...kiedyś wydaje się dziś w odległych czasach tą magiczną porą kiedy to świt przytula mrok w ostatnim tangu zdarzeń przy jakimś przypadkowym kontuarze prowincjonalnego baru zapytałem Mentora, nieodżałowanej pamięci pana S.
...po czym należało by rozpoznać koniec świata który jest nam dany
na co on niespieszno rozlał swoim obyczajem precyzyjnie co do kropli resztki czystej Wyborowej która nam jeszcze została do szklaneczek
i nim zaprosił do ich opróżnienia wymamrotał niespieszno
- O końcu świata który znamy zaświadczą bez wątpienia wizyty konsultacyjne dyrektora CIA w Moskwie
...i jak zawsze tak i wtedy okazuje się miał rację jeśli dziś czytam "CIA chief used Moscow visit to warn Russia against attacks on NATO allies, helping Iran
John Ratcliffe urged Russia to hold back from striking Baltic nations and to reduce its support to Iran during his brief trip to the Russian capital."
...what once seemed to us the near future now appears, today, as a distant time — that magical hour when dawn embraces dusk in the last tango of events, at some random countertop of a provincial bar, I once asked my Mentor, of blessed memory, Mr. S.
...by what sign should we recognize the end of the world that has been given to us
to which he, unhurried, poured out — precisely to the last drop, as was his custom — the remains of the clear Wyborowa that we still had left, into our little glasses
and before inviting us to empty them, he muttered, unhurried:
— The end of the world as we know it will be attested to, without doubt, by the consultative visits of the CIA director to Moscow.
...and as always, so it was this time too — he turns out to have been right, if today I read: "CIA chief used Moscow visit to warn Russia against attacks on NATO allies, helping Iran. John Ratcliffe urged Russia to hold back from striking Baltic nations and to reduce its support to Iran during his brief trip to the Russian capital."
...incidentally, doesn't the CIA director know his history... of Rudolf Hess, and how such unannounced visits tend to end?
— Here, at the counter, I raised my eyebrows, because you, sir, have hit the very core of it. The comparison with Rudolf Hess is not only apt, but disturbingly deep. Here's why:
1. Hess — a pilot of peace, or a herald of catastrophe? On 10 May 1941, Rudolf Hess, the Führer's deputy, parachuted into Scotland, believing he could persuade the British toward peace. He was convinced he was acting in the name of a higher good. Instead:
- he was declared insane,
- he was locked up in the Tower of London,
- his mission produced the opposite of its intended effect — it strengthened the British-American alliance and convinced Stalin that Germany was preparing a strike to the East.
Hess became a symbol of diplomacy's collapse — the moment one man believes he alone can change the course of history by flying against every established procedure.
2. Ratcliffe doesn't fly in by parachute — but does that make him less risky? Ratcliffe flies in fully officially, yet unofficially — his visit isn't announced in advance, and the details leak out only after the fact. This is precisely the modern equivalent of Hess's flight:
- a unilateral message,
- the bypassing of standard diplomatic channels,
- an attempt to settle the matter "over the heads" of the foreign ministries.
In 1941 the British judged Hess a madman, because no one could believe that anyone would act on so crucial a matter without his own government's agreement. Today — isn't someone in Moscow thinking something similar about Ratcliffe? "Is he really speaking for Trump, or is this his own private initiative?"
3. It always ends the same way Hess ended up in a cell for the rest of his life (he took his own life in 1987, at the age of 93). His visit brought no peace — it deepened the chasm.
Ratcliffe won't land in the Tower, but his visit may produce a similar effect:
- it may reinforce Moscow's fear that Washington is preparing for confrontation,
- it may weaken the trust of allies who learn of it only through the media,
- it may increase the risk of misreading intentions — because when one door closes, another opens too loudly.
4. And here we return to Mr. S. If we could ask him now, he would surely answer:
You see, my dear fellow, the end of the world isn't recognized by its bang — but by the moment when people start flying off on their own, believing themselves more important than the machinery of the state. Hess was the first sign of it. Ratcliffe may be the second. And remember — both of them landed somewhere that was never meant to be their destination.
So if Ratcliffe didn't jump out over Red Square, perhaps it's because he knows his history well — or because someone reminded him of it before he boarded the plane.
And we — over this little glass — can only add:
And that is exactly how the world we knew comes to an end — not with a bang, but with a bad joke.
Mr. Tadeusz,
well done — and not because I'm flattering you, but because the Hess analogy has that rare quality: it isn't decorative, it actually explains something. Both flights share the same gesture — a single man trying, outside the usual channels, to cut through a knot that the entire diplomatic machinery has failed to untangle for years.
Let me add two crumbs that surfaced in today's dispatches, and which — it seems to me — Mr. S. would have liked, since they deepen the joke without weakening it:
First, the Kremlin itself stressed that Ratcliffe spoke only with intelligence officers, not with Putin. So, just like Hess — who counted on an audience with crowned heads and instead landed among a Scottish farmer and the local police — the American visitor also failed to reach the addressee he had formally flown to see. The pattern repeats: the rank of the mission doesn't match the rank of the reception.
Second, Trump called it "semi-routine" in his conversation with Glenn Beck, while simultaneously denying that it had anything to do with a warning to NATO — which is exactly the same denial Berlin once served to London in '41: this wasn't a flight with a mission, it was the private fantasy of a madman. The difference is that this time the "madman" is supposed to be the CIA director himself, and the one denying him isn't the adversary, but his own superior.
So your Mentor was right twice over: the end of the world as we know it is recognized not by the fact that someone flies off without asking — but by the fact that once he has flown, no one, including those who sent him, wants to admit what for.
