I get up in the morning still with the nightmares of Ukraine. In my latest dream I was the London link of a Ukrainian patrol captured by the Russians. They had a link to my phone while they were being interrogated and tortured, one by one. Those with Russian accents from the east were particularly targeted as traitors to Russia and the Donetsk republic. I felt frustrated and impotent. As usual, ultimately, it made no more sense than Alice in Wonderland's game of cards. It was a product of my anxiety and despair about the current state of my life and of the world around me.
God knows the world is bad enough. The uncertainty over the future of the Zaporozhe power station continues depsite the latest UN visit. Could an enterprising Russian officer still mange to distinguish himself by causing a nuclear malfunction that would poison more than half of Ukraine and many of its neighbours. That would be a true "victory" for Putin, amid a sea of his preplanned denials and with no need to press any nuclear button himslef.
And he can continue his war against the West as Nordstream 1 is closed indefinetely. It's a total collapse of Angela Merkel's well-meaning but naive belief that Russian imperialism can be tamed by trade and the prospect of prosperity. Only a hungry, angry, deprived population would sustain the dreams of empire. Putin knows that; Merkel did not.
The nightmare continues in Pakistan, as at least a thousand perish under the waves, four thousand are injured and several million lose their homes, their livelihood and their hopes. Pakistan becomes the next safety valve for the world's climatic self-destruction. The worst flooding has subsided in the north but the waters are still rising and the rains are still falling further south in Sind. Waterborne diseases are increasing and the miserable aftermath can be seen throughout the whole country. The scale of the disaster can be measured by the size of the initial 33 million dollars of the US aid package. Liz Truss as Foreign Scretary oferred a miserable £1.5 million from an existing aid package, but that is utterly shameful.
Not that the people of Jackson, Mississippi, are that much better off as they are told to keep their mouths shut while taking a shower to prevent the ingestion of contaminated water. This has gone on for months as the National Guard distribute free bottles of water in a city with 75% black population. There is a sense, in parts of America, that the social infrastructure is collapsing as Republicans fight for a "small state" economy, and the whole country is splitting in two, divided by wealth, by education and by ideology. The two sides not only differ fundamentally over the future of their country, but have no proper common dialogue with each other. Trump considers Biden an illegal aberration as President and Biden has called Trump and his supporters a threat to democracy in America. Nearly 50% of Amercians believe there will be a civil war in the next 10 years. China and Russia have but to wait and the world will be theirs'. The EU will be too divided to withstand those pressures as well, especially as Italy is about to join the illiberal anti-EU alliance with Poland and Hungary.
The idiocy continues in Poland which has now, in the middle of a confrontation between Putin and the West, chosen to present Germany with a 1.3trn euro claim for war reparations. The task of war reparations for the horrors of German Nazi occupation of Poland is a massive subject and, in terms of natural justice, quite justifiable, and it is also true that the earlier settlement made through the Soviet Union in the 1950s, when Poland was not a sovereign state, was totally unsatisfactory. However the post 1990 Polish government chose not to pursue further claims, leaving the moral onus on Germany of investing in the Polish economy and Polish democracy. It was still a somewhat naive if well-meaning decision, as Poles thought they would be more effective if they were not a revisionist state, seeking to undermine the world order. That decision in 1990 by the semi independent Mazowiecki government required correction, but not in the ridiculous way that Poland has chosen to do it against an ally in the Ukraine war. What is the Polish government's response to the possibility that 1/ this claim could cause so much resentment that some Germans may wish to seek recompensation for property they lost in 1945, when they were expelled with their families from Silesia and Pomerania, 2/ what proportion of whatever they lay out in their claim would go to Jewish families, who were the main victims of German war crimes, albeit with many of them already compensated, and 3/ why this moment could not have been utilized better by staking a claim for war crimes and loss of property to Russia? Had they consulted other possibly interested countries, such as Serbia, the Czech Republic, Israel or Ukraine? Sadly, it is an ideologically driven claim aimed at prolonging Polish-German emnity and keeping alive the electoral prospect of a corrupt PiS victory at the next parliamentary election. The Oder-Neisse border was partly created by Stalin in order to foster this historical emnity, and Kaczynski is doing everything possible to let it fester on. Even the current pollution on the Oder River is automaticaly blamed on Germany, even though Polish industrial users in the upper reaches of the river have been unbridled pollutants in the past.
Tydzien Polski has again failed to publish my latest article on the Sikorski Institute, its underfunded museum and its conflict with the Polish Undeground Study Centre. I understood perfectly why they refused to publish my earlier article about the SPK building in Kirkcaldy, because of their dependence on the possible generosity of the SPK in setting up the website for the newspaper. But why this coyness over an article about the Sikorski Museum?
And then, on top of all this, Albina refused to get up this morning for an important blood test for glucose at 9.30 in the morning. I was due to drive her to the clinic but she decided that, like a spoilt immature child, she was too lazy to get up. Those are her words by the way, not mine. I was furious, but speechless.
The world is going to the dogs. I am waiting for the Artemis programme to get under way, and I will be changing planets.
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