Forty years or so ago, two Greek ship owners and the most famous diva of her time squared off in the British High Court over a financial dispute. Panaghis (I think) Vergottis, a gentleman and philanthropist, had sued Aristotle Socrates Onassis and Maria Callas over the ownership of a tanker, bought for la Callas by the two best friends, as they once were. Vergottis had, I suspect, fallen in love with the fiery coloratura, and once Onassis had dropped her for la Kennedy, tried to move in, unsuccessfully. Then who owned how much of a ship came up, and ended up in the High Court. The headlines back then were bigger than the ones covering the two Russian creeps of last week. But there were no theatrics. Onassis, the winner, made a brief, dignified statement outside the court, saying how sad it was to face a once great friend in a court action. End of story. Callas got her tanker, Onassis was saddled with Jackie and her bills, and Vergottis went back to building villages and museums in Cephalonia.
Compare this with the losing clown Berezovsky, his broken English, his ghastly looks, and the fact the judge called his testimony dishonest. That word never appeared when the two Greek tycoons clashed. Not so when the two Russkie oligarchs squared off. I must say, although no admirer of Roman Abramovich, far from it in fact, the ex-toy duck salesman did not show off and swagger after his victory. Not bothering to show up was the perfect answer to Berezovsky: you’re much too small fry to bother with. Ouch! The loser was described by an American newspaper report as an ex-academic. I wonder what subject he taught? Honesty? Both oligarchs look and smell to me something awful. Sitting on a boat planning whom to bribe back home must be as sleazy as it gets, but that’s the modern world. The two Greeks sat on a boat planning how to help Callas once her career was over. The two Russians planned how to rob a country blind, and they succeeded. All within the law, that is. Some country. Some oligarchs.
Just as the decision came down, I happened to be watching Tom Stoppard’s wonderful Parade’s End. The hero muses sadly about the new dishonesty of public life, the pigs at the trough, but just imagine if he were around today. One needs the virginal innocence of a Carmelite nun to take any Russian billionaire seriously, yet many do, or a Saudi or Qatari, for that matter. The reason Saudis and Qataris never tell the truth is that their beards would fall out. It’s been scientifically proved. Which makes one have second thoughts about Pussy Riot. Paul McCartney should take time off from dying his hair — which makes him look like a painted-up Miss Havisham — and ask himself what would happen to Pussy Riot if they had pulled the stunt they did in Saudi or in Qatar? They’d be beheaded or stoned to death, and their remains would be fed to wild dogs, something our bearded friends down south specialise in. Last year a record 250 million greenbacks were paid by the Qatari ruling family for Cézanne’s ‘The Card Players’. Qatar is a very famous country with a very famous past. They invented everything long before the Greeks, including thieving and buying expensive art from someone they had never heard of until the price of his painting was mentioned. This very famous country with a very glorious past even did well in the Olympics. The runners you saw with Qatar on their fronts were all Kenyans but, such was the glory that is Qatar, they switched nationalities.
There is something about the West’s embrace of Pussy Riot that makes me uneasy. Madonna speaking in their favour is bad enough. But the western media uniting against Putin smells to me of Uncle Sam playing geopolitics. The next thing you know is that the neocons in Washington will start arm rattling against Vlad. The neocons do have something in common with Pussy Riot. Their basic dishonesty. Posing naked and heavily pregnant in a public orgy, as one of Pussy Riot’s threesome did before their arrest, is no way to score political points. Stunts like Pussy Riot’s will get one arrested anywhere, except in countries where abuse of Christianity is no crime, such as western Europe and the United States. There are millions of Russians who think jailing Pussy Riot is right, and that Putin and the courts are right, and who the hell is Madonna, and other publicity freaks like her, to complain?
And another thing. I once ran into a Soviet ambassador in the lift of a hotel owned by my father and loudly complained about the freezing temperature. He turned towards me, smiled and said, ‘I know that you are referring to the Sharansky case, but things are more complicated than American anti-Soviet propaganda makes them out to be.’ I later found out from dad what a polite and civilised man the Soviet diplomat was. Sharansky was a Jewish refusenik who lobbied for greater human rights in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union. In 1978, after four years of civil disobedience, he was arrested and got nine years for his troubles. He was released in 1986 and whisked to Israel. He became a near saint. Some saint. In a rally in Jerusalem he advocated disenfranchising Israeli Arabs. He has compared returning occupied Palestinian territory to treason, and has advocated that his ‘goal is to deprive the Palestinian regime of its legitimacy and force’. Sharansky’s double standard is there for all to see. The West’s outrage over Pussy Riot ditto.
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