Month: August 2024

Having spent 15 years in Russia as ambassador of the Sardinian king, Joseph de Maistre (d. 1821) summed up his experience by saying that every nation gets the government it deserves.

Two centuries later, Vladimir Kara-Murza disagrees. He is one of the 16 Russian prisoners involved in the swap the other day. That operation flies in the face of the old proverb about fair exchange being no robbery.

Russia sends out FSB hitmen and spies, electronic or traditional, to do in the West what such people are trained to do: spy, hack and murder.

These are high-risk jobs, but those agents receive a solemn promise that, should they get nabbed, a grateful Russia will trade them back. The FSB then arrests foreign journalists and businessmen or else Russian dissidents known worldwide, sentences them to the kind of prison terms that haven’t been seen since Stalin, and uses them as a sort of exchange currency.

This is done with the cynicism characteristic of Russian secret services and the government behind them. Correction: these days the secret services are the government, led and staffed as it is by career KGB officers.

Kara-Murza and Ilya Yashin are perhaps the best-known among the released dissidents, and they are remarkable men. Having been sentenced to 25 and 8.5 years respectively, they accepted their martyrdom with courage and dignity.

Both refused to cooperate with their jailers which earned them long stints in punitive solitary confinement. They also didn’t give Putin the satisfaction of pleading for mercy, even though they knew they’d be unlikely to survive their ordeal, the way their friend Navalny didn’t survive it.

Now they are in the West, and whatever is left of the free world should rejoice. But Messrs Kara-Murza and Yashin aren’t rejoicing. On the contrary, they insist that they didn’t want to be exchanged, and they certainly wanted to stay in Russia – even in Russian prison.

The swap, they insist, is banishment and exile, not liberation. They’ll go back at the first opportunity because Putin should be opposed from inside the country, not from Germany, Britain or America.

Alas, their first press conference in the West proves that, while Russia continues to produce heroic people ready to give their lives for the cause, the country still lacks effective opposition. For any successful resistance must start with an accurate, dispassionate assessment of the situation – not with consuming and purveying a diet of red herrings.

Kara-Murza, incidentally, is an historian educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is a fluent speaker of English and holds dual British-Russian nationality. Yet, as I mentioned earlier, he disagrees with de Maistre.

“I care about my country,” said Kara-Murza, “and I think Russia deserves better than a corrupt KGB dictator. I want to make sure that Russia becomes… a normal, modern, democratic country.” He also wants “to remind people in democratic countries that Russia and Putin are not the same thing”.

If I didn’t admire Kara-Murza’s heroism as much as I do, I’d think that he and his fellow dissidents weren’t just released by Putin but sent out as his secret emissaries.

That’s the time-honoured strategy of the Russian and Soviet governments. While raping their own population and pouncing on their neighbours, they inundate the West with conciliatory messages sent through private channels.

Pay no attention to what our government is saying and doing, the messages go. These are just a few ghastly hawks who in no way represent the people. The good and freedom-loving people of Russia are staunchly opposed to whatever their leaders are perpetrating. So if the West could kindly ratchet down the tension, the opposition will triumph and Russia will become a worthy member of the Western family.

This sort of thing, a sustained campaign of disinformation designed to dupe the West into acquiescence, has been going on for over 100 years. A case that springs to mind is that of Nikolay Berdyayev, one of the Russian thinkers exiled from Russia onboard the notorious Philosophers’ Steamers in 1923.

His first stopover was Prague, at that time the nerve centre of the Russian emigration. The night after his arrival, Berdyayev found himself at a gathering in the flat belonging to Anton Kartashev, the last Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod. He and other prominent émigrés were discussing ways of fighting the Bolsheviks.

To everybody’s surprise, Berdyayev preached a different message. The Bolsheviks, he said, are the true practitioners of the Russian idea. Hence all Russians living abroad should renounce opposition and wait for the glorious Russian people to sort themselves out.

Once the initial shock subsided, Kartashev uttered his severe verdict: “We thought you were exiled, but it turns out you were infiltrated.” (It’s more poignant in the original: Мы думали вас выслали, а вас оказывается заслали.)

I wonder what Kartashev would say about the message delivered by Kara-Murza and his friends. Please, they said, stop sanctions against Russia because they hurt the good Russian people who are opposed to Putin and his dirty war. Instead, target specific officials with personal sanctions.

The Russians know they don’t deserve Putin and they certainly want to have no part in the war. Give them time, and they’ll create a democratic heaven on earth.

I don’t know what kind of history they teach at Trinity, but analysis of historical continuity and dynamic tendencies doesn’t seem to have been part of Vladimir’s curriculum. What does it mean that “Russia and Putin aren’t the same thing”?

This seems to suggest that Russia has had a long history of just government reflecting the people’s sterling quality and only occasionally put on hold by evil exceptions. But this suggestion is false.

Which just rulers would that be? Ivan the Terrible, the first Russian tsar, who only ever laughed when watching people being flayed or fried alive? Peter the Great, a sadist who personally tortured and beheaded dozens of people? His daughter Yelizaveta, who had society ladies knouted and mutilated for daring to wear the same dresses as Her Majesty’s? Catherine the Great who spread serfdom to the Ukraine? The tsars of the 19^th century under whom Russia became known as ‘the prison of nations’ and ‘the gendarme of Europe’? Lenin? Stalin? Khrushchev? Andropov? Yeltsyn? Who?

The newly released heroes woefully misunderstand Russian history, politics and indeed people. The problem with the country isn’t that it lacks democracy but that it lacks civilisation (not to be confused with culture).

In fact, Russian liberals have learned their misapprehension from their Western counterparts, who believe that democracy is a panacea able to cure the ills of the world. Yet civilisational problems have no political solution. Giving barbarians democracy is like giving a Stradivarius violin to savages. They’ll just use it for firewood.

Every attempt to disprove this observation is doomed to failure, as the Americans found out in Iraq. Egged on by neoconservative (in fact, nonconservative) liberals, the US invaded, set up a chain of voting booths and embarked on a programme of nation building. In short order, that created a blood-soaked chaos rapidly spreading over the whole region.

There are indeed a few thousand Russians who oppose the war, which isn’t many for a country of 140 million. And most of those protesters object not to the war as such but to its cost in lives and money. More Russians, perhaps as many as 30 million, are directly involved in the war effort, some in the military, others in the armament industry and related businesses.

Spontaneous support for the war – and Putin – is huge, which isn’t surprising given the state’s monopoly on propaganda. Democracy, on the other hand, has a bad name among the masses weaned on the notion of imperial chauvinism.

They still remember the 1990s, the only decade of supposed liberty in Russian history. Few people still recall the previously forbidden books that became easily available. Yet everyone remembers looking at shops full of goods – and having no money to buy them, what with rampant inflation and devaluations having wiped out people’s savings, and pensions and salaries sometimes not paid for months.

Kara-Murza and his friends doubtless love liberty, even though they are prepared to sacrifice their own at the altar of woeful misconception. Their heroism will be in vain: democracy may sometimes contribute to a civilisation, but it can’t create it.

The Saturn of the Russian state will avidly devour all the sacrifices offered to it, but it won’t change its essence – even if it may pretend to change its ways. This state is exactly what the Russians deserve. De Maistre was right, and Kara-Murza and his friends are wrong – much as I’m happy that these heroic if misguided people are now free.

As far as pick-up lines go, this one doesn’t go very far. In those half-forgotten days of my youth, I never relied on it as the starting point on the road to a girl’s heart.

Moreover, I despised those men who did and those women who fell for such overtures, but then young people are good despisers. They recognise other people’s foibles more easily and surely than their own, and contempt comes naturally to them as a form of self-assertion.

And what could be more despicable to a budding rationalist than astrology or anything occult? Materialists poopoo everything magical, while Christians look down on anything that breaks God’s monopoly on magic.

As a youngster, I was neither of those two extremes, but I certainly hadn’t yet realised the limits of reason, especially my own. It took something paranormal to put a dent in that self-perception, something that I was sure didn’t exist.

I was in my early 20s, doing a stint in a Soviet hospital, my customary habitat during my last 15 years in Russia. Altogether, almost two of those years were spent in hospitals.

One didn’t just stay at Soviet hospitals. One lived there, in my case months at a time, because things medical developed at an excruciatingly slow pace, typical of natural forces. Even a simple blood test took two or three days to deliver results, and seldom had less than a fortnight passed before treatment could even begin.

As an experienced patient, I always looked for temporary friends, those who could play chess or cards, talk on interesting subjects or at least tell jokes. That time my friend was named Stas, an old man of about 30 obsessed with paranormal phenomena, such as telepathy.

I knew nothing about it, other than being certain that all such things were nonsense. Instead of trying to convince me otherwise, Stas offered a demonstration. He blindfolded himself and asked me to put a chess piece on the board.

He then told me to concentrate as hard as I could on the occupied square, my mind acting as a transmitter of mental waves. He himself was to be the receiver, and receive he did. A minute or two later, he announced: “D5!” – and so it was.

I insisted on repeating the experiment several times, and each time Stas either got the exact square or one adjacent to it. We then swapped roles, with him sending and me receiving. My results were somewhat less impressive, but not by much.

That was my first brush with the paranormal, but it didn’t make much of an impression. I was too focused on trying to dodge the KGB to worry about such incidentals.

Fast-forward a few years, and I was living in Houston, having got out of Russia and made a seminal, if yet unrecognised, contribution to medical science.

My polyarteritis nodosa, to which I owed the pleasure of meeting Stas, mysteriously cleared the moment I left the Soviet Union. That enabled me to come up with a ground-breaking hypothesis on the aetiology of collagen diseases: they are caused by communism.

Anyway, I found myself at a party where I knew everyone, except one man who was someone else’s friend passing through Texas. We struck up a conversation, and he said he was a professional astrologist.

Again, I expressed scepticism bordering on contempt. I refuse to accept, I said, that stars determine our fate.

My new short-term friend was patient with me. We don’t claim, he said, that stars determine anything. All one has to accept is that life is by its nature cyclical. If so, stars are the clock by which one could time various phases of the cycle.

That’s a hell of an assumption, I objected. I wasn’t yet a Christian but I was already thinking like one. Hence I insisted life was linear, not cyclical, expressing in crude terms my understanding of teleology. And he couldn’t really believe that one’s star sign affected one’s personality, could he?

Yes, he could. Well, in that case, I said triumphantly, he ought to be able to guess a man’s birthday just by talking to him. Yes, he said, I suppose that’s true. So what’s mine then, I asked, again demanding empirical proof.

He didn’t hesitate. “August 9^th or 10^th,” he said. My high horse bucked and threw me off. “How did you know that?” I asked. “Simple,” he replied. “You are a quintessential Leo, which means you were born right in the middle of that sign”.

I suspected legerdemain of some sort, perhaps our hostess having told him in advance what my birthday was. To put such suspicions to rest, he then proceeded to guess the birthday of everyone present, never being a day or two off. Once again, he was passing through and didn’t know anybody there except the man who had brought him in.

Push the fast-forward button again, and now we are in the late 90s. Penelope and I had been married for some 10 years, and she insisted that we travel to Moscow for her to see where I had spent the first 25 years of my life.

It was winter, the best season in Moscow, when snow acts as makeup concealing the blemishes on the city’s skin. We arrived at night, dumped our bags at my friend’s place about a mile northeast of Red Square and went for a walk.

We took Miasnitskaya Street that in my day was named after Kirov, but had since recovered its ancient name. Let me reemphasise that Penelope had never been to Moscow before, and had little idea of the city’s geography.

As we approached the top of Miasnitskaya. Penelope suddenly stopped and pointed at the back of the massive building on our right. “There are awful vibes emanating from it,” she said. “Some horrible things must have happened there”. So they had. That was the KGB headquarters in Lubianka Square.

Penelope had no way of knowing that. Even if she might have seen photographs of that sinister building, the pictures would have featured its façade, not its back. Yet, as an extremely sensitive artist, she possesses an emotional conduit to knowledge residing in the ultra range above reason and hence superior to it.

On another occasion, a few years later, we were staying with friends in Amsterdam. Our bedroom was in the loft of a typical 17^th century Dutch house, tall and narrow.

On our first night there, Penelope couldn’t fall asleep. She seemed anxious, tossed and turned, keeping me awake too. When I asked what was bothering her, she again mentioned awful vibes. Something terrible had happened there, she was sure about that.

In the morning, I laughingly mentioned that little quirk to our hosts, but they didn’t laugh. They happened to have a written history of the house, and sure enough, a family of Jews had been hiding there during the war. They were then betrayed, arrested and taken away to a concentration camp, where they perished.

If you expect a conclusion to such recollections, I haven’t got one. The best I can do is quote Shakespeare: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

This morning, Sky News reporters said a hundred times if they said it once that the murderer’s identity can’t be revealed because he is under 18 and hence a child in the eyes of the law. And children must be protected from damaging publicity even if they can’t be protected from mass murderers.

Sky even refused to vouchsafe to its audience the snippets of information mentioned in the print media. These informed us that the murderer’s family comes from Rwanda, thus having travelled in the opposite direction to that advocated by the previous government. The family has “no known links to Islam”, and in fact the murderer’s father is “active in the local church”.

There, you Islamophobes you (on this evidence I’m part of that group), the moment you hear of a terrorist act you jump to the conclusion that the offender is Muslim. The fact that you (and I?) are usually right is no excuse, and I for one am suitably contrite. It’s Christianity that’s to blame for Southport, and trust you not to have figured that out for yourself.

Of course, even if it’s true that the father is a church-goer – and none of those snippets looked especially credible – that doesn’t necessarily mean the son can’t be a Muslim. Such things happen. For example, and I hope you’ll forgive a bit of solipsism, my religion is different from my father’s and my son’s (atheists, both of them).

Anyway, Sky circumspectly refused to jump the gun and only told us that the stabber is 17 and male. However, one reporter inadvertently let another important fact slip out, and I may be the only viewer who caught it.

So here’s that cat jumping out of the bag: the 17-year-old suffers from multiple personality disorder, or dissociative identity disorder, as it’s known nowadays. I just hope the correspondent who accidentally spilled the beans won’t be reprimanded or sacked.

She probably didn’t even realise her careless mistake, but it was egregious by media standards. Having identified the murderer as a 17-year-old boy, the reporter then said that “they will be transported” to such and such facility later today.

Do you get it? I did. Obviously, the ‘boy’ has at least two personalities to go by, a sort of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The plural personal pronoun might have also meant that the murderer had an accomplice, but that’s unlikely.

If my first guess is correct, then there’s the defence strategy mapped out. The defence counsel can claim that it was his client’s Mr Hyde personality that wielded that knife. The Dr Jekyll part, which is the real essence of his client, was unaware of the monstrous act perpetrated by his alter ego and hence can’t be held responsible for it.

Then, of course, there’s another possibility, and it fills me with dread. That reporter is a woke illiterate who refuses to use the masculine personal pronoun even in relation to someone whose male sex has already been established.

Now, you may think I’m making a cultural mountain out of a verbal molehill, but this sort of thing is a harbinger of a civilisational catastrophe. When language goes, everything goes. A glossocratic attack has our whole culture as its target.

I use – and might have even coined – the term ‘glossocratic’ because an attempt to control and dictate language for political ends is a naked power grab. As Orwell showed in his 1984, he who has the power to impose usage has the power to impose anything.

Our ruling elite is after self-perpetuation, and it’s prepared to sacrifice everything at the altar of that goal: taste, grammar, semantics, literacy and so on. Those who impose glossocracy don’t really care what words we use – they only care about their power to impose usage. It’s as if they are saying to us: “Yes, we know and you know that saying ‘they’ about one man is ugly and stupid – and we know that you know. But we can force you to do such things, and all you can do is shut up”.

That’s not to say that good old common-or-garden ignorance is alien to Sky News, and it doesn’t always have to be glossocratically motivated. Thus, later this morning, a presenter reading from the teleprompter spoke about the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.

Though obligingly describing him as a “moderate” and “pragmatist” (everything is relative, I suppose), the newsreader then said that Haniyeh was “one of Israel’s most important counterparts”.

Thinking that either he or I had gone crazy, I went into the dictionary to check the meaning of ‘counterpart’. And sure enough, it was defined as “a person or thing that corresponds to or has the same function as another person or thing in a different place or situation.” It doesn’t mean ‘enemy’, ‘foe’, ‘opponent’ or ‘adversary’.

Let me see if I can backtrack to the root of that error. The prefix ‘counter-’ can mean not only ‘corresponding’ but also ‘opposed’. The late Mr Haniyeh, for all his moderation and pragmatism, was staunchly opposed to Israel. Therefore, decided whoever wrote that news report, he was Israel’s counterpart. An easy mistake to make – if one happens to be an ignoramus.

And speaking of ignoramuses, yet another reporter described a handshake between Haniyeh and Iran’s ayatollah as ‘fulsome’. That word doesn’t mean ‘wholehearted’ or ‘enthusiastic’. It means ‘insincerely effusive’, and contextually that’s not what the reporter had in mind.

At this point, you may think I’m a pedantic nit-picker, but let me assure you that I’ve never picked a nit in my life, nor have ever even seen one (has anyone?). The matter isn’t trivial. It’s as serious as a coffin lid closing.

The systematic destruction of English, whether undertaken out of institutional ignorance or for glossocratic reasons, spells a full frontal assault on our whole civilisation – I’d even go so far as to say it undermines the very essence of humanity.

God gave us the gift of language so that we may give shape to the output of our reason and consciousness. What we are doing is throwing that gift back into God’s face, and the deity punishes such slights severely.

Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat, was how the Romans translated Sophocles who wrote, in Greek, that “Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first deprives of reason” – and hence of language.

We seem to have forgotten what the Greeks already knew 2,500 years ago. That’s a punishable transgression, and the penalty notice is on its way.

P.S. Sky presenters also mentioned approvingly that Home Secretary Angie is considering banning the EDL. This simple idea never crossed their mind: what’s sauce for the EDL goose should also be sauce for the Just Stop Oil gander. And there I was, thinking the spirit of fair play is still alive.