How Belarus fought the fascists

Today marks the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Belarus from the Nazis. Here’s my Morning Star article on the massive contribution Belarus made to the anti-fascist struggle.

Question: Which currently existing nation lost the largest percentage of its population in World War II - a higher percentage than that of France, Britain and the US combined?

The answer is Belarus, which lost a staggering one-third of its people in The Great Patriotic War - a total of 2.5 million citizens.

As Stewart Parker states in his excellent book The Last Soviet Republic, "the destruction wrought on Belarus was immense in terms of human life and of infrastructure." Thousands of towns and villages were destroyed, many, like Katyn, burnt to the ground with all their villagers.

This week marks the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Belarus from the nazi occupation and the event will be commemorated across the country and in Russia too.

To find out more about the sacrifices that Belarus made during World War II in the struggle against the nazis - and the way that its experiences during the war has helped shape the country's foreign policy today - I met up in London recently with the country's ambassador to Britain Aleksandr Mikhnevich.

"Not a single country involved in the hostilities was faced with such appalling atrocities and destruction," Mikhnevich told me. "The war left a deep mark in history and in the minds of the Belarus people."

I asked him for some examples of heroism in his country's anti-nazi struggle.
"One can talk for hours about the heroism of the Belarussian people and all the peoples of the USSR during the war. I will give one example. A small garrison deployed in the Brest Fortress was fighting with invaders for a month. The German troops were already near Smolensk but battles in Brest - 600km from the front line - were still underway. Even Hitler arrived by plane to Brest in July 1941 as he couldn't understand why his powerful army could not capture this small islet on Belarussian soil."

By the end of 1941, six months after the launch of Operation Barbarossa, the whole of Belarus was under nazi occupation. But the people refused to lie down and lick the jackboots of the illegal invaders. The resistance movement was strong and determined.

By 1943, there were 75,000 partisans active in the country. Overall, a total of 370,000 partisans fought in Belarus, with fighters coming from other Soviet republics and from western European countries too.

"The scale of the partisan movement was self-evident as single partisan zones sprang up in 1943 - two and half years before the hostilities were over," says Mikhnevich. "Around 60 per cent of the occupied territory was recaptured by the partisans. Government was restored in those areas, bringing the life of civilians back to normal. Belarussians took part even in the French Resistance."

Arguably no other country invaded by the nazis did more to protect its Jewish population than Belarus. In July 1941, the nazis established a Jewish ghetto in the capital Minsk with over 100,000 inmates.

Parker relates how the head of the ghetto, Yefim Stolerovitch, recounted after the war that though the Germans did find individual collaborators, "they were the exception and not the rule. The dominant characteristic of the Belarussian population was one of friendship and sympathy towards the Jews."

An example of this took place on July 21 1941, when the nazis roped a group of 45 Jews into a pit and then ordered 30 Belarussian PoWs to bury them alive. The PoWs refused and subsequently the Germans shot all 75.

Such acts of solidarity in Belarus were, as Parker notes, "in stark contrast to the overt anti-semitism that was reported by Germans in Polish, Baltic and Ukrainian territories."

The role that Belarussians played in protecting Jews in World War II has been acknowledged by the Israeli authorities. The Righteous Among the Nations is a secular award given by Israel to gentiles who risked their lives in the Holocaust to save Jews. There are no fewer than 587 recipients of the award in Belarus.
One of the Belarussians so honoured is Galina Imshenik who, together with her husband, rescued a little Jewish toddler named Yelena Dolgov. Sixty-five years later, Yelena and her husband care for Galina, who is now 96, round the clock. It's a wonderful story of human kindness being repaid.

Eventually, the combined might of the Red Army and the partisans evicted the nazi invaders from Belarus. Due to the worldwide recognition of the role that it had played in defeating fascism, Belarus, despite not being a sovereign state at the time, was made a founding member of the United Nations. And at the very first session of the UN general assembly a resolution proposed by Belarus was passed on the extradition and punishment of war criminals.

The enormous losses the country incurred during World War II continues to shape the foreign policy of Belarus today.

"Belarussian people as nobody else value peace, prosperity and universal values," Mikhnevich told me. "Our foreign policy is aimed exactly at the creation of a zone of neighbourliness. We will never forget the price of our freedom."

Since becoming a sovereign state in 1991, Belarus has taken a consistently pro-peace and anti-war line, opposing both the illegal NATO attack on Yugoslavia in 1999 and the equally unlawful aggression against Iraq in 2003.

The country that was at the forefront of the anti-fascist resistance 65 years ago is still standing up for the rights of free, independent nations today.

Neo-con George 'Flipper' Osborne to face investigation

In my First Post article on the influential neo-con faction in the Conservative Party I wrote:

Just as significant has been the way Cameron has protected his neocon allies during the expenses scandal - although they were arguably among the worst offenders. Gove, the Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, who was described by the Daily Mail's political commentator Peter Oborne as "one of the most notorious milkers of the expenses system", for spending thousands furnishing his London home before 'flipping' to a new property and claiming £13,000 in moving costs, came under no pressure from Cameron to stand down. He is likely to play a major role in the next Conservative government.
So too will fellow flipper George Osborne and Ed Vaizey, who claimed for over £2,000 in antique furniture bought from a business owned by David Cameron's mother-in-law.

Well, when it comes to protecting George ’Flipper’ Osborne, it seems that Dave will have a very hard job on his hands after this news.

The Mail reports:
If he (the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner) launches a full-blown inquiry it would mean a cloud hanging over Mr Osborne's career for months, until a verdict is reached. It will also fuel discontent on the Tory backbenches over the harsh treatment meted out to MPs outside Mr Cameron's inner circle over their expenses claims. Though several members of the Shadow Cabinet, including Mr Osborne, have repaid money to the Commons fees office, senior MPs complain that they have got off lightly compared to others.

The 'senior MPs' are quite right to be incensed about the double standards on show here.

UPDATE: Guido Fawkes has more on Osborne here.

It Ain't Half Hot Mum- Ticket to Blighty

It's something of a tradition on this blog to post a classic clip from 'It Ain't Half Hot Mum' when the temperature in Blighty tops 30 degrees. So, on what is likely to be the hottest day for several years, sit back and enjoy some really 'hot' comedy. Gunner Beaumont (aka 'Gloria'), is desperate to get discharged and get his 'Ticket to Blighty'. And desperate situations require desperate remedies.....

Why it's time to bring back British Rail

The government has refused to re-negotiate its contract with privateer transport company National Express and is to take the East Coast railway line into public ownership.

But rather than making this move the first step in the renationalisation of the entire network, Transport Minister Lord Adonis says that it is the Government's intention to tender for a new East Coast franchise operator from the end of 2010.

Why? What Adonis seems to want is a system where losses are nationalised and profits are privatised. Get the East Coast line back in profit and then flog it to Richard Branson or another privateer, seems to be the government's intention.

As taxpayers- and railway users- we shouldn't put up with this nonsense.

It's time to call an end to Britain's Great Train Robbery and pressurise the government to renationalise the entire railway network. If Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland and the rest of Europe can have publicly-owned railways why can't we?

If you are in agreement, then here's the pressure group for you.

The Neocon Party

This article of mine on how a David Cameron government would be brimming with hawks, appears in the First Post.

The Iraq war is widely discredited. George W Bush and Tony Blair are both out of office. Barack Obama has talked of a "new beginning" in his country's relationship with the Islamic world. Surely it's game over for the neocons, the small group of hardline hawks commonly held responsible for the US-led attack on Iraq in 2003?

Don't bet on it. If, as bookmakers believe, an overall majority for the Conservatives in the next election is a racing certainty, then the proponents of 'Shock and Awe' will once again be back in the corridors of power in Britain.

To understand why the neocons would be in such a strong position if David Cameron does make it to Number 10, we need to go back to the autumn of 2005, the time of the last Conservative party leadership election.

Fearing that in a head-to-head contest between popular former Chancellor Kenneth Clarke and right-winger David Davis, the more charismatic - and anti-war - Clarke would win, the neocon faction within the party started to champion the cause of a young, relatively little known MP for Witney, promoting him as the man who would 'modernise' the party and lead it back to power. The strategy worked a treat, and the little known MP - David Cameron - pulled off a surprise victory.

Cameron's campaign was masterminded by a triumvirate of MPs: Michael Gove, Ed Vaizey and George Osborne.

Gove, who believes the invasion of Iraq was a "proper British foreign policy success", is the author of the polemic Celsius 7/7, which has been described as a "neo-con rallying cry" for its attacks on Islamism, which he describes as a "totalitarian ideology" on a par with Nazism and Communism, and says must be fiercely opposed.

He, along with Vaizey, is a signatory to the principles of the ultra-hawkish Henry Jackson Society, an organisation founded at Peterhouse College Cambridge in 2005 and named after a warmongering US Senator who opposed détente with the Soviet Union.
The Society supports the 'maintenance of a strong military' with a 'global reach'; among its international patrons are the serial warmonger Richard 'Prince of Darkness' Perle, a former staffer of Henry Jackson who was considered one of the leading architects of the Iraq war, and Bill Kristol, the influential American journalist, formerly with the New York Times, who called for military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in 2006.

As for Osborne, Cameron's Shadow Chancellor and right-hand man; he praised the "excellent neoconservative case" for war against Iraq.

There are other strong neocon influences on Cameron. Policy Exchange, which has been described as the Tory leader's 'favourite think-tank', and which will have an open door to Number 10, was set up in 2002 by Michael Gove and fellow hawk Nicholas Boles, a member of the Notting Hill set who the Tories plan to parachute into the safe seat of Grantham and Stamford at the next election. Dean Godson, the group's research director and adviser on security issues, has been described as "one of the best connected neoconservatives in Britain".

When Godson, a former special assistant to the disgraced publisher Conrad Black, was dismissed by the Daily Telegraph, the newspaper's editor Martin Newland said of him (and Black's wife, fellow neocon Barbara Amiel, who also wrote for the paper): "It's OK to be pro-Israel, but not to be unbelievably pro-Likud Israel. It's OK to be pro-American but not look as if you're taking instructions from Washington."

In 2007, Policy Exchange was accused of deliberately stirring up anti-Muslim sentiment in Britain after a controversy over the veracity of some of the evidence it used in its report 'The Hijacking of British Islam'.

Although he said that Britain should learn from the 'failures' of neoconservatism in a speech in September 2006, and denied that he was a neocon himself, Cameron's public pronouncements on foreign affairs since then certainly give the Tory uber-hawks no grounds for believing that they have backed the wrong man.

Last summer, during the South Ossetia conflict, he called for Russia to be expelled from the G8, for Georgia's Nato membership to be "accelerated" and lambasted the British government for allowing Moscow's "aggression" to go unchecked.

He has consistently called for a tougher stance on Iran, warning that "every week, every month that goes by brings Iran closer to possessing a nuclear weapon." And, while staying largely silent on Israel's military assault on Gaza, he has declared his belief in Israel to be "indestructible" and pledged that he would be an "unswerving friend" to the country if he became Prime Minister.

Just as significant has been the way Cameron has protected his neocon allies during the expenses scandal - although they were arguably among the worst offenders. Gove, the Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, who was described by the Daily Mail's political commentator Peter Oborne as "one of the most notorious milkers of the expenses system", for spending thousands furnishing his London home before 'flipping' to a new property and claiming £13,000 in moving costs, came under no pressure from Cameron to stand down. He is likely to play a major role in the next Conservative government.

So too will fellow flipper George Osborne and Ed Vaizey, who claimed for over £2,000 in antique furniture bought from a business owned by David Cameron's mother-in-law.

The trio will not be the only hawks in Cameron's Cabinet. Shadow Defence Secretary Dr Liam Fox, is the founder and UK Director of the 'The Atlantic Bridge', an organisation which promotes closer US/British foreign policy ties. Members of the group's advisory council include Gove, Osborne, Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling and Shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague, a strong supporter of the Iraq war who has attacked Europe's "extraordinary weakness" in dealing with Russia.

It's a sobering thought that before the Iraq inquiry has finished its work, some of the war's most fervent supporters may, if the bookies are right and the Tories win the May 2010 election, once again be guiding Britain's foreign policy.

Michael Jackson R.I.P.

The King of Pop is dead. On this very sad day, let's remember some of the wonderful music Jackson created. My all-time favourite Jackson number is 'Can You Feel It?' by the Jackson 5, which you can hear above (video by tahuexo 1). For my money the best dance record of all time. What's your favourite Jackson track?

Errol Flynn: First of the Hellraisers

Here's my piece from the Daily Express to commemorate the centenary of one of the all-time greats from the Golden Age of Hollywood- Errol Flynn. A man from Down Under, who, so they say, was pretty big Down Under too, if you get my meaning. Flynn was a man whose life was even more remarkable - and adventurous than any of his films. Above you can see Flynn taking part in the quiz show 'What's My Line' (video Norbert R33).

If you're looking for some good summer beach reading, then I can heartily recommend Flynn's autobiography, 'My Wicked Wicked Ways', which was completed shortly before his death in 1959. It's easily the most entertaining showbiz autobiography of all time, and also, for my money, the best written. What a shame that neither the BBC nor ITV saw fit to commemorate Flynn's centenary by showing some of his great swashbuckling films.

HE WAS once described as "probably the greatest symbol of masculinity and virility developed in the modern age".

Errol Flynn - born 100 years ago this week - found fame with his portrayals of swashbuckling heroes such as Robin Hood and Captain Blood yet his real life was even more adventurous than any of his films.

The original serial womanising, heavy-drinking, drug-taking hellraiser packed more into his 50 years than most would do in several lifetimes.

Born in Hobart, Tasmania, Flynn worked as a gold prospector in New Guinea before fleeing after being accused of murdering a native. He dodged bullets and bombs as a reporter in the Spanish Civil War; he was a skilled yachtsman; he relished brawling; he was a drinking partner of Fidel Castro; and there were also allegations that he was a Nazi spy.

Yet it is for his incredible sexual exploits that Flynn will most be remembered. He had, in the words of biographer David Bret, "a quite staggering appetite" for sex.

"I know if I touch the arm of a girl or woman who fires me I have got to go as far øas she will let me, " he confessed. "In like Flynn" became a popular saying.

His obsession with sex was probably a reaction to his mother - whom he detested - trying to drill into him her belief that sex was "disgusting" and "dirty".

Flynn decided to have sex whenever he could and with whomever he fancied. He was 12 when he lost his virginity to his parents' maid, who was promptly dismissed.


From his early days Flynn was set upon a hedonistic approach to life.

"I believe I'm going to front the essentials of life to see if I can learn what it has to teach and, above all, not to discover when I come to die that I have not lived," he wrote in his journal at the age of 23.

But his sexual career could very nearly have come to a premature end when he was knifed by an irate rickshaw boy in Colombo, Ceylon. The knife narrowly missed emasculating him.

After becoming established in Hollywood Flynn soon assembled a coterie of close pals who joined in with his sexual adventures.

One was the young British actor David Niven, a co-member of the Hollywood Cricket Club.

The pair rented a house where they shared lovers, sometimes several in one night. Flynn was still married to his first wife at the time and would leave the orgies about twice a week to visit her.

Later Flynn and Niven shared another bachelor pad in Malibu, nicknamed "Cirrhosis-by-the-Sea" on account of the huge amounts of alcohol consumed.

Flynn also held sex, alcohol and cocainefuelled parties on his boat. Women would be shared between Flynn, the crew and friends.

His home at Mulholland Farm in the Hollywood Hills, where he moved in 1941, was designed with his favourite pastime in mind.

The bathroom was full of aphrodisiac potions. His bedroom had a huge circular mirror on the ceiling above the bed, as did the main guest room.

But what Flynn's guests didn't know was that the mirror was two-way so Flynn and his pals could enjoy watching their activities in the room above.

According to David Bret, Flynn's sexual conquests included men.

Bret claims one male lover was actor Ross Alexander, who played his sidekick in Captain Blood.

Another was Tyrone Power, who is said to have fallen passionately in love with Flynn but the affair floundered because for Flynn the relationship was purely physical.

Yet his alleged bisexuality was hotly disputed by his surviving wives and friends.

One actress who did not end up in his bed was Olivia De Havilland, his co-star in eight films.

This week the 92-year-old admitted she and Flynn did fall in love but "his circumstances at the time prevented the relationship from going further".

Flynn's shenanigans often landed him in trouble.

In 1942, in a case that stunned America, two underaged girls accused him of statutory rape. Robin Hood Accused Of Rape was one headline but Flynn was acquitted at trial.

"Rape to me meant picking up a chair and hitting some young lady over the head with it and having your wicked way.
I hadn't done any of those things, " he wrote.

Flynn's war record was also controversial. In a 1980 biography it was claimed he was a Nazi sympathiser who had spied for Germany while reporting on the Spanish Civil War and that he had wanted to enlist the IRA's support for the Axis cause.

The case rested on Flynn's close association with Austrian fascist Dr Herman Erben but no concrete evidence to support the claims has ever emerged.

On the contrary, in 2000 it was revealed that the Home Office possessed documents detailing how the actor offered to help Britain's security services.

Flynn had been keen to join up to fight in the war for the Allies but was ruled out on health grounds.

Even though still in his early 30s his hard-living had taken a heavy toll.

In 1941 he collapsed in an elevator and a specialist gave him only five years to live, telling him his heart and lungs were irreparably damaged. But Flynn refused to change his ways.

For a period in the early Forties he became addicted to opium, believing the drug would heighten his sexual pleasures.

In 1943 he married wife No2, redhead Nora Eddington, 20, who ran the tobacco kiosk at the Los Angeles courthouse and who had caught Flynn's eye when he had been on trial.

Flynn had no intention of becoming a faithful husband. He installed his wife - and new child - into a home of their own so he could continue his sexual adventures unhindered.

FLYNN explained: "This was the only way I would be married to anybody. Separate house, separate lives, separate people. The Christian concept of monogamy is to me nothing more than a travesty of human nature. It doesn't work, never will."

Flynn revelled in his reputation for being the world's most famous womaniser.

Co-star Robert Douglas recalled going to Flynn's dressing room and seeing the star naked in his armchair, with one woman on top of him and another waiting for her turn.

When Flynn's father visited Hollywood for the first time and turned up unannounced at his dressing room he was shocked to see his son making love to a naked young woman against the wall.

Yet Flynn's womanising and film success did not seem to bring lasting contentment.

"I could have anything money could buy. Yet I found that at the top of the world there was nothing. I was sitting at the pinnacle with no mountain under me".

As he approached his half-century Flynn was a physical wreck.

Bloated and overweight he was unrecognisable from the slim young actor. But there was still some adventure to come.

In 1959 Flynn travelled to Cuba to make a film on its revolution and befriended rebel leader Fidel Castro. "He will rank in history with some of the greats, " he predicted.

Even in his final years Flynn, now living in Jamaica, was still addicted to sex.

He embarked on a relationship with a 15-year-old blonde called Beverley Aadland, whom he called his Wood Nymph. He started writing his "'kiss and tell" autobiography My Wicked Wicked Ways (Flynn had wanted to call it In Like Me but the publisher refused).

His co-writer Earl Conrad was shocked that the actor would get pimps to supply him with under-aged native girls.
He would go upstairs for five to 10 minutes with them, then return to carry on with the writing.

Flynn died of a heart attack in October 1959 just four months after his 50th birthday.

True to form he was buried with six bottles of whisky in his coffin. Shortly before his death Conrad asked Flynn if he had any regrets. "Just the one, sport - that I never learned to play the piano".

Flynn was a man who lived the life he had set out to lead from an early age and accepted the consequences with magnanimity. There have been lots of Hollywood hellraisers but there was only one Errol Flynn.

Non! Why Sarkozy’s planned burka ban is a challenge to the left

This article of mine on why Nicolas Sarkozy’s plan to abolish the burka is not just moderne, but is politically very clever, appears in The First Post.


They said that a short-assed, half-Hungarian Frenchman with Jewish roots who openly admired America would never become the President of France. Then they said his Presidency would prove disastrous and his popularity would soon plummet.
But in the Euro elections earlier this month, Nicolas Sarkozy's UMP party trounced the Socialist opposition, becoming the first French ruling party to come out top in European parliament elections since 1979.

The secret of Sarkozy's success is that he knows how to spot a vote winner. While the left sought to focus on the underlying causes of the riots which plagued Paris in the autumn of 2005, Sarkozy, as Minister of the Interior, simply sent in the riot police and denounced the rioters as racaille or 'rabble'.

Faced with the impact of the global recession, he ditched his flirtation with Anglo-Saxon capitalism and adopted more traditional dirigiste Gaullist policies - in the process completely wrong-footing the left.

Now it seems he's played another trump card by announcing on Monday the establishment of a commission to consider banning the wearing in public of the burka - the garment worn by some Muslim women which covers the entire body, including the face.

His argument for doing so is not just that the burka represents an assault on French secularism, but that it is degrading to women. By championing the rights of women, Sarkozy is able to pose as the defender of the founding principles of the Republic. He also gains kudos for dealing with a hyper-sensitive political issue head-on. And here's the really clever part: he manages at the same time to expose divisions on the left.

Consider these opposing views. Andre Gerin, the Communist MP who tabled the Parliamentary motion last week calling for the establishment of a commission, and who is to lead the inquiry, has likened burkas to "mobile prisons". But Martine Aubry, leader of the Socialist Party, says: "If a law bans the burka, these women will still have it but will remain at home; they will no longer be seen."

The fact is that the left - not just in France, but in Europe generally - is in a dilemma over the issues raised by large-scale Islamic immigration to the continent. For some leftists, civil liberties, a strong belief in multiculturalism and a determination to fight the rising tide of Islamophobia come first. For others, defending Enlightenment values and the rights of women are paramount.

While in Britain a 2006 opinion poll showed 77 per cent to be against a ban on the veil, in Republican France, officially and proudly secular, there are undoubtedly more votes to be had in taking a tougher stance. Wearing the burka in state schools has already been banned, as the result of a 2004 law which prohibits students from wearing any ostensible religious symbols.

While the French Council for the Muslim Religion is against a general ban, the head of the Paris Grand Mosque, Dalil Boubakeur, supports such a move, saying that Islam in France must be an "open Islam".

There is, in fact, a compelling Islamic case for a ban, on the grounds that wearing a burka has nothing to do with religious belief (it is not mentioned in the Koran, but is merely traditional dress in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

This could - and should - provide the French left's get-out clause. It gives them the chance to adopt a position consistent both with their opposition to Islamophobia and their belief in progressive values, instead of rushing to defend an oppressive and degrading practice which surely has no place in a modern European state (Gordon Brown please note).

If not, they will be handing Sarkozy, their wily and unashamedly populist bete noir, yet another strategic victory.

Introducing Mr Speaker: John 'Flipper' Bercow

The Daily Mail reports:

he had 'flipped' the designation of his main home, to avoid paying capital gains tax on either the sale of his house in the country or the subsequent sale of his flat in London. He has agreed to repay £6,500 to the taxman.

Then it transpired that he has also repaid £1,470 to Parliament for unspecified office expenses for which he now realises that he should not have claimed. He has twice billed taxpayers for advice from his accountant on filling in his tax return.

Mr Bercow now has his hands on a job which, even if he is sacked tomorrow, gives him a pension of £40,000 a year for life. In his pitch to the Commons, he talked about reform and the need to be a 'different style of Speaker' in public, but in private has called for MPs' pay to be increased to £100,000

Ladies and Gentleman, I give you Britain’s new Speaker, Tory MP Mr John Bercow.A man who got the job not because of his popularity- but because of his unpopularity-Labour MPs voted for him to annoy the Tories- who can’t stand him.

That such a self-regarding mega-creep has been elected to such high office is surely only further proof of "what a desperately pathetic little country the United Kingdom has become'.

I've never met Bercow, but my father has and found him to be extraordinarily bumptious. It's an opinion that seems to be widely held.