Reaping the whirlwind

During Liz Truss’s ill-fated premiership, anxious to build on Boris Johnson’s Ukraine-bolstered popularity, Ben Wallace, the UK Defence Secretary, was sent to the United States to discuss with his American counterpart. We were told this was because of the villainous Vladimir Putin and the "very real" threat of his launching a dirty bomb attack on Ukraine. Of course Mr Putin denied this - but then, as we have been discovering here, politicians have a habit of lying in order to save their skins. Well, no doubt, our intelligence services know what they’re talking about - inasmuch as we’re allowed to hear.

Of course, we won’t learn the truth for many years. However there is an irony here. And that is that these foul weapons, which combine conventional and atomic elements, had their origins in our own country. I’m listening to the BBC Radio 4 series “Fallout: Living in the Shadow of the Bomb” at the moment. What a disastrous story! It’s an account of the British nuclear bomb testing after 1952, in Australia and the Pacific Ocean. I learned what I didn’t know before: that it was two scientists in Birmingham University (which even has a blue plaque to commemorate the event) who first wrote about the possibility of airborne nuclear fission and it was Winston Churchill and the UK wartime government who started an atomic weapons project, codenamed Tube Alloys, before the Manhattan Project in the USA. In fact it was we who shared the technology with them, and German and Soviet spies who disseminated it to their respective powers. Talk about reaping the whirlwind!

But then it has always been thus. We discover a new super-weapon, such as the rifle, and we destroy indigenous nations and take their ancestral lands; or chemical and biological weapons and are appalled when they’re employed by dictators. We develop sophisticated landmines and then weep crocodile tears when thousands of children have limbs blown off. Drones were developed in the UK and the USA and used by Germany in the war, and now they are devastating our ally, Ukraine.

As we approach Remembrance Day, in my view it’s vital that we recognise our complicity in this horrific trade and how central the military-industrial complex is in our economy. In his two-part essay, Re-remembering War Alan Storkey writes: “The Military-Industrial Complexes of the World need wars and generate wars. Accumulating arms causes wars and did in 1914. Most modern wars do not have a big disputed reason, but start because the military and the arms sellers need wars for their business. The military-industrial complex, allied to its politicians, cause wars and rumours of wars.” And he quotes Lord Grey: “The person who knew the build up to World War One most thoroughly was Lord Grey, British Foreign Secretary for the preceding decade. He said: ‘The moral is obvious; it is that great armaments lead inevitably to war. If there are armaments on one side, there must be armaments on other sides.. The increase in armaments that in each nation is intended to produce consciousness of strength and a sense of security, do not produce these effects. On the contrary, it produces a consciousness of the strength of other nations and a sense of fear. Fear begets suspicion and distrust and evil imaginings of all sorts…The enormous growth of armaments in Europe, the sense of insecurity and fear caused by them – it was these that made war inevitable. This, it seems to me, is the truest reading of history, and the lesson that the present should be learning from the past in the interests of future peace, the warning to be handed on to those who come after us.’"

As Storkey comments, "There were many other witnesses to the same truth, as we shall see. ARMS CAUSE WARS.” Both developing weaponry and deploying it are pernicious human activities, and we should be more than sad as this weekend we contemplate their effects. Surely we should pressure our politicians actively to resist the siren calls of the arms industry with their well-paid lobbyists and a light grasp of morality? And pledge ourselves actively to seek peace? Or as the Peace Pledge Union has it, "Remember and disarm".

There's a prayer for Remembrance Sunday which goes: "God, our refuge and strength, bring near the day when wars shall cease and poverty and pain shall end, that the earth may know the peace of heaven, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen." With due respect to the writer of the prayer, I reckon it isn't just the Almighty's job to work for peace.

Ash Wednesday - Confession

I was wrong.

Those who know me well will know that I have a soft spot for Russia. I enjoy Russian literature and its music and art. I have a relative whose husband's forebears left the Soviet Union shortly after the Revolution and I have a good friend who was born in St Petersburg and visits her family there. I felt sure that the Russian/Byelorussian military "exercises" which were interpreted as sinister by Western governments were no more sinister than those which NATO regularly carries out in Eastern European countries - ie. merely defensive. Even ten days ago, I couldn't believe that anyone would be so stupid or misguided as potentially to start a war in Europe. But I was wrong. One man was.

My grasp of East European politics and history, in particular that Ukraine could not rely on NATO protection if attacked, was woefully lacking. Mr Putin clearly realised that attacking Ukraine would elicit no military response from its so-called Western friends and presumably assumed that a weaker Ukraine would crumble before the might of the Russian military machine. But apparently it hasn't. Whether there are Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the south and east who welcome his invasion ("special operations", or "peace-keeping operation") we can't know, because we won't be told. It's clear however that there is an heroic unity among the Ukrainian people and a desire to be sovereign and independent. One irony of the invasion is that its effect so far has been the opposite of the objective. It's pushed Ukraine westwards rather than eastwards. I can't imagine it ever being a willing satellite state of the Kremlin after this, even if a Putin puppet government were to be installed.

Among the many shocking pictures of the war, tanks and armoured vehicles, shattered buildings, frightened refugees packing railway stations, families sheltering in bunkers, cellars and underground car-packs, one which chilled and shocked me almost more than them all was footage (which I assume was contemporaneous and posed) of Vladimir Putin kissing an icon, crossing himself, and lighting a candle. At about the same time he had put his nuclear forces on high alert. "What sort of man is this?" I wondered.

A few years ago an artist friend gave me a print of an icon she had painted at the Bethlehem Icon Centre. It's of St Michael (of angel fame). I'm not in the habit of kissing it; but it has a certain poignancy at the moment, as an early news report of the invasion was filmed overlooking St Michael's Cathedral in Kyiv (one of the city's many cathedrals). Ironically this beautiful Byzantine building was destroyed by the Bolsheviks between 1934 and 1936, but magnificently rebuilt and restored around the turn of this century. Now it's at the heart of the Russian assault on the city.

My friend from St Petersburg once gave me Anna Reid's horrifying account of that city's siege by the Nazis from 1941 to 1944, in which a quarter of the citizens died of starvation in the first year: Leningrad. The horrors of those years, just ten years before Vladimir Putin himself was born there, exceed anything we in Britain experienced or have cared to contemplate.

So how, I wonder, can he even contemplate investing Ukrainian cities and forcing them to similar straits? Ukrainians after all suffered just as terrible atrocities in World War 2 as their Russian brothers and sisters, such as the massacre of 33,771 Jews in two days at the Babyn Yar ravine in Kyiv.

I've this afternoon heard of a family whose sons had been conscripted, one into the Ukrainian army and the other into the Russian army.

As a Christian I am perplexed. I believe that we're all made "in the image of God" (imago Dei), in other words that there's a core of goodness in each person. I also know, and it's transparently clear, that we're all flawed and fail short of even our own hopes of goodness. When I blogged about Leningrad, I wrote: "I find I’m tired of politicians indulging in the rhetoric of suspicion and fear to justify spending on the arms trade. I do realise that Hitler was an exceptional evil, and that there have been and are others like him who need resisting. It’s a complex world. We need a transformation of human nature, transformed by love."

I suppose one thing I learned as a teacher is that if you tell a child they're bad or hopeless they're likely to believe you and fulfil your low expectations. You may criticise or condemn their actions or omissions, but when you condemn their character you kill some of their humanity. Another thing I learned is you should never sanction a whole group for the misdemeanours of an individual. It is counter-productive and teaches a faulty view of fairness and therefore of justice. 

In my view Vladimir Putin is as human as the rest of us. No doubt there are others, even among our allies, who have committed dreadful crimes as well. However his actions in Ukraine are exceptionally evil, even if there's a rationale of fear behind them. We must nevertheless resist evil specifically and not generally.

“Jesus, Lamb of God, have mercy on us.
Jesus, bearer of our sins, have mercy on us.
Jesus, redeemer of the world, grant us peace.”  

AFTERWORD

I've just begun to read for Lent Jane Williams' Approaching Easter. In her preface she writes: "The history of how and why Jesus died on the cross is at least partly an analysis of what we all do to one another when we are controlled by fear, or greed, or love of power, or too much love of ourselves. At every turn, Jesus challenges us to be brave enough to step out of our self-made prisons and turn towards the source of life and freedom, which he calls God. Unfortunately, too many of us don't see fear, greed, love of power, and love of ourselves as prisons. We see these emotions as necessary to grab what we think we need for our own security; we might even be prepared to kill for them, just as people 2,000 years ago were prepared to kill Jesus rather than hear his challenge." I suspect that, as I continue to read, I'll discover that Putin is not alone in a prison of fear, greed, love of power, or too much love of self. I may be there too.

The Right Honourable Leader of Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition

What exactly do MPs, of all parties, reckon the role of the Leader of the Opposition to be? Do they really want a supine yes-man who fails to submit government actions to critical scrutiny? Or do they want a leader who is not afraid to ask those in power the awkward questions which remain unanswered?

Whatever the truth of the Salisbury affair, we as the public certainly have been given no more proof that the attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal was authorised by the Kremlin than circumstantial evidence, such as that Skripal was a Russian spy and a British double agent, that the fourth generation nerve agent used, generically known as Novichok, was developed in Russia and has a Russian nickname meaning "newcomer", and we think the Russian president is a nasty piece of work. It might be summed up in Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson’s profound observation that if something "swims like a duck and quacks like a duck" it's probably a duck. “Proof” seems to add up to “you have to take our word for it,” said loudly and repeatedly. Theresa May, the Prime Minister, was more circumspect in her Commons’ statement saying merely that it was “highly likely” that the Russian state was responsible. According to our former ambassador in Uzbekhistan, Craig Murray - who is far better informed than me - it is highly unlikely that this "proof" is true. Read https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/03/the-novichok-story-is-indeed-another-iraqi-wmd-scam/. It is eye-opening.

Jeremy Corbyn was unflinchingly direct in his condemnation of the poisoning of the Skripals, both of the use of chemical weapons in war and on the streets. He also condemned the Putin government and its supporters for “its human rights abuses both at home and abroad”. But, much to the dislike of the government benches, he also asked some pointed technical questions, including whether they had referred the incident to the International Office for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons. A former member of that office and weapons inspector interviewed on Tuesday’s Today Programme confirmed that following a whistleblower’s revelations any “advanced” state could manufacture a chemical agent of this type. So it was also a reasonable question to ask what particularly pointed its manufacture to Russia.

Whatever the details of the Salisbury affair turn out to be, if we’re ever allowed to know them (and official secrets are a well-used governmental fig leaf), far from playing tawdry political games that proved he wouldn’t defend us (Daily Mail), Jeremy Corbyn proved himself a serious opposition leader, unafraid to do his job – subjecting the government to critical scrutiny and awkward interrogation. This was evidenced in the hostile personal attack with which the Prime Minister answered him. It is a shame that he is not receiving the support he deserves from some members of his own Parliamentary Party.

Another thing that seems to have riled the Conservatives is Mr Corbyn’s pointing out on Monday how much the Tory party has received in donations from rich Russian oligarchs now domiciled in the UK with British nationality – over £3million since 2010, and just since Mrs May took office more than £820,000. Of course they want to hold on to it. One wonders why these fabulously wealthy exiles choose to buy favour with the British ruling party.

An irony of the affair in the House of Commons is that in Russia and its predecessor, the Soviet Union, those we most admired were the dissidents, the brave people who dare to challenge accepted orthodoxy. And yet here the powers that be, political, media and plutocracy do all they can to shut his dissenting voice up. It’s perhaps no coincidence that his speech contained this comment about dissidents: “I join with many others in this house in paying tribute to the many campaigners in Russia for human rights and justice and democracy in that country.” One of those no doubt was Alexei Navalny, the hero of John Sweeney’s Panorama programme last night of which Vladimir Putin was the villain. 

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the case, we should welcome the fact that we have in Parliament an opposition leader who holds our government to account - however uncomfortable that may be.