him, and to swallow our pride, rather than seeking  future war with him to make ourselves feel better about our previous surrender.  Lord Halifax’s wounded pride after Munich led us to make the Polish guarantee, which doomed us as a great power by placing our national fate in the hands of Colonel Beck, Warsaw's unscrupulous Foreign Minister. The rest we know. The problem is that we still pretend that this hopeless, incompetent episode was our Finest Hour, and that anyone who dares suggest it wasn’t is falsely accused of sympathising with Hitler, or of dishonouring the memory of those who died in the war.  

We're being dragged into a new Cold War by a puffed-up bullfrog (and I don't mean President Putin)

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Stupidity and ignorance rule the world. The trouble is that the stupid and the ignorant think that they are clever and well-informed.

Take Mrs Hillary Clinton, next President of the United States and former chief of American foreign policy. She has directly compared Russia’s Vladimir Putin to Hitler. And she has compared events in Crimea to the Czech crisis of 1938.

Dozens of other politicians and grandiose journalists are currently doing the same.

It’s the one thing they think they know about history – that Britain’s pathetic Neville Chamberlain didn’t stand up to evil Adolf Hitler in 1938 at Munich over Czechoslovakia, so making Hitler believe that he could take over the world. And that the brave Winston Churchill then saved the world.

Almost no part of this legend is true. Even those bits that  are true are misleading, with one exception. Hitler was certainly evil. But so was Stalin, the communist mass-murderer who ended up as our main ally in the fight against Hitler.

If we had gone to war to save Czechoslovakia in 1938, we would have been beaten. We had no proper army. Nor did the USA, whose army at that time was about the same size  as Portugal’s.

 When we later went to war to ‘save’ Poland,  we didn’t in fact save it at all, leaving it to be bombed, starved and massacred by Hitler, carved up between Germany and the USSR and later swallowed whole by Stalin. And we were beaten – just not actually invaded.

Churchill was indeed a great man, but his achievement was to secure our bare survival, which came at the desperate cost of our national wealth and our empire. Later in the war, Churchill appeased Stalin by giving him the whole of Poland and Eastern Europe. Just like Chamberlain at Munich seven years before, he had no choice. The Yalta conference, which finalised these arrangements, was as disgracefully self-interested as Munich.

Yet the silly, half-educated politicians of today still like  to pose as tough guys with the following formula, addressed to anyone who suggests that Russia might have a case over Ukraine and Crimea.

It goes: ‘Putin is Hitler. You are Neville Chamberlain. I  am Winston Churchill – hear me roar.’

Apart from knowing nothing about European history, and apart from their bone-headed inability to distinguish Christian Russia from the communist USSR, these people also don’t understand what is going on in Ukraine.

It never occurs to them that Russia has good historical reasons to fear its neighbours. It never crosses their mind that the borders drawn by the victorious West in 1992, like  those drawn at Versailles in 1919, are an unsustainable, unjust mistake.

They never ask why Britain (or the USA) should be hostile to Russia, or what the quarrel between us actually is. What  is it to us whose flag flies over Sevastopol? Yet it matters greatly to those who live there.

They cast every Russian action as evil, and every Ukrainian action as saintly. The world is not like that.

I hated the old USSR as an evil empire. But, having lived in Moscow, I feel a strong affection for post-communist Russia and count Russians as good friends. That does not make me an apologist for Mr Putin. I have repeatedly condemned him for his suppression of opposition and the many evil things done by his state. I can see his faults and do not pretend they do not exist.

 But the warmongers are selectively blind. Hardly any British news media have mentioned an event in Kiev last week. A group of five louts, one of them an MP from the thuggish, racialist ‘Svoboda’ party, forced their way into  the office of Oleksandr Panteleymonov, chief of the main Ukrainian TV station. There they physically attacked him and shouted anti-Russian racial abuse at him.

The MP involved is a member of the Ukrainian Parliament’s committee on ‘Freedom of Speech’. And the louts were  so proud of what they did that they filmed it and posted it on the internet.

These people are supposed to be our allies and friends.

On their behalf, our Prime Minister is puffing himself up like a bullfrog, and busily creating a new Cold War that will benefit nobody except spies and weapons-makers, for a cause he doesn’t understand and can’t explain.

If this is the kind of statesman it produces, it strikes me that Eton can’t be such a good school after all.

Nazi-obsessed movie world has lost the plot

There’s something about a swastika that captivates film-makers and publishers. But is the effect at last wearing off?

The recent film The Book Thief has a daft plot and an even dafter voice-over, supposedly provided by the Angel of Death. It hasn’t been a wild success, and no wonder. If it weren’t set in Nazi Germany, with plenty of swastikas, would it have been made at all?

Meanwhile, really interesting moral puzzles in the modern world don’t seem to attract film-makers. On a recent visit to New York, I saw the fascinating Israeli thriller Bethlehem, about an Arab youth who collaborates with the Israelis. One of its many themes is how well Jews and Arabs get on when left to their own devices.

How I long for someone to make films out of the fine stories of Matt Rees, set in this part of the world.

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Half a century of liberal crime policies under all parties have utterly failed. As I write, the prisons of England and Wales (I expect Scotland is  much the same) are full almost to bursting. I am not sure why this isn’t a major story.

Some figures: in 1960, the England and Wales prison population was 27,000. By 1990, it had hit almost 45,000. Last week it stood at 85,338, with room for only 568 more. It won’t take long to find them.

Remember, this has happened despite the watering down of  all penalties and the repeated slashing of sentences. Yet nobody learns from it. It will  be ‘solved’ by letting more prisoners out, and sending fewer criminals to prison.

******

‘Child care’ actually means child neglect. The Government is bribing us with our own money, to dump our children with strangers. The only thing they won’t subsidise is children being raised by their own married parents. That’s penalised, and despised.

*******

Why rejoice at the abolition of annuities? It’s just an admission that saving of all kinds is pointless when interest  is microscopic and state-sponsored inflation is debauching the currency.

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Who is the Aggressor? Some Thoughts on the Continuing Crisis

I would like to wrap up a few of the arguments about the rights and wrongs of Russia’s intervention in Crimea and Ukraine.

 

How can anyone justify the seizure of territory from a sovereign country?

 

This takes me back to the subject of who has title to territory, how is it established, how far back does one go? This often comes up in discussions of Israel, the true ownership of the West Bank and of many other former territories of the defunct Ottoman Empire. Who has title to the territory which Ukraine held before Russia seized the Crimea? The territory has (as I have mentioned here a lot) been physically fought over during the 20th century after a reasonably long period during which it was an accepted part of the Russian Empire, with no recent history of true independence.

 

The USSR (as it then was) successfully recovered its territory twice from German invaders. At the last general settlement of European borders, the Yalta conference of 1945, Ukraine was left within the borders of the USSR. The borders of that settlement remain, at least formally, unchanged ever since. Poland is still confined within borders which removed its former eastern territories, yet gave it large pieces of Germany. Slovakia is still shorn of its far East, which is part of …Ukraine. Germany’s internal border, not agreed at Yalta, the accidental result of post-war partition, never recognised as a formal frontier by West Germany, has vanished and the German Democratic republic (which was, paradoxically given diplomatic recognition by West Germany and most major countries, even though its Western frontier was never really recognised by them) has simply ceased to exist, despite a brief attempt to maintain it as a separate state.

 

But the borders of the rest of Europe, East and West, have remained fixed, apart from in former Yugoslavia, which some might see as a sort of miniature sandpit version of the ‘West’s’ dismantling and dismembering of the old USSR - with Serbia playing the part of Russia. I yearn for a serious dispassionate history of this curious episode, which – like Russia – has been made virtually incomprehensible by a ‘goodies v. baddies’ media narrative which bears very little relation to the truth. It’s not that the baddies weren’t baddies. It’s that the goodies weren’t goodies. In which case, how and on what basis does one take sides?

 

Even in this case, the external borders of former Yugoslavia have not been breached.  

 

The really big frontier change in the west of Europe is invisible to most people, who are weirdly uninterested in this momentous thing. It is the revolution imposed by the astonishingly unremarked Schengen agreement which at a stroke deprived almost every country of Western Europe of its frontier, so undoing in an afternoon the entire Versailles settlement.

 

But it seems that the bureaucratic aggressions of supranational bodies are not in any way the equivalents of old-fashioned takeovers by sovereign states. I have to ask ‘Why not?’

 

Who is the aggressor in modern diplomacy?

If a supranational body takes away your borders, your customs posts, your currency (and so your control over your economy), your independent foreign policy, your supreme court and your power to make your own laws, and denies you the right to protect your citizens from arrest by foreign police forces, for offences which don’t even exist in your country, is that not a serious cross border incursion to say the least? The fact that it is done by paper-shuffling rather than by tanks doesn’t alter its essentially invasive character. Remember those pictures of grinning Wehrmacht soldiers in 1938 and 1939 and 1940, gleefully smashing down border posts all over Europe? Well, wasn’t one of the main points of World war Two to put those border posts back? But look for them now (I’ve done so) and you’ll find…nothing. I walked last summer from Aachen in Germany into the next-door town of Vaals, in the Netherlands. The border is no more noticeable, and no more enforced,  than that been West and East Sussex. I have done the same between Strasbourg in France and Kehl in Germany(though for this you have to cross an unguarded footbridge) and have done it by train between Austria and Italy on the Brenner pass, and between France and Spain between Hendaye and Irun. Anyone can get the Eurostar from London to Brussels, and find that he passes through France into Belgium without any check or hindrance. Take the train from Brussels to Amsterdam and you will notice more change when you cross from Wallonia into Flanders, which is technically in the same country, than you do when you cross from Flanders into the Netherlands. Very convenient for travellers, but very alarming for believers in the nation state.

 

But within the old USSR, there was the most enormous frontier upheaval. Ukraine went. Belarus went. Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia went. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – in many ways the most contentious, and in my view the ones over which there will one day be most trouble – went. Soviet semi-control of Finland (the Moscow Politburo used to approve Helsinki cabinet appointments) went. The whole of Central Asia departed.  

 

Borders which I used to pass without restriction when I lived in Moscow have now become real barriers, requiring visas and customs checks – the exact opposite of Schengen.

 

Now, you have to look closely at exactly how Ukraine ceased to be within the old Yalta borders. On 1st December 1991, 92.3% of Ukrainian voters approved a declaration of independence by Ukraine’s Supreme Council (Parliament). This independence applied to the curious creature previously known as the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, whose borders suited internal Soviet convenience, were purely administrative,  and had never been intended or designed as an international frontier. This is one reason why they have never worked very well since, economically, ethnically or politically.

 

In the months before this, it’s interesting to note, Crimea had sought to obtain some sort of separation from Ukraine, and had achieved a high level of local autonomy which the Kiev government would later cancel(though it did make very special arrangements for the city of Sevastopol and its immediate surroundings, as part of a treaty with Moscow that brought in enormous cash payments).  But it’s also interesting to point out that Crimea’s recent declaration of independence and referendum are in some ways remarkably similar to those of Ukraine nearly 23 years before.

 

Very soon after Ukraine’s secession, a very strange meeting took place in a  Belarussian forest, at which the leaders of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine dissolved the USSR and, in a sort of sop to those who might t be entirely pleased by this,  created the vacuous ‘Commonwealth of Independent States’.  It is a sort of high-speed caricature of the collapse of the British Empire 50 years earlier. Mikhail Gorbachev,  until a few months before one of the mightiest men in the world, hopelessly described this event as an ‘unconstitutional coup’, as it was. By this time there existed in Moscow what the Bolsheviks would have called ‘dual power’, with the real power flowing with increasing speed away from the empty organs of the old USSR and into those of the new Russia. The final hours of the USSR, with their ill-temper, surprise and unexpected speed, are well-described by Conor O’ Clery in his tremendous book, which I recommended here some years ago ‘The Last day of the Soviet Union’. If you wanted to see them as a description of a coup d’etat, you could easily do so. The only thing that was unclear was who was overthrowing whom. Now, after the Yeltsin years  it seems more obvious. Yeltsin shelled his own Parliament, conducted a savage war in Chechnya and blatantly rigged the ballot in his own re-election. Yet he was not criticised ( as Vladimir Putin rightly is) for his misdeeds. Why not? because he allowed his country to be raped by the ‘West’ , and offered no serious resistance to the EU/NATO destruction of Federal Yugoslavia

 

Now, consider this. What if Russia had refused to recognise this breakaway, despite the enormous popular support for it, and its inability to do anything about it anyway?

 

As it happens, the breakaway was almost immediately recognised abroad, by among others Boris Yeltsin’s Russia (one of the reasons why Russians of today tend to despise Yeltsin is his weakness over such matters).   But if the ‘West’ is right to register impotent and anti-democratic objections to the Crimea succession, why wouldn’t President Yeltsin have been right to do the same over Ukraine? You’ll have to explain to me. If the behaviour of Washington, Brussels and London on this issue has been correct, and the former power has a veto over any secession, then Russia had a veto over Ukrainian secession, and could have condemned Ukraine (and any backers it received) to endless harassment and sanctions from that day to this. Oddly enough, either out of weakness or out of a sensible recognition of that weakness, Russia didn’t do that. In fact Russia was intensely relaxed about Ukrainian ‘independence’ for years afterwards, not even bothering to build a proper border.

 

Our weakness, by contrast, has not caused us to use the same common sense.

 

The real trouble only began when first NATO (and what is NATO for since we won the Cold War, can anyone tell me?), and then the EU began to threaten a bureaucratic, economic and legal invasion of Ukraine.

 

Is it unfair or misleading to describe these attempts to bring Ukraine into the EU political orbit (and perhaps into NATO) as a postmodern form of territorial aggression? In fact, Russia’s first responses were symmetrical. Moscow first used its energy power. Then it used its economic power, to offer Ukraine a far more generous deal than the EU could possibly offer. The ‘West’ did not desist. It persisted with increased vigour.  At that point it became absolutely clear even to the dimmest observer that the EU’s intentions were political, not economic.   It was when President Yanukovich refused the EU offer that the demonstrators in Kiev opened a new phase of aggressive protest, at such a level that any sovereign government was more or less forced to respond if it was to remain in power.

 

 

Can a government ever use violence to defend itself against protest?

 

Which brings us to the next question, that of violence. Many of my opponents in various discussions about this question have said that, yes, it is true that the Kiev mob overthrew a legitimate government and did not come to power lawfully, constitutionally or democratically. They have little choice, if they have any respect for the truth. But they have then said such things as that the Yanukovich government ‘lost the mandate of heaven’ or at any rate its legitimacy, when it started killing protestors.

 

No doubt it did so. But who exactly killed whom and under what precise circumstances? Once again, I’d value an impartial report on exactly who killed whom, and also about who was armed. It remains my impression that 13 Ukrainian police officers were shot dead, and another 130 wounded by gunfire, which suggests that the protestors were neither wholly unarmed nor peaceful.

 

Any government would, I think, feel justified in using its monopoly of force to defend itself against such an attack, and I really don’t see how it can be condemned for the use of force *as such*. Protestors who use violence, or who continue to associate with, and hope to benefit from the actions of other who sue violence must expect the state to respond with equivalent violence.  This is not a specific defence of the actions of the Yanukovich government, for which I hold no brief. It’s a fundamental question about what sovereign governments can reasonably be permitted to do in defence of their own authority.

 

 I said earlier that I’d welcome an impartial investigation into who killed whom, when, how and under what circumstances. But I don’t expect to get one, not because the Yanukovich state was innocent( it plainly wasn’t) but because the protestors have serious questions to answer which may be very politically difficult, given the make-up of the new governing coalition.  No, my point is that it is not (in my view) automatic that a government loses the right to rule because it uses lethal violence.

 

The chant that such-and-such a government has ‘killed its own people’ has no moral force unless it can be shown that it did so without justification and disproportionately. In any case, it’s so selectively applied that we are entitled to wonder whether the outrage of its advocates is real or feigned.

 

I’ve mentioned that Turkey gets away with its 40-year occupation of North Cyprus, free of sanctions and untroubled by moral lectures from Messrs Obama, Hague and Cameron.  I’m also endlessly amused by the way in which the anti-Putin media ignore the behaviour of Turkey’s increasingly flailing Premier, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who killed his own people last year in suppressing demonstrations in Istanbul (one victim died of his injuries last week), holds evidence-free show-trials which end by putting his opponents in prison, and menaces the free press. Turkey has many more journalists in prison than Russia, and is also grotesquely corrupt. On Saturday Mr Erdogan actually tried to shut down Twitter, a laughable piece of postmodern despotism which, done by Vladimir Putin, would have led every bulletin in the world. But it’s hardly mentioned.

 

 

As for the Egyptian military junta, the failure of the ‘West’ to condemn or criticise this very violent government, which repeatedly kills its own people and locks them up on dubious pretences, is beyond satire. Why is the moral outrage directed against Presidents Yanukovich and Putin never aimed at Cairo?

 

No attempt has been made to declare the governments of Turkey or Egypt illegitimate,  or to say they have ‘lost the mandate of heaven’. In that case, these contentions clearly don’t operate as laws. They are just things people say when it suits them, and they can be disregarded by serious observers.

 

I think the real deep point here (touched on by Sir Rodric Braithwaite in the article I linked to here yesterday) is the new role played by supranational bodies – notably NATO and the EU. They can invade and interfere, but when they do so tanks and special forces are not needed to transfer power.

 

But individual nations, not covered by these supranational shelters and disguises, have to act more obviously. So this conflict is more symmetrical than it looks, because the aggression of the ‘West’ is disguised behind the skirts of the EU and NATO, and often operates through the deniable, untraceable fomenting of coups d’etat through ‘people power’, which is almost impossible to counter without being accused of ‘killing your own people’ and so declared illegitimate.  So the choice is ‘give in now or later’. The counter-aggression of Russia, on the other hand, looks like exactly what it is. And a populace which sees everything on TV sees only the Russian counter-aggression, not the primary aggression which provoked it.

 

How funny, by the way, that this aggressive  ‘people power’ in Ukraine involves people not terribly unlike Jorg Haider, the Austrian ultra-rightist whose rise to power horrified the entire EU a few years ago. If we were really such apostles of democracy, wouldn’t we have done more to get rid of these people? Or do we really not care?

 

Long ago, when I was a defence reporter in the late 1980s, I recall a debate in NATO as to what would happen to that alliance once the Cold War was won. The obvious answer was ‘shut it down and sell off the buildings’. But this very much did not happen. The ‘North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’ is now involved in a war in Afghanistan, which is about as far from the north Atlantic as you can get and which has less than one tenth part of nothing to do with the original purpose for which NATO was founded.

 

Sir Rodric hints strongly in his article that its subsequent career is a sort of job-creation project for bureaucrats who feared redundancy. There’s an element of that, but something else too.

 

People will note that I use the expression ‘The West’ in inverted commas, because it seems to me have completely lost the meaning it had when it was set against ‘The East’, that is, the Warsaw Pact built around the USSR. What is this ‘West’? What is it west *of*? What does it stand for or defend? I don’t mean to be rude, but Turkey’s no paragon of freedom (see above) and still occupies northern Cyprus (see above). I am far from convinced that Bulgaria and Romania reach western European standards of transparency or governance. As for Albania, a veil is best drawn over it. I remain amazed  that anyone thought it wise to bring the three Baltic Republics into NATO.  What good did this do? Whom did it help?  Did the members of NATO, when they agreed it, really think through all the consequences of their bravado? Anyone who knows anything of Russia will know that this part of the world is regarded with extreme sensitivity by any Russian government. I have myself seen the bloody evidence of this sensitivity, having witnessed (and been greatly angered, disgusted  and distressed by)  the grisly events in Vilnius on January 1991, of which most of the world remains ignorant. This was the last time Moscow tried to assert its control there. And this was done under the rule of Mikhail Gorbachev, perhaps the most enlightened and liberal-minded person to rule Russia since Tsar Alexander II.

 

I happen to think that Moscow reluctantly recognises that it must accept their independence. It is willing, if not happy, to respect their continuing independence indefinitely. But it cannot look happily on any attempt to turn them into bases for hostile operations against Russia, and anyone who advocates doing so is playing with fire.  Americans should consider their possible reactions to Russian military bases in the West Indies, Bermuda, Montreal or Cancun, to begin to get the picture. British people might imagine their attitude to the stationing of Russian bomber planes on the Isle of Wight. I promise you, you wouldn’t like it.

 

What I can’t understand is this absolute refusal to see that, if you poke someone repeatedly in the eye with a stick, you should not be surprised if he eventually fetches you a  great whirret round the jaw. I suppose, if you can pretend to yourself that you haven’t been poking him in the eye, you can then go on to pretend to yourself that he is the aggressor. 

St John the Unfinished - thoughts on Cathedrals

During my visit to New York City last week, I finally got round to a long-postponed pilgrimage. I took the Subway up to 110th Street to visit what may be the largest Gothic Cathedral ever built. It depends to some extent on how you measure size. It also depends on whether they ever finish it (It is in a way encouraging to know that Cologne Cathedral, similarly vast, was finished in the 19th century after a gap of several centuries, when the original mediaeval plans were rediscovered) .

 

I suspect most visitors to Babylon-on-the Hudson don’t even know that the Cathedral of St John the Divine ( also known as the ‘Cathedral of St John the Unfinished’) exists. It crouches enormously at the frowsy top end of Central Park, well beyond the normal tourist zones, in an area that I was long ago told wasn’t very safe (this may once have been so, but I am reliably informed that it isn’t now, and it seemed fine to me in the blaze of noon).

 

Readers here will know that I collect Cathedrals. I am now repeating a project I began many years ago to visit all the proper English cathedrals. But I am fairly sure I shall never complete my tally of foreign ones  I recently added Aachen to my list (and very unusual and startling it is too, as is that charming, unexpected city). I still need to see several of the great German ones, have hardly started on France and have not begun at all on Spain. These buildings are the most astonishing products of human thought rightly described as ‘frozen music’. Like the great art galleries, only more so because they involve so many more senses, they  compel you to think, consider and recognise the extent of your ignorance about your own culture and history.

 

They are also an expression of something very important – the declaration that the material world is not everything, that belief and faith, poetry, literature and music can raise the human mind to levels it will not reach when it is building a factory or a block of flats. That is why the old East Germany forbade the building of churches in new towns and housing estates. All blank-sheet utopias rely utterly on the view that man is a material object like any other, which can be formed by human will into what authority wishes him to be. That is why they hate the religious insistence that man is created in the image of God, and is fundamentally unalterable. The furious atheism of the left is not an accident or a by-product. It is integral.

 

But back to St John the Unfinished. In some ways like Scott’s mighty Anglican cathedral in Liverpool, this building is the last gasp of the Gothic. Not that it was originally meant to be – its original design was Byzantine – which can clearly be seen by the traveller as he approaches the colossal building and views the monstrous exposed arches on its flanks. The astonishing 50-foot granite columns that dominate the interior are also so huge that the mind reels at the task of quarrying and raising them.   From some angles, it looks like a wounded beast, raw and unfinished, and things were not helped by a  serious fire a few years ago. There is an air of shabbiness about parts of the site which do not really accord with the magnificence of the idea.   Yet amid the melancholy, parts of its west front are astonishing, covered in extravagant sculptures which would not look out of place in Chartres, and enhanced by enormous bronze doors adorned with Biblical scenes in relief. One chapel, dedicated to St Columba, is especially moving because of the many quotations from Durham cathedral in its arches and pillars, and because of the stained glass which gives it a special quiet light.  

 

It is well worth a visit for certain, should you be nearby. It cannot possibly leave any visitor unmoved. But what struck me most about it was that it unintentionally represented the failure of old-fashioned Anglican Christianity in the USA. In the late Victorian and Edwardian days of its design and beginnings, the Episcopal Church was still a great force in American thought and culture, its prayers and traditions (very similar to those of England) known and understood by the well-off WASP middle classes to which it preached and who paid for St John’s, consciously seeing it as a rival to the far better-known (and more centrally-placed) Roman Catholic fortress of St Patrick’s.

 

Now, as here,  that sort of sceptical, thoughtful, educated, serious religious belief has largely faded into agnosticism and liberal politics (Roman Catholic contributors and stern evangelicals will of course inform me here that this problem is inherent in such a wishy-washy church.  I shall just politely say that I disagree, and mention softly that all churches of all types are tempted by worldliness at one time or another and in one way or another).  The original builders’ ambitions remain unfulfilled because the tide of belief has gone out, far out,  and seems in no hurry to turn. Here is one of the most important cities in the English-speaking world, famous for its extravagant architecture (and its enormous wealth) and it has never completed the construction of a building which would have represented Anglican Christianity among the towers of Mammon.  

 

Ruins, as we all know, have a great power to disturb the mind with musings about what was once there and has gone forever. But vast unfinished structures are even more thought-provoking.  Who knows what turns history may take. I remember the old Gendarmenmarkt (Platz der Akademie as it was then)  in Communist East Berlin, whose twin cathedrals were abandoned and neglected so completely that trees grew out of their derelict towers. Now they are restored and the trees are gone. I also remember the curious open air swimming pool near the centre of Moscow, steaming amid the snow, which had once been the site of the great cathedral of Christ the Saviour, which was dynamited (a picture of this appalling event exists) on Stalin’s orders by Lazar Kaganovich in 1931. This was done partly out of anti-Christian spite, partly for plunder and partly to make way for a grotesque ‘Palace of the Soviets’ which was never completed because the ground turned out to be too soft to take its weight.

 

Kaganovich, to everyone’s amazement,  turned out to be still alive in the Gorbachev era (he died in July 1991),  and was much annoyed when journalists started to ring him up in his secluded elite flat in the sinister ‘House on the Embankment’, to ask him to reminisce about the old days of man-made famines and purges, when he and Nikita Krushchev had built the Moscow Metro with slave labour.  Kaganovich is said to have invented the nasty metaphor ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’, to justify his murderous career – to which Arthur Koestler later replied ‘Yes, comrade,  I see your broken eggs, plenty of them – but where exactly is your omelette?’

 

Now, when I return to Moscow,  I am pleased to see that the Cathedral has been rebuilt where it formerly stood. Its ghostly presence had lingered in the steam of the swimming pool, and its former worshippers must have laughed at the failure to complete the Soviet Palace, and the defeated decision of the Bolsheviks to turn the resulting hole in the ground into a scrofulous Lido full of bad-tempered, wallowing old ladies in bathing-caps. And now it is back, a lesson to anyone who thinks that the new Russia is the same as the old USSR. It is fundamentally different, and the rebuilding of that dynamited church shows how and why. Perhaps one day the Cathedral of St John the Divine will be finished, towers and all, and if it is we will know that the USA, too, has changed in a  fundamental way.