ED Noor: Interesting that the photo used to
illustrate this article is probably the most aggressive and ugly photo I have
seen so far of Mr. Putin
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December 21, 2014
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Villain or victim? Vladimir Putin in aggressive form ~ but we may be pushing him too far
This is a time of year for memories, and the ones
that keep bothering me are from my childhood, which seemed at the time to be
wholly happy and untroubled.
Yet all the adults in my life still dwelt in the shadow of recent war. This was not the glamorous, exciting side of war, but the miserable, fearful and hungry aspect.
My mother, even in middle-class suburban
prosperity, couldn’t throw away an eggshell without running her finger round it
to get out the last of the white. No butcher dared twice to try to cheat her on
the weights.
Haunted all her life by rationing, she would
habitually break a chocolate bar into its smallest pieces. She had also been
bombed from the air in Liverpool, and had developed a fatalism to cope with the
nightly danger of being blown to pieces, shocking to me then and since.
I am now beset by these ingrained memories of shortage and danger because I seem surrounded by people who think that war might be fun.This seems to happen when wartime generations are pushed aside by their children, who need to learn the truth all over again.
It seemed fairly clear to me from her experiences
that war had in fact been a miserable affair of fear, hunger, threadbare darned
clothes, broken windows and insolent officials. And that was a victory, more or
less, though my father (who fought in it) was never sure of that.
Now I seem surrounded by people who actively want a
war with Russia, a war we all might lose. They seem to believe that we are
living in a real life Lord Of The Rings, in which Moscow is Mordor and Vladimir
Putin is Sauron. Some humorous artists in Moscow, who have noticed this, have
actually tried to set up a giant Eye of Sauron on a Moscow tower.
We think we are the heroes, setting out with brave
hearts to confront the Dark Lord, and free the saintly Ukrainians from his
wicked grasp.
This is all the most utter garbage. Since 1989,
Moscow, the supposed aggressor, has ~ without fighting or losing a war ~
peacefully ceded control over roughly 180 million people, and roughly 700,000
square miles of valuable territory.
The EU (and its military wing, Nato) have in the
same period gained control over more than 120 million of those people, and
almost 400,000 of those square miles.
Until a year ago, Ukraine remained non-aligned
between the two great European powers. But the EU wanted its land, its 48
million people (such a reservoir of cheap labour!) its Black Sea coast, its
coal and its wheat.
So first, it spent £300 million (some of it yours)
on anti-Russian ‘civil society’ groups in Ukraine.
Then EU and Nato politicians broke all the rules of
diplomacy and descended on Kiev to take sides with demonstrators who demanded
that Ukraine align itself with the EU.
Fall: There is a complacent joy
about the collapse of the rouble. Above, the dollar-rouble rate on Friday
Imagine how you’d feel if Russian politicians had
appeared in Edinburgh in September urging the Scots to vote for independence,
or if Russian money had been used to fund pro-independence organisations.
Then a violent crowd (20 police officers died at
its hands, according to the UN) drove the elected president from office, in
violation of the Ukrainian constitution.
During all this process, Ukraine remained what it
had been from the start ~ horrendously corrupt and dominated by shady
oligarchs, pretty much like Russia.
If you didn’t want to take sides in this mess, I
wouldn’t at all blame you. But most people seem to be doing so.
Taking sides: Britain and the US have
backed the Gulf States' desire to destroy the Assad government in Syria. While
Russia has been a major obstacle
There seems to be a genuine appetite for
confrontation in Washington, Brussels, London… and Saudi Arabia.
There is a complacent joy abroad about the collapse
of the rouble, brought about by the mysterious fall in the world’s oil price.
It’s odd to gloat about this strange development,
which is also destroying jobs and business in this country. Why are the Gulf oil
states not acting ~ as they easily could
and normally would ~ to prop up the price of the product that makes them rich?
I do not know, but there’s no doubt that Mr Putin’s Russia has been a major obstacle to the Gulf states’ desire to destroy the Assad government in Syria, and that the USA and Britain have (for reasons I long to know) taken the Gulf’s side in this.
But do we have any idea what we are doing? Ordinary
Russians are pretty stoical and have endured horrors unimaginable to most of
us, including a currency collapse in 1998 that ruined millions. But until this
week they had some hope.
If anyone really is trying to punish the Russian
people for being patriotic, by debauching the rouble, I cannot imagine anything
more irresponsible. It was the destruction of the German mark in 1922, and the wipe-out
of the middle class that resulted, which led directly to Hitler.
Stupid, ill-informed people nowadays like to compare Mr Putin with Hitler. I warn them and you that, if we succeed in overthrowing Mr Putin by unleashing hyper-inflation in Russia, we may find out what a Russian Hitler is really like. And that a war in Europe is anything but fun.
So, as it’s almost Christmas, let us sing with some
attention that bleakest and yet loveliest of carols, It Came Upon The Midnight
Clear, stressing the lines that run ‘Man at war with man hears not the love
song which they bring. Oh, hush the noise, ye men of strife, and hear the
angels sing’.
Or gloat at your peril over the scenes of panic in
Moscow.
At Woolwich, in Ottawa and now in Sydney, deranged maniacs kill, in most cases while out of their minds on the drugs we have given up trying to control. Deluded by propaganda, we classify this as ‘terrorism’.
The streets are flooded with troops and robocops,
helicopters clatter overhead and blowhard ‘experts’ drone portentously about
how these are ‘lone wolves’, as if that solved the matter.
Actually, they are mad, and in the days before ‘care in the community’ they would not have been able to kill because they would have been in mental hospitals.
Such hospitals would be a much better use for all
the money we currently pour into grandiose ‘security services’.
Given up control: At Woolwich, in Ottawa
and now in Sydney, deranged maniacs kill, in most cases while out of their
minds on the drugs. Above, hostages escape from the Sydney cafe targeted by
extremists last week
How does Theresa May get away with it? She sits for
months on a report which exposes her department as a slovenly shambles. It
shows that 220,000 files on immigrants who should have been deported were found
rotting in boxes in back rooms and even in a lift shaft. The people involved
aren’t (of course) being deported. But it gets one tenth of the coverage of the
latest Ukip mini-scandal.
Does anyone really think that merging small police
forces into big ones in 1967 made the police better? Absolutely not. It was
then that they stopped foot patrols. So ignore calls for even bigger forces.
Small is best, as lucky Americans know.
ED Noor: But you, dear Reader, would not
be here without being fully aware that all police forces of North America are
now trained in and by Israel according to standards such as those used in
Palestine. This began before 911 and since that event become standard
procedure.
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