Oh Hush Your Noise, Ye Man of Strife - a message for David Frum

Beating the Frum of War

 

After many months of casting doubt on the conventional coverage of the Ukraine crisis, I published the following column in the Mail on Sunday, which was also posted on my blog and on Mailonline.

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/12/forget-evil-putin-were-the-bloodthirsty-warmongers.html

 

By one of those strange chances which decide what does and does not get noticed, it attracted more attention on the web than anything else I’ve written on this subject in some years of doing so. This is the article that began it all some time back:  

 

By using the index, or by simply Googling ‘Peter Hitchens Blog’ and ‘Ukraine’ you should be able to call up a wealth of material. If you are especially interested in history, add the terms ‘Tooze’ ‘Litovsk’,  and ‘Naumann’ to the search.  

 

I suspect that there is a large number of people on both sides of the Atlantic who are puzzled or unconvinced by the endless one-sided coverage of this issue, and alarmed  by the apparent recklessness of so many of those involved. There is actually a war in Eastern Ukraine, involving heavy artillery and regular troops. A civilian airliner has been shot down with terrible loss. Now the world oil price is dropping mysteriously, and a major country (as it happens a nuclear power at the junction of Europe, the Far East  and the Middle East is threatened with hyper-inflation and economic collapse).  Sensible people are entitled to be worried that they are being drawn into a conflict they do not desire, for aims they do not share. 

 

I have explained at length here what I believe is taking pace –a rebirth of a longstanding German policy of breaking up the old Russian empire by encouraging nationalist feelings in Russia’s subject peoples, and then incorporating the new ‘independent’ countries in a modern liberal empire.

I have explained how I believe German aspirations, which Germany itself can no longer pursue because it is discredited as a power by the Hitler era – have been transferred to the EU.

 

In fact the EU *is* the Liberal ‘federative empire’ dreamed of by German liberal imperialists such as Friedrich Naumann and Richard von Kuehlmann, whose Eastern policy was so devoted to the destruction of Russia that they financed the Bolshevik putsch of October/November 1917, not caring about the appalling aims of Lenin and his accomplices, and continued to support them till they were no longer able to do so.

 

This policy also led to to the creation of an ostensibly independent Ukraine which was in fact a German colony, and which was indeed very useful economically to the besieged Wilhelmine empire.

 

I have quoted repeatedly Zbigniew Brzezinski’s remarks on the significance of Ukraine. Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, is without doubt one of the most powerful and experienced minds to have considered this subject. He wrote in his 1997 book ‘The Grand Chessboard’ : ‘Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.’

 

 

‘However, if Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources as well as access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia.’

 

You will note that Brzezinski here mentions Ukraine’s population and resources as well as its position. As a skilled and experienced geopolitical power player he knows that people, food, raw materials and markets (and coastlines, another thing I mentioned) are crucial to political economy. To imagine that these things don’t matter in the current tug-of-undeclared-war over Ukraine would be absurd.

 

Anyway, a few months ago I got into a brief tussle, on Twitter, with Mr David Frum, a North Anerican neo-conservative writer . This followed a previous article I had written. I cannot remember the details. I recall mainly being struck by the reappearance of someone I had assumed was so laughably in error about one of the major issues of our time that he must have disappeared into some sort of obscurity.

 

I mention the previous clash only to point out that, if Mr Frum is interested in my views on Ukraine, he has had plenty of time to read them and discover what they are, if he wishes to.

 

Because he has suddenly appeared in my life again.

 

Let me briefly explain who he is. A Canadian born in 1960, Mr Frum became  (in 2000) a speechwriter and assistant to President George W. Bush, where he is said to have invented the not-very-useful phrase ‘Axis of Evil (then embracing Iraq, Iran and North Korea, now presumably extended to embrace Russia) and was a keen supporter of the Iraq war. Curiously, he said : ‘ During the decision-making about the Iraq war, I was powerfully swayed by the fact that the proposed invasion of Iraq was supported by those who had been most right about the Cold War—and was most bitterly opposed by those who had been wrongest about the Cold War. ‘

 

I think this is plain mistaken. Perceptive minds of Left and Right (I here cite my late brother and myself) both quickly saw that this was in fact nothing like the Cold War, and that the USA was now the chief Utopian power in the world,  warring vigorously and in the name of Freedom against conservative facts and ideas such as national sovereignty, particularism, protection of trade and industry.

 

The Blair Creature, one of the keenest supporters of the Iraq war, had been a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament  (and therefore wrong) during the Cold War , a fact he sought to conceal but which was easily discovered. Almost his whole party had been spectacularly wrong (for instance) in the quarrel over medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe.

 

By contrast there were Cold War conservatives on either side of the Atlantic who were against the Iraq adventure. I can’t believe Mr Frum is unaware (for example) of the existence of Patrick Buchanan.

 

Mr Blair  (it could be objected) is not very bright, but many of his aides and close colleagues are. They are, in several cases,  former Marxists and in almost all cases ideological left-wingers who opposed the USA during the Cold War on almost everything, lined up in favour of the Iraq adventure (and before that, the trial run in Kosovo). It’s also not very hard to track the Trotskyist strain in American neo-conservatism, some of whose greatest minds were disappointed revolutionaries who still (in my view) yearned for an earthly Utopia.

 

I am sorry Mr Frum’s knowledge of the Left wasn’t good enough for him to observe and make sense of this interesting anomaly, that many Cold War leftists were actually quite keen on the Iraq war. But one would have hoped the light would have dawned by now. He appears to accept that the Iraq war was not, in fact, terribly successful. He must at least suspect that this might have something to do with its aims and character, not just its execution.

 

Let us hope that it soon does dawn. In the meantime, I must here give a full response to the storm of abuse and distortion which he unleashed against me on Twitter.

 

I did respond to it at the time ( as I have mentioned before) , but this sort of speed-debating only really works if both sides are playing the game straight, and Mr Frum, in my view, preferred to distort and caricature my position than to engage with it.  This sort of behaviour almost always comes from people who are unsure about their own positions.

 

One of his Tweets was so silly that I riposted ‘David, you are not so clever that you can afford to pretend to be stupid’. This , for a few hours stemmed the flow of distortion. But I suspect it must have rankled overnight, for he then accused me of backtracking, which for the life of me I couldn’t see how or where I had done. So I pressed him to explained how I had done this.

 

For those of you with time to spare, and indeed for Mr Frum, whose future intellectual development I hope to aid and edify,  I recount below a selection of my responses to his principal jibes and twists. I know Twitter is hard to follow(I find it very hard to follow myself) but this is intended as a rough guide, not a total description.  Those who want the whole thing can still find it on Twitter.

 

He began by telling his many followers :

 

‘P Hitchens: Ukraine crisis due to EU desire for cheap labor, wheat, & coal. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2882208/PETER-HITCHENS-Forget-evil-Putin-bloodthirsty-warmongers.html … Also, oats for EU’s heavy cavalry’.

 

Of course, this is *part* of my argument.  But I thought and think it trivial and wrong for him to pretend he thought it was my entire argument. There was a bit of byplay about oats which you can look up for yourselves, but I objected to the suggestion that there is anything old-fashioned about grain or coal. I pointed out that China’s entire boom was based on enormous consumption of coal, much of it from huge new fields in Inner Mongol ia(my point being that the West’s obsession with ‘clean’ energy is not shared elsewhere, and coal is still a valuable commodity.

 

Mr Frum’s retort was ‘Ah, so that explains the Chinese invasion of Ukraine’, a remark so bottomlessly trivial, obtuse and unserious that it provoked my warning to him that he is not so clever that he can afford to pretend to be stupid.

 

After that Mr Frum’s readers started to join in, not always on his side, and I went home.

 

Earlier yesterday, I had seen his claim that I had backtracked, and twice asked him to substantiate it, but again went home having had no reply. But last night after my modest supper, I checked Twitter and found I was under a sort of Frummish cyber-attack.

 

It began;

Frum: I’m always struck by your disinclination to stand by the words you write after you write them. Why do you publish them then?

 

Me:  What ‘disinclination’? Give examples

 

He then referred to an irrelevant exchange with a person called David Juurlink, who claimed on Twitter  that I had said cannabis was ‘more dangerous’ than alcohol (a claim I don’t think I have made because I don’t see how one could establish the order of danger in any objective fashion) , and when I asked him to substantiate this produced quotes which did not confirm his claim. Yet he pressed on undaunted, saying that I had *implied* it by not saying it. I shall probably analyse this later, for those interested.

 

Sorry about all this, but the only answer to misrepresentation is fair representation. . Then he veered off into even more obscure territory, letting fly at an article I had written about the MMR controversy which he said was ‘evasive’, though I couldn’t get him to elaborate on why.

 

He then said I’d used the same ‘manouevre’ in my reply to him about the Ukraine, in which I had cited the Oakland Institute’s report on the West’s strong interest in Ukraine’s agriculture.

 

I still can’t see how this was in any way  a backtrack.

 

Then he characterised me as saying that  ‘the EU’s stake in Ukraine/Russia is covetousness for grain, coal and cheap labour’.

 

Well, this is *part* of the explanation, but I really don’t think any serious person, reading my many articles on the subject or even the one in question, could conclude that I believe it to be the *sole* reason.

I just think I’ve written quite enough about Friedrich Naumann’s Mitteleuropa project, Richard von Kuehlmann’s plan to destroy the Russian empire by fomenting nationalism in its possessions, Brest-Litovsk, the fact that the EU is the continuation of Germany by other means.

 

I thought it worth mentioning that there is also a material underpinning to this, which there is. Indeed , the origins of Germany’s desire to expand eastwards are all fundamentally material (lebensraum, soil, markets, raw materials, the elimination of the danger of Russian competition) , though ( as all advances need to be covered against resistance) they are strategic as well.

 

When one deals with adults, one assumes that they will at least attempt to debate reasonably, and generously – that is to say, to recognise that their opponent’s motives are good until they have evidence to the contrary, and sometimes even afterwards, to read his responses and respond to them directly, rather than misrepresenting or avoiding them.

 

Debating with someone who doesn’t follow these rules is like playing chess with a squirrel, or teaching Latin to a marmoset. You get a lot of squeaking and running away but not much progress.

 

Take, for instance, Mr Frum, who thught it witty to represent my view as : ‘Grain, coal and cheap labour matter to China, and for that reason (through some unexplained mechanism) motivate the EU in Ukraine.’

 

Note that this was posted some time after my blog posting devoted to explaining the importance of material issues in the Ukraine controversy:   http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/12/the-gods-of-the-copybook-headings.html

 

But it was even longer after I had tweeted to Mr Frum that food and natural resources were never out of date, and followed this by tweeting him the Zbigniew Brzezinski quote (given in full above) in which he discusses key importance of Ukraine’s millions of people and ‘major resources’.  

 

Mr Frum described this as ‘harrumphing over the “Risk” board’, which I think is a reference to a popular board game.  But it isn’t. It’s what it’s all about. I call this behaviour unresponsiveness. It’s easy on Twitter, where you can just keep going as if the other person wasn’t replying, and misrepresent him to your audience(many of whom will believe you), It’s much(I imagine) like being a prosecutor in a show trial in a people’s court.

 

There was one brief moment of levity, after he asked me why I didn’t mention thatch for roofing as an EU motive to which I replied ‘Because I’m not a Thatcherite. Ho Ho Ho’ But I don’t think he got it.

 

I was at the same trying to fend off some Ukrainian fanatic who couldn’t acknowledge that the removal of President Yanukovych had not been according to the constitution (when this fact is undeniable).

 

Anyway, Mr Frum spent much of yesterday evening telling me that I ‘like Putin better than the EU’ , a (let us be kind) misunderstanding of my view that Putin’s defence of national sovereignty is correct and admirable(even if not much else about him is). And that whatever the faults of the Russian state, aggressive expansion into its sphere of influence is foolish and dangerous and has gone too far already.

 

He said that if the EU wanted cheap Ukrainian labour, ‘all it need do is lift visa requirements on EU travel, and millions would arrive in the next six months’ . This statement is  ridiculous. The EU, in its current state, would not dare do any such thing. There are other ways, as many workers in northern Mexico well know, of exploiting cheap labour without actually importing human beings.

 

He then said that to attribute this conflict to the West’s desire for cheap labour is farcical.

 

I agree that to attribute it *solely* to such a desire would be. But I have never done so. I cannot believe that Mr Frum does not understand or know this.

 

I said, as I have been saying form the start, that the issue is the rightness and wisdom of the West’s current aggression in eastern Europe and the Caucasus.

 

While I was doing this, the Ukrainian Parliament was voting to drop the non-aligned status which it adopted in 2010. See here http://euobserver.com/defence/30212

Several of the scanty and brief reports of this momentous development (one that I suspect may be remembered in history for all the wrong reasons)  said Ukraine had adopted its non-aligned status four years ago (June 3rd 2010) ‘under Russian pressure’. No doubt this was so. Ukraine, being virtually bankrupt, is very much at the mercy of neighbours.

 

They did not say, though it is without doubt the case, that it adopted its new aligned state under Western pressure. A BBC website report http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-30587924

even put the word “expanding” in inverted commas, in referring to NATO expansion. I mean, NATO is getting bigger, and in an eastward direction. Why then is “expansion” in quote marks?

 

I do worry, as these events unroll, that we are at the beginning of a new Iraq, an unwise aggression, the absurd and thoughtless caricature of a foreign government as a new Hitler,  pathetic unanimity in the media, followed by blood, failure and recrimination, after which everyone discovers they should have thought a lot harder.

 

 Mr Frum’s involvement in the anti-Russian side does not diminish my fears. I do begin to think we may be on the path to war.  I do wish those who beat this drum would realise what war actually means.