Not Grand, Never Mind Ninety Grand

Peter Hitchens writes:

Is there any way this country can officially disown Anthony Blair? Those of us who were never fooled by him now have to watch as he cashes in on his time as Prime Minister in ways which are actually shaming.

His dishonesty, his lack of embarrassment and his greed are all so great that it is now possible to imagine him ending up munching gonads on I’m A Celebrity, perhaps trying to restore his fortunes after yet another failed property speculation. Or singing My Way on a talent show.

I am not sure whether to be furious or to laugh at this dark farce. I met Mr Blair before he was famous and concluded that he was an empty-headed soap actor, chosen by the Labour Party to be the plausible front-man for its slow-motion coup d’état.

Then I had to watch the ludicrous transformation of this man, who to my personal knowledge did not know in 1997 that they spoke Portuguese in Brazil, into a supposed World Statesman, the victor of Kosovo and the scourge of Saddam. These two wars, one dubious, the other indefensible, were conducted on the basis that Mr Blair is a dedicated foe of tyranny. Quite a lot of people still believe this piffle.

But how can they now, after Mr Blair’s trip to Azerbaijan, there to open a formaldehyde factory? The speech which he gave was such concentrated, congealed drivel that it probably had to be carried into and out of the room in a spittoon. You may read it in full on the web.

That is not all. Far worse than this piece of prostitution (he is said to have been paid £90,000 for his appearance) is the fact that he consorted, while in this sinister little country, with its President, Ilham Aliyev. Like Mr Blair, I have been to Azerbaijan. Unlike him, I met opposition politicians and heard about its miserable history of censorship, repression and despotism.

President Aliyev, like Kim Jong Il, inherited his job from his father, the late KGB General Heydar Aliyev. And Heydar Aliyev inherited his job from the Kremlin, which installed him as ruler of Azerbaijan when it was a Soviet province. Opponents of the current President Aliyev get beaten up or imprisoned. There are reliable reports of torture, including threats to humiliate female relatives of political prisoners. Protesting demonstrators sometimes end up clubbed to death. He ‘won’ his last election with a comically unlikely 87 per cent of the vote.

Well, there is an old argument which says that if such people control big oil supplies, we pass over their faults for the sake of our economy. But that is an argument Mr Blair, and his few remaining defenders, simply cannot make – because they all claim to have been so outraged by Saddam Hussein’s tyranny that even his oil couldn’t save him. So I think we can conclude from this well-rewarded little visit that Mr Blair’s outrage against Saddam was as false as it looked. In which case, what is there left of this person that is worth a farthing, let alone £90,000?

Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria and Nagorno-Karabakh have never been governed in practice by post-Soviet Georgia, Moldovo or Azerbaijan. Nor were they ever part of pre-Soviet Georgia, Moldavia or Azerbaijan.

Do they want, as Kosovo did and as Chechnya does, to join globalisation, European federalism, American military-industrial hegemony (now rejected at the ballot box by Americans themselves), and the militant Islam to which those forces pretend to be opposed but are in fact closely allied? After all, look at 1980s Afghanistan, at 1990s Bosnia, and at today’s Kosovo, Chechnya, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. Look at how a bulwark against Islamic militancy has been taken out in Iraq, with all the predictable consequences. Look at how the global capitalist economic system depends on mass migration, not least to the West from the Islamic world. And look out for Xinjiang.

Do the people of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria and Nagorno-Karabakh want into this? Or do they want out of states moving in that very direction? The latter. They therefore deserve full recognition and every possible support. Russia is leading that recognition and support. In common with all the Slavs, Russia is the gatekeeper of the Biblical-Classical synthesis that is the True West, not the secularised, consumerised, de-historicised, borderless, culturally debased, morally bankrupt pseudo-West, a wasteland without an Eliot, aimlessly waiting to be incorporated into the Dar al-Islam.