Life, death and planning policy in fighting Ukraine and socialist Argyll
NOW that the soft, amnesiac blanket of caring, north-London socialism has fallen again on north Britain, like a layer of malodorous soot, it is perhaps time to contemplate the fate of a much older socialist experiment – in Ukraine. If Ukraine can fight a war on the scale it is currently engaged in, and clamp down on the legacy corruption of socialism at the same time, that is an achievement beside which baby boxes, empty cycle lanes and the construction of a ferry with windows pales into insignificance.
Making due allowances for scale and context, I would suggest the twin-track Ukrainian phoenix effort is exceeded only by that of the United States in World War II. Starting with an army smaller than Belgium’s, it managed to win a major war in Europe, another one in the Pacific, and inaugurate the nuclear age, all at the same time – while simultaneously getting richer, making Citizen Kane and giving the world Glenn Miller.
But we in Britain, and Scotland in particular, are getting more socialist and “woke” with every tightening squeeze of the bureaucratic anaconda – or bureauconda. If we are ever to enjoy the moral health of beleaguered Ukraine, we need to understand the basic formula for the socialist disease it is fighting so courageously. That is the question which Nataliya Kibita’s strangely fascinating new book helps to answer.
The full title is The Institutional Foundations of Ukrainian Democracy: Power Sharing, Regionalism and Authoritarianism, but that does not really explain its contents. It sounds dull, and in a sense the subject matter is extremely dull, but the higher-level subject, or perhaps I should say the theme of the book, and the conclusion it suggests is extremely important as a case study in how not to run a country in which free-minded human beings survive and prosper.
There is hardly an interesting sentence in the book, yet the over-arching conclusion to be derived from it should be tattooed onto the much-flaunted skull of John Swinney, for example, or copied onto the crib-sheets which Starmer Minor smuggles into his weekly Comprehension tests in the Westminster common room. It is this. Avoid at all costs the death cult of “planning”.
The destructive power of socialism is a matter of historical record. It was able to kill a country with the size, resources, brains, discipline, courage, diversity, talent and military history of the post-war Soviet Union. If it can do that, it can kill anything, even Natty Scotland, with its shaved heads and shrivelled minds. The practical question is how? This book answers that well. The brotherhood of man sounds cool, but the “brotherhood” of socialists is a waste of cheap wine.
Socialism created nothing of moral value in the Ukrainian public space, if by morality you mean standards of conduct which enable people to interact purposefully yet politely on a lifetime view. Almost every page of this 300-page book contains at least one – often half a dozen – examples of people ordering others about with no concern whatsoever either for the people being ordered, the nature of the order itself or the society which was supposed to benefit from fulfilment of the order. All they were interested in was the relationship of the person ordering to the person ordered. Who is bossing who around? Who has status and who not? Snobbery, after all, is the body odour of socialism.
As Nataliya Kibita presents the story – and I am sure she is right – the history of Soviet Ukraine was little more than a power-struggle for resources fought by people who wanted them only in order to enhance their personal prestige amongst the nest of snake-brained psychopaths who ran the country into the ground. Nobody got rich out of all the theft and cynicism, not even the country as a whole. This is a story of the endless shuffling and re-shuffling of offices, commissions, titles, motions, meetings, paperwork and proposals for stuff that nobody actually cared about, even at the time.
The most popular form of self-expression in such circumstances is stealing for personal gain. That is why our own, home-grown snake-brains started stealing on such a huge scale as soon as the Natty socialists and repressed shoplifters of the current gang got their hands on the national cheque book—“iPads are ours”.
On the surface, everything and everybody had to conform to the Plan. Nothing could be impulsive, much less joyful. The only purpose in life was to fulfil a Plan which someone else had drafted in secret as a way of forcing the people at large to do what they did not want to do. Worst of all, even some of the planners did not really want to make the Plan work. Almost at random (because there are so many of them), I offer this example of the combination of chaos and futility which infected all Soviet planning offices:
“Only in 1960 did the central leadership place the Ukraine Statistical Agency under the double jurisdiction of the Central Statistical Agency and the Ukrainian government. At the beginning of the reform, Ukrainian planners had to rely on central planners and the sovnarkhozy to provide the information necessary to compile the plan drafts, and both were often unwilling to share it with Kyiv.” (p. 135)
While soviet statisticians and planners were futilising their lives away, and that of their country, important events were happening beyond the reach of the Plan, in the free world where bureaucondas fear to slither. It was in 1960 that the Beatles first performed in Hamburg, and Cassius Clay won gold in the light-heavyweight boxing at the Rome Olympics. Also in that year, Chubby Checker first performed The Twist, and Harper Lee published To Kill a Mockingbird. That was also the year in which the Goon Show ended, but Psycho was released and Francis Chichester won the first Single-Handed Trans-Atlantic yacht race. He beat his old pal, “Blondie” Hasler, the retired Marine colonel who sailed a tiny Folkboat equipped with the self-steering gear of his own invention which is now a basic requirement for short-handed, long-distance cruising.
In fact, the institutional history of the Ukraine within the Soviet bureaucondacy is so boring that a few words about “Blondie” Hasler would be more interesting. That would have the exciting bonus of introducing the Argyll & Bute Council, a body which is still operating, to our eternal shame, on the sort of left-brain, socialist template which Iain McGilchrist has reminded us all about.
Hasler lived in his later years on a farm near Tayvallich, which lies on the mainland coast opposite the Barnhill part of Jura. He spent his spare time sailing a junk-rigged 20-footer all over this part of the coast, and died at a good age in 1987. In 2005 his widow applied for planning permission to build two cottages on the farm to supplement her pension. Nothing exceptional about that, you might think.
Tayvallich was then a “rural opportunity area”, and there was a shortage of housing. (It is worse today.) Only five people objected to the project (one from a holiday home). Most of the locals were in favour. But the Plan intervened. This took the double-headed form of a tomb-brained representative of the national nature control agency and an English planning officer for the Council who’s particular beef was preventing 1930s/Home Counties-style ribbon development coming to twenty-first century Argyll. Building these houses would either “detract from the quality of the landscape” or “have adverse implications for landscape character.”
It was said that “National Planning Policy guideline 14” would be offended by a house being built in an area which had been empty since the Highland Clearances. Reference was made to “Policies RUR 1 and RUR 2 of the Mid Argyll Local Plan and Policy STRAT DC 8 of the Argyll and Bute Structure Plan”.
That is what the Ukrainian armed forces are fighting against today, with such heroism, just as Blondie Hasler himself fought against Der Plan or whatever the Nazi version of the Soviet Pyataletka (“Five Year Plan”) was. Hasler won the Croix de Guerre for his part in the Norway campaign in 1940, and the DSO for leading a daring Marine commando raid on Bordeaux in December 1942. This was fictionalised in the film, The Cockleshell Heroes, and recorded factually in a book of the same name.
Hasler and his marines had to paddle seventy miles up the Gironde river to the port which was so heavily guarded against bombers that it could not feasibly be attacked from the air. Two of his men died of hypothermia on the four-day paddle upstream, and six others were captured by the Germans and shot out of hand. Still the tiny force managed to sink two German merchant ships that had been blockade-running to the Far East, and to damage four other vessels. Hasler and a corporal were the only ones who escaped, making their way through Spain to Gibraltar. (You can read a summary account of Operation Frankton here.)
Though Zelensky and 40 million post-Soviet Ukrainians would understand the need to be flexible when accommodating the families of men who helped save their country from Der Plan, if necessary at the cost of their own lives, the planning staff of the Argyll & Bute Council appear not to have achieved such understanding. They still display the rigid, mechanistic outlook of those loyal to Der Plan. You’d’ve thought a grateful nation would have given a bit of leeway to Hasler’s widow, but no, the Plan is more important than any human life or history.
And that is what Nataliya Kibita’s book so well conveys, in necessarily dry prose but with a relentless focus on the futility of comprehensive and inflexible planning. Life is too important to be squandered on a mechanistic death cult run by cynical dullards. If we are to avoid the fate of Soviet Ukraine, we need to resist revanchist socialism as fiercely at home as our Ukrainian brothers in the spirit are doing abroad.
Slava Argylli & Buti!
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Still from Cockleshell Heroes courtesy of Warwick Films
