Some speech shouldn’t be free

Free speech is the bedrock of our civilisation – and the bane of tyrannies. Despots like Iran’s ayatollahs, North Korean communists and Russia’s ruling KGB dynasty shut their subjects up as a matter of course.

In Russia, for example, anyone voicing the mildest criticism of the on-going war, or even referring to it as such, rather than the mandated ‘special military operation’, goes down for double-digit spells in prison. Those are the lucky ones. The unlucky ones are poisoned, shot, defenestrated or otherwise disposed of. A fascist regime knows no constraints.

Such a regime has many hallmarks, but suppression of free speech is both prime and ubiquitous. Not all fascist regimes run gas ovens, but they all see free speech in their crosshairs. Yet that doesn’t mean that free countries do not or should not do so under any circumstances.

It’s axiomatic that a citizen’s liberty to spread enemy propaganda must be curtailed, especially while hostilities are in progress. Such situations turn propaganda into a weapon either wielded by a country or aimed at her heart. That propaganda of criminal causes is itself criminal has been made indisputable by any number of international bodies, from the Nuremberg Tribunal onwards.

Now, Russia’s war isn’t just criminal in itself, but it’s also conducted by criminal means. Russian troops started out as they meant to go on, by committing savage war crimes in Bucha and Mariupol. They perpetrate such crimes every day, and anyone facilitating their crimes becomes their accomplice.

This gets us to the case of Graham Phillips, the British journalist sanctioned by HMG for his tireless efforts to undermine the Ukraine’s struggle for her freedom by spreading incessant pro-Putin, which is to say pro-fascist, propaganda.

If the UK were officially at war with Russia, the case would be straightforward. Phillips would get a long prison sentence, unless the death penalty were reinstated. However, given Britain’s present legal status, our law has no provisions for such punishment.

That, however, doesn’t mean it has no provisions for any punishment. The Ukraine is our ally whom we help by every means possible, short of direct military involvement. We do so not only out of noble commitment to defending freedom wherever it’s under attack, but also because Russia has openly stated her intention to threaten NATO countries once she has finished the Ukraine off.

Britain, whose own security largely depends on NATO membership, thus has a vested interest in Putin’s defeat. Since all Western countries have come to the Ukraine’s aid, albeit with varying enthusiasm, Russia can’t win. Putin’s only hope is that the West’s commitment to the Ukraine’s cause attenuates and then disappears.

To that end, the world’s most elaborate propaganda machine has gone into high gear, spewing lies and above all trying to convince Westerners that the war is none of their concern, that they risk a nuclear confrontation for the sake of a country that’s no better than Russia and probably worse. All this is interspersed with a thinly veiled longing that we too should have a strong and decisive leader like Putin.

Phillips has been shilling for Russia since 2009. In 2013 he became a stringer for Pravda and RT, whose UK broadcasting licence was revoked in 2022 after Ofcom concluded the outlet was not “fit and proper” or a “responsible broadcaster”. A tool of the FSB disinformation department in other words.

As a Putin propagandist, Phillips routinely oversteps the boundaries of not only common decency, but also of international law. In 2016 he 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.

His masters rewarded Phillips’s loyal service as best they could (see the photo above). In 2015, the Russian Border Service, a branch of the FSB, gave him its aptly named ‘Border Brotherhood’ Medal. And he has also received several medals from the ‘People’s Republics’ of Donbas and Lugansk, essentially bandit lands run by Putin’s paramilitaries.

As a result, HMG imposed sanctions on him in 2022, making Phillips the first British subject to be added to the sanctions list. He launched an appeal, which a few days ago Justice Johnson rejected.

He stated that Phillips supported “the Russian war” by producing and publishing “propagandist video content which glorifies the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its atrocities, and promotes disinformation advanced by Russia as a justification for the invasion”. While the style of the ruling is suspect, the meaning is unmistakable: Phillips works for a foreign regime that explicitly regards Britain as its enemy and acts accordingly.

Now, Peter Hitchens has been faithfully supporting both Putin’s fascism and, consequently, Phillips for years. Hence it stands to reason that he has produced a diatribe aimed at Justice Johnson and his ruling.

Hitchens sees a valid difference between “a person who positively supports Russia’s propaganda war against Ukraine (for example by parroting Russia’s propaganda narrative), [and one who is] simply expressing an independent view which happens to align with Russia’s interests.”

The nuance escapes me, at least as far as its moral aspect is concerned. In Phillips’s case even the legal aspect is beyond doubt: as an employee of various Russian propaganda outlets, he is hardly an independent agent. Hitchens’s own reasons for regurgitating Kremlin propaganda are open to forensic doubts, an ambivalence he invariably exploits:

“Well, I regard my position on the Ukraine war as an entirely independent one. I never even read or listen to Russian propaganda on the matter. But I am, even so, almost daily accused on social media of ‘parroting’ Russian positions, and if someone like Liz Truss or Lord Cameron or James Cleverly decides, without any form of trial, to accuse me of such ‘parroting’, then I too could be sanctioned.”

And none too soon, may I add. For, while Phillips’s efforts enjoy only a small hardcore following, Hitchens’s weekly animadversions are read by millions. The damage he does to the cause of good fighting evil is thus much greater.

Whether he does so wittingly or unwittingly, as an independent journalist or a paid agent, is important legally but irrelevant morally. For Hitchens does parrot Russian positions, and with a word for word accuracy that makes one doubt a purely osmotic connection. However, doubts fall short of proof, in the absence of which legal prosecution is impossible. But sanctioning Hitchens on exactly the same grounds as sanctioning Phillips would be amply justified.

Incidentally, in the same article, Hitchens says we shouldn’t hit Houthi pirates until we have fixed all the potholes on our roads. “If we cultivated our own garden and ensured it was well-defended enough to keep enemies away, we would remain one of the most enviable nations on the planet,” is the geopolitical wisdom Hitchens vouchsafes to his audience.

“Our own garden” is so enviable partly because Britain has always been a seafaring nation dependent on its merchant marine for its prosperity. Thus an attack on key trading routes directly threatens Britain’s vital interests. Surely even Hitchens should see that?  

By joining the US to protect freedom of the seas, we don’t just “tail along behind the Americans”, in Hitchens’s phrase. We aid our key ally who yet again fights for our interests, not just its own.

Really, that hack abuses free speech every chance he gets. He is a weed threatening the very same garden for which he professes undying affection.