Kiev: Fun Zip Wire; Great Catacombs; Not Worth Dying For...
In the unlikely event you ever find yourself in Ukraine’s capital Kiev, here are the three things I recommend: 1. The spooky catacombs under the complex of churches called Kiev Pechersk Lavra 2. The flea market, where you can still occasionally pick up authentic WWII memorabilia. 3. The thrilling zip wire which takes you scarily over the city’s ring road, then the river Dnieper and finally to the tranquil area where the locals play chess and have picnics.
One thing I don’t recommend you do is try Chicken Kiev, other than for the obvious reason of being able to boast that you have eaten Chicken Kiev actually in Kiev. It’s not necessarily disgusting. But it’s not as good as the version they do at Marks and Spencer, in my experience.
I’m glad I went to Kiev, once: two days is all you need. But let me tell you about the thought that never once struck me while I was there: ‘This is our line in the sand. Our Czechoslovakia. If those Russkies even so much as think of laying a finger on this bastion of freedom, democracy and Slavic loveliness, then I for one am prepared to fight this one to the bitter end. I’ll sacrifice my sons in a ground war. I’ll lurk in a bunker while they nuke Britain to oblivion then, the second the last shimmery Kate Bush song of fall out has disappeared I’ll be up there, with my kitchen knives, ready to slash at every Russian paratrooper that falls out of the sky. And when I die, you will find UKRAINE engraved on my heart.’
The reason I never thought this thought is that, mildly interesting though Ukraine may be for a weekend trip, its security and sovereignty are most definitely not worth a drop of our blood nor a scrap of our treasure. By ‘our’ I mean, of course, those of us who live in Western nations like the US or the UK. The idea that we have any kind of moral responsibility to protect this country far away of which we know little (apart from the zip wire, the catacombs and the Nazi uniforms in the flea market) is so stupid, so wrongheaded, so fatuous in every way that only a deluded psychopath (or one of the deluded psychopath’s pet gimps in the basement) could entertain it.
Yet if you believe the mainstream media our populaces can think of little else. We’re all hot for war with evil Putin. Or if we are not, the MSM seems to think, we jolly well ought to be. That will be why, for example, the Daily Telegraph’s front page the other day featured a model-pretty Ukrainian girl in camouflage uniform standing picturesquely in a trench. “Bomb Russia now or the hot chick dies!” the caption might almost have read (if the Telegraph weren’t so achingly PC these days). It will also be why the Mail is running endless stories with emotive headlines like ‘Ukraine’s amateur army: Thousands of young civilians are drafted into the military and trained for war in desperate bid to fend off Putin’s 100,000 well-trained troops.’ And why the Sun drafted in Douglas Murray to write a jingoistic opinion piece headlined ‘War is increasingly likely, with Putin amassing troops and relishing the sight of a weak President Biden.’
All right, Murray doesn’t write the headlines. [If you read the piece it actually says that war isn’t that likely] But he can’t evade responsibility for lines like: ‘He [Putin] accuses NATO of expansionism and of trying to hem Russia in. Plenty of ill-informed voices in the West go along with this lie. Ignoring, always, that it was former Soviet States that looked West after the collapse of the Soviet Union.’
Douglas is an old friend of mine, so I don’t want to be too rude. Let’s just say that I find his assertions here less persuasive than I do those of Peter Hitchens, who has argued in his Mail on Sunday column that if anyone is to blame for the current tensions in the Ukraine, it's the West not Putin.
In a piece titled ‘Poke the bear and this is what happens’, Hitchens wrote:
Ukraine is not Czechoslovakia. Putin is not Hitler or Stalin. He has no ideology, racial or social. He has been complaining for years, using every peaceful means, against the expansion of Nato into Eastern Europe. He has asked, quite reasonably, who it is aimed at.
Nato was set up to deter aggression by the USSR, an empire which ceased to exist 31 years ago. Russia is not the USSR. Keeping Nato in existence is like maintaining an alliance against the Austro-Hungarian or Ottoman Empires, which vanished a century ago – a job-creation project.
He rightly points out that Moscow (mostly without violence) let go of vast tracts of Asia and Europe, and unwillingly permitted the reunification of Germany – something Margaret Thatcher was pretty reluctant about as well. In return, the then leaders of the West said they would not expand Nato to the east (a huge archive of documents at George Washington University in the US confirms this).
In a similarly trenchant article last year, Hitchens wrote: “The best test of whether your own policy is good or bad is to imagine how it would feel if your foes did the same thing to you. On this basis, our policies towards Russia are dangerous and aggressive.”
Hitchens is right. The West - or at least its political class and its official media - holds Putin to the kind of impossibly high standards it never observes itself. Were the boot on the other foot and the old Soviet Warsaw Pact were extending its territory right up to America’s borders, the US would be rightly paranoid and outraged. So how, exactly, do we expect Putin to just shrug his shoulders and ignore it when not only NATO but also the European Union make overtures to Ukraine, which not only sits on Putin’s border and has a sizeable Russian-speaking population in its eastern industrial region, the Donbass, but which has cultural, historical and geopolitical ties with Russia far stronger than it has with the West?
You don’t need to be Sting - ‘We share the same biology/Regardless of ideology/Believe me when I say to you/I hope the Russians love their children too’ - to recognise the outrageous double standards here.
But it’s actually even worse than I’ve described. The cause of the current tensions was the supposedly spontaneous popular revolution in 2014 in Kiev’s Maidan (the broad avenue through the middle of the city) in which the democratically elected Ukrainian president Yanukovych was overthrown. Sure, Yanukovych was a Putin puppet. But his various replacements, such as Petro Poroshenko, were essentially US/EU puppets. And there was nothing spontaneous about this popular revolution, either: it was a US/EU backed coup. The West has no moral high ground here. Indeed, the freedom fighters they were supporting were actually, quite literally, Nazis.
Hitchens quotes a Wall Street Journal correspondent David Roman who covered the so-called (according to Wikipedia) ‘Revolution of Dignity’:
‘As a Wall Street Journal correspondent who helped to cover the revolution and its aftermath, I must correct the impression left by her review that a courageous popular response to armed repression led to victory for the protesters. On the contrary, on the last days of February 2014, armed thugs – many, if not most, heavily armed far-right and neo-Nazi activists from western Ukraine – stormed Maidan square, killing and capturing police officers and forcing the hand of a government that, as well as being unpopular, was bankrupt and diplomatically isolated’.
Poor old Peter Hitchens has been ploughing a lonely furrow on the Ukraine. I dare say the majority of his Mail On Sunday readers groan whenever he brings up the topic yet again (though probably not as volubly as I groan whenever he writes about scooters or the vital importance of banning marijuana). But I’m glad he’s so dogged on this score because he’s doing the world a service. If it weren’t for contrarian voices like his, the specious MSM narrative on Ukraine would go completely unchecked. The ideas that Putin is a dangerous war monger, that Ukraine is a blushing maiden whose virginal innocence is being threatened through no fault of her own, that the West has a moral duty to stand up for Ukraine’s territorial integrity - these notions are all pushed so stridently and relentlessly by the West’s political class and by their media mouthpieces it’s amazing we’re not at war with Russia already.
It goes without saying that if such a war ever were to happen it would be a stupendous waste of lives and money. It would also, I hope I’ve demonstrated, be entirely unjustified: whatever the rights and wrongs of Russia and the Ukraine they are a local issue which ought to be of little concern to the West, a) because there are no obvious good guys and bad guys and b) because even if there were, the armed forces of NATO’s members are so depleted, spavined and emasculated that they are hardly in the position of being able to play the role of world policeman.
By 2025, I learn from an article by Richard Kemp in the Daily Express, the British Army will be reduced from its current strength of 82,000 to 72,500, smaller than at any time since the early 1700s.
Kemp goes on:
We will have only 148 tanks - down from 1,200 in the 1990s, which is the same number as Russia has today on the Ukrainian border.
Yet still our politicians and our mainstream media are banging the drum for a war they must know we are ill-equipped to fight, which would bring us no benefits and which (almost) no one in the broader population supports.
As an example of the kind of jingoistic nonsense I mean, here’s a sample tweet from young Tory broadcaster Darren Grimes, who made his name as a Brexit campaigner and now hosts a show on GB News:
Genuinely confused at the position of those arguing that Britain shouldn’t be sending Ukraine military equipment. Do you really think that Russia, once the West has turned away as it swallows Ukraine, would stop there? Once a bully gets your pocket money it comes back for more.
‘Why do these people write such crap?’ I was going to ask. But then I remember that not so long ago, when I was a mainstream media journalist still stuck in the Normie paradigm, I too might have been susceptible to this lame-arsed notion that the West has some kind of moral responsibility to enforce ‘democracy’ throughout the world. It’s even possible, if you went through all my old cuttings, that you might find a piece arguing some such bollocks: that we have to stand up to ‘bullying dictators’ like Putin - or Saddam Hussein or whoever - because if we don’t international borders will no longer be sacrosanct and the world will just become a free-for-all where no smaller, weaker nation is safe from its aggressive neighbours.
Never again, though. The experience of living through the last two years has been a steep learning curve for me, as it really ought to have been for everyone. How can anyone still argue, straight faced, for the moral primacy of the West when its leaders have behaved at least as capriciously, cruelly, irresponsibly, recklessly and callously as all those ‘rogue’ states it’s supposedly our job to police? To appreciate the egregious double standards here, just ask yourself how the MSM would have behaved if, prior to 2020, Putin had done any of the following.
Prevented his citizens from travelling abroad
Kept his populace under house arrest, on pain of swingeing fines
Forbidden people from visiting dying relatives in hospital
Accelerated the deaths of the elderly in residential homes with the drug Midozalam
Presided over an orgy of corruption in which friends of his regime benefited from billions worth of contracts for ‘Personal Protective Equipment’
Lied relentlessly about the ‘safety’ of ‘vaccines’, jeopardising the lives of anyone foolish enough to believe the state propaganda.
Destroyed small businesses while vastly enriching large-scale, state-favoured corporations
Any one of these crimes, pre-2020, would have been worth at least a double page spread in the Daily Mail, or a Panorama investigation on the BBC, or a hectoring editorial in the New York Times or an extended feature in the Atlantic or Vanity Fair or Rolling Stone revelling in the unutterable awfulness of the man we are regularly encouraged to believe by our media is like a cross between Hitler and Stalin. But when Western governments breach the human rights of their citizens so flagrantly, suddenly it’s not worthy of comment, let alone condemnation, apparently.
Truly I marvel at the mindset of any Western journalist who still believes, after the last two years, that any Western government is in a position to take the moral high ground over Putin. Are these hacks stupid? Are they in the pay of the security services? Are they frightened of losing MSM work by straying outside the Overton Window of acceptable discourse?
Whatever their excuse, they are doing their audience a terrible disservice. If they were doing their job, they would be telling the world that the only people who could possibly benefit from conflict in the Ukraine are the same shadowy Cabal who always benefit from wars (which is why they put so much effort into starting them); that if war does break out over the Ukraine, it will be as a result of a pre-planned psy op designed to distract from the ongoing (and engineered) collapse of the global financial system; that Putin is no goodie but he is certainly no more of a baddie than Joe Biden or most of the other meat-puppet Western leaders currently running down their countries and slowly crushing and enslaving their populaces at the behest of dodgy, globalist organisations like the World Economic Forum.
They won’t, of course, because they’re far too keen on maintaining their cachet within the corrupt and blinkered world of the mainstream media to engage in such ‘conspiracy theories.’ But given the choice between never, ever again being paid £900 for a Daily Mail or Sun opinion piece and being able to sleep easily at night, I think I know which one I’d go for…
