Every year or so, Peter Hitchens feels the urge to defend the man he unashamedly calls “my greatest ally”, the Putin stooge Graham Phillips.
Phillips is a journalist of sorts, who has been doing Putin’s bidding since 2009, an undertaking in which he is as enthusiastic as Hitchens himself. Unlike Hitchens, however, he hasn’t learned how to offset his message with disingenuous qualifiers.
Today, for example, Hitchens writes: “He has been more sympathetic to the Russian cause in Ukraine than is either right or wise for someone who calls himself a journalist.” By implication, Hitchens himself shows the right amount of sympathy, just enough to keep himself out of trouble with the British government.
Unlike him, Phillips has never bothered to couch his admiration for Putin fascism in journalese, even when the hack had to commit crimes against humanity in the process. Hitchens refers to one such rather coyly: “He has behaved questionably (I put this mildly) towards a British prisoner-of-war captured by the Russians, and to others in similar fixes.”
‘Questionably”, I’m afraid, is the wrong word here, even when qualified in Hitchens’s skilful manner. Allow me to refresh your memory of the crime that only rates “questionable” in Hitchens’s lexicon.
In 2016 Phillips published a video in which he taunted a Ukrainian POW who had lost his sight and both his arms. With the Russians’ blessing, Phillips also interviewed, or rather interrogated, a captured British soldier fighting in the Ukrainian army. The soldier, Aidin Aslin, wasn’t a willing participant – in fact, he was handcuffed throughout the interview.
That violated the terms of the Geneva Convention that bans coercive interrogation of POWs for propaganda purposes. Already at that time, plans were under way to charge Phillips with war crimes, which is a rare accolade for British journalists.
When he wasn’t busy participating in the torture of Ukrainians and Britons captured by the Russian invaders, Phillips kept inundating the electronic waves with the most brazen pro-Putin and anti-Ukrainian propaganda this side of Russia’s own media, often even outdoing them.
His masters rewarded Phillips’s loyal service as best they could. In 2015, the Russian Border Service, an FSB branch, gave him its aptly named ‘Border Brotherhood’ Medal. He has also received several medals from the ‘People’s Republics’ of Donetsk and Luhansk, which is sort of like getting a Medal of Honour from the Manson family.
“Mr Phillips,” writes Hitchens, “seems to be the only British person living who does not have any human rights.” Including, it seems, the most essential one: “Mr Phillips is legally forbidden (for example) to pay the council tax on his London house.” I wish someone deprived me of that particular human right.
Phillips isn’t allowed to return to the UK, which is why “he is living in a bombed-out, unheated block of flats in the city of Mariupol.” What’s left of it, after the Russians bombed the city flat, occupied it and looted whatever they could find under the debris.
However, contrary to what Hitchens claims, with his usual cavalier treatment of facts even tangentially related to Putin’s Russia, Phillips isn’t the only Briton denied re-entry into the UK. Shamima Begum, who left Britain for Syria and took part in Islamic State atrocities, was stripped of her citizenship in 2019, and in 2021 the Supreme Court banned her from returning to appeal the ruling.
To quote a government document, “Under section 40 of the BNA 1981 any British citizen, British Overseas Territories citizen, British Overseas citizen, British National (Overseas), British Protected Person or British Subject may be deprived of their citizenship if the Secretary of State is satisfied that: it would be conducive to the public good and they would not become stateless as a result of the deprivation.”
The banishment of Phillips is unquestionably “conducive to the public good”, and he doesn’t have to “become stateless as a result of the deprivation.” Putin has been generous in granting Russian passports to his foreign agents, and Phillips is among the most industrious ones.
I agree with Hitchens that ideally banishment should have been legalised by due process, and I’m sure this technicality will be taken care of in due course. But when it comes to defending his “greatest ally”, Hitchens uses such arguments as subterfuge. In reality, he supports everything Phillips says and does, and has done so for a couple of decades at least.
He acknowledges as much: “My own writing, broadcasting and debating, critical of Ukraine and of British policy towards it, could be cited against me in the same way under a slightly dimmer government than we now have.” You don’t say.
Not a “slightly dimmer” government but a slightly more principled one would, as a minimum, shut Hitchens up and prevent him from spouting Putin propaganda in support of what he once called “the most conservative and Christian country in Europe”. After all, freedom of speech shouldn’t, and at wartime doesn’t, protect enemy propagandists.
One such, William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, was strung up for similar efforts in 1946. The death penalty for treasonous propaganda is no longer on the books, and no doubt Hitchens would argue in any case that Britain isn’t at war with Russia, as she was with Nazi Germany.
That’s another technicality because, though it’s true we haven’t declared war on Russia, Russia has declared war on the West, including Britain. For the moment, this is a hybrid war, one that only includes sabotage of infrastructure, terrorist acts, electronic warfare, massive propaganda – and of course beastly aggression against the Ukraine, which is as closely allied with the West as Hitchens is with Phillips.
The legal situation is such that Hitchens can’t be charged with treason, the way Joyce was. But he has done more than enough to rate censure and being drummed out of the profession he has brought into disrepute by his shilling for fascism.
P.S. When in 2018 I wrote about Russia’s poisoning shenanigans in Salisbury, Hitchens kindly sent me an e-mail insisting that Russia’s guilt hadn’t been proved. I’m eagerly awaiting his comments on Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 shot down by a Russian anti-aircraft missile.
His logic will probably run along these lines: Russia’s crime hasn’t been, nor is ever likely to be, established beyond reasonable doubt in a duly constituted court. Ergo, Russia isn’t to blame. Hitchens is a master of such fake syllogisms, and he has his own standards of proof when it comes to Putin.
Phillips is a useful idiot, for the West this time? People like him usually harm their own cause with their unabashed grotesque partisanship. Moderate Putinistas are more harmful perhaps.