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hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk.rss.xml (71547B)
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7 <title>Mail Online - Peter Hitchens</title>
8 <link>https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/</link>
9 <description>Peter Hitchens is proud of his enemies. Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams once called for him to be 'decommissioned' and Tony Blair told him to 'sit down and stop being bad'. Read more from the man everyone has an opinion about</description>
10 <language>en-GB</language>
11 <lastBuildDate>Tue, 10 May 2022 19:44:57 +0100</lastBuildDate>
12 <generator>http://www.typepad.com/</generator>
13 <item>
14 <title>My latest conversation with Mike Graham on Talk Radio/Talk TV. Northern Ireland, Grammar Schools, Julian Assange</title>
15 <link>https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2022/05/my-latest-conversation-with-mike-graham-on-talk-radiotalk-tv-northern-ireland-grammar-schools-julian.html</link>
16 <guid isPermaLink="true">https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2022/05/my-latest-conversation-with-mike-graham-on-talk-radiotalk-tv-northern-ireland-grammar-schools-julian.html</guid>
17 <description>...can be watched or listened to here , at about 65 minutes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6cLYLzcg7w</description>
18 <content:encoded><p>.<span style="font-size: 15pt;">..can be watched or listened to here , at about 65 minutes&#0160;</span></p>
19 <p>&#0160;</p>
20 <p><span style="font-size: 15pt;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6cLYLzcg7w">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6cLYLzcg7w</a></span></p></content:encoded>
21
22
23 <category>Education</category>
24 <category>Grammar Schools</category>
25 <category>Human Wrongs</category>
26 <category>IRA (Irish Republican Army)</category>
27 <category>Ireland</category>
28
29 <dc:creator>DM</dc:creator>
30 <pubDate>Tue, 10 May 2022 19:44:57 +0100</pubDate>
31
32 </item>
33 <item>
34 <title>PETER HITCHENS: Part of the UK will soon be ruled by Dublin. So much for the defeat of the IRA... </title>
35 <link>https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2022/05/peter-hitchens-part-of-the-uk-will-soon-be-ruled-by-dublin-so-much-for-the-defeat-of-the-ira-.html</link>
36 <guid isPermaLink="true">https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2022/05/peter-hitchens-part-of-the-uk-will-soon-be-ruled-by-dublin-so-much-for-the-defeat-of-the-ira-.html</guid>
37 <description>This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column It is now clear even to the dimmest that the IRA have won in Northern Ireland. Their political poodle, Sinn Fein, has toppled the Democratic Unionists as the largest party in the...</description>
38 <content:encoded><p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; color: #ff0000; font-size: 15pt;"> <a class="asset-img-link" href="https://anmblog.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c565553ef0282e15469bd200b-pi" style="float: right;"><img alt="Capture" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8341c565553ef0282e15469bd200b img-responsive" src="https://anmblog.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c565553ef0282e15469bd200b-320wi" style="margin: 0px 0px 5px 5px;" title="Capture" /></a><em>This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column</em></span></p>
39 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">It is&#0160;now clear even to the dimmest that the IRA have won in Northern Ireland. Their political poodle, Sinn Fein, has toppled the Democratic Unionists as the largest party in the Stormont Assembly.&#0160;</span></p>
40 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">It is hard to see how this will not now lead, in the fullness of time, to the transfer of the Six Counties of Northern Ireland to Dublin rule.</span></p>
41 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">And what rule will that be? Why, the rule of Sinn Fein, rapidly growing in strength in the Republic, now that its grislier figures are dead or in alleged retirement.</span></p>
42 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">In Dublin, the party is ‘led’ by Mary Lou McDonald, who was mysteriously the only candidate for the job in 2018.&#0160;</span></p>
43 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Her Northern counterpart, Michelle O’Neill, similarly emerged in a process about as transparent as a North Korean general election. Both come from a pretty hard-edged Republican tradition.</span></p>
44 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">It is still risky to speculate about who really runs Sinn Fein, but as recently as 2019 the Police Service of Northern Ireland confirmed its previous assessment that the IRA Army Council ‘retained its oversight’ of the party.</span></p>
45 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Such things are increasingly unsayable as they might ‘derail the Peace Process’, but there you are. On the same grounds we have had to ignore countless bomb outrages, murders, bank raids, protection racketeering, intimidation, and who knows what else, by both Republican and ‘Loyalist’ gangsters, since the Great Surrender of 1998.</span></p>
46 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">This was sold to the Province, and to the British people, as ‘peace’. Many ninnies have claimed since that it was a defeat for the IRA and Sinn Fein.</span></p>
47 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">The only response to this must be the most savage sarcasm. Was the ‘beaten’ IRA forced to accept the mass release of its men of violence from prison, and the effective end of any prosecution of those as yet unconvicted?</span></p>
48 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Was Martin McGuinness so vanquished that he was compelled against his will to attend a dinner with Her Majesty at Windsor Castle, dressed in humiliating white tie and tails?</span></p>
49 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Now we see beyond doubt the true outcome. The Democratic Unionists, who once elbowed the official Unionists out of the way by pretending they could save something from the wreck, are now crumbling. This is because they cannot save anything.</span></p>
50 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">On one flank, their supporters are realising that the game is up. On the other, a more militant grouping is threatening to supplant them. They have nothing left to say.</span></p>
51 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Each day shows more clearly that the UK Government in London does not want the loyalty of the Loyalists, and wishes heartily that they would go away.</span></p>
52 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">The creation of a customs frontier between Northern Ireland and the rest of the country is about as big a hint as you are likely to get.</span></p>
53 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">So here it comes, and it will be a hugely significant moment in British and European history when it does. Because despite all the blather about ‘Good Friday’ and democracy, the handover of Northern Ireland to Dublin is the direct and undoubted result of a long campaign of ruthless murder, which the USA did not perhaps hamper or oppose quite as vigorously as it might have done.</span></p>
54 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">It will be the first transfer of territory as a result of violence in Western Europe since 1945.</span></p>
55 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">This is the hard truth, and, while I can see why a lot of people would rather not admit it, I think it is vital that it is openly stated – a total and unmitigated defeat, just as I said it was 24 years ago.</span></p>
56 <p class="mol-para-with-font mol-style-bold"><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">With the Bank of England warning (far too late) of inflation at ten per cent, I feel a need to remind you that on March 29, 2020, as Al Johnson plunged the country into months of mad, futile shutdown, I said: ‘Just you wait till you get the bill, in increased taxes, inflation and devastated savings.’ Told you so.</span></p>
57 <h2 class="mol-para-with-font mol-style-subhead"><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Condemned – by the lies of an evil empire</span></h2>
58 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">These days it is possible to get hold of almost any old movie, however obscure. But there are exceptions.</span></p>
59 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">For years now I have sought to find a recording of Costa-Gavras’s powerful 1970 film The Confession. It is a proper professional movie, starring Yves Montand, right, and Simone Signoret – reasonably big names.</span></p>
60 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">I searched and searched. I even contacted a company in Saskatchewan which specialised in locating hard-to-find videos and DVDs, and they admitted defeat. At last, thanks to the kindness of an alert reader, I have got hold of it and watched it for the first time in 45 years.</span></p>
61 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">And you can see why it does not often get revived. The portrayal of Communist cynicism and brutality in forcing their own loyal comrades to parrot lies and so condemn themselves to unjust death is not a story Left-wing people will much like to see told.</span></p>
62 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Deep down many of them have never quite fallen out of love with the old evil empire, whatever they say now.</span></p>
63 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Two especially terrible scenes stay in the mind. One of the accused, who has been starved and beaten for months before being forced to give lying evidence against himself, has been dressed in one of his old suits and put under a sunlamp to hide the effects of his cruel interrogation. But his diet of prison slop has made him so thin that his trousers fall down as he takes the witness stand. In a prolonged moment of horror, everyone in the courtroom laughs, even the condemned man, though they all know that he is about to hang.</span></p>
64 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">The other shows a pair of secret policemen, whose car is stuck in heavy snow, using the cremated ashes of the condemned to grit the icy road and go on their way. This actually happened.</span></p>
65 <h2 class="mol-para-with-font mol-style-subhead"><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Revolution that wrecked talent and promise&#0160;</span></h2>
66 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">When a Tory MP called last week for more state grammar schools, my heart sank. This is not because there should not be many more such schools, but because the Conservative Party is one of their main enemies and will never bring them back.</span></p>
67 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">I have just finished writing a book on these schools, and one of the main things I have learned is that the Tory Party was never their friend, and was happy to destroy them in pursuit of votes.</span></p>
68 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">The discredited Tory PM, David Cameron, Mr Slippery, had many faults. But at least he was honest about his hostility to grammar schools. Voters should learn from this. You need something better than the Tories, and soon.</span></p>
69 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Those who have bankrupted themselves to send their children to fee-charging schools, rather than endure the failed ‘comprehensive’ system, find that the great universities are open about discriminating against boys and girls with private education, even if they are academically more qualified.</span></p>
70 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">The Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge is not ashamed to admit his university will give priority to state-school pupils – because they are state-school pupils. He says: ‘We have to keep making it very, very clear we are intending to reduce over time the number of people who are coming from independent school backgrounds into places like Oxford or Cambridge.’</span></p>
71 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">The comprehensive revolution, a terrible enemy of promise, talent and true learning, is almost complete. And Britain is almost completely done for as a result.</span></p>
72 <p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;"><strong>If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down</strong></span></p></content:encoded>
73
74
75 <category>Communist Party</category>
76 <category>Czechoslovakia</category>
77 <category>Economics</category>
78 <category>Education</category>
79 <category>Grammar Schools</category>
80 <category>History</category>
81 <category>IRA (Irish Republican Army)</category>
82 <category>Ireland</category>
83 <category>Northern Ireland (see Ulster)</category>
84 <category>Soviet Union</category>
85
86 <dc:creator>DM</dc:creator>
87 <pubDate>Sat, 07 May 2022 22:05:48 +0100</pubDate>
88
89 </item>
90 <item>
91 <title>A Discussion of the Ukraine War on Spectator TV</title>
92 <link>https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2022/05/a-discussion-of-the-ukraine-war-on-spectator-tv.html</link>
93 <guid isPermaLink="true">https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2022/05/a-discussion-of-the-ukraine-war-on-spectator-tv.html</guid>
94 <description>Can be found here at 27 minutes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlTMRMRj030</description>
95 <content:encoded><p><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Can be found here at 27 minutes</span></p>
96 <p>&#0160;</p>
97 <p><span style="font-size: 18pt;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlTMRMRj030">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlTMRMRj030</a></span></p></content:encoded>
98
99
100 <category>Russia</category>
101 <category>Ukraine</category>
102 <category>warfare</category>
103
104 <dc:creator>DM</dc:creator>
105 <pubDate>Fri, 06 May 2022 11:18:09 +0100</pubDate>
106
107 </item>
108 <item>
109 <title>PETER HITCHENS: Coming soon... the day I stop watching the BBC (which is more narrow-minded than a 1950s prude)</title>
110 <link>https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2022/05/peter-hitchens-coming-soon-the-day-i-stop-watching-the-bbc-which-is-more-narrow-minded-than-a-1950s-.html</link>
111 <guid isPermaLink="true">https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2022/05/peter-hitchens-coming-soon-the-day-i-stop-watching-the-bbc-which-is-more-narrow-minded-than-a-1950s-.html</guid>
112 <description>This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column News comes of a heartbreakingly cruel survey in which 200 people were deprived for nine days of the output of the BBC. To ensure they complied, their homes were plastered with ‘NO...</description>
113 <content:encoded><p><span style="font-size: 15pt;"><em><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; color: #ff0000;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column</span></span></em></span></p>
114 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">News comes of a heartbreakingly cruel survey in which 200 people were deprived for nine days of the output of the BBC. To ensure they complied, their homes were plastered with ‘NO BBC’ stickers and they were required to confess any lapses.</span></p>
115 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">During the experiment, they were given envelopes containing the small amounts of money they would have saved if they had not been paying for their TV licences.</span></p>
116 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">Many of the subjects had originally boasted that they would happily manage without the Corporation’s output. At the end of this traumatic period, most of them whimpered that, actually, they had been mistaken and would happily hand over the money.</span></p>
117 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">As the report says: ‘Over two-thirds of the households that had initially said they would pay nothing or would only pay less than the full licence fee changed their minds and became willing to pay the full licence fee or more in order to keep BBC content and services.’</span></p>
118 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">The terrible thing is that this may well be a true reflection of reality. I once had some neighbours, a pleasant Christian couple of great integrity, hard-working and conservative, who to their dying day cheerfully watched BBC TV programmes despite the increasing levels of swearing, semi-porn and political indoctrination they contained. Somehow they couldn’t accept that an institution they had trusted all their lives was pumping electronic slurry into their living room every night. It was as if the grocers they had trusted all their lives had begun slipping packages of cocaine and marijuana into their weekly shop. It was absurd, so it couldn’t be happening. Yet it was. I wonder how much they would have put up with before they eventually realised what was happening, if ever.</span></p>
119 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">I am lucky enough to be able to afford the BBC poll tax and have for years paid it by direct debit. I support the idea in principle. When I lived in the USA, I missed the BBC a lot, especially Radio 4, and readily gave cash to local public service radio stations. During my time in Moscow, I depended hugely on the BBC World Service short-wave broadcasts, often heard through a storm of static. I used to be almost the last conservative who actually supported the idea of a national broadcaster on the BBC model.</span></p>
120 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">But in the past ten years, and more so in the last two, I have found it almost impossible to listen to or watch anything the BBC transmits, not just because of the predictably Leftist politics but because it isn’t any good. I watch University Challenge only to make notes on its ridiculous mile-long questions about astrophysics, women painters or the higher maths.</span></p>
121 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">The TV news is unbearable, apparently designed for simpletons. Radio these days is little better. I cannot remember a recent BBC drama which has not been poisoned by political messages, let alone one which was good. Recently I was able to see a bootleg version of a superb BBC TV series from 1970, a dramatisation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Roads To Freedom. It made me sad to recall how good they used to be at this sort of thing. Yet the series is unavailable on any BBC platform.</span></p>
122 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">I’m pretty sure this is because of the way it deals with such topics as abortion, drugs and homosexuality. Back in 1970 it would have been seen as enlightened. But 50 years of Cultural Revolution have made the BBC far more narrow-minded than the most bigoted prude of the 1950s. That’s why the day will soon come when I shall stop listening to it or watching it, at all.</span></p>
123 <h2 class="mol-para-with-font mol-style-subhead"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">Shabby way to portray a heroic fight</span></h2>
124 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">The Nixon era was one of the most thrilling periods of modern history. Daniel Ellsberg, the Julian Assange of his day, leaked the Pentagon Papers which showed that the US government had lied its head off about the Vietnam War and also knew it couldn’t win it.&#0160;</span></p>
125 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">Compare and contrast: major newspapers published his leaks and a proper judge threw out the case against Ellsberg, so that he became a national hero. Whereas, in modern Britain, Assange is in grave danger (unless you protest) of being sent off to rot in some concrete dungeon in the USA, and most journalists (to their shame) don’t care a hoot.</span></p>
126 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">So how disappointed I am in Gaslit, a new, much hyped TV melodrama about this era. Maybe the characters involved really were that mad and that foul-mouthed but the sense of a great contest between good and evil, repression and liberty, is completely absent. I cancelled my subscription after one episode.</span></p>
127 <h2 class="mol-para-with-font mol-style-subhead"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">I tried, but e-scooter menace is here to stay&#0160;</span></h2>
128 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">E-scooters will soon be a major curse. Because they appeal to human selfishness and laziness, they will be a huge commercial success once they become fully legal, as Transport Secretary Grant Shapps plainly means them to be. I tried quite hard to warn against this and was sneered at on social media for doing so.&#0160;</span></p>
129 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">I was told it was not important. I wonder how many will think this when there are hundreds of thousands of them, often in the hands of drunken or drugged people, careering along pavements, unrestrained by absent police, smashing into children and old people, terrifying the blind, and providing perfect getaway vehicles.</span></p>
130 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">I was sure that Mr Shapps’s so-called ‘trials’ were just a way of getting us used to them. There was never any serious intention to listen to the public or to examine their grave dangers. I can pretty much prove this. On March 3, I received a letter from Huw Merriman MP, chairman of Parliament’s Transport Committee, in which he assured me that the ‘trials’ were set to continue until November 30 this year. Yet Mr Shapps has announced that legislation to permit these death traps will be in the next Queen’s Speech on May 10, long before that date. Well, I tried. I hope those who attacked me have the grace to apologise when the reality becomes obvious.</span></p>
131 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">**********</span></p>
132 <p class="mol-para-with-font mol-style-bold"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">During&#0160;more than 40 years of active journalism, including a stint as a defence reporter, I have never&#0160;once been prevented from writing anything by a so-called ‘D’ Notice (nowadays they are officially DSMA Notices, if you care), until now. I used to scoff when people told me that such things were common, or that I was constrained in reporting by them. Now I cannot.</span></p>
133 <p class="mol-para-with-font mol-style-bold"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">**********</span></p>
134 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">It is time to ask some very simple questions about the Ukraine crisis, which each day threatens to spread, very dangerously indeed. I never really believed there was a nuclear danger in the Cold War, which I lived through. Now I think there is one. Though this country is not actually at war with Russia, and has no defence treaty with Ukraine, politicians and other supporters of this conflict often refer to ‘we’ when discussing it.</span></p>
135 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">Who is this ‘we’? What British national interest is served by deeper involvement in what is at root a Russo-American war? Must we yet again be the fifth wheel in America’s cart?</span></p>
136 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">How much are you prepared to pay in taxes for the munitions we send? If, as is horribly possible, British soldiers are drawn in, what British interest will they be dying or being injured for?</span></p>
137 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">Why is our Defence Ministry mounting a running commentary on the conflict? It is as if the Italian defence ministry had been holding press conferences on the Falklands War back in 1982.</span></p>
138 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">Is it because they wish to draw attention away from our very small Army and our shrunken, malfunctioning Navy? Yet our military ‘experts’ speak from a position of assumed superiority.</span></p></content:encoded>
139
140
141 <category>BBC</category>
142 <category>BBC bias</category>
143 <category>Censorship</category>
144 <category>Human Wrongs</category>
145 <category>Intervention, Liberal</category>
146 <category>Ukraine</category>
147
148 <dc:creator>DM</dc:creator>
149 <pubDate>Sun, 01 May 2022 09:34:34 +0100</pubDate>
150
151 </item>
152 <item>
153 <title>PETER HITCHENS: Did you ever need an arts graduate in a hurry? So why so many universities?</title>
154 <link>https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2022/04/didyou-ever-see-in-the-old-yellow-pages-or-on-the-web-anyone-advertising-himself-as-an-emergency-journalist-no-nor-i.html</link>
155 <guid isPermaLink="true">https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2022/04/didyou-ever-see-in-the-old-yellow-pages-or-on-the-web-anyone-advertising-himself-as-an-emergency-journalist-no-nor-i.html</guid>
156 <description>This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column Did you ever see, in the old Yellow Pages or on the web, anyone advertising himself as an emergency journalist? No, nor I. Did you ever, on some blighted weekend, tell yourself...</description>
157 <content:encoded><p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt; color: #ff0000;"> <a class="asset-img-link" href="https://anmblog.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c565553ef02942fa706a4200c-pi" style="float: right;"><img alt="Capture" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8341c565553ef02942fa706a4200c img-responsive" src="https://anmblog.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c565553ef02942fa706a4200c-320wi" style="margin: 0px 0px 5px 5px;" title="Capture" /></a><em>This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column</em></span></p>
158 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">Did&#0160;you ever see, in the old Yellow Pages or on the web, anyone advertising himself as an emergency journalist?&#0160;</span></p>
159 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">No, nor I. Did you ever, on some blighted weekend, tell yourself that you’d pay practically anything to get a journalist to come round? No, nor I.</span></p>
160 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">So when people ask me how they can get into journalism, as they sometimes do, I urge them to become plumbers instead.&#0160;</span></p>
161 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">First of all, they can absolutely guarantee that they will always have work and income, as plumbers will never cease to be necessary. This is not the case with journalists.</span></p>
162 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">So if you want to take up the ancient trade of scribbling articles, it would be best to have a standby. And a few months of unblocking sinks and rescuing people from flooded kitchens and broken boilers will give you an education in life, and what people really care about, which will make you a much better journalist.</span></p>
163 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">This illustrates better than anything else why Sir Anthony Blair’s call for 70 per cent of young people to go to university, instead of learning how to do actual jobs, is sheer foaming madness, and actively wicked into the bargain.</span></p>
164 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">Because for most of them, the experience will involve poor tuition and huge debts incurring increasingly vicious interest rates. And what will they have at the end? Certificates to frame, but no special advantage in seeking the rather small number of jobs for which a degree is really needed.</span></p>
165 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">As far as I can see, the wild expansion of universities, which began under John Major and exploded under the Blair Creature, had three real purposes. By raising the school leaving age to 21 it kept the official unemployment figures down and compelled those involved to pay their own dole by borrowing the money for fees, rents and food.</span></p>
166 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">It completed the foolish switch to an American-style school policy, which began with the smashing-up of the selective state grammar schools in the 1960s and 1970s. This created a high school system in which the 11-18 years are used mainly to socialise children into citizens of an egalitarian state, with a little education on the side. Education of a sort then begins in college, which costs a fortune. But real university tuition starts only when the young stay at college, for even longer and at even greater cost, to do second ‘Masters’ degrees.</span></p>
167 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">Third and perhaps most important was the transformation of universities from serious places of learning into hard-driving businesses, cramming in the numbers, joining the property rental business and paying giant salaries to their bosses. I suspect many British towns and cities nowadays depend heavily on these shaky places, founded almost entirely on debt. How they will cope in the new world of savagely rising prices and taxes, I cannot tell.</span></p>
168 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">But there are few things worse than giving false promises to the young. Starting wars is one of them, but Sir Anthony has done that too. How does he have the nerve to stay in public life? Probably because he has ensured that hardly anyone these days is educated enough to see through him.</span></p>
169 <p class="mol-para-with-font">&#0160;</p>
170 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="color: #ff0000; font-size: 15pt;"><strong><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Please act to save Julian Assange from Extradition</span></strong></span></p>
171 <p class="mol-para-with-font">&#0160;</p>
172 <p class="mol-para-with-font mol-style-bold"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">Only&#0160;Home Secretary Priti Patel now stands between the journalist Julian Assange and the spiteful fury of the US government, who hate him because he embarrassed them. The courts have accepted Assange’s extradition. This is quite wrong, because it is for a political offence, and unfair because the USA would never give up one of their citizens to us in a mirror-image case. I say again here that I do not like Mr Assange or share his views, but I would count myself a coward if I did not oppose this state-sponsored kidnap.</span></p>
173 <p class="mol-para-with-font mol-style-bold"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">May I ask anyone else who loves freedom and wishes to safeguard our independence to write, courteously and briefly, to Ms Patel, asking her not to send Mr Assange to the USA, as he has committed no crime. Also, Britain has a proud record of giving sanctuary to political dissenters, which is what he is. <span style="color: #ff0000;"><strong>The address is: The Rt Hon Priti Patel, Home Secretary, The Home Office, 2 Marsham Street, London, SW1P 4DF.</strong></span></span></p>
174 <h2 class="mol-para-with-font mol-style-subhead"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">Political ambitions that hide true scandals</span></h2>
175 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">The&#0160;new Netflix drama Anatomy Of A Scandal (starring Sienna Miller and Rupert Friend, above) is amusing enough, and an enjoyable watch. But surely the biggest scandal in British politics is not that some politicians led rackety lives at college. It is that they are dishonest about what they plan to do to the country. They hide their true motives and lie about who and what they are.</span></p>
176 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">We need a drama about how young revolutionary Marxists got together at Oxbridge 50 years ago to change the world, infiltrated the political parties, the police, the charities, the BBC, the courts and the schools, and eventually achieved the revolution they dreamed of long ago.</span></p>
177 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">It would be much truer to life than this stuff.</span></p>
178 <h2 class="mol-para-with-font mol-style-subhead"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">The one war we DO need</span></h2>
179 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">Last Wednesday was the annual Holy Day of Marijuana users. A sickly cloud of cannabis smoke hung in the warm air above Hyde Park as they gathered to praise and consume this mind-destroying poison.</span></p>
180 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">Despite its ‘soft’ image, its users often become insane and commit acts of hideous violence.</span></p>
181 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">Possession of marijuana carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison and an unlimited fine. It is a hard and dangerous drug which ruins thousands of lives every year.</span></p>
182 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">But you would not have known it from the relaxed response of the police, who long ago gave up any serious attempt to enforce the drug laws they are paid rather a lot to apply.</span></p>
183 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">Despite this, you may be sure Parliament’s Home Affairs Committee will shortly be told, during its latest inquiry into the issue, that there is a ‘War on Drugs’ in this country which has ‘failed’ and must therefore be abandoned.</span></p>
184 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">There is a long queue of blowhards waiting to tell them this. They say we must ‘treat’ voluntary drug criminals as if they suffered from a compulsory disease. Much of the evidence submitted to the committee is of this sort.</span></p>
185 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">But I and a few others have put in evidence urging enforcement of the law, as is successfully done in Japan and South Korea. We hope to impress on the committee chairwoman, Yvette Cooper, that plenty of people don’t want legalisation.</span></p>
186 <h2 class="mol-para-with-font mol-style-subhead"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">Where is the peace effort?</span></h2>
187 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">I have pointed out here before the shocking fact that the war in Ukraine is actually between the USA and Russia. Ukraine and its suffering people are being used as a battering ram by both sides. Some people think I have imagined this.</span></p>
188 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">Let me give you two good reasons for believing that I am right. The first is a recent statement by Leon Panetta. Mr Panetta was Secretary of Defence in the US government from 2011 to 2013. He was Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2009 to 2011. He was White House Chief of Staff from 1994 to 1997. He knows what he’s talking about. And on March 17 he said in an interview with Bloomberg Politics: ‘It’s a proxy war with Russia whether we say so or not. That effectively is what’s going on.’</span></p>
189 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">The second is that there is no serious effort to make peace, from any direction. Why is this?</span></p>
190 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">This is a disgusting war, and we have only seen a small part of its horrors. What aim can possibly justify it continuing a second longer than it has to? Shouldn’t serious statesmen be straining to bring it to an end? But I see no sign of this.</span></p>
191 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">I am sorry to tell you that there are people in Moscow and Washington who want this war to last, and hope to gain by keeping it going. Why is the British Government so involved in fuelling the fighting? Our last intervention in Ukraine, the Crimean War, ended in 1856, and turned out to be a complete waste of lives, money and time.</span></p>
192 <p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;"><strong>If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down</strong></span></p></content:encoded>
193
194
195 <category>Blair, Anthony</category>
196 <category>Cannabis</category>
197 <category>Comprehensive Schools</category>
198 <category>Conservative Party (see also Useless Tories, Tories)</category>
199 <category>Culture</category>
200 <category>Economics</category>
201 <category>Education</category>
202 <category>Egalitarianism</category>
203 <category>History</category>
204 <category>Human Wrongs</category>
205 <category>Liberty</category>
206 <category>Ukraine</category>
207 <category>War on Drugs(alleged)</category>
208
209 <dc:creator>DM</dc:creator>
210 <pubDate>Sat, 23 Apr 2022 22:03:27 +0100</pubDate>
211
212 </item>
213 <item>
214 <title>The Day I was advised to Get Fatter in the (vain) hope that I would then be taken more seriously</title>
215 <link>https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2022/04/the-day-i-was-advised-to-get-fatter-in-the-vain-hope-that-i-would-then-be-taken-more-seriously.html</link>
216 <guid isPermaLink="true">https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2022/04/the-day-i-was-advised-to-get-fatter-in-the-vain-hope-that-i-would-then-be-taken-more-seriously.html</guid>
217 <description>My latest column for 'The Lamp' https://thelampmagazine.com/2022/04/21/thinner-on-paper/</description>
218 <content:encoded><p><span style="font-size: 18pt;">My latest column for &#39;The Lamp&#39;&#0160;</span></p>
219 <p>&#0160;</p>
220 <p><span style="font-size: 18pt;"><a href="https://thelampmagazine.com/2022/04/21/thinner-on-paper/">https://thelampmagazine.com/2022/04/21/thinner-on-paper/</a></span></p></content:encoded>
221
222
223
224 <dc:creator>DM</dc:creator>
225 <pubDate>Thu, 21 Apr 2022 21:49:50 +0100</pubDate>
226
227 </item>
228 <item>
229 <title>Extracts from ' The Grand Chessboard' , published 1997 by former US Secretary of State Zbigniew Brzezinski </title>
230 <link>https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2022/04/extracts-from-the-grand-chessboard-published-1997-by-former-us-secretary-of-state-zbigniew-brzezinsk.html</link>
231 <guid isPermaLink="true">https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2022/04/extracts-from-the-grand-chessboard-published-1997-by-former-us-secretary-of-state-zbigniew-brzezinsk.html</guid>
232 <description>‘Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. Russia without Ukraine can still...</description>
233 <content:encoded><p><span style="font-size: 18pt; font-family: &#39;times new roman&#39;, times;">‘Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia.&#0160; Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. Russia without Ukraine can still strive for imperial status, but it would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state, more likely to be drawn into debilitating conflicts with aroused central Asians, who would then be resentful of the loss of their recent independence and would be supported by their fellow Islamic states to the south. China would also be likely to oppose any restoration of Russian domination over Central Asia, given its increasing interest in the newly-independent states there.</span></p>
234 <p><span style="font-size: 18pt; font-family: &#39;times new roman&#39;, times;">However if Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources as well as its access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state , spanning Europe and Asia. Ukraine’s loss of independence would have immediate consequences for Central Europe, transforming Poland into a geopolitical pivot on the eastern frontier of a united Europe.’</span></p>
235 <p><span style="font-size: 18pt; font-family: &#39;times new roman&#39;, times;">…</span></p>
236 <p><span style="font-size: 18pt; font-family: &#39;times new roman&#39;, times;">‘Can Russia be both powerful and a democracy at the same time? If it becomes powerful again, will it not seek to regain its lost imperial domain, and can it then be both an empire and a democracy?</span></p>
237 <p><span style="font-size: 18pt; font-family: &#39;times new roman&#39;, times;">‘US policy towards the vital geopolitical pivots of Ukraine and Azerbaijan cannot skirt that issue, and America this faces a difficult dilemma regarding tactical balance and strategic purpose. Internal Russian recovery is essential to Russia; democratization and eventual Europeanization. But any recovery of its imperial potential would be inimical to both of these objectives. Moreover, it is over this issue that differences could develop between America and some European states, especially as the EU and NATO expand. Should Russia be considered a candidate for eventual membership in either structure? And what then about Ukraine? The costs of the exclusion could be high – creating a self-fulfilling prophecy in the Russian mindset – but the results of dilution of either the EU or NATO could also be quite destabilizing’.</span></p></content:encoded>
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239
240 <category>Cold War</category>
241 <category>European Union</category>
242 <category>New Cold War</category>
243 <category>Russia</category>
244 <category>Ukraine</category>
245
246 <dc:creator>DM</dc:creator>
247 <pubDate>Mon, 18 Apr 2022 14:41:07 +0100</pubDate>
248
249 </item>
250 <item>
251 <title>PETER HITCHENS: We ruined Britain but what do people get furious about? A cake in a Tupperware box</title>
252 <link>https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2022/04/peter-hitchens-we-ruined-britain-but-what-do-people-get-furious-about-a-cake-in-a-tupperware-box.html</link>
253 <guid isPermaLink="true">https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2022/04/peter-hitchens-we-ruined-britain-but-what-do-people-get-furious-about-a-cake-in-a-tupperware-box.html</guid>
254 <description>This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column How mad we all are, demanding Alexander Johnson’s resignation because someone brought a cake into his office, quite possibly without his knowledge. The true madness is in the lawless rules under which...</description>
255 <content:encoded><p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt; color: #ff0000;"> <a class="asset-img-link" href="https://anmblog.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c565553ef0282e1502a1c200b-pi" style="float: right;"><img alt="Capture" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8341c565553ef0282e1502a1c200b img-responsive" src="https://anmblog.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c565553ef0282e1502a1c200b-320wi" style="margin: 0px 0px 5px 5px;" title="Capture" /></a><em>This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column</em></span></p>
256 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt;">How mad we all are, demanding Alexander Johnson’s resignation because someone brought a cake into his office, quite possibly without his knowledge.&#0160;</span></p>
257 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt;">The true madness is in the lawless rules under which he has been ‘fined by the police’ – a form of punishment expressly banned by the 1689 Bill of Rights, one of the foundation stones of our liberty.</span></p>
258 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt;">If I thought he would be replaced by anyone better, I’d be perfectly happy for Johnson to quit. As it is, I barely care. Our current Parliament is a care home for nonentities, unmatched in our long history for mediocrity, ignorance and dimness. Who would be better?</span></p>
259 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt;">But if we’re having resignations let them all go, all the panic-stricken conformists and groupthink victims who rushed this country into economic and social disaster in March 2020 and who invented the daft regulations under which the Premier has been fined.</span></p>
260 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt;">Let them all go, the Cabinet Ministers without the sense their mothers gave them, hypnotised by guesswork dressed up as pseudo-science and gripped with pathetic admiration for the muscular dictatorial stupidity of the Chinese police state.</span></p>
261 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt;">Let them all go, the Opposition who did not oppose, the MPs who wouldn’t think, the judges who refused even to hear a case against the ridiculous rules, erected on the tiny foundation of the Public Health Act of 1984. And the BBC, which closed its ears and doors to dissent. Not merely did the measures not work. To the fury and embarrassment of the Covid Zealots, Sweden did not take part in the frenzy of closure, house-arrest, ludicrous mask decrees and economic strangulation. And lo, its health outcomes are, if anything, better than those countries, such as us, which went off their heads. So here we stand, with inflation rotting our savings like an evil fungus, taxes soaring, millions of educations wrecked, countless small businesses ruined and worse to come, and all for nothing. As for the precious NHS, which we were supposed to be saving by all these insane actions, it was easy to see that the shutdown was in fact wrecking it. I looked up my articles: On November 1, 2020 I said: ‘Their decision to strangle our struggling economy once again in an alarmist shutdown is one of panic piled on panic and is visibly destroying the NHS they claim to be saving.’</span></p>
262 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt;">Two weeks later I said: ‘Many are already experiencing a far poorer NHS, with private GP services starting to boom.’ On January 17, 2021 I wrote: ‘Last week, official figures showed tens of thousands of cancer cases went undiagnosed as NHS waiting lists ballooned. And 4.46 million people in England are waiting for non-emergency surgery, the highest figure since records began in 2007. Lockdowns also kill.’</span></p>
263 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt;">On May 30, 2021 I said: ‘The devastation of the health service, from NHS dentistry to GP services and cancer prevention and treatment, is and remains frightful and will cost lives for years – a total for which nobody is being blamed.’</span></p>
264 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt;">We didn’t save the NHS. We didn’t save anything. We just trashed the country because we lacked an elite with enough experience and guts to do what Sweden did. Even now, most people aren’t angry about this. Instead, they are furious about a cake in a Tupperware box.</span></p>
265 <h2 class="mol-para-with-font mol-style-subhead"><span style="font-size: 15pt;">Nazi doublethink is no laughing matter&#0160;</span></h2>
266 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt;">I never watched the TV series ’Allo ’Allo! because I don’t think Nazis are funny and the truth about their occupation of France is far from amusing. I am baffled by the strange habit of dressing up in Nazi uniforms, which at last seems to be going out of style. But I am fascinated by the treatment of the very minor Tory politician Colin Davis. He has been suspended as chairman of the Enfield Southgate Conservative Association. This is because a picture of Mr Davis, dressed up very unconvincingly in Nazi uniform 40 years ago, has turned up out of the blue.</span></p>
267 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt;">Mr Davis says he was never a Nazi sympathiser and suggests it might have something to do with ‘wild parties’ he used to attend. Too bad. The mere suggestion has put paid to him.</span></p>
268 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt;">In the same week, there have been pictures of Ukrainian soldiers, actually in the army of that country, wearing SS emblems, published in British media, without anyone caring a bit. I think this may be called doublethink.</span></p>
269 <p class="mol-para-with-font mol-style-bold"><strong><span style="font-size: 15pt;">&#0160;If this guy says I’m right, then I must be!&#0160;</span></strong></p>
270 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt;">Many in Britain laughed when a senior American diplomat, Victoria Nuland, was caught out by Russian spies a few years ago. They taped and leaked a conversation in which she said: ‘**** the EU!’</span></p>
271 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt;">As so many British people feel the same way, they read no further. They did not realise that Ms Nuland, a fierce neo-conservative hawk, was mainly discussing (with the US ambassador to Kiev) the composition of the next Ukrainian government, as if it was for the USA to decide. Which, as it turned out, it was. Her choice for prime minister duly got the job after the coup d’etat which removed the non-aligned, legitimate President Viktor Yanukovych. This fishy incident is the best evidence that Washington was up to its elbows in that violent mob putsch – the incident which began the Ukrainian war, way back in February 2014. Well, Ms Nuland is back in the US government as a very senior figure at the State Department. And she has an influential husband, Robert Kagan, who is if anything, even more of an anti-Russian hawk than she is. And here’s a treat for all those who have been calling me a ‘Putin apologist’ for the past month or so. Mr Kagan agrees with me that, while Putin’s invasion is unforgivable and wrong, the USA shares some responsibility for provoking it.</span></p>
272 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt;">Writing in Foreign Affairs magazine, he said: ‘Although it is obscene to blame the US for Putin’s inhumane attack on Ukraine, to insist that the invasion was entirely unprovoked is misleading.’ He added: ‘Russian decisions have been a response to the expanding post-Cold War hegemony of the US and its allies in Europe. Putin alone is to blame for his actions but the invasion of Ukraine is taking place in a historical and geopolitical context in which the US has played and still plays the principal role.’</span></p>
273 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt;">I think Mr Kagan uses longer words than he needs to here, because he probably doesn’t want what he says to be picked up widely by people like me. But he is far too intelligent to pretend that America’s relentless expansion of Nato since 1998 has not infuriated many Russians, even moderate ones. Of course it has. In my view, it more or less created Vladimir Putin. I honestly wouldn’t recommend calling Mr Kagan, let alone his wife Victoria, a Putin apologist. But in that case, you can’t call me one either.</span></p>
274 <p class="mol-para-with-font">&#0160;</p>
275 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt;"><strong>A warship from the age of the Ford Cortina</strong></span></p>
276 <p class="mol-para-with-font">&#0160;</p>
277 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt;">This column is proud to say it has no ‘intelligence’ sources. They come at too high a price. So I don’t claim to know what exactly happened to the fearsome-looking Russian missile cruiser, the Moskva. But please note that this ancient vessel dated from 1979, the era of the Ford Cortina. As I have many times pointed out, the Russian Navy is even more decrepit and clapped out than ours, for the same reason that its Army is not very good. The country is poor, inefficient and corrupt. It really is not the threat it is made out to be.</span></p></content:encoded>
278
279
280 <category>Human Wrongs</category>
281 <category>Russia</category>
282 <category>Ukraine</category>
283 <category>warfare</category>
284 <category>World War Two</category>
285
286 <dc:creator>DM</dc:creator>
287 <pubDate>Sat, 16 Apr 2022 22:01:53 +0100</pubDate>
288
289 </item>
290 <item>
291 <title>Marriage, Green Fanatics and Ukraine, my latest conversation with Mike Graham on Talk Radio </title>
292 <link>https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2022/04/marriage-green-fanatics-and-ukraine-my-latest-conversation-with-mike-graham-on-talk-radio-.html</link>
293 <guid isPermaLink="true">https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2022/04/marriage-green-fanatics-and-ukraine-my-latest-conversation-with-mike-graham-on-talk-radio-.html</guid>
294 <description>...can be listened to here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31RE2Kaz1MU</description>
295 <content:encoded><p>.<span style="font-size: 18pt;">..can be listened to here&#0160;</span></p>
296 <p>&#0160;</p>
297 <p><span style="font-size: 18pt;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31RE2Kaz1MU">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31RE2Kaz1MU</a></span></p></content:encoded>
298
299
300 <category>Divorce</category>
301 <category>Global Warming</category>
302 <category>Marriage</category>
303 <category>Religion</category>
304 <category>Russia</category>
305 <category>Ukraine</category>
306
307 <dc:creator>DM</dc:creator>
308 <pubDate>Tue, 12 Apr 2022 10:48:23 +0100</pubDate>
309
310 </item>
311 <item>
312 <title>Some things you may not have realised about the Ukraine crisis</title>
313 <link>https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2022/04/some-things-you-may-not-have-realised-about-the-ukraine-crisis.html</link>
314 <guid isPermaLink="true">https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2022/04/some-things-you-may-not-have-realised-about-the-ukraine-crisis.html</guid>
315 <description>Some cold, hard facts they don’t tell you about Ukraine Here are some facts about the Ukraine crisis you may not be aware of. I have listed them to try to cool down the hot temper of so much of...</description>
316 <content:encoded><h2 class="mol-para-with-font mol-style-subhead"><strong><span style="font-family: &#39;times new roman&#39;, times; font-size: 24pt;">Some cold, hard facts they don’t tell you about Ukraine&#0160;</span></strong></h2>
317 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">Here are some facts about the Ukraine crisis you may not be aware of. I have listed them to try to cool down the hot temper of so much of the debate about this issue, which threatens to widen and deepen an appalling war.</span></p>
318 <p class="mol-para-with-font mol-style-bold"><span style="color: #ff0000;"><strong><span style="font-family: &#39;times new roman&#39;, times; font-size: 18pt;">Q. How long have Western countries been giving military aid to Ukraine?</span></strong></span></p>
319 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">A. The US has been giving Ukraine generous foreign and military aid since 1991, when Ukraine became a country. In the decade after 1991, Ukraine received almost $2.6 billion. In the years leading up to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, it was getting roughly $105 million per year, including military financing, most given long before any threat of Russian invasion. The US began supplying weapons in 2018. Britain began giving military aid to Ukraine in 2014, in the form of advisers and training.</span></p>
320 <p class="mol-para-with-font mol-style-bold"><span style="color: #ff0000; font-family: &#39;times new roman&#39;, times;"><strong><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Q. Did anyone ever try to solve the problem that some of Ukraine’s Russian-speaking citizens did not want to be in Ukraine – a main reason for hostility between Moscow and Kiev after 1991?</span></strong></span></p>
321 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">A. Yes, right from the start. On August 26, 1991, two days after Kiev declared independence from Moscow, the then Russian president Boris Yeltsin said that the old Soviet borders between Russia and Ukraine would have to be redrawn to deal with this problem. He retracted this within a day, almost certainly thanks to pressure from the United States. By May 1992, 250,000 of Crimea’s roughly two million mostly Russian people had signed a petition asking for a referendum on independence – enough to trigger a vote under Ukrainian law. On May 5 that year, Crimea’s parliament voted 118 to 28 to secede from Ukraine. But the Kiev government prevented a referendum from taking place.</span></p>
322 <p class="mol-para-with-font mol-style-bold"><span style="color: #ff0000;"><strong><span style="font-family: &#39;times new roman&#39;, times; font-size: 18pt;">Q. Would it have been possible to change the borders of Ukraine peacefully to avoid this obvious problem?</span></strong></span></p>
323 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">A. Yes, as European borders are not sacrosanct. The US and the UK, along with dozens of other countries (though not Ukraine), have recognised Kosovo’s breakaway from Serbia in 2008. The whole of the former Yugoslavia has been scissored into many new states, mostly recognised by the majority of nations. Ukraine, for instance, was among the earliest countries to recognise Croatia’s 1991 breakaway from Yugoslavia, then a highly controversial step.</span></p>
324 <p class="mol-para-with-font mol-style-bold"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">Q. What is the biggest political snub in modern history?</span></p>
325 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">A. In March 2007, Vladimir Putin warned very specifically against further expansion of Nato. Just a year later, President George W. Bush announced that he wanted Ukraine to join Nato, wholly aware that his action would infuriate Moscow. It did.</span></p>
326 <p class="mol-para-with-font mol-style-bold"><span style="font-size: 18pt; font-family: &#39;times new roman&#39;, times; color: #ff0000;"><strong>Q. Is Russia alone in committing alleged atrocities in Ukraine?</strong></span></p>
327 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">A. No. More than one allegation has been made, supported by apparent video evidence, of Ukrainian soldiers killing or maiming captured and helpless Russian prisoners of war. It must be stressed that these claims have not been proven. However, it is incontestable that both Russian and Ukrainian forces were guilty of military actions leading to the deaths of civilians, including children, during the war which has raged since 2014 in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions.</span></p>
328 <p class="mol-para-with-font mol-style-bold"><span style="font-family: &#39;times new roman&#39;, times;"><strong><span style="font-size: 18pt; color: #ff0000;">Q. Could the current war have been avoided?</span></strong></span></p>
329 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">A. Very much so. President Volodymyr Zelensky was elected largely on a promise to seek peace, which he courageously did in 2019. But political rivals and hard-Right militias both opposed him.&#0160;</span></p>
330 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-size: 15pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; color: #111111;"><strong>On a visit to soldiers on the front line, he told one Rightist who lectured him: ‘You can’t issue me ultimatums. I’m the president of this country. I am 42 years old. I’m no sucker. I came here to tell you to move your weapons away from the front line.’ But in the end, Mr Zelensky gave in to the pressure, and the peace deal withered away.</strong></span></p>
331 <p class="mol-para-with-font mol-style-bold"><span style="font-size: 18pt; font-family: &#39;times new roman&#39;, times; color: #ff0000;"><strong>Q. Whatever happened to the United Nations, which is supposed to prevent or end wars such as this?</strong></span></p>
332 <p class="mol-para-with-font"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt;">A. I have no idea. It seems to have evaporated.</span></p></content:encoded>
333
334
335 <category>New Cold War</category>
336 <category>Russia</category>
337 <category>Ukraine</category>
338
339 <dc:creator>DM</dc:creator>
340 <pubDate>Sun, 10 Apr 2022 08:51:32 +0100</pubDate>
341
342 </item>
343
344 </channel>
345 </rss>
346
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