Whoever ultimately wins the German election, we lose. By ‘we’ I mean the West facing up to its enemies.
Putin’s kleptofascist regime is one such enemy, implacable and self-proclaimed. And consecutive German governments have been its collaborators. Political analysts have even come up with the term ‘schroederisation’, in honour (dishonour?) of the ex-chancellor now making millions on the board of Gazprom and other Russian cash cows.
It’s from that angle that I invite you to look at the German election. The dead heat between the Christian Democrat Armin Laschet and the socialist Olaf Scholz brought up a photo finish in favour of the latter. However, his victory doesn’t necessarily mean Scholz will be able to form a coalition.
As with all countries practising proportional representation, it’s the marginal parties that often decide the outcome (which explains why our dear LibDems pine for this inherently ineffectual system). At the moment, the Greens and the Free Democrats are playing hard to get, hoping to drive up the price of their participation.
Yet whoever forms a coalition, Putin wins. For both candidates are his stooges, unwitting or otherwise.
Using his professional skills, the KGB colonel started out by buying European politicians retail. He later switched to wholesale purchases, doubtless trying to lower the unit price.
Britain is no exception, always open for Russian business. Our illustrious PM has even cooked up a KGB peer of the realm by elevating Evgeny Lebedev to the Lords.
Lebedev’s father is a career KGB officer turned tycoon, whose ill-gotten loot bought two British newspapers and hundreds of lavish shindigs, at which his son wooed British politicians, including Johnson. A life peerage followed, leaving me surprised that it wasn’t a hereditary one. Something to look forward to, I suppose.
For details of Russia’s recruitment of the City of London and the relevant politicians, I do recommend the recent bestseller Putin’s People by Catherine Belton. Since she wrote that book, our former chancellor, George Osborne (whose recent job was editing Lebedev’s Evening Standard), has become advisor to Oleg Deripaska’s aluminium concern.
That consummated a courtship conducted by Osborne since at least 2008, when he was shadow chancellor. Osborne visited Deripaska’s yacht in the cross-party company of Peter Mandelson, with great and profitable fun doubtless had by all. Deripaska, incidentally, is under personal sanctions in the US, whose authorities cited his links with organised crime as the reason for that exclusion.
Actually, any Russian billionaire or government official (the two categories often overlap) could be found guilty of the same indiscretion. After all, Putin’s government is history’s unique fusion of secret police and organised crime – unique, that is, in a sizeable country with lofty pretensions.
Such a combined background stands Putin in good stead when it comes to seducing Western politicians, especially German ones. His bias towards Germany is easy to understand.
First, the country is the most influential EU member; second, Col. Putin served at the KGB Dresden station, where he developed a particular expertise in recruiting and running German agents. Since he became national leader (nationaler Führer in German), that activity has, if anything, intensified.
Merkel, while occasionally making critical statements about Putin for public consumption, toed an unswerving pro-Russian path in everything that mattered. The two leaders are on a first-name basis, and they happily indulge in public foreplay each time they meet. That cordial friendship extended to business, with Merkel happily increasing Germany’s dependence on Russian gas.
In particular, she lobbied to overturn US sanctions against Nord Stream 2, the Russian pipeline using gas as a profit spinner and blackmail weapon. Biden obliged, and when the pipeline starts pumping, just about all of Germany’s gas will be at Putin’s mercy. So much for German Christian Democracy.
But the good colonel doesn’t discriminate: he is happy to woo any European parties, right, left or centre. The so-called right-wing (in effect fascisoid) parties, like Germany’s AfD or France’s National Rally, are the easiest marks, but like a priapic lothario Putin is out to seduce any willing prey.
Hence both deadlocked candidates treat Putin with sympathy and affectionate understanding. Laschet especially has set out to out-Merkel Merkel or even to out-Schröder Schröder.
He responded to Putin’s bandit raid on the Crimea by saying: “Yes, of course Russia is breaking international law. But do let’s look at this through the eyes of our partner in dialogue”. No wonder that Laschet is a welcome and frequent guest at the Germano-Russian forum ‘Petersburg Dialogue’.
By way of conducting such bilateral communications, Laschet doubts Russian spies had anything to do with the Skripal poisoning, he didn’t demand sanctions after the poisoning of Navalny or his imprisonment on trumped-up charges. He applauds the role Russia is playing in Africa and the Middle East. And of course he adores Nord Stream 2.
The other candidate, Scholz, who won the election by a whisker, is more reserved in his pronouncements about Putin. However, judging by his close links with his Parteigenosse Schröder, his policies will be softer than his rhetoric.
While rebuking Putin for the theft of the Crimea and eastern Ukraine, Scholz believes that: “If we want to guarantee collective security in Europe, then it’s up to the EU and Russia to do so.” Herr Scholz refuses to see that this is the same as using burglars to secure one’s house from burglaries.
Who does he think is threatening European security? Britain? US? New Zealand? Clearly not Putin’s Russia, which pounces on its neighbours like a rabid dog and whose rattling sabres are deafening the world.
One has to congratulate Col. Putin for this operational success. These days he can watch any European elections with the detachment of a neutral observer. Whoever wins, he wins.
Is there a leader anywhere in the world who has his country’s and his people’s best interests at heart? Where is the trusted patriot advisor, who has the king’s ear and corrects his course when his policies lead toward destruction? As we know, the common man, with his common education, is not fit to vote. However, the voters are only partly to blame – as has been stated on theses pages, the system itself does not elevate those fit to govern (the evil of two lessers – now, where did I read that?).
“Using his professional skills, the KGB colonel started out by buying European politicians retail. He later switched to wholesale purchases, doubtless trying to lower the unit price.”
I can imagine a lot of old and dusty files from the Soviet era examined with the fine-tooth-comb.
Is Russia an insoluble problem?
I’m sure God would answer this question differently, but my answer is yes.
In a diary entry in 1994, George Kennan (1904-2005) wrote of the “enormous damage – social, spiritual, and even genetic – which seven decades of Communist power had done to the Russian people, what this had cost them, how far it had set them back, and what now remained: a confused, genetically and economically impoverished population, shaken, humuliated, and traumatized, without much confidence in itself, and without the leadership to give it that confidence.” See “The Kennan Diaries” (2012), p. 637. Do you agree with Kennan’s assessment then, and, if so, has there been any change for the better in the Russian psyche in the ensuing 27 years?
The real question is whether there has been any change for the better in the Russian psyche since, say, the time of Ivan the Terrible. I’m not so sure. Russia got her religion from Byzantium, added a large does of superstition and created no deep religious conscience. That, of course, was the foundation of Western culture. She got her governance and legality from the Horde (until the Mongol invasion in 1240 Russia didn’t really exist as a unified political or even cultural entity), where all power was concentrated in a single point. That’s why the Bolsheviks triumphed there — there was no moral fibre to resist them. The Bolsheviks did corrupt the population even further, as they do everywhere they vanquish. In my view it takes any country at least twice as long as it was under Bolsheviks to reset to where it had been before. At the moment, I can’s see much difference from the way the Russians were when I parted company with them (1973). Crass materialism is spread wider, but I don’t see that as a change for the better.
Your comment reminds me of something Ernest Gellner (1925-1995), the great polygot thinker, said about societal attitudes or demands having little to do with the fall of communism in Russian and Eastern Europe. In his article, “The Price of Velvet: Thomas Masaryk and Vaclav Havel,” Gellner contrasted the differing views of why communism fell in Czechoslovakia that were put forward by Havel and Petr Pithart, a former dissident who published what Gellner described as “a remarkable analysis of Czech history and of communist guilt (in which he shared), named simply ’68’.” Gellner inclines to Pithart’s view, and says that the fall of Communism in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere was not driven by the populace, which had become apathetic. As Gellner put it, “Communism was not destroyed by society or by honesty; it could dominate the former and contain or corrupt the latter.” “Whether we like it or not,” Gellner said, “[communism was] destroyed by consumerism and Western militarism, plus an outburst of decency and naivete in the Kremlin. Faced by a double defeat in both the consumption and the arms races, the Soviet leadership chose to liberalize politically, in the simple-minded and quickly refuted expectation that this would rapidly lead to an economic improvement.”
The fact that Frau Merkel stayed in her office almost as long as Putin stays in his says it all. As for Britain, former KGB colonel and PM Gennady Gudkov who had to flee from Putin’s regime and found shelter in Bulgaria, rightly suggested that the West could easily put an end to Putin’s regime if they started investigating the origin of Russian capital invested in the West and arresting bank accounts and assets of Putin’s oligarchs. The latter stole trillions of rubles from common Russian citizens and from the Russian Treasury and invested them in UK, France, US, offshore jurisdictions. They enjoy dolce vita in the West with their wives and mistresses while their children study at best Western universities on the dirty money thus laundered in the West. If the collective West imposed pinpoint sanctions against roughly 10,000 families of Russian tycoons and Putin’s cronies enjoying a luxury life in the West, this pernicious regime would have fallen a decade ago. Yet the West seems to love dirty Russian money more than common Russian people groaning under the yoke of Putin’s regime.