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.