April, the cruellest month, is a month of anniversaries, of Belsen, of the Battle of Berlin and of the Armenian genocide to show that our cyclical lives never quite escape winter’s deathly clutches.

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April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

And so famously begins TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, one of the English language’s greatest poems and one of very many inspired, if that is the correct word, by the carnage of The Great War.

April, the cruellest month, is a month of anniversaries, of Belsen, of the Battle of Berlin and of the Armenian genocide to show, like Eliot’s opus shows, our cyclical lives never quite escape winter’s deathly clutches.

Though Belsen was liberated on 15 April 1945, to properly feel its texture, read nightmarish articles like this where then captain James Molyneaux recalls that happy event. As the horrors of the Armenian genocide are unspeakable, we will only remark that Armenia has a poetic tradition second to none.

As regards the Battle for Berlin, there is nouth to say, except that Germany’s casualties exponentially increased in the last months of the war when, like today’s Ukrainian Reich, the war was irretrievably lost long before Hitler blew his brains out on 30 April 1945.

Zelensky won’t even give us that. Once his rump Reich finally implodes, he will scoot off to Florida and those ordinary Ukrainians who survive will have to eke out a living as best they can. For Ukraine’s able bodied men, there is always the French Foreign Legion, which hired Waffen SS veterans by the thousands following VE Day, and for the rump Reich’s fräuleins, there is their surrogate mother industry to fall back on, renting their cut price wombs out to the journalists of the New Yorker who write trash like this about their glorious fighting men. Though Hollywood will have a field day with it, it makes me as sick as Belsen made Molyneaux.

Not quite so as there is Gaza where British MP George Galloway recently recounted a feral dog carrying a baby’s corpse off through its smoldering rubble. Although the “fake news” image that inspired the story was supposedly from Bangladesh, that does not negate the Gazan crimes it so perfectly personifies. The young Gazan children recounting how aid is parachuted for them into the sea, from where they are supposed to fetch it like they were feral dogs, capture the crimes of Gaza as surely as Molyneaux’s testimony gives us our snapshot of Belsen. Like Belsen, Gaza belies words.

Though the children of Gaza are dying with dignity, with their metaphorical boots on, Hollywood won’t even give them that. Their stories, like those Russia rescued from Donbas, are not worth telling, no money in it; it does not fit Tinseltown’s business model. Far better to tell us how our intelligence services are saving us from all those Chinese and Russian spies, who threaten all that is great and good in our civilisation.

The Chinese are, perhaps, the easiest to smoke out. Just read this 1941 Time article on How to tell your friends from the Japs and reverse the roles as the Chinese are now Hollywood’s baddies and the Japs (sic) the goodies.

Russia Today seems to be up to speed on all this as they recently ran a story where Sweden’s crack intelligence services (Nordstream?) unmasked a 57-year-old Chinese Mata Hari, who had openly lived in Sweden for 20 years, where she even went so far as marrying a Swede and having children with him.

Swedish public broadcaster SVT claims the Chinese embassy in Stockholm had paid this Mandarin speaking Mata Hari for a clutch of articles published on her website, that she had also hosted Chinese officials and businessmen visiting Sweden and that she had even sought to arrange meetings for them with Swedish officials. The weasel!

Not only would all of that be standard operating procedure, but when I lived in Japan, I knew a Japanese lady who would only rent rooms to Finns and whose Finnish, they claimed, was better than their own, a remarkable feat as Finnish is a notoriously difficult language for foreigners to learn, let alone master. The Japanese in Finland, like the Chinese in Sweden, would be remiss if they did not solicit help from their own, if they did not, in other words, do what the British, the Americans and every single other power do in every single country they have diplomatic and commercial relations with. Can the pathetic Swedes not come up with something spicier than Ikea, trumped up charges against Julian Assange and undercover Chinese grannies with dodgy knees?

And then there are the Russkies. Whereas long ago, the great Luke Kelly sang about catching the bonny shoals of herring, now it seems Russia’s James Bonds can be just as easily netted. Following the start of hostilities in Ukraine, the Western powers, who have no idea who blew up Nordstream, scooped up shoals of Russian James Bonds in much the same fashion as Luke Kelly’s fisherman did with those bonny North Sea herrings.

Fair enough says you but what were all these spawning spies doing to justify their roubles? It seems, from the latest round of expulsions, that they were doing nothing more than flogging highly regarded Russian software  to pay for their Ikea furniture, their Abba CDs and their Greta Thunberg’s Thoughts for the Day.

Although Russia and China both have their faults, one of their biggest seems to be that their products are superior to the junk Sweden, the United States and the rest of the Nordstream gang produce. And, heavens above, they make unwanted noises about ongoing genocides in places like Gaza, Syria, Ukraine and Armenia. The cads!

These NATO problems will not be solved by banning Kaspersky and arresting Chinese grannies who watch reruns of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. NATO must, if it can, reassess its role in the world by doing cost/benefit studies on blowing up pipelines, destroying its own competitive base and slaughtering Palestinian, Syrian, Armenian and Russian children.

Though I can’t see Biden’s clutch of criminals getting their Damascene moment from those slaughterhouses, the hope, if that is the correct word, has to be they will see some sense when their armadas are sunk in the South China Sea. The good news is that the works of TS Eliot and geniuses like him will survive NATO’s further machinations. The bad news is that all those Palestinian, Syrian, Armenian and Russian children NATO continue to target will not, thus validating April, which should be a herald of hope, as the cruellest month.