Sunday 23 March 2014

Busily Creating A New Cold War

Although I have reason to quibble with his last line, Peter Hitchens writes:

Stupidity and ignorance rule the world. The trouble is that the stupid and the ignorant think that they are clever and well-informed.

Take Mrs Hillary Clinton, next President of the United States and former chief of American foreign policy. She has directly compared Russia’s Vladimir Putin to Hitler. And she has compared events in Crimea to the Czech crisis of 1938.

Dozens of other politicians and grandiose journalists are currently doing the same.

It’s the one thing they think they know about history – that Britain’s pathetic Neville Chamberlain didn’t stand up to evil Adolf Hitler in 1938 at Munich over Czechoslovakia, so making Hitler believe that he could take over the world. And that the brave Winston Churchill then saved the world.

Almost no part of this legend is true.

Even those bits that are true are misleading, with one exception. Hitler was certainly evil. But so was Stalin, the communist mass-murderer who ended up as our main ally in the fight against Hitler.

If we had gone to war to save Czechoslovakia in 1938, we would have been beaten. We had no proper army. Nor did the USA, whose army at that time was about the same size as Portugal’s.

When we later went to war to ‘save’ Poland,  we didn’t in fact save it at all, leaving it to be bombed, starved and massacred by Hitler, carved up between Germany and the USSR and later swallowed whole by Stalin.

And we were beaten – just not actually invaded.

Churchill was indeed a great man, but his achievement was to secure our bare survival, which came at the desperate cost of our national wealth and our empire.

Later in the war, Churchill appeased Stalin by giving him the whole of Poland and Eastern Europe. Just like Chamberlain at Munich seven years before, he had no choice.

The Yalta conference, which finalised these arrangements, was as disgracefully self-interested as Munich.

Yet the silly, half-educated politicians of today still like to pose as tough guys with the following formula, addressed to anyone who suggests that Russia might have a case over Ukraine and Crimea.

It goes: ‘Putin is Hitler. You are Neville Chamberlain. I  am Winston Churchill – hear me roar.’

Apart from knowing nothing about European history, and apart from their bone-headed inability to distinguish Christian Russia from the communist USSR, these people also don’t understand what is going on in Ukraine.

It never occurs to them that Russia has good historical reasons to fear its neighbours.

It never crosses their mind that the borders drawn by the victorious West in 1992, like  those drawn at Versailles in 1919, are an unsustainable, unjust mistake.

They never ask why Britain (or the USA) should be hostile to Russia, or what the quarrel between us actually is.

What  is it to us whose flag flies over Sevastopol? Yet it matters greatly to those who live there.

They cast every Russian action as evil, and every Ukrainian action as saintly. The world is not like that.

I hated the old USSR as an evil empire.

But, having lived in Moscow, I feel a strong affection for post-communist Russia and count Russians as good friends.

That does not make me an apologist for Mr Putin. I have repeatedly condemned him for his suppression of opposition and the many evil things done by his state. I can see his faults and do not pretend they do not exist.

But the warmongers are selectively blind.

Hardly any British news media have mentioned an event in Kiev last week.

A group of five louts, one of them an MP from the thuggish, racialist ‘Svoboda’ party, forced their way into  the office of Oleksandr Panteleymonov, chief of the main Ukrainian TV station.

There they physically attacked him and shouted anti-Russian racial abuse at him.

The MP involved is a member of the Ukrainian Parliament’s committee on ‘Freedom of Speech’. And the louts were so proud of what they did that they filmed it and posted it on the internet.

These people are supposed to be our allies and friends.

On their behalf, our Prime Minister is puffing himself up like a bullfrog, and busily creating a new Cold War that will benefit nobody except spies and weapons-makers, for a cause he doesn’t understand and can’t explain.

If this is the kind of statesman it produces, it strikes me that Eton can’t be such a good school after all.

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