Month: April 2022

The full phrase, De mortius nil nisi bonum, is usually translated as “Speak no ill of the dead”, a commandment that has always struck me as odd.

The parallel phrase, De mortius aut bene, aut nihil (“Of the dead, either well or nothing”) is odder still – especially when the dead in question are wicked public figures who have left their footprint on history.

Saying either nice things or nothing about them means falsifying history, either by omission or by commission. Mercifully, commentators tend to ignore this injunction – as shall I, when writing about Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who has died at age 75.

Our papers are full of obituaries written by people who aren’t guided by the two Latin phrases either. Their articles correctly identify Zhirinovsky as a fascist, his Liberal Democratic Party as a misnomer, and his personal demeanour as vile and clownish.

Avoiding thereby one falsifying pitfall, they stumble into another, by misreading the role Zhirinovsky so brilliantly played in Russian politics for over 30 years. Above all, they don’t realise that throughout his career Zhirinovsky never uttered a single word he wasn’t ordered to utter by the KGB/FSB, nor has he ever performed a single revolting antic, without a direct order from that sinister organisation.

One can sympathise with the obituarists. It’s hard for good Western people to understand the inner workings of evil regimes, especially those as secretive as Russia.

For example, The Times obituarist thus describes Zhirinovsky’s young years: “He studied at Moscow University where he learnt languages including English, German and Turkish, and then worked in Turkey as a translator.”

Any Russian of a certain age and education would instantly read the signs escaping Western observers. No graduate of Moscow University’s Institute of Eastern Languages could be posted to a ‘capitalist’ country (‘capcountry’ in our jargon), as a translator – especially if his CV was marred by Jewish ancestry.

He could only be posted there as a KGB spy under translator’s cover. And it was for espionage that Zhirinovsky was subsequently expelled from Turkey, which partly explains the particularly venomous hatred he always felt for the Turks and everyone resembling them facially.

“In the early 1970s he did military service in the Caucasus,” continues the obituary. As what, an infantry grunt? In fact, Zhirinovsky served as a political officer, meaning a KGB overseer of army units.

It was his sponsoring organisation that manufactured his political career that started during the chaotic interregnum of the early nineties. The éminence grise of Russian politics at the time, KGB four-star general Filip Bobkov, oversaw the transition of power from the Party to the KGB, and he infiltrated KGB reserve officers into every Russian institution.

Zhirinovsky’s party was one child sired by that underappreciated figure. Its role was to play the official bogeyman, a manifestly evil, fascist organisation deflecting public fury from the real powers that be.

With every seemingly insane pronouncement, every brutish act, every drunken escapade, Zhirinovsky was effectively saying to the people: “This is what you’ll get if you don’t support [the KGB’s chosen figurehead of the moment, be it Gorbachev, Yeltsyn or Putin].”

Yet many Russians wanted to get just that, a strong, faschisoid leader venting their own xenophobia, imperial ambitions, a sense of inferiority, disdain for the basic civilities of life – above all their frustration at what they saw as Russia’s humiliation at the hands of the West.

That’s why Zhirinovsky’s party attracted millions of votes at every election, polling at various times between 10 and 25 per cent of the electorate. His hysterical, hateful, spittle-spattering, vodka-fuelled diatribes tickled the nerve endings of many Russians in a peculiar way, only describable in the terms of social psychology or, in this case, psychiatry.

Little capers, such as brawling in parliament, punching a female deputy, throwing a glass of juice into an opponent’s face, public swearing to the full capacity of the unmatched Russian lexicon, would each be sufficient to end any political career in a civilised country. Yet Zhirinovsky thrived.

I remember watching a home video of his rant about Condoleezza Rice, then US Secretary of State. Zhirinovsky was flanked by two athletic bodyguards, as drunk as he was (if reliable rumours are to be believed, it wasn’t just their professional competence that attracted him).

He was screaming foul invective, calling Miss Rice “a nigger slag” and inviting her to visit Spetsnaz barracks, where she would be “gangbanged until soldierly sperm will be coming out of her ears”. I am sure Miss Rice didn’t take that charming invitation, but Zhirinovsky’s viewers took the hint: nothing was off limits when the West was in the rhetorical crosshairs.

With the advent of Putin, electoral politics lost whatever little meaning they had hitherto had. The FSB was in full control, and only Putin’s sense of operating procedure kept his share of the vote under the 105 per cent customary under Stalin. Hence Zhirinovsky’s role changed.

He began to prime the public for the advent of the policy brewing in the bubbling cauldrons of the Kremlin’s inner sanctum. Outside observers didn’t realise that his new-style rants, although still hysterical and foul, were statements of Putin’s geopolitical aspirations.

Zhirinovsky was saying in public what Putin was at the time saying in private only. Zhirinovsky wasn’t extemporising. He was simply jumping the gun he knew was going to be fired soon.

As ordered, he began to ratchet up his anti-Western invective, making good Western people wince at such crudeness. They failed to realise that Zhirinovsky was enunciating the actual battle plan, which at the time still couldn’t be revealed in a language of realpolitik.

It was all there: Russia must fulfil her historical destiny by claiming what’s rightfully hers. The former Soviet republics, that goes without saying. But also, given half the chance, every erstwhile possession of the Russian Empire, including Poland and Finland.

That was to be followed by what the title of Zhirinovsky’s book identified as The Last Thrust Southwards, the conquest of Turkey and then everything all the way to the Indian Ocean. The West could be scared off with nuclear war, and it’s so decadent and cowardly that it would scare easily.

This is how Zhirinovsky put it in 2015: “One sharp shout from Moscow, and that’s it. Nato would be disbanded in 24 hours because otherwise all Nato capitals would be destroyed. They’d give it a think and say, ‘Fine, we’ll disband Nato to stay alive, to keep having fun…’ The Russian flag must be raised everywhere where the Russian army has ever been.”

Considering that the Russian army had been in such places as Paris and Berlin, the West should have heeded those words as a fair warning. Yet our politicians kept talking about understanding Russia’s hurt and resetting the mechanism of compassionate friendship and mutual cooperation.

They didn’t know the language Zhirinovsky spoke. When he talked about using giant fans to blow radioactive waste into the Baltics, they thought they were dealing with a madman. In fact, that was a metaphorical statement of actual policy, driven by hatred for Russia’s former colonies trying to break free.

Zhirinovsky was merely following orders. He was told to march half a step in front of the propaganda troops, leading the way and shining a floodlight on the pathway of advance. And sure enough, everything he said they repeated after an increasingly shorter delay.

Then Putin himself began to say the same things and in similarly elevated tones. And still the West took such pronouncements for mere bluster. It was all strictly for internal consumption, wrote our commentators. Putin would be crazy to act on his threats, and we know for a fact he is perfectly sane.

Zhirinovsky was consistently dismissed as a ‘clown prince’, a jester to the court of the strong leader we wished we had. That was music to his masters’ ears: their agent had played his part to perfection. The marks had swallowed the bait.

Away from the public eye, Zhirinovsky wasn’t at all the frenzied, half-crazy demagogue we saw on TV screens. A friend of mind, a New York journalist who was Zhirinovsky’s classmate at university, had many meetings with him in Moscow and interviewed him several times.

He told me Zhirinovsky was sensible, humorous and well-behaved in private, a far cry from his public shenanigans. That tallied with many other similar reports I’ve since heard, the last one from a former French ambassador who knew Zhirinovsky professionally. No wonder. Zhirinovsky was a master of KGB tradecraft.

Last December Zhirinovsky predicted the invasion of the Ukraine, and was only two days off in specifying its date. His seemingly insane rants became Russia’s actions – Putin tossed off the mask of a world statesman and unfurled the banner of naked fascist aggression.

The curtain fell; Zhirinovsky’s role was written out of the play. He was no longer needed. So he died, unlamented and – in the West – never properly understood.    

If you expect me to write something today, sorry. I’ll be acting mostly as translator, for Russia has announced her war objectives so lucidly and unequivocally that there’s little anyone can add.

For, not after the Wannsee Protocol has any European (or in this case quasi-European) country outlined the desideratum of a Final Solution in so many words, without resorting to subterfuge.

The banner idea was declared by Dmitri Medvedev, Putin’s loyal poodle. It was then fleshed out by RIA (the Russian Information Agency), the government’s mouthpiece.  

So first Medvedev, Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of Russia, formerly her prime minister and president:

“President of Russia Vladimir Putin has firmly set the objective of demilitarising and denazifying the Ukraine. These difficult tasks cannot be carried out instantly. And neither will they be accomplished solely on the battlefields… The ultimate goal is to secure peace for the future generations of the Ukrainians by finally creating an open Eurasia – from Lisbon to Vladivostok.”

The Third Reich, eat your heart out – Hitler had more modest objectives. But what do “demilitarising and denazifying” mean when they are at home? Specifically?

RIA Novosti kindly explains, or rather transmits Putin’s explanation:

“Russia is fighting the West for the future of the world… The Ukraine has become the West’s tool for reshaping the world.”

Therefore, “All war criminals and active Nazis must suffer an exemplary and widely publicised punishment. A total purge must be carried out…

“However, it’s not just the leaders but also a significant part of the people who are passive Nazis, Nazi collaborators. They supported the Nazi regime and kowtowed to it. Just punishment of this part of the population is only achievable by inflicting the unavoidable hardships of a just war against the Nazi system…

“Any further denazification of this part of the population will consist of re-education, to be achieved by an ideological repression (suppression) of Nazi ideas and by strict censorship: not only in the sphere of politics but also definitely in the sphere of culture and education…  

“Hence the denazified country cannot remain sovereign. The denazifying state – Russia – cannot practise a liberal approach to denazification. [Could have fooled me – AB]. The denazifier’s ideology shall not be contested by the guilty party to be denazified…

“The collective West is itself the designer, source and sponsor of Ukrainian Nazism.

“The name ‘Ukraine’ clearly cannot be preserved as the designation of any completely denazified polity on the territory liberated from Nazism… The newly created people’s republics… cannot in reality be neutral – the guilt of treating Russia as an enemy can only be redeemed by depending on Russia for reconstruction, rebirth and development.

“No ‘Marshall Plans’ can be allowed in these lands. There can be no ideological or political ‘neutrality’ in any practical sense compatible with denazification. The personnel and organisations acting as instruments of denazification cannot succeed without Russia’s direct help, both military and organisational.

“Denazification will inevitably also become a de-Ukrainisation… As history has shown, the Ukraine cannot exist as a nation state, and any attempt to ‘build’ one ineluctably leads to Nazism.

“Historical experience shows that wartime tragedies and dramas ultimately benefit the nations seduced and tempted to act as Russia’s enemies. [I’m sure the surviving Bucha residents will take much solace in this – AB]

“The ‘Catholic province’ (the five regions of Western Ukraine) is unlikely to join the pro-Russian areas. The demarcation line will be established empirically. Lying beyond it will be a neutral and demilitarised Ukraine where all the haters of Russia will congregate, but where every formal manifestation of Nazism will be banned. Should these demands not be met, a threat of an immediate resumption of military action will guarantee the neutrality of this rump Ukraine. A permanent Russian military presence may be necessary to ensure this.

“Russia will have no allies in this denazification of the Ukraine. [What, not even North Korea? – AB]. For this is a purely Russian affair. And it is not just the Banderite version of a Nazi Ukraine that will be uprooted, but also and above all Western totalitarianism, the imposed programmes of civilisational degradation and collapse, the mechanisms of subjugation to the superpower of the West and the USA.

“To succeed in carrying out the plan of denazifying the Ukraine, Russia herself will have to abandon for ever all her pro-European and pro-Western illusions. She will have to perceive herself as the last bulwark of defending and preserving those values of a historical Europe that are deemed worthy and that the West itself has given up.”

I’m sure you don’t need any clarificaction, but I can’t resist adding my penny’s worth. For spelled out here is a genocidal plan to exterminate most Ukrainians, while enslaving and Russifying the rest.

But Russia also gets the good news: she’ll have to forget any hope of ever becoming a European nation.

And, since a few million Russians do consider themselves culturally European, they too will have to be purged by re-education, exile, imprisonment or – better still – mass extermination. Mein Kampf meets the Wannsee Protocol and the Bolshevik programme of annihilating whole classes.

This is unvarnished fascism and an open declaration of war on the West. If you still doubt that a Third World War is under way, I suggest you re-read the above. And if after that you still love that strong leader Putin, you must be Peter Hitchens.

No army exists in a vacuum. As a microcosm of the country that sends it out, an army reflects and magnifies the salient features of its society.

That’s why it’s odd that so many commentators seem to be baffled by the two principal traits of the Russian army in the Ukraine: its inhuman brutality towards civilians and its general incompetence.

What else did those hapless commentators expect? Let’s look at those two features in order.

Over the past century (I could go further back, but 100 years seems to be sufficient), the Russians have been on the receiving end of the kind of cruelty that, say, Germans didn’t experience even under Hitler.

The communists murdered some 60 million by bullet, torture, artificial famine or inhuman imprisonment. And the same organisation that was guilty of those crimes took over the country in the late 20^th century — and it’s still in power.

The scale of internal violence dished out by Putin’s regime isn’t quite up to Stalin’s levels, but it’s still appalling by any civilised standard.

Sadistic, sometimes lethal, beatings and torture are commonplace in Russian police stations and prisons. (If you don’t remember the Magnitsky case, look it up). Arrested and imprisoned men are routinely raped with broom handles, truncheons and bottles. (Again, I suggest you look up the clips smuggled out of the Saratov prison.)

Arrests are arbitrary, for the rule of law doesn’t exist in Russia – nor has it ever existed, in the Western sense of the word. Since corruption is pandemic, anyone in a position of responsibility is a hostage to the boss’s good graces. If the boss likes him, he can go on thieving. If the boss wants to send him down, he will.

Any psychologist will tell you that a person growing up in a society characterised by sadism and contempt for the individual is more than likely to dish out what he has been conditioned to take.

And if the whole society is brutal, its army will be even more so. The Russian army has an appalling suicide rate because fresh conscripts are invariably humiliated, beaten and tortured by the ‘elders’ (second-year soldiers), with the officers’ acquiescence. Young lads often mutilate themselves just to escape the unbearable suffering.

A friend of mine served in the 70s. He was bullied so badly that he chopped off three fingers on his left hand, only to be sentenced to five years in prison for it. Nothing has changed since then, not for the better at any rate.

Now those same soldiers, themselves ‘elders’, find themselves in a position of power over helpless civilians. They know they can wield this power as they see fit – their officers aren’t going to stop them, just as they didn’t stop the sadistic torture of the conscripts. All in all, the soldiers have been so thoroughly dehumanised that no natural restraints are putting limits on their behaviour.

They haven’t grown up as free moral agents. Instead, they’ve been locked up in a prison of eternal infantilism, and whatever inchoate sadism is lurking in their heads is encouraged to come out. So they torture, murder and rape, rejoicing in their freedom from grown-up limits. It’s Lord of the Flies all over again, and there are no limits.

Their martial incompetence is just as predictable. Why would the Russian army develop any standards of organisational nous that don’t exist in Russian society? Why do you suppose the country blessed with the greatest natural resources in the world has never been able even to feed its people properly, never mind creating a thriving economy?

A modern army is even more complex an organism than a modern economy. It’s the distillation of the country’s spirit, intellect, character, morale, initiative and managerial talent. If such virtues are lacking in society, they will be absent in the army.

Now Gen. David Petraeus, known to his intimates as ‘Peaches’, says he is bewildered by the muddled performance of the Russian army. I am surprised he is surprised.

The general, who certainly knows what he’s talking about, points out that the Russian troops are unable to perform the “most basic tasks”. What happened to their training?

Troops on the ground aren’t being led by officers in command. Those officers have to wait for instructions from the Kremlin, hundreds of miles away. “Presumably the leaders in Moscow thought they could do a better job,” added the bewildered general.

So what else is new? That’s how the Russian army functioned in the Second World War, which explains why it lost more men than all the other combatants together.

Soviet officers and generals were scared to show any initiative for fear of summary execution. Hence the buck was passed on and on until it ended up in the Kremlin, with Stalin.

At the beginning of the war, the entire high command of the Western Front, starting with the best Soviet tank strategist, Gen. Pavlov, were executed for letting the Germans break through. The cull of generals continued throughout the war, which severely limited their ability to respond rapidly to constantly changing situations.

They knew that if they got it right, they’d get another medal – and if they got it wrong, they’d be shot before the ranks. Is it any wonder that they didn’t so much pass the buck as hurl it all the way to Moscow?

As we go down the organisational structure, exactly the same tendencies were observable. Officers were trained to follow orders and, in the absence of such, to do nothing just in case.

And Russian NCOs weren’t trained at all, that is in anything other than sadistic bullying of the rank-and-file. They too passed the buck to officers, who were insanely numerous.

The Soviet army regulations specified one officer for six privates and NCOs. In the Wehrmacht, the same ratio was one for 29. Their officers knew they could rely on their sergeants; Soviet officers knew they couldn’t.

It was Friedrich Engels who pointed out that the Russian army had never won a battle against a German, French or Polish adversary in conditions of even approximate parity. Had Engels lived another 100 years, he wouldn’t have seen anything to make him change his mind.

Petraeus also pointed out that the Russian troops can’t achieve “combined arms effects”, something that the forces under his command demonstrated so well in Iraq and Afghanistan. This meant they can’t coordinate the action of armour, infantry, artillery and air force to produce the synergy essential for a modern fighting force.

The Ukrainians are better trained and infinitely better motivated. If they were comparably equipped, they’d quickly rout the Russian army. That would probably put paid to Putin’s regime, although I’m not certain it would put paid to Putin’s fascism.

Yet Joe Biden is stubbornly denying the Ukrainians the tanks, planes and AA systems they so badly need. Tanks, explains Biden, are offensive weapons, rather than defensive ones. And the Ukraine is only allowed a defensive war, meaning she has to fight with one arm tied behind her back.

Now, Joe is of course a military strategist of no mean attainment. That’s why he can perceive a clear distinction between offence and defence, which has so far escaped most experts. They still wonder if, say, a counterattack is offence or defence. It could be either or both, depending on how one looks at it.

No such problems for Joe. He has a toggle switch in his mind that clicks to say “thus far, but no farther”. It almost looks as if Biden wants Putin to stay in power to the end of his natural life.

I can only repeat what a frustrated fan shouted at ‘Shoeless’ Joe Jackson, the baseball player accused of fixing the 1919 World Series: “Say it ain’t so, Joe!”

The chorus of Europeans weeping and wailing over Russian atrocities in the Ukraine is strong enough without my husky voice chiming in. Suffice it to say that I saw it all before, when visiting a Chechen refugee camp on the Dagestan border in 1995.

Dozens of people were bunched up together on mattresses covering the floor of a school. Scabied children were the only people who could still walk easily. Others were too weak from hunger, disease and fatigue to move a muscle. An old woman died in front of my eyes.

Just a few days earlier, the Russians had massacred the village of Samashki, doing exactly what they’ve now done in Bucha and elsewhere in the Ukraine. Just like Bucha today, Samashki made the news then, but it wasn’t the only massacre, nor probably the worst one.

The refugee told me stories of the Russians routinely shooting every man and raping every woman in the places they occupied. In one village they loaded a helicopter with as many villagers as could fit in, then threw them out at 1,000 feet. When one woman on the ground cried too loudly, a Russian soldier fired an AK burst across her legs.

Another woman, blinded by a flash grenade, begged me to tell my people everything when I went back to England. I promised I would, and kept my promise as best I could – knowing in advance the sheer futility of such efforts.

That was under Yeltsyn’s government, seen in the West as a history-ending liberal democracy. Four years later, the perpetually drunk president appointed Putin as his successor, and Russia embarked on a gradual but accelerating progress towards full-fledged fascism. Hence, doing some quick mental arithmetic, I multiply what I saw in Chechnya, 1995, by ten to get a reliable picture of the Ukraine, 2022.

I used the word ‘fascism’ in its technical meaning, not as a multi-purpose term of abuse. For details, may I refer you in a shamefully self-serving way to a talk I gave some seven years ago: http://www.alexanderboot.com/russian-fascists-and-british-conservatives/

My ‘conservative’ listeners were unconvinced then, and I’m sure they still are, no matter how many Ukrainian civilians end up with a bullet in the base of the skull. But I hope they’ll have the honesty to admit to themselves that, fundamentally, they see nothing wrong with fascism, provided it’s clouded in the smokescreen of conservative-sounding shibboleths.

And I also hope they’ll have the modicum of intelligence, integrity and education not to repeat the blithering idiocy uttered by the leaders of the main EU parliamentary parties in their address to the Russians.

Seldom does one see such a statement of craven surrender justified by bone-crushing ignorance. The message is that “we are all Europeans” and “no one wishes Russia ill”. Hence we should combine our efforts to stop the war and bring about “that long-awaited day when we can all be together again.”

Never mind the sheer immorality and vacuity it takes to utter such empty bien pensant phrases at a time when civilians are being tortured and massacred by an evil regime.

What I find especially incredible is the aesthetic aspect of it. Yes, I know those people have neither intelligence nor character. But at least I hoped, forlornly as it turns out, that they’d have the taste not to indulge their natural cowardly instincts at a time like this.

And, of course, they had to reiterate Biden’s open-ended vow never even to contemplate stopping Putin’s fascism by force. “No Nato army,” said those ‘leaders’, “American or European, has ever entered, not will ever enter, Russia.”

That statement alone shows that, no matter how this war ends, fascism will triumph. For Putin and his clique have been issued blanket guarantees of impunity. So even if they have to retreat, lick their wounds and regroup, they’ll strike again later, this time upping the stakes.

The concluding statement of this shameful document deserves to be quoted in full. It’s staggering in its ignorance, especially since most of its authors must have gone to decent schools and some might even have attended university:

“We are all Europeans, from Dublin to Vladivostok, because our destinies have always been intertwined, and your writers – Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and Bulgakov – belong to our common heritage. We are all Europeans because we derive our common culture from Greek philosophy, Roman legality, Old and New Testaments, the Enlightenment, and the Athenian and Roman democracy reshaped by the English and French revolutions… So let us join our efforts to put an immediate end to this macabre period of our lives and to usher in the day when your Federation and our Union, with its present and future members, will find a way towards mutual understanding and cooperation so necessary for Europe and the whole world.”

To paraphrase Mary McCarthy’s pithy dismissal of Lillian Hellman, every word written here is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.

With the partial exception of Greek philosophy and the Bible, none of the cited roots of “our common heritage” have anything to do with Russian cultural history – and even those exceptions never affected Russian civilisation, such as it is.

The writers mentioned do indeed belong to European culture, but then so do at least half a dozen Japanese writers I could think of offhand. So are the Japanese Europeans too?

However, even discounting that, mentioning Dostoyevsky in this context is peculiar. The writer was a Russian supremacist, who despised and hated the West with unmitigated passion. His particularly venomous loathing was reserved for the Catholics and the Jews, but no other groups in the West were exempt.

Those EU ignoramuses ought to read Dostoyevsky’s Diaries of a Writer and his poems to see if they find any protestations of affection for “Athenian and Roman democracy reshaped by the English and French revolutions”. They won’t.

What they are guaranteed to find is a jingoist animus against Europe, including England, a thinly disguised longing for the extermination of Jews, and countless references to Russia as a spiritual, God-bearing nation entitled to conquer her neighbours and educate them in the ways of the world.

Neither was Tolstoy conspicuously affected by all those wonderful European things, with the possible exception of Greek philosophy.

He was militantly anti-Christian (to the point of actually being excommunicated, which even Lenin wasn’t), and his religious feelings gravitated not westwards, but towards the East, especially the Indian subcontinent. Tolstoy had nothing but contempt for Western legality and parliamentarism, which sentiments were dialectically linked with his worship of the saintly Russian peasant, beautiful in his anarchic anomie.

Hence that EU epistle to the Russians is ignorant even on its own puny terms. As to their hope that one day “your Federation and our Union” will live in peace and harmony, it’s simply beneath contempt on every level: intellectual, moral and political.

Much more appropriate would be a breast-beating mea culpa, for it’s mostly Europe’s greed and cowardice that made Putin’s fascism possible. And the EU continues to finance it by paying hundreds of millions for Russian gas every day.

How much more “mutual understanding and cooperation” do they want? Perhaps giving Russia the same heavy weapons denied to the Ukraine would do the trick.

If you want to understand Putin’s Russia, don’t think Europe. Think Rwanda. Or, if you prefer the historical perspective favoured by the EU, the Golden Horde.

“I once again find myself on the despised, hated and reviled side of the argument,” writes Peter Hitchens. He must have looked in the mirror and seen a courageous maverick doing battle for unpopular truth.

That mirror distorts reality. For Hitchens is nothing but a conduit for enemy propaganda, which these days he doesn’t even bother to paraphrase.

“This is not a war between Ukraine and Russia. It is a war between the USA and Russia,” he writes. A daring line, that, if somewhat lacking in novelty appeal.

I’ve read, seen and heard it repeated in the Russian media countless times since 2014. Putin has consistently denied that the Ukraine acted of her own accord when opting for independence.

Those neo-Nazi Ukies were egged on by America, because, explains Hitchens, since 1992 “Washington has wanted to crush any revival of Russian power.”

If so, Washington could be forgiven. After all, during the previous 40 years “Russian power” had kept the world trembling on the edge of a nuclear holocaust.

However, if that indeed was Washington’s aim, it certainly went about achieving it in an odd way. Untold billions in US, and generally Western, investments poured into Russia, with a massive transfer of technology following in its wake.

Without it, Russia would indeed be what an American journalist once described as “Upper Volta with nukes.” Replace, as a bow to geographical gerrymandering, Upper Volta with Burkina Faso, and the description would still apply – but for the West’s acquiescence in the rise of Russian fascism.

Every piece of high-tech equipment in Russia has either been imported from the West or at least depends partly or wholly on Western components. This goes for the whole range of products, from computers and TV sets to ICBMs and warplanes.

Putin and his henchmen are driven in Mercedes limousines, not the Ladas available to hoi-polloi. And even those automotive answers to Chernobyl are manufactured at the plant built by Fiat in the late 1960s.

The blackmail weapon that goes by the name of Russian oil and gas industry would have no ammunition without American technology. Exploration and drilling equipment, gas-lift and other extraction systems, pipeline controls, electronic management all come courtesy of Western, mostly US, companies.

Rather than trying to “crush the revival of Russian power”, the West has gone to criminal lengths building it up. But propaganda isn’t about facts, is it?

Taking his cue from the Kremlin, Hitchens simply rehashes the mandated line: the Ukraine isn’t a free agent. She is America’s proxy, and, by murdering, raping and looting Ukrainian civilians, Russia is actually fighting the dastardly Yankees.

Hitchens also has an issue with Britain: “We pour in more weapons and shout encouragement from a safe distance.” How much better it would be if we stopped those supplies and let Putin take over the Ukraine. That would instantly solve her real problems:

“What Ukraine actually needs is action to cure its festering, universal corruption. It would also benefit from the pushing to the margins of the ultra-nationalist fanatics who have far too much influence in its government and armed forces. The war will make these problems worse, not better.”

First, the Ukraine didn’t start the war hoping thereby to rise to Hitchens’s lofty moral standards. She didn’t start it at all; Russia did. Or, if you believe Hitchens, it was actually America that provoked Russia into precipitate action.

The rest of that passage comes straight out of Kremlin briefings, starting with the Ukraine’s “festering, universal corruption”. Corruption does exist in the Ukraine, as some members of the Biden family can confirm. But it’s not even remotely as festering and universal as in Russia, whose regime is formed by history’s unique fusion of secret police and organised crime.

It’s true, however, that Kremlin Goebbelses are encouraged to emulate a thief who runs away from his pursuers, screaming “Stop thief!” louder than anyone else. By the looks of it, that order is obeyed not only by the Goebbelses, but also by the Lord Haw-Haws.

The same goes for the line about “the ultra-nationalist fanatics”. I can only quote the numbers I’ve quoted before: said fanatics garner a mere three per cent of the Ukrainian vote. Similar groups in Russia collectively poll over 20 per cent.

Even though such groups do exist in the Ukraine (as they do almost everywhere), they’ve partly redeemed themselves by their self-sacrificial heroism over the past six weeks.

For example, the notorious Azov Battalion was indeed fascisoid before the war. Its members were often photographed making inappropriate salutes against the backdrop of inappropriate flags.

They aren’t doing it now. Those youngsters are heroically defending Mariupol, trying to save at least some of its denizens from annihilation.

In addition to going about their military duties, the Azov fighters ring children with their own bodies to shield them from murderous fire. They risk (and lose) their own lives trying to save civilians from the ruins of bombed buildings about to collapse. And they do so without first securing the upper tiers with cables and winches, of which they have none.

Does this strike you as Nazi behaviour? And which side is fascist here?

Again Hitchens is loyally recycling the Kremlin line about denazifying the Ukraine. And what better way of achieving this laudable outcome than by bombing hospitals and kindergartens, torturing and executing civilians at will, looting and raping a swathe through the country?   

Then comes that old chestnut about Putin being provoked by Nato’s expansion, especially by “the taunting of Russia by President George W. Bush’s 2008 suggestion that Ukraine should actually join Nato… when Putin was still more or less open to reason”.

So was it more or less? If you read Hitchens’s own effluvia from that period, Putin was more than just open to reason. He had turned Russia into “the most conservative and Christian country in Europe”. Yet if you simply study history, you’ll find that Putin’s regime was every bit as fascist then as it is now.

Putin came to power by the expedient of blowing up apartment blocks in Moscow and elsewhere, killing more than 300 and injuring more than 1,000. That was blamed on Chechnya, which enabled Putin to consolidate his power by doing to that breakaway republic exactly what he is doing to the Ukraine now.

A year before Mr Bush’s infuriating suggestion, Putin brought nuclear war to London, where his hitmen poisoned Alexander Litvinenko (a British subject) with polonium in Grosvenor Square. It was a miracle that Litvinenko was the only one to die.

A massive cull of Russia’s own journalists had been going full pelt for years before Mr Bush spoke out of turn. For example, Putin, still “open to reason”, had the journalist Ivan Safronov defenestrated in 2007 for investigating the sale of Russian arms to Iran and Syria.

It’s the ever-increasing threat of “Russian power” that made Eastern European countries, including the Ukraine, seek the protection of Nato membership. Contrary to what Hitchens and his Kremlin ventriloquists claim, those long-suffering countries had every right to do so – and, as the current events prove, every reason.

Naturally, Hitchens’s piece wouldn’t have been complete without his rehashing the Kremlin mantra about the 2014 “mob putsch which overthrew Ukraine’s legitimate President Viktor Yanukovych… This putsch was the true beginning of the war now raging, the initial act of violence which triggered everything else.”

The word ‘putsch’ harmonises neatly with Hitchens’s Kremlin-inspired motif of the Ukraine being a Nazi state. In fact, the Maidan Revolution overthrew a Putin puppet to claim real, as opposed to bogus, independence.

Yanukovych was a career criminal who in his impetuous youth had served two prison terms for robbery and assault. When that worthy individual rose to power, he became largely responsible for fostering the very corruption that so upsets Hitchens.

That thug himself lived in a palace with a private zoo, taking lifestyle tips from his Kremlin masters. When the people finally rose against Yanukovych, he had his police kill dozens of demonstrators and then fled to Russia, begging Putin to intervene militarily.

Putin obliged, and days later Russia invaded the Ukraine for the first time. Yanukovych wasn’t reinstated though, and in 2019 a Ukrainian court found him guilty of treason (in absentia).

It’s useful to remember, that, unlike their Russian equivalents, Ukrainian courts are independent and Ukrainian elections are verifiably honest. The country has a long way to go before she shakes the Soviet dust off her feet, but at least she is making a real effort.

The American goal, “the elimination of Russia as a major country”, may well be achieved, moans Hitchens. But “someone had better be careful about what happens to all its nuclear weapons if that comes to pass.”

This is an enunciation of Putin’s nuclear threat, as expressed both by him and his henchmen thousands of times. But Hitchens ought to pay attention in class: Putin promises a nuclear inferno to prevent “the elimination of Russia as a major country”, not to avenge that tragedy.

In any case, forget Russia. It’s China that’s the real threat. Her “police state… grows in strength and power, biding its time.”

So the man does pay attention to the Kremlin’s briefings. The odd lapse here and there notwithstanding, Hitchens is a conscientious pupil. He also knows how to add a touch of verisimilitude to his lies.

China is indeed a police state, and it’s indeed a factor of strategic danger. But alas, the West is threatened from more than one direction. It takes a warped or else mendacious logic to maintain that, because China is a threat, Russia isn’t.

In fact, that’s what Putin’s useful idiots in the West have been shouting for years, trying to divert attention from the rise of expansionist Russian fascism. Persisting with that ruse now, when thousands of Ukrainians are being massacred and the very system of European security is creaking at the seams, betokens staggering immorality.

Or else treason. Wars have always been fought not only with guns but also with words, now more than ever. Warring parties seek to undermine each other’s resolve by carpet-bombing whole populations with propaganda.

I find it hard to understand why a wielder of such weapons within our own country is less of an enemy than the monster who threatens to turn the West into “radioactive dust”, to quote one of Hitchens’s Russian colleagues.

Since Britain isn’t at war with Russia de jure, there are no legal grounds for charging Hitchens with treason. But since Russia is waging de facto war on Britain, along with what’s left of the civilised world, there is every justification for cutting off his access to mass media.

For Hitchens isn’t supporting any side in any argument. His weekly articles are enemy action. Pure and simple.

Not according to Gérard Depardieu, French actor and Russian citizen. “The Russian people are not responsible for the crazy, unacceptable excesses of their leaders like Vladimir Putin,” he said.

Old Gérard received his Russian passport in 2013, from Putin personally. The two men hugged and kissed (no tongues, I believe), with Depardieu describing Putin’s fiefdom as a “great democracy.”

When the great democracy pounced on Ukrainian territory in 2014, the nouveau Russian Gérard saw nothing wrong with that. Then again, even as a young man, Depardieu was regarded even by his fellow actors as daft, which is no mean achievement considering the overall intellectual standard of that profession. And that was before a steady diet of five bottles of wine a day made heavy inroads on his meagre mental faculties.

Yet he has clearly retained an ability to find out what the current mots justes are and to regurgitate them to a wide audience. On second thoughts, even more accomplished men than him repeat the same lazy platitude ad infinitum: “The Russian people are just lovely. Shame about Putin though.”

However, it’s not Putin who’s aiming bombs and shells at residential areas. It’s Russian people, serving as pilots or artillery men.

It’s not Putin who’s laughingly shooting civilians, just for the hell of it. It’s Russian people, dressed as soldiers.

It’s not Putin who’s raping Ukrainian women. It’s Russian people, forming raping gangs in the communal spirit of which their nation is so proud.

It’s not Putin who’s looting people’s houses, and, as numerous phone intercepts show, even taking orders from home: “Vania, see if you can score a tape recorder [fur coat, some nice jewellery, camera].”

The grandfathers of these soldiers didn’t have the luxury of non-stop communications with their families. When they looted their way through Eastern Europe and then Germany, they had to rely on their own tastes. Now their descendants can steal to order.

It’s not even Putin who ordered them to murder, maraud and rape – it’s possible no one did. And if some such orders were issued, they came from NCOs, lieutenants, captains – Russian people.

Neither have Putin’s propagandists told them it was fine to murder civilians, then boobytrap their corpses and leave them to rot by the roadside. We’ll come to those infernal propagandists later. But suffice it to say now that none of them is a match for their Stalin equivalent, Ilya Ehrenburg.

When Russian troops were moving into Germany, that future darling of the Soviet intelligentsia was publishing one incendiary article after another, explicitly giving Red Army soldiers a licence to kill, rape and rob civilians.

Since the nation had only been infected with the communist syphilis 14 years before the war started, young Russians still had some decency left, enough to need a ringing endorsement of satanic behaviour from a figure of authority. Today’s lot have been exposed to the same contagion (in different variants) for over a century, so they don’t need anyone’s permission.

The Nuremberg Trials, a travesty of justice though they were in many respects, established a useful legal principle: it’s not only someone who gives a criminal order who commits a crime, but also someone who obeys it.

The same should go for the culpability of both the producers of criminal propaganda and the willing consumers of it. And here we have to go beyond those thousands of Russians who cut a swathe through the Ukraine, murdering, raping and looting. Here we have to talk about the Russian people in general, mutatis mutandis.

This tagged-on disclaimer covers those thousands of heroic Russians who protest against the war, bravely facing police truncheons, torture and possible prison terms. Then there are perhaps a million or two who don’t have the courage to come out, but who do have the mind and moral sense to detest Putin’s regime and everything it represents.

Yet these – and believe me, I hate to be writing this – are only the kind of exceptions that prove the rule. For throughout its history, but especially over the past century, the Russian nation has been not just willing but eager to delegate its mind and moral sense to the Leader, whatever title he holds.

That has wasted the advantage of being fully human – a thinking moral agent endowed with free will. It also precludes any possibility of creating, or even adopting, a true civilisation, as distinct from a loose, herd-like association of dehumanised, brutalised people all too ready both to submit to violence and to mete it out.

As the first Russian philosopher, Chaadayev, wrote almost 200 hundred years ago, “We [the Russians] belong to those who are not an integral part of humanity but exist only to teach the world some type of great lesson.” In how not to do things.

Roughly at the same time, one of Russia’s greatest poets, Lermontov, described Russia as a “land of masters, land of slaves”. Nothing has changed since then, certainly not for the better. And nor does the existence of Chaadayev, Lermontov and a few hundred other great poets, thinkers, novelists and composers disprove the characterisation of Russia as a thoroughly barbaric land, devoid of any civilisational bonds and restraints.

For a culture, defined as something produced for few by fewer, can happily coexist with mass barbarism. One can even go so far as to suggest that culture and civilisation are often antithetical.

Unlike a culture, a civilisation has to include the whole society, not just its intellectual elite. Even people who have no ear for music, no eye for painting, no talent for writing and no brain to think about serious matters independently must still be united by the ethos of their civilisation. That’s its function, which in Russia has always gone begging.

Hence the Russians are so willing to salute any red, brown or black flag run up the pole by evil ghouls. They lack a civilisational cut-off valve to be activated whenever they are exposed to cosmically wicked nonsense.

Hence, when evil men like Putin and his army of propagandists tell them for twenty years, day and night, that they are superior to everyone else not because of any individual achievement, but because they are Russians, they jump up and salute.

When told that, though Ukrainians and Russians are the same, identical people in every respect, the former are creating biological weapons to kill the latter selectively, they believe every word.

When told that Ukrainians must be saved from their Nazi oppressors, they go out to murder Ukrainians and level their cities as a way of saving them.

So yes, the general who orders carpet bombing of a city is guiltier than the pilot who releases the bombs. And those thousands of propagandists who have pumped nothing but poisonous grime into people’s heads, not so much washing their brains as amputating them, are more criminal than a silly lad who believed them. And yes, the butcher in the Kremlin (or rather in the bunker) is the criminal of all criminals.

But if we repeat Depardieu’s drivel about the nasty Putin and gorgeous Russian people, we debauch the very idea of humanity – at least the idea that formed our, great civilisation. The idea that the words ‘human’ and ‘free moral agent’ are synonymous. Fully and invariably.

P.S. -3C and snow in London tonight. Where art thou, global warming?