David Simpson
In the 1962 film “The Manchurian Candidate”, starring Frank Sinatra and Laurence Olivier, an American soldier captured by the North Koreans is brainwashed into believing that when he is released he should assassinate a US Presidential candidate. Happily, that did not happen and democracy was saved. No-one then, at the height of the Cold War, would have imagined that someone under the influence of a hostile foreign power could actually one day be elected President of the United States. But this is what happened in November 2024.
No-one who watched Donald Trump fawning over Putin in Alaska earlier this month, and who remembers the help that Putin gave him to win the 2016 Election against Hillary Clinton, and who looks at his track record of repeatedly failing to defend Ukraine against Russian aggression can doubt that he is under the influence of the Kremlin.
It is plain for all to see that Trump has no intention of putting pressure on Putin to come to a cease-fire in Ukraine. Instead, he is content to allow existing US military commitments to Ukraine to expire. For their part, he Western European powers, France, UK and Germany, have neither the military means nor the political will to defend Ukraine by themselves. Abandoned by the West, Ukraine will soon be forced into a humiliating settlement that will leave it with a rump of territory it cannot defend against a future Russian assault. This will be a replay of the ‘peace deal’ signed by Hitler and Chamberlain at Munich in 1938, which left Czechoslovakia defenceless; Hitler marched in six months later.
For Hitler, the absorption of Czechoslovakia into the Greater German Reich was just the first step in his planned eastern expansion. In the same way, for Putin, Ukraine is just the first step in his planned westward expansion. His desire to restore Russian authority over the whole territory of the former Soviet Union has been frequently stated. He claims to have built up the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world. Taken together with the fact that military spending accounts for more than 7% of Russian output, compared to the 2% each spent by the UK, France and Germany, there cannot be any doubt about Putin’s expansionist intentions. But the political leaders of most Western European countries just don’t want to know. Their voters do not want their comfortable living standards destroyed by the higher taxes needed to pay for re-armament.
The British Government is preparing to raise taxes in its Autumn budget to pay for its existing health and welfare commitments. To add still further tax rises to pay for a big increase in defence spending is politically unthinkable. That would deliver the 2029 Election to Nigel Farage – the reincarnation of Oswald Mosley – on a plate. He is already eight points ahead in the polls.
While Friedrich Metz seems to be aware of the Russian threat, his coalition Government is weak, and electorally vulnerable to the far-right (and pro-Putin) AFD. Only Emmanuel Macron has the power and the will to act, but France by itself is not strong enough to resist Russia. In the late 1930’s, the American President Franklin Roosevelt was a friend of the beleaguered European democracies; today, Trump is their enemy.
Once Putin has swallowed up Ukraine, Poland will be his next major objective. Ninety years ago, after letting down the Czechs and the Slovaks, Chamberlain felt obliged to give security guarantees to Poland. Will Starmer do the same this time? Any such guarantees would only be credible if backed up by a programme of rapid rearmament. There are no political voices in the UK today calling for that. Instead, we all prefer to look the other way.
American voters may eventually tire of the reckless posturing of the entertainer whom they elected President in 2024, despite his flagrant criminality. As the one-time host of a long running reality TV show, Trump learned how to keep his audience’s attention: always give them something new to look at. But on the global political stage, his failures cannot be disguised for ever, although perhaps for long enough to get him past the Congressional Elections of November 2026. A Democratic majority in either the Senate or the House would clip his wings.
Up to now, the Democratic Party has failed to provide any effective opposition to Trump. Preoccupied with internal policy differences, in 2024 it allowed a manifestly senile Joe Biden to run for re-election and certain defeat. At the last minute, when it was far too late to choose a good candidate, the electorate was presented with a very weak alternative to Trump.
Today the Democrats are missing an open goal. Not only is Trump demonstrably under the influence of a foreign dictator whose interests are anti-American and pro-Chinese, but during his two terms in Office he has allowed America’s longstanding global military advantage to be overtaken by both the Russians and the Chinese. In addition to their nuclear arsenal, the Russians lead in the field of missile technology, while the Chinese are ahead in the military uses of space as well as beginning to enjoy naval supremacy in the Pacific. (So Goodbye to Taiwan. And Goodbye to the two British aircraft carriers deployed in the China Sea.) So far from Making America Great Again, Trump has taken the US’s global power position back to the nineteenth century.
One of the explanations for Trump’s curious deference to Putin is that Trump admires the latter’s ruthlessness. Putin is a truly evil man, like Adolf Hitler. His abduction of some 20.000 Ukrainian children, the murder of his domestic critics and his well-documented crimes on the Ukrainian battlefields, for which he has been indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) all attest to this. Trump is a foolish man but not an evil one, (although many of his acts may have evil consequences). But, just as Mussolini was in awe of Hitler, so Trump admires leaders more ruthless than himself. (Indeed, Mussolini’s vanity, showmanship, stupidity and cynicism make him the ideal role model for Trump.)
Another truly evil leader, also indicted by the ICC, to whom Trump routinely defers is Benjamin Netanyahu. In the last two years alone Netanyahu has murdered some fifty thousand Palestinian women and children, with an Old Testament- like zeal. He calls his destruction of their homes a ‘War’ against Hamas. But the Israeli Defence Force, (an Orwellian phrase if ever there was one), is equipped with bombs, shells, missiles, drones, aircraft and tanks, whereas the Palestinians have none of these things. So the so-called ‘fighting’ is not a battle, mot even a conflict, but a slaughter.
Netanyahu has turned Gaza into one large Concentration Camp, from which the inmates cannot escape and into which supplies of food, water and medicines are regularly cut off. Just as the SS camp guards of the 1940s were free to kill their prisoners at will, so the soldiers of the IDF can select their victims on a whim and kill or maim them with impunity. These atrocities have earned Netanyahu his indictment before the ICC. Significantly, Trump has responded with sanctions, not against Netanyahu but against the members of the Court.
The parallels with Nazi Germany are even more stark. Like the Nazis, Netanyahu and his followers find it easier to kill their victims because they believe in their own racial superiority. To these people, Palestinians are ‘subhuman animals’. Such attitudes are deeply ingrained in sections of Israeli society but pass largely unremarked n Western media.
Netanyahu, Putin and Hitler are alike in other respects. All have been obsessed with expanding the territory they inherited, inventing different reasons for doing so. Hitler wanted “living room” for his people, Netanyahu wants to recover all the lands of Biblical Israel, while Putin wants to restore the territory occupied by the old Soviet Union. Just as Hitler wanted to clear Slavs and other ‘inferior’ races off their lands in eastern Europe, and resettle them with ethnic Germans, so Netanyahu is systematically forcing Palestinians from their land, and resettling it with Israelis.
They all share a similar degree of cynicism in their dealings with others. They shamelessly issue public statements which they know, and everyone else knows, to be untrue, simply to demonstrate their contempt for their listeners. Hitler blamed everything on “the Jews”. Putin’s opponents died in prison camps from “natural causes”. For Netanyahu, the starvation of the population of Gaza is variously the fault of Hamas or the fault of the UN or it doesn’t exist – a “bare-faced lie”. When the IDF shelled a hospital In Gaza City on Monday 25th August, Netanyahu called it a “tragic mishap”.
Of course, Netanyahu dismisses all criticism of his Government’s actions as ‘antisemitism’, ignoring the fact that many, if not most, Jewish people are appalled by it. From his point of view, it is an advantage that his behaviour stokes real antisemitism amongst people in the rest of the world who are ignorant enough not to be able to distinguish between Netanyahu and other Jews. He can then pose as the defender of all Jews against antisemitism.
Like Hitler, Putin, and Netanyahu respect only force. They believe that might is right, and laugh at the hollow threats and empty words of the Western politicians who dare to criticise them.
While there are some honourable exceptions in countries like Spain, Norway and Ireland, many Western leaders have preferred to ignore the continuing atrocities being committed in Gaza. They have made this task easier for themselves by tolerating the exclusion of Western journalists from the scene. If images of the death, destruction and starvation that are happening daily in Gaza were to be shown on Western television screens the resulting popular outcry would surely provoke a demand for action. It may be significant that the IDF have targeted and killed more than 1o0 non-Western journalists in Gaza and the occupied West Bank in the last two years.
It is bad enough that so many Western governments have decided to I overlook what is happening in Gaza. How much more shameful is the position of the British Government which has been actively complicit in what has been going on. The Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, set the ball rolling as long ago as October 2023 when, in a radio interview. he justified the withholding of water and power from the civilian population. Since then, his Government sanctioned UNWRA following unproven allegations made against some of their staff. The UK has continued to supply Netanyahu with aircraft parts while, astonishingly, the RAF has been conducting surveillance flights over Gaza, not to locate areas of the greatest civilian need nor even to assess the extent of the destruction, but in order to provide images for the use of the IDF.
A decade or so from now our grandchildren will be hanging their heads in shame. They will ask us why, when these atrocities were being committed in front of us, we chose to look the other way?
28.8.25