A well spent life

'He remained at Swansea for the rest of his academic career, serving as head of department and dean of the Faculty of Arts during the 1980s, before settling into “modestly comfortable” retirement in Portland Place, Marylebone, cultivating, as he put it, the “life-mode” of a gentleman of 1840, “relishing the last enchantments of Regency and resisting the early onset of earnest Victorians”.

From the obituary in the Telegraph of Richard Shannon, the historian of 19th century England and biographer of Mr Gladstone. It said that he showed no interest in the bloke culture of his native New Zealand. He sounds an admirable role model and soul-mate, except for the years in Swansea. The period as a history don at Peterhouse, under the mantle of the great Maurice Cowling, I very much envy him.

Quotations

"It is good to have been born in this time of decay. Our generation was granted a privilege that future generations may never know—a view of Western civilization in its totality, and a knowledge of its inner meaning. We were given the pure truths of the Christian religion, and the morality of sacrifice which turns renunciation into triumph and suffering into a secret joy. We also had the chance to see what will happen should we lose these gifts. . . . Of course it is hard to feel the full confidence that those teachings require. But they are addressed to each of us individually, and their validity is not affected by what others think or do. We have within ourselves the source of our salvation: all that is needed is to summon it, and to go out into the world."
Sir Roger Scruton

"The Right Honourable gentleman has sat so long on the fence that the iron has entered his soul."  

Lloyd George on Sir John (later Viscount) Simon.

“Here lies an anachronism in the vague expectation of eternity”.
Dorothy L. Sayer's detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, expressed his desire for this epitaph on his grave -in the fourth of “The Wimsey Papers”, published in the Spectator during World War II.

“Am I not deserving of praise for the moderation which marked my proceedings? Consider the situation in which victory at Plassey had placed me. A great prince was dependent on my pleasure; an opulent city lay at my mercy…I walked through vaults…piled…with gold and jewels! Mr Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation!"

Robert Clive commenting on accusations of looting the Bengal treasury after his victory at Plassey, at his impeachment trial in 1773.

A January 2015 interview with George Friedman about Ukraine is very illuminating today

A January 2015 interview with George Friedman sheds light on the war raging now in the Ukraine. 

George Friedman was the founder of Stratfor and then Geopolitical Futures, which forecast the course of global events. The full interview is here.

GEORGE FRIEDMAN: For all of the last 100 years Americans have pursued a very consistent foreign policy. Its main goal: to not allow any state to amass too much power in Europe. First, the United States sought to prevent Germany from dominating Europe, then it sought to prevent the USSR from strengthening its influence.

The essence of this policy is as follows: to maintain as long as possible a balance of power in Europe, helping the weaker party, and if the balance is about to be significantly disrupted -- to intervene at the last moment. And so, in the case of the First World War, the United States intervened only after the abdication of Nicholas II in 1917, to prevent Germany from gaining ground. And during WWII, the US opened a second front only very late (in June 1944), after it became clear that the Russians were prevailing over the Germans.

What is more, the most dangerous potential alliance, from the perspective of the United States, was considered to be an alliance between Russia and Germany. This would be an alliance of German technology and capital with Russian natural and human resources.

A lot of misinformation about Ukraine

Marți Hari of Finnish intelligence, in his fascinating talk on Russianness on December 3, 2018, to which I linked before, says it is certain that the Malaysian Airline Flight 17  was shot down by a missile from the Russian 53rd Air Defence Brigade and says the uprisings in 2014 in Lugansk and Donetsk were staged by Russian soldiers who sometimes forgot to take off their armbands. This is what I had read years ago but it is good to have it confirmed, because there are a lot of unreliable things churning around in conversations in real life and on the net, repeated, sometimes by people you'd not expect. 

We know, because the Daily Mail has told us so, that there were biolabs in Ukraine funded by Americans and Hunter Biden made a large amount of money helping arrange finance. Trump's friend Roger Stone (he was sentenced to 40 months but received a presidential pardon) thinks this means the Americans or Ukrainians were preparing chemical or biological weapons. I am sure this is not true, but you, gentle reader, can decide for yourself. 

This is not to say that we should trust the mainstream media very far (remember their long, mendacious record from Kosovo and Iraq to Covid and Hunter Biden) and still less the Ukrainian side of the story - even the good guys use propaganda in war. 

Fog of war - do not believe what you read in the media uncritically

I don't think Russia expected the war in the Ukraine to last so long and go so badly for them, but nobody knows. 

Optimism has crept into my heart about Ukraine over the last week, but I am worried that I am being manipulated.

A week ago on March 18 retired US Colonel Douglas MacGregor told Fox News that 

"The war is really over for the Ukrainians... Are we going to stop trying to use Ukraine or anyone else as a battering ram against Moscow?"

That was how it had seemed at one point. 

Mr Biden's little outing to Warsaw goes horribly wrong - Alexander Nevzorov, the seer

Speaking in Warsaw tonight, Mr Biden said of Mr Putin, "For God's sake - this man cannot remain in power."

Many people, and not just Americans, feel the same way about Mr Biden.

The White House quickly intervened to say the President was not calling for a regime change in Russia, but this is exactly what he did call for - in other words he told Russians that their war is one of self-defence and justifying the Kremlin's insistence that the revolution in Kiev in 2014 was American instigated regime change.

'What used to be called the Global South does not always share the priorities and perspectives of Yale Law School.'

Another sign of what a man I know (Matei Paun) calls the great decoupling, from the Wall St Journal.

'In a development that suggests trouble ahead, China’s basic approach—not endorsing Moscow’s aggression but resisting Western efforts to punish Russia—has garnered global support. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa blamed the war on NATO. Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, refused to condemn Russia. India and Vietnam, essential partners for any American strategy in the Indo-Pacific, are closer to China than the U.S. in their approach to the war.

'Western arm-twisting and the powerful effect of bank sanctions ensure a certain degree of sanctions compliance and support for symbolic U.N. resolutions condemning Russian aggression. But the lack of non-Western enthusiasm for America’s approach to Mr. Putin’s war is a phenomenon that U.S. policy makers ignore at their peril. Just as Western policy makers, lost in fantasies about building a “posthistorical world,” failed to grasp the growing threat of great-power competition, they have failed to note the development of a gap between the West and the rest of the world that threatens to hand the revisionist powers major opportunities in coming years. The Biden administration appears not to understand the gap between Washington and what used to be called the Third World, the degree to which its own policies contribute to the divide, or the opportunities this gap creates for China.

The Crețulescu church

The Crețulescu church early this morning. In the first volume of Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy queues of people flock there in September 1939 to pray for peace. She lived across the road.

Putin's hubris - an interesting comment on an article in Unherd

"The Cheka believe it is the role of the rest of the nation to serve their purposes. Putin was born into the Cheka, his father and grandfather were Chekists. The Cheka were murdering 40,000 a month by 1918. Putin was surrounded by Chekists who acted as oriental courtiers. Putin’s actions are based upon hubris.

"If Schroeder and Merkel were KGB assets could they have done more to help Russia? S and M closed down nuclear reactors: made Germany and Europe dependent on Russian oil and Gas, reduced defence spending to 1.2% of GDP and failed to maintain military equipment.
Perhaps Putin’s hubris was induced by Germany’s actions?"

I think his hubris was induced by many examples of what the Soviets called western decadence.

The ‘Iranian-backed Houthis’ get little help from Iran. The Saudis are committing terrible war crimes in Yemen.

Peter Hitchens and many other people say the invasion of Ukraine is not so bad as the war waged by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia against the Houthis. I confess I long ago forgot to follow this and real news is very hard to find anyway.

Patrick Cockburn is the person I most trust on the Middle East because he's very left-wing and left-wingers seem to be the most objective people to read on the subject of the Middle East. They are not committed to the American narrative (dread word Wallace Arnold would say - I find myself sounding like him).

Increasingly hard left and hard right resemble each other: anti-American, anti-war. This war in Ukraine splits both left and right but too many people swallow the Russian (renamed KGB) line hook, line and sinker. Far more people think Putin is Hitler or mad or both.

This is Cockburn in a very interesting recent essay in the New Left Review.

"The Houthis in Yemen, for instance, have been fighting for years and receive little material help from Iran, but are almost always described in the Western media as ‘Iranian-backed Houthis’, implying that they are simply Iranian proxies, which they are not. In Iraq, some of the Hashd al-Shaabi (Shia paramilitaries) are under orders from Iran, but others are independent."

What a huge amount of harm America has done in the world, especially since Reagan left office but going back to Lyndon Johnson and the 1960s cultural revolution.

"Putin Lives in Historic Analogies and Metaphors": political scientist Ivan Krastev interviewed about Vladimir Putin

DER SPIEGEL: What was your impression of Putin?

Krastev: Very intelligent and quick, forthright, confrontative. Sarcastic when speaking with someone from the West. But it is the small things that reveal the most about people. He held forth about the situation in the Donbas like a foreign service agent who knows how many people live in each village and what the situation is like in each of them. He considered the fact that primarily women were responsible for Russia policy in the Obama administration to be an intentional attempt to humiliate him. The hypocrisy of the West has become an obsession of his, and it is reflected in everything the Russian government does. Did you know that in parts of his declaration on the annexation of Crimea, he took passages almost verbatim from the Kosovo declaration of independence, which was supported by the West? Or that the attack on Kyiv began with the destruction of the television tower just as NATO attacked the television tower in Belgrade in 1999?

I recommend this interview. It reinforces my idea that Putin's wars have been reactions to US actions starting with Kosovo in 1999. He sees the Americans and British as hypocrites and this is very understandable. We are not hypocrites in the true sense of the world because a hypocrite is a conscious dissembler, but we have been hypocrites in the modern post Freudian sense of the word, meaning not seeing the mote in our own eye, for example in making war on Yugoslavia and recognising Kosovo as an independent country.

Mr Krastev thinks Putin and his KGB colleagues are full of guilt that they let the Soviet Union come to an end.

The refugee's tale

I had dinner last night with a foreigner who has lived in Kiev for twenty hears and just arrived in Bucharest, very shaken by his experience of two weeks being bombed and full of understandable cold anger at Putin. Kiev inhabitants are determined never to give in and never will.

The Russians deliberately bomb civilians, he told me. I knew this anyway.

He and everyone he knows like Zelensky now and think he is doing a good job.

Some have decided to stay, others to leave. He suspects he may never return and nor will most of the refugees. He thinks it's important when you flee to flee to somwhere nice where you'll enjoy living. 

The so-called ethnic Russians in the east are just as much Ukrainian as the Ukrainian speakers and just as patriotic. The inhabitants of the enclaves that Putin created in Lugansk and Donetsk feel Ukrainian.

I was reminded of the ethnic Germans in Eupen and Malmedy who were the most patriotic of all Belgians during the Second World War and afterwards.

I had dinner last week with a Cambridge educated British friend who told me he sees this war as a reasonably cheap (in terms of Ukrainian lives not money) way to defeat Putin and the populists and boost Nato and the EU.

Does anyone in the State Department or the chanceries of Europe think like this?

I hope the war will not cost many more lives before it ends, but Ukraine will still lose much much more than had she promised Putin to be neutral in January.

David Goldman writes for Asia Times, sometimes under the pen name Spengler. He is a keen observer of life and just posted on Facebook:

The Biden laptop revelation has geostrategic implications: If the Intel Community and Big Tech can tilt a presidential election by alleging "Russian disinformation" and squelching evidence of Biden's corruption, Moscow will conclude that it is dealing with fanatics in the US.

Putin is responsible for all the things the Azov Brigade did in Donbass, obviously

All the people killed by the Ukrainian army and irregulars in Donetsk and Lugansk would presumably not have been killed had Putin not arranged for his proxies to set up so called republics in 2014, backed by his troops in disguise. The locals there just want to be left alone, several well informed people tell me (a British ambassador, a famous British journalist and a leading foreign businessman in Kiev).

So let's not pay much attention to the doings of the neo-Nazis in the Azov brigade, who admire the murderous nationalist Bandera rather than the murderous Bolshevik commissars on the other side in 1941-4. I am sure the armies fighting for the rebel enclaves include equally extreme and violent young men, like Igor Strelkov (or Girkin) who is accused of shooting down the Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 in 2014.

On the other hand, Biden and Blinken are clearly hugely to blame for having provoked Putin when they should have ended the idea of Ukraine joining NATO.

The view from China: the most interesting thing I have read about the war

I forgot to link to this essay, which is eye-opening, published on March 12 by the deputy head of what the English would call a think tank, advising the very top of the Chinese regime. It was sent to me shortly after it appeared, by a retired US diplomat.

The essay was later withdrawn and an apology was issued.

Three excerpts:

At this point, Putin’s best option is to end the war decently through peace talks, which requires Ukraine to make substantial concessions. However, what is not attainable on the battlefield is also difficult to obtain at the negotiating table. In any case, this military action constitutes an irreversible mistake.

At present, public opinion believes that the Ukrainian war signifies a complete collapse of U.S. hegemony, but the war would in fact bring France and Germany, both of which wanted to break away from the U.S., back into the NATO defense framework, destroying Europe’s dream to achieve independent diplomacy and self-defense. Germany would greatly increase its military budget; Switzerland, Sweden, and other countries would abandon their neutrality. With Nord Stream 2 put on hold indefinitely, Europe’s reliance on US natural gas will inevitably increase. The US and Europe would form a closer community of shared future, and American leadership in the Western world will rebound.

China cannot be tied to Putin and needs to be cut off as soon as possible. 

Justin Bronk of Chatham House: The Russian army is seriously running out of momentum

"Given that Mariupol continues to hold out despite being surrounded, bombarded and starved without supplies for three weeks, and Russian forces have been unable to take Sumy, Chernihiv or Kharkiv, it seems highly unlikely at this point that Russia can muster sufficient forces to attempt a serious assault on Kyiv in the coming weeks.

"....Ukraine has mobilised hundreds of thousands of reservists and civilian volunteers, and is receiving huge supplies of weaponry and other key aid to equip these new forces in the relatively secure western half of the country..... As a result, Ukraine has an ever-increasing advantage over the Russian invasion forces in sheer numbers, but committing these newly mobilised forces to operations en masse will result in extremely heavy casualties and limited effectiveness due to lack of training and experience.

"But the longer this war continues, the worse position Russian forces will find themselves in and the larger and more capable the Ukrainian reserve and volunteer forces will become. If Ukraine can sustain the current pace of combat without overcommitting its inexperienced new forces, it can deny the overstretched Russian forces an opportunity to consolidate their current positions and may be able to force them to retreat in other areas as their supply lines and staging areas become indefensible. However, if Russia manages to force a ceasefire that leaves its forces in place, then it is likely to use that pause to reinforce its frontlines, get logistics support to its beleaguered units and renew its ability to sustain offensive momentum."

Full article here.

Many people said that as Russian victory was certain it would be best if Ukraine surrender. I did not agree and now it seems as if Russia is stalling.

I had wanted a peace based on Finlandisation as soon as possible, but is that different from surrender? It's inevitably going to happen, whether or not it is surrender.

The Russian slow advance and failure as yet to besiege, let alone take, Kiev changes things. A ceasefire will help them reinforce their troops.

But do they want to take Kiev, which they might be well advised not to try to do?

In other words, I am confused.

Still God save us from an endless war that goes on for a long time, like the Spanish Civil War.

No-one expected Finland to fight so effectively when Bolshevik Russia invaded in 1939 but she did, finally made peace in 1940, invaded Russia in 1941 alongside Germany and ended up being the one Soviet ally that was free, independent, democratic and capitalist. So independent that everyone thought she was neutral. 

Charles XII expected to defeat Peter the Great but the Battle of Poltava made Russia the great power she still is and Sweden the powerless country she remains.

I have tended to skip accounts of warfare when reading history but I shan’t from now on. War is history in the raw. It's unpredictable because it is decided by the decisions of millions of people, as Tolstoy teaches in the last chapter of War and Peace. 

Evaluation of Russia by Martti Kari (former colonel in Finnish military intelligence)

If you have an hour this talk by a Finnish former colonel in military intelligence,
delivered on December 3, 2018, is very informative about the Russian mind.

He makes the obvious point that Russians are used to and like a strong autocrat. 

Orthodoxy, autocracy and "the people" (narodnost) have always been the three elements of Russianness. 

The Patriarch Kirril was photographed wearing a EUR 30,000 watch. He and the Church are a vital part of Putin's system.

Putin's shameless lying is something Russians understand and accept as normal.

The Russians think they have to save Europe and they did, from Napoleon and Hitler. 

Martti Kari might have added that they helped save Europe from Turkey and Islam in numerous wars with the Sublime Porte.

They consider that they have a mission to unite Slavs. Poles and all the Slavs other than the Russians disagree, of course, but the Serbs and Bulgarians are friendly.

It reminds me of the letters of the Marquis de Custine published in 1839, which did for Russia what De Tocqueville did for America. I was struck when I read Custine, just after going down from university, how similar the Russia of Nicholas I and the Soviet Union were. For example, critics of Nicholas I were put into mental hospitals for thinking Russia was not the ideal country just as critics of Brezhnev were.

Much of what Custine said is true today. 

The Russian invaders are stalled in Ukraine, for now

 

"It seems to me that Russian don't believe so much in their civilising mission, but they are convinced of our decadence." Emil Cioran in 1986.

"Migrants Syria Trump Brexit Putin. I’ve never known politics be so interesting. Well not since the coup in Moscow and before that 1989." My Facebook status 6 years ago yesterday.

"A world is collapsing before our eyes", tweeted by French ambassador to the USA Gerard Araud in November 2016, as it became clear Donald Trump had won the presidency. He hadn't seen anything then.

The world is being transformed in extraordinary ways and fast. As Mark Twain's Pudd’nhead Wilson said, "Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t."

How strange compared to the comparatively dull period between 1948 and 1988.

Even as a schoolboy in Brezhnev's Era of Stagnation I saw that the Cold War kept the peace - in Europe.

Putin would not have invaded the Ukraine were Trump in office because he would not have enraged the most friendly US President he could ever hope for. But that's in the past.

Should the West have sent troops into Ukraine after Russian proxies seized parts of the Donetsk oblast? I and almost everyone thought not in 2014 and did not even want a Nato backed proxy war there, but now I wonder if we were all wrong. 

But that's also in the past. 

The explanation for why the American defence establishment (the 'deep state' as Trumpians call it) long hated Putin might be less because of Donetsk and Crimea than that they blame him for President Trump, but the Americans wanted to wrest Ukraine from his orbit long before Trump was elected. 

That's in the past too. 

What matters is ending the war quickly. 

Can China help?

The French Foreign Minister says the Russians are only pretending to negotiate.

"Just as in Grozny (in Chechnya) and Aleppo (in Syria), there are three typical elements - indiscriminate bombardment, so-called humanitarian 'corridors' designed to allow them to accuse the other side of failing to respect them, and talks with no objective other than pretending that they are negotiating.

The Russians have stalled for a week. Nato and Ukrainian anger are the crucial factors delaying the invaders. Al Jazeera (the best source of news) commented:

This is one of the big surprises of the war so far: that Russia’s military with its “new” professional army has barely achieved any of its strategic objectives and, in terms of applied combat power, logistics, command and control and general morale and focus, has underperformed across the board. 

Military communications have been so bad that Russian generals have had to move much closer to the front lines to exert some control over the tactical situation there. Three generals have so far been killed in the war, an almost unprecedented number in any modern conflict.

It's four now plus, someone said, a Chechen general.

Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman on Wednesday 16th, three days ago:

The strains on the Russian war effort are already evident, from the army’s hesitation about trying to fight their way into cities and the recruitment of mercenaries, to the reported appeal to China for help with supplies of military equipment and Putin’s fury with his intelligence agencies for misleading assessments and wasting roubles on Ukrainian agents who turned out to be useless. He is now having to choose between a range of poor outcomes, which the US suggests may include escalation to chemical use (which would be both militarily pointless and test further Western determination not to get directly involved).
We are now beyond the point where Putin has much ‘face’ to be saved, even if it were a priority for the other major powers to save it. In launching this disastrous war he has revealed himself to be not only a vicious bully but also a deluded fool.....
As there can be no Western-led peace talks without Ukraine, it should be made clear to Moscow that for now this is a card for Zelensky to play. The future of the Russian economy can then be in his hands. Should a moment come to start to ease sanctions, some leverage will be required to ensure that any agreement is being honoured. There could be a link to reparations for the terrible damage caused.
“Fanaticism”, according to George Santayana, “consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.” As his original war plans failed Putin has insisted his forces follow a disruptive and cruel strategy that has put his original aims even more out of reach and Ukraine with a say over the future of the Russian economy.'

David Goldman also on Wednesday:

Zelenskyy now accepts Ukraine neutrality, Lavrov accepts Ukraine sovereignty (minus some Russian control of Donbass, not to mention Crimea, I assume). That's the shape of a compromise, along the lines of Minsk II. As Steve Bryen has been writing, that was the only basis for a negotiated solution before, and remains so now. Russia originally proposed Minsk II; the French and Germans signed on; Washington opposed it. For all the blather about Russian Army incompetence, it looks like Putin is accomplishing his objective: Beat up Zelenskyy until he accepts Russia's original terms. Of course, if you believe that Putin is a new Stalin who wants to restore the Russian Empire, his army hardly seems up to the job. But if Putin's war aims are highly focused (keep Ukraine out of NATO and missiles far from the Russian border), he seems to be succeeding. The cost well may be higher than he expected, but he can still sell oil and gas -- the Netherlands gas price has fallen by half since the crisis peak. After the dust settles and the virtue-signaling loses its novelty value, Putin will have won.

Lord (Conrad) Black on the Mark Steyn Show on GB News made interesting points including: sanctions against Russia won't work because Russia can get anything it wants via China (I am not sure if he is right ); there is no possibility of nuclear war; the numbers of dead are very tiny compared with the destruction of Tokyo, Warsaw or German cities in World War II (obviously); Macron is competent, unlike Biden or Kamala Harris, but there are intelligent people in the US government like Jake Sullivan. 

Mark Steyn made the point that, unlike 1941-5, when Stalin threw away millions of young lives, Russia has far fewer young men. It's the first time I saw GB News but Mark Steyn is always good.

Seen on Facebook: ecology as GDR disinformation

My Facebook friend says "the institute for European defense and security studies wrote a paper over thirty years ago about East Germany’s promotion of green ideology to undermine the West’s industrial capacity".

From Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye

“There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.”

"Nothing ever looks emptier than an empty swimming pool." 

"I might even get rich - small-town rich, an eight-room house, two cars in the garage, chicken every Sunday and the Reader's Digest on the living room table, the wife with a cast-iron permanent and me with a brain like a sack of Portland cement. You take it, friend. I'll take the big sordid dirty crooked city.”

“The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful die young, but that they grow old and mean. It will not happen to me.”

“You talk too damn much and too damn much of it is about you.”

“He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel. Over the phone anyway.”

Russian oligarch's house in Belgrave Sq. occupied by squatters used to belong to Chips Channon

From the diary in yesterdays's Times. Sir Henry Channon was the ineffably glamorous MP for my distinctly unglamorous home town, Southend-on-Sea.

On V.E. Day Channon threw a very grand party in that house. The guests included much exiled royalty and many peers and peeresses.  He said to the heiress Emerald Cunard, ‘This is what we were fighting for’. To which she replied, 'What, are they all Poles?’

The story about the squatters in the house, which is now worth reportedly £50 million, is here.