Category: Blog

Ed Miliband is asking for 10 years in power to “turn Britain around”.

He’s being uncharacteristically modest. Socialists have never needed years to destroy a country when they take over.

Depending on their radicalism, this feat may take them days to achieve (Lenin) or perhaps weeks (Hollande). Never years.

Writing his essay The Apocalypse of Our Time in early 1918, shortly before he starved to death, Vasily Rozanov remarked ruefully: “Russia faded away over two days, three at the most.”

Of course Lenin’s speedy version of socialism relied on such time-saving measures as mass confiscations, torture and murder.

Our ‘democratic’ socialists regretfully have to use more moderate techniques to achieve the same purpose: transferring more power from the individual to the state.

The results are therefore slower in coming, but they do come. Actually one result is always almost as instantaneous as it was in Soviet Russia: when the socialists take over, the most capable, energetic and enterprising people flee.

A recent demonstration of this law of nature was kindly provided by François Hollande who in a matter of weeks turned London into the world’s fifth largest French city.

I don’t know if Ed has deliberately set out to stem the influx of French economic migrants, but he’ll certainly achieve this purpose, given the chance.

For he’s proposing all the same policies as those Hollande introduced to such a rapid effect. The result will also be the same: reduced liberties, economic devastation, job creators fleeing to create jobs elsewhere.

The refreshing effrontery of it all is that the Milibandits are trying to give the impression they’re proposing something new. In fact they’re following, mutatis mutandis, Marx’s prescriptions – certainly in general principles, if not every detail.

Their umbrella promise is pure Marx: to create paradise on earth (the only paradise this lot believe in) by taking from the rich and giving to the poor, thereby reducing the gap between the two.

As is the case with socialist fantasies, the results aren’t just different from the promises, but often diametrically opposite to them.

For example, in the second half of the nineteenth century, when Marx’s and Ed’s dreaded capitalism was at its peak, robber barons at their most oppressive and markets at their freest, the average ratio of income earned by US company directors and their employees was 28:1. Yet in 2005, when socialist corporatism became the norm, if less so than in Europe, this ratio stood at 158:1.

What Ed is proposing is a rehash of the same wicked idiocy that has historically brought Britain to her knees under every Labour government – and has never failed to achieve similar results everywhere else.

Miliband has declared he’ll “save the NHS” by pumping an extra £2.5 billion into this moribund socialist project. That’s throwing good money after bad.

Such Leviathans always end up operating for the benefit of the operators, not in this case patients. Hence the ruinous cost of the NHS is greatly attributable to the cancerous growth of the administrative staffs running it.

Hospitals all over Britain are reducing the numbers of beds and frontline medical staffs. Instead they bring in leeches and freeloaders: all those highly paid Directors of Diversity, Optimisers of Facilitation and Facilitators of Optimisation.

Such bureaucratisation is an ever-present feature of socialism, as Lenin realised months into the Soviet nightmare. Here too, if in the past a hospital was run by two people, the head doctor and the matron, today doctors and nurses are marginalised.

Under Labour this tendency will gather speed, whatever Ed says. It always does, and other countries, even those that are even more socialist than we are, know this.

That’s why Britain remains the only Western European country with completely socialised medical care; everyone else relies on a mixed system with a strong private element.

Anyway, where’s the £2.5 billion going to come from, Ed? No problem, at least none for the mendacious chaps who claim that borrowing one in every six pounds, as opposed to one in five, constitutes cruel austerity.

The billions will come from squeezing the rich till their pips squeak, in Denis Healey’s colourful phrase.

Specifically, the Milibandits will introduce ‘mansion tax’ on expensive houses. One wonders if they’ve followed the asset inflation over the last few decades, which has been outstripping the money inflation by a factor of almost 10.

This means that property prices have for decades been growing 10 times faster than incomes. The observable result of this two-speed economy is that many people on small incomes live in jolly expensive houses, those they bought years ago.

Making them pay even higher taxes will force them to sell out and move, but the houses won’t move with them. They’ll be bought by the rich, which will further increase the very gap between the two groups that keeps Ed awake through those long Hampstead nights.

What else? Oh yes, of course, Ed will reintroduce the 50% tax rate.

Serious economists have shown, calculator in hand, that this punitive measure would result in, at best, trivial gains in tax revenue.

But the slowdown in economic activity would be far from trivial. Economic emigration will start, not at the same rate as that prompted by Hollande’s 75% tax but ruinous nonetheless.

Abolish the married tax allowance, that goes without saying. God forbid we’ll give people financial incentives to get married, and who says social engineering has to be economic only?

The family is the greatest competitor to the power of the central state, which is why all socialists seek to destroy it. This started with the founders of this evil creed – just read The Communist Manifesto. So Ed will simply continue this fine tradition.

Have I forgotten anything? Nationalisation perhaps?

Actually this word hasn’t been uttered yet; focus groups must have suggested the Brits aren’t quite ready to hear it again.

But crude confiscation isn’t the only way for a socialist state to gain control of businesses. This was demonstrated by another socialist, of the national variety, Adolf Hitler.

The Nazis didn’t nationalise companies, they simply told them how to go about their business: whom to hire, whom to fire, what to produce, in what quantities, how much to pay, how much to charge and so forth. It’s good to see that Ed takes lessons not only from Marx himself, but also from his diverse disciples.

Hence he plans to force large businesses to take on young apprentices. A universal result of such policies, observable for example in France, is burgeoning unemployment. Rather than being saddled with unsupportable labour costs, companies stop hiring.

To make sure this happens, Ed also plans to introduce an £8 minimum wage, which many companies will be unable to pay. Unskilled labour, which otherwise would have been employed, say, for £6 an hour, will go on the dole instead.

The Milibandits also promise to make wages grow at the same rate as the economy, which is a safe proposition. The only way to make sure this happens is to tell businesses how much they must pay their employees. If any government is asinine enough to try this, it’s a surefire guarantee that the economy won’t grow at all.

But it’s not all about destruction. Ed also promises to create – a million ‘green’ jobs in environment-friendly industries. How exactly?

The only way a government can create jobs is to nationalise more of the economy, where the public sector already accounts for almost half of GDP. If you wonder how this will work, look at Britain circa 1975.

Of course another way would be to provide tax incentives, but this would clash with Ed’s other ambitions.

So far I haven’t mentioned the national debt and budget deficits, but I’m not the only one. Neither did Ed, in his yesterday’s speech at the Labour Conference.

Such reticence is understandable, for both will climb as rapidly and vertically as the Harrier used to do.

Neither have I said anything about the profound immorality of everything the Milibandits are proposing. There’s no point: wicked immorality is the founding and defining feature of socialism in its every manifestation.

“Friends, it is time we ran the country like we know it can be run,” concluded the Demosthenes of Labour. Yes, into the ground.

 

My forthcoming book Democracy as a Neocon Trick can be pre-ordered, at what the publisher promises to be a spectacular discount, from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.html

 

 
 

 

 

 

A sound piece of advice, that. Sometimes one wishes that those who report on Russian affairs followed it.

They don’t though, which is why over the last few days they’ve been breaking the earth-shattering news of Russian paratroopers fighting, and dying, in  the Ukraine.

I hope you won’t think I’m bragging, but I shattered that very earth a fortnight earlier, on 28 August: http://alexanderboot.com/content/no-russian-soldiers-are-fighting-ukraine-so-why-are-they-dying.

How did I manage to scoop the Moscow bureaus of our major newspapers? By doing what they evidently neglect to do: following Russian sources.

The Russian media don’t just enlighten; they also delight. They don’t just sate one’s hunger for information; they also stroke one’s poetic sensibilities.

Take, for example, the chastushka by the blogger Norvezhsky-Lesnoy who, if it were up to me, would give Bob Dylan a good run for his money in this year’s Nobels.

For the non-Russians among you, the chastushka is the Russian answer to the limerick. Unlike the limerick, the chastushka has only four lines, rhymed as either AABB or ABAB.

Also unlike the limerick, where each line develops the story, chastushkas often say what they have to say in the last two lines, unrelated to the first two. Like the limerick, the genre demands the use of off-colour lexicon.

In common with Bob Dylan’s doggerels, which, according to Ben Macintyre of The Times, represent the height of lyrical poetry, chastushkas are meant to be sung, not read. This didn’t prevent my New York friend Vladimir Kozlovsky from publishing two volumes of them.

However, those he published weren’t so much the original folk verses as parodies of them, written by Moscow intellectuals able to delve the poetic depths of the genre. Sometimes they resort to it by way of commentary on current events.

That’s what my Russian colleague did in response to the oligarchs’ frantic rush to sell off their foreign assets – for fear of having them impounded should the national leader attack another few countries, or else losing them to said leader’s confiscatory whims.

Here’s his chastushka, in my loose translation that captures some of the lyricism of the original without doing it full justice:

“In the street a lonely Basset// Is sitting sadly on a stone// I have sold my every asset// To be left the f*** alone.”

Sublime, isn’t it? I hope the Nobel Committee gives the poem proper consideration.

Unless, of course, they’d rather honour the Ukrainian Putin-leaning poet Oles Buzina. I’ve been unable to obtain the full text of his masterpiece What Did They Fight for in the Maidan?, but the last two lines answer the eponymous question with awe-inspiring poignancy:

“So that the fate of the Ukraine// Be decided in Europe by pederasts.”

Here’s another deserving Nobel candidate, whose poetic power is fully comparable with Bob Dylan’s, even if his civic pathos is different.

Lest you may get the impression that the Russians shun prose as a means of political self-expression, allow me to assure you this isn’t the case.

Moreover, the erudition of Russia’s commentators fully matches the poetic sensibility of her bards.

For example, the most widely viewed talk show on Russian state television (which is to say Russian television) got to the bottom of the West’s hostile reaction to Russia’s reclaiming her rightful property:

The vengeful West has imposed sanctions “because 500 years ago Russia declined to accept the crown from the Pope’s hands.”

This regrettably fails to explain why mainly Protestant countries, such as the USA or Britain, have imposed the same sanctions as the Popish Italy or France.

Also, dating the Catholic Russophobia back precisely to the early 16^th century strikes one as slightly arbitrary, what with the Reformation diminishing papal power in Europe at exactly that time.

Yet the Papist angle is self-evident to Russian audiences, what with their possessing the Gnostic knowledge inaccessible for Westerners. As an ex-Russian myself, I can try to fill in the blanks for your benefit.

Half of Europe rejected Roman Catholicism 500 years ago, and so did Russia. (Actually the Russians did so in 988 by opting for the Byzantine rite, but what’s a few centuries among friends? It’s the thought that counts.)

Unlike the Russians, however, the West still feels guilty about this apostasy, an emotion universally known to make people seek scapegoats. In this instance it’s Russia, which remains staunchly anti-Catholic, and indeed anti-Western, to this day.

Hence, 500 years after half of them rejected Catholicism the dastardly Westerners have decided to punish Russia for doing the same. Only a Judaeo-fascist Nazi Banderite would detect a causal relationship between the sanctions and Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine.

Gnostic Russians are capable of discerning real, as opposed to trumped-up, causal relationships. Thus that very talk show explained that those opposing Russia in eastern Ukraine are the same people who are decapitating hostages in northern Iraq.

And even if they aren’t exactly the same people, they are certainly driven by the same evil forces. This equates the Ukraine with the Islamic State, and just to think that the Ukies stubbornly claim to be as Christian as the Russians themselves.

It’s time the world saw through their heinous subterfuge; it’s time the Patriarch of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (recently anathemised by the Moscow KGB Patriarchate) referred to himself by his real, if hitherto secret, title: the Ayatollah of Kiev.

Isn’t Putin’s propaganda fun? One does wish the Hitchenses and Bookers of this world knew enough Russian to follow it.

“People who don’t read the papers,” said Ostap Bender, the hero of the most popular Soviet novels Twelve Chairs and The Golden Calf, “ought to be killed on the spot.”

The death penalty would be a bit harsh; public recantation would suffice. Or perhaps a Catholic-style mea culpa would be just the ticket.

 

It’s hard not to notice the semantic confusion arriving in the slipstream of the Scottish referendum.

No one seems to be any longer sure of anything: nationhood, home rule for Scotland, England or possibly Merseyside, democracy, constitution, why the chicken crosses the road or whether or not it comes before the egg.

What one is observing is an intellectual mess, a veritable rain of error. Whenever a political system delivers such a deluge, one has to question the system, not just its isolated workings.

More than that: one has to take a piercing look at the tectonic shifts that threw up the system in the first place.

Modernity, as I use the term, was brought to life by a frenzied mass rebellion against traditional Western civilisation, otherwise known as Christendom.

At the root of it lay a mutiny against the religion that had inspired the civilisation: its demands had proved to be too onerous, especially when juxtaposed with the seeming free-for-all of humanism.

As Chesterton put it, “The Christian idea has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult – and left untried.”

Steering clear of metaphysical issues, Ortega y Gasset referred to this mutiny as ‘the revolt of the masses’, and this is the only explanation that makes modernity intelligible.

Thus every newfangled political innovation, whatever its positive content, always has a significant, at times dominant, negative element.

Democracy of suffrage for all, including pubescent youngsters, is one such. It belies its etymology in numerous ways, including the most fundamental one. It divests demos of the power it possessed under the putatively oppressive monarchs of yesteryear.

I enlarge on this point in my forthcoming book Democracy as a Neocon Trick, but in this abbreviated format a purely empirical observation will have to suffice: the most absolute monarchs of Christendom never had the same power over demos that today’s democratically elected prime minister or president claims as his due.

Believing, along with St Paul, that their power derived from God, rather than mythical ‘consent of the governed’, traditional rulers were committed to the same structural principles as those applied by the Church.

Fundamental to them was what the Church called subsidiarity and what in a political context is best described as localism: the devolution of power to the lowest sensible level.

Just as familial setups (parish, guild, village commune, township etc.) acted as the individual’s defence against local government, so did local bodies protect those setups, and hence the individual, from the tyranny of the central government.

Democracy of universal suffrage, on the other hand, was put forth as a battering ram of modernity designed to smash traditional polity to smithereens. Its ubiquitous stratagem is reversing the vector of power.

If in the past power was vectored from periphery to centre, in misnamed democracies it infinitely gravitates the other way. Thus George III, against whom his American subjects rebelled, never possessed even a modicum of the power wielded by Barack Obama. Louis XIV may have said l’état, c’est moi, but he was politically impotent compared to François Hollande.

National self-determination is another arrow in the quiver of modernity, and it too is aimed at the heart of traditional order.

The term first gained currency courtesy of Woodrow Wilson, who was a fanatic of world government. The League of Nations, his brainchild, was supposed to be the first step towards that goal – and yet the term ‘national self-determination’ was never far from Wilson’s lips.

There seems to be a contradiction there, but in fact there is none. ‘National self-determination’ was touted to destroy the remnants of traditional polity, largely vested as they were at the time in multinational empires: British, Austro-Hungarian, German and Russian.

Those empires more or less honoured the localism of traditional polity, and even the authoritarian Russian tsars relied on a great deal of self-government at the outskirts of the empire. The other European empires went much further along that route, with the Habsburgs serving the brightest example.

Breaking those empires up was Wilson’s goal, as he heard the clarion call of modernity in every tonal detail. Their demise would inevitably create a vacuum of power, to be filled by a supranational government in hock to the only combatant emerging from the Great War stronger than before: the USA.

It took another war to complete the destruction. The last bastion of traditional polity, the British Empire, collapsed in the immediate aftermath, with the other European empires by then a distant memory.

The map of Europe was now defined by nation states, the biggest of them multiethnic. Yet the inner imperative of modernity, that of greater and greater centralisation of power, didn’t disappear.

Its champions had the same target, but they now had to readjust their sights. If before they wanted to smash the traditional empires, slated for destruction now was the nation state.

But the weapon of ‘national self-determination’ didn’t have to be decommissioned. It’s just that modernity, with its usual sleight of lexical hand, perverted its meaning.

National determination increasingly got to mean ethnic self-determination, which isn’t at all the same thing. In its previous meaning, the term was used to bring down multinational empires. Today it’s counted upon to perform the same outrage on the nation state.

The idea that every ethnic group constitutes a nation, whose birthright to independence is reclaimable by either referendum or revolution, isn’t just spurious – it’s deliberately subversive.

No wonder that both the USA and, more to the point, the EU are firmly committed to it. Both have the same DNA traceable back to the first tentative steps of modernity.

A nation state has clearly defined borders, setting a natural limit to centralisation. Once a morally and intellectually corrupt elite has concentrated all power in its hands, further centralisation seems impossible.

And so it is – within the national borders. For centralisation to proceed apace, such borders therefore have to be made nominal to begin with, and nonexistent in the near future.

It’s in this context that most European politics can be understood. The rise of separatism, of which the Scottish referendum provides but the most recent example, is specifically designed to destroy the nation state.

One might object that Europe is trying to revive the traditional polity of Christendom, based as it was on localism, or devolution as it’s now called. Indeed, one hears many EU fanatics, especially French and German, drawing false parallels between their ugly contrivance and the Holy Roman Empire.

The difference is fundamental. The Carolingian empire was a working arrangement organically evolved to protect Christendom with its political ethos. The EU is an artificial concoction whose aim is to destroy whatever is left of traditional polity.

The Holy Roman Empire was a loose ganglion made up of local elements, exercising real power. The EU, on the other hand, wishes to destroy local power and exercise totalitarian control over all its constituents.

The two entities, therefore, aren’t so much similar as diametrically opposite. And the drive for ethnic separatism, encouraged by the EU, is a destructive weapon.

In connection with Scotland, any sensible government, if we still had one, would have snuffed out any talk of independence. Rather than allowing a pathetically designed unconstitutional referendum, it would have insisted that Great Britain, whose age of 300-plus makes it the oldest major Western constitution, is indivisible.

At the same time, such a government would act to transfer increasingly more power to the local bodies, including, but not limited to, those in the Celtic fringe. The Brits, wherever they live, shouldn’t feel that revolutionary separation is the only path towards self-government.

This would be a step in the right direction, that of restoring some of the traditional political dispensation of Christendom. Alas, we have no such government and we’ll never again have such an arrangement.

What we do have is an agglomerate of self-serving spivs who are unfit for government and hence have to bribe their way to it. All three parliamentary parties spoke in touching unison: let’s give the Scots even more of our money.

Thus a place already corrupted by welfare is being offered more of it. The subversive drive towards ‘national’ independence is bound to return but – and that’s a critical consideration for our spivs – not straight away.

It may take 10 years or even 20, by which time most of today’s politicians will be past their sell-by date. So by all means, let’s throw more unearned cash at the Scots and whomever else may vote for us. Après moi, le déluge, to quote another Louis.

It’s hard to feel encouraged by the referendum outcome. The feeling of disgust at the whole thing comes more naturally.  

  

 

The answer to this question, that is: Is there any limit to the stupid, subversive, demotic rubbish The Times will publish these days?

Ben Macintyre’s article on Bob Dylan unwittingly plucks the answer out of the blowin’ wind and lays it before us. It’s an emphatic no.

The article itself must have been plucked out too, but not so much of the wind as of the orifice that at times produces it. For Ben thinks Bob should be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

Correction: he doesn’t just think that. He agitates for it with the fervour that can only come from deep conviction, approaching religious faith in its intensity.

Like faith, this conviction first springs from intuition and only then acquires the support of rational justification. This may sometimes look odd to an outsider, whose intuitive assumptions take him on a different path.

And odd would be too mild a word to describe Ben’s belief in Bob’s greatness; “…Dylan is indisputably one of the greatest lyrical poets of the age, a supreme master of language who has reinvented his art with exemplary energy and imagination for more than half a century.”

The only way to establish whether or not Bob’s greatness extends to the lofty heights at which the Nobel Prize is merited is to read some of those poetic masterpieces. Such as:

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:

Let the winds of dawn that blow

Softly round your dreaming head

Such a day of welcome show

Eye and knocking heart may bless,

Find the mortal world enough;

Noons of dryness find you fed

By the involuntary powers,

Nights of insult let you pass

Watched by every human love.

Now what kind of illiterate nonsense… Hold on a moment. Come to think of it, this stuff isn’t bad at all…

Oops, sorry, lapsus manus. With my characteristic negligence of detail, I’ve written out a wrong poem. This stanza actually comes from Lullaby by W.H. Auden. Someone who never received the prize so richly deserved by Bob for such immortal lines as:

How many roads must a man walk down

Before you call him a man?

How many seas must a white dove sail

Before she sleeps in the sand?

Yes, how many times must the cannon balls fly

Before they’re forever banned?

The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind

The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

This flatulent doggerel supposedly merits the accolade that has bypassed, along with Auden, such undeserving scribes as Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Mark Twain, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Henrik Ibsen, Graham Greene, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges and Robert Frost.

To be fair to Ben, he anticipates dissent in some quarters and moves fast to preempt it:

“Those who insist that words can only be literature if written for the page seem quaintly old-fashioned. At a time when traditional formal poetry is in decline, informal oral poetry is booming. This is poetry written for the ear before the eye, returning the voice to verse, and now being consumed and recited in vast quantities by a younger generation. It is called rap.”

This is a time-honoured trick. The writer concocts an idiotic objection that no one in his right mind would ever make. Then he refutes it with some élan.

Someone insisting that true poetry can’t be sung wouldn’t be ‘quaintly old-fashioned’, Ben. He’d be ignorant.

Sublime poetry has been sung since the Song of Songs, Homer and the troubadours. Great Persian poets, such as Saadi, sang their poems. Whenever the sublime Russian poet Osip Mandelstam (who never received the Nobel either, instead dying in a Soviet concentration camp) recited his poems, he did so in singsong. So did Pasternak. So did Brodsky.

Poetry doesn’t have to be ‘written for the page’. But it does have to be poetry, which Bob’s excretions aren’t.

Bob is nothing but a trendy leftie who not only hasn’t written a single poetic line in his life but wouldn’t recognise one if it hit him in the eye, still aching from yesterday’s intake of coke.

His acclaim is wholly owed to the fact that he is indeed a trendy leftie who during the ’60s appealed to the pimply youths ready to ‘tune in, turn on and drop out’. Since then he has been attracting their intellectual heirs.

Bob’s art, such as it is, is an extension of the drug culture, which is the only kind of culture it’s an extension of. Only a tasteless ignoramus would regard his songs as poetry (sorry, Ben).

But then Ben also thinks that rap is poetry, albeit ‘informal, oral’. He doesn’t offer any aesthetic judgement to back up this assertion. His argument is entirely ad populi: “[rap is] now being consumed and recited in vast quantities by a younger generation.”

A younger generation does indeed display a voracious taste for aesthetic coprophilia. That’s why a middle-aged, bespectacled gentleman like Ben is duty-bound to educate their taste as best he can, bucking the paedocratic trend. Instead he serves up more of the same malodorous fare.

A modern reader, battle-hardened in the trenches of egalitarianism, may object that I’m too harsh on Ben and indeed Bob. They have one opinion on what constitutes great poetry, I have another. And all opinions are equally valid, aren’t they?

They may be. But not all judgements are, and the crucial difference between an opinion and a judgement is these days lost. Allow me to illustrate this shockingly retrograde point by using Andy Murray as an example.

“I don’t think Andy is all that great a player” is an opinion. “Andy doesn’t get enough ball rotation on his topspin forehand” is a judgement. “Andy’s statement on Scotland’s independence was ill-advised” is both an opinion and a judgement.

In my judgement Bob’s verses, with their distorted meter, attempts to rhyme words that don’t rhyme and absence of any poetic sensibility, are crude doggerel which isn’t so much poetry as its exact opposite.

In Ben’s judgement they, along with rap, are high poetry worthy of the highest accolade. You’ll have to judge which of us is right.

One can observe two things about modern tyrants: first, they can’t resist divulging their plans; second, the world never listens.

Marx, for example, laid down the blueprint for a modern totalitarian state, complete with genocide, democide, concentration camps, suppression of every liberty, dictatorship of a small elite, confiscation of all private property, destruction of the family – the lot.

He himself didn’t quite succeed in bringing his vision to fruition, but it didn’t take much imagination to predict that any future Marxist state would.

Yet no one took any notice.

Lenin too suffered Cassandra’s fate. He honestly and with remarkable forthrightness wrote in every pre-revolutionary book of his exactly what he’d do if he grabbed power.

Well, perhaps not quite exactly: the future Red Square mummy was so reticent about the positive end of his programme (little things like the economy, food supply, medicine) that one could see he had never given the matter much thought.

The same can’t be said about the negative end. There the mummy-to-be was extremely detailed and explicit. He knew exactly which classes made up of ‘noxious insects’ should be expropriated and exterminated – not just in Russia but all over the world.

Again no one took any notice, and many feigned surprise when in due course the Bolsheviks started doing exactly what Marx and Lenin said they’d do.

Some 60 millions died in the Soviet Union alone as a direct result, which could have been avoided if civilised people had unplugged their ears and listened.

Hitler in his Mein Kampf also said exactly what he’d do 14 years before he did it. Again one can get the impression that the West was at the time governed by people needing a remedial reading class.

It wasn’t just that the West refused to believe that those wonderful people who gave the world Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Bach and Beethoven could ever do such awful things.

The West actually failed to acknowledge the ongoing monstrosities as they were going on. More than that: both the Soviets and the Nazis had a huge army of Western admirers, and only a slightly smaller one of Western agents.

Lenin was a visionary reformer, ‘the dreamer in the Kremlin’ in H.G. Wells’s phrase. Stalin was an effective, if occasionally strict, manager (which is, incidentally, how he’s presented in today’s Russian textbooks). Hitler had the backbone that was, according to many British aristocrats all the way to the royal family, so lamentably missing in Britain’s own politicians.

Reading problems were again very much in evidence. People who knew what they were talking about were dismissed as overemotional cranks; their books were left unread.

For example, the émigré historian Sergei Melgunov published his The Red Terror in the West while Lenin was still alive.

The book documents thousands of such niceties as skinning people alive, rolling them around in nail-studded barrels, driving nails into people’s skulls, quartering, burning alive, crucifying priests, stuffing officers alive into locomotive furnaces, pouring molten pitch or liquefied lead down people’s throats.

All this went on against the background of mass shootings that in the first three years of Soviet rule dispatched almost two million in a quasi-judicial way, and millions on top of that without even a travesty of justice.

Yet Melgunov was derisively dismissed. He’s a Russian émigré, isn’t he? So he has a chip on his shoulder. What does he know that those clubbable Bloomsbury chaps don’t?

In fact, the so-called public opinion in the West refused to acknowledge the Russian Walpurgisnacht until 1956, when Khrushchev himself owned up to it, tactfully omitting his own role in mass murders.

Similarly the NKVD defector Walter Krivitsky was mocked when he revealed in his book serialised in April, 1939, that in a few months Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union would form an alliance.

Utterly preposterous, those Russians, what? Say anything to draw attention to themselves. A Nazi-Soviet pact? Unthinkable.

The West has form in such negligence, and there has always been a steep price to pay. In this context, we’d be well-advised to listen very carefully to what Putin has to say for himself.

The other day the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung published a documented statement made by the Ukraine’s president Poroshenko to José Manuel Barroso. Poroshenko quotes Putin as saying “If I wanted to, it would take me two days to occupy not only Kiev, but also Riga, Vilnius, Tallinn, Warsaw and Bucharest.”

Putin went on to advise Poroshenko “not to rely too much on the EU”. He, Putin, could easily “influence and block any decision” made there. That second part of his claim is more readily believable than the first, but we’d ignore it at our peril. 

The general thrust, if not the details, of Putin’s threat is the same as in the statement he had made to Barroso directly.

According to La Repubblica, Putin waved aside Barroso’s timid objections to Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine: “That’s not the issue. Thing is, I can take Kiev in a fortnight if I want to.”

Taking Kiev in two weeks sounds more plausible than taking six European capitals in two days, but it’s the thought that counts. And the thought that has at least crossed Putin’s mind is that no one could stop him if he wished to occupy the Ukraine and also five Nato countries.

Strategic plans for that type of action were drawn up by the Soviet General Staff as far back as the 1930s. Then it was called Operation Thunderstorm, and only Hitler’s preemptive strike managed both to delay it by four years and also limit its scale.

Since Putin’s stated objective is to resurrect the Soviet Union to its former glory, he must have had his generals working overtime on an updated version of Thunderstorm. Of course having plans and carrying them out are two different things, but history shows that the distance between the two is much shorter in dictatorships than in democracies.

And yet once again, just as Lenin, Stalin and Hitler were never short of Western admirers, neither is Putin. He’s supposed to be the sole remaining flag-bearer of Christianity, a champion of all those conservative values we in the West no longer uphold.

The Hitchenses, Bookers and Tolstoys of this world, not to mention some of my readers, are busily extolling Putin’s virtues. Why, one such chap even went so far as to describe Putin’s foreign policy as ‘pacifist’.

Come to your senses, gentlemen, before it’s too late – yet again. We’re looking at the greatest danger the West has confronted for 20 years, and a show of strength is the only way of preventing a catastrophe.

Except that we’re neither confronting the danger nor showing strength. In fact, our demob-happy governments, hoping to get fat on the peace dividend, have made sure we have little strength left to show.

We must rebuild our military power, and the resolve to use it, as fast as we did in 1940. Learning to heed what the aggressors are saying would be a good start.

A financial consultant shouldn’t have fundamental misgivings about the morality of money.

A geography teacher shouldn’t doubt that the Earth is round.

A nuclear physicist shouldn’t wonder if the atom is really divisible.

If these professionals are indeed beset by such doubts, any sensible person would be justified in thinking they should seek a different line of work.

So what’s one supposed to think of a Christian prelate who publicly admits doubting the existence of God? Especially if he then talks about it at a theological level normally associated with a composite of Chesterton’s ‘village atheist’ and ‘village idiot’?

Exactly the same thing, I dare say. That he’s in the wrong job.

Apparently his Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury experiences his primal doubts on his morning jog, making one wonder if his predecessors in the job, such as St Augustine, St Anselm or William Laud, ever felt the same way – or indeed jogged.

What makes His Athletic Grace so uncertain is the undeniable existence of suffering in the world. Apparently he asks himself the same questions that have been asked by, before and after David Hume:

“If God allows suffering and [insert any disaster of your choice], then he isn’t good. If he doesn’t know about it, then he isn’t omniscient. And if there’s nothing he can do about it, then he isn’t omnipotent.”

All such queries are posed by intuitive atheists seeking to post-rationalise their atheism. That’s the only explanation of why undoubtedly intelligent men, such as David Hume, always sound like children with learning difficulties when asking (or especially trying to answer) such questions.

That’s exactly how His Grace sounds: “We know about Jesus, we can’t explain all the questions in the world, we can’t explain about suffering, we can’t explain loads of things but we know about Jesus. We can talk about Jesus – I always do that because most of the other questions I can’t answer.”

This is the kind of tirade one would expect from a half-crazed, megaphone-toting sectarian in Trafalgar Square, screaming “Jesus is coming! The end is nigh!!!” It’s rather incongruous coming from the leader of one of the world’s three apostolic denominations.

Of course we can’t explain the entire mystery of God, this goes without saying. Any man able to do that would himself be God, which few claim this side of a lunatic asylum.

But there are “loads of things” that anyone with even a cursory knowledge of theology should be able to tackle with reasonable confidence.

The existence of suffering is one such thing: a theologian may explain it in the context of wrongdoing, both individual, of the kind all of us commit regularly, and collective, otherwise known as Original Sin, that of disobedience to God.

Augustine, for example, ascribed evil, and by inference suffering, to the abuse of free will first perpetrated by Adam and Eve. This distorted the original perfect harmony of God’s creation, both in man and nature. Hence the suffering.

Aquinas went even further. He too treated suffering in terms of cause and effect, but he emphasised that every form of existence, including suffering, has a meaning and ultimately contributes to the goodness of the world.

Suffering dialectically emphasises the just order of the universe, and God inflicts it as punishment for that very purpose. Augustine would have agreed: central to his theodicy was the concept of ‘privation’, according to which evil isn’t an entity in itself but merely the absence of good.

Moreover, if imitating Christ is the goal of a Christian life, then any Christian, never mind a prelate, ought to be aware of the redemptive, and therefore positive, value of suffering. Personal observation vindicates this: most people who have suffered grievously emerge the better for it spiritually, intellectually and morally.

I’m merely scratching the surface here, which is all this abbreviated format allows. However, even as strictly an amateur in such matters, I could probably delve quite a bit deeper if pressed.

Yet in this area, as in all others, I defer to professionals, those who have single-mindedly devoted their whole lives to pondering the meaning of God and his creation.

One would like to assume that this category includes the leader of the world’s 80 million Anglicans. Yet His Grace Justin Welby has evidently set out to prove how far this assumption is from the truth.

With prelates like him, is it any wonder Anglicanism has such a hard time in Britain? One almost feels like repeating Henry II’s plea “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”, issued in relation to another Archbishop of Canterbury.

Except that in this instance one could think of a few modifiers that would be more emphatic than ‘turbulent’.

 

 

 

 

Yesterday Putin’s storm troops made a move on Crimean Tatars, a people whose claim on the peninsula predates the Russians’ by centuries.

Ever since the anschluss of the Crimea last March, the Tatars, who make up about 12 per cent of the population, have been on the receiving end of persecution.

This went beyond your normal common-or-garden jostling for position and the odd offensive word on public transport.

The more vociferous Tatars would simply disappear in the middle of the night, many others were roughed up, and all the rest scared into relative silence.

Traditional Russian xenophobia was a factor, but mainly the persecution was caused by the Tatars’ refusal to accept the annexation as legitimate.

Hence they refused to take part in the sham referendum conducted at gunpoint, instead demanding autonomy under their own parliament, the Mejlis.

The Russian propaganda machine went in high gear, opportunistically portraying the Tatars’ stubbornness as some form of Muslim jihadism, linked to al-Qaeda, the IS and other newsworthy groups.

This doesn’t quite explain why the Tatars never displayed such proclivities under the aegis of the Ukraine, when they led quiet, peaceful lives. Nor is it clear why these putative jihadists are staunch Europhiles to a man, and why they never showed any hostility to non-Russian Christians.

After all, it’s the Ukrainian flag they have been flying off the Mejlis building, not the green banner of Islam – this in spite of the Ukrainians’ less than cordial feelings about the Muslims.

One way or the other, Putin’s storm troops seized the Mejlis building yesterday, simultaneously harassing and ransacking many Muslim households.

In the aftermath, Mustafa Dzhemilev, the spiritual leader of the Tatar community, described the Putin regime as “worse than in Soviet times”. That is saying a lot.

For in Soviet times, exactly 70 years ago, the Tatars suffered one of the worst demographic catastrophes of all time.

Stalin held the entire Tatar population of 238,500 collectively responsible for the actions of the 9,225 Tatars who had fought on the German side.

As a result, on 19 May, 1944, they were all rounded up by 32,000 NKVD troops, loaded into cattle trucks and deported to Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Siberia. By 1 January, 1947, 109, 956 of them had died of starvation, disease and maltreatment.

Collective responsibility is a time-honoured concept, but it has to be said that the Soviets applied it selectively. For example, at least 1.5 million Russians fought against Stalin during the war, with millions more cooperating with the Germans in non-combat capacities.

Should the whole Russian population have been deported too? The thought no doubt crossed Stalin’s mind, but he regretfully abandoned it for the obvious logistic difficulties.

(Interestingly, during the 1812 Napoleonic war not  a single Russian soldier switched sides – this in spite of the army being made up of serfs, effectively chattel property. The pandemic outbreak of treason in 1941, 24 years after the advent of social justice for all, requires an explanation which it doesn’t quite receive in Putin-inspired history books.)

Smaller groups were easier to handle, hence the gruesome genocide not only of the Tatars, but also of the Chechens, the Balkars, the Kabardins and others in the region. Wholesale deportation of Jews was also planned, and only Stalin’s death prevented another Final Solution.

Towards the end of the 1980s all those groups had been exonerated and allowed to return. The Chechens probably wish now they hadn’t been quite so quick to do so – courtesy of successive post-communist Russian administrations they’ve been decimated in two horrible wars, the last one started specifically to tighten Putin’s hold on power.

Now it’s the Tatars’ turn. By now their Crimean population has built up back to the pre-deportation levels, with another 150,000 or so having wisely decided to stay in Uzbekistan.

Yet one can understand those who have returned: it is, after all, their ancestral land. Between the 15^th and late 19^th centuries, the Tatars were by far the largest ethnic group in the Crimea.

Until the 1768-1774 Russo-Turkish War, the peninsula had belonged to the Ottoman Turks. The treaty signed at the end of the war made the Crimea independent, but Russia’s compliance with such documents has never been of sterling quality.

In 1783 Russia violated the treaty, and Grigory Potemkin, Catherine II’s morganatic husband, annexed the Crimea, earning himself the title of the Prince of Tauris (the Greek name for the peninsula) and her the soubriquet of Great.

Since then the Tatars have been clinging to their old land mostly for nostalgic reasons. Those not given to such emotions have been fleeing in droves following each outburst of hostilities in the region.

Many of those who didn’t flee were expelled, occasionally for the same reason as they were deported by Stalin: insufficient loyalty at wartime. Each time emigration and expulsion combined to reduce the Tatar population.

This happened in 1812, after the 1853-1856 Crimean war, and especially after the Russso-Turkish war of 1878-1879, when 200,000 out of the 300,000 Tatars left the Crimea.

This brief retrospective glance ought to explain why the Tatars’ affection for the Russians isn’t without limits, which feelings are widely shared by all ethnic groups that have ever found themselves in close proximity to the Third Rome.

At the moment the Crimean Tatars are fearing yet another genocide, which in view of their history can’t be wholly ascribed to groundless paranoia. One doubts that yesterday’s events will go a long way towards allaying such fears.

 

 

 

 

Socialism corrupts; socialism plus nationalism corrupts absolutely.

With apologies to Lord Acton for this slight paraphrase, it does explain the morass into which Scotland has sunk.

The Scots used to be a proud, and proudly self-sufficient, people of empire builders, engineers, entrepreneurs, scientists, statesmen, writers, philosophers and economists, one that punched way above its weight in British life.

Then came the age of handouts accompanied by the fanfare of socialist propaganda. This wasn’t the Scots’ fault: both the handouts and the propaganda arrived courtesy of HMG.

It is, however, their fault that they responded with so much alacrity, not realising the lasting, probably irreversible damage socialism does – not merely, nor even primarily, to the economy, but to the people’s mentality.

This is true of individuals and just as true of nations, as epigrammatically expressed by that great Scot Adam Smith: “What is prudence in the conduct of every private family, can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.”

Unemployment and the dole destroy the traditional bonds that have taken centuries to build. The first bond that suffers is the one binding families together: when the family loses its economic function, in due course it’ll lose all others.

Step by step, a talented, self-reliant nation thriving on its talent, hard work and thrift was corrupted to become an aggregate of disaffected, indolent and resentful welfare recipients.

When people lose their erstwhile backbone, their minds will soon follow. They squander the ability to think straight, replacing it with a Pavlovian response to purely emotional stimuli.

This creates the troubled waters in which assorted demagogues can then fish. When people no longer hear the voice of tradition in their souls, they’re ready to listen to anyone and anything.

Demagogues are like bullies: they have an animal-like instinct for weakness. Once they’ve detected it, they pounce.

Thus, courtesy of the hideous Alex Salmond and his jolly friends, Scotland’s socialism acquired a nationalist tint, a combination historically proven to produce disasters.

A mere 100 years ago the Scots would have seen through the venomous waffle, but that was before their brains got concussed by several decades of moral and intellectual corruption. Now they are at the demagogues’ mercy.

A reader of mine illustrates this unwittingly. He has obviously swallowed the propaganda whole, not bothering to chew on it and thus taste its rancid flavour.

 I’m a middle aged working class man who wants his country to be a normal western democracy. Electing it’s own government & running it’s own affairs,” he writes, the odd grammatical solecism failing to subtract from the depth of feeling.

Much of this feeling I share. I too want my country, Britain, to be independent. That’s why I despise our supine submission to the diktats of the EU, a diabolical contrivance we should never have joined.

Like Esau, we’ve sold our birthright. Unlike Esau, we didn’t even get a mess of potage in return. All we got is a pot of message, generally meaningless and invariably mendacious waffle.

I could understand, indeed welcome, a proud Scotland declaring she wants none of that. She refuses to belong to a union more than half of whose laws are imposed by Brussels bureaucrats. She’ll go it alone, taking her chances as an independent nation.

But that’s exactly the opposite of what the Scots, including my reader, are saying. They crave joining the EU and becoming its minor province, with half the population of Portugal and inevitably half as much say in their own affairs.

My reader enunciates this desire quite succinctly: “Here is an unpalatable possible (probable even) prediction: by 2018 we could be out of Europe, and under the jurisdiction of a Conservative-UKIP coalition led by Boris Johnson…”

From your mouth to God’s ear, my friend, I’d say, even though I don’t think we’ll ever have a government with enough guts to regain Britain’s independence,  don’t believe that a Tory-Ukip coalition (in the unlikely event it happens) will do so either, and don’t particularly like Boris Johnson.

But it’s not my thoughts that matter here, but my reader’s and, by inference, many other Scots’. These are reasonably clear – and clearly confused.

Unhappy with belonging to the union in which they are equal and even somewhat privileged partners, they wish to replace it with vassalage in another union in which they’ll be treated as poor cousins thrice removed.

Also shining through my reader’s prose is hatred of conservatism, either with or without the capital initial. This is understandable in a nation whose soul has been corrupted by the social.

It’s not as if Tory governments skimp on welfare handouts: it’s just that some residual pressure at the grassroots prevents them from being quite so criminally irresponsible as Labour administrations.

Thus Dave’s promise “I won’t be here forever”, which came at the end of his emetic grovelling, was music to my ears but not the Scots’.

No Tory government will please them, even if it’s led by someone like Dave, who has as much to do with conservatism as the Korean People’s Democratic Republic has to do with either democracy or republicanism.

They are appalled by the very possibility that the Tories may form any government in the future. No such government can possibly be legitimate in their eyes.

My reader is also upset by the “ludicrous hypocrisy of lectures to other countries about weapons of mass destruction, while spending even more billions on Trident ourselves”.

The number of billions we are spending on welfare, of which Scotland is proportionately the greatest recipient in the UK, is four times the number of billions we spend on defence. And our nuclear deterrent only takes up a small portion of that grossly inadequate budget.

Obviously the Scottish Socialist Republic my reader envisages will have no need for defence – this function will be delegated to the EU, and we know what a formidable military power it is.

But Britain, while she was still independent, was an important (and in 1940 the only) obstacle in the way of even nastier forms of socialism than those my reader seems to favour. Our post-war nuclear deterrent was a significant factor in that – relinquishing it would spell abandoning any hope of ever regaining our independence.

Then again, with the inversion of meaning so common to our brave new political lexicon, independence now means greater dependence.

At the end of his letter my reader apologises for his “lack of eloquence”. Actually there’s little wrong with his eloquence (I wonder if he’s as fluent in Gaelic, but this is by the bye), which is unfortunately more than one can say for his thoughts.

I hope and pray that he and his fellow Scots will see sense at that last moment on Thursday. If not, they’ll never again use words in their true meaning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was the current American VP Joe Biden who set the precedent.

During his 1988 presidential campaign Biden repeated word for word Neil Kinnock’s speech on being the first in his family to go to university. Sorry, it wasn’t quite word for word: Joe did replace ‘the first Kinnock’ with ‘the first Biden’.

Personally, if I wanted to steal somebody’s speech I’d choose a more illustrious model. I hope you won’t find me disrespectful, but I don’t think Neil was easily confusable with Demosthenes or even Churchill.

But one chooses rhetorical heroes after one’s own heart, on the basis of subcutaneous kinship lying deeper than facile oratorical skills, or lack thereof.

This may explain why Dave chose to plagiarise George W. Bush when commenting on the murderers of the British hostage in Iraq:

“They boast of their brutality; they claim to do this in the name of Islam. That is nonsense. Islam is a religion of peace. They are not Muslims, they are monsters.”

This repeats almost verbatim what Dubya declared after 9/11. He then proceeded, with Blair’s help, to unleash a stupid and criminal war that put paid to about a million exponents of the peaceful religion and inflamed millions more.

The statement was cosmically stupid and ignorant when first aired, and a repeat performance doesn’t make it any less so.

Of course they aren’t Muslims, Dave. They are Buddhists. We all know that. It’s the world’s 350 million Buddhists that have been involved in just about every armed conflict over the last 20 years, and hundreds of them over the last 1,400. It’s those saffron-robed chaps who can’t resist blowing up buildings and public transport. They are the monsters.

No? Then perhaps we’re ready to admit that not all religions are equal, that some indeed inspire peace and some – emphatically like Islam – don’t.

Calling Islam a religion of peace betrays improbable ignorance, especially on the part of someone as expensively educated as Dave.

From its very inception, Islam was rather weak on theology but strong on violence.

The former is a patchwork quilt of scraps ripped out of Nestorian Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism or whatever else Mohammed could pick up with the ease of an autodidact.

The latter, however, was his hallmark from the very beginning, or at least since his move from Mecca to Medina. This explains why the later verses of the Koran are considerably more bloodthirsty than the earlier ones – but never mind the words, feel the deeds.

The founder of Islam wasn’t a crucified martyr who taught to turn the other cheek. He was a brigand and a military reader, adept at raiding caravans and sacking towns.

His creed proved to be the catalyst to violent conquest whose pace was unprecedented in history. Unlike Christianity, which was first spread by peaceful and usually self-sacrificial sermon, Islam was propagated by exactly the methods currently on display in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Here’s an excerpt from the earliest Muslim biography of Mohammed, showing that in addition to inspiring murder the Prophet wasn’t averse to committing it with his own hand:

“Then [the Jewish Qurayza tribe] surrendered, and the apostle [Mohammed] confined them in Medina… Then he sent for them and struck off their heads… as they were brought out to him in batches… There were 600 or 700 in all, though some put the figure as high as 800 or 900… This went on until the apostle made an end of them.”

The Muslims began as they meant to go on. The subsequent 1,400 years provide a detailed catalogue of violence, both of the geopolitical and common-or-garden variety.

Since the IS knife-wielders are undeniably followers of Mohammed, how are we then to understand the phrase ‘They are not Muslims, they are monsters’?

That Muslims are never monsters? No, that can’t be it. Not even Dave can possibly think so.

I get it. The beheaders, according to Dave, are indeed both Muslims and monsters, but they aren’t monsters because they are Muslims. They are monsters because they are Islamists, or, better still, Islamofascists.

Most Muslims, Dave would argue, don’t cut off people’s heads just for the fun of it.

That’s true. But if there ever has been a totally, self-evidently nonsensical truism, this is it.

There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world. Only 15 to 25 per cent of them are, according to Western intelligence services, radicalised.

Fair enough, 15 to 25 per cent is a minority. But if we graduate from proportions to absolute numbers, the picture becomes both clearer and scarier: there are up to 300 million Muslims out there who wouldn’t flinch at cutting your head off.

That’s quite a lot, but even the proportion is impressive: the Soviet Communist Party’s membership never even approached 10 per cent of the population, never mind 25. Yet the party managed to create a state that several times brought the world to the brink of extinction – and may do so again in the near future.

Our judgement of bolshevism isn’t clouded by the actuarial calculations of the radicalised proportion, and nor do we evaluate Nazism on the basis of the exact number of fanatics among the Germans.

We look at the two creeds’ deeds and pass a moral, rather than arithmetical, judgement: both are evil. Then why do we withhold the same evaluation from Islam?

We don’t. Even Dave doesn’t. He no doubt knows all the facts I’ve mentioned, and many of those I’ve omitted. In his Bullingdon days he wouldn’t have hesitated to pass an uncompromising verdict on Islam.

But in those days he spoke English, which he no longer does. He now speaks political, and the denotation doesn’t matter. Only the connotation does.

Allow me to translate from the political back into English. What Dave is actually saying is this:

“Hey, chaps, I know all about the Muzzies as well as you do. But you don’t need the Muslim vote to win the next election, and I do – even the tiniest proportion of it could make a difference.

“And it’s not just their vote. The Brits in some parts of the country are sick and tired of seeing their towns being turned into Kasbahs. Their resentment may spill out into civil disorder at any moment, and seeing a Brit beheaded by Muslims may just provide the spark.

“If that were to happen, where would the Tories – and, more important, I – be in the national election? Exactly where we were in the European one, in third place.

“If I said a word against Islam, this just might trigger off a public revolt in Bradford or Leicester. And even if it didn’t, imagine the capital Ed would earn out of it?

“I’d be accused of racism, elitism, little-Englandism, fascism, sectarianism, antediluvian prejudice and everything else you can imagine, including, against all evidence, homophobia.”

“Can’t have that, now can we?”

This is how our ruling class thinks nowadays. This is how it acts. This is what it is. Scary, isn’t it?

 

 

 

 

Most historians agree that the Second World War started on 1 September, 1939.

Some will argue that the real date was 23 August, when Molotov and Ribbentrop signed the pact whose secret protocol divided Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union.

Some others will pick an even earlier date, such as the remilitarisation of the Rhineland, the Anschluss of Austria or the occupation of Czechoslovakia. 

All sides will present their arguments, and they will all make sense. Most people, however, will miss one important feature the arguments have in common: they are all retrospective.

Today, with the acuity of hindsight, we know that the Second World War started on one of those dates, 1 September, 1939, being the one most widely accepted.

But no one knew that on 2 September. In fact, the papers were running dispatches about the beginning of the Germany-Poland conflict. The words ‘world war’ never came up.

Moreover, even though Britain and France declared war on Germany on 3 September, no fighting was done for the next seven months. That period is known as the Phoney War, not yet a world one.

For 17 days Polish and German soldiers were dying in what was universally treated as a local conflict. And even when Stalin got in the act on 17 September, and Russian soldiers began to die too, the newspaper-reading public didn’t realise that a global cataclysm was under way.

I wonder if 75 years from now our great-grandchildren will look back at our own time, wondering how on earth we failed to realise that the Third World War had already started.

How could we be so blind as not to see that Russia’s attack on the Ukraine was but a first act of the tragedy, Putin putting his toe in the water to test the West’s response? Didn’t we realise that a combination of appeasement and derisory sanctions would only whet his appetite?

Didn’t we see the signs, plain to any reasonably alert individual?

If any of us miraculously live that long, we’ll have to admit self-deprecatingly that we indeed suffered the onset of temporary blindness. Because the signs are there, for all to see.

Quite apart from the relatively low-scale action being fought by the Russian army in Donetsk and Luhansk (which neither side regrettably calls by its real name: Russia’s war against the Ukraine), Putin is clearly priming the country for a big war.

This is obvious in the nauseatingly bellicose propaganda campaign being waged in the Russian state press, which is to say the Russian press. Reading their papers and watching their TV channels, I can vouch that I saw nothing like it even in Soviet times.

All my Russian friends, including those few who are more ambivalent on Putin than I am, confirm this impression. Then of course none of us lived in the ‘30s, when drums rattled and bugles roared off every official word.

And it’s not just words. Large-scale military exercises are being conducted in every border area from the Far East to Kaliningrad, from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

Bilateral military treaties are being annulled unilaterally, a worrying development drowned by the shooting in the East Ukraine. These include the 2001 treaty with Lithuania, according to which Lithuania was to be informed of, and allowed to inspect, any military build-up in the Kaliningrad region, the westernmost part of Russia.

“This measure by Russia,” declared the Lithuanian Defence Ministry, “… may be regarded as yet another step towards the destruction of mutual trust and security in Europe.” Indeed it is – have you seen this mentioned in our papers? I haven’t.

Putin is clearly creating two powerful beachheads, the southern one in the Crimea and the northern one in Kaliningrad, where short-range missiles are being deployed. Is anyone worried? I am.

And that’s not all. Russia is deploying more troops on the Ukrainian border than is necessary merely to support the Donetsk ‘rebels’ and ‘separatists’ (actually Russian troops).

At the same time the Russians are conducting joint exercises with their puppet Byelorussian army. They are also calling up the reservists, constantly increasing both the duration and frequency of such call-ups.

For the first time since Brezhnev, Russian strategic bombers are regularly violating the borders of Nato members, while Russian fighters are tracking Nato planes. Such developments used to worry people – why are we so complacent now?

Russia’s military expenditure is rising steeply, with a particular accent, according to Putin’s pronouncement, being placed on strategic arms. New weapon systems are being brought on stream at a rate far exceeding Nato’s. This is being widely ignored, in spite of the obvious fact that Russia doesn’t need ICBMs to fight the Ukraine.

Yet modern war isn’t all about troops and weapons – it puts a strain on the whole economy and the entire population. Since Russia lacks any obvious allies, apart from the likes of Gambia and Sudan, she has to prepare herself for going it alone, in conditions of total isolation.

Such preparations are going on at full speed. Putin has blocked the supplies of foreign foods, instead setting the goal of making Russia self-sufficient enough to prevent, this time around, widespread starvation in war time.

Less and less gas is being supplied on credit, with Russia demanding cash payments. At the same time Putin’s cronies, be it companies or individuals, are dumping their foreign assets with alacrity.

The most glaring example is Gennady Timchenko, affectionately nicknamed ‘Gangrene’ in some circles. Gangrene, who used to operate in Switzerland, is widely known to be Putin’s personal banker, the guardian of the colonel’s reputed $40-billion wealth. Well, Gangrene presciently sold all his, and presumably Putin’s, Swiss assets the day before the first batch of sanctions went into effect.

Russia’s central bank is also busily buying up gold, building up the reserves. Since time immemorial this has been considered a sure telltale sign of a country preparing for war – have you seen any comments on this in our press? Probably not.

Does this all mean that Putin wants a Third World War? Not necessarily.

Megalomaniac tyrants want power, as much of it as possible, both in their own country and other people’s. That’s a given. But they’d rather achieve their goal without the devastation of major war.

Hitler had no intention of fighting the whole world. His aim was to scare the West into peaceful capitulation, and the West gave him every encouragement. Austria and Czechoslovakia were taken without a shot fired, and the Führer’s head swelled.

Yet at some point Hitler overstepped a line. Neither he nor the West knew exactly where it had been drawn, but evidently it had been drawn somewhere. Suddenly appeasement ended, and the war wasn’t phoney any longer.

For Hitler, read Putin; for Chamberlain and Daladier, read the EU; for Austria, read the Crimea; for Poland, read the Ukraine.

Putin is clearly gambling on the West’s capitulation, just as Hitler did in 1939. Hitler didn’t get it in the end; instead he got what not only he but every German schoolboy knew would be fatal: a two-front war.

Will Putin get his bloodless victory? I don’t know, and neither does he. That’s why he’s preparing for a global war, which he knows would be hard to avoid if he does to a Nato member, say Lithuania, what he’s doing to the Ukraine.

A resolute response from Nato and the EU could stop him in his tracks, avoiding a catastrophe – just like some fortitude on the part of Britain and France in, say, 1938 could have prevented the Second World War.

So far no such response is in evidence. Is it forthcoming? I’m not holding my breath.

 

P.S. The Russophones among you may be interested to read an interview with the historian Yuri Felshtinsky, who makes most of the same points: http://www.szona.org/felshtinski-bolshaia-voina/