I reply once more to Mr 'P'

I just wanted to say how astonishingly, breathtakingly, hilariously unresponsive and Olympically obtuse the latest response from Mr ‘P’ is (on the ‘Secret War in Ukraine’ thread).

 

It is ludicrous for him to object to me countering his case with detailed arguments,  with strange allegations about a ‘Gish Gallop’. Here, I think even most of my opponents will concede, the whole point is that arguments are met with arguments, and facts provided to support them.

 

He says I am ‘drowning [my]opponent in such a torrent of small arguments that [my] opponent cannot possibly answer or address each one in real time’

 

Twaddle.  First of all, ‘real time’ in this case is limitless, as we are arguing in writing, not in verbal debate. He knows perfectly well that he can write here as often as he wants, and that normal word limits will be suspended to allow him to respond at full length. If he finds my arguments overwhelming, then that is not because any attempt has been made to ‘drown’ or swamp him.  It is because I have taken time and trouble to rebut his arguments properly. He has all the space and time he desires to respond.  

 

He copes with the facts by pretending not to understand the operation of modern public relations and manipulation in the overthrow of the Ukrainian government, and refusing to see that power can be exercised by other means than open force.

 

 

An example of this is his teenage question ‘Will Mr Hitchens please name and shame the EU units sent into Ukraine to 'overthrow the legitimate Ukrainian government using violence and menace?'.

 

 

Also he ceaselessly speaks of ‘Ukrainians’; as if they are one body of one opinion, when the very election of Viktor Yanukovych  (close but undisputed in a tight contest) demonstrates that the population have strong political divisions and cannot be cited as a unity on this or many other issues.

 

The statement that ‘Ukrainians had for twenty years seen EU membership to be in their interest’ simply cannot be made by any informed and honest person. Some had. Some had not. The President had not, so far as I know, been elected on any mandate obliging him to sign an Association Agreement with the EU on any terms. He was elected to take such decisions.

 

Mr ‘P’ says I am ‘refashioning EU machinations, mischievous though no doubt many of them are, into an equivalence to tanks and missiles, enabling him to style EU economic politics as "aggression"’

 

Well, that’s a start. But why is it ‘twisting my case to limits tantamount to self-delusion’ by saying so. Nor does ‘equivalent’ as he seems to think , mean ‘identical’ ( a distinction which would help him overcome his principal mental block to understanding what is going on, if he would let it).  Why is it ‘absurd’ ?  This is just abuse.  I am more and more persuaded that he has not properly studied the article he attacks.

 

Power in modern times is ceaselessly projected in this way.  The Anglo-American putsch against Mossadeq in Iran proceeded by way of hired mobs and suborned newspapers. The entire ‘Arab Spring’ is a prominent example of the manipulation of crowds by external or internal forces. So was Georgia’s ‘Rose Revolution’ and so was the overthrow of the Marcos regime in the Philippines, which had lost the confidence of Washington at the time.  Nor is this new. Nobody, not even Hitler or Stalin, uses tanks unless he has to. Hitler took the Saarland with a referendum, and Austria without tanks, and forced President Hacha to extinguish Czechoslovakia without tanks. What was the Sudeten German movement but the 1938 version of a ‘Civil Society Organisation’, demanding the democratic will of Czechoslovakia’s German-speakers? Stalin took Czechoslovakia in 1948 without firing a shot, but manipulated crowds in Prague were vital in the process.

 

 

And this is not ‘economic politics’, any more than the ‘Common Market; was a free trade association. Nothing to do with the EU is unpolitical.  The Association Agreement  has a political and military character (once again, as stated clearly by the pro-Kiev Michael Mosbacher in quoted material - why does Mr ‘P’ repeatedly force me to repeat points that are not in dispute, by pretending he is unaware of them? Why can he not debate seriously?).

 

Mr ‘P’ described a ’20-year process of EU membership negotiation’ being ‘almost at an equitable conclusion’.

Really? Is this a purely factual description of a far more complex situation? Why did it take so long,  if it was so simple and continuous a process?  The history of the Association Agreement is far from smooth. Was it just that they were finalising details of tariffs on tomatoes all that time? It has always been about the internal balance of power in Ukraine, and would have happened long before if the government resulting from the ‘Orange Revolution’ (another example of Civil Society manipulation of sovereign states) hadn’t turned out to be just as corrupt as what it replaced, and so fallen to bits?

 

The Euromaidan was an attempt to rerun this, spookily similar to the Orange Revolution, only with added violence and menace,  plus the open participation of EU and US politicians, after the Tymoshenko bubble had burst, and Ukraine’s voters had annoyingly put Mr Yanukovych back in power with an undisputed national majority, nuisances that they are. Democracy, I ask you.

 

 

Does Mr ‘P’ truly, honestly  think that corruption in Ukraine is only to be found among the so-called pro-Russian side? (I have explained here in the past, while Mr ’P’ was asleep, that Vladimir Putin loathes Viktor Yanukovych, especially for  the very hard bargain he drove – now cancelled -  over the Russian Navy’s access to Sevastopol, so calling him pro-Russian is justa  sign that you don’t know what’s going on).

 

I mean, does he? Really? But of course, he has to believe this absurd thing,  for otherwise, the (transparently false) contention that the Euromaidan was a protest against corruption cannot stand. The politicians raised to power by the Euromaidan are in general no cleaner than those laid low by it. Therefore (here it comes, as it so often does) the corruption must be the pretext, not the reason.

 

So his tedious fact-free moralising about President Yanukovych’s alleged personal motives for rejecting the EU plan, is just that.

 

Mr ‘P’ asks : ‘A twenty-year process of EU membership negotiation is almost at an equitable conclusion when the Russian-leaning Yanukovych accepts a bribe on behalf of Ukraine from the Russians (and not a small commission for himself it is speculated) and promptly junks the EU scheme in the face of Ukraine national astonishment, a national astonishment that leads to a popular uprising. Who, whom or what does Mr Hitchens take us for? Complete simpletons??’

 

I am not sure why simpletons would be needed or required here. I do not require any, thank you.  I take readers of this blog for open-minded persons capable of following an argument.  My descriptions of events (despite my undoubted and unconcealed partiality in the matter)  seem to me to be more accurate and dispassionate than those of Mr ‘P’. Surely simpletons would be more impressed by Mr ‘P’ and his partisan description of events than would thinking persons? And is that enough question marks???

So in Planet ‘P’, EU offers of aid are just offers, made without political purpose or strings, out of pure disinterested love of mankind.  Russian offers of aid, on the other hand,  are a ‘bribe’. Wouldn’t it be more honest to admit that both sides were bidding for favour?  But Mr ’P’ cannot, for any admission that the EU wants something undermines his (comical)  case that the EU, which plainly has nevr had any jurisdiction in this contested region before)  is not the aggressor. Without any evidence, let alone proof, he blithely accuses President Yanukovych of personal corruption in the matter, knowing that his claim can never be investigated or disproved. And he describes as ‘national astonishment’ what can with equal (if not greater) fairness and accuracy be described as foreign-funded, foreign-supported and foreign-directed *sectional* rage over a divisive issue.

 

But here’s an interesting bit

 

Mr ‘P’ says :’*The Ukrainians 'overthrew' their government by 'extra-legal' means, and by all accounts it was aggressive in part*.’

I love that ‘in part’. (‘The Germans marched into Belgium and by all accounts it was aggressive in part’).

 

We must all rejoice over this admission, wrung from Mr ‘P’ after weeks of wrestling. He has now formally admitted that the action he so doggedly supports was a lawless and violent overthrow, though his mouth is crammed with meal as he says it.

 

But then, very curiously, he accuses me of trying to change the subject, saying : ‘But we have now switched from EU 'aggression' to Ukrainian popular 'aggression'. Will Mr Hitchens please stay with the topic under discussion.’

 

But I have done so. It is the same subject.  I have repeatedly, laboriously and with much supporting evidence argued that the supposed outbreak of Ukrainian public opinion was in fact manipulated from beyond Ukraine’s borders, through NGOs and Civil Society organisations. I think I have now said this enough times for even Mr ’P’ to have noticed it. He has not sought to contradict me. We know, because it is beyond dispute, and happened on TV,  that significant figures from the USA and the EU, Victoria Nuland, John McCain, Catherine Ashton, Guido Westerwelle, came personally to the Euromaidan to show their support.

 

So the subject is the same. My claim is that the EU used ‘people power’ to overthrow a government that stood in its way. This action was intended to lad, and did lead, to the unconstitutional overthrow of the elected President as a result if organised foreign pressure. Would Mr ‘P’ like this to happen to his own country? I really think it is time for him to answer this. His own fellow-citizens of wherever he comes from might like to know that they have a Jacobin putschist in their midst. If not, then why is he happy to license it in other people’s countries? Presumably because he is some ghastly ‘might is right’ merchant who thinks that , if he and his friends don’t like the way your country is run, they are entitled to overthrow its government. It just never occurs to him that what he wills for others might one day happen to him. If he did, he might be less blithe about wishing it on others.

 

Mr ‘P’ blusters on ‘Seeking the overthrow of corrupt individuals and/or regimes is not the same thing as sending in tanks and sponsoring insurgence with the supply of weapons. Mr Hitchens is at considerable pains to have us see this as equivalent, but it simply won't and can't wash.’

 

Why can’t it? First of all, flinging in the word ‘corrupt’ is a bait-and-switch trick. Almost any sovereign government could be brought down if corruption were accepted as a justification for so doing.

 

Most of the countries in the world are corrupt to some extent. China’s is famously so, but I see no sign of the EU or the US  trying to overthrow that one  Why. I’m told the many old-established EU countries are not immune from political scandal, or so one reads in le Monde, the Irish Independent the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and La Stampa. I’ve heard it whispered that some British MPs aren’t wholly above board, and someone once told me that campaign finance in the USA wasn’t all that it might be. ‘Corruption’ as a charge, in such circumstances, is worthless.

 

And of course it’s not *the same thing* as sending in tanks and sponsoring insurgence with the supply of weapons. Who said it was? This is a straw man.  But it is very, very similar, in that it results in a lawless and unconstitutional transfer of power desired and achieved by foreign agencies. As I was careful to say above,  ‘equivalent’ is not the same as ‘identical’ , as Mr ‘P’ seems to think. To say something is not *identical* is not to say it is not *equivalent*.

 

 And in such putsches, once you have the state power, you have the weapons. That is why it is so wrong that the power is transferred by lawless and violent methods. Those weapons are supposed to be used on behalf of the whole people by a constitutional and lawful authority, not in the hands of a violent and unscrupulous faction.

 

The rest of the contribution of Mr ‘P’ is so non-responsive that I must refer him, for the answers,  to previous posts of mine, which he plainly has not read with any care. But I do respond to some of his other ‘points’ below:.    

 

On ‘voluntary’ accession to the EU, those defeated nations who sign peace treaties can misleadingly be said to do so ‘voluntarily’, provided their actions are divorced from the circumstances that brought them to the table in the first place. Nobody puts a pistol to their heads.

 

Likewisse,the ‘voluntary’ surrender of small European nations to EU hegemony (weak and poor after years of Communism, faced with the choice of total economic and political isolation, exclusion from subsidies offered to their neighbours and competitors, etc)  is a similar admission of reality. No force is needed.

 

Yet power is transferred. The nation does not join a club of friends. It cedes (non-negotiably) huge packages of sovereignty, over law and lawmaking, frontiers, currency, taxation, defence,  foreign and trade policy. It accepts that it has a very small part in the decision-making process which controls these things, and certainly lacks any veto or ability to obtain exemption. And it accepts that other members of the EU, notably Germany, have a far greater role in these decisions. Who, Whom? Eu,  Eum?

 

And the pressure of isolation and poverty is not the only reason why no force is needed.  All of Europe knows in its bones ( and its ruins and its cemeteries) what happens when Germany’s will is frustrated. And Helmut Kohl is always available to remind anyone who forgets,  with one of his nice speeches against the sin of ‘nationalism’. Failing that, slow learners, such as Serbia, find that the EU has not in fact abolished war in Europe after all. And that it is actually quite relaxed about secession, provided it is secession in the ‘right’ direction, ie, out of countries which are giving the EU trouble.

 

Mr ‘P’ asks (as if I hadn’t repeatedly answered this and then answered it again in marshalled detail on this very post, in the links to which it drew especial attention and in recent posts on the same subject quoting the pro-Kiev Matthew Omolesky, how ‘civil society’ organisations have been deployed by the EU and the US to influence events in Ukraine (the European Commission office in London has yet to respond to a request I made some days ago for details of EU support for such civil society organisations, but I live in hope)).

 

I did not realise there was any dispute over the obvious fact that the demonstrators in the Euromaidan used violence and menace to remove president Yanukovych (anyone with access to TV or newspapers saw it happen.  The demonstrators made it repeatedly clear that they would not cease their threatening occupation until they got their way. There was undoubted violence against the legitimate forces of the legitimate state. At least 20 police officers died ) ; nor that his removal was unconstitutional and lawless (even the wondrous Mr Jaremko has now conceded that the constitutional impeachment process exists, and was not followed, whatever excuses he may give for this dereliction).