This is not, I hasten to disappoint my fellow Ukip voters, another attempt to besmirch the veracity of the German chancellor.
God knows I’ve made many such attempts in the past and, health and the EU Arrest Warrant permitting, will probably make many more in the future. But this isn’t it.
On the contrary, one can commend my friend Angie for the diplomatic way in which she handled the thorny issue of attending Putin’s victory Walpurgisnacht. Solomon himself would have been proud of Angie.
She, along with all other leaders of the upmarket part of the world, refused to take part in the obscene spectacle of Putin’s 9 May parade, in which the national leader celebrated not so much the Soviet victory over Angie’s Vaterland as the Russian victory over the Ukraine.
Many observers have remarked that this should have been an occasion not for gala celebrations, but for expressing sorrow over the millions killed and crippled. Repentance wouldn’t have been out of place either, especially on the part of Germany and Russia whose criminal pact divided Europe between history’s two most satanic regimes.
The Pact was signed in August, and in September the Second World War was kicked off by an almost simultaneous attack on Poland launched by Germany from the west and the USSR from the east.
When Hitler just managed to beat Stalin to the punch, attacking Russia a fortnight or so before Russia was to attack Germany, the Soviets went on to lose almost 28 million soldiers, the number they’ve been mendaciously lowering by five-million increments every few years.
The catastrophic casualties were partly due to the initial incompetence of the Soviet freshly minted officer corps, with 40,000 properly trained commanders purged out of the army, many of them out of life, in the run-up to the war.
But by far the greatest reason for the carnage was the Soviet method of fighting the war, based on the assumption that a few hundred thousand lives here or there don’t matter. Burying the enemy under an avalanche of Soviet corpses was the principal strategy, and exterminating those corpses-to-be that demurred.
In that spirit, the Soviets executed 107,000 of their own soldiers, and that’s just those sentenced to death by military tribunals. Many more, estimated at twice as many actually, were, by way of encouragement, machine-gunned in the back by the NKVD ‘blocking units’ or simply shot out of hand by political commissars.
Hence, rather than mocking the ‘pitiful’ casualties of their American allies (without whom the Soviets wouldn’t have won), Putin, who sees himself as the typological and dynastic heir to Stalin, should have gone down on his knees and begged forgiveness for his idol’s war crimes against, among others, his own people.
Instead Vlad chose to rattle a few state-of-the-art sabres in a show of aggressive strength exceeding in mind-numbing jingoism similar extravaganzas of Soviet times. It would have been immoral folly on the part of Western leaders to attend, and they didn’t.
And that’s where Angie’s Solomon bit comes in. She shunned the parade as well, but, smoothing Vlad’s ruffled feathers, she arrived in Moscow the next day to lay a wreath at the tomb of the unknown soldier. (Contrary to the old Moscow quip, what was unknown about the soldier was his name, not the fact that he was indeed a soldier.)
Angie then talked cabbages and kings with Vlad for a couple of hours, after which she issued a stern statement denouncing the Russian beastliness in the Ukraine.
The old forked tongues spoke loud and clear, except that this time it was wagging not in Angie’s mouth but in that of whoever translated her remarks for the Kremlin website.
This is how the official site of Germany’s Bundeskanzlerampt (Federal Chancellery) quotes what Angie really said about Europe’s cooperation with Russia:
“This cooperation has, however, been seriously compromised by the ‘criminal and unlawful annexation of Crimea and the military hostilities in eastern Ukraine,’ said Angela Merkel. ‘It is serious because we see these acts as a violation of the very foundations on which our common European peace order is built,’ she explained.”
And this is what purports to be the exact translation of her statement on the official Kremlin site (in my own reverse translation from the Russian):
“This cooperation has been seriously damaged by the annexation of Crimea, carried out, in contravention of international law, by military action in Ukraine, which we see as a threat to the European peace settlement.”
Change a few minor details here or there, and the statement becomes much softer than it actually was. By the sleight of the Russian translator’s hand, several key words simply disappeared: ‘criminal’, ‘unlawful’, ‘serious’, ‘violation of the very foundations’.
The general thrust of Angie’s rebuke hasn’t changed, but in such statements the tone means as much as the semantics. An annexation that’s criminal and unlawful is cosmically different from one that merely contravenes international law.
Still, one has to compliment Vlad for his self-restraint. After all, the official Russian translation could have just as easily ascribed to Angie an unequivocal support for Russia’s self-defence against Ukrainian Judaeo-Banderite fascism, along with the promise to join in by attacking the Ukraine from the west.
This pincer tactic was, after all, perfected by the two countries 76 years ago. However, Germany has seen the light since then, this time relying on subterfuge rather than tanks to conquer Europe.
Vlad, however, is the old dog who eschews new tricks. And that dog is red in tooth and claw.