A Treat For All

Peter Hitchens writes:

This column is proud to say it has no ‘intelligence’ sources. They come at too high a price. So I don’t claim to know what exactly happened to the fearsome-looking Russian missile cruiser, the Moskva. But please note that this ancient vessel dated from 1979, the era of the Ford Cortina.

As I have many times pointed out, the Russian Navy is even more decrepit and clapped out than ours, for the same reason that its Army is not very good. The country is poor, inefficient and corrupt. It really is not the threat it is made out to be.

And:

I never watched the TV series ’Allo ’Allo! because I don’t think Nazis are funny and the truth about their occupation of France is far from amusing. I am baffled by the strange habit of dressing up in Nazi uniforms, which at last seems to be going out of style.

But I am fascinated by the treatment of the very minor Tory politician Colin Davis. He has been suspended as chairman of the Enfield Southgate Conservative Association. This is because a picture of Mr Davis, dressed up very unconvincingly in Nazi uniform 40 years ago, has turned up out of the blue. 

Mr Davis says he was never a Nazi sympathiser and suggests it might have something to do with ‘wild parties’ he used to attend. Too bad. The mere suggestion has put paid to him.

In the same week, there have been pictures of Ukrainian soldiers, actually in the army of that country, wearing SS emblems, published in British media, without anyone caring a bit. I think this may be called doublethink.

And:

Many in Britain laughed when a senior American diplomat, Victoria Nuland, was caught out by Russian spies a few years ago. They taped and leaked a conversation in which she said: ‘**** the EU!’ As so many British people feel the same way, they read no further.

They did not realise that Ms Nuland, a fierce neoconservative hawk, was mainly discussing (with the US ambassador to Kiev) the composition of the next Ukrainian government, as if it was for the USA to decide. Which, as it turned out, it was.

Her choice for prime minister duly got the job after the coup d’etat which removed the non-aligned, legitimate President Viktor Yanukovych. This fishy incident is the best evidence that Washington was up to its elbows in that violent mob putsch – the incident which began the Ukrainian war, way back in February 2014.

Well, Ms Nuland is back in the US government as a very senior figure at the State Department. And she has an influential husband, Robert Kagan, who is if anything, even more of an anti-Russian hawk than she is.

And here’s a treat for all those who have been calling me a ‘Putin apologist’ for the past month or so. Mr Kagan agrees with me that, while Putin’s invasion is unforgivable and wrong, the USA shares some responsibility for provoking it.

Writing in Foreign Affairs magazine, he said: ‘Although it is obscene to blame the US for Putin’s inhumane attack on Ukraine, to insist that the invasion was entirely unprovoked is misleading.’ He added:

‘Russian decisions have been a response to the expanding post-Cold War hegemony of the US and its allies in Europe. Putin alone is to blame for his actions but the invasion of Ukraine is taking place in a historical and geopolitical context in which the US has played and still plays the principal role.’

I think Mr Kagan uses longer words than he needs to here, because he probably doesn’t want what he says to be picked up widely by people like me. But he is far too intelligent to pretend that America’s relentless expansion of Nato since 1998 has not infuriated many Russians, even moderate ones.

Of course it has. In my view, it more or less created Vladimir Putin. I honestly wouldn’t recommend calling Mr Kagan, let alone his wife Victoria, a Putin apologist. But in that case, you can’t call me one either.