Gullible Russians keep falling for tyrant’s trick
NATIONAL obsessions are strange phenomena but serve one very useful purpose to incompetent governments. When their failures finally antagonise their own people they can be used to unify them against a common “enemy”, usually a foreign one. Take Spain and its obsession with Gibraltar.
The Rock was conceded to Britain in perpetuity at the Treaty of Utrecht, which finalised the War of the Spanish Succession in 1715. Two successor treaties confirmed this ruling.
When we captured it in 1704, there was one inhabitant – a Spanish fisherman who left because he was lonely. It was then settled by groups from across the Mediterranean – but not Spain. Gibraltarians are not descended from Spaniards or related to them.
In two referendums – in 1967 and 2002 – the people of Gibraltar voted overwhelmingly to stay British. Spain pays lip service to self-determination, but not for Gibraltar. And nor for its own colonies of Ceuta and Melilla, gouged by force from the Moroccan coast.
Another such obsession is the Argentine claim to the Falklands. In 2013, Falklanders voted 99.8 per cent to stay British. The electorate was 1,653 people, all British – not a Spanish-speaking Argentinian among them.
But in 1982, the incompetent tyrant Gen Leopoldo Galtieri, facing revolt on every hand, used the Falklands as his excuse to unify the Argentine people by invading. We lost 255 young men winning them back. But still the hysteria goes on.
As with Gibraltar, history proves the claims are bunkum.The British took the islands off the Spanish in the days of Spain’s empire. The ancestors of 90 per cent of today’s Argentines were still in Europe.
But perhaps the craziest selfdelusion is the Russian collective conviction that has led to the Ukraine war. No matter how bad the government in Moscow, gullible Russians can always be united by the fiction that they are being attacked and must defend themselves. Twice, of course, they were – by Napoleon in 1812 and by Hitler in 1941, leading to hideous sufferings. But the story of the past thousand years is quite different.
The Rus civilisation started as the city of Moscow with its fortress The Kremlin at its centre and a surrounding enclave about the size of the UK, maybe smaller. It is now the world’s biggest country. You do not get territorial expansion this staggering by self-defence.
The truth is, Russians are insatiably aggressive, through tsars and communists, and have invaded, conquered and annexed their neighbours, one after the other. Even today, with nuclear weapons, the myth of “Poor little Russia, we are surrounded by enemies and must defend ourselves” lives on.
It is dictator Putin’s excuse for the current genocide and polls show a clear majority of the Russians, egged on by hysterical government-managed media, continue to believe it. Generations of obedient gullibility does not die easily.
That said, this is a new, technology-dominated age and thanks to the internet the truth is available to every Russian who cares to tap into it. Which is what the young are at last doing. So there is hope of a growing dissent, the first time in centuries.