Putin’s fans: mad, bad or stupid?

An irate reader of mine complains that I ascribe the eponymous faults to anyone who disagrees with my assessment of Putin’s kleptofascist junta.

That would indeed be rude – unless it were true. I argue it is; the reader believes it isn’t, but without offering any arguments.

He seems to proceed from the assumption that any opinion on this or any other subject is equally valid and therefore meriting a public airing, especially if it tallies with his own.

I, on the other hand, would go so far as to suggest that no opinion merits a public airing. Only sound judgements do, and they differ from opinions in that they offer an intelligible interpretation of reality based on facts.

This distinction is largely lost these days. We’re all supposed to be created equally knowledgeable, intelligent and good. Suggesting that someone may be remiss in any part of that triad implicitly attacks the presumption of equality all around, which is the most cherished shibboleth of modernity.

Yet suppose I were to express an ‘opinion’ that the monster who recently bludgeoned an octogenarian to rob her of her meagre possessions isn’t to blame – for whatever reason. He felt betrayed by society, the victim had jostled him in a bus queue, he didn’t mean to kill her, she had attacked him first, she’s a xenophobe and homophobe – you name it.

How would most readers describe me then? I suspect they’d use the adjectives in the title above. Take your pick: mad, in that I would have lost touch with reality; bad, in that I would have displayed the moral sense of a skunk; stupid, in that I would have lacked the basic cerebral skill to draw conclusions from the known facts.

Yet Putin’s Western fans, such as my irate reader, display all these faults, albeit on a much greater scale. After all, Putin explicitly threatens to obliterate life on earth, which the hammer-wielding monster has neither the means nor, seemingly, the desire to do.

Madness is usually characterised by obsessive behaviour and a divorce from reality. To diagnose the condition, we must first establish the reality of Putin’s regime and then see to what extent his fans are divorced from it. The task is easy.

I describe this regime as kleptofascist, demonstrably so. First the klepto- part.

The Kremlin junta ably led by Putin himself has amassed close to two trillion dollars in various personal offshore havens, with half of it in the US, a quarter in the UK and the rest spread wide, from Panama to the Channel Islands.

This money has been brazenly stolen from the Russian economy, specifically from those 20 per cent of the population, many of them pensioners, who are starving below the poverty line of about £100 a month (the Russians’ own data).

My favourite bit of current news is Vice Premier Shuvalov, whose annual salary of some £90,000 hasn’t prevented him from amassing half a billion’s worth of properties in London and the Home Counties.

Such is the klepto- reality and denying it is a symptom of madness, especially since even Russian putinistas don’t bother to do so.

Now the –fascist part. As my irate reader points out, correctly but irrelevantly, the word has been widely misused by the Left to describe the Right. But that doesn’t remove the word from the lexicon – it still denotes something specific if used correctly.

As it is in this case, for Putin’s regime shows every characteristic of fascism:

Populism combined with chauvinism; externalising evil in alien groups or countries; sacralisation of power: internalising the good of the nation within the person of the leader; state control of the media and their almost exclusive use for propaganda purposes; the leader’s will replacing the rule of law; violent suppression of dissent; acquisitive aggression against neighbours; eliminating all legal means of removing the leader from power; allowing political opposition for window-dressing only, if at all; burgeoning militarisation, used either for actual aggression or blackmail.

Even a cursory familiarity with the last 20 years of Russian history will show how emphatically Putin’s junta ticks all these boxes. Anyone who doubts this should acquire such cursory familiarity – for example, by scanning my pieces on this subject over the past few years. This labour would be rewarded by a compendium of hundreds of facts, along with textual references and video links.

Such is the reality, or rather some of it. For I’ve left out the most relevant part.

In all those traits Putin’s Russia is no different from other Third World kleptofascist regimes, such as Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. There is, however, a crucial difference: unlike them, Russia is threatening the West directly – for example, by amassing troops at the borders of NATO members and threatening to do to them what she has already done to the Ukraine.

Moreover, every day brings new discoveries of the electronic war Putin’s junta is waging against the West, spreading lies and disinformation aimed at subverting our institutions and sowing discord between us and our allies. And any student of warfare will tell you that disinformation is as potent a weapon as any of those that go bang.

To wit, the last man hanged in Britain for treason had never betrayed any of the country’s secrets. It was William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, the mouthpiece of Nazi propaganda in English. (Peter Hitchens, ring your office.)

Electronic war is still war, and so far only one side has been fighting it. But in addition, Putin’s junta indulges in crimes that have throughout history been regarded as a legitimate casus belli.

The latest one is the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal, his daughter, and, by way of collateral damage, a few dozen British bystanders. Here Putin’s useful idiots come up with several lines of defence.

They either claim that there’s no proof of Russia’s responsibility for the crime; that killing traitors is Russia’s internal affair; and that British and other Western governments have ‘overreacted’.

Now, useful idiots would deny Russia’s culpability even if Putin had been caught personally spraying Skripal’s doorknob with novichok. However, millions of criminals have been convicted on much thinner evidence than the evidence in this case.

Russian officials, including Putin himself, had issued numerous threats of murder by poisoning towards all ‘traitors’, and Skripal by name. Then Skripal was poisoned with a nerve agent of uniquely Russian provenance. Hence Russia is the only country that had the motive and the means to carry out this assassination attempt.

All this is circumstantial evidence that may or may not be sufficient to convict in a court of law. But it’s certainly sufficient to believe that Russia has a case to answer: no court would dismiss such a case for lack of evidence.

Yet Russia hasn’t answered the case, or rather has answered it with sarcasm, rudeness, lies and threats – including one of global extinction. The same applies to other murders the Russians have committed on British soil, including that of Litvinenko.

Then too there were lying denials and accusations that Britain was conducting a witch hunt by slandering Russia’s pristine morality and unmatched spirituality.

Of course the easiest way to prove their point would have been to allow Scotland Yard to interrogate the suspected murderers. However, the Russians refused to extradite them and instead co-opted the prime suspect Lugovoi into their sham Duma, where he enjoys parliamentary immunity.

Our useful idiots routinely echo Putin’s propaganda verbatim, including, in this case, references to Skripal as a ‘traitor’. Well, one side’s traitor is the other side’s hero.

For example, we consider Philby a traitor, while the Russians gave him medals and displayed his portrait at Lubianka among other KGB heroes. So it depends on which side Putin’s useful idiots support, and they leave one in no doubt on that score.

Then again, whatever Skripal’s moral fibre, no murder a foreign power commits on our soil, especially of a British subject, is that power’s internal affair. This is so basic that one is almost embarrassed to have to mention it.

As to our government’s supposed ‘overreaction’, I’d suggest that it was both limp and belated. Yet one realises that to this lot any reaction would constitute an overreaction. We’re supposed to sit idle as their role model commits acts of nuclear and chemical terrorism.

Should Western governments have reacted resolutely to Russia’s nuclear terrorism on British soil in 2006, Putin’s junta might not have felt emboldened to proceed to the next steps.

The naked aggression against Georgia in 2008 and the Ukraine in 2014 might not have happened, those 298 people aboard the Malaysian airliner would still be alive, and Sergei Skripal wouldn’t be dying.

Instead, Western governments introduced token sanctions that badly hurt ordinary Russians but had no effect on the ruling junta. For example, when the Rotenbergs’ assets were frozen in the US, Putin simply paid them the same amount from the public purse, thereby blithely stealing more billions from the poor.

This time around, HMG expelled 23 Russian ‘diplomats’, and the Russians retaliated with tit for tat expulsions. However, the US and 20 other countries followed suit, presenting a united front and sending an unequivocal message that further heinous acts would not go unpunished. It’s not much, but it is something.

Such is the reality of Putin’s Russia. If his Western fans don’t know it but still have warm feelings about the KGB colonel, they’re fools. If they know it, but still love Putin, they’re knaves. And if they ignore reality altogether, they are mad.

The other day, a perfectly conservative friend offered an explanation. These people, he said, are so obsessed with their hatred of the EU, that they desperately look for idols wherever they can be found.

That’s indeed an explanation. But it isn’t an excuse. For surely any obsession that overrides reason and morality is in itself a symptom of madness?

Our putinistas ‘argue’ the case by delivering a long litany of opprobrium heaped on every post-Thatcher government (the sainted Lady herself is above criticism, although she did sign the Single European Act). I agree with every accusation they voice, and happily add a few of my own.

However, I can’t for the life of me see how any sane man can build a logical bridge between our several past governments, bad, weak and, in Blair’s case, downright wicked as they have been, and their love for Putin’s kleptofascist regime.

They should realise that I pay them a compliment by calling them mad or stupid. These, after all, are congenital conditions they can’t help. An alternative to that would be calling them ghouls longing for fascism – or else Putin’s paid trolls.