Peter Hitchens – Mail on Sunday Feb 27, 2022
So they finally got their war. But what are they going to do now? This is the most avoidable, needless conflict in modern history.
It was nurtured and hatched in the small minds of foolish men. There was a compromise available, but because they were too proud to consider it, terrified civilians now weep outside the ruins of what were once their homes.
At this point, these noisy boasters turn out, as usual, to have big mouths and tiny fists. The Kremlin, responding to years of deliberate humiliation, taunting and provocation, finally goes mad and invades a sovereign country. The mighty West hits back by… chucking Moscow out of the Eurovision Song Contest.
You might have thought that, after 30 years of tough talk, they could have come up with something a bit better than that. But if you had observed, as I have, the steady, shameful shrivelling of Britain’s diplomatic soft power and hard armed forces over the past three decades, you would not have been surprised.
When I say ‘they’, I mean the army of Washington power-worshippers, think-tankers, politicians and swaggering musclemen journalists – most of whom have never heard a bullet fly or seen a corpse.
Since 1992, they have thought it wise to treat Russia like a beaten dog. The inventor of that policy is the American neo-conservative politician Paul Wolfowitz. He just happens to be the architect of that other great disaster, the Iraq War.
The New York Times in March 1992 reported the existence of a Pentagon document, believed to be the work of Mr Wolfowitz. It said that from now on there should only be one superpower. It stated ‘Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union.’
The suggestion was ridiculous. The former Soviet Union was at that time a bankrupt mass of scrap metal, rust and corruption. I was there, I know. Once the dust settled, it would find itself with an economy the size of Italy’s, and an ageing, ill, diminishing population. The Communist ideology which had driven its expansion and aggression was dead.
Yet here were senior American political figures, planning further humiliation. The outcry over this dangerous language caused a hasty rewrite, and when the document was published it had been greatly toned down.
Yet within a few years, under Bill Clinton, and supported by expensive lobbying by US arms manufacturers, the USA began the eastward expansion of Nato.
Since then Nato has never said who it is defending its members against – because such an admission would be an act of aggression in itself. But it can only really be explained by a desire to keep Russia down. For what purpose?
I have never seen any attempt by anyone to reply to the urgent condemnation of this decision, made in 1998 by one of the greatest diplomats who ever lived, George Kennan. Mr Kennan, inventor of the successful strategy of ‘containment’ of the Soviet Union, came out of retirement to protest.
He said Nato expansion was folly, and correctly predicted it would create nationalist backlash in Moscow. Did the neo-conservatives who created this policy really think Russia, with its huge intelligence services and vast, sophisticated foreign policy establishment, would not notice that it was being targeted?
Russia guards its interests, as do all nations, just as rain falls downwards and water is wet. Out of this realisation came Vladimir Putin, the direct consequence of the Wolfowitz doctrine. We created him.
In fact, Wolfowitz and Clinton were simply wrong. China was the real danger. Think about this. In 1989, the Soviet Empire gave way to mass demonstrations in Prague and East Germany. It could have massacred protesters in Leipzig, Dresden and Berlin, but it did not. After a few nasty but feeble attempts to fight demands for independence in the Baltic states and Georgia, Russia gave up its enormous empire in Europe and Asia. In return, Russia was treated like a pariah by the EU and Nato when it sought a civilised relationship with them.
That same year, China’s Communists answered their people’s demands for freedom by murdering them on the streets of Peking.
In the years since, they have created an ever-fiercer police state regime, tightened their dictatorial grip on Tibet, and menaced Taiwan by hugely increasing their military and naval power. They have also blatantly broken their promises to maintain freedom in Hong Kong, and engaged in a shameful and racialist repression of the Uighurs.
This is a real threat, and a regime which makes Putin look relaxed. Yet we stay on friendly terms with them. When their despots come to London, and dine at Buckingham Palace, British police cravenly crush peaceful demonstrations of protest lest our tyrannical guests are offended.
We continue to pretend Taiwan is not independent. We cravenly shun the Dalai Lama for the sake of trade. Is it precisely because we are so feeble in this real struggle that we pretend to toughness in the supposed New Cold War with Russia? I often think so.
And now here we are again, in a moralising frenzy. The BBC, which insisted on strict neutrality between Britain and Argentina in its coverage of the Falklands War, flings itself into an ignorant and one-sided coverage of the Ukraine crisis.
A leading presenter proclaims, from a city he weirdly calls ‘Kyeeeev’, that Ukraine is a ‘European democracy’, in which case he is very easily satisfied.
As my old friend Edward Lucas, no friend of Russia, put it in the Daily Mail yesterday, Ukraine is a country where ‘oligarchs run media empires, with politicians and officials on the payroll.
The judicial system is a festering mess where arrests, prosecutions and verdicts are used as score-settlers between political and commercial rivals.
Senior positions are bought and sold. Healthcare and education are plagued by kickbacks. The security service, the SBU, is infested with intrigue and sleaze – and penetrated by Russian agents of influence’.
Justified outrage over the terrible harvest of war would be more convincing if we had paid more attention to the hundreds of civilian casualties, many of them inflicted by Ukrainian armed forces, in and near the breakaway regions in the country’s East.
A 2020 report by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe said that between January 2017 and September 2020, there were 946 civilian casualties, of which 161 were fatalities. Among the casualties were 100 children (73 boys and 27 girls).
It would also be more convincing if our political and media establishment had not supported the Nato bombing of Belgrade in 1999 (with major civilian casualties); the crazy invasion of Iraq in 2003; and the forgotten Nato bombing of Libya, also with its toll of dismembered children killed in supposed ‘surgical strikes’.
That intervention destroyed Libya. Mr Putin, and the Chinese police state, know that we did these things, and see them as precedents for any crimes of the same kind they may commit later.
I’m told I am supporting the invasion by saying we provoked it. But if I warn a child that, if he annoys a wasp, it will sting him, am I supporting the wasp?
I am accused of treachery, or of being an apologist for Russia, for urging a different view on this crisis. Surely this is how dissent is treated in dictatorships.
I write this as a British patriot. How was it in our interests to provoke a war we cannot win, and cannot even fight, against a country which is not, in fact, our enemy?
great commentary on the russia situation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mm6CgyWeF8
NO Mr Hitchens… YOU are too feeble to stand up to the REAL enemy…. which is YOUR OWN government!
“Russia guards its interests, as do all nations”. No: what happens is that they let the Jews in and then the Jews let all foreigners walk in so that there is no feeling of a nation and then the individuals on the land can all be milked of money forever and the Jew got what he wanted, millions of slaves. The nation in the first place was only a path for a king to do something similar. His dynasty is removed if it is not Jewish enough to satisfy the Jehovics, whatever they really are–frogs and toads or whatever. Is Russia still nationalist? Only for divide and rule purposes. People have not got to grips with how FOREIGN humans are to the Jews. Even “exopolitics”, as described by Steven Greer, does not give you a grasp of it, because Galactic distances only enlarge the usual three dimensions, when you need to understand further dimensions(of yin and yang). To explain, I need to teach reality.
Could this ‘chinaman’ Xi be a mischling.. because somehow his genetics don’t seem to scan, there are certain features that seem, ahem unjewsual… what say you?
is there ‘something’ alien inside him?
on a more serious note Hitchens proffers an article that under current circumstances is as good as it gets for the dinosaur propaganda rags…
Hitchens himself presented as a rational old style conservative, the voice of reason…
This act and masque of mendacity of course shields his co-ethnics and his reformed trotskyism (how unusual)..
His brother ran the neoliberal mossad op over in the yankee asylum… but thankfully is now dead.
The enemy is us.
@No longer a Trump supporter
I remember that you said Putin is a Jewish puppet just like Donald Trump and Joe Biden. I remember you showed us many pictures that prove Putin is Jewish who wore the Jewish cap (kippah) and is surrounded by many Jews. You said the world, including Russia, is under the control of the Jews. You said the world is a Jewish stage where Jews control virtually all countries (or at least all powerful countries) and have the power to create any chaos or political dramas they want. Therefore, Russia is very likely not innocent like the way you said that “they just protect their border”. Russia under Putin just follows the evil Jewish script to create more chaos or drama (by invading Ukraine). I agree with you that the world is a stage where Jews pull the strings from all sides (including Putin and Russia). They want more chaos and political drama to shake the world. Currently, I see no one powerful is innocent or honest. They are all evil, ambitious, dishonest, and two-faced. Putin is no exception.
No, China is not “our” “enemy” any more than is Russia “our” “enemy.” But both countries are “enemies” of the cult of demon-possessed theistic Satanists that runs the corrupt West.
This Satanic cult – known in the Bible as the first beast of Rev 13, aka the beast from the sea – has launched a spiritual war of aggression against all of humanity, seeking complete world domination and control – on behalf of Satan – AT ANY COST.
The Satanists prosecute their war toward a Satanic end by Satanic means; i.e. evil for the sake of evil. They seek to proselytize the whole world for Satan (thereby achieving the goal set forth in Isaiah 14:13,14) by way of deception, corruption and manipulation – and by way of destruction for anyone and anything that can’t be so corrupted and manipulated.
To put it another way, the clash between Russia and the West is a civilizational conflict between societies with two diametrically opposed sets of moral values. Russia is the beast’s most important target right now probably because Russia is militarily powerful, has undergone an Orthodox Christian revival – making it resistant to Jewish subversion – and Russia has explicitly denounced and rejected the moral depravity of the Satanic West. The choice Russia apparently has in this conflict is to either concede and “call evil good” or to fight WW3, probably a nuclear WW3.
If Russia falls then all the remaining countries and peoples on the earth will be targeted for corruption or destruction, from China and India down to the smallest Amazon tribe.
@chesterton…look at Putin’s physiognomy next to Xi’s..they both look to possess similar Mongoloid ‘mischling’ characteristics..There are Chinese/Asiatic Jews, so Xi could likely be one of them, like Putin..
It is the West that is the enemy of the whole world, not the other way around.
All of your troubles will disappear if you simply go to where your ‘leaders’ are and kill them. But each and every one of you is too cowardly to do so, and thereby you will die.
Quote:The West acts tough with Russia because we’re just too feeble to stand up to our real enemy… China
Past history …
Russia , 1812 & 1945 ….
China Opium War I & Opium War II….
@ LEWIS JONES
there was once tribal consciousness
between germans but since split into
classes, leftist,greens right, conservative,
rich + poor, decomposed by jewish poison
(spiritual + biological) there will be no
unity anymore specialy since Merkill-
Soros flooding with invaders . my germany
will not exist anymore and i dont mind
since im old + have no children . the next
generation is already in decomposing
perverting jewleftist hands . nothing i can
do about since nobody listens to profets
in own land .
To “not me”–what do you think “thereby” means, or why don’t you care, when using it?
Russia has not invaded Ukrrraiaian, the USA and the Jews did, in effect, in 2014.
The west claims Russian forces aren’t that good but I think their generals will learn well the lessons of WWII – their Great Patriotic War. The US measures everything by its own standards from the economy to culture to war aims, and the fact the US military would struggle to win a coin toss makes them think Russia went just as stale, but since the fall of communism they’re a different people under Putin.
If not bombing Ukraine back to the stone age is seen as weak by the US, then US troops who generally don’t go up against opposing forces but let planes and drones do their killing, to face Russian troops on the ground will be a hard knock for the average US grunt. Russians learn all about the Nazis and know the US supports them in Ukraine, plus their troops are defending their home not stealing someone else’s.
I want to see the US go down in flames, And it might.
Russia watched as the US and it’s vassals carried out illegal acts in Europe and the Middle East. Ultimately when things got too close for comfort it decided to follow suit.
Russia agreed no UN resolution was needed to violate another country’s sovereignty as happened in Yugoslavia. It agreed that borders could be redrawn and countries could be split up as one fancied. A disagreable government could be replaced violently with one that was more to it’s liking all the while singing the praises of democracy.
It seems Russia has decided to join the club.