Horizontal Thinking

While the official response to Covid-19 in Belarus has been criminally irresponsible, it did make possible the enormous celebrations of the seventy-fifth anniversary of Victory Day. Had I been elected to Parliament last year, then I might even have taken the risk and turned up in Minsk on that Day, because to secure that Victory, Belarus lost one third of its total population. 

Those people did not die under a horizontal triband of white, red and white. That was the flag of the collaborators with the Nazis. And that is the flag of those who, having failed to dislodge the appalling Alexander Lukashenko at the ballot box (he did not take the 80 per cent of the vote that he claims, but he will certainly have taken 60 per cent), have taken to the streets instead, much as they have been known to take to the streets to deny the legitimacy of the election of Donald Trump, or to deny the legitimacy of the result of the Brexit referendum.

Of course there are NATO troops on the borders of Belarus. That has never been any kind of secret. Up to now, they have not been aimed at Belarus, or at least not primarily. But they have been there. They still are. Of course they are. And NATO material routinely glorifies Nazi collaborators as valiant resisters of the Soviet Union. The United States Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of VE Day by issuing a joint statement with the Foreign Ministers of countries that had not only had Axis regimes until that Day, but were now governed by politicians in those same political traditions. Neither Belarus nor Russia was invited to participate. 

Yet in Russia no less than in Belarus, the West's favoured alternatives make no attempt to disguise who or what they are. They wave the black, yellow and white flag of Russian ultranationalism in all its anti-modern, anti-urban, anti-scientific and anti-Semitic awfulness. Or they are the National Bolsheviks, whose flag is that of Nazi Germany, but with a black hammer and sickle in place of the swastika. Or they are neocon stooges for whom next to nobody votes, so that it is difficult to see why anyone in Russia would consider either Boris Nemtsov or Alexei Navalny important enough to kill. Vladimir Putin's faults do not make his opponents any less horrendous.

I do not blame Times and Guardian types who identify with their own sort of people when they take to the streets to support globalisation, NATO and the EU against the doubts of recalcitrant commoners. But in like manner, those types more than cheered on literal Nazis in Bosnia, Kosovo, Ukraine and Venezuela, as we tried to explain to them at the time. In like manner, they more than cheered on Saudi-backed Islamists in Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, Libya and Syria, as we tried to explain to them at the time. And they ended up surrendering to the Taliban in Afghanistan, just as we had predicted from the start.

As for the fact that Britain is arming the regime in Belarus, Britain also arms the vastly worse regime in Saudi Arabia, which inspires, funds, supplies and directs terrorism right here on the streets of Britain. After all these years, we are still trying to tell you.