Dr Goebbels, meet Mr Orwell

Now that Russian monstrosity in the Ukraine has made the world shudder with revulsion, Russian propaganda has mapped two directions for its offensive:

A) No atrocities against civilians have been committed in the Ukraine and B) if they have been, it was the Ukrainians themselves who either staged or committed them to cast Russia in a bad light.

Such are the main themes, but there are quite a few variations, depending on the nature of the atrocity and the amount of evidence available. That stands to reason: a practised liar won’t put all the dregs into the same casket.

The best propagandists are flexible. When one line doesn’t seem to work, they smoothly segue into another. And if the two lines say diametrically opposite things, that’s not a problem either.

If both lines are patently ridiculous, then, according to Dr Goebbels, so much the better. After all, the more ridiculous, the more believable, as far as he was concerned.

In one of his essays, George Orwell showed that in reality things are more subtle than that. Totalitarians say verifiably idiotic things not because they expect everyone to believe them, but because they can force most people to pretend they believe. A barefaced lie can thus hit two targets: persuade the credulous masses and suppress the incredulous few.

Dr Goebbels also taught, and one should always listen to experts, that such outdated notions as truth and falsehood have no place in the flowering field of propaganda. Statements are divided into effective and ineffective, not true and false.

The most outrageous lie will eventually ring true if repeated often enough. And if some bloody-minded elements still insist on demurring obdurately, well, that’s what prisons and execution cellars are for.

While the world was still trying to collect itself after watching the pictures of the Bucha horrors, two Russian rockets hit the railway station in Kramatorsk, killing 50 on the spot (five of them children) and wounding hundreds more. Considering that many of the wounded had limbs blown off, the death count will creep up.

At first, the Russian propagandists responded with a variation on Point A) above. Civilians, what civilians? The Ukies had concentrated their troops at the Kramatorsk station, making it a legitimate military target.

However, Ukrainian authorities then produced enough photographs of mangled civilian bodies to fill a whole library of albums. Not a problem. Push the button for Point B).

So fine, some civilians got killed. But it’s not the Russians who did it. It’s the bloodthirsty Ukie Nazis who are “hitting their own”. Why would they do an awful thing like that? Need you ask? To blame the murders on Russia, thereby turning the whole world against her.

Reading both official and unofficial reports coming out of Russia, I get the impression that a majority of the population are happily swallowing Points A) and B), singly or together. How big a majority, I don’t know. The estimates I’ve seen range from 60 to 90 per cent. Either way, that’s enough to congratulate Putin’s Goebbelses on a job well done.

Those Russians who know both points for the barefaced lies they are, also know that sharing that understanding publicly could earn them up to 15 years in prison. And that’s if they survive the arrest and interrogation techniques for which Col. Putin’s sponsoring organisation is so widely celebrated. Hence, a few heroes apart, they keep shtum.

Most Westerners, on the other hand, haven’t yet been sufficiently brainwashed, or rather brain-amputated, to accept fascist propaganda at face value. Hence Western collaborators with Russian fascism need to couch their lies in disclaimers, such as ‘probably’, ‘I suspect’, ‘allegedly’ and so on.

Such people can’t use MI5 to make people pretend they believe unalloyed lies. Hence they have to confer an air of verisimilitude on their propaganda, an annoying requirement Dr Goebbels didn’t have to satisfy.

But they still follow his prescriptions to the letter: it’s not only all learning that repetition is the mother of. Repetition can also beget propaganda efficacy.

Today Rod Liddle has decided to provide reinforcements for Peter Hitchens’s mostly singlehanded fight for the glory of Russian fascism. Writing in The Times with his usual flippancy, Liddle offered his admiring readers this statement:  

“My suspicion, for what it’s worth, is that there was a massacre carried out in Bucha by Russian forces – but I do not believe it as an article of faith and it’s not outside the realms of possibility that we are all being skilfully manipulated by the plucky Ukrainians.”

One has to admire craft, however misapplied. Liddle suspects “it’s not outside the realms of possibility” that everything Putin’s Goebbelses have been hammering into the Russians’ encephalectomied heads is true.

It’s possible, though Liddle graciously acknowledges not quite certain, that those Ukie Nazis are torturing, raping, looting and murdering thousands of their own people just to paint Putin black, or rather brown. And if you happen to reject this unquestionably plausible explanation, you are a zealot irrationally upholding “an article of faith”.

Liddle’s paragraph has 49 words, which amazingly is enough space not only to serve full-strength Kremlin propaganda, but also to dilute it with five disclaimers, making the cocktail more attractive but just as intoxicating. If for some reason The Times doesn’t work out, RT will always find room for skilful scribes like Rod.

Now reinforcements have arrived, Hitchens has pushed on with renewed vigour. This time around he presented fascist propaganda in a Q&A format, so familiar to former pupils and students.

It’s in this format that, following Goebbels’s instructions, Hitchens regurgitates the same Kremlin lies he has repeated, faithfully and monotonously, since the Ukraine became independent.

By a laudable exercise of willpower, this once he doesn’t describe all Ukrainians as Nazis and the Maidan Revolution as a putsch. But he again repeats something he has said a thousand times if he has said it once.

There are only two reasons for the current war. First, it’s the plight “of Ukraine’s Russian-speaking citizens”. Second, it’s the eastward expansion of Nato.

Both are lies, but frankly I lack Hitchens’s monomaniacal persistence and stamina. And that’s what it would take for me to debunk these lies for the umpteenth time. So please act as my co-author, or research consultant if you’d rather, and look up the dozens of pieces I, or other commentators free of pro-fascist bias, have written on this subject.

Yet one tack Hitchens has tried this time is new, at least to me. All the same techniques I’ve mentioned before are here in evidence, although Hitchens lacks Liddle’s lightness of touch:

“Q. Is Russia alone in committing alleged atrocities in Ukraine?

“A. No. More than one allegation has been made, supported by apparent video evidence, of Ukrainian soldiers killing or maiming captured and helpless Russian prisoners of war. It must be stressed that these claims have not been proven. 

“However, it is incontestable that both Russian and Ukrainian forces were guilty of military actions leading to the deaths of civilians, including children, during the war which has raged since 2014 in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions.”

Do you share my admiration for the clever tricks? I have the same admiration for Hitchens’s swindles that architecture students feel for Albert Speer’s designs. Never mind the ideology, they say, feel the mastery.

I too have heard rumours that Ukrainians sometimes kill Russian POWs. Since, using Hitchens’s jargon, such “allegations… have not been proven”, it would be wise not to comment until they have been. If they were indeed proven, I’d be appalled. But I wouldn’t be surprised.

Killing an invader’s POWs is a disgusting act – but far lower on the scale of monstrosity than the invader murdering thousands of civilians and wiping whole cities off the map. A Ukrainian soldier shooting a prisoner might have had his child killed by a Russian bomb, his wife raped and murdered by Russian troops, his house turned to rubble by Russian artillery.

None of this is an excuse, but all of it is an explanation.

I’d like to think that my age, experience and – above all – Christian faith would stop me from responding in a similarly murderous way to similar crimes. But when I was as young as those Ukrainian soldiers, I suspect I would have been guided not so much by the Sermon on the Mount as by the Old Testament’s “an eye for an eye”.

This is, if I so say myself who shouldn’t, a civilised way of responding to such appalling rumours. But it’s not the way of a committed fascist propagandist.

Hitchens’s thesis, easily discernible behind his hackery, is that it’s mostly the Ukraine, acting as the West’s proxy, that’s to blame for the war. Before Bucha, he denied that Russia bore any guilt at all. Now he grudgingly admits that perhaps Putin’s lads have overreacted to the severe provocation.

But what do you expect? After all, a “war… has raged since 2014 in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions.”

There has been no war there since 2014. In 2014, Putin’s fascist regime committed the first act of its aggression against the Ukraine by occupying a part of Donbass. Hitchens again recycles here the Kremlin’s lie about the abuse of Russian speakers in the Ukraine.

It takes amorality of Hitlerite proportions to claim that “both Russian and Ukrainian forces were guilty of military actions leading to the deaths of civilians, including children”, thereby implying that both sides share the guilt equally, especially the Ukraine.

I wonder how long it will be before our papers stop providing space for fascist propaganda. Never, would be my guess. It’s much easier to hide behind the wall of free speech.

Yes, but what if the speech isn’t free? What if it’s part of Putin’s hybrid war on the West? Such questions can’t be answered if asked. But no one ever asks them.