EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen today condemned Russia, comparing its actions to Stalin’s brutal engineered famine in Ukraine in the 1930s, and promising to take action to… export thousands of tons of Ukrainian grain.
Stalin was all in favour of exporting Ukrainian grain!
This is clearly a positive development, but the analogy needs some work…
Following Vladimir Putin’s ambiguously threatening “partial mobilisation” speech, this seems an appropriate time to remind everyone that a single letter transposition turns UNCLEAR threats into NUCLEAR threats.
Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov has raised some hackles with his recent comment that Hitler “had Jewish origins,” and “that the biggest antisemites are the Jews themselves.”
It’s a pretty obvious point. European civilisation has come to the nearly unanimous consensus that antisemitism is among the most terrible scourges of humanity. It is, in the words of Pope Francis, a “great evil”, hateful, “disgusting” (Keir Starmer), and ultimately destructive of human rights and dignity of all people.
Hitler was mankind’s ultimate villain, indifferent to human life in pursuit of his last schemes to control the world, and we all know where that kind of person goes to pray.* And really, once you’ve acknowledged how corrosive and malign antisemitism is, the question answers itself, who must be responsible for creating it, and likely pulling the strings behind the scenes to promote it…
[For another example of the Jews are the real antisemites and white racists are the new Israel trope, see this post.]
* No one ever stops to wonder whether AH’s well-known vegetarian diet was just a devious choice for avoiding a certain kind of meat…
Apologists for Putin’s Ukraine atrocity point to NATO’s eastward expansion as the original sin that provoked Russian aggression. Proponents of Western innocence argue that this is a matter of autonomy of independent states whose need for the protection of the NATO alliance has been confirmed by Russian aggression not only against Ukraine, but also against Georgia and Moldova. Realism wouldn’t allow expansion to include former Soviet republics (except the Baltic states), they argue, but Western Europe had an obligation to go as far as it could to defend newly aspiring democracies.
In this telling, NATO has done as much as it could, taking on the burden of defending Poland, Hungary, etc. It explicitly decided not to make a commitment to Ukraine, and so has no moral obligation there — though it has gratuitously chosen to go beyond any obligation in assisting in the current crisis. But I’ve just been wondering… I haven’t heard any discussion of the alternative to NATO expansion. I don’t know what was realistic at the time, but I could imagine that following a rejection for inclusion in Western defense arrangements, the non-Russia former Warsaw Pact might have formed some kind of defensive alliance of their own, aimed at deterring Russian aggression, but sufficiently separate from NATO as to be recognised as a neutral buffer. These countries collectively have comparable population to Russia, and significantly higher GDP.
In this telling, NATO would bear significant responsibility for the current plight of Ukraine, not because it provoked Russia, but precisely because it couldn’t afford to provoke Russia too much. This led it to absorb Ukraine’s natural allies into an alliance that could never plausibly include Ukraine. It is then plausibly the fault of NATO expansion that Ukraine seemed to Putin a tempting target, defenceless and alone.
While looking up something else in Uriel Weinreich’s Yiddish-English dictionary I came across the expression לעבן ווי גאָט אין אדעס — to live like God in Odessa — translated as “to live the life of Riley”.
I was familiar with the German expression Leben wie Gott in Frankreich — to live like God in France — with the same meaning, and I’d always assumed it was a reference to the large number of opulent houses that God has in France. But Odessa? It’s not a city I associate with cathedrals — though I’ve never been there. And would a Yiddish expression locate God’s dwelling in cathedrals? Is it originally a Russian expression? Presumably it’s connected to the German expression, but which came first? Maybe they both have nothing to do with cathedrals, but with a general opulence of lifestyle, in which God figures only as a kind of ironic hyperbole.
So many questions…
(Including about Riley. According to some sources the phrase goes back to a Sligo landowner Willy Reilly who found his way through to a contented and prosperous life after some ballad-worthy marital complications. There are no records of him ever having visited Odessa.)
Sunday I went to a small demonstration in support of Ukraine, in Radcliffe Square in Oxford. One of the speakers recalled his experience hearing about the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956, and himself being in Prague in 1968. The point being, the Russians are at it again, just like then.
But I couldn’t help but think, the invasion of Hungary was ordered by Khrushchev, who grew up in Ukraine. This is how it is with empires: No one has clean hands. The victims find their way to service of the empire, not actually to positions of power among the perpetrators. The same way, the Scottish and the Irish like to see themselves as victims of English colonialism, but their forebears were also fighting for and even leading the armies of British conquest.
The UK government is making a big show of considering, though they ultimately probably won’t follow through, scrapping the so-called “golden visa” programme, which allows wealthy people to bypass immigration constraints to move to the UK, in exchange for investing at least £2 million. This scheme is generally considered to have grossly abetted the growth of London as a world centre for money laundering.
Now, The Guardian reports, “London lawyers who help the global super-rich apply for “golden visas” to enter the UK have called on the government to reconsider its decision to abolish the Tier 1 investor visa scheme, warning that it would be “enormously damaging” to the economy.”
Kyra Motley, a partner at the law firm Boodle Hatfield, said the UK was jeopardising billions of pounds in overseas investment “because of a popular myth that foreign money is dirty money”…
Chetal Patel, a partner at law firm Bates Wells, said scrapping the investor visa because of increased tensions over Russia’s threat to Ukraine would be “unfair” to other rich people wishing to come to the UK.
“Since the introduction of golden visas in 2008, the UK has benefited from billions of pounds of investment. It would be enormously damaging to the UK economy if this was to be cut off.”
Weirdly, despite the fact that this is a purely economic argument the only people quoted are lawyers, not economists. I wonder whether The Guardian would be equally open to splashing on their home page claims by a group of economists that a new tax law would damage the integrity of the UK legal code? Particularly if those economists admitted — indeed, if their sole claim for expertise in this matter — was their personal pecuniary interest in having the law changed.
Honestly, is there any reason to think that the UK is suffering a shortage of foreign investment — as opposed to, say, a shortage of farm workers, which is well documented, and has been driven by intentional government action to exclude foreigners. And this despite the fact that — “popular myth” or no — the incidence of criminality among billionaires (domestic or foreign) is clearly higher than among farm workers.
Boris Johnson obviously considers himself a master rhetorician. His fascination with striking words and images, combined with his inability to structure a sentence — perhaps out of indiscipline, perhaps attention deficit, perhaps just out of a general mismatch between high education and mediocre intelligence — makes his speeches read like something out of one of William S. Burroughs’s less successful cut-up compositions.
The clash of tone and images can be jarring, as in the quote on the cover of yesterday’s Daily Telegraph:
Given the leanings of the Telegraph, I’m assuming this was intended to flatter Johnson, not to mock him. And yet… Illustrating an accusation of finger-pointing with a photo of the accuser pointing his finger? And that’s before we even get to the hoary Labour is Stalinist accusation. In 2019? Really? So Johnson has to show that it’s not just a tired slogan by bringing some historical detail into it. With foreign words. So they’re persecuting kulaks. British kulaks should tremble! Before the horror of Jeremy Corbyn, who would be just like Stalin: a notorious scold!
Here’s a crazy theory that I need to write down, because no one else seems to be saying it: Could it be that the Novichok poisoning of two ordinary British people in Amesbury was not, as most have assumed, an accidental effect of residual Novichok somehow lingering after the Skripal poisoning in eight miles away in Salisbury, but rather an intentional effort to keep Theresa May away from the World Cup.
British politicians and royals are staying away from the World Cup in protest against the March assassination attempt. Of course, no one cares. Putin has his spectacle. But May was hedging recently:
THERESA May has hinted that her World Cup boycott on royals and ministers attending the football tournament in Russia could be dropped if England were to make it to the final.
When questioned whether her stance could change, the Prime Minister said she is taking the decision “every game at a time” but the Government had been “very clear” about why the position was taken.
Wouldn’t that be just the sort of psychopathic trolling that would appeal to Vladimir Putin, to raise the embarrassment level for British politicians to come, or prevent them from basking in the reflected glory of their football team?
One of Bill Clinton’s most famous contributions to the political lexicon is
It depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is.
This was his defense from the accusation of having lied when he explicitly said, of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky,
There is not a sexual relationship, an improper sexual relationship, or any other kind of improper relationship.
It was immediately obvious that there was something strange about his somewhat tortured insistence on the present tense, where what he was asked to deny was in the past. Of course, we know that he was trying to be extremely clever in making a statement that was literally true, while seeming to deny an accusation that he knew to be correct.
Now Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has spoken out, not in his own defense, but in defense of the president:
“In all of this, in any of this, there’s been no evidence that there’s any collusion between the Trump campaign and the President and Russia,” he said. “Let’s just make that clear — there is no collusion.”
Is he being ironic?
Common Infirmities 