“Governments lie and get others to lie for them,” writes Peter Hitchens.
True. But at least others lie for their own governments. Hitchens, on the other hand, regurgitates lies emanating from Russia, our self-proclaimed enemy.
He brings to the task his affection for that “most conservative and Christian country in Europe”, woeful ignorance about it, and contempt for his readers, who he thinks will swallow any bilge he shoves down their throat.
This time around, he builds a rickety logical structure to insist that the West lives in a glass house and therefore shouldn’t throw stones at Putin. Didn’t NATO countries attack Serbia in 1999 and Iraq in 2003? And doesn’t Erdogan imprison dissidents without losing Turkey’s NATO membership?
It takes dialectical flexibility worthy of a circus contortionist to insist on those bases that the West and everyone in it have thus lost any right to oppose Putin. Hitchens here uses the trick of moral equivalence, favourite of Western Leftists. Hitchens must have learned it when he himself was one, well into his mature years. You know, Russia has the KGB, America has the CIA, what’s the difference?
Those two attacks were indeed ill-advised, although it takes quite a stretch to compare them to Russia’s starting the first major war in Europe since 1945. Nor is it valid to compare the two actions to each other: they pursued different objectives.
And yes, the West is more lenient to Erdogan than to Putin, but there exist sound strategic reasons for this. Kicking Turkey out of NATO, as Hitchens suggests, would weaken NATO’s southern flank and lay the Middle East open for Russian aggression… oops, sorry, I forgot. Russia, according to Messrs Hitchens and Putin, never commits aggression. She is always the victim of it.
For example, writes Hitchens, the 2008 Russo-Georgian War was started by Georgia, that mighty power hellbent on aggression. This is one of the most emetic lies concocted in the Kremlin and spread by our homegrown Putinista.
On general principle, only an ignoramus or an idiot would believe that Georgia would start a war with a country that has 40 times her population. She didn’t. But under her government, led by Mikhail Saakashvili, Georgia moved towards the West, just like the Ukraine did six years later.
Georgia began to develop civilised political and legal institutions, which Hitchens’s “conservative and Christian” idol couldn’t bear. In what was probably used as a rehearsal of the attack on the Ukraine, the Kremlin accused Georgia of committing “genocide” and an “aggression against South Ossetia”, run by Putin’s puppet government.
South Ossetian forces started shelling Georgian villages, in violation of the 1992 ceasefire agreement. When Georgians responded in kind, Russia launched a full-scale land, air and sea invasion, coyly called a “peace enforcement operation”, not a war. (The 2022 invasion of the Ukraine was similarly called a “special military operation”. Those conservative and Christian Russians don’t ever start wars.)
As a result, mighty Georgia outnumbered 40 to one was defeated, and a pro-Putin puppet government was installed. Any movement towards the West has been nipped in the bud, which is what those Georgian aggressors deserve, as far as Messrs Hitchens and Putin are concerned.
In general, Hitchens throws a fit whenever Putin’s puppets are either ousted or, as in Romania’s case, prevented from taking over. This is another item in his indictment of the West: “Calin Georgescu’s election was annulled by judges in December when he looked like winning the first round. And he has been banned from standing in the second round – all because he has the wrong kind of politics.”
Georgescu’s politics are indeed wrong: he is Putin’s agent who, if elected, would have turned Romania into Russia’s colony. Still, I am deeply touched, as I’m sure you are, by Hitchens’s devotion to democratic procedure, a commitment that abates somewhat when he writes about Russia, where every election for the past 30 years has been blatantly rigged.
Now, hypothetically, what if the polls in Germany showed that her next election would be won by a party campaigning under the slogan of Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer? And what if the Bundestag then disqualified it from standing? Would Hitchens still scream bloody murder in the name of democracy?
And then of course, NATO, including that “crime-blighted, decrepit, rubbish-strewn, rat-infested, broke Britain” provoked Putin into invading the Ukraine, and “seldom in history has a war been more provoked.”
You see, the West expanded NATO eastwards, although it had been begged by the “liberal, democratic politician Yegor Gaidar” to desist. Now, Gaidar was about as liberal and democratic as Julius Streicher was philo-Semitic.
The parallel isn’t random, for both were editors of their parties’ flagship journals, Der Stürmer for Streicher, Kommunist for Gaidar. One difference was that the former had no official status, while the latter was the official mouthpiece of the CPSU’s Central Committee.
Gaidar was a career party apparatchik whose tenure at Kommunist made him superior in rank to most Soviet ministers. He was a scion of a well-known NKVD-KGB family, with both his grandfather (who also wrote propaganda masquerading as children’s books) and father veterans of that sinister cabal. Gaidar continued the family tradition with distinction, rising to the position of prime minister in Yeltsyn’s government, one that begat Putin. Perfect liberal and democratic credentials, wouldn’t you say?
As for Putin having been provoked, my question is, How? Did he fear that such superpowers as Latvia and Estonia just might attack Russia? Or at least be used as beachheads for a NATO assault? If he thought that, he is suffering from paranoid delusions because no member of NATO would ever contemplate launching a first strike against a nuclear power.
You see, there’s provocation and provocation. A thug deliberately jostling you in the street and groping your wife may provoke a verbal or violent response. Then again, wearing three-piece pinstripes in an area inhabited by thugs may provoke a mugging. In the former case, the provocation was real. In the latter case, it was merely used as a pretext for thuggery.
The button for Russian aggression against both Georgia and the Ukraine was pushed in 2007 when Putin made what Hitchens calls his “dramatic speech in Munich”. Dramatic it was, just as Hitler’s maiden speech in the Reichstag was dramatic.
Putin described the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”, a calamity he made a transparent promise to remedy. Dramatic indeed.
Then came the ultimate provocation, and I must compliment Hitchens for the self-restraint he showed by refraining from describing it as a ‘putsch’ this once: “Ukraine’s elected president was lawlessly overthrown by a mob in 2014. Britain and the USA condoned this shameful event because they preferred the illegal rebels to the elected government. You just can’t do that and pretend to be the guardian of democracy.”
Oh yes, you can. Especially if you remember that many functional democracies were born like babies, covered in blood. American colonists lawlessly overthrew British rule, French revolutionaries set France on the road to democracy by lawlessly overthrowing the Bourbons, Romanian democracy was lawlessly announced with shots fired into Ceaușescu’s body.
“Ukraine’s elected president”, Yanukovych was a career criminal brought to power by Russian influence. He was Hitchens’s favourite type of Eastern European politician, a puppet at Putin’s beck and call.
Once he was overthrown – by popular uprising, not a “mob” – he was followed by two presidents, both winning the kind of free elections Russia has never had. But I’ve already mentioned that Hitchens’s delicate democratic sensibilities are offended whenever a Putin acolyte is ousted. He ends on a melodramatic note:
“Demand proper debate. Demand the truth. Don’t be dragged into more stupidity, or we will end up with bomb craters as well as potholes.”
If modern history teaches anything, it’s that bomb craters are more likely to result from appeasement than from a resolute stand against evil. And as for debate, Hitchens is again being selective there.
When he wrote to me in 2018 saying that Russia had nothing to do with the attempt on the Skripals’ lives in Salisbury, I wrote back with an offer to debate him before any audience other than the Russian Embassy, where he was guaranteed a receptive audience. I haven’t heard from him since.