EU leaders are leading us to perdition

The chorus of Europeans weeping and wailing over Russian atrocities in the Ukraine is strong enough without my husky voice chiming in. Suffice it to say that I saw it all before, when visiting a Chechen refugee camp on the Dagestan border in 1995.

Dozens of people were bunched up together on mattresses covering the floor of a school. Scabied children were the only people who could still walk easily. Others were too weak from hunger, disease and fatigue to move a muscle. An old woman died in front of my eyes.

Just a few days earlier, the Russians had massacred the village of Samashki, doing exactly what they’ve now done in Bucha and elsewhere in the Ukraine. Just like Bucha today, Samashki made the news then, but it wasn’t the only massacre, nor probably the worst one.

The refugee told me stories of the Russians routinely shooting every man and raping every woman in the places they occupied. In one village they loaded a helicopter with as many villagers as could fit in, then threw them out at 1,000 feet. When one woman on the ground cried too loudly, a Russian soldier fired an AK burst across her legs.

Another woman, blinded by a flash grenade, begged me to tell my people everything when I went back to England. I promised I would, and kept my promise as best I could – knowing in advance the sheer futility of such efforts.

That was under Yeltsyn’s government, seen in the West as a history-ending liberal democracy. Four years later, the perpetually drunk president appointed Putin as his successor, and Russia embarked on a gradual but accelerating progress towards full-fledged fascism. Hence, doing some quick mental arithmetic, I multiply what I saw in Chechnya, 1995, by ten to get a reliable picture of the Ukraine, 2022.

I used the word ‘fascism’ in its technical meaning, not as a multi-purpose term of abuse. For details, may I refer you in a shamefully self-serving way to a talk I gave some seven years ago: http://www.alexanderboot.com/russian-fascists-and-british-conservatives/

My ‘conservative’ listeners were unconvinced then, and I’m sure they still are, no matter how many Ukrainian civilians end up with a bullet in the base of the skull. But I hope they’ll have the honesty to admit to themselves that, fundamentally, they see nothing wrong with fascism, provided it’s clouded in the smokescreen of conservative-sounding shibboleths.

And I also hope they’ll have the modicum of intelligence, integrity and education not to repeat the blithering idiocy uttered by the leaders of the main EU parliamentary parties in their address to the Russians.

Seldom does one see such a statement of craven surrender justified by bone-crushing ignorance. The message is that “we are all Europeans” and “no one wishes Russia ill”. Hence we should combine our efforts to stop the war and bring about “that long-awaited day when we can all be together again.”

Never mind the sheer immorality and vacuity it takes to utter such empty bien pensant phrases at a time when civilians are being tortured and massacred by an evil regime.

What I find especially incredible is the aesthetic aspect of it. Yes, I know those people have neither intelligence nor character. But at least I hoped, forlornly as it turns out, that they’d have the taste not to indulge their natural cowardly instincts at a time like this.

And, of course, they had to reiterate Biden’s open-ended vow never even to contemplate stopping Putin’s fascism by force. “No Nato army,” said those ‘leaders’, “American or European, has ever entered, not will ever enter, Russia.”

That statement alone shows that, no matter how this war ends, fascism will triumph. For Putin and his clique have been issued blanket guarantees of impunity. So even if they have to retreat, lick their wounds and regroup, they’ll strike again later, this time upping the stakes.

The concluding statement of this shameful document deserves to be quoted in full. It’s staggering in its ignorance, especially since most of its authors must have gone to decent schools and some might even have attended university:

“We are all Europeans, from Dublin to Vladivostok, because our destinies have always been intertwined, and your writers – Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and Bulgakov – belong to our common heritage. We are all Europeans because we derive our common culture from Greek philosophy, Roman legality, Old and New Testaments, the Enlightenment, and the Athenian and Roman democracy reshaped by the English and French revolutions… So let us join our efforts to put an immediate end to this macabre period of our lives and to usher in the day when your Federation and our Union, with its present and future members, will find a way towards mutual understanding and cooperation so necessary for Europe and the whole world.”

To paraphrase Mary McCarthy’s pithy dismissal of Lillian Hellman, every word written here is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.

With the partial exception of Greek philosophy and the Bible, none of the cited roots of “our common heritage” have anything to do with Russian cultural history – and even those exceptions never affected Russian civilisation, such as it is.

The writers mentioned do indeed belong to European culture, but then so do at least half a dozen Japanese writers I could think of offhand. So are the Japanese Europeans too?

However, even discounting that, mentioning Dostoyevsky in this context is peculiar. The writer was a Russian supremacist, who despised and hated the West with unmitigated passion. His particularly venomous loathing was reserved for the Catholics and the Jews, but no other groups in the West were exempt.

Those EU ignoramuses ought to read Dostoyevsky’s Diaries of a Writer and his poems to see if they find any protestations of affection for “Athenian and Roman democracy reshaped by the English and French revolutions”. They won’t.

What they are guaranteed to find is a jingoist animus against Europe, including England, a thinly disguised longing for the extermination of Jews, and countless references to Russia as a spiritual, God-bearing nation entitled to conquer her neighbours and educate them in the ways of the world.

Neither was Tolstoy conspicuously affected by all those wonderful European things, with the possible exception of Greek philosophy.

He was militantly anti-Christian (to the point of actually being excommunicated, which even Lenin wasn’t), and his religious feelings gravitated not westwards, but towards the East, especially the Indian subcontinent. Tolstoy had nothing but contempt for Western legality and parliamentarism, which sentiments were dialectically linked with his worship of the saintly Russian peasant, beautiful in his anarchic anomie.

Hence that EU epistle to the Russians is ignorant even on its own puny terms. As to their hope that one day “your Federation and our Union” will live in peace and harmony, it’s simply beneath contempt on every level: intellectual, moral and political.

Much more appropriate would be a breast-beating mea culpa, for it’s mostly Europe’s greed and cowardice that made Putin’s fascism possible. And the EU continues to finance it by paying hundreds of millions for Russian gas every day.

How much more “mutual understanding and cooperation” do they want? Perhaps giving Russia the same heavy weapons denied to the Ukraine would do the trick.

If you want to understand Putin’s Russia, don’t think Europe. Think Rwanda. Or, if you prefer the historical perspective favoured by the EU, the Golden Horde.