The Spanish fighters who changed my views

After four years of Nazi occupation, Paris was finally liberated by Allied armies on 24 August 1944. Units of the mythic French force, the ‘Deuxième DB’, the Second Armoured Division, led the way into the city. They had raced there to support the population that had risen against the occupying forces.

In the evening, the first half tracks pulled into the square outside the Paris town hall. As in all such units, the vehicles had all been given names by their crews, names that were painted on their sides:

Gudalajara

Brunete

Ebro

Santander

Teruel

If you’re thinking “those don’t sound like French names”, you’d be right. They were great battles of the Spanish Civil War. And the language the crews were talking was Spanish.

These were the men of the ‘Nueve’ (‘nine’ in Spanish), the ninth company of the Deuxième DB, almost exclusively Spanish. Their commander, the French Captain Raymond Dronne, wrote of them later:

The Spaniards fought remarkably. Commanding them is a delicate matter but they have enormous courage and experience of combat.

That ‘delicate’ is a glorious piece of French understatement. It chimes with what Dronne was told when he was first given command:

Everyone’s afraid of them. They’re good soldiers. They won’t give you any problems.

The halftrack Guernica of the Nueve in Paris in 1944

Moving to a new country certainly gives you a new perspective on many things you thought you knew.

For instance, I’ve had to rethink some of the most elementary facts I felt I knew about the Second World War. I’ve long accepted that it didn’t start on 1 September 1939 with the Nazi invasion of Poland, as is generally taught in schools. The first shots were fired on 19 September 1931, when Imperial Japanese forces invaded the Chinese territory of Manchuria.

OK, you might think, but that was the Pacific Theatre. In the European theatre, the war started in September 1939, surely? Well, that too is an idea I’ve had to revise, under the gentle guidance of Marisa, a friend we’ve met out here in Spain, who’s frighteningly well-informed on history.

My view was always that the Spanish Civil War, which started in July 1936, was a sort of preamble to the World War. In reality, however, with the Soviet Union supporting the Spanish Republic, while Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy backed the military uprising that brought Franco to power, it offered a first opportunity for three of the major powers of the coming World War to test each other’s strengths and weaknesses and, indeed, to expose some of their forces to combat.

That feels more like the first Act of the wider war rather than merely a preamble to it.

In any case, it wasn’t just the Germans and Italians, or to a smaller extent the Russians, who emerged from the Spanish Civil War with trained and battle-hardened veterans ready for the next stage of the conflict. There was also quite a lot of the Spanish Republican army. The Republic itself had been defeated and overthrown, but many of the soldiers survived.

Large numbers joined the flood of over 450,000 refugees fleeing across the Pyrenees into France. They rightly feared the retaliation that Franco’s victorious regime would exact from them if they were caught. The regime proved they were right by what it did to those it did in fact catch.

In France conditions were, however, not particularly better. They were held in what the French called “internment camps”, but the Spanish, especially the ones who were there, unequivocally referred to as “concentration camps”. Lack of food, poor sanitation and inadequate housing led to huge numbers of deaths. This was 1939, after all, when France and Britain still hoped that their policy of appeasing Hitler might avoid war. That desire, combined with the xenophobia and right-wing beliefs of a significant current amongst Frenchmen, conspired to ensure the refugees were shockingly badly treated.

Offered the option of returning home, about 100,000 chose to go, mostly women and children. Few of the combatants, understandably, took up that offer, however. Some paraded in front of French officers hoping to be taken into the army, but the generals, who were to be humiliatingly defeated the following year, decided they didn’t need these experienced troops whose political loyalties they weren’t sure of (they were generally left wing, some extremely).

Some 10,000, however, were recruited into the Foreign Legion. And, once war with Germany broke out, others were taken into ‘Foreign Labour Companies’ who were set to work on the Maginot line, the great string of bunkers and fortresses along the border with Germany. Life there was certainly preferable to the camps, though in the end it worked out little better. After defeating France, the Nazi authorities captured many of the Spanish workers. Refusing to treat them as prisoners of war, and working with the Franco government’s agreement, they transferred them to concentration camps. Over 7000 were sent to the Mauthausen camp and fewer than 2500 were released at the end of the war.

Chillingly, some of the survivors later said that their experience in the French camps helped them to prepare for the Nazi ones.

Those who were able to avoid capture, joined the resistance. And among those who had taken part in the fighting, many decided to carry on the battle. One Spaniard in the Foreign Legion, Manuel Fernandez, described his feelings on the defeat of France to a 2017 television documentary:

“It was the greatest disappointment of my life. There were moments when I cried like a child. I’d fled Spain and here I was going to fall into the hands of the Germans.”

One answer was to join General de Gaulle who was setting up Free French forces in London. Of his initial 2000 men, 300 were Spanish.

Alternatively, those who were in the Foreign Legion could cross the Mediterranean with their units. In North Africa, however, they were under the orders of the government in Vichy, a puppet regime of the Nazis, set up after the defeat of France. There they were left to wonder how they’d managed to escape Franco, only to find themselves in a military unit whose orders were dictated by a government collaborating with Franco’s most powerful ally, Hitler.

It would take over two years. Though then things would change dramatically.

But more of that in another post. Just click here...

Thoughts of the victims of war in a Valencia air raid shelter

If you’re sightseeing around our local city, Valencia, the saddest sight you can see is an air raid shelter. I’ve visited two and there are many others.

Inside the air raid shelter under the Valencia town hall

They date from “the war”. However, I believe when most of us say “the war” we probably still mean the Second World War, if we’re from countries that took part in it. In Spain, “the war” means the Civil War the raged from 1936 to 1939, led to the overthrow of the Spanish Republic and ushered in 36 years of dictatorship under Francisco Franco, ending only in his death.

On the other hand, there are many people, inside and outside Spain, who would reckon that the Spanish Civil War was a part of the Second World War. That makes some sense. After all, despite signing the same non-intervention treaties as the democracies, Germany and Italy, then under Nazi and Fascist control respectively, sent not just weapons but military forces to support the Franco rebellion. Only the Soviet Union supplied the Republic, and then only with toxic strings attached.

So major players in the Europe-wide conflict that was about to break out were involved in the Spanish war. The air raid shelters in Valencia were built to withstand attack by Italian forces, chiefly in the form of bombing raids from bases they had set up on the island of Mallorca.

One of the striking aspects of our visit was a video they played us. At several points, I realised that I wasn’t listening to Spanish any more, but to Italian. What was being played was Fascist propaganda about how ‘heroes’ from the Italian air force were taking part in raids on Valencia to make civilisation safe from ‘Soviet communism’, in a fight many saw as a Christian crusade.

Down in that air raid shelter, that irony was particularly bitter. These were shelters for civilians, and they were the main victims of the raids. The propaganda claimed the bombers were targeting armament factories and military concentrations. In reality, they were dropping their bombs on civilian dwellings.

No one puts that better than the great New Zealand cartoonist David Low, who has Franco being told that his Arab troops are concerned by the ‘unchristian’ behaviour of his army.

David Low has an officer reporting to Franco, Mussolini and Hitler
“Excellency, the Moorish troops are disturbed.
They say our conduct of the war is unchristian.”

The assault on civilians would become the hallmark of the long struggle that the Spanish Civil War announced: heavy bombing of civilian centres, often described as a means of ‘weakening enemy morale’. Killing civilians to undermine morale? There’s a word for that. It’s terrorism.

And I was particularly struck by one of the photos in the air raid shelter. A mother with her child. Both faces are paralysed with fear. And it’s perfectly obvious that neither has been guilty of an act that merits the punishment they’re undergoing.

Part of the display in the air raid shelter
Left, a bombed home. Right, a terrified mother and child

Sadly, this kind of terror bombing was by no means limited only to the enemies of the democracies in those years of war. In fact the worst bombing was carried out by the Western powers themselves, something they should perhaps bear in mind when they denounce terrorism today. Dresden, Cologne, Hamburg all but destroyed, with tens of thousands of dead.

And, to top it all and inflict still greater destruction, there were the atom bombs dropped on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Mentioning those Japanese cities reminds me of the only reason I disagree with those Spaniards who say the Second World War started with the conflict in Spain. That same David Low I mentioned before had a different view, which I share. After all, there was a Pacific Theatre to World War II as well as a European one. Fighting started there in 1931, when Japanese troops invaded Manchuria, five years before the uprising in Spain and eight before the Nazi invasion of Poland.

In the background, the “Japan-China mixup” as a mugging
In the foreground, the USA, France, Britain,
Germany and Italy are walking away
One is saying, “Don’t you think, after all, there
may be something in the idea of having a police force?”
Another replies, “Tut Tut! Too risky! Much wiser and cheaper
to wait until we’re all murdered in our beds

Just as in Spain, the democracies stood back and did nothing. And, just as Low warned, they paid the price. All the enemies they would face in the official Second World War – Japan in the Pacific, German and Italy in Europe – were using the earlier conflicts to get into shape to fight the big one.

A tragedy. Which makes visiting the Valencia air raid shelters such a sad moment. Though perhaps a necessary one.

Do we need more spies? And more traitors?

Treason is a terrible offence. Why, even after the British abolished the death penalty for murder, one of the few offences for which it was retained was high treason. That was the case until the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into British law finally did away with capital punishment altogether. But I suspect most of us still think of betrayal as one of the basest of crimes.

Perhaps the most notorious of British traitors, and the most fascinating, is Kim Philby. For the best part of thirty years, he was an agent of the Soviet Union's KGB, who was deeply embedded inside Britain’s own secret intelligence service, MI6. Any information of importance known to MI6 was immediately known to the KGB too. Since James Jesus Angleton, then a rising star of the CIA, was in the habit of confiding pretty much everything he knew to Philby, that meant that most of the CIA’s secrets were also being shared with the KGB.

Some of the missions Philby betrayed inspire little sympathy in me. 

For instance, I have no time for joint MI6 and CIA operations which sent young Albanian men being to their home country, to carry out actions that would be most generously described as sabotage, more harshly as terrorism, in order to weaken the Communist regime and ultimately foment an uprising against it. On the other hand, I find it somewhat nauseating that every single one of those missions was betrayed by Philby. Possibly 200 of these young men were captured and put to death, often in the most atrocious way. Even worse, the number rises to some 2000 when you include the friends and relatives, and even the unfortunates who happened to share the same surname as a captive, who suffered the same fate.

What Philby did was by no means pretty. But there’s no doubt that he showed a lot of guts and ingenuity, with which he turned MI6 inside out, and made some of the most senior figures in the CIA look pretty silly too. It’s a remarkable story, extremely well told by Ben MacIntyre in his book A Spy Among Friends. The title neatly expresses the thinking that put Philby above suspicion among people, his friends from childhood, who ran the secret service and regarded him as ‘one of us’.

Oleg Gordievsky in 1994
Photo from The Times

MI6 wasn’t, however, without its riposte to the KGB for Philby. In his latest book, The Spy and the Traitor, Ben MacIntyre tells another story, rather less well-known than Philby’s but fully as compelling. In Oleg Gordievsky, MI6 recruited its own double agent, deep within the KGB – he ended up with the rank of colonel – who was Philby’s mirror image, ostensibly serving the KGB, in reality betraying its secrets to British intelligence.

The book is well worth reading, an excellent tale of intrigue, peril, betrayal and loyalty. But one of the most interesting stories it tells is of the visit by Mikahil Gorbachev, then the newly appointed General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, to Britain in 1984. It was one of the most successful, and above all cordial, visits by a Soviet leader to the West. Maggie Thatcher, then British Prime Minister, declared that Gorbachev was someone with whom the West “could do business”.

At the time, Gordievsky, by then a well-established MI6 agent, was head of the political intelligence department in the KGB station (rezidentura) in London. This put him in a pivotal position for the visit. As MacIntyre explains:

As head of political intelligence in the rezidentura, he would be responsible for briefing Moscow on what Gorbachev should expect; as a British agent, he would also be briefing MI6 on Russian preparations for the visit. Uniquely in intelligence history, a spy was in a position to shape, even choreograph, a meeting between two world leaders, by spying for, and reporting to, both sides.

Ben MacIntyre and his excellent book on Gordievsky

The same man was briefing both the British and the Soviets. And far from leading to the collapse of the talks, it ensured their success. Unlike Philby, Gordievsky betrayed no one to his death. But in this operation, as in several others that were nearly as significant, he did a great deal more than Philby to advance the cause the Soviet agent claimed to serve: making the world a safer place. And yet Gordievsky was just as assuredly committing treason.

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Perhaps the greatest danger to world peace is state secrecy. And one of the best ways of countering that danger is to have talented spies betraying those secrets, effectively and repeatedly.

Treason is a terrible crime. But, paradoxically, maybe we need rather more spies keeping everyone informed of what everyone else is doing. 

And rather more traitors, not fewer.

England their England

It’s been fun to re-read Ben McIntyre’s biography of Kim Philby.

These days, Philby’s name may not be as well-known as it was in my youth. He was the man once tipped to lead Britain’s counter-espionage service, MI6, and who was involved in practically every major operation it had run between 1940 and 1951. Then he fell under suspicion of being a spy for the Soviet Union, and having therefore betrayed every single one of those operations, but the charges weren’t proved at the time. Indeed, four years later he was back in British intelligence and spying for both his masters – MI6 and the Russian KGB – until he was finally and conclusively exposed in 1963 when he defected to Moscow.

The biography’s title is apt: A Spy among Friends. Philby was recruited by the Russians in the 1930s, but waltzed into MI6 in 1940 with barely a question to answer. He had been educated at one of Britain’s great public schools (as we confusingly call our major private schools) and one of the ancient universities, Cambridge. He belonged to an elite of friends or at worst friends-of-friends, who knew that each could trust each of the others.

Kim Philby: a joy to his friends. Whom he joyfully betrayed

His closest friend, and the man he therefore duped most comprehensively, was Nicholas Elliott, who explained his own recruitment into MI6:

There was no serious vetting procedure. Sir Nevile [Bland, a senior diplomat] simply told the Foreign Office that I was all right because he knew e and had been at Eton with my father.

Membership of this elite group simply opened all doors and Philby, like Elliott, simply slid through them into the very heart of Britain’s secret world, where he could betray and harm the most.

That leaves me with some contradictory feelings. I find that sloppy, incompetent elite deeply unpleasant. It runs the country still, chiefly through its control of the top positions in business, the services and politics (principally through the Conservative Party). A fine example of that elite would be David Cameron, who was Prime Minister from 2010 to 2015 and whose legacy is Brexit.

In a sense, then, I suppose I should approve rather than censure Philby. He acted out of communist conviction. A man of the left taking on a deeply entrenched, massively incompetent and shamefully complacent group of rulers firmly anchored to the right. But I just can’t see anything admirable in what he did.

Perhaps it’s because of the cold-bloodedness and cruelty of his treachery. For instance, several hundred young Albanians were sent by the CIA and MI6 into their homeland to foment unrest against the then Communist government of Enver Hoxha. It strikes me as a brainless thing to have done, undoubtedly illegal, and violent in intent. But I can’t bring myself to like the action taken by Philby, who ensure that they went to their deaths by betraying them to the Soviets. Still worse, several thousand others died with them: relatives, friends, sometimes even people unfortunate enough to share a surname with one of the infiltrated subversives.

I don’t know. I don’t find anything admirable in that. In much the same way as I find it hard to admire a murderer, however unpleasant the victim.

Then there’s another reason. Because another possible title for McIntire’s book could have been An Englishman Abroad, had the title not already been taken by an excellent TV film about another of the Soviet spies who worked inside MI6, Guy Burgess. Even when Philby made it to Moscow, he never stopped hankering for English things. Phillip Knightley, from the spy-hunting service, MI5 – MI6’s rivals – claimed to know what Philby longed for in Moscow:

He’s a totally sad man, dreaming of a cottage in Sussex with roses around the door.

When Philby’s third wife left him in the Soviet Union, his gift to her was telling: the school scarf he had kept since his time at Westminster. He clearly felt a deep bond of loyalty to the very institutions he was betraying.

The Soviets recognised his Englishness. When Philby married his fourth wife in Moscow, the KGB’s present was a quintessentially English tea set in bone china. Even Philby himself described himself as “wholly and irreversibly English”.

Strangely enough, I too feel profoundly English. But mine is a different England from his. I recently watched The Happy Prince, a TV film on Oscar Wilde’s decline into death. In it, Wilde at one point describes England as the natural home of hypocrisy. That’s the England that Philby belonged to, champion of deception that he was.

Sadly, it seems to me that Brexit Britain has chosen to become that kind of nation. Certainly, the like of Boris Johnson or Jacob Rees-Mogg, leaders of the Brexit movement, belong to precisely the same type of entitled, self-selected, public-school and ancient university-educated elite that spawned Philby.

I belong, in some deeply-rooted sense, to England. But that kind of England is not where I want to live. Which is why I don’t live there any more.

The story of Kim Philby reminds me of exactly why.

Personality cults: toxin of our times

One of the benefits of having dogs is that you have to go for walks. It may be cold and wet, or oppressively hot, but the dogs always know that what you really need is another walk.

And they’re right.

Now, and I hesitate to write these words, in case they read them, but even with the company of two charming dogs, I find those walks not entirely exciting. So I take earphones, and an audible book downloaded to my phone. That passes the time satisfactorily, while Luci and Toffee hunt around smelling any patch of ground that seems potentially interesting, or playing with small dogs and running away from large ones.

Luci with Toffee behind her.
Great fun but walks need a little more...

Currently, I’m listening to a book I previously read, Ian Kershaw’s biography Hitler. I seem to be getting more from it this way than from reading it. Perhaps it’s the intimacy of a voice speaking directly into my ear. But what perhaps 
makes the book more vivid to me now is that it feels so much more topical. 

Whether on the first or second time through, the picture that emerges is of a Hitler who was not unintelligent, but hopelessly limited. Perhaps one could describe him as selectively stupid.

For instance, he warned the Jews before the war that if they dragged Germany into another world war, they would pay the price, through the annihilation of Jewry. 

He then invaded Poland, and found himself at war with France and Britain.

Two years later, with Britain still undefeated, he invaded the Soviet Union, convinced the German army could strike a knockout blow in a matter of months, leading to a complete collapse of the Soviets. So now he was in a major European war.

A few months later, Hitler’s ally Imperial Japan attacked the United States and he declared war too.

So now he was in a world war.

The Jews had absolutely nothing to do with any of those steps. Indeed, they had been increasingly victimised as each military adventure got under way. Even so, this was the point at which Hitler, claiming that the Jews had indeed dragged the nation into this terrible conflict, decided that his warning was about to be verified, and Nazi Germany launched its programme of Jewish extermination.

As Kershaw points out, there’s little doubt that Hitler believed what he was saying, however contrary it was to any real evidence. That’s what I mean by blinkered. It’s also what I mean by selective stupidity. It allowed him to delude himself into adopting a series of views with no basis in reality.

It wasn’t, however, the only form of stupidity at play. Or the only form of delusion. Much more widespread was the poisonous beliefs that formed the bedrock of Hitler’s power: the personality cult that developed around him and which meant that any statement he made had to be true, simply because he’d made it.

Hitler was a self-deluded limited man, and profoundly dishonest, but he came to be thought of in Germany as incapable of error.

No attitude is more dangerous. Because if a man is infallible, to question him isn’t merely an error, it’s a lie. To disseminate such a lie is nothing short of treason.

If such questioning is by someone powerful, say the newspapers, then the treason is particularly deadly. The damage is done not to the revered personality – he is above such damage – but to the people who may read or listen to the lies. To protect them, not the leader, it’s necessary to shut down the purveyors of these distortions. Indeed, it may even be necessary to punish the people who produce them.

This is a crucial step to take. Because democracy itself is based on suspicion of its leaders. We elect people to power, but then we surround them with institutions designed to monitor them and question their actions. We never give way to unqualified faith in leaders but expect them to be, like any human, fallible and therefore likely to have to be replaced at some stage.

Personality cults represent an opposed point of view and, consequently, tend to lead to authoritarianism.

Now in long-established and deeply-rooted democracies, such as the United States or Britain, there are mechanisms in place which may be able to prevent that decline into autocratic rule. It may be possible to remove the personalities at the centre of a cult from power before they can consolidate their hold. The great question of our time is whether they are strong enough. Because, and this is why Kershaw is so topical, personality cults are back with a vengeance.

Donald Trump in the US is the head of a personality cult, that sees him as infallibly right, a view he shares. So anyone who questions him is not merely incorrect, but an enemy. Again, the media, or the mainstream media to use today’s dismissive term, are the among the most dangerous. 

Trump would not, I think, launch a Holocaust as Hitler did. However, I’m convinced that he would have no hesitation in locking up opponents if he could. He’d be sure he would be serving the people by doing so.

It’s no accident that the cry of ‘lock her up’ rings out at his rallies.

Not so different as one might think
as both lead personality cults

We have a similar problem in Britain. The Labour Party has been invested by a personality cult. Jeremy Corbyn is seen by his supporters as incapable of error. I’ve been told that I need to show ‘faith’ in the leader, the most dangerous attitude towards leaders. I’ve been told that he is being ‘savvy’ when he refuses to back either side of the Brexit debate, though that merely strikes me as dishonest. And I see in him the same self-deluding tendency to believe that he cannot err: he’s a man of the left so that all his positions are left wing, even when he is pandering to hard right Brexiters whose support he feels he needs, to win office.

As with Trump’s followers, Corbyn’s also loathe the ‘mainstream media’.

Corbyn is no Hitler, of course. However, he necessarily embodies the same tendencies towards authoritarianism that mark all personality cults. Equally, by their unqualified faith, his supporters encourage and reinforce that trend.

Forget the man. Forget his policies. It’s the qualities of a cult themselves that are toxic and need to be resisted.

I’m indebted to Kershaw for reminding me of that vital lesson. And to my dogs, of course, for obliging me to listen to him again.

At the source of the movement

It’s easy to miss important things if you don’t take care.

This week, I nearly left Leipzig without visiting the Saint Nicholas church. When I first went past, it wasn’t open, and I decided that it probably wasn’t worth trying again later. But, in the end, my wandering around the city centre brought me back near the church, so I popped in after all.

The St Nikolai Church in Leipzig

I’m glad I did. Not just because the church has a lovely interior, which it does: the building is far older but the inside is eighteenth-century, like a more elaborate version of London’s Saint Martin in the Fields – soaring but beautifully understated elegance. But even more attractive was the role the church played in the ‘peaceful revolution’ of 1989.

The former nation of East Germany referred to itself as the ‘German Democratic Republic’ or GDR. It viewed itself as democratic because its leaders simply knew they were doing the right thing by the people. It didn’t matter that most of the people didn’t agree. Naturally, if you’re doing the right thing, there’s no need to tolerate any dissent, because opposition must, by definition, be wrong. Sadly, that’s an attitude that seems increasingly common in the West too these days.

After four decades of this rule, the people of the GDR were sick to death of the lack of opportunity their tiny country offered them, coupled with the near impossibility of ever leaving it, surrounded as it was by prison-like fences. The paradoxes bloomed. A friend I met when I visited East Germany in 1982, told me he’d suffered the wrath of the authorities for having Western magazines in his possession. His penalty was to interrupt his university of studies for a year and work as a carpenter instead – in a regime that trumpeted the nobility of manual labour, actually having to do some was regarded as a punishment. More serious offences could lead to far worse consequences: an illegal attempt to leave could even cost you your life.

Strangely, however, the one institution the state never fully brought to heel was the Church. That led to frustrated Leipzig citizens attending services every Monday in the Saint Nicholas Church, to take part in ‘peace prayers’. Week after week growing numbers attended, eventually spilling into the streets. As the Church itself admits, the vast majority of the people clamouring to get in to the services weren’t Christians. They were just thirsting for the right to express a democratic disagreement with the self-styled democrats who ruled them.

And they did it without violence: the Monday meetings truly were peace prayers.

Christian Führer speaking to one of the Monday meetings
A movement without a leader that brought down an autocratic regime

Eventually, the movement grew so large that it took the streets. During my visit, a taxi driver reminded me of the time that the ring road around the city was blocked by crowds 100,000 strong. And in other cities, people followed the example Leipzig had set, increasing the pressure on the leaders until, eventually, they could take it no more. When the then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev made it clear that he would not deploy Soviet troops to put down the popular movement, the Party’s press secretary went on TV to announce that, after 28 years as a blood-soaked tool of authoritarianism, the Berlin Wall would finally open.

Asked when this would happen, the spokesman checked his notes, realised he hadn’t been briefed on a date, and answered, ‘well, now, I suppose’.

From both sides, thousands descended on the checkpoints demanding that the guards open the gates. They checked out the spokesman’s words themselves and, having confirmed he’d really spoken them, they lifted the barriers and the crowds surged through. Some climbed on to the wall, an act that would have been met with gunfire just hours earlier, and with sledgehammers, or pickaxes, or even just chisels, began to chip away at a hated symbol of oppression.

And I might have missed a visit to the place where this all started…

The wall has now been down for longer than it was up. Saxony, the German province of which Leipzig is the biggest city, had been celebrated down the centuries as a centre of elegance and beauty. It is again today. I was enchanted by the arcades and covered passaged linking streets in the centre, the soaring spires and older buildings alongside glorious new structures – I fell at once for the University building – where everything fits despite the contrasts of period and style.

The new University building
Leipzigers have kept their sense of style

I had to smile when I saw the ubiquitous trams. It reminded me of another East German friend, this time in the city of Erfurt, where the trams were of Czech design and too big for the streets. They were damaging the historic buildings by just rumbling past.

‘They’re Dubček’s revenge,’ he told me, referring to shameful moment when East German troops had joined Soviet forces in invading what was then Czechoslovakia to overthrow the liberal, reforming government that Alexander Dubček had formed.

It was also he who told me about the East German rulers' attempts to win hearts and minds in the population. The kids, he said, were bombarded with propaganda from the day they started school. And it worked, he reckoned, right up to the day that they got their first taste of Western chocolate. Suddenly, the contrast of life in East and West swung dangerously to favour the West.

Rather less amusing was his account of his own life. It was one of those things that I should have realised but hadn’t: people like him had been born into a democracy and then, like all of Germany, seen it strangled by Nazi totalitarianism. However, unlike the West, the citizens of the East had seen no return to democracy after the war but four more decades of authoritarian rule. Nothing like as awful as the Nazis, but no democracy all the same. A depressing fate.

Memorial to the Bamberger family whose confectionery business had stood
on this Leipzig street corner, until it fell to the antisemitic Kristallnacht attacks
A reminder that things were even worse before the GDR

Still, at least those days are behind the East Germans now. It struck me how much things have changed as I travelled to Leipzig. Back in 1982, I would have had to apply for specific police authorisation to go there. Today, I just needed a ticket. And had I wanted to invite someone from Leipzig to come back to the West with me, he too would only have had to pay his fare.

Not everything’s better, though. On top of the reputation for elegance, and then for defying power in the name of freedom, Saxony is now building a new reputation as the centre of the far right in Germany – outside Leipzig, it’s true, remains attached to its liberalism. But in the countryside intolerance and xenophobia have grown, as among Trump circles in the States or Brexit supporters in Britain.

It may be time to get those peace prayers going again in the St Nicholas Church.

Venezuela: the case for just saying “no”

There is a glorious scene in my favourite book of World War One memoirs, Emilio Lussu’s Sardinian Brigade. He describes a moment when his Italian unit is waiting to charge the Austrian lines. The pre-assault artillery barrage starts up but the fire, instead of hitting the Austrians, falls on its own, Italian positions.

While Lussu rushes about trying to restore discipline among the panicking troops, he’s struck by an astonishing sight: one machine gun unit which is under full control of its officer, a friend of his, marching in fine order – towards the rear.

“What on Earth are you doing?” shouts Lussu.

“Attacking those guns,” replies his friend.

“But they’re our guns,” he shouts back.

“They’re firing at me,” comes the calm reply, “so they’re enemy guns.”

That strikes me as a thoroughly sensible, not to say commendable, attitude. By analogous reasoning, if a government is wreaking havoc on the lives of workers and the poor, it is, by that simple fact, a government hostile to the principles of socialism. It’s crucial to bring it down, as quickly as possible. If it claims to be socialist then, as soon as we’ve got our hollow laugh out of the way, we need to devote ourselves still more urgently to the task – a false friend is far more dangerous than an open enemy.

Why do I mention that just now?

Because there seems to be a belief among certain circles of the British Left that we need to back the present government in Venezuela, on the grounds that it’s ‘socialist’. This is a ‘socialist’ government that presided over a reduction in GDP by 18.6% last year. Inflation was running at a yearly rate of 741% in February 2017. Although the official figures are different, many commentators believe that unemployment is climbing towards 20%.

The face of socialism? Not as I see it

Venezuela is sitting on the biggest oil reserves in the world. And yet it’s GDP per head is a little over $12,800 a head and falling, while even Cuba, with no oil, is running at $11,900. How long before Venezuela falls below Cuba?

There’s plenty wrong about Cuba, but at least it’s delivering a stable economy, secure if low living standards and decent healthcare, in spite of decades of US sanctions. Nicolás Maduro’s government is delivering chaos, in which the first victims are the poor and the workers it claims to protect.

Sure, the parties likely to replace his in power may well be pretty awful. At least they’re open enemies and we can get on with opposing them once they’re in office. The one controlling the regime right down is a false friend and it’s wreaking horrific damage on those it should be defending.

Marching on it at the head of a machine gun detachment probably isn’t a good idea. But doing the same thing metaphorically? It’s firing on our people, which makes it the enemy, so why not?

After all, don’t forget Stalin called himself a socialist too. He proved it by taking out 80 million people. Among whom were all the leaders, bar him, of the revolution that was supposed to bring socialism to Russia.

I got tired decades ago of being told that his successors’ governments had to be supported simply for the principles to which they paid lip service. I feel tired when I hear the same stale old rhetoric being dragged out in defence of Maduro. 

We need to find something more innovative. And actually stand up for the people we’re supposed to represent.

An anniversary. With a message for today

Seventy-five years ago today, a powerful military nation made a fatal military error.

Instead of swinging northwards from its conquered territories in China and tackling the Soviet Union, then gripped by a life and death struggle against Nazi Germany, the Empire of Japan chose to go South and attack the Far Eastern possessions of Holland and Britain. If it had done only that, it might have achieved its aims: its forces on both land and sea quickly overcame the British and the Dutch. But they weren’t satisfied with so much and overreached, attacking the United States too.

Had Japan taken on the Soviet Union, the world might have been a profoundly different place. The Soviets might have had to divert forces from the Western Front and weaken the fight against Hitler. The United States might have felt it impossible to join the war at that stage. The outcome might have been a great deal less favourable to the Western powers.

It didn’t happen. Admiral Yamamoto had opposed the Southern strategy but, bowing to the orders he was given, decided the only way to make a success of it was to launch an attack on the US so powerful that it would knock them out in one strike. He combined careful planning with intensive training of both naval and air forces, and finally a brilliantly executed attempt to destroy US naval power in the Pacific with a single blow against Pearl Harbor.

The Japanese embassy in Washington had trouble translating and typing its government's warning to the US, with the result that the attack occurred before the the message was delivered. That led Franklin Roosevelt to describe 7 December 1941 as a day that would “live in infamy”.

More to the point, it was an attack that looked like a victory – it wreaked huge damage on the US Pacific fleet – but it failed to deliver the knockout blow Yamamoto sought. Instead, it led to a war that would ultimately cost Japan as many as three million dead, culminating in the double atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was the end of the expansionist dream of the Japanese Empire. Instead, the United States emerged as the major power in the Pacific.

Pearl Harbor: it looked like a victory for Japan
but it ultimately ensured the Empire's defeat

That’s a position the US has held on to, sometimes grimly, ever since. It’s flexed its military muscle, not always with success – viz. Vietnam – but it has relied above all on its huge economic and commercial strength. The greatest challenge in recent decades has come from a new source, China. That was a threat that Obama spent a great deal of time and effort countering. Notably, he negotiated the Trans Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement between twelve nations not including China.

The election of Donald Trump, however, killed the deal. He made it clear that he would drop it on his first day in office. That was a piece of news that must have been received with celebrations in Beijing: it marks a withdrawal by the US leaving the field open to China.

The attack on Pearl Harbor was a triumph of wishful thinking over good sense. By overreaching, Japan ensured the victory of its enemy. Ideology led to a reckless military act that rebounded catastrophically on its perpetrator.

It’s a lesson Trump could do with learning. Governed by his ideological concerns, he too has behaved recklessly, in the commercial rather than the military field, and with a withdrawal rather than an advance, but, in all likelihood, with the same drastic effects. A decision his compatriots could well come to regret.

Especially if he persists with his apparent addiction to picking fights with China.

Vladimir Put in his place by Eurovision

So let me get this right.

The Eurovision song contest, one of the frothiest and least significant of competitions around the world, has actually got the Russians riled? Even though everyone knows the result is politically fiddled, with the Russians among the main manipulators? Are they perhaps upset because the Ukrainians outmanoeuvred them?

It seems the issue is that the winning Ukrainian song was about the deportation of the Tatars from Crimea in 1944. Crimea was part of Ukraine until two years ago, when the Russians moved in with armed force. Invited, they naturally assured the world, by locals, but then, how many invaders claim to be invited by the invaded?

That difficult moment back in 2014 has left what I suppose one can only call bad blood between Ukraine and Russia. So one can imagine that getting up Russian noses might well have been a pretty significant motivation for Ukrainians to sing that particular song.

As it happens, however, at the time to which the song refers, Crimea wasn’t part of Ukraine at all. It was Russian territory, as it had been for a long time. Russian claims to the Crimea are, to be honest, quite difficult to deny; it’s the use of saboteurs and tanks to enforce them that’s harder to swallow.

What’s more, back then, in 1944, Russia wasn’t even under the control of the present allegedly democratic regime. The Soviet Union was at the summit of its power, still led by its iconic dictator, Stalin. His regime in Russia, alongside Hitler’s in Germany, had been one of the two great totalitarian powers in Europe for a dozen years, and World War II, then raging, had been largely caused by their antagonism.

Tatars loaded into cattle trucks for their deportation
Ah, so reminiscent of scenes from Germany at the same time...

In driving the Tatars out of Crimea, Stalin was merely engaging in yet another act of totalitarian brutality. Totalitarianism flows from a sense of belonging to a movement powered by some force far greater than mere men: history itself for the Soviet Union, the destiny of a people for Nazi Germany, but it can equally be some religious or other faith in different places at different times.

If you represent the force of history, you can’t be doing wrong. So treating an entire ethnic group like the Tatars as disposable is perfectly justifiable, and driving them out made perfect sense to Stalin, whatever their suffering and their losses. This particular act of ethnic cleansing affected 230,000 people, of whom probably about 100,000 died.

Most of us these days take a dim view of such behaviour. It’s not generally regarded as compatible with the highest standards of democratic values. And the present Russian leadership likes to claim it wholly conforms to values of that kind.

So here’s the question: why on earth would they be offended by a song that denounces a regime under which Russia too suffered abominably for several decades? After all, Stalin wreaked more killing on the Soviet Union than Hitler did on Germany, partly no doubt because he had longer.

Unless, of course, there’s real hankering to get back to that kind of regime again. Might Putin be not quite so committed to democratic principle as he likes to maintain? Does he perhaps long nostalgically for a state in which he was, after all, a leading functionary of its most repressive institution, the KGB?

Ah, perish the unworthy thought.

Faith can move mountains – or hearts. Or it can kill shopkeepers...

I’ve met many people who are improved by their religious faith. Somehow, the teachings of their beliefs improve their naturally good qualities.

Sadly, however, the exact opposite can also apply. There are many for whom belief, and in particular the belief that all their basest instincts are endorsed by a supreme power, only emphasises their worst characteristics. Indeed, they treat it as authorisation to act on them.

Asad Shah, who was murdered on Good Friday, was a Glasgow shopkeeper viewed with great affection by the community he served. He regarded himself as a Muslim but liked to keep lines of communication open to other faiths – not long before he died he used Facebook to post the message “Good Friday and a very Happy Easter, especially to my beloved Christian nation.”

A community grieving for Asad Shah's death
Their slogan? “This is not who we are”

He also liked to distribute personalised Christmas cards to his customers. That reminded me of my Jewish grandmother who used to exchange Christmas cards, each and every year, with her neighbour, for decades. The fact that one of them was Jewish changed absolutely nothing in a small gesture that was intended to communicate goodwill and bring a little happiness. To both of them.

The general form in murder cases is for the presumed perpetrator to deny everything, plead not guilty and struggle to get off the hook. In this case, however, the defendant, Tanveer Ahmed, has taken the unusual step of issuing a statement, in his own words, through his lawyer:

This all happened for one reason and no other issues and no other intentions.

Asad Shah disrespected the messenger of Islam the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him. Mr Shah claimed to be a Prophet.

When 1,400 years ago the Prophet of Islam Muhammad peace be upon him has clearly said that “I am the final messenger of Allah there is no more prophets or messengers from God Allah after me.

“I am leaving you the final Quran. There is no changes. It is the final book of Allah and this is the final completion of Islam.”

Just to make a trivial point in passing, this communication makes me hope he isn’t the product of a British school system. Because if he is, it’s no testimonial to his teachers’ ability to teach him English.

The chilling part is the reference to Shah disrespecting the Prophet Muhammad. No wonder he had to die. Ahmed at the end of his statement tells us, “If I had not done this others would and there would have been more killing and violence in the world,” which is a glorious notion: he killed a man, by stabbing and beating him, in order to reduce the killing and violence in the world. That has all the rationality of NATO powers going to war to preserve international peace.

Mr Ahmed’s hatred was directed at the man who disrespected Islam, while claiming to be a Muslim. We hate no one as much as a traitor, do we? The man who turned his coat is far worse than the man who was always an open, avowed enemy.

To make things still graver, Shah belonged to a sect, the Ahmadiyya, whose members are not even allowed to refer to themselves as Muslims under the law of Pakistan. A man who persisted in calling himself a Muslim, though he belonged to a group deemed beyond the Pale by one of the world’s great Muslim Nations? No wonder he had to die. 

Especially if he disrespected Muhammad.

Treason, when it occurs in a religious context, has its own term: apostasy. And religious authorities who, down the ages, have never been reluctant to resort to fairly hideous forms of punishment, reserve the worst for the apostate. Catholics and Protestants burned each other with particular glee precisely because each side saw the other as traitors from inside the same Church, who had turned against it. Why, there was plenty of persecution even of Protestants by other Protestants.

Similarly, Stalin, despite having taken supreme power in what was then the Soviet Union, couldn’t rest until Trotsky had been murdered. Trotsky, reduced to a rootless exile, travelling from country to country until he found some kind of asylum in Mexico, thousands of miles from Russia and Stalin. Yet even there, Stalin could not bear to let him live, and sent in Ramón Mercader to see him off with an ice axe.

He contrived the murder in August 1940, the same month in which he signed the Nazi-Soviet pact. Stalin could shake the hand of Hitler, but couldn’t bear the thought that he was sharing the world with his old comrade from the St Petersburg barricades of 1917.

Just like Tanveer Ahmed, who couldn’t bear the idea that Asad Shah was drawing breath at the same time as he was.

Most of us take limited action against those we feel have betrayed us. A friendship ends. A professional relationship dies. Maybe a marriage leads to divorce. Generally, we stop short of violence. A long way short.

But when there’s a belief at stake? If what you’re doing is the will of God? Or, as in Stalin’s case – and Hitler’s – obeying the dictates of history? Why, what possible limits should you put on a righteous anger in the name of an unlimited cause?

As assuredly as Mercader wielded his ice axe, or the two sides of the Reformation wielded their bonfires, Tanveer Ahmed wielded his knife in the name of something they all saw as greater than themselves. Most often, against victims as hapless as Asad Shah. 

No wonder he had to die.

I know many people who have been helped to lead blameless, even praiseworthy lives by their beliefs. Unfortunately, however, belief can also have the opposite effect. Instead of intensifying the better instincts of man it can justify the worst – and sadly Asad Shah and his community have paid the price.

Thirteen years to start to measure the impact of 9/11

So it’s the 11th of September again.

It was a shocking day back in 2001. But 13 years on it’s clear we haven’t finished measuring the damage it did.

As the Twin Towers fell on 9/11, it was clear the West had to do something. Sadly, in many circles, and above all in government circles, that view became translated into a sense that the West could legitimately do any old thing.

What we did first was invade Afghanistan. Now Britain fought two Afghan wars in the nineteenth century, and even a small postscript Third Anglo-Afghan war in the twentieth. Afghanistan never fell to Britain.

Brilliant success in the First Afghan War
The last British survivor gets back to base

In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Just over nine years later, in 1989, it was forced back out. The opposition it couldn’t crush was spearheaded by Muslim jihadists which the United States armed and financed. The government put in office by the Soviets struggled on for another three years and then fell to the US-backed insurgents, and the fallen President was eventually brutally assassinated.

But just because Britain and Russia failed, that wasn’t going to stop the US leading a coalition into the country to show the Afghans who was boss. And they’ve succeeded. A decade later, the last forces are poised to leave and the Taliban, now the enemy of the US, is poised to move right back in.

Just like after the Russians left.

The second thing the West did was to invade Iraq. There was some rationale behind the Afghan adventure, since the government there backed Al Qaida and offered refuge to its leader, Osama Bin Laden, who organised the 9/11 attack. But Iraq? It had nothing to do with it. One could have understood an invasion of Saudi Arabia, Bin Laden’s home nation and the source of much of his financial support, but Saudi has lots of oil, so it’s an ally. A rich ally.

The justification for Iraq was weapons of mass destruction. They hadn’t been used on 9/11 (the idea that aircraft, which were used, are weapons of mass destruction has some merit, but tends to be held only in more fundamentalist ecologist circles). People who really ought to know, like Hans Blix, then in Iraq as a weapons inspector, reckoned it was unlikely Iraq had such weapons. But we went in anyway.

A decade later, the situation there is if anything worse than in Afghanistan. Iraq is riven by violent sectarian conflict. It is impotent and heavily influenced by the West's great enemy in the region, Iran. Worse still, the fighting has given impetus to the emergence as a major force of the fundamentalist movement Islamic State, which makes the Taliban look almost civilised.

Ah, yes. 9/11 was a disaster. Firstly for the brutality, cynicism and ruthlessness of the perpetrators of the attack. But secondly for the myopia that caused the West to walk straight into the trap before it, eyes wide shut.

The anniversary is a good time to remember the victims. The horror such violent bigotry can cause. But also to bring back to mind just what disasters human folly can lead us to, when we allow it to lead us in our response to terrible events.

Brilliant success in Iraq
The West bringing peace and democracy to the Middle East

The powers that blunder and their victims in Ukraine

It’s agonising to watch the suffering of Ukraine today. And I feel it all the more strongly because of the work I was doing only fifteen months ago, with a group of Ukrainians who impressed me as much for their competence as colleagues, as for their warmth as friends.

At the time I worked for an American company whose founder and his seriously ill son, had undergone the pain of finding a way through the maze of the healthcare world. He emerged appalled at how little information is available about hospitals.

He decided to launch a software system to tackle the problem, and assigned the work of building one of the first modules to two Ukrainian students at Berkeley, near San Francisco. They amazed him by turning it around in a few day. He gave them a second much bigger task, and again they’d completed it in astonishingly quick time. There was more to them, he decided, than met the eye.

“You’re not doing this alone, are you?” he asked.

“No,” they admitted, “we’re getting help from a bunch of friends back home.”

“Well, why don’t you form yourselves into a company and I’ll give you an exclusive contract to develop the system for me?”

By the time I joined the American company, the arrangement had been working well for seven or eight years, and a pretty remarkable system had emerged from their collaboration. They were two separate companies, but they worked as though they were one. The people I met when I travelled out there didn’t behave as though they were in a partner company, but like colleagues. Skilled and dedicated colleagues. I was proud to work with them.

Where in Ukraine was this happening? That’s a question one can’t answer without making a political statement. It’s like that city in Northern Ireland: call it Londonderry, and you sound like a Unionist who regards it as part of the United Kingdom; call it Derry, and you sound like a Nationalist who feels the place is Irish.

I knew next to nothing about Ukraine at the time, and had barely heard of the city, which I called “Kharkov”. That’s a Russian name, and arguably it makes sense to use it, the population being overwhelmingly Russian (it’s only twenty miles from the border).

On the other hand, it is in Ukraine, and many of my colleagues used the Ukrainian name “Kharkiv”, which was probably more politically correct. I didn’t meet any Russian speakers from there that objected to the name, and so made an effort to use it too.

Kharkov/Kharkiv illustrates the problem of that whole region. Russian speakers belong to the same community as the people half an hour’s drive away, the other side of the international border. Many of my colleagues had close family in nearby Russia.

The problem is particularly acute in one area of Ukraine that most Britons have actually heard of: the Crimean peninsula. British and French troops fought Russians there in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1854, at the battle of Balaclava, the British plumbed the depths of military incompetence at the same time as they scaled the heights of glory (glorious incompetence being one of the great characteristics of armies in combat). Tennyson summed it up for us:

“Forward, the Light Brigade!” 
Was there a man dismay'd? 
Not tho' the soldier knew 
Someone had blunder'd: 
Theirs not to make reply, 
Theirs not to reason why, 
Theirs but to do and die: 
Into the valley of Death 
Rode the six hundred.

A British blunder,
where the Russians are blundering around today

The Brigade captured the Russian guns, couldn’t hold them, and had to retreat to their starting point. Of the 600 who started out, just 195 were still unhurt and on horseback at the end. 

“C’est magnifique,” French Marshal Pierre Bosquet observed, “mais ce n’est pas la guerre.”

In truth, it wasn’t magnificent, it was carnage, and it was very much what war’s about.

That was in October 1854. A century later, in 1954, Crimea was the subject of another historical blunder. In a fifteen-minute interlude in a meeting of the leadership of the Soviet Communist Party, its General Secretary Nikita Kruschev told his colleagues that Crimea was being given to Ukraine.

He liked Urkaine, where he’d spent some time, and his wife was Ukrainian. At the time it probably didn’t seem to make a lot of difference: no one imagined the Soviet Union was going to unravel, so transferring a territory from one administrative unit wholly dominated by Moscow to another, was an empty gesture.

But then the Soviet Union fell apart, Ukraine became a sovereign state, and found itself in possession of Crimea. The Russians hastily agreed a lease to allow their Black Sea fleet to keep using the port at Sevastopol, but otherwise they were out.

Although not really. Ukraine remained heavily dependent on Russia, particularly for energy, as Russia showed by turning off gas supplies when it felt the need to exert some pressure. And it was glad to be able to work through a friendly President, in the form of Viktor Yanukovych.

But now Yanukovych has gone, to be replaced by people far less under Moscow’s thumb, far more inclined to look westward. We’ve seen the results: explicit military threats from Russia, and open army action in the Crimea, where “self-defence” groups, looking suspiciously like Russian forces without identifying insignia, have seized key locations.

It’s deeply depressing.

But I’m particularly distressed for my former colleagues. Because just as the international political atmosphere around them deteriorates, the international commercial world has turned toxic for them too.

It was announced on Friday that the Ukrainian arm of the operation I worked with is suing the American company for $30 million. Why’s that? Because the Americans, under entirely new management, have unilaterally decided not to extend the contract after it expired on 28 February. After ten years outstanding work, my friends in Kharkov/Kharkiv now have to go the Californian courts to try to protect their position.

I don’t know whether those friends in Kharkiv/Kharkov will still be Ukrainian in a few months, or will have been made Russians by force of arms. I don’t know whether they would welcome such a change or resent it. Equally, I don’t know whether they’ll still be delivering services to their old American partners or whether they’ll be struggling to find new sources of work.

What I do know is that in both instances they have been the victims of international forces beyond their control.

All I can do is wish them well. These are tough times. I hope you and your compatriots emerge from them quickly, and unscathed. 

Unlike the Light Brigade.