The Betrayal of Bulgaria: A Dialogue on Bulgaria Past, Present and Future.

Yavor Siderov has written on the contemporary economic and political crisis in Bulgaria ,

Last Sunday's parliamentary elections failed to resolve Bulgaria's bitter political impasse. Worse, there is now a palpable sense of confusion and disappointment among those who opposed the centre-right government of prime minister Boiko Borisov, as the poll returned his party to a position of primacy, albeit short of absolute majority. This is no mean feat for a party that was pushed out of power three months ago by fervent street protests and a series of self-immolations.

 Aside from Borisov's Citizens for the European Development of Bulgaria (Gerb) party, the other big winners are the Bulgarian Socialist party, the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF) of the ethnic Turks and the nationalist and xenophobic Ataka.

So the economic condition in Bulgaria is in 2013 so dire that Bulgarian are burning themselves alive on the streets of Sofia in despairing protest.  It's no mean feat that Borisov's regime is so fundamentally callous and incompetent that is driving Bulgarian to commit such extreme actions that in Middle Eastern states would no doubt lead to terrorism.

In fact, in Greece the oligarchy and 'the police apparatus' has already been subject to anarchist terror attacks, at least on police stations. As Siderov states, though,

Aside from Borisov's Citizens for the European Development of Bulgaria (Gerb) party, the other big winners are the Bulgarian Socialist party, the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF) of the ethnic Turks and the nationalist and xenophobic Ataka.

By contrast Bulgaria is a land of great potential, hospitable intelligent people governed by those like Borisov who are more concerned with the narrow monetary interests of the party, fulfilling EU austerity measures and spending vast amounts of Bulgarian tax payers money on NATO weapons.

Unfortunately, Bulgaria has always been neglected by the Western Powers of Europe as with the entire Balkans itself. It is treated only as a state of 'use value' to the more economically powerful nations of Europe as it was during the Old Great Game between the C19th European Empires.

Militarily since it joined NATO in 2004, the USA has converted Bulgaria, against the wishes of its people, into a militaristic client state willing to send troops to Afghanistan and Iraq as opposed in investing money in hospital and protecting those pensioners who live on meagre incomes.

The level of discontent was so severe a few years ago when I lived in Sofia that on election days all alcohol was banned in the shops lest the anger spill over into anti-government riots. Generally, however, Bulgaria has a history of tolerance and lack of xenophobia.

During World War Two King of Boris of Bulgaria and his constitutional government refused to send Bulgarian Jews to the European death camps, It would be surprising, and disappointing to see anything akin to the neo-fascist Golden Dawn of Greece arise in Bulgaria.

Bulgaria was from the late nineteenth century divided, as an Orthodox nation, as to its Western or Eastern identity. At least then, there was a debate. Betrayed by the EU and forced by US client politicians into spending on military equipment, Bulgarians are expected to be grateful to 'the West'.

Botched IMF neoliberal impositions, the continued presence of the Bulgarian mafia ( often ex-wrestlers !) , the economic impact of NATO's war on Serbia in 1999 and continued failed neoliberal policies have brought a nation with great potential and wealth to destitution.

The colossal expenditure on NATO was parts of a policy of 'stabilising the Balkans' while it, in fact, empowered Kosovan terrorists in the KLA and dragged Bulgaria into NATO as the price of defending one of the war objectives of the 1999 war-the protection of the AMBO pipeline.

Just as in the nineteenth century Bulgaria was treated as a contested zone over railway routes, the expenditure demanded by NATO in a country where most make $200 a month and the collapse of social provision is the price they must pay for yet more Great Power pipeline realpolitik.

Bulgarians are justifiably proud of their nation's history and all sympathy is due to the ordinary people , many of whom may well emigrate to Britain which is why the Bulgarian neoliberal government is so annoyed by attempts to dissuade what would be a policy of 'social dumping' by the UKIP.

In the face of these intractable tensions, there are no easy answers, Bulgarians deserve better, Britain simply cannot take masses more immigrants without severe social tensions arising. Yet Bulgarians are not particularly prone to wanting violent revolutions.

During the nineteenth century the conspiratorial nationalists were more concerned with ridding Bulgaria from the Ottoman Empire. It was only a lukewarm last ditch attempt by Todor Zhivkov in the late 1980s to drive out Muslims that saw an atavistic nationalism aimed at propping up Communism

Bulgaria has been betrayed both by unaccountable IMF transnational elites, the EU and its austerity programmes and US militarism, none of which was wanted and all of which contributed to the dichotomy between populists with few answers and neoliberal technocrats who obey Western diktat.

Mr Girondist replies,

Bulgarian military defense spending was 1.2% of GDP in 2012. Warsaw Pact accounting was always a moveable feast, but I'm pretty sure in the old days they spent more than 1.2%. The idea that this an unaffordable level of spending, or that such a level can be seen as a primary factor in the country's fiscal position, is rather laughable. 

But never mind, you want to paint NATO as the villain, so NATO it is, even if given the neighbors and history a rigidly neutral Bulgaria would need to spend more than 1.2% and be more Finland than Ireland.

RESPONSE

The country is destitute and that sort of expenditure can make a difference as far as hospital beds and social security is concerned. So the comparisons with Finland and Ireland and number crunching irrelevance. Which country was threatening Bulgarian in 2004 when it joined NATO. ?

And that wealth of opportunity spreads out vastly beyond Sofian elites does it? Despite being invited to their parties and enjoying myself, I saw the poor ( not alcoholics but just the poor ) eating pizzas crusts out of bins on a regular basis.

Please try to stop reading Novinte or the Economist and look with your eyes in connection with the facts about the actual reality in Bulgaria. Have you actually lived there? Have you spoken to the average person? Have you seen the prices in Sofia's Billa supermarket.

Mr Girondiste replies,

'The point I am making is that 1.2% of GDP is a pretty normal level for a country in Bulgaria's position - it's less than the Czechs and Poles, more than the Slovaks. It's also less than rather unwarlike nations like the Dutch and less than half of the GDP share of France and the UK. All of these levels are much, much lower than the GDP ratios on both sides of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.

That can be contrasted with countries in a more serious military posture - Georgia spends something like 5% of its GDP and Armenia is similar. Russia and the US are comfortably more than double that of Bulgaria's with obviously a much bigger GDP.
Very few countries with ANY potential instability on their borders hit Irish levels of defense as GDP (0.7%).

I generally like your posts even though I often disagree, but implying that NATO driven defense spending is a minor, let alone major, factor in Bulgaria's economic woes is simply incorrect.
If you don't trust the figures, just look at the Bulgarian order of battle today. If they have been bankrupting themselves buying weapons from the evil NATO, why are they still flying ancient Soviet aircraft and using T-72s?

The bottom line is that Bulgaria lends exactly as much in GDP share as Belgium, and Belgium hasn't expelled large groups of people from a minority ethnic group in recent memory, doesn't have a front-row seat to surely-they-wouldn't tensions between Greece and Turkey and isn't next door to the angrier bit of ex-Yugoslavia. Also, Belgiums core equipment isn't functionally obsolete'

RESPONSE

 Let's look at this statement,

The bottom line is that Bulgaria lends exactly as much in GDP share as Belgium, and Belgium hasn't expelled large groups of people from a minority ethnic group in recent memory,

Belgium is far richer than Bulgaria and the expulsion by Todor Zhivkov of Turkish Muslims in the late 1980s was a sort of ruse to prop up a failing 'national communist regime' by a discredited dictator.

Comparing post-communist Bulgaria to a dysfunction democracy, but a democracy nevertheless and so at least a definite improvement politically, is slightly contradictory as it is to expected that a democracy will not act as a dictatorship.

Yet the reason so many states such as Bulgaria joined NATO in 2004 is that the USA tends to try and link the expansion of the EU to membership of NATO as if the two are the corollary of each other. Such a strategy would be disastrous in Georgia.

The point is that Borisov and others are uncritically pro-US and have allowed their nation to transfer militaristic allegiances from one military bloc ( the Warsaw Pact bloc ) to another in the form of NATO when no country near Bulgaria threatens it.

As in the past Bulgaria is being treated as a military base for US proximity to the strategically vital areas of the Middle East and the Caucasus ( termed crassly by Zbigniew Brzezinski as "The Eurasian Balkans". There is no need for neutrality not to be an option.

For as US involvement in the Middle East is set to continue, including it's catastrophic meddling in Georgian politics, this will invariably mean Atlanticist political elites may well need to ramp up military expenditure in the future.

Many ordinary Bulgarians are apathetic now to their unaccountable elites. To quote Joesph Roth in his novel Rebellion

'The government is something that overlies man like the sky overlies the earth. What comes from it may be good or ill, but it cannot be other than great and all-powerful, unknowable and mysterious, even though on occasion it may be understood by an ordinary person'

Ordinary people in Bulgaria understand the pipeline transit politics. Bulgaria was a zone of competition during the late nineteenth century during the last Great Game. In the new one, Bulgaria's scope to derive energy from various sources has been curtailed.

The disastrous interventions of NATO in Kosovo in 1999 was based on empowering Hasim Thaci's criminal gangster organisation the KLA, an organisation known for spreading mafia links across the Balkans.

The economic instability, on top of further empowering the mafia, sex trafficking, torture and supplies of contraband affected Bulgaria badly. The use for Bulgarian security in joining NATO in 2004 was negligible and it's support for the Iraq war in 2003 also destroyed trade.

As with Georgia in the Caucasus, there was a good case for Bulgaria to retain a position of neutrality. This expansion of NATO eastwards and 'for us or against us' posture is akin to the sort of geopolitical insanity satirised by Orwell in 1984.

As regards the post-communist transition, the dovetailing on harsh doctrinaire neo-liberal economic policies with even supposedly 'left wing' political parties is due to obeisance to EU austerity measures and US global dogmas of universal 'economic freedom' as it dovetail exactly with 'economic freedom',

That's why Bulgarians are angry and confused when they are not apathetic and increasingly indifferent.

To quote Orwell once more ,

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

President Saakashvili- 2003-2013

As it's a decade since the mostly failed "Rose Revolution" , I have decided to revive some of my writings on this malign figures devastating influence upon Georgia, a country I had the great fortune to live in until January 2013.

I have stocked up on a great deal of literature on the subject including Stephen Jones's Georgia A History Since Independence and Mark Almond's Post Communist Georgia.

My experience in Tbilisi, having lived in Tabidze Street just below PM Ivanishvili's "James Bond style" hilltop retreat is that the President is widely detested for his blundering into the war on Russia in 2008 and even compared by Anatol Lieven to the far right nationalist Zviad Gamsakhurdia who plunged Georgia into civil war in the early 1990s.

The Contradictions and Messianic "New Cold War"

ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN 2010

In addition to his monomaniacal hatred of Russia in the New Cold War, Lucas is so blinkered that he cannot even bring himself to use plain English to condemn Saakashvili's vandalistic destruction of the Kutaisi War Monument in December 2010.

On Jan 7th 2010 in The Economist he merely had recourse to a bland article that predictably starts off by trying to insinuate that Soviet War Memorials are symbols of oppression by drawing on the examples in Central Europe rather than deal directly with the fact Saakashvili's Georgia was part of the Soviet War against Nazi-Germany. Berlin and Vienna were not.

Instead he waffles on about "The messy politics of war memorials".

Yet, there is nothing "messy" about the politics of war memorials if it is accepted that those who died during World War Two had no choice but to fight, not least if they were conscripted in the Soviet Red Army. Lucas opines,

War cemeteries are poignant places, better suited for reflection than controversy. In Vilnius, Poles, Lithuanians, Russians and others, all fierce foes in their day, rest in the same hallowed ground.

But, of course, Lucas has to make the facile point that Soviet War Memorials are less equal and deserving of respect than others

Some war memorials make no political statement. The Thiepval Memorial on the Somme, designed by Edwin Lutyens, bears the names of 72,000 fallen British soldiers from the 1914-18 war. It does not try to say anything about the origins of the war or who won it.

British memorials usually bear an epitaph on the lines of this: “When you go home, tell them of us and say, ‘for their tomorrow, we gave our today’.” That may strike the modern eye as a bit maudlin, but nobody could find it offensive.

This is true, but then Lucas goes on to suggest that the triumphalism of the Soviet Union's monuments is what makes them monuments to Soviet power and a claim to a Russian or Soviet "sphere of influence". Hence,

The Soviet war memorials in Vienna and Berlin, in contrast, are built in the hearts of each city with demonstrative and meticulous attention to Stalinist iconography and cliché.

“Eternal Glory to the Heroes of the Red Army, fallen in the fight against the German-fascist invaders for the freedom and independence of Europe” reads the inscription on the Viennese one, in Schwarzenbergplatz.

But the Vienna monument is different. According to Norman Davies in Europe at War 1939-1945: No Simple Victory, the inscription also reads " In Honour of the soldiers of the Soviet Army died liberating Austria from Fascism".

The fact is that this is what the Soviet Union did and it did not occupy Austria as it did East Germany where in Berlin the inscription is the same except the word "Europe" is omitted in favour of the words "for the freedom and independence of the Soviet Union".

The distinction is small but it is an important small brass plate addition does make a difference. Lucas does not cite the Berlin Monument as it does make it clear that Germany's liberation was the Soviet Union's and not Europe's.

The reason Lucas cites it is that he wants to make it clear that the Soviet Union or now Russia has always claimed that it's part in "liberating Europe" is one that gives it still the right to have a central interest in Central Europe. And further,

Given what actually happened in the Soviet-occupied part of Europe after 1945, views may differ on the merits of that inscription. Some Austrians, ungratefully, nicknamed it the “Looter’s memorial” or the “Unknown rapist”.

But that was back in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War when feelings about the Red Armies banditry were high, In the era of neutrality it has long been forgotten as such by the Viennese who just call it the Russendenkmal ("Russian monument").

What Lucas is attempting here is to show how the Soviet Union is still regarded as some threat in Vienna no less than it is in Estonia or nations liberated from Soviet domination in 1990. It is using history to make a current propaganda point.

As indeed where those French far right desecrators who wrote on Commonwealth Graves in Normandy "Rosbifs Go Home" few saw that as typical of prevalent French opinion either now or after the war.

Lucas is trying to dredge up old fears in the heart of Central Europe and by implication connect it with the "Neo-Soviet" threat posed by Putin and to get Austria, a non-NATO member, to be remembered as somewhere the liberation of Europe meant totalitarianism for the Eastern half.

Rape is common during war and happened on the Allied side too but not on the scale of the Soviet army whom Stalin encouraged to rape German women to "let them have their fun".

So Lucas has it that it's still an unwanted symbol of tyranny when most have actually forgotten or do not care much for it.

Some have tried to blow it up or otherwise vandalise it. But it is protected by law, dating from the 1955 treaty in which Austria regained its independence from the liberator-occupiers.

Lucas leaves it open whether it "should" be protected by law and offers no condemnation of those who had tried to demolish it. The simple fact is that not all those who fought in the Red Army were rapists. This insinuates collective guilt.

Yet it suits Lucas to assume it is a prevalent opinion in Austria which remained neutral during the "Old Cold War". To assert that the words on the Austrian memorial are the same as the one in Berlin shows the only "mess" being made is by Lucas.

For the main fear of Lucas is that the option of "neutrality" in unthinkable when Putin is a "Neo-Soviet" threat trying to strike back and regain its "sphere of interest" in Central Europe and thus rid Europe of that notion in the New Cold War.

This view chimes with Brzezinski who is scathing about "Finlandisation", as Finland was another state that opted to remain neutral and prospered and, like Austria, could be an alternative to to the "you're either for us or against us" attitude of New Cold Warriors like Lucas in places like Georgia.

Clearly,

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the former Soviet republics were under no such legal requirement to preserve or protect war memorials. That gives them more freedom of manoeuvre, though whether they use it wisely is another matter.

What Lucas means by "freedom of manouevre" really means that the assumption of collective guilt can have free reign in lands which as he puts it in bellicose rhetoric in The New Cold War lie "On the Front Line". ( page 169 )

In 2007 Estonia abruptly moved a Soviet war memorial from a conspicuous position in the centre of Tallinn to the military cemetery on the capital’s outskirts, provoking riots among local Russians who saw the move as blasphemy towards past generations’ sacrifice and heroism.

Those Russians had every right to be outraged by this desecration. But as Lucas can only ever see atavistic nationalism in operation if it emanates from Russia, he has to rationalise it by claiming,

Though the government’s tactics and timing were indeed questionable, the motivation was understandable—for Estonians the statue epitomised their country’s 50-year occupation, during which its own military memorials had been obliterated.

By those standards then, the Iraqis have every right to break up and demolish, or move to some junkyard, the Commonwealth Graves of British soldiers killed in Iraq during the 1920s. More so, as a majority of Iraqis regard the British now not as "liberators" but as "occupiers".

It is doubtful whether Lucas, having venerated British War Memorials, would agree that this would be an "understandable motivation". Not least, as the US-UK invasion led to the sacking and destruction of ancient artefacts from Baghdad Museums.

Lucas' craven recourse to euphemism was evident when he rationalised Saakashvili's decision to blow up the Kutaisi War Memorial to the 300,000 dead Georgian soldiers who had to fight in the Red Army of Stalin, himself a Georgian.

... Georgia took things a step further when it demolished a colossal 46m-high Soviet war memorial in Kutaisi, the country’s second city. Bungled use of explosives killed two bystanders, a mother and child.

The idea it was "bungled" is an understatement as Saakashvili was in such a hurry to do this before his birthday on 21st December that officials went against mass opposition to it in Kutaisi itself.But ordinary Georgians opinions don't count if they go against the notion that Saakashvili was on a "bumpy ride" to modernisation before his regime, suffering economically before his nationalist attack on South Ossetia in August 2008 was crushed by Russia.

Lucas waffles on blithely,

The official, somewhat contradictory, explanation was that the monument needed restoration and in any case stood on a site needed for a new building to house the country’s parliament.

The question is whether Lucas believes that was the motive or whether it was really just an act of total hatred designed to curry support by conflating the Soviet Union with Russia as Mr Lucas himself regularly does for propaganda purposes,

It is easy to see why Soviet monuments are resented in places that see themselves as former captive nations of the evil empire. Railing against them may win votes.

But they did not "win votes" and it was precisely because Saakashvili was losing popularity and was threatened by mass opposition in 2007 to his repressive regime that he acted in such a dictatorial and arbitrary manner ( or "hotheaded" as Lucas likes to say ).

The soft peddling and damage limitation to Saakashvili, so lauded and celebrated in the New Cold War by Lucas reaches more euphemism and inability to call and spade a spadewhen he blithely generalises

But vindictiveness is not a good policy. Relocating monuments to neutral locations, preferably with proper consultation, no haste, and all due decency, is one thing. Cheerfully destroying them is another.

Well, it would be if Saakashvili had contemplated that. He did not. Thus meaning that Saakashvili is a petty, vicious and nasty atavistic nationalist, an irony confirmed by the fact that he launched his Rose Revolution outside Stalin's statue in Gori.

The bland tone of exculpation, of totally ignoring internal protests of hundreds of thousands of Georgians in Kutaisi against it is simply skimmed over when Lucas warbles on with his usual neoliberal generalisation and abstract waffle.

Respecting different approaches to the past is a hallmark of a free plural society just as forcibly rewriting it is a hallmark of totalitarianism. That does not make monuments sacrosanct (you will search in vain for a German military cemetery with a swastika).

But going to Estonia will reveal that collaborators with the Waffen SS in Museums are now lauded as "freedom fighters", a curious direction for a "plural society" such as Estonia to take.

As there is, of course, no alternative to NATO expansion in Georgia, a key strategic ally of the Baltic States who clearly enjoys rewriting history by obliterating it or churning out "revisionist" history of the sort David Irving would approve.

The last sentence is meant to stake out Lucas's "moral stance" when he ponders that,

"But the dead deserve to be treated with respect, however flawed or horrible the cause in which they died".

After all, if the double standards are revealed, the Iraqi example being a case in point as a rapacious oil grab waged by Blair and Bush, then clearly Iraqi's might be "understandably motivated" to smash British War Graves there.

That would not be good form for Lucas as these graves are decent ones. Forget the reason why British troops were there and why Bomber Harris and the RAF was bombing them-oil. Earlier David Lloyd George had written of the necessity of "bombing the niggers". Bomber Harris strafed entire rebel villages as a "pacification campaign".

The decaying War Graves in Iraq are in a style that is not bombastic as Soviet War Memorials were but it is the substance of the history behind propaganda myths that needs to be interrogated and the same standards have to be applied to the Soviet Union as they are to the USA. "Style" is no alternative to the substance of what these invasions meant.

Now in "soft power" terms US War Memorials in Europe are more dignified but Museums and Memorials in the USA do strike a rather different tone as the fight against Nazi-Germany is rolled over into one seamless monumental struggle against Russia during The Cold War, Vietnam and Iraq.

The radical journalist John Pilger points this ot when he writes with his customary with ( though his political conclusion on many matters are misguided ) that he went to the,

.......the American Museum of History, part of the celebrated Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. One of the popular exhibitions was “The Price of Freedom: Americans at War”.

It was holiday time and lines of people, including many children, shuffled reverentially through a Santa’s grotto of war and conquest where messages about their nation’s “great mission” were dispensed.

These ­included tributes to the “exceptional Americans [who] saved a million lives” in Vietnam, where they were “determined to stop communist expansion”.

In Iraq, other true hearts ­“employed air strikes of unprecedented precision”. What was shocking was not so much the revisionist description of two of the epic crimes of modern times as the sheer scale of omission.

“History without memory,” declared Time magazine at the end of the 20th century, “confines Americans to a sort of eternal present.. They are especially weak in remembering what they did to other people, as opposed to what they did for them.”

Ironically, it was Henry Luce, founder of Time, who in 1941 divined the “American century” as an American social, political and cultural “victory” over humanity and the right “to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit”.

Despite the prominence of the Holocaust Museum, the USA was simply not that interested in the fate of Europe's Jews until the 1960s when Israel became a key strategically in preserving the USA's hegemony in the Middle East. Before then , ironically, it had been the Soviet Union that had supported Israel up to 1955.

So if there is a "New Cold War", then that form of history as propaganda needs to be critically judged as well, not least in light of the double standards when at the same time as the Auschwitz sign "Arbeit Macht Frei" was stolen the press in the West featured it as a major news item.

Yet when Saakashvili blew up the Kutaisi Monument there was no mention in any of the daily newspapers. There was total silence almost apart from the Irish Times and, of course, Edward Lucas.

By contrast Putin's response, irrespective of what Lucas thinks of him, was dignified and ethically the correct one as reported by Russia Today on May 10 2010.

Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin and Georgian opposition leaders have laid a stone to a future monument to Georgian soldiers who gave their lives for the victory over Nazism.

The monument will be erected on Poklonnaya Hill in Moscow and will replace a giant monument in the town of Kutaisi in Georgia which was demolished last year by the country’s government.

“The new obelisk on Poklonnaya Hill will be built using voluntary donations,” the Russian premier said at the ceremony on Saturday. “It will be a symbol of respect to the Great Patriotic War soldiers, a symbol of the inviolability of the monuments erected to celebrate their heroic deeds.”

There is nothing here about celebrating Stalin. The Great Patriotic War is a part of Russia's history and as Davies says it is one of history's ironies that it was primarily the Soviet Union, of which Russia was the largest part, that defeated Nazism and liberated Auschwitz in January 1945.

Which nation does not celebrate sacrifice in war and why are Russia celebrations seen as so much more bombastic than the USA's "revisionism" as present at the Smithsonian Institute ? Putin is an astute politicians and needs to make sense of Russian history in a way that will restore pride. The USA as a Great Power does exactly the same thing.

The disparity reflects the fact that Israel remains a geostrategic ally of the USA in the Middle East and a prime driver of the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 and overreacted to it claiming it was part of an anti-semitic plot and not a perverted memento collector's scheme hatched in Sweden.

Compared to that the major embarrassment of Saakashvili, who claimed that Georgia was a "victim nation" just as Israel and Poland were, blowing up an entire monument was just not considered news in the West, despite being a vulgar act of aggressive nationalism. For pointing this out in the "liberal" British Guardian newspaper in December 2009 I was censored.

Given that Norman Davies actually aims in Europe At War the debunking of history as propaganda mythology, being critical of it also in Europe : East and West, it is curious that he made the error of putting his distinguished name to Lucas's 'New Cold War' which erects history as propaganda into its principle objective.

Davies is scathing about the role of "ideology" in the US invasion of Iraq but he tends to marginalise the blatant fact this war was planned for years by circles in Washington years before the neoconservatives came to power in 2000 under George Bush. Davies is right to stress 'ideology' but the question is whether this was the rationalisation of an oil grab.

This lead Davies into the error of tending to see the US and UK invasion of Iraq as "however" well intentioned" as one that was based on a "liberation" that, knowing the history of Iraq and the resistance against colonialism between 1917-1932, would never be welcomed as such. In other words, it was not intentional to invade Iraq only for its oil.

This tends to be the viewpoint of liberals too inhibited in calling a spade a spade because they are afraid of the apolar anarchy that may result from the destruction of the world's sole remaining "hyperpower", at least until the huge financial crash brought the era of US hegemony and the prime preo-currency to an end.

Timothy Garton Ash, once so magnificent in writing of the struggle for freedom in Poland against a repellent Communist regime in The Polish Revolution 1980-1982 could only manage to rather pathetic weasel words of condemnation of the way the US invasion of Iraq was handled or rather mishandled.

Criticism of the fact the USA did not actually have strategy to nation build in Iraq and outsourced construction work to private contractors backs up the known facts that the Invasion of Iraq was about access to oil. And the scale of the death in this "New Cold War"
of 2003

Ash, a “liberal interventionist”, wrote on 9 April, 2003 “America has never been the Great Satan. It has sometimes been the Great Gatsby: 'They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things...'. Britain's duty, he earnestly opined, “is to keep reminding Tom and Daisy that they now have promises to keep”.

This is a pure delusion. Blair's support for Iraq was welcomed by Bush IIfor propaganda reasons but in neoconservative circles he was slightly looked down upon for trying to get the second UN Resolution passed when the US had decided it was going to invade whether Hans Blix found Weapons of Mass Destruction ( WMD's ) or not.

This again point back to the flaws of Lucas' thesis of a "New Cold War". The point is not whether people in the West are free to demonstrate against Iraq, as they haven't tried in Chechnya ( mostly because Chechens have resorted to terrorism and bombing and murdering Russian civilians ), but that the protests mean nothing.

Irrespective of public opinion in the West or investigations into the Iraq War, every enquiry has been as Establishment whitewash. The documents which Blair and Bush persused at Craford in 2002 about Iraqi oil are unmentionable. The invade a nation to appropriate and take its resources is a major international crime.

So to go back to the issue of War Memorials one things is clear: the bodies of US troops can these days be easily flown back to the USA by rapid air transportation. There will be no memorials for Iraqis to smash down. But in Lucas's view, the destruction of the Kutaisi Monument was a "messy business". Just like Iraq is to Timothy Garton Ash.

Russia is Not Only to Blame for Georgia Starting the 2008 War

FIRST WRITTEN IN 2008

The release of a much anticipated EU-commissioned report into the causes of the Russian-Georgian war of August 2008 predictably spread the blame for the conflict around. Georgia got its share of the blame, but the text of the report is devastating to Russia's narrative of the conflict.

Svante Cornell writes today of the "damning verdict on Russia" with regards the EU report on the conflict between Russia and Georgia in August 2008 to deflect attention away from the responsibility both Saakashvili and neoconservative propagandists have by putting the blame wholly on Russia.

A year ago Cornell wrote this,

The Kremlin's blatant aggression puts at stake not only the future of the most progressive state in the former Soviet Union, but the broader cause of European security.

The blatant aggression was Georgia's in bombing Tskhanvali . That fact is clear as is the assertion of the report that this was a breach of international law. That fact cannot be spun away by pure propaganda like this.

The press has so far mainly reported the commission's conclusion that Georgia started the war. That should not be confused with the question of responsibility: firing the first shot does not necessarily mean bearing responsibility for the conflict.

Yes it does mean Georgia bears responsibility for the conflict. Only in Alice in Wonderland style logic can suggests otherwise.

Georgia was the Soviet Union's most 'progressive state. The one criticised by HRW for murdering sleeping civilans whilst they slept in bed with grad rockets. causing indicriminate death to 400 and injuries to scores more. As well as firing live bullets at protesters in Tblisi in November 2007.

If this is what Cornell has in mind by "progressive" then it is curious what he might mean by 'reactionary'. Probably any nation that does not fall in with the USA's designs for global hegemony. This is very much what Orwell meant by doublethink.

Sakashvili's regime practices torture, represses the media, and was the creation in 2004 of a rigged election that gave him 97% of the vote. If that had been in Belarus, Cornell would have been screaming election fraud.

...the Kremlin had escalated its interference in Georgia's territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia - bombing Georgian territory twice last year, illegally extending Russian citizenship to residents there,

Cornell has nothing to write about Romania giving out passports to Moldovan Romanians though, despite it ramping up tensions which came out when the Twitter Revolution in April this year revealed the opposition to the Communists to come from far right admirers of Antonescu's wartime fascist state.

Last year Cornell also mirrored far right nationalist propaganda in comparing russia's incursion into Georgia with the invasion of the Baltic States in 1939, a propaganda that conflates Putin's Russia with the Soviet Union and legitimises the revisionism with regards the collaboration with Nazi Germany.

Then there is the fact Cornell fails to deal with the Kosovo precedent,

The EU report finds that because Russia's distribution of passports to Abkhazians and Ossetians in the years prior to the war was illegal, its rationale of rescuing its citizens is invalid as they simply were not legally Russian citizens. It also concludes that Russia's claim of humanitarian intervention cannot be recognised "at all", in particular given Russia's past opposition to the entire concept of humanitarian intervention.

Well, the idea of humanitarian intervention is itself a myth, one used to justify the bombing of Serbia in 1999 and which never takes recognition of the support the US gave the KLA in training and tactics. The KLA subsequently ethnically cleansed 250,000 Serbs and Sinti from Kosovo.

...it faults Russia for failing to intervene in the ethnic cleansing of Georgians from South Ossetia and Abkhazia that took place during and after the war. Finally, it castigates Russia's recognition of the independence of the two breakaway territories as illegal, and as a dangerous erosion of the principles of international law.

Yes, but it does mention the precedent set by the unilateral policies of the USA ( obviously Cornell assigns the invasion of Iraq to the Orwellian memory hole ) and the recognition of kosovo's independence in January 2008 which acted as the model for Russia to copy with regards Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
To give Cornell his due, he is at least honest about the neoconservatives real motives in Georgia.

Georgia's position astride the western access route to the Caspian sea's energy reserves and Central Asia give it geopolitical significance. Moreover, Georgia represents exactly what Moscow does not want to see on its borders: a country both independent and increasingly democratic. Moscow instead seeks submission, preferably by authoritarian rulers that it can manipulate.

By backing Saakashvili, the neoconservatives clearly think Moscow's line, such as they portray it as, worthy of emulation.

Racism against Russia is 'Politically Correct'

ORIGINALLY WRITTEN IN 2008

Denis MacShane continues to berate the Tories for their Euro alliance with Pis and the Latvian far right with their more explicit nostalgia for the Nazi era freedom fight against the Soviet Union which did, of course, invade the Baltic republics before Hitler's Germany.
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What is conveniently omitted from MacShane's attempt to portray to British Conservatives as yet again appeasing Fascism as they did in the 1930s is the fact that MacShane has himself allied with President Saakashvili in Georgia in his struggle against Russia.
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In August 2008 it was MacShane who demanded shoulder to shoulder support with Saakashvili's regime which is now widely regarded as having started the war in Georgia by firing grad rockets at the South Ossetian capital and targeting civilians ( i.e. committing war crimes ).
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Moreover, it is none other than Saakashvili who in turn has used 'revisionist' historian and former Estonian PM Mart Laar as his media adviser and propagandist in the USA. Saakashvili has referred to Russians as a 'race of barbarians' and imitated Estonia's museum about 'the Russian occupation'.
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As Mark Almond has pointed out,

Georgia also imitated the "freedom-loving" Baltic States by broadcasting TV documentaries sympathetic to the few Georgian Waffen SS collaborators who fought to defend their country from Soviet occupation in Holland in 1945 just as Dutch, Belgian and Scandinavian "volunteers" defended their homelands in Estonia in 1944. In reality, many Balts resisted the Nazis as did so many Georgians, but in the New World Order their service to the defeat of Hitler is at best ignored but at worst and increasingly it is denounced as treason to the New Europe, whose leaders assembled alongside Mr Saakashvili in Tbilisi included the American-Lithuanian President, Valdas Adamkus, who has the distinction of being the last European head of state to have fought in the Second World War - in German uniform.

The visceral and racist contempt for Russians is deemed just fine by MacShane if it advances his neoconservative agenda of expanding NATO into Ukraine and Georgia even if it will mean ramping up the ethnic tensions that led to a bloodbath in Yugoslavia.

Then there's Saakashvili's rhetoric about blowing up Russian boats on their way to Batumi in Abkhazia ( that is, full of Russian tourists who like to holiday there ) is in the same category as the British National Party leader Nick Griffen's statement about blowing up those boats full of refugees trying to get into Europe.

Also Western backed redevelopment schemes in Tblisi-and the necessary measures to remove existing tenant by a new exhorbitant property tax- were justified by Besik Jugheli, who leads the National Movement in the Georgian Parliament, as applying merely to non-Georgians:

Mainly Armenians, Azeris, Kurds and other nationalities live in the historic districts… It is not directed against Georgians!

To be fair to MacShane his stance has been shared by David Cameron who repeated neoconservative rhetoric over Georgia no less than PiS's Lech Kaczynski, a cross party form of sacrificing morality to expedient alliances shared by MacShane and that goes beyond his banal politicking over the 'narcissism of small differences' between them.

MacShane is not hypocritical as most people who even aspire in some way to do right but fail through moral weakness are merely hypocrites; more obviously it is the systematic dissimulation and spin of Orwellian doublethink that in in operation here as racism against Russia and Russians is necessary for oil realpolitik.

Corelli Barnett on Georgia

ORIGINALLY PRINTED HERE IN 2008.

Since the Russian Army routed the Georgian incursion into South Ossetia last week, Western politicians and media have been hotly accusing the Russia of President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin, of Soviet-style expansionism by means of bullying small neighbours like Georgia.

In windy rhetoric, U. S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Britain's Foreign Secretary David Miliband pronounce that this alleged strategy would, if continued, pose a threat to world harmony.

It reminds me all too vividly of the way George W. Bush and Tony Blair worked up war fever against Iraq in 2002-2003, entirely on the false basis (as some of us suspected at the time) that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction ready to use against us.

Five years on, we still have to live with the poisonous political and military residue of that particular bout of war fever, including the human grief on a vast scale.

Back in 2002-2003, I warned in this newspaper that an attack on Iraq would result in a protracted guerilla war bringing catastrophe on Iraqis and invaders alike. So it has proved.
Today, I find Russia under Putin and Medvedev much less alarming than America under George W. Bush in his belligerent prime.

And I also find Putin and Medvedev far less of a potential menace to world peace than today's Washington hawks, who even now are acting as intellectual seconds to John McCain in his big fight for the presidency, and who could - heaven forfend - shape American policy if McCain wins.

Hawks like the luxuriantly mustachioed John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the UN, whose idea of foreign policy is to shout that he can beat any man in the global saloon, and who now berates Condoleezza Rice for relying on diplomacy instead of picking a fight with Putin over the Georgian crisis.

And not forgetting hawks like the ever- so- clever academic theorists in right-wing Washington think-tanks.

These hawks proclaim that by militarily humiliating the Georgian Prime Minister, Mikhail Saakashvili, Russia has begun a new 'Cold War'.

It's time again, we are told, to defend 'freedom and democracy' against aggression.
All this is hysterical nonsense. And why?

Because Prime Minister Putin has no ideological motivation to remodel the world, unlike the Marxist leaders of the Soviet Union or the fervently Christian George W. Bush and Tony Blair.

Instead, Putin is just an old-fashioned Russian autocrat and nationalist of the kind that would have been familiar enough to Bismarck, Palmerston and Disraeli.

Even the trappings of the current Russian regime, such as the state coat of arms or the 19th-century uniforms of Kremlin guards of honour, are pure Czarist revival.

You could say the same for the widespread business corruption and the suppression of independent opinion.
So the paramount concern of Putin and his tame President, Medvedev, is to restore Russia's position and prestige as a great power in a world setting.

They do not buy into the fashionable Western concept of 'globalisation', where great foreign companies are free to acquire a nation's major industrial or energy assets. This is why BP is being gradually edged out of the exploitation of Russian oil reserves.

Not for modern Russia the British pattern whereby the electricity supply industry is largely in the hands of a German and a French company. Or whereby future British nuclear plants will be built and run by French- owned EDF. Russia's leaders are, therefore, cool-headed (and possibly cold hearted) calculators of Russia's advantage - men whose outlook is inspired by strategy rather than by idealism or moral purpose.

Hence, the Russian flag placed by submarine on the bottom of the sea below the North Pole, so registering in the most public way Russia's claim to whatever mineral bounty lies below the ice.

These are leaders who want Russia to profit politically as well as economically from her immense wealth in oil and gas, and will ruthlessly use the leverage which these resources give her over all the states dependent on her pipelines.

But none of this amounts to a new ideological 'Cold War', but only to a very old-fashioned great-power rivalry pursued with cunning and caution.

For instance, there is no similarity between the present Russian action in Georgia and the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

In both those cases, the Soviet leadership ordered the Red Army to invade in order 'to defend Socialism'.
The mind of the men in today's Kremlin is a world away from such doctrinaire thinking - just as it is from the ideology-heated emotion and belief in a great moral cause which consumes the hawks of Washington.
Just compare the short-lived and limited Russian military intervention in Georgia to secure Russia's own border region with George W. Bush's long-distance invasion of the sovereign state of Iraq in the hope of democratising the Middle East and then the world.

Then again, Western commentators condemn Russia for making threats to Poland and the Czech Republic because they agreed to accept American 'Star Wars' anti-missile systems on their soil.

But imagine what would be the reaction of the Washington hawks to news that Mexico had accepted a Russian anti-missile system just south of the American border! And how would they react if Russia's strategic frontier had advanced as far west in Europe since the end of the Iron Curtain as Nato's strategic frontier has advanced eastwards?

Or for that matter, what would be the reaction of the Washington hawks (and their acolytes in the British media) if Russia sought to recruit Mexico to a Russian military alliance - as NATO certainly intends to recruit Georgia?

I personally am only too grateful that Putin & Co. do not go in for the moralising common to Anglo-Saxon leaders - even those in opposition like David Cameron, who has been proclaiming after visiting Tbilisi that we must all stand by that absurd posturer and blunderer, Saakashvili, Prime Minister of Georgia.

But then, Cameron is not so much 'a liberal Conservative' (in his own words) as simply a liberal, and a liberal in the mode of Gladstone.

I dread what the foreign policy of a Conservative government might be - what fresh far-off entanglements Britain and her Armed Forces could be involved in.

So what is the final lesson I draw from the Georgia crisis?

First, that it is pointless to denounce the actions of Putin and Medvedev when NATO has no military means of intervening - neither forces in the region, nor available reserves to fly in. Strategic reality trumps pious sermons every time.

And the second and far more important lesson: that we in the West should jettison moral indignation and global do-goodery as the basis of policy, and instead emulate Russia's admirable reversion to 19thcentury realpolitik.

Henceforth, we should base our foreign and economic policy on hard-nosed pursuit of our own national interest.

Branded Revolutions: Designer Dissidents and their Failure

It is now a decade since Mikheil Saakasvili came to power. As a leading number of his ministers are being arrested, not least for the scandal of prison abuses where inmates had rubber truncheons inserted into their anuses in this wonderful new "liberal" democracy, it's worth remembering other flawed "Colour Revolutions" funded and instigated by transnational institutions and the USA.

This from John Laughland at The Spectator

The ‘rose revolution’, Georgia, 22 November 2003
The ‘rose revolution’ in Georgia turned on a disputed election. Street protests were organised by a group called ‘Kmara’. The opposition leader, Mikheil Saakashvili and his supporters started their march on Tbilisi from under Stalin’s statue in Gori and forced their way into the parliament clutching roses, thus overthrowing the incumbent president. Weeks later, Saakashvili was elected with a suspicious 96.24 per cent of the vote. Since then, his reputation has become tarnished. Last year, an EU report concluded that Saakashvili had started the conflict with Russia in 2008 when Georgia launched its military attack on South Ossetia: the subsequent stationing of Russian troops in Georgia’s two breakaway provinces will ensure that the country will never now join Nato.

The ‘Orange revolution’, Ukraine, November 2004
By the time presidential elections came up in Ukraine, the ‘rainbow revolutions’ were on a roll. The main protest group, ‘Pora’, was a carbon copy of Kmara. The West encouraged the divided Ukrainian opposition to unite behind one man, a boring stooge called Victor Yushchenko. He broke out in what looked like a bad case of acne during the campaign, which was presented as a poisoning attempt orchestrated by the Kremlin. Western media went wild but during the subsequent five years of Yushchenko’s presidency, no prosecution has ever been brought for an attempt on his life, nor for the massive electoral fraud of which he accused his opponent at the time. Yushchenko proved an ineffectual and unpopular president. On 17 January this year, he was humiliated when he received 5 per cent of the vote, beaten by a man who has promised to try to reverse Yushchenko’s artificial and anti-historical rift between Ukraine and Russia.


The ‘tulip revolution’, Kyrgyzstan, March 2005
Protesters ransacked the presidential palace in Kyrgyzstan in late March, but not before various brand names for the unrest had been tried and discarded — ‘lemon’, ‘pink’, ‘silk’ and ‘daffodil’. ‘Tulip’ stuck only because the president said there would be no colour revolution in his country, shortly before there was one. The man brought to power in this delightful display of flower power, Kurmanbek Bakiev, was duly confirmed in office with a modest 89 per cent of the vote. Despite initial hopes, Bakiev’s time in office has been sullied by political murders, corruption and economic crises. There are now regular riots protesting against him, but he remains in office. 

The ‘denim revolution’, Belarus, March 2006
By 2006 the whole idea of revolution branding was wearing a bit thin, so what more fitting image than the failed attempt to unseat the Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, than denim? Only a very ageing trendy could still associate that material with radicalism today. But this ‘revolution’ fizzled out after it mustered little more than a few spotty adolescents standing in jeans carrying posters in support of President Bush.

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In an earlier article Laughland commented, quite accurately, this,

'The myth of revolution now wields such a strong hold over our collective consciousness that, with the compulsiveness of children who beg to be retold the same story, we regularly accept at face value fairy tales about revolutions in a faraway country of which we know nothing. Being tabula rasa for us, these countries are the perfect backdrop on which to project our own fantasies: these tales invariably follow the same formulaic sequence, in which a dishonest or authoritarian or brutal regime is overthrown by ‘people power’, and everyone lives happily ever after. 

Recent years have seen a spate of such ‘revolutions’. The overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic on 5 October 2000 in Belgrade; the overthrow of the Georgian president, Eduard Shevardnadze, in the ‘rose revolution’ of November 2003; the ‘orange revolution’ in Ukraine last Christmas; the violent overthrow of the president of Kyrgyzstan in March; the uprising in the Uzbek city of Andijan in May — all these are presented as spontaneous outbursts of righteous popular indignation. 

Perhaps authoritarian regimes, rather like the walls of Jericho, really are brought tumbling down by the chanting of a John Lennon song. But before the fall of communism, ‘revolution’ and ‘people power’ were considered just leftish propaganda. We dismissed the Soviet regime’s appeal to its own founding event as grotesque political kitsch, masking the sinister reality of power machinations behind the scenes. Now we seem to have become more naive, and have started to take these same two-dimensional archetypes seriously. 

It often happens that, after the event, reports reveal that things were not as spontaneous as was believed at the time. In the case of Ukraine, for instance, it is now a matter of public record that the Americans poured huge sums into the campaign of Viktor Yushchenko, and that the Ukrainian KGB was also heavily involved on the Americans’ side, playing a key role in stagemanaging the whole charade. 

To be sure, the fact that secret services may be involved does not mean that the people on the streets themselves do not believe in the rightness of their cause, or that the events are the result of manipulation alone. But the simplistic terms in which these ‘revolutions’ are presented by our media, and believed by us at the time, are so strong that they reveal more about our own inner fantasies and desires, and about the true nature of our own political culture, than they do about the countries themselve'.

On George Szirtes : On How "Liberal Interventionist" Propaganda Works.

In respect of Szirtes propaganda against Orban's government, some fact need to be borne in mind
Szirtes is a signatory of the Euston Manifesto and best described as liberal left, an affected faux cultural leftism combined with indifference to the Hungarian left's destructive and selfish neoliberal policies of economic and moral deregulation.

Actually, Szirtes is an accomplished translator of Hungarian literature into English. He is not exactly "a bigot" but merely narrow minded in staking out that affected pose as being as part of the one authentic voice among the Hungarian liberal left which asserts only its values are humane and real.While the real impact of the political parties of the Hungarian left has been appalling.

The pose, and it is a mere pose negated by Szirte's chums failure to condemn the global violence and militarism propagated by the Bush II administration but only the "execution" of the war. Has Gyorgy Konrad anything to say on "repetitive administration" i.e repeated use of torture on "terrorist suspects" ? What happened to "speaking truth to power?"

The double standards are clear. Orban has not reverted to "fascism". Principled criticism of Orban would not be characterised as being a "traitor" to Hungary. Orban has not ordered a war in which people have been tortured and obliterated by bombs and bullets. Nor has he, to my knowledge, been an enthusistic supporter of the USA in this regard.

Szirtes was and is: yet he has the audacity to take the high ground on Hungarian politics and effectively accuse Orban of being a new version of Admiral Horthy. While acting as an armchair apologist for those who advocate war and actual militarism in this year 2013. Yet still he wants to know how he can possible be accused of "moral failings".

'Which moral failings are you referring to? Nobody's moral failings would surprise me but I'd be willing to bet that we could go tit-for-tat on moral failings.

But before I tackle that perhaps you'd point out where in the article I made any reference to the moral virtues of the the Hungarian left? The fact is I haven't. I simply made a list of government actions that worry me and might worry others: all items being well-documented. I could link you to every one.

Nobody has really questioned the list, all they have done is to suggest that I must be a wcked man to have made the list because it brings disgrace to the country. The country, you notice, not Fidesz, because for them Fidesz IS the country. They all assume that the actions of a specific government, the government they support, are fully representative of a nation's people. I think much better of the Hungarian people than that'.

Usually I think of Hungarians , or those of Hungarian extraction, as having a strong handle on understanding logic, from the inventor of the Rubik's Cube to the number of Hungarian mathematicians to economists. Clearly, here this is not the case.

Firstly there is the silence by omission, the complete absence of any context and the narrow minded partisanship that follows the line that there is a move towards dictatorship, fascism or authoritarianism under Orban. Moreover, Szirtes has effectively referenced the moral virtues of the Hungarian left.

The implication is embedded in this statement,

The bad press Hungary has been getting of late is the result of left-liberal lies. ( my italics ). At least, that is what the current government claims. In fact, it argues, Hungary is a perfectly normal country going about its business. Criticising the ruling party, the centre-right Fidesz, we are told, is an attack on Hungarians generally. Fidesz is, in effect, Hungary

Note, the implication is that then nothing the liberal left has asserted, not one accusation, can be said to have been a smear or an exaggeration or a lie. It is only FIDESZ that is claiming the liberal left is lying when it is not ( and is it true, the liberal left hasn't or not ?).

It's quite clear for Tibor Fischer's superb rebuttals of anti-Orban propaganda that they have been exaggerating, distorting truth and using their control of the media to smear Orban and to insinuate or directly accuse him of reverting to dictatorship or authoritarianism.

Silence by omission in a Guardian article, that ought to have at least refer specifically far more to the substance of the accusations against Orban so as to advance discussion, also decontextualises the reason that opposition to the Hungarian left is so visceral.

Turned on it's head, that initial statement can be taken to mean the liberal left in Hungary is the guardian of truth and can be trusted not to smear the Orban government. That would mean that the liberal left media had not once lied or accused Orban of dictatorship.

Then you proceed to move seamlessly into the assertion that this not being true in any instance, FIDESZ thinks it is Hungary.

The contrary assertion could be that the Hungarian left, in particular the Budapest intelligentsia, is somehow the guardian of Hungary's eternal interests. While failing to understand at all why the MSZP and SZDSZ ( Demsky et al ) are now so justifiably loathed.

If Szirtes 'thinks so well of the Hungarian people', why not ask those battered and beaten by the police under Gyurscany in 2006 what they think ? Ignoring the attempt to hi-jack the demonstration, most were peaceful anti-government demonstrators. Has Szirtes interview them? What research has he done?

In fact, the way the Hungarian left thinks of itself precisely as Szirtes thinks FIDESZ does, i.e as being Hungary, is precisely the case made by György Schöpflin who puts it well when he comments,

"Part of the problem is that the left simply cannot cope with Viktor Orbán [Hungary's prime minister]. Orbán has charisma, the capacity to move people... I don't see this autocracy happening. There are debates, there is opposition. I wish there was a better opposition, a proper centre-left opposition that was committed to democracy'

And further,

'The Hungarian left appears to have no theory of the democratic center-right and, hence, to assume that they and they alone own democracy.'

Their arbitrary actions, callous indifference to the small entrepreneur in Hungary, to the cultural mores of the small cities and towns of Hungary beyond Budapest and years of irresponsible neoliberal dogmas ( based on emulating Tony Blair) show they do not.

Essentially Mr Szirtes's mode of argumentation is to assert that the virtue of the opposition to Oraban can be understood only in relation to what the Hungarian left has said about Orban-without even bothering to check the veracity of all the claims made against Orban.

It was the same with "liberal interventionists" weird logic chopping apologetics for the Iraq war in 2003 made at Mr Szirtes' favoured Harry's Place. The fact that some "anti-war" propagandists were Stalinists or Fascists aligned them with Saddam: ergo invasion is liberation.

"We", the worthy one's and guardians of truth, define ourselves as what we are for by smearing all our opponents as being "fascists", creeping towards facism or moving towards a de facto form of dictatorship by disagreeing with "our" worldview.

And they do this while posing as sensitive, intelligent and humane people devoted to anti-totalitarianism and that anyone who has the temerity to disagree is some sort of hideous monster. Hence Szirtes' smug little response "Absolutely delighted to be abused by the likes of Carl Naylor. I must be doing something right".

By that logic ( and ignoring the fact  he was not "abused" in any way )  the fact that I disagreed with the Iraq War in 2003, must mean that Szirtes's support for "liberal intervention" was right. Well, at least he helps them out by intervening with poetry readings in Erbil on the tenth anniversary of the invasion.

Only the 600,000 Iraqi dead won't ever be able to enjoy it not the "liberation" which came at such high cost. Szirtes seems to have written little on this.

A Response to George Szirtes in The Guardian

It seems bizarre that a poet and translator as George Szirtes, whose job consists of words and their nuance and meaning, should respond with a clearly stung reply to his feeble case for Orban's FIDESZ marking a return to the 1930s being challenged.

Absolutely delighted to be abused by the likes of Carl Naylor. I must be doing something right. It is only the paucity of his arguments, ably rebutted by a good many here, that is disappointing. No one ever says 'he got this wrong or he got that wrong'. 

I could have quoted a good many more instances of the kind of behaviour than are listed in the article. They are not 'accusations' - they are records of actions that have been widely reported in both the Hungarian and the foreign press. It's just that some people think these were good things to have done. I don't.

It's the same story every time. If you criticise the government you must be a filthy traitor to the country. Because that's what it amounts to, doesn't it?

For the record I have spent almost thirty years translating marvellous Hungarian literature and hope to carry on doing so as long as possible. It is a great literature, produced by great Hungarians, of whom there have been many and still are.

First of all, Szirtes is entitled to react to the view that his characterisation of FIDESZ's government in Hungary is reverting to either "Fascism"or authoritarianism is arrant drivel and hyperbole. But, the picqued tone of his response desrved the one I gave below

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Mr Szirtes, you have been challenged. " or what I consider your double standards and omissions. To assume a person has been "äbused" ( playing the victim ) and then, to extrapolate from that, that one must be doing something right is a very weak argument.

It's the same story every time. If you criticise the government you must be a filthy traitor to the country. Because that's what it amounts to, doesn't it?

No, it does not. This is more unfounded victimspeak. You are not a "traitor". You simply ignore the realities of Hungary and the political, social and economic context of the post-communist years. Pointing that out needed doing. And it's not "äbuse"

The very word äbuse"has been degraded in recent years to mean a euphemism for torture ( of the sort meted out by the USA in it's "War on Terror" ) into which the Iraq War was blended in a seamless continuum , cheered on by "liberal interventionists"( you know who they are don't you ) said what ?

And, for the record, as great a translator as you are, you are not the only one. "There is Carol Janaway, who translated Embers by Sandor Marai .There was the "Passionate Outsider" known as G F Cushing who translated a great deal of Hungarian literature for the Corvina Press in Budapest

( If Szirtes had even bothered reading my first response, he would have noticed I paid tribute to him as an excellent translator in the very first sentence-hardly the tone of someone who is out to äbuse" him-what self pity. )

Mr Szirtes knows this. Yet others may not. Being a poet and translator does not give a person some right to think they are above being challenged ( repeat not abused ). And you have done nothing to refute the challenge to your viewpoint.

I have yet to get a reply on his double standards in which he has nothing to write about the way FIDESZ supporters were brutally battered by the police ( often without ID numbers ) in 2006 and the fact that none of Gyurscany's protesters have been threated that way ( even if in 2006, far-right hooligans were stirring things up ).

GeorgeSz -

And no one has denied the swing back to the thirties as a national model either. But that may be because they do actually want to go back there. Would they like to say whether they think the thirties is an attractive model?

So a simple set of questions for Mr Szirtes,

1) Do you really think Orban is modelling himself on Admiral Horthy ?

2) If the context is akin to the 1930s, why no criticism of the neoliberal left extremism of the MSZP.

3) Why no criticism of the MSZP, Gyurscany's role in creating the chaos?

There may well be a certain reversion to some of the symbolism, but as Orban is not a dictator, he cannot order this not to be done. But even he must admit this notion that Hungary is reverting a 'Fascist Regime' is simply hyperbolic drivel.

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Professor Roger Scruton summarised well in a Budapest speech in 2010 the problems of the Budapest intelligentsia, most of whose assumptions are blithely followed by George Szirtes.

Instead of feeling so awfully sorry for himself, he may wish to reflect upon these wise words as Scruton is broadly supportive of Viktor Orban an FIDESZ intellectuals such as Gyorgy Schopflin

Here, in Hungary, as I am sure many of the people in this room remember, there was not an atmosphere of fear but just an atmosphere of repression and hopelessness – a sense that you were not likely to be arrested or to be punished in any way for doing anything in particular, but nevertheless there was no point in doing anything in particular anyway. I looked around for people to help, for people to try to do things. There was a very active group of Budapest intellectuals who met in the houses of people like János Kis and Miklós Haraszty, and who were connected with others of the former or actually practicing academic professionals who had taken an interest in political liberty and in propagating an alternative to the Socialism of their day (people like Demszky Gábor, Vajda, and Magyar and so on). So I got to know these people and did not really have a great deal of sympathy with their worldview except that we agreed on the most important thing, which was liberating Hungary from the oppression of the Communist party. These people seemed to me to be thinking something out and trying to propagate it. They published in samizdat, and I spent quite a lot of time briefing people who came to Hungary and trying to persuade them to take ink for Demszky’s printers, for which he was always in serious need. But that was one group of the opposition in Hungary.

I felt that the Budapest intellectuals, although admirable in their opposition to the regime, were really in some way attempting to rescue Socialism from the people who would make it unacceptable to the world. They wanted to rescue Socialism as a kind of liberalism. A kind of freedom, but freedom nevertheless imposed by intellectual elite. And not a freedom that would allow the ordinary person to really think and believe and act as he wanted but a superior kind of freedom that we the intellectuals would define and you the people would have to learn about.

....you also find this protest in the anti-Christian attitude of the American liberal intellectual. The American’s views are being shaped in opposition to what he understands as the norms and received values of the surrounding American society, and I think you can see a form of this in the anti-Hungarian posture of the Budapest elite.

....the ideology of the ACLU has transferred itself to Hungary where you have a very active Hungarian Civil Liberties Union more or less devoted to defending minority rights against majority values. Now there is some room for that defense, but when that becomes the whole of politics, once again we have this negative, subversive approach to things which is irrational and a nightmarish red sludge that I have been put on this earth to counter.
Everything is being postponed to the future. As to what is actual today, it is simply an object of contempt or aggression. And I think this is the toxic mud in which we still find ourselves since 1945. It is the very same attitude, if not the same dogmatic beliefs, that brought George Lukács to power in 1918, and his successors in 1945 and 1948. You see it in the way in which the Communists took power after 1945. Sándor Márai wrote a book, a memoire of Hungary, which many of you may know, about the way in which this innocent society slipped without resistance into the trap of the Communists. And you see a repeated pattern here, which is one of remorseless hatred towards anything that people do for themselves and an attempt to identify the good people, people who are acting out of the love of their neighborhood and the love of their neighbors and the love of their country and to attempt isolating them and removing them.

Update 14.32 CET

As yet Mr Szirtes has proved either unwilling or unable to answer the polite questions on the deficiencies of the Hungarian left, including the silence of those such as Gyorgy Konrad and A Heller as regards supporting the Iraq War, saying nothing about the lies and deception that accompanied this illegal invasion in 2003. All he has done is made snidy asides in The Guardian.

Contrary to what certain opponents have accused Mr Szirtes of, he is not a Stalinist or a "Communist foot soldier".Szirtes is not at all in the tradition of Stalinism. Nor can Szirtes be written off as "non-Hungarian" as one rude commentator has He is, like Tibor Fischer, who defended Orban in the Guardian, Anglo-Hungarian.

Szirtes is a signatory of the Euston Manifesto and best described as liberal left, an affected faux cultural leftism combined with indifference to the Hungarian left's destructive and selfish neoliberal policies of economic and moral deregulation.One wrote,

Szirtes and his colleagues, as faithful party soldiers, fulfill their ideologically bigoted missions by planting articles in foreign newspapers that are full of hate and lies, and with their political bigotry. This proves to be an effective tool because practically no foreigner speaks Hungarian

Actually, Szirtes is an accomplished translator of Hungarian literature into English. He is not exactly "a bigot" but merely poses as being as part of the one authentic voice among the Hungarian liberal left which asserts only its values are humane and real.

Something negated by Szirte's chums failure to condemn the global violence and militarism propagated by the Bush II administration but only the "execution" of the war. Has Gyorgy Konrad anything to say on "repetitive administration" i.e repeated torture.? Can anyone provide evidence ?

The double standards are clear. Orban has not reverted to "fascism". He has not ordered a wat in which people have been tortured and obliterated. Not has he, to my knowledge, been an enthusistic supporter of the USA in this regard.

Szirtes was and is: yet he has the audacity to take the high ground on Hungarian politics and effectively accuse Orban of being a new version of Admiral Horthy. While acting as an armchair apologist for those who advocate war and actual militarism in the early twenty first century.

The Failure of the Left in Hungary

Some on the Hungarian left have criticised the characterisation of Viktor Orban as liberal conservative. They achieve this through a delusional remoulding of reality. For example,

.'....to call Orban simply a "liberal conservative" would make it seem like he is a kind of One Nation Tory, or at most perhaps the Hungarian equivalent of Angela Merkel. That seems rather understating the issue: most liberal conservatives don't go on nationalist rants like Orban, and would shy away from his populist mish-mash of libertarian policies (flat tax) and collectivist policies (nationalizing people's private pension savings). I would rather go for populist right-winger. But a fascist, obviously, he is not, and I agree that bandying around such a word is silly. (It's also counterproductive, because if Orban is already a fascist, what are we supposed to call Jobbik?)'

At least, the crude propaganda trope that Orban is a "fascist", a sort of Stalinoid way to dismiss anybody who is not "progressive" ( another increasingly meaningless cant term ) is rejected. Political terms are not relative to those want to frame them in such a way to make narrow partisan political points.

FIDESZ has to be somewhat "populist" if only because the previous MSZP did not give a damn for most Hungarians outside Budapest. Orban is his career has never once given himself over to any "nationalist rant". His statement that Hungary "should not be a colony" is one that accords with his leadership being threatened by the IMF who has often imposed neoliberal dogmas that have made economies and suffering worse.

The decision to implement the flat tax is a pragmatic decision in the context that, as Orban himself said, only one fifth of Hungarians pay tax. Small businesses regularly fiddle their books in order to survive and Hungarian lie about their income as the tax is simply too high and high levels of unemployment and the lack of social contribution from Roma communities has helped create budget deficits.

The flat tax is accepted by centre-right governments across the former "Eastern Europe" from neighbouring Slovakia to the Baltic Republics. Simply because that policy seems to contradict more collectivist ones does not make Orban a "right wing demagogue". He's a pragmatist trying to improve his nation's standing and integrity.

Orban should have shown more backbone and sacked Zsolt Bayer ( though individual politicians may say awful things does not mean the entire party is far right-though the comment was an attempt to exploit anti-Roma sentiment rather crudely in order to get votes. Then again smearing Orban as a "fascist" hardly shows any less of a lack of "populism" or "demagogy" on the Hungarian left.

The issue of Roma integration is one that works both ways: they lack a successful role in Hungarian economic life as they often refuse to send their children to school. They had their traditional way of life destroyed by Communist social engineering and forcing them into panelhaz and the sort of work they had never been used to.Any solution has to involve both side making efforts. FIDESZ has three Roma MPs.

The Jobbik is far right populist, though it is a sort of "fascism with laptops" as John Gray termed it. The odd thing is many Jobbik, according to recent sociological research,  are not skinhead paramilitaries ( though they are a menacing presence ) but fully literate IT professionals and living and struggling in small towns like Debrecen and Nyiregyhaza.

The Jobbik is the consequence of the MSZP having espoused a cultural leftism while hypocritically imposing extreme neoliberal policies in order only to make Budapest and the M3 corridor the engine of growth. The rest of Hungary was of little or no importance to Gyurcsany's regime not that of his unelected successor Gordon Bajnal

This objective fact is omitted from Hungarian leftist critics of Orban. The Hungarian leader believes that these forces can be contained by policies that make elected governments responsible for trying to improve the condition of all Hungarian citizens not just a coterie of spivs, porn merchants, and pseudo-democratic designer dissidents living in Budapest.

The pseudo-leftism of the literati in Budapest and their proclamations of being anti-totalitarian have long been in bad faith since the end of communism in 1989-1990. Gyorgy Konrad who was mentored by gorgy Lukacs too, the commissar under the Communists who sought to proscribe what could and could not be read by Hungarians. They have never outgrown this idea they can dictate what Hungary must be.

George Szirtes: The Faux Left and Criticism of Viktor Orban.

George Szirtes is an excellent translator of Hungarian literature into English. Yet he shares the arrogance of the Budapest intelligentsia that they are their values alone are the only legitimate ones and that are the guardians of Hungary's true values and even of democracy. In the Guardian he writes,
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'Among the foreign dignitaries attending Margaret Thatcher's funeral on Wednesday will be a man who many feel shouldn't be representing his country. But it will be a handy getaway for Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, an excuse for him to break off from trying to defend his country's new constitution from its EU critics, who include commission president José Manuel Barroso".
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Barroso is not elected. Orban was voted in fairly by 2/3 of the Hungarian electorate. When Szirtes complains about "many" he means the cultural left and their allies in the MSZP and SZDSZ which were trounced at the elections in 2010 after eight years in which Fidesz Party members were purged from administration.

That makes Szirtes complaint that Orban is politicising of the Hungarian administration one based firmly on double standards. The MSZP purge thousands of civil servants for being FidesZ after 2002. Orban was staunchly anti-communist and called in 1989 for Russian tanks to leave Hungary. Szirtes role in helping Hungary gain freedom was precisely nothing.

Szirtes translates Hungarian classics into English, a worthy role.Yet his politics is simply based on prejudice and credulity. Far more than that other Anglo-Hungarian writer Tibor Fischer.

"The bad press Hungary has been getting of late is the result of left-liberal lies. At least, that is what the current government claims. In fact, it argues, Hungary is a perfectly normal country going about its business. Criticising the ruling party, the centre-right Fidesz, we are told, is an attack on Hungarians generally. Fidesz is, in effect, Hungary"

The bad press comes from those in Hungary or of Hungarian origin using their fluency in English to project their own partisan agenda. Fidesz noes not claim Admiral Horthy, the right wing authoritarian leader between the wars as a model. On the contrary, it is the Budapest intelligentsia and the MSZP who think they have the inalienable right to rule

Szirtes cannot even get his basic facts correct. Horthy was a right wing authoritarian, no doubt an unpleasant leader with no liking of "alien" and decadent Budapest, the centre of the Communist revolutions in 1919 led by Bela Kun. But Horthy was never a fascist: he had no plans for the revolutionary mass mobilisation that Mussolini and Hitler aimed at.

The real fascists, the Arrow Cross, came to power in 1944 when it was clear that Horthy no longer supported Hitler as the alliance was of no use and was determined to stop any more transport of Jews from Budapest to Auschwitz. Hitler arrested his son and removed him from power. Later Horthy was protected from Moscow's retribution as he was more anti-communist than "pro-fascist"

Not only was that stance against the Soviet Union a braver stance than any ever took by Szirtes, the English residing writer prefers to leave the bravery to others when acting as an armchair apologist for wars such as the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 as did his ally Gyorgy Konrad. Advocating brutal violent wars and revoltions in the name of universal values is what these leftists do.

Orban has thus every right, more than most, to represent Hungary at the funeral of Margaret Thatcher. Szirtes has little moral position from which to complain about that simply because his precious friends in the writers and journalists of the Buda Hills are irate and perplexed by at Orban's popularity.

The increased emigration is of the young is due to the sheer level and destructive neoliberal policies of Ferenc Gyurscany who remarked that if one did not like his economic policies then one was free to leave Hungary. If that attitude prevailed amidst the left, no wonder FIDESZ would became popular.They are not necessarily leaving because or Orban.

The truth is diametrically opposite to most fake claims made by Szirtes: it is the tiny majority of leftist dissidents against Communism before 1989 who believe they represent "real Hungary" when all they represent is the cosmopolitan Budapest leftists who enriched themselves handsomely while they contrived to ignore the destructive impact of supposedly left wing governments on people.

Having nothing to say about the destructive impact of the Bokros Programme of 1996 that implemented "reforms" which destroyed entire swathes of Hungarian industry overnight and of Gyurscany's later callousness towards his own Hungarian electors, Szirtes wonders why the opposition is hated.

This makes the following shrill hyperbole as absurd as it is redundant,

"Fidesz's notion of national values – so easily "betrayed" by those who do not share their political sympathies – trumps everything. Opposition exists, but the cultural and political ground is being cleared of such voices.The government is on a fast track back to the 1930s".
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FIDESZ is trying to restore a measure of national sovereignty over the Hungarian economy. He is simply not some admirer of Admiral Horthy and there is no evidence of this, a baseless smear made by those who affect to be sensitive and cultured whilst advocating violent wars in far off lands such as Iraq as part of 'democracy promotion" and with no expert knowledge of the Middle East.

If there needs to be a discussion in Hungary by those opposed to Orban, it might be necessary for them to use their supposed intellects to stop getting angry that the Hungarian people, mostly outside Budapest, simply do not value to lack of leadership, cronyism and corruption shown by the MSZP. If anything FIDESZ's popularity shows that it is the Hungarian left that stands in need of reform.

Post 1989 and the Legacy of Thatcherism.

In discussion with Guardian journalist Neil Clark, who writes of the Myth of Thatcherism, it seemed relevant to draw attention to the fact Margaret Thatcher was mobbed by ship workers in Gdynia when visited in 1988. She provided, in the Polish worldview, the moral impetus along with Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II to argue against the evil of communism.

Niel Clark offers a slightly different view,

"What most people protesting in eastern europe in 1989 wanted was to get rid of the bad aspects of life under communism, e.g restrictions on freedom to travel, not to throw everything out and adopt a heartless, dog-eat-dog capitalist model with mass privatisation and large scale unemployment"

True. But the Soviet system collapsed from within. The Soviet model was not even followed in Poland. The question then was what to replace it with. The extreme Balcerowicz Plan was actually abandoned by 1992 in the face of popular protests. But freedom is freedom.

There was no possibility that the Communism of Eastern Europe could converge with capitalism to create a "market socialist"state not even a social democracy. Most ex-communists themselves were eager to embrace ultra-capitalism themselves and had the right crony connections to benefit.

The liberation from communism only to replace it with a state ideology of extreme neoliberalism ( Hayek's ideas were influential ( and he was anti-conservative and anti-communist ), was part of a historical continuity. Top down modernisation and "Market Bolshevism".

It is interesting that we don't really hear much about the other once prominent dissidents in Hungary and Poland who did not embrace neoliberalism nor travel with Bush II's wars and militarism.They are the forgotten now.

Only self regarding windbags such as Adam Michnik seem to express an abstract regret that workers got a raw deal after 1990. Indeed, ironically, it was Michnik who claimed "the worst thing about Communism is what comes after".

Even more ironically, he fails to have applied it to himself when he fell in with other "dissidents"such as Gyorgy Konrad who advocated the Iraq War, mostly through uncritical support for the USA for liberating them from Soviet domination. A form of Orwell's ''transfered nationalism

Many who admired Thatcher's role in providing a moral impetus to destroy Soviet domination are equally as critical of the neoliberal policies then imposed by Balcerowicz, a man who claimed Milton Friedman as his ïnspiration.

The results in Chrzanow, a small town between Krakow and Katowice, are sad. Once the centre of Fablok, a major locomotive manufacturing firm, is a tiny fragment of what it was. Mines and manufacturing decimated as managers asset stripped the firms.

Mass unemployment followed. Working men reduced to eating out of bins or drinking themselves to death on cheap sulphurised wine ( jabcok ). The young are leaving in droves. It was called by one student of mine a "zombie town".