They wanted net zero — they got 100% Putin
In his State of the Union address, Joe Biden called the Ukrainians Iranians. Dalrymple comments:
What Biden said was correct: it is unlikely that Vladimir Putin will win the hearts and souls of the Iranians. He is not really a hearts-and-souls-capturing type of person. Recently, indeed, he has emerged as more of a mind-concentrating kind of person, especially of German minds.
Dalrymple concedes that it is rather worrying that the second or third most powerful man in the world appeared to confuse the names of the inhabitants of a hostile and friendly nation because they happened to share three of four syllables.
One wouldn’t make a clinical diagnosis solely on this basis, but it can hardly have convinced Vladimir Vladimirovich that he was faced by a mentally very formidable interlocutor.
He writes that once the Russians have flattened and occupied Kiev, Lvov, Kharkov, etc.,
the question will be asked in the West, ‘Who lost Ukraine?’
Spoilt brat
Dalrymple’s answer is: Greta Thunberg.
The Thunberg episode must have been of great aid and comfort to the man in the Kremlin, for it must have convinced him, as it convinced his apologists in the West, of the almost total decadence and fundamental unseriousness of the West. Here was a spoilt upper-middle class girl claiming that her childhood had been stolen — by whom and by what, exactly? — and no one in any position of power or responsibility had the guts to tell her to shut up and to stop broadcasting her disgusting self-satisfied and highly privileged self-pity. Instead, she was the object of deference and almost of adulation, as if she were being brave in the way that anti-war demonstrators in Russia have been brave.
Sentimental tosh
Why did no one in any position of power or responsibility tell Thunberg to go away? The answer is
sentimentality: adolescence is the springtime of idealism. To destroy the fatuous illusions of the ignorant and inexperienced is cruel; we must submit meekly to be lectured, or hectored, and to do as they say. The fact that the person in question may have been as manipulated as a cruise missile was not allowed to enter anyone’s mind.
The idea of Thunberg trying to hector Putin or Xi
is so absurd that it cannot be entertained for a moment. It was for this reason, that Putin was not decadent enough to take her seriously even for a moment, that some in the West admired Putin: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. As we now see, Putin is not anyone’s friend: but little Greta was his friend, in what Stalin would have called the objective sense.
Net-zero delusions
Thunberg, Dalrymple notes,
assisted in creating Europe’s extreme vulnerability to Russia’s control over its energy supplies. We do not want
- nuclear
- coal
- gas
- oil
The reality, however, is that the population does want to be warm over winter. It does not want the factories to close down. It is quite attached to the continuous electricity supply that renewables cannot guarantee. Thus, the political class paid lip service to the Thunbergs while continuing, indeed extending, the continent’s dependence on energy from Russia—a potentially, and now actually, hostile power.
(Of Boris Johnson’s net-zero policy, Dalrymple can barely bring himself to speak.)
They chuckle in the Kremlin
Putin’s hand, Dalrymple points out,
would have been much weaker had Europe not chosen to be so abjectly dependent on Russian energy.
How Putin must have giggled to see the fawning reception of Thunberg in the West.
With what contempt must he have regarded us, he, an ex-KGB operative who believes that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century. Thunberg and her ilk must therefore bear some of the responsibility for bringing about the war in Ukraine.
They wanted net zero.
What they got was the scramble for more nuclear power stations, more oil and gas exploration, and even a resort to coal, plus Russia into the bargain.
