After some weeks of national polling, discussion and debate, and following Wednesday’s signing of bilateral security agreements with the U.K., it now looks all-but-certain that Finland and Sweden will apply to join NATO – perhaps as early as next week – and that if they do, they will be welcomed with open arms, swelling the ranks of the alliance to 32 members.
But Finland sits directly on Russia’s western border.
Indeed, amongst European nations, Finland has the dubious distinction of possessing the second-longest land border with Russia – second only to Ukraine’s. So why hasn’t this expected eastward expansion of NATO been greeted with the same hand-wringing from those in the West, and the same threats from Russia that we’ve seen in past years with respect to Ukraine’s “provocative” ambition to join NATO?
The reason is that NATO’s eastward expansion was never viewed by Russia as an existential threat – at least not militarily. In fact, the factitious and pretextual nature of Russia’s claimed fears over Ukraine’s closer ties to NATO couldn’t be clearer: on April 8th, Dmitry Peskov repeated Russia’s long-held position that if Finland and Sweden were to join NATO, this would be a threat but not an existential threat. His remarks were repeated by RT in a clear confirmation of the official line:
Moscow opposes the expansion of NATO, but the inclusion of Finland and Sweden in the bloc won’t become an existential threat to it, Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov told Sky News on Friday.
This is despite the fact that Finland has a large, modern and well-equipped military (soon to include F-35A “stealth” jets), is geographically very close to Russia’s second city, St. Petersburg, and has the will to defend itself – as well as something of a track record against Russia. The Finnish attitude – reminiscent of Jim Mattis – was exemplified just yesterday by Pekka Toveri, Finland’s former military intelligence chief, who said:
We just want to be left in peace – but if you f—— come over the border, you will pay the price.
It would be difficult to believe – prior to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, at least – that Russia viewed the Finnish armed forces as anything less than the most potent military force on its western border. So why is Finnish NATO membership not the threat that Ukraine’s accession to the alliance would supposedly be?
The reasons are (in no particular order) historical, demographic, cultural, financial and political. But when talking of Ukraine in this context, it should be noted that much of these observations would apply equally to Georgia, whose developing ties with NATO are of similar concern to Russia.
Historically, Ukraine (as well as Georgia and the Baltic states) was of course governed from Moscow as part of the USSR, the collapse of which Putin rues:
Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century. As for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our co-citizens and co-patriots found themselves outside Russian territory. Moreover, the epidemic of disintegration infected Russia itself.
It’s clear from Putin’s words and actions, first in Georgia in 2008, and later in Ukraine in 2014, that he follows an irredentist policy which is tied to, and in his mind justified by, the concept of ‘ethnic Russian’ identity. The tactics employed – of claiming ‘ethnic Russians’ are under threat or attack by the governments of those nations in which they find themselves – mirror precisely the tactics employed by Nazi Germany in respect of the Sudetenland, Gdansk, and so on. As with Nazi Germany, these claims have been reinforced by a stated desire to protect shared culture and traditions, and in this case the sense that Russian culture is under direct assault from Western liberal values. But what really animates this line of thinking is the demographic crisis in Russia.
Much like the rest of Europe, Russia has been facing declining birth rates amongst its core ethnic population, and a relative increase in its other ethnic minority populations, notably Muslims. It has sought to compensate for this by importing ‘ethnic Russians’ from other former USSR states. And since the invasion, forced transportation of Ukrainians to Russia has been in the news, with some as-yet-unsubstantiated claims putting the figure in the hundreds of thousands or even above a million.
The other key reasons for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are financial and political. A successful invasion of Ukraine would have left Putin in a much stronger – practically unassailable – political position, giving him control of a client state and effectively expanding Russia’s territory and overall economic (and military) power – a war of conquest. But there are undoubtedly more personal financial motivations, having to do with the workings of the Russian state and its thoroughly kleptocratic and corrupt nature. Control of the Ukrainian economy might enable Putin to buy an even bigger palace and another superyacht, but it would also be a chance to reward his cronies and further cement his position as dictator-for-life.
With this in mind, Ukraine has the twin advantages for Russia of being both rife with corruption (as mocked in Servant of the People) and possessing important industries and vast natural gas reserves (including the large Yuzivska gas field, discovered in 2010) – as well as being a major global player in agriculture. In the Yanukovych era, the pro-Russian faction was busily co-opting natural resources, aping Putin’s Russia, and was well on the way to turning the country into an entrenched kleptocracy. Had Yanukovych not lost power and ignominiously fled Ukraine in 2014, the ‘need’ for Russia to invade would have been absent: control of Ukraine’s economy would have been enough for the short term, and in due course Russia’s political domination would have turned it into another Belarus.
These motives for the Russian invasion of Ukraine could never remotely translate to Finland, which was never part of the USSR and whose ‘ethnic Russian’ population is tiny. In addition, Finland’s economy would have provided Russia with no easy opportunities for looting and plunder, besides which its polity is already infused with those ‘Western’ values that Putin so despises, making it much more difficult to corrupt. In sum, Russia can’t keep Finland in its orbit, because Finland was never in it. Thus, Finland joining NATO poses no ‘existential threat’ to Russia, so it has done the diplomatic equivalent of shrugging its shoulders, sending out its spokesman with some tired and weak threats.
Of course there is a military dimension to this, in that a NATO presence in Ukraine would have permanently prevented Russia from invading, but it was Ukraine’s rejection of Russian domination, its increasingly closer ties with Western liberal democracies, its keenness to adopt Western values and to be part of ‘the West’ that offended Russia and threatened its goal of imposing a corrupt, anti-democratic and pro-Russian ethno-nationalist regime on the country. But the threat was not primarily a military one, it was rather a matter of values – such as they are, in Russia’s tortured soul.
The ‘NATO provocation’ explanation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was always weak. Besides any other considerations, one can simply look at the current map of NATO member states: Latvia and Estonia, both member states, also border Russia. And NATO has no intention of attacking Russia – that would be mad, and not since Bertrand Russell has anyone seriously proposed a first strike. But to be fair, proponents of this hypothesis, such as John Mearsheimer, are aware that it doesn’t make much sense in the West, so they fall back upon a reduced hypothesis, saying it’s “irrelevant” whether it seems rational to us, so long as Russia believes that NATO’s expansion towards its borders is an existential threat.
That might be a valid theoretical consideration, but it’s lazy and serves only to disguise Russia’s true motivations, which are not militarily defensive, but defensive on an ethno-nationalistic level: Russia fears its own decline, and sees the more ‘modern’ Western values as corrosive – a view shared, incidentally, by many conservatives in the West. This is why Russia objected just as much to EU influence in Ukraine, despite the EU having neither an army per se, nor a collective defence treaty. In fact, a cynic might say that this is as much a war about gay rights as anything else; but that would have about as much merit as the ‘NATO expansionism’ argument. The truth is that this war concerns the sovereignty and self-determination of a nation state: a core and immutable Western value, older than the Treaty of Westphalia, that flows from the Christian belief in individual sovereignty. Finding reasons to agree with Putin’s excuses, while glossing over the true causes of his war, is like volunteering to polish the gold toilet-paper holder on his yacht.
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Lest we forget Harman was affiliated with the paedophile information exchange in the 1970s. This should have disqualified this utter creep from any position of authority for life, actually helping paedos target vulnerable kids. What next is Gary Glitter going to be Foreign Secretary?
..Secretary for child welfare!
To be fair to Harman, there were a lot of arguments, deals, and horse-trading in the 1970s about which minority human activities should be de-criminalised and de-stigmatised (and de-medicalised) and which should be further proscribed. It was the era of the rising of Stonewall and the setting of Mary Whitehouse, the partition (leading to schism) between PIE and CHE (LGB’s fore-runner). Overall, the latter won legalisation (and starting adding letters, but avoiding P) at the expense of the former, who became further marginalised, stigmatised, criminalised and pushed to the shadows. I think one needs to be cautious about stigmatising erstwhile political advocates of a movement which eventually lost ground. (Labour’s historical anti-Semitism, originating in the 1930s, is perhaps a comparable “awkward” former policy which they have moved on from.) In the 1950s P’s were considered to have medical/mental problems rather than being serious criminals (as Lord Willis observed around 1960), where as G’s were considered healthy criminals; half a century later the legal situation was reversed and intensified. I suspect there is a hidden Law of Conservation of Stigmatism, in which society always seeks out, seemingly at random, birds of a different feather and deems them to be outcasts. I also suspect that the recent abolition of the relevant statutes of limitations mean that many half-century-old cases that would have previously lapsed will now be dragged in front of a jury, who will be asked to choose between opposing stories from two memory-challenged pensioners regarding who did what to whom behind the bike-sheds in Year 9.
Your description of gays is way off. My father at Durham university in the late 50s said the gay society was fairly obvious and open and no much cared at all, other than their society had to be named something else and acts private. In the town it was also known where fun with men could be had, my father’s pals used to make a joke of it. It’s a total complete fabrication to pretend gays were persecuted if they did it behind closed doors. They were obviously prosecuted if carrying on in public toilets etc.
It was all about the fear of the homosexual in those days in this 1960s video: Boys Beware:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08UGlR999g4
That’s a video. I’m talking about lived reality in a northern university town in England first hand from my father. The idea all gays were chased around with a pitch fork by nobs is untrue. They just had to be private about it.
But they could be, and were, blackmailed especially in later life having reached a position of prominence in some field.
Roy Everett’s argument is flawed and specious from start to finish.
There is NO equivalence between homosexual adults seeking out likeminded ADULTS for mutual sexual activity, and paedophiles seeking CHILDREN on whom they FORCE sexual activity.
Children are not capable of consent, or of defending themselves physically or psychologically against adults who coerce and abuse them sexually or otherwise.
Our present age of sexual consent should NEVER be lowered despite the suspicious clamourings of certain Labour MPs and other public loudmouths.
Harman was not an MP when she first started promoting PIE
So what? She was a fully functioning, intelligent adult, wasn’t she?
What possible excuse is there for placing the rights of disgusting kiddy-fiddlers above the inalienable rights of children to be left unmolested?
You are scraping the barrel.
‘To be fair to Harman’ – ! You gotta be kidding!
Why the hell should anyone who values free speech in a free society be fair to Harman the Horrible, the person who at the behest of her demonic master T Bliar formulated the hated ‘hate speech’ laws from which have spewed first, ridiculous political correctness then, even worse, insanely damaging wokery that has bedevilled us all??
Can you even imagine how much lifelong serious damage has been done to millions of children worldwide by perverted adults forcing their sexual depravity and physical assaults on THE most vulnerable people in our society?
No, I don’t think you can judging from your comments about ‘Lord Willis observing this’ and ‘Law of Conservation’ that, paying no attention to WHY paedophiles are morally abhorrent as well as their activities being highly illegal.
Paedophiles ARE mentally sick and if they indulge their sickness they are also dangerous criminals. We take that very seriously in this country these days and rightly so, regardless of what fine legal arguments were made in the 1930s or 1960s by judges sitting on their high benches. How are they relevant now?
But not taken seriously enough, because why should ANY child be exposed to the physical and psychological harm paedophiles cause if it can be prevented? And there have been some shocking cases recently where morally dubious judges have let off child abusers with piddling sentences. Members of PIE themselves?
Convicted paedophiles should be given a choice BY LAW: lifelong chemical castration or lifelong prison.
Minister for Schools.
Let us not forget how wide her close friendships were among the Labour and Trades Unionists in the 1970s.
I remember very clearly Harman’s support of PIE being exposed as a scandal in at least one newspaper in the ’70s. I also recall how this ghastly woman has always flipped off any reminder of it from journalists or rivals as ‘ignorance’ or ‘misunderstanding’ on her part. PIFFLE.
No excuses accepted, in my view, for defending the ‘rights’ of sexual predators targeting children under any circumstances.
I suppose we should all be grateful that when this harridan was busy formulating the notorious ‘hate speech’ laws – laws that were deliberately designed to suppress freedom of speech – she did not include paedophiles as a protected group about which no one was allowed to say anything derogatory.
But give her a chance as Chair of the EHRC and who knows what Starmer’s stormtrooper will do. Formerly a strident feminist, she has dropped women’s rights in favour of men who pretend to be women. It has been shown repeatedly that too many of these pose as females all the better to prey with sexual intent on women and children.
Harman would flip off those concerns as easily as she has been able to dismiss questions about her support of PIE for the last 50 years.
If only her withdrawal from Parliament had signalled permanent retirement from public life, we would all be safe from her depredations.
All the more reason to ABOLISH THE EQUALITY & HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION.
Harriet Harman stayed silent over paedophiles to avoid ‘rocking the boat too much’, claims former leader of PIE after Daily Mail allegations | The Independent | The Independent
Harriet Harman and PIE Scandal: Who Were British Establishment Paedophiles Who Were Involved? | IBTimes UK
See their disgusting “logo” in the second article.
“PIE was a group on a public mission to gain respectability for sexual relations with children and acceptance for the adults obsessed with child sex.”
“It was also a front for a depraved criminal network which abused vulnerable youngsters, often from social care.”
“Behind closed doors PIE was also an exchange for perverts to swap materials such as photographs and lurid sexual fantasies which fed their lust for sex with the most vulnerable youngsters.”
“A former British high commissioner to Canada who was also an top civil servant at the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence, Hayman’s links to PIE were exposed when he left a parcel of paedophile porn on a London bus in 1978. It contained wads of diaries of explicit sexual fantasises – including killing children by sexual torture. There was also correspondence with members of PIE.”
WeAreChange who is Polish/American discussing Bio Labs, Jabs etc and his guest is making a documentary on the subject. Almost two hours but was a good conversation.
https://rumble.com/v54cfkz-end-of-biden-whats-next-media-collusion-and-debate-fallout.html?playlist_id=watch-history
Well what could possibly go wrong in placing a paedophile supporting grifter at the head of the EHRC? Actually the appointment would be rather appropriate given Kneel’s turning a blind eye to the kiddy fiddler and arch “fixer” Jimmy Saville.
By way of putting an indelible stamp on his new administration I would say this appointment would be straight out of the WEF manual. Utterly depraved.
The rape gangs are going to see this as a free pass.
Use of the term ‘paedophilia” will become a hate crime worthy of jail time and to ensure inclusitivity the pervs
will be honoured by definition as ‘supporters of minor attracted persons.’ They will probably be given their own holiday camps at taxpayers expense.
God help us.
With free children?
Aye.
Abi Robberts is always slagging off Andrew Bridgen, do you think she has a point or maybe she has an issue with ‘purity’.
https://abiroberts.substack.com/p/walk-the-walk?utm_source=podcast-email%2Csubstack&publication_id=849936&post_id=146214579&utm_campaign=email-play-on-substack&utm_medium=email&r=16enov&triedRedirect=true
Anybody slagging off Andrew Bridgen needs to have a bloody good case.
His life has been all but destroyed since becoming an MP. In the H of C he was treated like a leper for speaking out about the damned injections.
This Abi Roberts needs a reality check.
She claims that he claimed that he stopped the jabs for children. And that he was late to the show. She has a better point with Malhotra when you consider he was a Dr and pushing them on ITV. Only when his dad had issues did he stop and think. The fact that they were a new technology was not lost to the man on the street, he should know better. I personally think AB is doing a great job and her ranting was getting on my nerves so though I’d see what others on here think.
Anybody supportive of the trans ideology needs their head read, because it would appear that you cannot be simultaneously supportive of that *and* want to protect female sex-based rights. And I’m getting a bit triggered by this ”F” word these days. As if only feminists are the ones opposing this abuse of our rights. So are fathers of young girls going to just sit on their hands and be like, ”I’m just letting the feminists get on with it and fight these battles”, like Mr Apathy? This is the very thing Billboard Chris lives and breathes, travelling all round the world, for instance. Is he a feminist? Would he get the convenient ”TERF” slur hurled at him from the Alphabet Mafia? Course not, because he’s a bloke, and any bloke worth their salt should be up in arms about this because it concerns and effects everybody. Can’t you be a woman who *isn’t* a self-identified feminist and oppose what’s happening? Anybody with an ounce of common sense should be standing against the enabling of this toxic ideology to just become the norm in our society.
But on a different note, is this really the case in Calais? Wouldn’t surprise me. ( <2mins )
”Thousands of illegals are massing at Calais, waiting for Labour to win on Thursday. They know Starmer will ban the Rwanda bill immediately. Brace yourself folks.”
https://x.com/juneslater17/status/1808202130508886069
God Almighty.
Fudge the quangocracy. Dissolve them all. We’d lose nothing.
Repatriate powers to parliament and “Make Politicians Accountable Again”
Yugggh!
https://youtu.be/C5ItyuDpQT8?si=kOtmLQ-4aZj5FKLQ
A “bespoke service” eh?
Horrible old woman is Harman the man hater. She was very involved with that organisation in London back in the 70s, that quite liked paedophiles. Lefties are very warped people.
Good. She will make the case for abolishing the Equality and Human Rights Commission even stronger.
Probably not in Labour’s eyes. The worse and more oppressive something is, the more they like it.
This is not surprising; this woman was complicit with her husband, Jack Dromey, in promoting paedophilia in the 1970’s. What else is “the right to enter womens and girls spaces with a hard on and a dress”? It’s a perverts charter just as she and Dromey wanted all those years ago.
For your information, they promoted the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) which advocated that the law should be changed to have sex with children.
Utterly disgusting and perverted people, as Labourites/Communists/Marxists often are.
Fighting for the rights of any minority, however unspeakable. They care little for the rights of the majority to live in a civilised society and to protect their children. Would they have been OK with it if a paedophile had come along with designs on THEIR children??
‘Civil liberties’? Outrageous debauchery is nearer the mark.
She looks like a female clone of Drakeford.
Grey, washed out and without personality.
Grim indeed.