Brian Barder describes a failed attempt to pull together a letter to The Times from a group of British ex-Excellencies about ‘the profoundly mistaken policies of the British and American governments’ towards Russia/Georgia:

… some of those who had occupied key positions in the area during their diplomatic careers, and whose signatures were needed if the letter was to make any significant impact, now hold post-retirement appointments in both the public and private sectors, some actually in Russia, and are consequently precluded from joining in controversial expressions of opinion of this kind…

Hmm. Not to mention some who had occupied key positions in the region and flatly disagreed with the line proposed?

Brian does share with us the draft of the sort of letter being cranked up, a laborious effort with at least one very strange angle:

… Russians have historically always been preoccupied by fears of encirclement by a potentially hostile west, and concerned that their immediate neighbours should never fall under the influence of a potential great power adversary. Whether such fears are well founded in Russia’s experience over centuries is irrelevant: as the saying goes, just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. 

Huh?

Wrong! Seriously, really wrong.

It is hugely ‘relevant’ whether such fears are well founded.

Are we dealing with basically reasonable European-minded people whose concerns are heartfelt but sincere, albeit misguided ?

Or with something much darker, feverishly anti-Western Red-Brown national-socialist extremists, wound up by the former KGB?

Is not the point rather that ‘just because you claim to be paranoid, it doesn’t mean that they are out to get you’?

The final paragraph of Brian’s blog entry on all this has an extended sentence sprawling far across Siberia, part of which runs that Russia did more than any other to defeat Hitler when all Europe and much of Asia was in danger of being overrun by fascism…

True. But misses the vital point which Putin’s Moscow want us to miss.

Who unleashed the fascist onslaught on Europe to start WW2, and why?

Yes … it’s all coming back.