Barbarity, past and present

In the summer of 1209, the Albigensian Crusade was gathering momentum. Béziers, a Cathar stronghold in Languedoc, was surrounded and about to be stormed.

The Crusaders were out to eradicate Catharism, an offshoot of the Bulgarian gnostic sect of the Bogomils. This was one of the deadliest heresies ever to threaten the survival of Christendom, quite on a par with Arianism in that respect.

Not to plunge too deep into theology, the Cathars were dualists. To them, there were two Gods, not one. The good God of the New Testament eternally fought the evil God of the Old Testament, with both enjoying equal status. The domain of the good God was the spirit, good when pure. The bad God ruled over the flesh, irredeemably and invariably evil.

One can hear the echoes of some Eastern doctrines there, such as Buddhism. Yet Buddhism was too far away to threaten Christendom. Catharism, on the other hand, was a rapidly growing malignant tumour in the very body of Europe.

That heresy contradicted the monotheistic essence of Christianity, putting the Church in jeopardy. And in those unsophisticated times, it was the Church, rather than Instagram, that was the cornerstone of our civilisation. So at peril there was more than just Catholic doctrine.

Pope Innocent III tried to explain to the Cathars the error of their ways, sending his legates and missionaries to Languedoc. The Cathars, whose religion was more Asian than European, responded in a way popular in Asia at the time. By way of saying ‘no’, they killed the legates and the missionaries.

Finally, in 1209, the Pope was left with no option but to announce a Crusade later named after Albi, the Cathars’ capital city. And so to Béziers.

The reshuffled demographics of the city featured a sizeable population of Catholics, whom the Crusaders wanted to get out of harm’s way. They offered them free passage out of Béziers, but the offer was firmly declined.

The Crusaders attacked, and it was clear Béziers couldn’t hold out for long. At that point, the soldiers asked the papal legate Arnaud Amalric how they could separate the wheat of the Catholics from the chaff of the Cathars.

His reply went down in history as an oft-quoted (if possibly apocryphal) aphorism: “Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.” Kill them all. God will claim his own.

Cruel though that advice was, it was practical. Since Catholics and Cathars were physically indistinguishable, the latter could have got away by pretending to be the former.

Béziers fell and most of its citizens died. But the aphoristic phrase, in various translations, lives on. It’s widely used today, mainly by people who don’t know its origin but fancy themselves as intrepid commandos. (Boys of all ages are often given to such fantasies.)

I’m sure even Putin must have heard the phrase – one can detect its inspiration behind his actions. Thus some may be tempted to equate his propensity for waging wars of terror with the Albigensian Crusade or other medieval conflicts. This only goes to show how dangerous it is to draw historical parallels.

The Crusaders believed, with ample justification, that their Church, and therefore their civilisation, was at stake. Hence those who think that civilisation was worth keeping must see their cause as just.

Had the Cathars prevailed, Europe wouldn’t have found the resolve to repel alien conquerors, at that time mainly Muslim. Houellebecq’s novel Submission would read not as a dystopic tale of an Islamic Europe, but as reportage.

By contrast, Putin’s cause is seen as just only by fascists, actual, vicarious or aspirational, wherever they crawl out of the swamp.

The existence of a free, westward-looking Ukraine in no way threatened the survival of Putin’s Russia and her civilisation, such as it is. The Ukraine could have joined the EU, Nato or for that matter a Pall Mall club, and Putin could still have continued unimpeded to suppress free speech in Russia, terrorise the few protesters, flog hydrocarbons and launder the proceeds, enriching his acolytes and impoverishing everyone else.

In the likely event the Ukraine had gone on to become freer and more prosperous than Russia, the Russians might have got restless. But Putin’s early career in the KGB’s Fifth Chief Directorate ideally equipped him with crowd-control tools.

That toolbox includes bullets, poison, concentration camps, torture, rubber truncheons – whatever the job takes. Putin’s CV should leave one in no doubt that he owns such tools and is more than willing to wield them.

All in all, his cause isn’t to save his country but to subjugate someone else’s. No way would Augustine describe Putin’s current war as bellum iustum, just war.

Those 1209 Crusaders made every effort to convert the heretics or, barring that, to save their own kind, the Béziers Catholics. Putin’s conduct is quite different.

The Ukrainians aren’t heretical or apostate Russians, but a separate nation with its own culture, language and history. Its roots are similar, though far from identical, to Russia’s, but then so are the roots of Britons and, say, Germans.

Anglo-Saxons originate from what today is Germany, which doesn’t entitle the Germans to bomb British cities, although at one point they did try. Nor is Britain entitled to bomb New Delhi because India used to belong to Britain.

Putin is making no attempt to save his own kind, quite the opposite. About 20 per cent of the Ukrainians are ethnically Russian, and east of the Dnieper that proportion is closer to a third. Thus at least 300 out of every 1,000 Ukrainians killed by Putin’s bombs are the very same ethnic Russians he claims to be protecting. And the bunker hermit has form in that gruesome endeavour.

In 1999-2000 Russian bombers wiped out Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. At least 80 per cent of its population were Russians, different in their language, ethnicity and religion from the Chechens.

That, incidentally, should put paid to any attempt to identify countries strictly by the blood mix of their inhabitants. No major nation can boast an ethnically homogeneous population, nor can many individuals claim to be ethnically pure. But that doesn’t mean that nations don’t exist – only that blood and soil nationalism is a pernicious chimera.

Nations are brought together by shared culture, history, customs, injunctions and, above all, self-perception. A Russian baby adopted and raised by an English family will grow up English, not Russian. He’ll prefer warm beer to cold vodka, restraint to emotional incontinence, and, if so inclined, he’d choose Dickens over Tolstoy, Shakespeare over Pushkin or – in extreme cases – Elgar over Prokofiev.

Putin is obsessed with another chimera, that of a Pax Russica, some mystical ‘Russian world’ uniting Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians and any other peoples he wants to conquer. They are all supposed to be the same family torn asunder by evil Anglo-Saxons.

If he genuinely believes that nonsense, his crime is even more monstrous. The arithmetic I mentioned earlier no longer applies: his own people add up not to 300 victims out of a 1,000, but to the whole thousand. He is carpet-bombing his own family.

Moreover, Putin is even attacking the escape routes, crowded with desperate Ukrainians of any ethnic origin, trying to flee from Russian fascism. No Albigensian chivalry there, no attempt to save his own kind from slaughter.

Killing people out of hand can’t be justified by anything other than a just cause. The Albigensians had that; Putin doesn’t. They tried to give their own people a chance to escape; he bombs their escape routes. He can’t be justified under any circumstances; they…

I won’t complete that sentence lest I may be accused of moral relativism or, eschewing political correctness, even Hottentot morality (“If I steal his cow, that’s not good. If he steals my cow, that’s bad.).

Yet it’s not I but human nature that’s morally relativist. Recognising this, the founders of our civilisation taught that evil though violence is, it’s justifiable if it prevents a greater evil. The violence of those Albigensian Crusaders falls into that category. Putin’s violence doesn’t. It’s just evil.

P.S. Speaking of moral relativism, while the West helps the Ukraine with one hand, it’s paying Putin $1 billion for his gas — every day. Something tells me that money won’t be used for social care.