In Monty Python’s Life of Brian, Cleese famously asked an amusing question: “What have the Romans ever done for us?” That was followed by a long litany: “The aqueduct, sanitation, roads, irrigation, medicine, education, wine,” and so on.
Cleese’s character asked that silly question for laughs. Yet Hitchens has neither the sense of humour nor the talent to entertain people. Instead he has a keenly felt duty to serve Putin’s fascism, even at the expense of making himself sound idiotic and ignorant.
Hence he asks in today’s Mail not one stupid question but several. Yet, I hope, nobody laughs.
What has piqued Hitchens’s curiosity is the leaked presence of 50 SAS soldiers in the Ukraine. Hence the litany of questions:
“Why are we in this? How does Britain benefit from war between Russia and Ukraine? How, for that matter, has poor Ukraine benefited from it…? Why should any British soldiers be there at all?”
After all, “as far as I know, this country is not at war with Russia.” That’s true, if he means a declared state of war.
But then the SAS has also operated in a few other countries that failed to satisfy that supposedly ironclad requirement. One could mention, off the top, Malaya, Borneo, Oman, Yemen, Northern Ireland, the Falklands, Sierra Leone, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria – stop me once you’ve got the point.
Neither, for that matter, was Britain at war with Iran in 1980, when SAS soldiers attacked that country’s territory, its embassy in London, where British hostages were held. Nor was Britain at war with London, come to think of it.
Hitchens obviously considers all those questions rhetorical. What he means is that we shouldn’t be “in this”, Britain doesn’t “benefit from war between Russia and Ukraine”, neither does the Ukraine, and British soldiers shouldn’t “be there at all”.
This is an extension of the mantra he has been reciting with maniacal persistence for at least a decade, probably longer. Putin’s Russia is “the most conservative and Christian country in Europe”. Putin is the strong leader Hitchens wishes we had. Russia isn’t to blame for any banditry. Putin had nothing to do with the Skripals’ poisoning (this came in Hitchens’s indignant e-mail to me). The Ukraine is a fascist country run by an illegal government. Putin didn’t attack it – he was forced to defend Russia against Nato aggression…
All this time, while Hitchens has been writing about Russia, I’ve been writing about him. This is monotonously repetitive, but I consider it my duty to counter enemy propaganda as best I can. Since it’s clear that Russia is our enemy and Hitchens is her witting or unwitting agent, I suppress nausea and put my fingers on the keyboard each time.
So let’s pretend the questions above were asked in good faith, and they are a genuine request for information. Such pleas must be satisfied.
“Why are we in this? How does Britain benefit from war between Russia and Ukraine?” We are in this for the same reason we were in the Second World War: to stop an evil aggressor from dominating Europe. Just like Hitler who never concealed his intentions, Putin has been declaring since at least 2007 that his mission is to restore the Soviet Union to its past grandeur.
Russia practises what he preaches, pouncing on neighbouring countries like a rabid dog and openly threatening Nato members, both collectively and individually.
Hardly a day goes by that either Putin or one of his mouthpieces doesn’t threaten to sink Britain with a couple of well-placed bombs. The Ukraine is only the first step towards Russia’s pan-European domination, which directly impinges on Britain’s strategic interests.
“How, for that matter, has poor Ukraine benefited from it…” This is either the most cretinous question I’ve ever heard or the most cynical, you decide. The underlying assumption is of course that the Ukraine started this war with a specific benefit in mind.
His editors should mention to Hitchens that it was Russia that attacked the Ukraine, not the other way around. Having started in 2014 with Putin’s bandit raid on the Crimea, the war steadily escalated until, on 24 February of last year, Russian hordes swept across the border to turn the Ukraine into a prostrate colony.
That, according to Hitchens, was Putin’s sacred right and, rather than resisting, those Ukrainian warmongers should have rolled over meekly. Since they didn’t, they have only themselves to blame for the destruction of their cities, along with the satanic murders, rapes and tortures their civilians have suffered at the hands of Putin’s bandits.
Their latest achievement is a video they posted of a Russian soldier beheading a POW with a knife. There have been other videos in the same genre: POWs castrated, resisters within Russian ranks killed with a sledgehammer and other such niceties. (This, by the way, is consistent with the way the Russians have acted elsewhere, notably in Syria.)
The Ukraine’s benefit is saving her people from the most diabolical ghoul threatening Europe since Stalin and Hitler. “Poor Ukraine”, is how Hitchens now describes that heroic country, feigning empathy. This after he has spewed out gallons of spittle, screaming hatred of that country and her government, while at the same time declaring love of Russia.
“Why should any British soldiers be there at all?” He means they shouldn’t be, of course. I think I’ve already answered that question in general terms. Talking specifically about the 50 SAS soldiers, I don’t know what their mission is.
That’s the point: the SAS operates in the shadows, everything it does is highly classified. Hitchens outdoes his own put-on idiocy by insisting their action should have been approved by Parliament. That’s like saying that HMG should publish a complete list of British spies everywhere in the world. That would kind of defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it?
Britain has been training Ukrainian soldiers since 2014. The SAS has played a prominent role in that effort, training Ukrainian special forces in weapons and tactics. I suspect that’s what they are doing there now. Along with the heavy stuff, Britain supplies the Ukraine with sophisticated infantry weapons, and SAS soldiers are ideally qualified to teach their use.
Another possibility is that they are keeping an eye on the Russians’ movements. For example, it would be a dire strategic necessity to spot any massing of Russian troops in a formation suggesting a possible offensive against a Nato country.
I don’t know. All I can do is wish them Godspeed and pray they come to no harm in defence of the Ukraine’s freedom – and ours. They serve a noble cause.
Hitchens reserves his last salvo for those awful people in America who keep the war going because “they believe passionately that Russia must never be allowed to rise again”.
If Russia rising again means regaining her ability to create puppet regimes all over Europe and use them to advance Russian imperial megalomania, then I share that passionate belief. So do all decent people, a category to which Hitchens manifestly doesn’t belong.
That he proves with every sentence, such as: “If every dollar these zealots have spent on war had been spent instead on building prosperous free countries in places such as Russia, the world would be a startlingly better place.”
America and the rest of the West have pumped billions into Russia (and China). The entire Soviet industry was built by Western, mostly American, capital and technology when Lenin and Stalin were still in business.
That continued throughout the Cold War. For example, Russia wouldn’t be able to blackmail Europe with her oil and gas without the massive transfer of Western exploration and production technologies.
Since their perestroika, that is transfer of power from the Party to the KGB, the West has intensified its efforts. So has Russia become “prosperous and free”? Is the world now “a startingly better place?”
By Russia’s own data, a third of her people live below the poverty line (about £150 a month). The slightest dissent is punished by draconian prison terms, banishment or the odd murder. And the world has been taken to the brink of nuclear holocaust, something Putin’s propagandists are openly promoting.
The amazing thing is that Hitchens doesn’t even bother to conceal his allegiance to the cause of Russian fascism – and that his paper does nothing about it. Free press ought to end where enemy propaganda begins.
USA has Colonel Ritter [the knight] and Colonel Macgregor [the Scotsman]. The latter a distinguished combat record who has worked at the highest level of USA military and defense policy making. The both of them rather surprisingly [?] anti-Ukrainian and apologists of Russia and Putin. I even hate to think and don’t want to think of what the two are getting [might be] in return for their pro-Russian advocacy.
Keep up the good work. Refuting idiots and propagandists is necessary work.
“If every dollar these zealots have spent on war had been spent instead on building prosperous free countries in places such as Russia, the world would be a startlingly better place.” Naive, or worse, idiotic. Do we really build prosperous and free countries by throwing money at them? And what does he mean by building a prosperous, free country “in places such Russia”? Is he suggesting we rebuild Russia? In whose image?
I forgot to mention in my first comment that the picture of John Cleese is not from the discussion on the Romans, but on Stan’s (Eric Idle) desire to be a woman, which Reg (John Cleese) describes as his “struggle against reality.” Unfortunately, another timely topic (see yesterday’s article).