Peter Hitchens writes:
Donald Trump is a dangerous yahoo who may well destroy what is left of the USA’s constitutional government before he is finished. I do not in any way defend him. But there is something almost comically hypocritical about the establishment’s shocked reaction to the January 2021 failed putsch which he is accused of inciting.
Once again I must point out that the same liberal elite types happily condone a much worse putsch, one which succeeded and which has helped to drag Europe into its worst war for more than 70 years.
Mr Trump is alleged to have sought to prevent the democratic outcome of the 2020 Presidential election. If he and his allies did so, this was a disgraceful thing. If you believe that power in free societies is decided by votes, then you cannot support such a thing. Your own politics cease to matter. It goes to the very root of law and power.
So why did major Western nations accept without protest the violent, lawless overthrow of Ukraine’s elected President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014? This shameful event, achieved by a yelling mob, was led by people who make Mr Trump’s supporters look like Greenpeace and who openly threatened violence if they did not get their way. Yanukovych is not very nice either. Few Ukrainian politicians are. But the fairness of his victory in the 2010 election is grudgingly accepted even by his opponents.
What is more, at the time of his overthrow, he had made a clear offer of early elections to test his mandate. The offer was endorsed and put to the Ukrainian opposition by a group of EU Foreign Ministers who had taken part in drawing it up and would have guaranteed it. Did the protesters think their faction would lose those early elections? Who can say? But it is beyond doubt that the Kiev parliament voted illegally to remove him. It clearly lacked the votes needed to do so under the constitution. It also failed to follow the procedures set out in that constitution.
Those who condone the removal have tried to excuse this blatantly lawless act on the grounds (among others) that Yanukovych had fled the country. But recent research has exploded this claim, too.
At the time of the Kiev putsch, Barack Obama’s White House did not condemn the violent removal of another elected President, or the Ukrainian parliament’s blatant defiance of its own constitution.
Instead it released a statement that praised the ‘constructive work’ done by the Ukrainian parliament. The US Ambassador in Kiev tweeted merrily that it was ‘a day for the history books’, which doesn’t seem very disapproving. Our own Foreign Secretary William Hague misled Parliament, saying incorrectly that Yanukovych had been removed ‘by the very large majorities required under the constitution’, and adding, quite unjustifiably: ‘It is wrong to question the legitimacy of the new authorities.’ There is, as yet, no sign of the Commons Privileges Committee taking this matter up. Lord Hague (as he now is) broke off contact with me after I drew his mistake to his attention.
The terrible eruption of large-scale violence in Ukraine, the growing danger of long-term European war, Russia’s illegal seizure of Crimea, the splitting of the country and the terrible toll of death and destruction all began with the putsch against Yanukovych.
It is one of the most significant events in European history since the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. It is time we were honest about it, and time it received proper attention. It is at least as important as Donald Trump.
And:
Eight years ago, I and a group of friends and allies took on the task of rescuing the reputation of a man we believed to have been falsely convicted of a terrible crime.
The late Bishop George Bell of Chichester (not, please, to be confused with the disgusting proven criminal Peter Ball) was accused, nearly 60 years after his death, of child abuse.
If you take on such causes, you may expect to be accused of sympathising with such crimes.
It mattered because George Bell, unusually for the Church of England, had been a man of huge moral courage, an anti-Nazi before it was fashionable, an ally of German resistance to Hitler and a courageous opponent of the British bombing of German civilians, a proper Christian position.
I am pleased to say that last week the C of E finally admitted it had been wrong to convict him without a fair trial (a serious legal review showed that the evidence did not stand up).
They abandoned attempts to wipe his great name from the record and restored it to a building long called after him. I forgive them with all my heart. And I consider this may be the best thing I ever did.
Peter Hitchens, the only Corbynista with a Fleet Street column and a weekly spot on a Freeview station.
ReplyDeleteOn this as on most issues, he could write for the Morning Star and no one would bat an eyelid. Whereas only he could get away with it in the Mail, and even he could not do so in any other British right-wing publication.
DeleteIt all goes back to Kosovo, which all of 13 MPs opposed: Tony Benn, Jeremy Corbyn, Tam Dalyell, George Galloway, Neil Gerard, Alice Mahon, Bob Marshall-Andrews, Alan Simpson, Llew Smith, Bob Wareing, Audrey Wise, John McDonnell (teller) and Bill Michie (teller). The only national newspaper to oppose the war was, again, the Morning Star.
You never really involved yourself in the George Bell case, did you?
ReplyDeleteYou can only do so much at a time, and this one was in very capable hands. As we now see.
DeleteIt all goes back to Kosovo indeed. Alan Clark was the most articulate and patriotic MP to oppose the Kosovo war in Parliament-but it was the Republican Party which strongly opposed it in the United States from whence it was launched-with the GOP dubbing Clinton's Democrats the "chickenhawks". The other British MPs in opposition were an embarassing motley crew of IRA apologists, Cuba supporters and people like Tam Dalyell and George Galloway who supported the IRA and Argentina against their own country. Hitchens wouldn't touch them with a bargepole-their useful idiots for those who wish to discredit the anti-war case by associating it with them. As both Hitchens brothers understood, those throwbacks are too thick to realise that post-Kosovo humanitarian interventions are leftwing wars, justified in leftwing terms (bringing feminism and democracy to the Middle East etc).
ReplyDeleteAlan Clark never voted against the war. Only those listed did, all Labour at the time and mostly members of the Campaign Group. In a sign of things to come, the nominally Conservative papers back Tony Blair to the hilt.
DeleteMuch of your comment is just hysteria. Peter Hitchens has been doing this since Iraq or earlier, wanting to be the anti-war movement in the way he wants to be whatever party it is that exists only in his own mind. But there already is an anti-war movement. That is not just him, and is therefore not him at all, is his hard luck.
ReplyDeletePeter Hitchens on Ukraine sounds like Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump, who both said America has no vital interest there and shouldn't be funding the war.
He certainly wouldn't be allowed in the Democrats with his views.
Who would want to be? In any case, not only will the Republicans revert to Reaganism eventually, although there is no the need when the Democrats are already there, but that is in any case a foreign country. Any anti-war Right in Britain is negligible in the media and practically non-existent in electoral politics.
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