Fry’s Turkish delight

Polymath and Olympic-standard bien-pensant Stephen Fry puts the boot in against the Daily Mail.

Of course I know Putin isn’t Hitler. But then Hitler wasn’t the full Hitler we now think of in back in 1935 either. The death camps and atrocities were years away. He became the Hitler of 1939 because we never stopped him. All historians agree now on how doubtful and uncertain he was in 35, 36, 37, and 38. The occupation of the Rheinland provinces of Alsace Lorraine and the annexation of Austria went unchallenged. The Olympic games reinforced his huge status at home.

Nor was Stalin the full Stalin in 1920. True terrible bloody leaders become so because they are not stopped. The last four lines of W. H. Auden’s The Tyrant come to mind:

Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Franco and any other despot you care to mention: they become despotic, maniacal, more autocratic, more insane every time they are given a greater sense of their own power. The fanatical junior KGB officer Vladimir Putin will become, if he is allowed to get away with it, as autocratic as any Tsar or any Soviet chairman. Vladimir the Terrible will have blood on his hands. He already does, but there will be so so much more. Little children will die in the streets. All power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. That saying is so well-known it’s hardly worth repeating. You would think…

So he’s a neoconservative, too!

I agree with his implicit retrospective wish that the British and Allied expeditionary forces against the Bolsheviks in 1918-20 had been successful in the hope of preventing the Red Terror and its ideological contagion spreading as it did with a 100,000,000+ worldwide body count by the time of the fall of the Iron Curtain.

I’m also bang alongside his wish that the Allies had crossed the Rhine a decade earlier than they did to overthrow the result of the 1933 German elections and impose a government not fundamentally ideologically committed to conquering the world, suppressing women and killing Jews. That would have involved ignoring the peace-lovers of Left and Right, and siding with the alarmist ultranationalist, proto-Tommy Robinson, Winston Churchill. That lout.  See how the cast of peace heroes has not changed much in seventy years or so.

I wish he’d get with the same programme regarding the little global difficulty we’re facing right now.

Perhaps we’d better hold the Olympics somewhere in the Middle East.

Only overwhelming and ruthless military force could have prevented either socialist empire consolidating the ambitions that were explicit in their founding documents. But in the long run the West lacked the resolve so the totalitarians racked up a 150,000,000 death toll, including genocides, police states and their wars of mutual aggression.

On the other hand, Fry is bang to rights about the Daily Mail.

You only have to take a stroll through many of our major cities to witness what a paradise of multicultural neighbourliness, respect for women, respect for private and public property, freedom of conscience and the rule of law that ignoring the Daily Mail has made the western world into.

I for one just can’t wait until we get our fair share of Bulgarian and Rumanian gypsies. I’m sure they’ll fit right in with the law-abiding and settled British ones who live amongst us peacefully now (No irony intended, great grandmother.)

Besides, someone has to put to good use all those unused houses, empty hospital beds, echoing GP surgeries, oceans of spare tax revenues and unspent benefits money and unoccupied school places that are cluttering up the country.

Picture from here.