Latest reports on French TV news channels tell me that the European Union still does not “get” reality – though reality is pressing in hard as a result of the horrific events in Ukraine.
I have just seen pictures of 3 EU presidents parading abreast for the cameras at Versailles during the EU summit of 10-11th March 2022. The president of the Commission; the president of the Council, and the president of France which holds the 6 monthly chairmanship of the Council of Ministers. All were smiling and manifestly very pleased with themselves, despite all the horror of Ukraine and the serious repercussions of their insane economic sanctions on the peoples they govern. War gives their imperialist agenda new impetus.
They have announced that the EU – always referred to as “Europe” – will impose even greater sanctions on Russia. Please note that the series of sanctions to date are of unprecedented severity and everyone, everywhere is feeling the impact on energy and petrol prices – now also at records levels. Let’s just remember that the economic consequences of government imposed restrictions to counter the Covid pandemic have already caused serious problems. But that doesn’t matter to the Brussels Bubble Club; their concern is with themselves and their ideological project – the people of Europe must pay the price for the religious rectitude of the Rights ideology which blinds western politicians to reality.
Macron is manifestly very pleased by circumstances which make him the unassailable winner in this April’s presidential elections. His totally gratuitous attacks on Boris Johnson about Ukrainian refugees are symptomatic of his Napoleonic pretensions as THE LEADER of Europe. Incidentally, his attack on Johnson should tell us something. The EU fears UK prominence in Europe and the world, but Prime Minister Johnson has signally failed to play the historic part of Mediator over the crisis with Russia and Ukraine. Johnson instead takes sides and attacks Russia with sanctions: the tragic poisonings in Salisbury in 2018 distort his judgement; the parochial has obscured the geopolitical reality; Johnson fails to be the post-Brexit Statesman which Europe desperately needs to defuse this terrible conflict.
Western leaders are manifestly so obsessed with their own reputations and their cultic, ultra liberal-Left ideology that they utterly neglect a most basic duty to the people they govern. Economic security.
They have behaved as if our military security is at stake. It is not. But this propaganda assumption drives their self-deception.
The hard reality is that this is a war between Russia and Ukraine; that this war was avoidable; that this war was provoked by persistent western intrusion into eastern Europe over the last 30 years. The ferocity of sanctions from western leaders exposes their pretensions and their claim to absorb all of eastern Europe into the Western orbit, totally regardless of very real Russian worries.
FACTS
- Russia has never attacked western Europe, but Western European Dictators have attacked Russia in each of the last two centuries: in Russian eyes, NATO EXPANSION into Eastern Europe can only precede another attack in this century
- NATO lost its reason to exist when the threat it existed to counter disappeared 30 years ago – the American diplomat Kennan warned about this foolishness back in 1997
- the border of Ukraine is as close to Moscow as Scotland is to London – just 6 to 8 hours by road
- The United States assiduously enforces its 2 centuries old Monroe doctrine, asserting its hegemony militarily over the entire Americas – it would never entertain Russian forces or missiles in Canada or Mexico – that is the real parallel and the correct perspective here
Yet the West has for decades asserted unilaterally the Right to encroach right up to the Russian border, adamantly refusing to address very real Russian concerns. This is an insistent ideological and economic imperialism in all but name. In my view, therefore, NATO and the West bear as much responsibility as Moscow for the atrocious events taking place in Ukraine …
That this is an ideological and totally unrealistic position by the West is revealed by the thoroughly foolish and self harming sanctions which have already been taken. This will not harm Russia alone. It will harm us all on the spurious pretext that our democracies are under imminent military threat – Macron even said this week that democracy was now under threat from Russia.
Ukraine is not a member of either the European Union or NATO – but it has been treated as belonging to both, de facto. This gives substance to the Russian claims about western intrusion. Russia may or may not be in the hands of a tyrant. But the West is in the hands of western governments – not the Russian – and Russia patently lacks the capacity to conquer Europe, judging by its army’s reported performance in Ukraine.
Yet western governments are behaving as though we must be put on a war footing, and so suffer all the consequences, certainly economically if not worse. This is false; it has more to do with politicians image and ideological preoccupations than with reality.
Events this week begin to betray the dangerous detachment of western governments from reality. Ever increasing sanctions are one indication. If Putin’s Russia really is a threat, why has Europe become dependent on Russian gas ? This week, the German Chancellor had to admit that Germany cannot punish Russia by shutting off Russian gas. Thus Western governments are exposed as schizophrenic: their thinking and behaviour is distorted and self-absorbed, totally unable to react as reality demands.
In the UK, Her Majesty’s Government is suddenly alive to the presence of Russian oligarchs and their now tainted, filthy money. Such sudden sensitivity betrays the ideological preoccupations of western government thinking today. Either Russian oligarch money is criminal, or it is not. The political context is irrelevant where a country genuinely adheres to the Rule of Law. But the United Kingdom is now ruled by the Religious Imperatives of political correctness. That Religion has displaced Christianity in the West. Edmund Burke accurately identified it as the spirit of atheistical fanaticism…
Conservatism Institute 