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Anatole Lieven was a brooding, arresting presence at lectures at Cambridge. He obviously had something big inside him. This essay by him is the best thing I've read about the Ukrainian war since Christopher Caldwell's article in September.
It's a rebuttal of the ideas of an utterly misguided woman called Anne Applebaum and Jeffrey Goldberg, for either of whom the word globalist might have been invented.
Their argument comes in three parts. The first, wearisomely familiar from every conflict in which America has been directly or indirectly involved, is that this is not a war for territory or geopolitical power, but of absolute good against absolute evil. They quote Zelensky:
“This is a war over a fundamental definition of civilization…to show everybody else, including Russia, to respect sovereignty, human rights, territorial integrity; and to respect people, not to kill people, not to rape women, not to kill animals.”One element of this is self-evidently true; that Russia, by illegally annexing Ukrainian territory, has violated a critically important international law and norm. In this, Russia has also gone further than (for example) Turkey in its invasion and partition of Cyprus in 1974; for while Turkey (like Russia in the Donbas from 2014 to 2022) created a breakaway non-recognized statelet in northern Cyprus, it did not formally annex the territory to Turkey. This may seem an academic difference, but it matters. What also matters however is that Turkey was and remains a member of NATO, so clearly in this area the lines dividing “civilization” from barbarism are rather more blurred than Zelensky, Applebaum and Goldberg suggest.
The story is here.
I wonder if the Ukrainians blew up the North Stream pipeline. Fiona Hill said it was possible and that it wasn't the Americans or else their responsibility would have leaked out. In fact a source did tell Seymour Hersch that the Americans did it. On the one hand it's deeply shocking that the story has been suppressed - and censored on Facebook! - but on the other hand I don't think it's true. A clever man who knows Russia well and who is strongly pro-Ukraine read Oliver Alexander's rebuttal and was not impressed but it seemed persuasive to me.
By the way, at the best Christmas party of my life in Bodrum in 2020, I was with an eclectic bunch of people including a Venezuelan (with a Slavic name) who lived in Minsk. He said he couldn't understand what the protestors were unhappy about. 'Everything works fine in Minsk!'
Owen Matthews in the Spectator makes a very important point I hadn't heard before and which I'm sure is true.
"It was mass protests in Belarus’ capital Minsk in August 2020 after an election widely seen as stolen by Lukashenko that prompted Putin to decide that the West was irrevocably hostile to the Kremlin and was hell bent on fomenting regime change across the former Soviet Union – including in Russia itself.
"To Putin and his inner circle of ex-KGB colleagues – notably Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev and Federal Security Service head Aleksandr Bortnikov – the Minsk protests were, like the Maidan revolution that brought down a pro-Moscow leader in Kyiv in 2014, entirely directed and produced by Washington. Lukashenko narrowly survived the 2020 revolt, aided by lots of Russian brute force and only after arresting tens of thousands of protestors who were systematically beaten, raped and tortured. But the chain of events that led Putin to invade Ukraine was directly triggered by fear that supposedly western-backed people-power protests that had so nearly toppled Lukashenko could be repeated in Moscow."
Bloomberg: 'Russia is likely to resume buying foreign currency [yuan]
for its reserves as soon as this month as rising oil earnings stabilize public
finances despite US and European efforts to squeeze Kremlin income.'
Sanctions against Russian have not had the effect America expected.
Meanwhile sanctions elsewhere cause enormous suffering. Why are there sanctions
against Afghanistan or Syria?
Posting this on Facebook led to a long exchange with one of my most intelligent Facebook friends, a retired senior State Department official (Mr S) who, to his credit, only ever supported ‘targeted sanctions’, not sanctions against a general population. Good, but the ensuing discussion made me understand how insane American policy is.
America thinks she has a duty to save the world from autocracy anywhere in the world. In other words, to rule the world. Napoleon , the Kaiser, Hitler and Great Britain at her imperial apogee did not have any such mad hubris. The only leaders who did were Lenin, Trotsky and in theory, but certainly not in practice, Stalin.
Mr S: Assad brutally murdered thousands of innocent civilians, including defenceless children. Perhaps he is no worse than those he fights, but that does not excuse his actions or make them less deserving of condemnation by civilised society.
Me: But why do we have a dog in this fight? I remember the Daily Telegraph saying Bill Clinton's foreign policy made the US an attachment of Oxfam. Reading what you wrote in the last few days I see wise canny State Department people like you see foreign policy as a moral crusade. This is terribly misguided. Sanctions are a terrible idea and should be reserved for cases where one country invades another. Nobody proposed sanctions against the USSR even though they did invade and conquer several countries. This moralism always seems to be accompanied by the idea that Israel is important to American interests, which it clearly isn't any more now the cold war is over. US foreign policy seems an illogical bundle of emotional ideas, but all reasons for American domination of the world in a way the UK never contemplated for a moment. It's all connected to the idea that the USA is bound together by the Whig ideals of the declaration of independence. (In fact it is bound together by Anglo-Saxon culture and to a limited extent blood.)
Mr S: Alas, some thugs, see Putin, Ortega, et alia are not dissuaded and then must be fought. Surrender to imperialist autocracy is not an option.
Me: This remark absolutely horrifies and terrifies me. You seem to be saying that America and friends are entitled to and even have a duty to oppose all dictatorships? This is mad. You will always have autocracies and what business are they of America or GB? Stanley Baldwin and at first Neville Chamberlain were rightly anxious not to go to war in Europe - you want conflict anywhere!
Mr S: Yet not oppose all dictatorships is madness. To acquiesce to oppression is cowardice. But after acknowledging the morally right thing to do, one must determine how to do it. Thus, prudence demands that our opposition to oppression requires different responses at different times with appropriate tools and methods. Totalitarian rule is like a chronic disease - one must live with it if one cannot eradicate it, but one should never call it healthy or treat it with indifference.
Me: I read too fast. You said we should resist attempts by dictators to EXPORT their malevolence. Very few try to. I don't approve of dictators but not all are malevolent - Salazar was a good thing and in NATO. The Saudi monarchy of course is malevolent but our ally as it slaughters tens of thousands of civilians for the crime of being Shia. Dictatorships are not a disease. Nor are absolute monarchies. The medical analogy is so wrong. America preferred dictatorship in Algeria to democratic victory for Islamists. Allende in Chile. Iran in 1953. Perhaps the most unforgivably stupid of all the stupid mistakes the 2nd Bush administration made was the insane idea that all countries are ready for democracy. This is the disastrous liberalism that gave us leaders like Wilson, LBJ, Bush 2 and now Joe Biden.
Literary historian George Watson cited an 1849 article written by Friedrich Engels called "The Hungarian Struggle" and published in Marx's journal Neue Rheinische Zeitung, and commented that "entire nations would be left behind after a workers' revolution against the bourgeoisie, feudal remnants in a socialist age, and since they could not advance two steps at a time, they would have to be killed. They were racial trash, as Engels called them, and fit only for the dung-heap of history." One book review criticized this interpretation, maintaining that "what Marx and Engels are calling for is ... at the very least a kind of cultural genocide; but it is not obvious, at least from Watson's citations, that actual mass killing, rather than (to use their phraseology) mere 'absorption' or 'assimilation', is in question." Talking about Engels' 1849 article, historian Andrzej Walicki states: "It is difficult to deny that this was an outright call for genocide." Jean-François Revel writes that Joseph Stalin recommended study of the 1849 Engels article in his 1924 book On Lenin and Leninism. My source for all this is Wikipedia.
Romanians were certainly one nation Engels considered unfit, as Larry Watts explains in his 'With Friends Like These'.A.E. Housman: “I find Cambridge an asylum, in every sense of the word.”
Derek Turner: "After a short and frantic storm, the sun has come back out, and cherry blossom lies in deep pink and white drifts like slain chivalry.""‘Russia,’ the Russian said, ‘must be isolated. Utterly walled off. Let the world forget Russia.’ There was no murmur of protest, so he continued: ‘The state must be declared rogue, a terrorist organisation. You don’t deal with it. Because when Putin falls, and he will, the new regime will be the same as the old one, with another figurehead.’
"Russia missed its chance to change in the 1990s and what the Estonian MP called the ‘Chekist state’ would rule Russia forever; the people are too miserable, poor and ill-educated to protest."
"... it has to be said that royal births, weddings and deaths are probably the one time most contemporary Britons encounter religion."
"It [the Gold State Coach] may be traditional, and it may look impressive in an antiquated, grotesquely ostentatious, fountains-of-gold-leaf-kind of a way. But by all accounts it is monstrously uncomfortable for its
