We read in today’s paper that the late Bob Crow’s office was “…stuffed with working class memorabilia, including a bust of Lenin.” This news has filled me with an irresistible desire to have a statue of Lenin too. It’s usually said that, while Stalin was a genocidal monster, Lenin was much more idealistic in his communism, altogether softer. This is not true. Lenin instituted his own genocides and persecutions, concentration camps and the whole apparatus of totalitarian control. Men as diverse as Winston Churchill and Bertrand Russell wrote of his extreme ruthlessness and cruelty. So why do I have this craving for a statue of Lenin? Well, you see, it’s like this…

The winter’s heavy rains caused our birdbath in the garden to sink and the basin has come off. It will have to be chucked out and I’d like to replace it with something suitable. I think I will get a statue of Lenin so that at garden parties in the summer my friends can come and throw stones at it. This is in the fine Victorian tradition when householders used to put pictures of those they couldn’t abide in strategic places in the lavatory.

What I object to though is this report which puts busts of Lenin among “working class memorabilia.” For the British working people were never communists. There was a fine tradition of British socialism which loathed the communist dictatorships. This was the socialism of the Workers’ Educational Association, night schools, self-improvement, apprenticeships, chapel-singing, friendly societies and charitable works. This is the world we have lost. It has been replaced by two hideous developments. One is the radical chic nomenclature in the BBC and much of the rest of the mass media, the Champagne socialists of Hampstead and Primrose Hill and the nauseating, fawning hypocrisy of the theatrical luvvies, the movie crowd and what are fatuously referred to as “the arts.” The other development is generational institutionalised  lethargy promoted by the dependency culture which has been enthusiastically promoted and maintained by the Labour Party in order to  buy votes in the general elections.

We used to have socialist patricians with a moral conscience and millions of ordinary folk possessed by the protestant work ethic. Now we have Socialist Estates of the Realm incarnated in the all-powerful corporate bureaucracies of the NHS and the useless state schools which do not exist to provide the services for which they were set up but for the benefit of their highly-unionised employees.

And we no longer have the working class: we have the underclass.

I wonder if Bob Crow’s executors have put his statue of Lenin on E-bay yet?  

Yesterday 360 members of the House of Lords  voted to replace long-standing terms such as “widow” with phrases such as “woman whose deceased spouse was a man” or “that person’s surviving spouse”.  Terms such as ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ will become redundant. Many centuries-old Statutes were amended in anticipation of the Same-Sex Marriage laws which come into effect later this month.

Wittgenstein wrote, “Change a language and you change a world.” To which we might add, “Destroy a language and you destroy a world.” The very best that can be said about the changes is that they are excessively cumbersome. We know instinctively that something has gone profoundly wrong – it’s sick actually – when it now takes seven words to say what was ever before said by one word.

We might as well have some fun before the whole house burns down. So, for a moment, consider some of the dafter consequences of this syntactical genocide. The posters advertising the pantomime will have to be much bigger as Widow Twanky will henceforth be billed as, The Twanky Woman Whose Deceased Spouse Was A Man. (But how long before the terms “man” and “woman” become victims of the same genocide?) The changes will make our common language impenetrable. I mean for instance, how will the biblical translators render the sentence, “A man will leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife”? I know: “A person will leave his or her parents and shack up with their spouse person.” Or perhaps something even more convoluted.

I don’t care what our leaders say in their promotion of this scandalous destruction not only of our language but of everything which forever before we regarded as our way of life. The new definitions of human relationships are a satanic invention. They are not trivial. Words are never trivial, for the choice of words determines what is being said.

What these new configurations of devilish babel really mean is the end of the natural covenant between a man and a woman with its connection to the procreation of children. It entails the abolition of the family. It proclaims that there is no longer anything right or wrong except that our atheistic, nihilistic society thinks it so.   Anything Goes – though the devil’s bureaucrats could never put it so succinctly.

The consequences will be catastrophic. The customs and society which have defined and preserved us for millennia are dead. And ourselves with them. This is the Judgement. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

I am grateful for Alex Boot’s very full response to my stated views on the Crimean crisis and, indeed, I am pleased to discover myself in agreement with much of what he has said. But I would continue to maintain that it is not a matter of whether Putin is a nice man or the leader of an evil empire comparable to that of Hitler’s and similar to Hitler’s in so many ways. I know that Hitler could have been stopped on many occasions before 1939. And I never had any sympathy for the appeasers.

But – it may be that this comparison with Hitler is a perfect analogy. I don’t know. It may be in the West’s interests to stand up to Putin – not that the West will. But that is not my point. I simply maintain that Putin believes he is acting in his interests; and that, tactically and strategically, control of the Crimea is very important to him. Of course, it might not be in Putin’s interests to do as he is doing in the Crimea: only he has judged that he is acting according to his interests.

 

Dear Peter,

I totally agree with you that ‘practical politics is not about ideals and principles – still less about morality; it’s about perceived interests’. That is, I agree with it in general. However, there have been concrete historical occasions when politics, ideals, principles and even morality overlapped with interests.

The Crusades spring to mind, and many other instances, such as the Russo Turkish War of 1877, when the Russians went to war to protect the Orthodox Bulgaria against the Muslim Ottoman Empire.

But your use of the Chamberlain quote “a far-away country about which we know nothing” sends us back to a modern example of morality and interests wrongly perceived to go their different ways – with catastrophic results. Eerily the present situation in the Ukraine has much in common with that one.

As Hitler was preparing for his conquest, and immediately after he launched it, there were three opportunities to stop him in his tracks – yet another instance of real politik and morality being in agreement.

First, after Hitler broke the Versailles Treaty and remilitarised the Rhineland in 1936, it would have taken two French divisions to send him packing. Yet nothing was done, out of both cowardice and a misapprehension of the ‘perceived interests’.

Second, when Hitler’s intentions were made crystal clear, and every European with half a brain knew that his 1938 demands on the Sudetenland, ostensibly based on protecting the German population there (notice the parallels with Putin?), were in fact the next stage in conquest, Hitler could have been stopped almost as easily. Instead Chamberlain waved a piece of paper in the air – our interests, he felt, weren’t threatened.

Third, after Hitler attacked Poland in 1939 and the ‘phoney war’ started, Hitler left his western flank so utterly bare that there wasn’t a single tank there. As the Polish Poznan Army Group was digging in on the other bank of the Vistula, the combined Anglo-French force could have had a pleasant, practically unopposed ride all the way to Berlin. Yet the war remained phoney – that’s how we perceived our interests. Well, we all know the rest.

In this article I draw the parallel between Nazi Germany and Putin’s Russia: http://alexanderboot.com/content/peter-hitchens’s-love-affair-putin-continuesFirst

And here I touch upon Russia’s long-term strategy:

http://alexanderboot.com/content/whichever-way-ukraine-goes-putin-wins

The parallels with the Nazis are clear-cut. Not to turn this into a lengthy pamphlet, I shan’t cite ample support for each point – but believe me, I could.

First, Russia’s is an evil regime, led by an evil man pursuing evil ends. In every respect, other than rhetoric, it’s a continuation of the Soviet Union by other means. Whatever changes are discernible are purely tactical. Free speech isn’t suppressed as totally as in the USSR, but it is suppressed. Concentration camps are less full, but they’re still there. And certainly more political opponents have been murdered under Putin than under Brezhnev – some in London.

(Amazingly, some conservative commentators both here and in the USA see Putin as a bulwark of traditional values against PC modernity, mostly because of his ban on homosexual propaganda. However, Hitler wasn’t keen on homosexuals either, and neither was Osama bin Laden. Concentrating on a part at the expense of the whole is called heresy in religion and stupidity in politics.)

One of the evil ends is the recreation of the Soviet Union using the Zollverein tactic of coercing some former Soviet republics to join and bribing the others. Kazakhstan and Belorus have been bribed, Georgia – that repelled all the overtures – was raped in 2008, with the West’s acquiescence. After an aggressive war, two Georgian provinces were gobbled up by Putin, and a couple of years later a puppet government was installed.

Second, emboldened by the West’s passivity (just like Hitler was after Munich), Putin has now attacked the Ukraine. No doubt you’re right – he sees the aggression as a way of furthering his strategic interests. But surely you don’t think these are our interests as well?

The independence and territorial integrity of the Ukraine were guaranteed by the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which doesn’t quite have the legal power of the Versailles Treaty, but almost. The Ukraine certainly felt the guarantee was strong enough for her to relinquish her nuclear weapons.

Putin’s arguments based on protecting the Russian minority cut no more ice than Hitler’s did in 1938. The Russians are in no way threatened in the Ukraine, and in fact in 2012 Russian was accepted as the second official language. Most key figures in Ukrainian politics, including Yanhukovych, Timoshenko and many of the Maidan people, can’t speak Ukrainian at all.

Historical arguments are even iffier. True, the Crimea has never had any link with the Ukraine and only became its part as a result of Khrushchev’s gerrymandering in 1954. But if we go further back, the Crimea had nothing to do with Russia either. Originally it was Greek, the center of Mithridates’s Empire, then a province of the Roman Empire – Ovid’s Metamorphoses was written there. It then became Muslim (Tartar) and so it remained until late 18^th century, when Prince Potemkin, Catherine the Great’s lover and co-ruler, conquered it for Russia.

Historical references are a shaky basis for territorial claims. Königsberg, for example, the city where Kant lived all his life, is historically German. So is the Sudetenland. So is Silesia. So is Alsace. None of them is German any longer – that’s how the world works.

Historically, Kiev, where Russia was baptised, was the capital of Kievan Rus or rather of the Vikings who then made up the ruling elite. The Moscow principality was originally only a small part of it, so in that sense one may say – with equally poor justification – that the Ukraine has historical claims on Russia, rather than vice versa.

Putin’s aggression against Georgia first and now the Ukraine isn’t just immoral and illegal – it’s a direct clash with our national interests. Moreover, it proves the point I’ve been making since 1989, the heyday of perestroika: Russia remains the greatest danger to world peace there is. Forget the Muslims, forget Kim, forget China: Putin’s expansion presents an immediate threat of world war.

Remember that the three former Soviet republics at the Baltic are now NATO members. Our obligations to them are stronger than even ours to the Ukraine under the terms of the Budapest Memorandum. What if Putin decides that the Russian minority is threatened there as well? Why, those dastardly Balts even make their Russia citizens speak the local languages – if that’s not oppression I don’t know what is.

Protecting the sovereignty of Europe’s largest country isn’t only moral but in our national interests. Our options are of course limited – no one is going to start a war over the Ukraine. But what we can do is treat Russia as a rogue, pariah state violating every norm of civilised conduct.

That would entail all sorts of political and economic steps that are too numerous to go into now. The task of a political commentator is to know all the facets of the problem, historical, legal, cultural, ethnic, linguistic, political, geopolitical, and explain them to readers short of such knowledge.

Instead Putin’s propaganda machine, just as Hitler’s and Stalin’s did so successfully, is imposing its own terms on even conservative commentators. For example, every Putinite newspaper, which is to say every Russian newspaper, describes the people who kicked Yanukovych out as ‘Banderovtsy’, the followers of the nationalist leader Stepan Bandera who during the war fought against both the Soviets and the Nazis.

Bandera’s armed struggle against the Soviets continued well into the ‘50s, after which he managed to escape to Munich, where a KGB assassin got him with a cyanide pistol. Courtesy of Soviet propaganda, the word ‘Banderovtsy’ is hugely pejorative in Russia: it’s used to describe ultra-Right fascist thugs.

In that time-honoured vein, all Ukrainians who don’t want to be Putin’s poodles, including those who unseated Yanukovych, are described in this way. This is a lie. The Maidan crowd was made up of many groups, of which the ultra-right were only one. Most people there were self-sacrificial freedom fighters, feeling they deserve a shot at independence after almost a century of suffering at Russia’s hands.

Whoever they are, it’s in our interests to support them as best we can – not all of them are our friends but they are all our enemy’s enemies.

Rather than treating Putin’s strategic interests with sympathetic understanding, we should be mindful of our own – and understand where they lie.

Alex