The Oracle of Delphi is alive and well

It has come back as the columnist Peter Hitchens, a man of modest intellect but immodest egotism. Hence every article he writes includes phrases like “no one has listened to me”, “will you now listen to me?”, “as I have been saying all along” and some such.

The impression of oracular powers is hard to avoid. But who is the intended target audience? It can’t be just the readers of The Mail on Sunday. Even assuming they hang on to every word Hitchens vouchsafes them from his lofty height, there is precious little they can do to take any corrective actions.

So Hitchens’s ‘you’ is aimed at the powers that be, Western governments, which could avoid silly mistakes by listening to him. Presumably, every one of them should include a department whose sole function would be to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest Hitchens’s prophesies.

Logically following from there is the idea that political sagacity should be quantified and measured in specific units, hitchenses. Governments could then be rated on a five-star system, from five hitchenses to none.

Seriously now, that kind of earth-shattering tastelessness would make one reject every word Hitchens has ever uttered, even those that would be acceptable if coming from a different source. Rejecting his mendacious drivel on the subject of Putin’s Russia, on the other hand, would be easy even if Hitchens were otherwise a sensible, well-informed, self-effacing man.

I do listen to him because I see it as my duty to counter enemy propaganda, which is what Hitchens’s writings on that topic are. Whether he does a Lord Haw Haw wittingly or unwittingly is a matter for his priest or perhaps the Crown Prosecution Office. What is important to me is that, to paraphrase what Mary McCarthy said about Lillian Hellman, every word he writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.

Yesterday, for example, Hitchens took aim at “many people [who] reacted to [the Russian aggression] by developing a strange admiration for Ukraine. But it is in fact a corrupt, troubled, ill-governed and increasingly unfree country, not all that different from Russia in many ways.”

That’s a lie. Compared to Russia, the Ukraine is an impeccable Western democracy, an oasis of liberty. Unlike Russia, the Ukraine holds real, as opposed to bogus, elections. Her elected leaders are accountable to the people who are informed by the uncensored media. The Ukrainian president isn’t a dictator like Putin – his power is no greater than that of a French or American president.

The Ukraine may be more corrupt than, say, Britain, but infinitely less so than Russia that’s ruled by an eerie blend of secret police and organised crime. Ukrainian special forces don’t murder political opponents, and those few who ever go to prison are demonstrable agents of Putin’s Russia.

As to her being “unfree”, the government’s conduct of the war is openly criticised in the Ukrainian press – at wartime, when even countries like the US and Britain have been known to suspend some civil liberties. And what do you know, the editors of those papers aren’t even arrested, never mind defenestrated, shot out of hand, poisoned or, if they are lucky, imprisoned, as they are in Russia. There prison terms of up to 10 years or longer have been meted out for the slightest hint of criticism, even for referring to the war as such, not as the mandated ‘special military operation’.

The admiration that all decent people feel for the Ukraine isn’t “strange”. It’s richly merited by the people heroically resisting brutal invaders who are committing the kind of savage, large-scale atrocities that neither the Ukraine nor indeed Europe has experienced since the big war.

Then comes the story of the stalled Ukrainian counteroffensive, which Hitchens knew was going to fail, yet “I kept my mouth shut because apparently impossible things can sometimes happen, but it seemed to me to be more likely that the attack would stall. It has duly done so.”

Mouth shut? Excuse me? Practically every week Hitchens has been agitating for the Ukraine’s surrender, which he calls peaceful negotiations. And before the full-scale invasion, hardly a week went by that he didn’t extol Putin as the “conservative and Christian” leader he wished Britain could have. As to Putin’s stated ambition to rebuild the Soviet empire to its past glory, Hitchens always treated it with barely concealed sympathy.

It’s only when the evidence of the mass tortures, rapes, murders and looting of civilians began to emerge from the occupied areas that Hitchens moderated his almost erotic admiration of the muscled man in the Kremlin.

The counteroffensive hasn’t succeeded in driving the invaders out largely because of the massive propaganda effort launched by Putin’s trolls, moles, agents of influence and useful idiots (you decide which category Hitchens falls into).

They’ve been screaming for years that the Ukraine is a Nazi state (Hitchens always refers to the 2014 revolution as a “putsch”), corrupt, historically a part of Russia, that Putin is legitimately concerned with Nato’s eastward expansion and hence the invasion is Nato’s fault, that supporting the Ukraine will impoverish Western tax-payers for no good cause – well, I don’t want to paraphrase everything Hitchens has been writing for at least 10 years and possibly longer.

When the totality of such spirit-sapping propaganda reached a critical mass, Western leaders, emphatically including Biden, got an excuse for keeping down the level of assistance for the Ukraine, indulging thereby their own craven instincts.

Armaments have been drip-fed to the Ukraine, their quality, quantity and types sufficient for keeping her in the fight but not for her winning. Had the Ukrainian army got the tanks, warplanes and long-range missiles from the start, the war would have ended months ago, and the thousands of deaths that Hitchens sheds crocodile tears over wouldn’t have happened.

The logical conclusion would be for Western governments to realise the error of their ways and start supplying the Ukraine properly, without talking about “the danger of escalation” or “provoking Putin”. The conclusion of the Putin propagandist, aka Peter Hitchens, is that the Ukraine should sue for peace, which is another term for surrendering.

Anyone whose intelligence is one notch above imbecility knows that ceding the occupied territory to Putin wouldn’t bring peace. It would bring a lull of a couple of years, or however many it would take for Russia to regroup, restock, rearm and then go again, that time rolling not only over the Ukraine but also over much of Eastern Europe, including some Nato members.

Then came that claim of oracular powers and unique knowledge: “This has all been entirely predictable, and it has been very painful for people such as me, who actually know something about the area and the issues.”

Saying that Hitchens knows very little about “the area” would be true, but it would be paying him a compliment. The suggestion would be that he writes his subversive bilge out of ignorance, not for some nefarious reasons. What those reasons are I don’t know, but I hope we’ll learn one day.

Meanwhile, he concludes by asking a question doubtless meant to be rhetorical: “And what have we gained by these deaths, exactly?”

Who is “we” there? Certainly not the Ukraine, because even a child will know what “exactly” she has gained: preserving her freedom and sovereignty in the face of a fascist predator. Certainly not Eastern Europe, which the heroic Ukrainians have shielded with their bodies from that fascist predator whose plans self-admittedly included their countries as well.

If by “we’”, Hitchens means Britain, then helping the Ukraine defeat the fascist aggressor in question is by far the least costly way of preventing a major war in Europe, possibly the world. It’s also the least costly way of preempting another emergence of a dominant fascist power in Europe, with the dire consequences that one doesn’t have to be an oracle to predict.

Will anyone ever shut up this present-day Lord Haw Haw? (And no, I’m not suggesting he should be shut up by the same method.)