Blogoir

A zany but prominent piece in this morning's Guardian, asserting that the newspaper has been 'prevented for reporting Parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds':

Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.

The Guardian has vowed urgently to go to court to overturn the gag on its reporting.

The report mentions the various battles of John Wilkes in the eighteenth century to keep the public informed over what went on in Parliament.

Indeed.

A summary of this lively fellow's life and work is here.

The point is that Wilkes several times went to prison to defend and champion and advance his and our liberties.

Not our brave Guardian friends. They apparently have been served with some sort of injunction against writing a story. They are quite free to ignore it and publish anyway, battling it in the courts subsequently.

You are only gagged if you let someone gag you - without fighting back.

Luckily we have the Internet to help us find out what is happening.

Enter Guido and Mr Eugenides. And yes, one MSM stalwart - the Independent.

The point?

Namely that in this country the liberties we have were gained incrementally over hundreds of years, usually by people fighting for them and often paying a price.

Likewise these liberties can be rolled back incrementally.

The more so if people who usually claim to make a fuss about Liberty give a sad sigh and lean forward in a resigned fashion to receive the gag as the gagger comes along.

Another part of my foraging for witty things to say about Diplomacy has involved exploring this magnificent official FCO tract from 1965:

Restricted

 Guidance

to Diplomatic Service and other Officers, and Wives

or

some "do's" and "don'ts" of Diplomatic Etiquette and other relevant matters

Almost every page is a time-machine taking us back to a period far, far before political correctness, when manners and proper behaviour were expected, albeit and in a somewhat, hem, paternalistic and sexist way.

A couple of crackers:

• Remember too that while you and your British friends may privately be critical of British institutions or British public figures, you might not like hearing the same criticisms made by, say, an American or a Frenchman
• Some post reports are better than others and some paint an unduly sombre picture, such as concluding that "there are facilities for Christian burial"

And how about these:

• Smoking:  Although smoking at table, even between courses, has now become quite customary, be wary of lighting up too soon ...
• Segregation:  There is much to be said for letting the ladies leave the men after dinner for an interval of not more than twenty minutes ... but you should in any case bear in mind that women Ministers and senior women diplomats may not like being segregated 

At least this has not changed:

• It is a horrible thought that anyone should not be able to come to your party because they lacked the right clothes ... but do not be shy of asking people to dress for dinner; it makes for a gayer scene and often has a surprisingly good effect on the conversation

Off to Paris tomorrow to give a presentation to a distinguished group of people about Diplomacy.

Meandering around the Internet for inspiration I started looking at the fine story of one of the greatest ever Ambassadors, Thomas Jefferson, who represented the newly emerging USA in Paris in the years leading up to the French Revolution. He returned home to even greater things, namely to be the third President of the USA.

Some wonderful material is to be found.

Including how Jefferson ordered a dead moose to be shipped from North America to Paris so that he could prove wrong annoying French experts who were claiming that the New World in its people, flora and fauna was a stunted, degenerate place. The moose was then displayed in all its (by then) somewhat moth-eaten glory in his Residence.

Here is some background by David Post.

Mr Post was so inspired by this story that he wrote a fine book about today's emerging Internet as it might have been described by a brilliant person like Jefferson exploring in a very practical way the frontiers of the very latest scientific innovation.

I have just ordered it on Amazon.  

So you should do so too. 

Also fascinating to read about the diplomatic machinations of the time concerning whale oil, a product vital for keeping Parisian streets lit and so deterring crime.

Products change.

The machinations of world trade do not.

Update  Aargh. My first shot had an Amazon Link to the wrong Jefferson + Moose book. Now fixed. I hope. 

Craig Murray has a good posting on the important interview between Iain Dale and Michal Kaminski. It just shows where things now stand when a mere Blogger does what no so-called serious MSM journalist has done, and talks to the person at the centre of a controversy to hear what he might have to say.

Craig uses this interview to give some pertinent thoughts on Polish anti-semitism and other 'racist' phenomena in Poland, drawing on his own time in Poland in the 1990s:

... I should add that a young black British businessmen reported to me that being spat at was an almost daily occurence.

The strange thing is that I adore Poland, and Poles, and Polish culture. I was ever so happy in my time there. There are reasons for the development of this deep-seated racist strain which are historic. There is a limit to how far you can blame individuals for adopting attitudes which are widespread in their culture; and without understanding you cannot change attitudes. Which brings me back to Kaminski. Much as he tries to hide his past, for the present I do not think we should rule out that he really has changed his views, after being exposed to wider cultural influences (like Iain Dale!)

...

A key part of Poland coming to terms with its anti-semitism will be an acknowledgement of what Polish people did to Jews in or just after World War II. Iain Dale's questioning about the Jedwabne massacre is actually important. This was one of a number of massacres of Jews by Poles, but there were also hundreds of individual murders of Jewish survivors who inconveniently resurfaced, and perhaps tried to reclaim their property.

Poland must come to terms with all of its history, not just the heroic bits. Poland suffered terribly for three hundred years of near continuous foreign occupation. It was moved about physically on the map, sometimes disappearing, and emerged an artificially placed and artificially ethnically homogenous nation. Of course it was screwed up and nationalistic. Of course Kamnski is screwed up and nationalistic. Poland is slowly getting better. Who knows? Maybe Michal is too.

Not quite how I would have put it, but it's a free country.

Some wider thoughts.

'Anti-semitism' comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes, so when we talk about so-called 'Polish anti-semitism' we need to be a bit more precise.

At one extreme of the anti-semitism spectrum there is one of my favourites, Japanese Anti-Semitism, which has nothing to do with any actual Jewish people as far as one can tell but rather spirals off into surreally kinky Asian occult fantasising.

The Polish case is quite different. For centuries as Poland's borders ebbed and flowed in central Europe large communities of Jews lived in Polish villages, towns and cities, often flourishing and achieving reknown. As and when surges of anti-Jewish feeling erupted elsewhere in Europe, Jews headed for Poland or Polish-dominated places.

For example, Jews were not even allowed to live in Moscow until about 1800. Their numbers grew there until some 30,000 Jews were expelled in 1892; they headed for Lodz and Warsaw.

A further disaster happened in 1914/15 when Germany attacked Russian territory and the Russians expelled up to  500,000 supposedly disloyal Jews at virtually no notice, 100,000 people dying in the process.

To cut a long and complex story short, the reality of anti-semitism in Poland does not spring from mystic nutty theories of Jewish conspiracy/supremacy, although that strain is now there (see below). It rather comes from a combination of centuries-long Catholic anti-Jewish teaching (the Jews being deemed responsible for the crucifixion of Christ) and what might be called 'normal' ethnic rivalry/tension of the sort seen today in plenty of other places, where different language/cultural communities are jostling for position precisely because they are so close and mutually entangled (see eg Bosnia).

Which explains why, yes, Poland between the Wars did take up its share of the sort of Nazi-backed pseudo-scientific anti-Jewish propaganda and legalised oppression which by then had a thriving tradition elsewhere in Europe, but also why Poland conspicuously did not rise up against its Jewish population when the Nazis invaded. The Nazis built several big death-camps in Poland once they embarked on the Final Solution because that's where so many Jews were (plus eg Auschwitz was a handy railway junction for trains from elsewhere in Europe).

So now (as Craig rightly says) there are different legacy issues in Poland.

Plenty of Jewish cultural activities go on. A huge new museum for the history of Polish Jews is being built in Warsaw. Many Poles are discovering unexpected Jewish roots in their own families. All serious political leaders emphasise their good relations with the Jewish community. Above all, John Paul II made a massive effort to lead the Catholic Church towards reconciliation with the Jewish faith, and that is percolating its way through the Church in Poland too.

On the other hand, there is a lumpen low-level anti-semitism around on a scale which is depressing. Newspaper kiosks in Warsaw carry weird little pamphlets about Jewish conspiracies, stickers against Jews appear inside buses, football fan graffiti attacks other clubs for their Jewish affinities, and so on.

As for wider racism, Poland looks to visitors from the UK like a stunningly 'white' place. Dark-skinned people are few and far between.

Is Poland an especially racist place? Not obviously. Once (prompted by an alarming report from our Embassy in Budapest describing how dark-skinned colleagues in Hungary were being jostled on public transport and constantly receiving racist slurs) I asked one Embassy colleague with Asian DNA if she had had problems in Warsaw. "Apart from some funny looks now and then, no."

So, praise the Lord, on this one I am basically with Craig Murray.

Racist/ethnic/religious/cultural and other aggressive forms of Fear of The Other have been a feature of life round the planet for much of human history, if not all of it. We are all working our way through it, some with more integrity and open-mindedness than others. 

Poland was the default refuge of choice in Europe for Jews for hundreds of years. Its huge and successful Jewish community was obliterated by the fathers and grandfathers of the Germans sitting primly in EU meetings now. It also saw a huge number of Poles being executed by the Nazis for trying to protect Jews from persecution.

In short, Poland is the last country on earth which needs to be lectured on the subject of anti-semitism.

And the noises in the UK from senior parts of the Labour Party spin-machine to try to smear the Conservative Party for their links with supposedly 'anti-semitic Poles' are beyond contempt.

Lieutenant-Commander Tadeusz Lesisz has died aged 91.

Here is a sense of what he achieved and witnessed in his extraordinary life.

People like him built the social and moral capital which today's enfeebled generations do not even understand and are frittering away.

So civilisations flow and ebb.

Dziekuje.

Some good comments from readers on my (too) long piece about the US Missile Defence decision.

Two take a different view, arguing that Putin's Russian government is not motivated by crude nationalism, and that if one stacks up various decisions taken in recent years by the USA/West it is not hard to see plenty of reasons why Russia currently is uncooperative.

Thoughts on what 'cooperation' means in this context.

I was working closely in Moscow with the Russian MFA in the mid-1990s when the post-Cold War sense of official disillusionment with the West started in earnest.

We Brits helped this along by making a serious blunder, refusing to give a visa to a close friend of Mr Primakov who was designated by the Russians to head (in an openly acknowledged way) their external intelligence representation at the Embassy in London.

This decision, taken at a very high level in London against Embassy advice, was (as far as we could see) stupid and insulting and above all pointless. It gave terrific support to those in the Russian security establishment who argued that the Brits did not want true cooperation in the grown-up areas of policy but were bent on playing more Cold War games. 

Thereafter the Contact Group and other processes continued, but with Russian enthusiasm drip-drip waning as US/UK/German support for Kosovo's independence grew. I know that the Russians did try to get through to Milosevic just how damaging his policies were likely to be to Serbia's interests - I had a vivid account from a Russian diplomat who listened to him being ridiculous about the subject until 4am, then walked out in despair.

More generally, the practical problems Russia has faced in dealing with such sprawling new borders and all the other human and policy issues arising from the collapse of the Soviet Union have been daunting, and handled pretty fairly. The Putin period has led to much greater discipline and sense of purpose.

So a lot has been achieved in a generally positive direction.

The difficulty comes from the psychological aspects of the dissolution of the USSR:

• formally the Russian elite accept Ukraine's and the other CIS states' independence. But because they (rightly) see 'Westernisation' as a threat to their privileged and untransparent status, they do not want Ukraine to modernise according to normal European standards. So Western support for the tendencies which want reform, transparency and modernisation becomes a 'threat to Russia's interests'.
• the loss of Big Power status has been especially painful. Rather than appear to accept limits on what Russian diplomacy can now do by being 'merely' part of a pro-reform bloc under US leadership, Moscow tries to project power by being awkward and obstructive - see Russia's disgraceful support for Mugabe at the UN, a classic example of the Russian leadership having nothing at stake and blocking pressure designed to bring about improvements for the mass of Zimbabweans
• elsewhere the Russians have just not tried to make use of their strong KGB-style weight to improve the behaviour of obnoxious regimes such as Iran and North Korea. They appear to dislike the very idea that US-led Western pressure might be seen to be working in such cases (since if that were so, their own role might be diminished), preferring instead to hold back and make half-hearted moves only when they 'get something' as a price.   

In short, the Russia we now have sees no real advantage for itself in the world's bad regimes (including a good few in the CIS itself) behaving in an increasingly pluralist and measured way, nor in other parts of the CIS becoming more 'European'.

Nor can the Russian ruling elite bring themselves to come fully clean about the violence and horror of the Soviet period - perhaps because their own families were either victims or perpetrators or both? 

All this is not an irrational or 'crudely nationalistic' attitude. It makes sense, once the basic hard premise is accepted that for the next few decades Russia will do better for itself - and above all its self-esteem - by defining itself separately from 'Western' processes and (as necessary) countering them where the cost of doing so is not too high. 

And, if some territorial gains can be made and loud warning shots fired across European/Western bows in the process to send a strong message of a new psychological confidence (see S Ossetia and Abkhazia), so much the better.

When the Americans pressed that famous Reset button, what new (or old) set of conditions and beliefs were they trying to reset?

Do they know themselves?

And how would they tell if it had worked?

Here (h/t Skeptical Bureaucrat) is an interesting report about apparent self-censorship among US diplomats going back some years:

One diplomat told The Washington Times that he has decided to resign in part because of frustration with "rampant self-censorship" by Foreign Service officers and their superiors that has gone so far as to ban "bad news" cables from countries that are friendly with the United States.

The diplomat, who asked that his name not be used for fear of retribution against himself and colleagues, said that, in one instance under the George W. Bush administration, an embassy in the Middle East did not report local government interference in elections. Senior management censored accounts of low morale at another Middle East mission that had been the target of terrorist attacks, he said.

More than a dozen diplomats serving in Washington and abroad told The Times that they agreed with most of the officer's critique, and that the censorship has continued to a lesser extent in the Obama administration. All asked not to be named to avoid retribution.

It must seem self-evident to any normal taxpayer that there is not much point in having diplomats if they do not send back their best, honest analyses of the places they live in, but rather shape their analysis to suit prevailing policy prejudices back at HQ.

Well, yes. But...

Your job as a diplomat is to represent your government's policy abroad. If after due deliberation your government has decided that it is in your country's interests to befriend the odious government/regime in the country to which you are posted, that is what you are paid to do.

It then becomes a matter of nice judgement how far and often you call that position into question. You need to find a way to get across to your political masters that the position to which they have publicly committed themselves is, for one reason or the other, unwise or counter-productive or wrong in principle. Part of Craig Murray's problem as HM Ambassador in Uzbekistan was his inability to do this with even minimum guile and judgement. See eg here. 

And it is genuinely not easy to get such changes effected. Other partners/allies may have views. Domestic lobbies too. There may be some deeply-held secret reasons for continuing the policy which even diplomats in the country concerned do not know.

In these circumstances, the issue is not so much self-censorship as avoiding fighting battles which have been fought and lost, or which are just not going to be won this time round.

This earlier post by me takes up that question with some real examples, and features an interesting exchange (well, I thought it was interesting) between Craig and myself which goes into the professional issues in some depth. 

Two examples from my own career.

1   Back in 1983/84, a couple of us middle-ranking young dips at the British Embassy to socialist Yugoslavia in Belgrade came to the view that the decay of Yugo-communism was such that this country could no longer sensibly be termed 'a pillar of stability in the Balkans' as the official briefs in London proclaimed. In fact, it was a crumbling pillar of instability.

We had various internal disagreements if not rows with our senior Embassy colleagues about this: how far was it true, and how far should those who felt the policy analysis was wrong be allowed to put their concerns to high levels in London? One of my first blog postings was all about my famous MTS/Non-MTS paper about just these questions.

2   I think now that the Embassy pulled its punches in reporting the massive devastation caused by Moscow trying to suppress separatist elements in Chechnya in the mid-1990s. The general policy instinct had it that the nascent democracy in Russia just had to be supported come what may, and that if that meant looking away from gruesome human rights excesses in and around Chechnya, so be it. That approach made political sense at the time - but what problems did it store up for later?

So, all this is not as straightforward a subject as you might think, the more so these days when just about anything is likely to leak.

Yet the hard fact remains. It is right to take a firm policy stand, and sometimes the only available choices are all deeply unattractive.

But a firm stand in the end is only as firm as the ground it stands on.

And surely Ministers need to know if that ground is not as firm as it looks:

“One has an eerie feeling of being perched on a sandcastle with the waters of economic logic slowly but surely eroding the base.”

The most important sentence I wrote in my diplomatic career? Both because it was right in fact - and because I put it on the public record that I thought our policy was wrong?

This week I distribute the prizes as guest of honour at my old school, St Albans School.

St Albans School is one of the oldest schools in the world. Thirteenth oldest in fact.

It was founded in 948 by the Abbot Ulcinus, whom I recall with affection. He was an avuncular prelate with white bushy eyebrows who chanted Latin psalms with great piety as he flogged us pert young choirboys with birchtwigs early every morning.

Later the school flourished thanks to a lucrative Wine Charter. The school still uses the historic Abbey Gateway which was attacked during the Peasants Revolt of 1381.

Its most famous Old Boy is genius Stephen Hawking, who, of course, was nothing special at school. Later in 1972 I was there to cheer as schoolmate Kirk Dumpleton whupped two other skinny teenagers (and future Olympic champions) Steve Ovett and Seb Coe to win the English cross-country championships - the only British runner ever to beat them in one race.

A distinguished former teacher who attempted to knock Music into me was Simon Lindley. He would make a half-hearted but witty attempt to beat the whole class one by one with a long ruler if we were too noisy waiting for him outside the old Lecture Room. Happy days. 

My own claim to fame at the time was more modest. I was captain of the school chess club which made it to the last eight in the Sunday Times National Competition. But I was Head Boy in my Oxbridge term. Creep Crawly Crawford indeed. 

The current Headmaster is the energetic Andrew Grant, who also currently leads the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference (HMC - national association for independent schools).

Should be a blast.

Researchers and experts have been studying the history of fairy tales and have traced different versions of Little Red Riding Hood all round the planet and back into history:

Whilst the European version tells the story of a little girl who is tricked by a wolf masquerading as her grandmother, in the Chinese version a tiger replaces the wolf.

In Iran, where it would be considered odd for a young girl to roam alone, the story features a little boy.

Contrary to the view that the tale originated in France shortly before Charles Perrault produced the first written version in the 17th century, Dr Tehrani found that the varients shared a common ancestor dating back more than 2,600 years.

I hope they have not overlooked this very modern version.

My earlier posting about Vladimir Putin's 'Letter to Poles' has been taken up (in a shorter version) by RFE/RL.

Have a look at the comments from pro-Russian types, which are especially agitated on the subject of whether the Red Army in 1920 was attempting another 'land grab' by invading Western Europe.

Here is Wikipedia doing a valiant job at decribing in 'neutral' terms the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-21, not a conflict most people in 'the West' have ever even heard of.

Basically, in the confusing circumstances of the end of WW1 and wider boundary changes, Poles and Russians lunged at each other for control of much of Ukraine.

The Poles made a serious miscalulation in thinking that Ukrainians would rise up and greet them as liberators. Many Ukrainians seemed to see the Poles as long-lost returning imperialists. Polish advances were quickly reversed.

However, the Russians were not planning to liberate Ukraine themselves. Rather the newly established Soviet ledership under Lenin was bent on spreading Bolshevism into Europe, and hoped to use the Red Army's advance through Poland to that end.

So, yes, Moscow was bent on another land grab.

Have a look at this fine RFE/RL essay by Vladimir Nadein, which covers the same sort of ground mine covered but with added passion about the way PM Putin scorned those who try to pick raisins from the 'mouldy bun' of history:

Poland is not the West. The West knows communism, but Poland feels it. Poland knows how it tastes, how it smells, what it feels like. Poland knows how prison-camp gruel tastes, how gulag latrines smell, what it feels like to have a pistol barrel put to the back of your head.

What good is Putin's criminal vagueness in such a place? A thousand Ciceros could not convince the Poles that the stale roll of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact contained even one single raisin...

Well.... Here I'm afraid I have to admit something that I usually try not to admit. Readers have no business knowing how much time and effort an author expends searching for the right words. Even in the best restaurants of Paris, the general rule is not to let the diners into the kitchen.

But Putin's "rotten roll" is a completely unique case. I have already spent half an hour trying to find a brief and precise definition. I have been struggling with terms and epithets, but each time I give up in despair. How much was expressed in this unique baked good!

... Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk preferred to avoid morbid comparisons. "No one in Poland has forgotten or will forget how much blood remains on our land of Soviet soldiers who liberated Poland from Hitler's occupation," he said.

Putin, of course, saw with his own eyes in what immaculate condition the graves of Soviet soldiers are kept in Poland, and he nodded to confirm Tusk's words.

"Soviet soldiers in 1945," Tusk continued, "liberated our land, but they were not able to give us freedom because they didn't have it themselves." Putin met these words with a stony expression.

History is great.

If it didn't exist, we'd have to invent it.

As many senior international dignitaries gather in Gdansk today to commemorate the start of WW2, Russian Prime Minister Putin (one of the guests) has written an open letter to Poland to give a clear and (as of now) definitive Russian view on the Molotov/Ribbentrop Pact.

Here is the Russian official version in English. The published Polish version is here. It is a well-turned and characteristically clever piece of work. And long - nearly 2200 words in the English version.

Let's go through it, looking at what it says - and what Messages it sends.

Invited by Donald Tusk, Polish Prime Minister, to take part in the commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Second World War, I did not hesitate to accept the invitation, I could not do otherwise: because the war took a heavy toll of 27 million lives of my compatriots, and every Russian family keeps both the sorrow of loss and the honor of the Great Victory...

First message: Poland bangs on about the role of the Soviet Union in starting WW2. Attack is the best form of defence. Onward!

No judge can give a totally unbiased verdict on what was in the past. And no country can boast of having avoided tragedies, dramatic turning points or state decisions having nothing to do with high morals. If we are eager to have peaceful and happy future, we must draw lessons from history. However, exploiting memory, anatomizing history and seeking pretexts for mutual complaints and resentment causes a lot of harm and proves lack of responsibility.

Message:  there's no real 'truth' in all this, so why talk about it so much? Let's all be ... responsible.

The canvas of history is not a third-rate copy which can be roughly retouched or, following customer's orders, modified by the addition of bright of dark tints. Unfortunately, such attempts to rehash the past are quite common today. We witness the efforts to tailor history to the immediate political needs. Some countries went even further, making the Nazi accomplices heroes, placing victims on a par with executioners, and liberators - with occupants.

Message:  no 'equating' Nazism with Soviet Communism, you pathetic ungrateful Balts and others.

The situation in Europe prior to the Second World War is considered fragmentarily, regardless of the cause-and-effect relationship. It is indicative that history is often slanted by those who actually apply double standards in modern politics.

Message:  any attempt to look at these events on the basis of clear standards is necessarily hypocritical and false, since there's no 'truth' anyway, plus those who assert such standards invariably fail to live by them, so what they say can not count.

One cannot help but wonder to what extend such myths-makers differ from the authors of the memorable "Brief Course of Russian History" published in the Stalin period, where all names or events uncomfortable to the "leader of all nations" would be erased and stereotyped and completely ideology-based versions of reality would be imposed.

Message:  yes - you too are no better than Stalinists, so don't accuse me of being one.

Thus, today we are expected to admit without any hesitation that the only "trigger" of the Second World War was the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact of 23 August 1939.

However, those who advocate such a position neglect simple things - did not the Treaty of Versailles which drew the bottom line of the First World War leave a lot of "time bombs", the main of which was not only the registered defeat of Germany but also its humiliation. Did not the borders in Europe begin to crumble much earlier than 1 September 1939? What about the Anschluss of Austria and Czechoslovakia being torn to pieces, when not only Germany, but also Hungary and Poland in fact took part in the territorial repartition of Europe.

Message:  Germany was 'humiliated' by the Versailles settlement which you wrote, so what did you expect? Plus things were falling apart anyway before we started taking our slice. That means you Poland (Note: Good Point.)

And is it possible to turn a blind eye to the backstage attempts of Western democracies to "buy off" Hitler and redirect his aggression "eastwards" and to the systematic and generally tolerated removal of security safeguards and arms restrictious system in Europe?

Finally, what was the military and political echo of the collusion that took place in Munich on 29 September 1938? Maybe it was then when Hitler finally decided that "everything was allowed". That neither France nor England would "lift a finger" to protect their allies.

Message:  you Westerners were weak but crafty in dealing with Hitler - who are you to talk now?

There is no doubt that one (sic) can have all the reasons to condemn the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact concluded in August of 1939. But a year before, in Munich, France and England signed a well-known treaty with Hitler and thus destroyed all the hope for a united front to fight fascism.

Message:  the M/R Pact was the inevitable consequence of what others did. 'One' might condemn it - but I don't.

Today, we understand that any kind of collusion with the Nazi regime was morally unacceptable and had no prospects of practical implementation. However, in the context of the historical events of that time, the Soviet Union not only remained face to face with Germany (since the Western States had rejected the proposed system of collective security) but also faced the threat of waging war on two fronts, because precisely in August of 1939 the flame of the conflict with Japan on the Halkin-Gol river reached its highest.

Message:  as I keep saying, Russia resists being encircled by its enemies. Events thousands of miles away left us simply no choice but to invade Poland. Strange but true.

The Soviet diplomacy was quite right at that time to consider it, at least, unwise to reject Germany's proposal to sign the Non-Aggression Pact when USSR's potential allies in the West had already made similar agreements with the German Reich and did not want to cooperate with the Soviet Union, as well as to be confronted with the Nazi allmighty military machine alone.

Message:  we only did with Hitler what y'all did. And we were wise to do so. Right?

...the Munich Agreement that led to disunity among the natural allies in the fight against the Nazis and made them distrust and suspect each other. While looking back at the past, it is necessary for all of us, both in Western and Eastern Europe, to remember what tragedies can result from cowardice, behind-the-scenes and armchair politics, as well as from seeking to ensure security and national interests at the expense of others. There cannot be reasonable and responsible politics without a moral and legal framework.

Message:  and, by the way, since there is no Truth we define the moral and legal framework as we like.

... the moral aspect of policies pursued is particularly important. In this regard, I would like to remind you that our country's parliament unambiguously assessed the immorality of the Molotov - Ribbentrop Pact. This has not been the case so far in some other States, though they also made very controversial decisions in the 1930s.

Message:  NB this is very important. The M/R Pact was assessed as 'immoral' by the Russian Parliament back in 1989. I have mentioned that in this message. But I also have said that it would have been 'unwise' for the Soviet Union not to sign the Pact. What's immoral about being wise? So you stupid media people in the West need to say that I have condemned the Pact as 'immoral', even though I have not done so.  Got that?

All experience of the prewar period - from the Versailles Peace Conference to the beginning of the Second World War - provides strong evidence that it is impossible to set up an efficient system of collective security without involvement of all countries of the continent, including Russia.

Message:  if we are not happy, look what we do. That's just the way it is. You Americans - represented in Gdansk by some junior flunkey - can relax and stay at home.

Establishment of the Anti-Hitler Coalition is, without exaggeration, a turning point in the history of the 20th century, one of the most important and determining events of the previous century. The world saw that countries and peoples, despite all their differences, diverse national aspirations, tactical discords were able to stand united for the sake of the future, for the sake of countering the global evil...

Message:  you Westerners got into bed with Stalin and Stalinism to defeat Hitler. And thereby gave Stalin a legitimacy which is not going away.

The historic post-war reconciliation of France and Germany opened the way to the establishment of the European Union. At the same time, the wisdom and generosity of Russian and German peoples, as well as the foresight of statesmen of the two countries, made it possible to take a determining step towards building the Big Europe. The partnership of Russia and Germany has become an example of moving towards each other and of aspiration for the future with care for the memory of the past.

Message:  some things are for grown-ups.

I am sure that Russian-Polish relations will, sooner or later, come to such high level, to the level of genuine partners. It is in the interests of our peoples and of the whole European continent.

Message:  sigh ... you Poles need to work on it, and get with the Russian-German Narrative. Remember 1939.

We are deeply grateful that Poland, the land where more than 600 thousand soldiers of the Red Army lie, those who gave their lives for its liberation, shows care and respect to our military burial places. Believe me, these words are not simply for the record, they are sincere and heartfelt.

The people of Russia, whose destiny was crippled by the totalitarian regime, fully understand the sensitiveness of Poles about Katyn where thousands of Polish servicemen lie. Together we must keep alive the memory of the victims of this crime.

Message:  be very grateful, sensitive Poland, for our liberating you, even though we murdered and imprisoned thousands of Poles to do so. And let's remember the victims of the Katyn crime. But let's not talk about the criminals who committed it.

Katyn and Mednoye memorials, just as the tragic fate of the Russian soldiers taken prisoners in Poland during the 1920 war, should become symbols of common grief and mutual pardon.

Message:  you have your massacre victims, Poland - we have ours. No double standards. OK?

Our obligation to the past and gone, to the very history, is to do everything in order to make the Polish-Russian relations free from the burden of mistrust and prepossession, which we have inherited. To turn over the page and start writing a new one...

Message:  all this historical stuff is so tedious. We all know Poland and Europe just won't wear us down into apologising for the M/R Pact and all that. Why not look at some oil/gas deals instead?

* * * * *

Vladimir Putin has a weak hand to play here, on the merits. And plays it aggressively.

He basically turns the fact that Poland is making so much of this anniversary of Nazi/Soviet aggression to Russia's advantage. He knows that once the Poles have invited him they will be loath to be too critical of what he says, lest they come over as churlish, 'needlessly' generating a controversy when there should be a sense of reconciliation.

Hence this message. It deftly strikes a reasonable, fair-minded overall tone, while conceding precisely nothing at all on the hard-core post-Soviet view of WW2:

• The Munich Agreement is presented as no different from the M/R Pact, even though France and UK struck a deal with Hitler to avoid war, not to launch it by invading and annexing great slabs of other countries.
• The brutality the Soviets inflicted on millions of Poles as they invaded in 1939 and thereafter is not mentioned.
• Nothing is conceded on Katyn, which is compared to the messy aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1920 (another attempted land-grab) - did Poland's top leaders back then really sign papers ordering the cold-blooded murder of tens of thousands of Red Army prisoners?
• Warsaw's 'courageous' resistance is mentioned, but nothing about Stalin's shameful refusal to intervene as the Nazis razed the city in 1944.
• Nothing is said about post-WW2 Soviet crimes.

And Putin boldly puts all this in the context of Russian/German reconciliation. At the ceremonies today the UK is represented by Foreign Secretary David Miliband, whose recent speech in Poland did not even mention the Molotov/Ribbentrop Pact and why the issues around it still matter. The USA is sending only a senior official.

Thus Poland as the first victim of the Nazi/Soviet Pact is left today commemorating it sandwiched between Big Germany and Big Russia, Angela Merkel and PM Putin, the former keen to achieve substantive reconciliation on modern European terms, the latter nodding stiffly in that direction but in practice offering only Russian terms.

Putin's Message?

You see, Poland and Europe, I will come to your so-called ceremony - and assert my view of history, not yours.

I'll make some nice noises but concede nothing. But your sissy leaders and idiotic media will feel obliged to portray my message as a positive conciliatory gesture and say that I have 'condemned' the Molotov/Ribbentrop Pact as 'immoral' when - as we both know - I have done no such thing.

You will have no choice but to accept my view, thereby legitimising it for a long time to come.

In short?

I am strong. You are weak.

Понял?

Moral of the story?

Be careful which VIPs you invite to a party.

Some of them may show up.

And then it becomes their party.

Via Ed Driscoll, this fine rant from 2000 against those who insist that urban life is the best there is:

The book frowns on gated communities, of course, because they’re exclusionary. Conversely, they praise urban developments with dense housing - which include, I presume, apartment buildings with doormen and security systems. Driving past a guard booth or getting buzzed up via intercom - what’s the difference?

“The unity of society is threatened not by the use of gates, but by the uniformity and exclusivity of the people behind them.” Oh, blow it out your ass. Doctors will never live next to janitors. The streets of New York are full of people from all walks, races, creeds, colors; they are the antithesis of a gated sprawling suburban development. Does this mean that doctors invite their housekeepers to their parties? Or that racist morons cannot be forged in a big city?

“A child growing up in such a homogeneous environment is less likely to develop a sense of empathy for people from other walks of life, and is ill prepared to live in a diverse society.” Boolsheet! If this is the case, then we’d best forcibly integrate North Dakota, right now. And Cabrini Green, as long as we’re at it. Make them more like Brooklyn. Why, everyone who was ever raised in Brooklyn is perfectly prepared to live in a diverse society; naught but harmony reigns in the boroughs.

This sort of fatuous moralizing can be found at the heart of most anti-suburban tracts, and it’s why I distrust the general idea. There are millions of Americans living happy lives in affluent comfort,never troubled by the aroma of cabbage wafting in from a neighbor’s window, never knowing the communal experience of being awakened at 4 AM by a siren and knowing that everyone else in the building is up as well, and this fact just galls some people.

All that space . . . all that room . . . all those things! It just can’t be right.

From, of course, Lileks.

As it is a holiday today in the UK, set aside a few hours to peruse James Lileks' beyond awesome site: "trust me, you can waste a lot of time here".

Starting here.

And moving on to the extraordinary case of L'il Jerry:

Jerry wasn’t cute. With his empty eyes, his trollish body and oversized feet, there was something wrong about Jerry - especially since he didn’t grow as the years passed. He didn’t appear to have any parents, although he had “aunts” - perhaps a code word for the women who hung around the train station where he worked. He had no skills, no endearing qualities.

But he had one superhuman skill - the ability to deliver the Violently Ordinary Rejoinder which blew people off their feet (usually backwards) with stunning force:

That and the myriad other masterpieces on display will keep you happy for hours.

Maybe days. 

Aaargh.

Bosnia hits another political crisis or two or three:

Meanwhile, Bosnia's state government - the Council of Ministers - is facing a similar crisis after the strongest Bosniak party, the Party of Democratic Action, SDA, announced it may boycott the government over the issue of top appointments to key state bodies.

The SDA has been expressing its profound dissatisfaction on this issue since last week, after Bosnian Serb State Premier Nikola Spiric appointed a Bosnian Croat candidate as the country’s new EU negotiator, overriding SDA claims that that positions should be held by a Bosniak.

This week, the SDA and Spiric have continued their quarrel over this appointment, and over who should head the state's Indirect Tax Administration and Communication Regulatory Agency.

The quarrel over the division of top positions among the three main ethnic groups at state level, and the increasingly frequent outvoting of Bosnian Croat and Serb ministers in the Federation government, reflect growing tensions and animosities among Bosnian leaders, local and international analysts claim.

Which all goes to show that a system in which top jobs are allocated according to ill-defined ethnic quotas rather than merit is doomed to go nowhere fast.

It also exemplifies the deep problem in the overall 'Bosniac' view of Bosnia.

On the one hand they insist that the country has to stay together, all three communities sharing power nicely.

On the other, they just don't trust the Serbs/Croats enough to make that happen, not least because they know that the Serbs/Croats do not trust them and ipso facto are untrustworthy.

This logic of mutually reinforcing distrust gurgles around in circles, and nothing gets done.

At least all the BH political parties agree on one thing: that under no circumstances are people for senior official positions to be appointed via open competition by merit.

Maybe the return of my old friend Dragan Kalinic will help restore common sense.

It was always charming to visit him in Pale to discuss the goings-on in Republika Srpska, especially when he would take me out of the main coinference room for some whispered conversations away from the microphones.

Edwin Forprogress helpfully comments on one of my postings about Edward Kennedy and briefs us on the legacy of the great man:

Gee, thanks Edwin. But rather than sharing with us Democrat popcorn, pl attempt to answer the question I posed, namely how to assess the morality of building all those dreams on the reality of Mary Jo being left to drown. Which ends justify which means?

Here is a good account of how Senator Kennedy grappled with his gnawing conscience:

Having provided his constituents his self-serving account of the accident, Kennedy pretended to throw himself on their mercy:

The people of this State, the State which sent John Quincy Adams, and Daniel Webster, and Charles Sumner, and Henry Cabot Lodge, and John Kennedy to the United States Senate are entitled to representation in that body by men who inspire their utmost confidence. For this reason, I would understand full well why some might think it right for me to resign. For me this will be a difficult decision to make...

It has been written a man does what he must in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles, and dangers, and pressures, and that is the basis of human morality. Whatever may be the sacrifices he faces, if he follows his conscience -- the loss of his friends, his fortune, his contentment, even the esteem of his fellow man -- each man must decide for himself the course he will follow.

The stories of the past courage cannot supply courage itself. For this, each man must look into his own soul.

Looking deep into his soul, Edward Kennedy bravely decided to ... continue to build his own career, by pumping out legislation. But which of these many laws have really made a bad situation notably better?

Views differ:

Kennedy was, in the turgid term regularly applied to him, the "liberal lion" of the Senate, a principled and unyielding advocate for bigger government, higher taxes, more business regulation, you name it.

Yet many of his signature accomplishments—No Child Left Behind and the Americans with Disabilities Act, for instance—were not pushed through along partisan lines. In each instance, he worked with the respective President Bush and a slew of Republicans at the time to ensure passage.

Which brings me to the second point: The legislation for which he will be remembered is precisely the sort of top-down, centralized legislation that needs to be jettisoned in the 21st century.

Like Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.V.) and the recently deposed Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), Kennedy was in fact a man out of time, a bridge back to the past rather than a guide to the future. His mind-set was very much of a piece with a best-and-the-brightest, centralized mentality that has never served America well over the long haul...

As the world looks aghast as the US government struggles to pay its way well into the future, maybe some of this Dreamy legislation will come to be seen as just a bit too Real?

Damn.

When I wrote my few words about Edward Kennedy I had at the back of my mind John Profumo. But I did not make the link.

So Mark Steyn has done so, brilliantly (emphasis added):

An "accident," "ugly" in some unspecified way, just happened to happen – and only to him, nobody else. Ted's the star, and there's no room to namecheck the bit players. What befell him was … a thing, a place. As Joan Vennochi wrote in The Boston Globe:

"Like all figures in history – and like those in the Bible, for that matter – Kennedy came with flaws. Moses had a temper. Peter betrayed Jesus. Kennedy had Chappaquiddick, a moment of tremendous moral collapse."

Actually, Peter denied Jesus, rather than "betrayed" him, but close enough for Catholic-lite Massachusetts. And if Moses having a temper never led him to leave some gal at the bottom of the Red Sea, well, let's face it, he doesn't have Ted's tremendous legislative legacy, does he?

Perhaps it's kinder simply to airbrush out of the record the name of the unfortunate complicating factor on the receiving end of that moment of "tremendous moral collapse." When Kennedy cheerleaders do get around to mentioning her, it's usually to add insult to fatal injury. As Teddy's biographer Adam Clymer wrote, Edward Kennedy's "achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne."

You can't make an omelet without breaking chicks, right? I don't know how many lives the senator changed – he certainly changed Mary Jo's – but you're struck less by the precise arithmetic than by the basic equation: How many changed lives justify leaving a human being struggling for breath for up to five hours pressed up against the window in a small, shrinking air pocket in Teddy's Oldsmobile?

If the senator had managed to change the lives of even more Americans, would it have been OK to leave a couple more broads down there? Hey, why not?

At the Huffington Post, Melissa Lafsky mused on what Mary Jo "would have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history … Who knows – maybe she'd feel it was worth it." What true-believing liberal lass wouldn't be honored to be dispatched by that death panel?

We are all flawed, and most of us are weak, and in hellish moments, at a split-second's notice, confronting the choice that will define us ever after, many of us will fail the test.

Perhaps Mary Jo could have been saved; perhaps she would have died anyway. What is true is that Edward Kennedy made her death a certainty.

When a man (if you'll forgive the expression) confronts the truth of what he has done, what does honor require? Six years before Chappaquiddick, in the wake of Britain's comparatively very minor "Profumo scandal," the eponymous John Profumo, Her Majesty's Secretary of State for War, resigned from the House of Commons and the Queen's Privy Council and disappeared amid the tenements of the East End to do good works washing dishes and helping with children's playgroups, in anonymity, for the last 40 years of his life. With the exception of one newspaper article to mark the centenary of his charitable mission, he never uttered another word in public again.

Ted Kennedy went a different route. He got kitted out with a neck brace and went on TV and announced the invention of the "Kennedy curse," a concept that yoked him to his murdered brothers as a fellow victim – and not, as Mary Jo perhaps realized in those final hours, the perpetrator. He dared us to call his bluff, and, when we didn't, he made all of us complicit in what he'd done...

Which hits the nail on the head.

It is not that Kennedy behaved so badly on so many occasions. It is tough being a leader and having to take responsibility for far-reaching decisions, balancing pragmatically and even cynically what is 'for the best' and for whom.

It's rather that almost uniquely in political life Kennedy faced a personal life and death crisis, and in that existential self-defining moment left someone else to die.

But the true evil is not that grisly act of cowardice. It is not even that Kennedy knew what he had done and then made jokes about it all afterwards.

It is that so many otherwise sensible people who realised what he had done then lauded him and brushed those oh-so-awkward lapses aside, perhaps horrified and yet also somehow exultant at their own dark evil acceptance of his evil, thereby diminishing us all.

As Ayn Rand said:

The soul is that which can't be ruled. It must be broken. Drive a wedge in, get your fingers on - and the man is yours. You won't need a whip - he'll bring it to you and ask to be whipped.

John Profumo showed us one way to make amends and respect the soul. Edward Kennedy showed us the other.

Last word with Mark Steyn:

If a towering giant cares so much about humanity in general, why get hung up on his carelessness with humans in particular? For Kennedy's comrades, the cost was worth it. For the rest of us, it was a high price to pay.

Think.

It as far from here to Sergeant Pepper as it is from him to 1925.

Lawks. Getting old.

And so it is that I recently have meandered back again to a couple of the records of my, hem, student years.

Quadrophenia, by The Who.

And (gulp) Tales of Topographic Oceans, by Yes.

These were both double albums intended to be in effect one long piece. Few bands have tried attempt anything on this scale. Even fewer have succeeded in achieving musical distinction and overall coherence. The Wall by Pink Floyd is perhaps the best known effort.

Listening again to Quadrophenia I am amazed above all by the drumming. Keith Moon's non-stop assault on the drum kit defined the sound of the whole group in a way no other drummer has ever achieved. Try this: 

Keith Moon was not a distinguished scholar ("'Retarded artistically. Idiotic in other respects"). But his frantic drumming and scarcely less frantic attempts to blow up hotel toilets were more than distinguished.

As for Quadrophenia, the general theme is (of course) teenage angst but cleverly expressed via a young man with a personality split in four ways, each member of the Who having his own memorable musical motif picked up variously throughout the album. Not all of it works or is especially memorable, but the best songs are terrific; the sustained lyricism and sheer musical technique shine through.

The concluding punning Love Reign O'er Me is a wonderful piece of music:

Only love
Can make it rain
The way the beach is kissed by the sea.
Only love can make it rain
Like the sweat of lovers laying in the fields.

Love, Reign o'er me.
Love, Reign o'er me, rain on me.

Only love
Can bring the rain
That makes you yearn to the sky.
Only love can bring the rain
That falls like tears from on high...

On the dry and dusty road
The nights we spend apart alone
I need to get back home to cool cool rain.
The nights are hot and black as ink
I can't sleep and I lay and I think
Oh God, I need a drink of cool cool rain.

Topographic Oceans is something else again. Serious top-end 'progressive' rock musicianship (ie likely to be bought by students with too much time to pore endlessly over the imagery and obscure words), but serving up many wonderful melodies, coming and going and twisting and turning for over an hour.

Here the 'sound' is defined primarily by Steve Howe's guitar, Rick Wakeman's keyboard solos and Jon Anderson's beyond impenetrable but yet somehow touching mystic-style lyrics:

Skyline teacher
Warland seeker
Send out poison
Cast iron leader

And through the rhythm of moving slowly
Sent through the rhythm work out the story
Move over glory to sons of old fighters past

Young Christians see it from the beginning
Old people feel it, that's what they're saying
Move over glory to sons of old fighters past.

This shows how in later years they were still playing sections from it:

Here is an eloquent, impassioned account of a first visit to Auschwitz.

Not least the stunning bewildering realisation when you arrive at the site that the car-park in front of it is full of ... tourist coaches. People in shorts with video cameras, chatting away, perhaps looking forward to moving on to the next mass tourist attraction near Krakow, the salt mines.

The accompanying almost cheery summer pictures bring out well the baffling feeling one has visiting the camp. How did it all happen? How come it is now a tourist site? How come I am here trying to grapple with all this in my head?

Why is that tawdry supermarket over the road so close to the camp? How does one start to try to work out just how far a supermarket 'should' be built from the entrance to a former death-camp?

Imagine what it must be like to live in the town of Oświęcim now. A place of some historical distinction dating back 1000 years, yet now largely ignored by tourists and visitors who want to see only the fearsome Nazi camp built there because it was a handy European railroad crossing.

How to pitch a positive PR campaign for the town? What foreign investor will be keen to invest there, with that baneful camp so closely associated with it? But if one doesn't try to live a normal life nearby, does that mean that the Nazis somehow have won, blighting the area for ever?

One odd thing about Auschwitz is that the operational and policy responsibility for the camp complex and its future is shared among various local and national bodies, with different religious communities too all closely following developments. This creates many possibilities for furious disputes, as have happened down the years.

It also means that, oddly enough, the camp complex is not especially well funded. Nor is it easy to get a decision taken on how to make changes. 

As British Ambassador in 2004 I was told that the Auschwitz archives contained a large collection of poignant drawings made by prisoners, but that the museum/camp authorities did not have the funds to sort them all out and display them properly or publish a book of them.

I suggested that the 60th anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz would be a fine opportunity to set up an international appeal to make this happen - the British Embassy would be ready to help drum up high-level British support as part of a wider initiative.

Nice idea? So it seemed. But it shriveled away, no-one on the Polish side seemingly keen to take a lead and drive the project forward (partly, to be fair, because the sheer scale of the Anniversary commemorative events and the visits by Putin/Chirac/Cheney and so many others swamped everything else).

So Auschwitz remains there, with all its ghastly contradictions on daily display.

Yet haunting though it is to visit that camp, a lot has to be left to the imagination as the Nazis did quite a good job in demolishing part of the complex as they fled the Red Army's advance in 1945.

To see even more of what these fiendish places were actually like, you need to go further east in Poland, to Lublin. And the Majdanek camp, much of which was not destroyed. Macabre beyond words. 

Mark Steyn on Budd Schulberg:

As a 20-year-old Dartmouth student, Schulberg visited the Soviet Union and was shown its artistic glories. He fell in love with the theatre of Vsevolod Meyerhold, Stanislavski’s wayward disciple. Meyerhold loved the older stylized dramatic forms—commedia dell’arte, pantomime—and refused to confine himself to Socialist Realism. So in 1939 Stalin had him arrested, tortured and his wife murdered. He was shot by firing squad in February 1940.

How about that? Executed over a difference of opinion about a directing style...

Even today, we continue to draw a distinction between Nazism and Communism—between the bad evil and the good evil, the evil that’s philosophically sound, admirably progressive and just ran into one or two problems on the ground, like a great movie idea that went off course in development.

I have written previously here about the Two Vampires, Nazism and Communism, which - and not by some chance - were closely related:

There is a form of 'European Identity based squarely on a profound Stalin-inspired 'law of the excluded middle' attempt to cast any objection to Communism as 'essentially' support for Fascism. This Vast Lie has been remarkably successful down the decades, and still gives all sorts of cover to extremist collectivist viewpoints of different shapes and sizes.

Here is a classic explanation of why these two ideologies have so much in common.

My very final telegram from Warsaw to the FCO was called the Final Submission. It talked at some length about the unrelenting psychological pressure on the West emanating from Moscow and echoed by Leftist forces round the planet to overlook communist crimes.

Such as those of Vasili Blokhin, the most prolific murderer in human history among whose many victims were 7000 Poles shot one by one in the Katyn massacre|:

Blokhin initially decided on an ambitious quota of 300 executions per night, and engineered an efficient system in which the prisoners were individually led to a small antechamber—which had been painted red and was known as the "Leninist room"—for a brief and cursory positive identification, before being handcuffed and led into the execution room next door. The room was specially designed with padded walls for soundproofing, a sloping concrete floor with a drain and hose, and a log wall for the prisoners to stand against.

Blokhin—outfitted in a leather butcher's apron, cap, and shoulder-length gloves to protect his uniform, then pushed the prisoner against the log wall and shot him once in the base of the skull with a German Walther Model 2.25 ACP pistol...

His count of 7,000 shot in 28 days remains one of the most organized and protracted mass murders by a single individual on record.

Sigh.

It all boils down to a simple question.

Nazism's collectivist death cult was, if you like, essentially irrational if not mad, but with manic method in the madness. All that raving about blood and Jews and maggots, combined with Germanic efficiency in rounding up so many Jews and Romas and Poles and others and then destroying them.

Stalinism's collectivist death cult by contrast was ultra rational. It was based on the idea that the end (Scientific Socialism) justified any means and in any case was inevitable as the communist Wheel of History rotated. Bourgeois and other opponents simply 'had' to be eliminated.

Surely an intelligent deliberate murderer is more morally guilty than a crazy one?

Put it this way.

Imagine that Hitler and Stalin had been captured at the end of WW2 and put on trial for their crimes.

Hitler's lawyers might have been able to mount some sort of defence argument based on Insanity - that he was so crazed by that in any sense that mattered he should not be regarded as legally responsible for his actions.

Stalin surely could not claim that. The record of his iniquity and his countless justifications of it and the documentation describing it would all show that he knew exactly what he was doing and meant to to do it.

So, yes, any normal person has to 'equate' Nazism and Communism and find nothing of any true significance to distinguish them.

If anything the very nihilistic 'rationality' of Communism makes it even worse.

A conclusion terrifying to today's Marxists-Lite such as Slavoj Zizek, who makes his position clear:

• Fascism has to be proclaimed to be fundamentally worse than Communism
• since the alternative is to see Fascism as a natural reaction to the Communist threat and therefore somehow a lesser evil.
• Which is bad since it weakens a "postwar European identity hitherto based on anti-Fascist unity"  

Indeed. A postwar Europe based on the biggest of all Stalinist Big Lies.

Truth will out.

Guardian writer Jonathan Steele dies, and as such goes straight to Hell.

He is greeted warmly by the Devil, who praises his life's work and offers him a choice of bijou accommodation. Jonathan peers uneasily through three windows.

In the first cell is Tito, screaming as he twists impaled on a Balkan stake, his juices dripping sizzlingly into eternal fire.

In the second is Hitler, howling as he is cut to pieces atom by atom by fiendish imps.

In the third is Stalin, slurping and slobbering, with Marillyn Monroe squealing in pain on his knee as he grossly abuses her, for ever.

"Hmm. If it's all right with you I'll pass on Hitler's hell and Tito's hell and opt for Stalin's hell - that third room."

"Granted. Please, pass in my son."

Jonathan enters the room. Clang. Locked in. For eternity.

"Oh, Jonathan my dear boy, just to be clear. That is not Stalin's hell. That's Marilyn Monroe's hell..."

Silence.

Then scuffling noises.

Then a very long shriek.

* * * * *

Here is Jonathan while he is still in our midst sharing his thoughts with us about the Molotov/Ribbentrop Pact :

"... the issue is still a political football" 

You know, a bit like fox-hunting or MPs' expenses, issues people kick around to pass the time.

"... the issue matters as it marks an unpleasant effort by many Baltic and central European politicians to equate Stalinism and Nazism or claim Stalinism was worse" 

Unpleasant indeed! How dare these people make this nasty, grubby claims. Such poor form. Positively vulgar. It makes me shiver to think of it. Brrr.

"In part concerned by the continuing strength of former Communist parties in the region, they use the Nazi-Soviet "equation" as a device to smear any party of the left. (The draft resolution was watered down by left groups in the European parliament.)" 

Phew. Thank goodness for left groups in the European Parliament, holding the line against any such 'equation'.

"It is also a barely disguised attempt to maintain extreme wariness, if not outright hostility, to contemporary Russia." 

Good grief, these people are just stupid. Can't they see that Putin's peace-loving dismemberment of Georgia last year was in Georgia's and Europe's best interests?

"The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact certainly showed Stalin to be as cynical as Hitler." 

I accept that Stalin was cynical. You know, like David Cameron and Tony Blair, but not quite as odious and public-schooly.

"But to jump from that to equate the two men's record or ideology does not accord with reality." 

Let's jump from cynicism to the reality of Stalin's murder of many millions of people, and then be realistic.

"Nor does it take account of the fact that Soviet policy evolved after Stalin's death so that political activity, let alone ordinary family life, in the two decades under Brezhnev was not subject to arbitrary terror." 

No, let's not mention all those tiresome communist murders. Once Stalin left communism was all not so bad, really. No, really!

"Rightwing Baltic politicians have a point in saying most other Europeans are unaware of Stalin's mass deportations from the Baltics. Perhaps 100,000 people were sent to Siberia after 1939 or when the Red Army defeated the Nazis and re-entered the region. But to believe that western Europeans did not know about the Gulag ignores the massive influence of Alexander Solzhenitsyn after his books were translated into every European language in the 1970s."  

Huh? OK, we will mention some of them. But not the mass deportations of Poles, or Katyn, or the thousands of summary murders of democrats across Eastern Europe after WW2, or the blighted lives of millions of people. Only unpleasant Rightwing (sic) people dwell on such trivia.

"There is always more to learn, and historians are always trying to re-interpret. One of the biggest areas which remains to be explored is the extent of local civilian participation in the Nazis' central European killing fields." 

Quite so. The Nazis and Soviets were merely opening the way to all that latent evil in these unpleasant central European people. In a way, a sort of much-needed therapy for them - to get it all off their chests, once and for all.

"When it comes to numbers, Hitler's record is dominant. He killed almost twice as many people as Stalin. Snyder lists the number of European Jews murdered under German auspices at 5.7 million, German starvation of Soviet citizens at about 4 million and mass reprisal killings against civilians, mainly for actual or suspected partisan activity, as at least 750,000. Stalin killed about 5.5 million Soviet citizens by starvation and had about 700,000 people shot in the prewar Great Terror." 

Can't you people do elementary maths? Hitler killed about 10 million and Stalin killed only 5 million. So Hitler was twice as bad as Stalin, duh. In fact, Stalin was 50% less bad than Hitler, well on the way to being not bad at all.

So no way can you equate them.

NO WAY.

"There is a difference between memory and history ... But, important though it is to be reminded how the Soviet authorities (until 1989) blamed their 1940 massacre of imprisoned Polish officers on the Nazis, one should not forget that in Operation Tannenberg the Nazis killed a comparable number of Polish intellectuals a few months earlier." 

No, let one not forget that. In fact, it's far more important. Because as I have already pointed out to you dullards, life under Brezhnev was not subject to arbitrary terror, only unarbitrary terror, so the fact that the Soviets kept on lying for decades about Katyn is quite beside the point.

"Is there a moral?" 

In your case, Jonathan, no. Only an immoral.

"The Baltic Way's commemoration of Molotov-Ribbentrop sent a particular message in August 1989 by breaking a 50-year taboo and expressing a widespread demand for independence. But what was right in one part of Europe at a special moment should not be extended across the continent for ever."  

For ever is the time you'll spend in that cell being rogered by whiskery vodka-reeking Stalin, my friend.

But let's agree that until the Left stops making excuses for Stalinism and the Russian government opens all the communist archives once and for all and lets the truth out, we have to assume that Moscow's overall attitudes and motives remain at best ambiguous. Hence remembering events such as these plays an essential part in defining modern Europe.

"History is too complex and sensitive to be left to politicians. First they manipulate anniversaries, then they move to textbooks, and the slide gathers speed." 

Why have you started talking about Russia all of a sudden?

* * * * *

The. Most. Catastrophically. Bad. Guardian. Article.

Ever?

Most of the noise generated by Foreign Secretary David Miliband's observations on a BBC Great Lives radio programme has been linked to his words on terrorism:

Asked by presenter Matthew Parris whether there were any circumstances in which terrorism was justified, Mr Miliband said: ‘Yes, there are circumstances in which it is justifiable, and yes, there are circumstances in which it is effective.’

He added: ‘The importance for me is that the South African example proved something remarkable: the apartheid regime looked like a regime that would last forever, and it was blown down.

It is hard to argue that, on its own, a political struggle would have delivered. The striking at the heart of a regime’s claim on a monopoly of power, which the ANC’s armed wing represented, was very significant.’

Eeek.

Where to start?

On the Miliband/terrorism point, the FS was either simply wrong or missed a key point.

It is not whether terrorism is 'morally justifiable'. It is whether those who use terrorist methods to win power are more likely than not to use terror to stay in it.

Insofar as South Africa has emerged from apartheid 'peacefully' and today is in not too bad shape, it is because the ANC/SACP did not use terrorism (other than against fellow Africans which as we know did not count) on any great scale.

On the whole (and wisely, albeit at great cost) the South African masses did not rise up violently against apartheid, but let unrelenting pressures and contradictions of different shapes and sizes erode it.

In fact, if there was an ANC/SACP armed struggle at all it was against other African groupings (PAC/AZAPO/Inkatha). Which is why some 30,000 Africans and almost no 'whites' were massacred in South Africa's legendary Peaceful Transition to Democracy.

Plus the ANC/SACP/UDF in the mid-1980s had a clear policy of unleashing 'the worse, the better' revolutionary terror in the townships, with necklacings and other horrors being perpetrated by groups of demonic school-children. Hence, 20+ years later, South Africa's amazing violent crime rate.

In short, ANC/SACP terrorism did not 'blow down' apartheid. P W Botha's heart attack and the collapse of Communism in Europe did.

The BBC link to the interview coyly describes Joe Slovo as a 'leading member of the ANC and the first Housing Minister in Nelson Mandela's government'. The point, of course, is that Slovo was the leading South African communist and formal head of the 'military wing' of the ANC/SACP alliance. Slovo was at the heart of ANC/SACP policy-making for years, plus a close suck-up of Moscow and  vigorous apologist for Communism anywhere he found it.

So here we have the ghoulish spectacle of British Foreign Secretary David Miliband extolling the merits of this dark character, a great friend of his own Marxist father Ralph Miliband.

Slovo by the usual standards of Communists was something of a moderate and pragmatist. He had to be. Years of exile forced him to grasp that the South African masses were not to be mobilised for a brisk, amazingly violent surge aimed at toppling apartheid. And he seems to have been avuncular in large doses, chatting over Marxist ideology with assorted Milibands. What a great life indeed!

Yet Slovo has to bear a significant responsibility for the carnage inflicted by the SACP/ANC in the townships in its drive for sole power as apartheid ended, and the calamitous crime-rate thereafter. Not an issue I suspect the Miliband family has given much thought to, such is the Labour Party's fevered admiration for the ANC/SACP.

Plus, while Slovo was devoted to the cause of freedom for South Africans, he was openly and shamefully against freedom for those trying to cast off communism.

See how the SACP urged Moscow to suppress the pro-freedom movement in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Slovo later claimed to have had personal doubts about this, but fealty to Moscow was a prerequisite for leadership in the anti-apartheid struggle. And that was what counted, not some higher principle of real empowerment and freedom for all.

His ideological writings were ghastly beyond description. His famous piece Has Socialism Failed written in 1990 is a cracker of the genre. It agonizes over the ruin which has come to the classic Communist project as the Berlin Wall crashed, and meanders in a jargonised pseudo-logical way towards a purported condemnation of the 'Stalinism' which Slovo had championed for most of his life.

Avuncular Joe scratches for nuggets of Marxist hope in the wreckage:

The transformations which have occurred in Poland, Hungary, the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria are revolutionary in scope. With the exception of Romania, is there another example in human history in which those in power have responded to the inevitable with such a civilised and pacific resignation?

We should remember De Gaulle's military response in 1968 when ten million workers and students filled the streets of Paris. It is not difficult to forecast how Bush or Thatcher would deal with millions in their streets supported by general strikes demanding the overthrow of their system of rule.

Huh?

Of course for Slovo Communism in fact did quite well in lots of respects:

Among other things, statistics recently published in The Economist (UK) show that in the Soviet Union - after only 70 years of socialist endeavour in what was one of the most backward countries in the capitalist world - there are more graduate engineers than in the US, more graduate research scientists than in Japan and more medical doctors per head than in Western Europe. It also produces more steel, fuel and energy than any other country (The World in the 1990s; Economist publication).

How many capitalist countries can match the achievements of most of the socialist world in the provision of social security, child care, the ending of cultural backwardness, and so on? There is certainly no country in the world which can beat Cuba's record in the sphere of health care.

Lies and/or specious drivel.

It was all just a mistake:

We believe, however, that the theory of Marxism, in all its essential respects, remains valid and provides an indispensable theoretical guide to achieve a society free of all forms of exploitation of person by person.

The major weaknesses which have emerged in the practice of socialism are the results of distortions and misapplications. They do not flow naturally from the basic concepts of Marxism whose core is essentially humane and democratic and which project a social order with an economic potential vastly superior to that of capitalism.

My own abiding personal memory of Slovo comes from 1990, a huge rally organised by the ANC/SACP in Jo'burg soon after they were unbanned. Slovo was the final speaker. The crowd had been brought to life by the late Chris Hani leading rounds of cheery Kill the Boer chants and dancing.

Slovo at last rose to speak. Perhaps the proudest moment of his career to date.

And as he started droning on, the Africans started to go home in their droves. Who was this boring old white man anyway?

Slovo on centre-stage could see for himself what was happening. The South African masses were at last voting freely, albeit with their feet. And not for him!

The more impassioned his voice as he glorified the SACP/ANC, the faster people left. It was really remarkable. By the time he finished he was almost shouting, but to desultory applause - the stadium was close to empty.

All the pro-ANC media and its white Leftist elite of course ignored this astonishing spectacle in reporting the event. It was not just appallingly embarrassing for themselves in their self-proclaimed intellectual leadership roles. Worse, far worse, it did not fit the Narrative.

Was Slovo's a 'great life'? In its own tenaciously dogmatic, blinkered, selfish blood-flecked way, perhaps it was.

Does he deserve a fawning BBC piece led by a British Foreign Secretary?

No.

If Mr Miliband is looking for a real Great Life hero, why not go for a poorly educated working man who led a true bloodless democratic revolution in the part of Europe where the Slovo and Miliband families came from?

Such as this one.