Faraway Countries

Listening to my friend Phillip Blond on Any Questions, I was rather saddened when he recounted his experience of being told by the Polish Foreign Minister than Poland now looked to Britain to defend her against invasion by Russia, and that politicians from the Arctic to the Black Sea felt the same way after the war in Georgia.

Pleased though I am that they are so sceptical about NATO, and of course that they are instinctively so pro-British, Phillip will know that Georgia was and is a thoroughly corrupt and anti-democratic outpost of the indebted, stupefied, promiscuous, rootless, godless pseudo-West that the neocons berate both him and me for hating as much as does any Islamist.

Whereas Russia takes seriously her historic role as pre-eminent among the Slavic gate-keepers of the True West, the civilisation defined by the recapitulation in Jesus Christ and His Church of all three of the Old Israel, Hellenism and the Roman Empire. In the exercise of that mission, there is a long history of Slavic, including Russian, affinity, and indeed active alliance, with Britain. Russia is the front line in the True West's real war against an Islamist terrorism aided and abetted by the neocons. It is obvious on which side Poland properly belongs.

We have gone to war in the past to defend Poland. That was an abject failure, ending with a significantly redrawn Poland's being handed over by Churchill to Stalin, as if Stalin, the Georgian who severed Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Russia and whom the neocons would give the last word on those (and two other) subjects, was somehow any better than Hitler. We have been inventing post facto justifications for that catastrophic conflict ever since. None of them was mentioned at the time.

Still, Phillip did end by saying that his wedding present to Prince and Princess William would be the restored Royal Yacht Britannia. Angus MacNeil, the SNP MP for the Western Isles, also maintained, during the Queen's holiday in his constituency last summer, that the Royal Yacht should never have been scrapped. He was of course quite right, just as Phillip is, to bemoan that action of the last Conservative Government. John Redwood raised no objection to it at the time. But it was vigorously opposed by Peter Shore.