March 2022
“Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation”
In my early teens I built short wave radio sets which could find many more stations than the average receiver. It was an era of political turmoil, including the Hungarian uprising of 1956 against their Soviet Communist occupiers.
There were strident demands for democracy from American stations.
The BBC World Service at that time played Lilliburlero as its call sign.
Other stations had their distinctive tunes or sequences, recognisable through the background noise of short-wave reception. So you could identify Moscow, Prague and other communist stations too.
Our government never jammed them but the communist bloc often tried to blot out reception of Western stations. The sound of jamming was a bit like a noisy motor boat engine.
I later learned from my wife’s Glasgow relatives that, during WWII, they had sometimes relaxed by listening in to the Nazi broadcasts of Lord Haw Haw. They had great fun with some of his intended insults, such as his frequent mentions of “your whisky-drinking Queen”. That always raised a cheer! Glaswegians generally enjoy a drop of whisky.
It is surprising that our government is now following the totalitarian continental practice of the Communists — blocking broadcasts by the Russian TV Channel RT.
The government never felt the need to do any such thing under conditions of total war but today has meekly followed the EU in enforcing this censorship.
Back to 1956!
There were urgent appeals from the Hungarian insurgents for arms.
In spite of American incitement of the uprising, none were ever sent.
I spoke to one of my teachers about this with some indignation, as the Hungarians were obviously desperate. Why could we not help them?
My teacher explained very calmly and at some length “Because, if we did, it would risk a nuclear war”.
In those days NATO was a defensive alliance with a policy of containing Communism within the Soviet Union and its allied states in the Warsaw Pact, whilst standing ready to defend the territory of Western Europe, if there was an attack.
Years later (around 2006, the fiftieth anniversary I think) I heard a broadcast by a veteran of the Hungarian uprising. The interviewer asked him how he felt about this lack of Western support. He said they were very disappointed and felt abandoned at the time but, on mature consideration, he was extremely grateful that nothing of the sort had been sent“ or we could all have been incinerated”. Then I thought of my teacher all those years ago.
The policy of defending Western Europe and containing Communism without aggression against Communist states had been devised by an American diplomat, George F Kennan. It worked so well that, when the Cold War ended, Soviet forces were able to withdraw from central and Eastern Europe in an orderly way with Russia having confidence that the NATO forces would honour their commitment not to advance “an inch” into the territories of the formerly Communist states.
George Kennan was worried that aggressively-minded Americans, taking advantage of the weakened condition of post-Communist Russia, might break this arrangement and warned of the possible consequences in a letter to the New York Times on February 5th 1997, entitled “a Fateful Error”.
“Why, with all the hopeful possibilities engendered by the end of the Cold War, should East-West relations become centred on the question of who would be allied with whom and, by implication, against whom in some fanciful, totally unforeseeable and most improbable future military conflict?”
“Bluntly stated….expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking….”
Unfortunately that is exactly what happened because the Americans followed just the policy which George Kennan feared.
In Ukraine they sponsored a Putsch against the elected government. Victoria Nuland, a senior US diplomat, boasted that they had spent 5 billion dollars destabilising the country and the EU spent some 385 million euros in preparation for the Euromaidan demonstrations and “Orange Revolution” in 2014 which freed fascist militias to oppress the Russian-speaking population.
NATO has consistently denied that any assurances were given to the Soviet Union that Western military forces would not advance beyond the German border.
That has since been found to be incorrect — what is called a lie in the everyday world.
So, it is perhaps not surprising that our authorities want to maintain the lie and suppress the truth from being repeated. Hence the broadcast ban.
There is overwhelming condemnation of the Russian incursion into Ukraine and sympathy and support here for people who are suffering in the fighting.
There is very little understanding of the thirty years of calculated bad faith by NATO and the EU which pushed events in this direction.
We pray that leaders will have the wisdom to cry halt to the carnage.
An ignorant people is an easily managed people and our authorities want us to remain ignorant. So they follow the EU Diktat.
Without a free exchange of information it is impossible for the BBC to achieve the aspiration of its motto,
“Nation shall speak Peace unto Nation”,
...let alone to hear a response.