What’s worse than a moron?

An ignorant moron, is the answer to that one. And what’s worse than an ignorant moron? An ignorant moron with an ideology.

And what’s worse than an ignorant moron with an ideology? Ronald Atkinson, Rowan’s giftless brother.

He wouldn’t be worth talking about if he weren’t so typical of a lamentably large group of Putin groupies. But here I must own up to a bad mistake on my part.

Normally I don’t argue with such people, outside my articles, that is. For a rhetorical contest is like any other game: it must be played by some rules.

Alas, ignorant, ideologised morons are always rhetorical anarchists. They don’t accept any rules; usually they aren’t even aware that such rules exist. Hence they’ll say anything – and if there’s nothing to say, they’ll start screaming and sputtering spittle.

Knowing all that, I shouldn’t have commented on Atkinson’s Facebook posting about how it’s all Nato’s fault. Yet comment I did, which elicited a response from him. My only excuse is that I did that silly thing at an emotional moment, when Putin’s hordes embarked on their rape attempt in the Ukraine. So here goes:

Me: “For your sake, I hope you’re getting paid by Putin. Otherwise one would have to consider such possibilities as mental retardation.”

He: “Nice to hear from a supporter of a Nazi friendly regime which closes television channels and arrests opposition leaders.”

Me: “Better than murdering them with radioactive elements or battle gases or bullets or garrottes or defenestration. And do try to look up the history of Russian independent TV or even independent websites. On second thoughts, don’t. One shouldn’t let facts interfere with the call of one’s heart.”

He: “The Zelensky Ukrainian government shut down three television channels and imprisoned the leader of the main opposition party. What democratic allies you have! Have you not joined the Azov battalion yet? Maybe not Nazi enough?”

Do you get the picture? One has to infer that Putin’s gang attacked the Ukraine to impose the sterling standards of Russian democracy, reopen the TV channels and liberate an opposition leader. And anybody who opposes that undertaking is a Nazi.

Atkinson didn’t provide the identity of that innocent victim of Ukrainian Judaeo-Nazi Banderites, but he had to mean Viktor Medvedchuk, a mafioso ‘oligarch’ and Putin’s best friend.

Medvedchuk, the leader of the pro-Putin For Life party, has been charged with treason, spying on Ukrainian military installations and violating trade sanctions against the Russian-occupied provinces of the Ukraine.

Rather than being imprisoned, he was placed under house arrest awaiting trial, but hey, Atkinson could just as easily have said that Medvedchuk was shot out of hand. No holds are ever barred for that lot.

Medvedchuk’s three TV channels were indeed sanctioned a year ago for undermining Ukrainian democracy. The US government beat Zelensky’s to it by seven years, when it put Medvedchuk under personal sanctions on that very charge.

Since then Putin (godfather to Medvedchuk’s daughter and widely celebrated as a staunch champion of democracy) has ordered his acolytes around the world to whip up a hysterical campaign demanding that this worthy individual be freed in the name of liberty.

Medvedchuk’s house arrest strikes me as an unforgivably mild measure. After all, he acted as a conduit for propaganda emanating from the Ukraine’s implacable enemy, Putin. The case for putting him in actual prison was much stronger than that for interning Britons of German descent and Nisei Americans during the Second World War.

Is that the best Messrs Atkinson, Hitchens, Farage, Zemmour et al. can do to prove that Zelensky (and, by ricochet, his supporters, including me) is a Nazi? Rather thin, wouldn’t you say?

Anyone who is neither paid by Putin nor blinded by ideological afflatus would know that Zelensky’s record, while not spotless, stacks up favourably against that of Atkinson’s idol. Hence every stone thrown at Zelensky shatters the glass house inhabited by Putin and Putinistas.

Murdered on Putin’s watch have been 156 journalists, and not just Russian ones. Hundreds of others have been beaten up, crippled, splashed with ghastly liquids, threatened or otherwise harassed.

There are more political prisoners currently held in Putin’s prisons than there were under Brezhnev, which is no mean achievement. Yet those are the lucky ones.

The unlucky ones have been murdered, and I hope their names will never be forgotten: Anna Politkovskaya, Galina Starovoitova, Boris Nemtsov, Natalia Estremirova, Sergei Magnitsky, Alexander Litvinenko, Paul Khlebnikov, Artyom Borovik, Yuri Shchekochikhin, Anastasia Baburova… (Google the full list if you’re interested; it’s available).

It’s not just hydrocarbons – murder is another commodity Putin happily exports to the West. At least 15 people Putin disliked have been murdered in Britain alone, some with nuclear or chemical weapons, some garrotted, some poisoned with extracts of rare Chinese plants, some killed in blown-up helicopters, most shot the old-fashioned way.

As for freedom of speech, whose deficit in the Ukraine so vexes Atkinson, every independent Russian TV channel, such as NTV, has been silenced. So have all independent newspapers, except, with certain reservations, one — and even that one is owned by Putin’s KGB colleague. All on-line opposition journals were blocked years ago.

Russian TV has become a generator of nauseating round-the-clock propaganda and nuclear threats to the West (the last such came yesterday from Dmitry Kisilev, whom the Russians affectionately call ‘Putin’s Goebbels’). And Alexei Navalny, the only opposition leader with wide popular support, was first poisoned with Novichok and then clapped into prison on a trumped-up charge.

Putin’s scorecard would be even more impressive had hundreds of opposition leaders not fled for their lives to the safety of Europe and America. But even had they all been martyred in Russia, Zelensky’s treatment of a Russian spy would still be invoked with enviable effrontery by Atkinson and his fellow Putinistas.

Rumour has it that his talented brother Rowan based his Mr Bean character on Rodney. I actually doubt that: Mr Bean is a lovable klutz. There’s nothing lovable about Atkinson et al. They do the dirty work of spreading enemy propaganda, which makes them today’s typological equivalents of Lord Haw-Haw.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that they should suffer the same fate. However, on second thoughts… No, perish such second thoughts – even if I am a crypto-Nazi.

P.S. Putin has sent out 400 professional bandits of the Wagner Group (owned by his stooge Prigozhin) with orders to kill Zelensky. This reminded me of the good old days of Waterloo. One of Wellington’s riflemen told him he had Napoleon in his sights. But the chivalrous Duke forbade him to fire. “It’s not the business of generals to shoot one another,” he said.