Father Franks Rant's - DRIVE TO THE EAST 594

Try a thought-experiment. Imagine it was proved the Malaysian airliner was shot down by the Kiev regime. Would the howls of execration, of anti-Putin hysteria cease? How naïve. Western sycophants would argue: ‘But Putin created the civil war conditions that made the accident possible. It is ultimately his fault…’ Dig it? Nothing to do with truth or the facts. Or pity for the poor crash victims. Hatred of Russia is the point. QED.

A hatred that puzzles the priest. Why? What are the reasons behind British government and Parliament and media indulging in a sustained frenzy of anti-Russian odium? Watching the last PM questions in the House of Commons, it looked as if Cameron and nearly all MPs were preparing for WWIII. Mad. A fat Tory fellow called for the next NATO war games to take place in an EU nation close to the Russian border. Ye gods! What next? Nuking of Russia? Stark, raving mad hypothesis but, you bet, some NATO strategists are thinking it right now. Again, why?

Sir Peter Westmacott, Britain’s man in Washington, has called Putin’s actions in Ukraine as ‘thuggish, dishonest and reckless’. As it happens, the priest knew Peter when chaplain at the British Embassy in Ankara, Turkey. I remember a clever, charming and kind young diplomat. I felt he was going places and he has. I am dismayed he now goes in for this sort of crude, sabre-rattling language. I could, I suppose, point out to Sir Peter the rather thuggish behaviour of his own country, along with the Yanks, in making aggressive, dishonest and reckless war on not one but on three Muslim countries: Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Nations that have been broken, devastated and thrown into a bloody, ongoing chaos by their reckless ‘liberators’. Perhaps those who live in glass houses should not throw stones?

Why hate Russia? Think back to WWII. Churchill ‘was basically more concerned over preserving England’s position in Europe than preserving the peace’. So noted Admiral Leahy, Roosevelt’s Chief of Staff during WWII. Fair enough. Churchill’s job was to defend the British Empire. The Russian bear had been coveting Central Asia since the Tsars. Rudyard Kipling’s wonderful spiritual-political novel, 'Kim', shows Britain and Russia playing the Great Game, as the two rival imperialisms clash over the Khyber Pass. It made sense. India was the prize. No India, no British Empire. Fear of Russia was then rational.

The Bolshevik revolution made Russia an even more redoubtable foe. Communism stirred up anti-colonial revolts everywhere. Churchill’s opportunistic alliance with Stalin only accelerated the Empire’s disintegration. Today Communism is kaput and the quaint affair called the Commonwealth with its boring Games is the bloodless shadow of the dazzling imperium that once ruled the world. No British possession is threatened by Russia. Why then the hatred?

Is Putin out to export…Putinism? Pity there is no such an ideology. Only in the ravings of self-interested warmongers is Putin seen as another… Hitler! Pretty rich! He, the leader of a nation which crucially helped to save the arse of old Blighty in WWII. Leahy acknowledged the Russians as America’s only allies capable ‘of surviving without assistance.’ Bit biliously anti-British but…true, perhaps?
Maybe it is about…gays? OK, Putin, unlike David Cameron, is not particularly gay-friendly. Well, maybe he can be ‘converted’? Regardless, a dickey bird tells me that Western gays are flocking to hols in Russia. Apparently, contrary to media scaremongering, plenty of hot, blond Ivans and Dimitris hang about there…and all available! Heaven forfend, of course, but that’s the lowdown…

All right, Ukraine. But that country is historically, culturally and politically split. There is a Ukrainian-speaking West and a Russian-speaking East, at loggerheads with each other. (Even many Ukrainian speakers speak Russian at home, I know from experience.) The principle of the self-determination of peoples is enshrined in the UN Charter, as well as being morally justified. And the civil war was started by an anti-democratic coup in Kiev, that is fact.

Is Putin out to change the balance of power in Europe? To grab lands under NATO? But Ukraine is not part of NATO. If Putin attempted to seize an EU country, that would be folly. A suicidal act, as it would give the war-mongers the casus belli they hanker after. There is no evidence Putin is that irrational. Rather, it is the West which is menacing the East. Stimulating columnist Simon Jenkins (Celts seem to trump Anglo-Saxons at commonsense much of the time, eh?) points out how NATO and the despicable EU have ‘rolled forward over Eastern Europe to the Russia frontier, as if aiming the guns at Russia for its defeat’.

Why does that put me in mind of…huh! 'Drang nach Osten'. German meaning ‘drive towards the East’. The Encyclopaedia Britannica says it harks back to a medieval policy to subjugate and colonise the Slavic people of the East. The warlike monks, the Teutonic Knights immortalised in Sergei Eisenstein’s epic movie, 'Alexander Nevsky' were the spearheads of German penetration into Slavic lands. In the last century a fateful man with a moustache also drove into Russia to dominate it. You know how it ended. Could it be that David Cameron is a latter-day democratic avatar of Adolf Hitler? Don’t smile: it is Drang nach Osten in both cases.

Or is the hatred just the primitive, savage desire for a scapegoat? Originally a real goat driven into the desert after the Jewish High Priest had laid on it the sins of the people - see Leviticus 16. An insight from Holy Scripture – always best. Putin then as the fall guy? A man made to bear the sins, the shortcomings, the morass of crimes of the West?

Quite likely.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli