My heartstrings have been tugged so violently, they are about to snap.
Seldom have I seen such a passionate, nostalgic declaration of love for the city of my birth, Moscow, and for “the old, kindly Russia, raped and murdered by Communists”.
In fact, I got so misty-eyed it took me a full five seconds to realise that Peter Hitchens was up to his usual tricks.
They follow, with nary a variation, the same pattern of almost mathematical quality. Today’s piece adorns the formula with soppy romantic touches, and no doubt some readers won’t see the forest of bias for the trees of lachrymose prose.
I sympathise with Hitchens. Unlike Putin, Lavrov, Soloviov et al., he can’t serve Putinesque panegyrics straight as they come. Their rancid taste has to be masked with treacly mixers to produce a cocktail his credulous readers can swallow without wincing.
The ratio has changed since the war started. Hitchens used to be heavy-handed when pouring his poison about Putin, the “strong leader” turning Russia into “the most conservative and Christian country in Europe”.
That sort of thing has been blown to bits, along with the bodies of thousands of Ukrainians. If people tasted such concoctions now, they’d spit them out in revulsion. Hence they have to be tricked by changing the recipe, made to believe their minds aren’t being poisoned.
The recipe always has the same ingredients, and I’m sorry to see an otherwise competent journalist being so formulaic.
First, plead emotional attachment to the Russia of “low, graceful old houses, trees and churches”. Within that tear-jerking narrative, slyly establish your bona fides as an expert by extolling “Russia, where I spent two of the most astonishing years of my life”.
Second, put up a shield to ward off the slings and arrows shot by those who can see through the ploy: “And if you think, as some spiteful people do, and have said, that I do all this because I am in Russian pay… then you are terribly mistaken.”
Since I’ve been writing about Hitchens’s Putinophilia for at least 10 years, I must be more spiteful than most. For the record then, I’ve never written that Hitchens is a paid agent of influence. What I have said on a few occasions is that I struggle to imagine how different his writing would be if he were.
Third, put those spiteful people to shame by establishing a family history of British patriotism: “My father (who hated Stalin and all his works) ferried tanks to the Soviet Union on the terrible Murmansk convoys…”
Alas, that intrepid Hitchens père didn’t do a good job bringing up his sons. The talented sibling Christopher remained a flaming leftie to his dying breath, while Peter himself was a Trotskyist well into his thirties. Then again, Trotskyists hated Stalin too, so perhaps there’s no contradiction there.
Hitchens’s preamble out of the way, it’s time to deliver, as if in passing, the real message “that Western stupidity helped to bring it [the war] about.”
For once I’m ready to nod enthusiastically and shoot up my thumb, rather than the customary two fingers. I too think it was Western stupidity that emboldened Putin, but my understanding of that failing is the opposite of Hitchens’s.
He has been dutifully parroting Putin’s line about Russia feeling threatened by the likes of Estonia joining Nato. That’s bilge and, if you want to know why, just look up any of my earlier pieces on the same subject.
By contrast, my charge of the West’s criminal stupidity uses real evidence: negligence in failing to prepare for confrontation with Putin’s evil regime; failure to understand that Putin’s regime is indeed evil; corrupt eagerness to launder Russian trillions without any due diligence; suicidal energy policy, delivering a strategic advantage to evil; rampant decadence, which made Putin see the West as a soft touch.
I consider the West stupid because it has failed to do so many right things. Hitchens considers the West stupid because of something it has done right: offering the Nato umbrella to small nations threatened by a fascist regime.
Then comes a bit of disinformation, with a contortionist pat on Hitchens’s own back: “I keep telling you that Russia isn’t strong. This stupid, brutal war has proved it.”
Disregarding Hitchens’s stock claim to oracular insights, “this stupid, brutal war” is proving exactly the opposite.
Russia is much stronger than the West because she is prepared to fight and take horrendous casualties, and the West isn’t. She is also ready to wage a war of total annihilation, while the West will offer anything, including abject surrender, to avoid one. Russia is prepared to use first-strike nuclear weapons, while the West wouldn’t even consider such a possibility. Even its readiness to launch a retaliatory strike is in doubt.
A mendacious cause can’t be propped up with impeccable logic. Hitchens proves that by serving up an obvious lapse.
If Russia is as weak as he says, then surely we must do all we can to help those heroic Ukrainians slay the fascist monster? Hitchens disagrees.
Because Russia is so weak, the West, according to him, must surrender. We should “do nothing to extend or prolong war, for the longer and deeper the war is, the more people will die and be maimed.”
What exactly is it that we do and should stop doing? We are not, after all, sending our soldiers into battle, and we aren’t lifting a finger to protect Ukrainian civilians from murderous carpet bombing.
We are helping Ukrainians with arms, finance and logistic support. We are helping (not very eagerly, it must be said) those millions of Ukrainians fleeing from Europe’s “most conservative and Christian” murderers. We are trying to downgrade Putin’s war effort with economic sanctions.
If we follow Hitchens’s thinly veiled prescription and desist from all that, evil will conquer. The Ukrainians will again be “raped and murdered” by the heirs to the same regime Hitchens used to love as a grown-up man.
I only wish he spared us the sentimental tosh about people getting killed and maimed. We are all weeping for them – and I perhaps more than most, for the war is directly affecting members of my family, both in Kiev and Moscow.
But Hitchens has forfeited the right to vent such emotions. He has been playing Quisling to Putin’s Hitler for too long for his protestations to produce any other than an emetic effect.
He and his likeminded colleagues have done much to create a pro-Putin bias in our society, especially its margins on both right and left. Now that Hitchens’s “most conservative and Christian country in Europe” has uncapped a gushing well of Ukrainian blood, some of those scarlet drops have fallen on his hands.
If it comes down to a choice between a war of total annihilation– the whole world destroyed in an hour, that is- or the return of the old Soviet borders, should not the provisional (hopefully) ‘abject surrender’ of spineless sanity prevail? What would Churchill do?
Let me answer your question with a few of my own. Would you be prepared to live in a world dominated by fascist powers? To have your country run the way Putin runs Russia, and by his humanoid equivalents? Would you like to have no free speech and, above all, no freedom of conscience? If such were your choices, would you be able to live with yourselves?
These are the questions being posed by Putin in the Ukraine — and they aren’t all about the Ukraine. And my questions contain their own answers, don’t you think?
An absolute no to those questions of course. I just meant to say that all out mutual suicide, which is a war of total annihilation, should not be considered as a possibility. As long as there is life there is always the hope of defeating fascism
It does seem a little odd these days, though, to see leftists, Hollywood celebrities, Sean Penn, CNN, BBC–usually degenerates and agents of the greatest idiocies– taking up strong moral positions for the right cause..
All these years I have lived under President Reagan’s mischaracterization of an “evil empire”! I had no idea Russia had old houses and trees! Obviously then we should be on her side.
As for all of the refugees, could we somehow declare them muslim? Then the EU would force countries to take in and support them.
I apologize if that came off as insensitive. Nicholas and I have been including the people of Ukraine in our nightly prayers.
That didn’t come off as insensitive at all. I’d rather describe as commendably satirical and lamentably realistic.
Hitchens is not the only sympathiser: he expresses the attitude of a certain class. While travelling in Europe I was amazed to meet quite a few people in Belgium and Germany who told me they are fed up with “Americans ruling their nations and telling their politicians what to do”. They’d rather see a strong Russia as a counterbalance. My counter arguments were not convincing enough for a taxi driver in Brussels (a genuine Vallone) who took me to the airport or for a German mother and daughter (60 and 30 years of age) who tried to convince me that Russian intellectuals should be patient and suffer if necessary because Putin is the only politician who does not jig to the tune of Americans and keeps slapping them on their hands.
Alas, you are absolutely right. This was a widespread view in the West, but I hope things are changing. Thanks, Vlad, well done.
It was hilarious enough to see a hammer and sickle signs at every step in such a God-forgotten place as Peniche, Silver Coast, Portugal.