For quite some time (as regular readers of this blog will be aware), I have been critical of the tendency of various celebrities to sound off on international relations( usually on matters they know little if anything about)- case in point US tough guy actor Steven Seagal who played a blues gig in Crimea(recently seized by his buddy Putin) at a pro-Putin bikers' festival.

When critics asked why he chose to do so, Seagal disengenuously replied that "music tends to bring people together".

As critics such as Paul Johnson in his 1988 book "Intellectuals" and Paul Hollander in "Political Pilgrims" have long noted, intellectuals and other celebrities no matter how erudite they may in their given field, they are often babes in arms in the world of international relations- a fact that has not escaped tyrants and autocrats as different as Stalin, Mao, Castro and Ho Chi Minh- witness actor Paul Robeson, Beatrice and Sidney Webb(authors of "Soviet Communism: A New Civilization?") US Ambassador Joseph E.Davies

(author of " Mission To Moscow" which was made into an even more improbable film), Hewlett Johnson "The Red Dean Of Canterbury", Jane Fonda

(or "Hanoi Jane" as Vietnam veterans still call her) and others too numerous to mention who as was said of Martin Heidegger during the Nazi era, "sanded for the jackboot" or to quote Lenin's apocryphal phrase were "useful idiots" for tyrannical regimes.

Granted Putin is not Lenin, Stalin , Mao or Castro but the willingness of certain commentators( not all of them politically Leftist such as paleocon Pat Buchanan and UKIP leader Nigel Farage- now both mercifully silent) to flack for his regime remains a troubling constant.

My personal "favourite"is actor /director Sean Penn who after a meeting with Peronist President of Argentina Cristina Fernandez Kirchner a few years ago, called for the Falklands Islands (or "Las Malvinas" as he termed them, echoing Buenos Aires's propaganda) to be returned to Argentina calling it a "classic case of colonialism" , disregarding the fact that the Islanders have expressly voted to remain British. It was left for me and other commentators that if Mr Penn was consistent in his "anti-colonial" rhetoric he would support the return of California, Texas and New Mexico to Mexico( the US seized the territories of where these states are from Mexico in the war of 1848)-which of course he doesn't( this might mean losing his malibu beachhouse)

Perhaps Mr Seagal(who like French actor and reported Putin pal Gerard Depardieu has reportedly taken or is considering taking Russian citizenship) could persuade his good buddy Vladimir to return the Crimea to its lawful owners and cease supporting "rebels" in the Ukraine?

Anybody think as I do?

Terry