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.