The Great Paradox Is This

Peter Hitchens writes:

I doubt this peace deal will work, though I really hope it will.

Some way must be found to end this stupid, pointless war, which began long before most people in the West noticed it and has now lasted 11 years.

It has created graveyards which can be seen from space. It has demolished much of Ukraine. Yet if president Zelensky agrees to these terms, he will not be garlanded with flowers and called 'Volodymyr the Peacemaker'. He will be accused of 'capitulation' (a wild exaggeration). He will swiftly fall from office. He might even be driven out by an ultra-nationalist putsch like the one which overthrew another Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, in 2014.

Very strong nationalist forces in Ukraine do not want peace on such terms. Nobody wants to take the blame for such a defeat.

This is always the problem with modern wars. Rulers tell their peoples for years that they are angels and that their foes are demons. Then they have to sit down with those fiends and make peace with them.

This problem is one of the reasons why the First World War lasted two years longer than it needed to, and why this one may not stop for years. Mind you, it is a worse deal than Kiev could once have had when the war was in its infancy. If they had agreed to the peace terms Mr Zelensky negotiated in 2019, we'd all be a lot better off. But the militants called that deal a capitulation, too – and killed it.

To me, the great paradox is this – a Russia-hating faction in Washington DC sought this war for years, goading the Kremlin with westward expansion of Nato.

With matching stupidity, Putin gave into the provocation and mounted his cruel, savage and illegal invasion.

This gave the American Russia hawks what they wanted. Because Ukraine was not a member of Nato, they could have a shooting war with Moscow, in Europe, that would not lead to a nuclear confrontation.

No Western troops took part, so the miseries of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan were avoided. It was all done by sending money and weapons, and sharing intelligence.

They presumably hoped that this would bring down Putin. But it didn't.

So now America, as so often, is bored with a war it once desired and now seeks to get out of it.

You might think the leaders of Europe would welcome the chance to bring it to an end, especially as it is costing them so much and gaining them nothing. It wasn't even their idea.

But no, they want it to go on, as they are all in the grip of a strange fantasy. They claim to think that Russia – broke, rusty, decrepit and even more corrupt than Ukraine – is poised to sweep across the Continent and wash its tank tracks at Calais.

Well, Putin has yet to take the Ukrainian city of Kharkov, ten miles from Russia's border.

And the nations of Europe together already spend roughly three times as much as Russia does on defence.

Maybe they are worrying too much.

And:

The repulsive liar and drug abuser Hermann Goering is the star of a questionable new film about the Nuremberg war crimes trials.

This seems to me to be a pity. Goering is shown as cunning, even charming. At one point he boasts that he has never been beaten.

Actually, he was humiliated in Nazi Germany’s Supreme Court in 1933 by a very brave Communist, Georgi Dimitrov.

Dimitrov was falsely accused of burning down the German Parliament building, the Reichstag. The Nazis, who had almost certainly burned down the building themselves, made this the excuse to abolish what was left of German freedom.

Dimitrov made mincemeat of a jackbooted, menacing Goering, in one of the great real-life courtroom dramas of the time, which has now sadly been forgotten. It would make a better film than this one. Russell Crowe, left, is a fine actor, but should his talents be used to humanise this pagan bully?

The film also misrepresents a meeting between the American chief prosecutor, Robert Jackson, and Pope Pius XII. It uses it to slander the Pope as soft on the Nazis, now a fashionable view among atheists and leftists.

The Vatican may not have done all it could, but the Nazi response to Church protests was to commit even more murders.

In July 1942, when Dutch Catholic bishops cried out against persecution of Dutch Jews, the Nazis retaliated by murdering more than 200 Jewish converts to Christianity, who had until then been spared. So you can see why church leaders hesitated to raise their voices.

But as is the way with films, many will see this stuff and think it true.

As someone once said, “Tell a lie big enough...” In fact, Pius XII was first ever called “Hitler’s Pope” by John Cornwell, in his 1999 book of that name, a thinly disguised liberal rant against Saint John Paul II with the ‘thesis’ that the future Pius XII, while a diplomat in Germany, could have rallied Catholic opposition and toppled Hitler. Pure fantasy, like the origin of the whole “Pope supported Hitler” craze: the 1963 play The Deputy by Rolf Hochhuth, who was later successfully prosecuted for suggesting that Churchill had arranged the 1944 air crash that had killed General Sikorsky.

Pius XII directly or indirectly saved between 8500 and 9600 Jews in Rome; 40,000 throughout Italy; 15,000 in the Netherlands; 65,000 in Belgium; 200,000 in France; 200,000 in Hungary; and 250,000 in Romania. This list is not exhaustive, and the Dutch figure would have been much higher had not the Dutch Bishops antagonised the Nazis by issuing the sort of public denunciation that Pius is castigated for having failed to issue.

After the War, Pius was godfather when the Chief Rabbi of Rome became a Catholic, and was declared a Righteous Gentile by the State of Israel, whose future Prime Minister, Moshe Sharrett, told him that it was his, “duty to thank you, and through you the Catholic Church, for all they had done for the Jews.” When Pius died in 1958, then the tributes to him from Jewish organisations had to be printed over three days by The New York Times, and even then limited to the names of individuals and their organisations. All of this is contained in works of serious scholarship by Margherita Marchione, Ralph McInerny, Ronald J Rychlak, Rabbi Professor David G Dalin, and others.

There were Bavarian Catholics who were active in the early Nazi Party in Munich. Looking back to Döllinger, they defined themselves as Catholics in the sense of belonging to a community of faith across the world and throughout the ages, rather than in terms of perfect submission to the Petrine See as that See required.

They strongly affirmed the purported autonomy of the German Church, including the control of Her affairs by the activist laity on the basis of their financial contributions (in Germany, the church tax system) and by means of quasi-parliamentary institutions. Does any of this sound familiar? Those of such mind were key to the emergence of Nazism until it was kicked out of Bavaria following the failure of the Beer Hall Putsch. After that, Nazism became a movement and a party with its base in staunchly Protestant areas of Germany and within the fiercely anticlerical Third Lager in Austria.

Colonel Claus Schenk, Count von Stauffenberg, later to be given the full Tom Cruise treatment, was a devout Catholic, with close dynastic connections to the Bavarian Royal House of Wittelsbach that Jacobites would have on the Thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland, and to the family of Saint Philip Howard, martyred Earl of Arundel.

In Austria, Hitler ordered the murder of the Chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, who defended, on the borders of Italy and Germany, Catholic Social Teaching and what remained of the thoroughly multiethnic Habsburg imperial ethos (to this day, numerous German, Magyar and Slavic names are found throughout the former Austria-Hungary) against both the Communists and the Nazis. In the same tradition was Blessed Franz Jägerstätter.

Examples of Catholic anti-Nazism could be multiplied practically without end. The more Catholic an area was, the less likely it was to vote Nazi, without any exception whatever. Not least, the future Pope Benedict XVI’s Mathematics teacher sent him to get the Hitler Youth form, and then just kept it on file for him. “Thus was I able to escape it.” So he was never in it. Have you got that? He was never in it.

Buy the book here. Arrivals to this Diocese from several continents have already done so, and already know who I am. Gosh.