Mad Vlad

People only allow themselves the luxury of doing wrong in the full knowledge they are doing wrong when they commit relatively small offences.  If I fiddle my taxes by asking to be paid in cash I know I shouldn’t but I guess I’m going to get away with it.  Anyway, MPs fiddle their expenses too.  Remember the duck pond?  When they commit great crimes though people always do it for the noblest of reasons, no matter that these justifying narratives are always completely mad.  Hitler killed six million Jews, gassing preferred option, in order to purify the blood  of the  Aryan  race.  Stalin sent 60 million to the gulag in order to establish a socialist paradise.  The British destroyed the wonderfully skilled cotton industry in India in the name of free trade.  The Catholic Church burnt thousands alive in the name of the gentle Lamb of God.  We have poor countries by the throat in deliberately engineered debt traps that is making us richer and them poorer.  I so hate Children in Need.  Instruments of self-delusion are always noble in themselves and the nobler the better and the more efficiently they delude.  Don’t get me onto the Brexit vision of global Britain.  Look, you’re a small offshore island getting poorer by the minute.  These often passionately believed narratives are always mad and so it is with Mad Vlad’s idea that he is invading Ukraine to free it from Nazis.   But the madder thing still is that so many in Germany believed Hitler and so many in Russia believe Putin.  And so many in Britain believe that we are going to be a huge global presence and no longer practise colonialism. Why are we like this? Why did so many good men fight for Hitler?  Why do we so easily believe falsehoods? 

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