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

Ah well, it’s business as usual. Europe may be about to tear itself apart and the apocalypse is back on the agenda, but we can be reassured by the fact that Sky News leads on a story about a celebrity differently-abled man on trial in Saarf Effrika for shooting his wife dead, while the Daily Mail’s top story is the Oscars – with special reference to a hideously sentimental, politically-correct piece of self-flagellation in the form of yet another film about slavery.

It’s at moments such as this that I recall the way John McEnroe used to address tennis umpires: “You cain’t be serious!”

Is the West utterly incapable of seriousness? That old Greek hymn keeps bobbing around in my head; apo doxeis ths doxhs porhumenoi. Except it’s not from glory to glory advancing but from trivia to trivia. Kierkegaard commented on the Danish people’s similar inability to be sombre and reflective in the face of catastrophe: “I sometimes think this is the way the world will end, celebrated by all the wits as a joke.” And what will we in England do then? Turn it into a new series on The Comedy Channel.

Western politicians and their accomplices in a debauched mass media cannot get into their heads the everlasting truth that nations do not act in accordance with abstract principles – international treaties, UN resolutions and the like – but in their perceived interests. Consequently, their politics and policies are about as worthless as Mr Chamberlain’s scrap of paper. Specifically, an assorted gang of radicals and anarchists in Kiev have deposed their elected president and set up their own government. In the face of this provocation, was there any other rational course of action for Russia than to take steps to secure her strategic presence in the east of Ukraine and particularly in the Crimea? The West’s response? President Obama, David Cameron, the vapid and vague William Hague and the paper-shufflers in the EU have sent Mr Putin to the naughty corner and told him he can’t have any more sweeties until he says he’s sorry to all the little girls he’s been bullying.

The West has already lost its soul – when it gave up the Christianity which created and formed the us. Now it has lost what remained of its mind as well.

Harriet Harman has refused to apologise for having been closely associated with the National Council for Civil Liberties in the 1970s when the NCCL had links to the Paedophile Information Exchange, I still cringe when I recall those days. It was the decade following the student riots in Paris and the USA. Anarchic nihilism was everywhere. There were more fringe leftist parties than you could throw a hammer and sickle at: the Socialist Workers, the Revolutionary Marxist Current, the International Marxist Group and so on. One published a newspaper called Spectre which always carried a slogan above its masthead: “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism.” And “oppression” was the word ever on the lips of the radical chic. “International capitalism” and “the ruling class”  oppressed wimmin, blacks, workers and students especially – despite the fact that university tuition was free and most received generous maintenance grants. Harriet, as a member of the coy, trendy very middle class agitprop subversive NCCL, was the original radical chick: a posh gel slumming it among the proles.

PIE hijacked this loony left bandwagon and claimed that denying sexual relationships between children and adults constituted the oppression of children. Sane voices pointed out: “No – it’s child molesters who oppress children.”

I was a philosophy undergraduate at Liverpool University at the time and the long-haired, beaded flower-power lumpen intelligentsia were in full sail. “Man” was another of their favourite words. They ended every utterance with it, rather as Dr Johnson ended his sentences with “Sir.” They smoked pot and regarded Bob Dylan as a poet and a prophet.  One of the most puerile of their antics – puerile even for a mob that turned puerility into a  pop art form – was to claim that the university authorities were holding “secret files” on them all. It never occurred to them to ask why anyone in his right mind would want to to store information about this riff raff. What would such information say about them: thick, spoilt, infantilised, petulant, paranoid, lazy. So they would cut lectures and instead hold “sit-ins” in the senate building and thus prevent the office workers from working. (They must have forgotten they were supposed to be on the side of the workers). I remember the Vice Chancellor offering to throw open the administration centre and the riff raff could see for themselves there were no secret files. Came the reply, “Ah no – that’s because they’re secret!”

Forty years on and sister Harriet still has the same mindset. I’m sure she’s among that great horde of politically-correct tribunes who insist that we all apologise for stuff we didn’t do – like the slave trade, the persecution of homosexuals and blacks. I wonder they don’t ask Italian ice cream sellers to apologise for the fall of the Roman Empire. But when it comes to apologising for something for which she did have responsibility – being a leading light in the NCCL which had connections to the PIE – Ms Harman keeps her trap firmly shut.

I wish she would make a habit of it.

The mother of murdered London teenager Stephen Lawrence has said she believes parts of the police are still racist.  Speaking fifteen years after the Macpherson Report branded the Metropolitan Police force “institutionally racist”, Baroness Lawrence said some attitudes “haven’t changed much”.She said stop-and-search measures are still unfair.

There are few things worse than having your son murdered and there is rightly great public sympathy for the parents of Stephen Lawrence: but sympathy is one thing and irrationality is another thing altogether. I don’t know how racist the Metropolitan Police Force is. I cannot judge whether their stop-and-search tactics are unfair. But, fifteen year on, it is disgraceful that a very significant part of public policy and the criminal law continues to be enacted according to a definition which is manifestly absurd.

I mean that judgement in the Macpherson Report which says, “A racist incident is anything so described by the victim or any other person.” So, if I were to invite you for a nice cup of tea, you could, if you were so perverse, report this as a racist incident. And unfortunately our society is not free from exactly this sort and degree of perversity. 

This perversity is called political correctness

Most people regard political correctness as a bit of a joke and rather a laugh, but in its serious consequences it is neither. When sceptics asked for a justification for his coining the tendentious neologism “institutional racism,” Lord Macpherson declared loftily,

“We do not pretend to produce a definition which will carry all argument before it.” But that is the whole purpose in making legal definitions: to avoid the confusion which partisan arguments inevitably produce. You would think that a man who is one of our senior judges could understand this.

Macpherson’s arrogant refusal to answer criticism amounts to his saying, we won’t answer your awkward questions. Just like the secret police.

The Macpherson definition of an act of racism is meaningless of course, but it is the catch-all, you’re-guilty-even-when-you’re-innocent terminology of the gulag. If anything can be legitimately described as a racist incident, then the term “racist incident” is vacuous. Meaningless jargon, politically-correct or not, is not merely spurious: when a meaningless expression is made the basis of a law of the land it is a prescription for confusion and chaos. Certainly the definition of a racist incident set out by Macpherson is incoherent and as such cannot reasonably stand as the basis for law-making.

But it does so stand, thereby making us all victims of an insane procedure. Badly-framed legal definitions damage our whole society and undermine our way of life.

Among those who dared criticise the Macpherson Report, William Hague, former Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition, and now Foreign Secretary, said:

“It has led to every police officer in Britain being branded a racist.” Hague promised to “…take on and defeat the liberal elite that has never trusted the police force and now wants us to believe they are all racists”.

He never had a hope. The “liberal elite” are our rulers now. But there is nothing liberal about them.

And not just the pol;ice, but everyone in the country. “Institutional racism” is a deliberately and systematically vague expression. It is relatively easy to demonstrate racial prejudice in an individual, but how would you go about showing that a whole institution such as the police force or, as Archbishop Sentamu has said, the Church of England, is guilty of this crime?

The Macpherson definition and the concept of institutional racism are exactly the sorts of linguistic devices invented by totalitarian regimes to silence dissenters by criminalising dissent. Orwell called Newspeak.