It’s no debate. It’s enemy action

“I once again find myself on the despised, hated and reviled side of the argument,” writes Peter Hitchens. He must have looked in the mirror and seen a courageous maverick doing battle for unpopular truth.

That mirror distorts reality. For Hitchens is nothing but a conduit for enemy propaganda, which these days he doesn’t even bother to paraphrase.

“This is not a war between Ukraine and Russia. It is a war between the USA and Russia,” he writes. A daring line, that, if somewhat lacking in novelty appeal.

I’ve read, seen and heard it repeated in the Russian media countless times since 2014. Putin has consistently denied that the Ukraine acted of her own accord when opting for independence.

Those neo-Nazi Ukies were egged on by America, because, explains Hitchens, since 1992 “Washington has wanted to crush any revival of Russian power.”

If so, Washington could be forgiven. After all, during the previous 40 years “Russian power” had kept the world trembling on the edge of a nuclear holocaust.

However, if that indeed was Washington’s aim, it certainly went about achieving it in an odd way. Untold billions in US, and generally Western, investments poured into Russia, with a massive transfer of technology following in its wake.

Without it, Russia would indeed be what an American journalist once described as “Upper Volta with nukes.” Replace, as a bow to geographical gerrymandering, Upper Volta with Burkina Faso, and the description would still apply – but for the West’s acquiescence in the rise of Russian fascism.

Every piece of high-tech equipment in Russia has either been imported from the West or at least depends partly or wholly on Western components. This goes for the whole range of products, from computers and TV sets to ICBMs and warplanes.

Putin and his henchmen are driven in Mercedes limousines, not the Ladas available to hoi-polloi. And even those automotive answers to Chernobyl are manufactured at the plant built by Fiat in the late 1960s.

The blackmail weapon that goes by the name of Russian oil and gas industry would have no ammunition without American technology. Exploration and drilling equipment, gas-lift and other extraction systems, pipeline controls, electronic management all come courtesy of Western, mostly US, companies.

Rather than trying to “crush the revival of Russian power”, the West has gone to criminal lengths building it up. But propaganda isn’t about facts, is it?

Taking his cue from the Kremlin, Hitchens simply rehashes the mandated line: the Ukraine isn’t a free agent. She is America’s proxy, and, by murdering, raping and looting Ukrainian civilians, Russia is actually fighting the dastardly Yankees.

Hitchens also has an issue with Britain: “We pour in more weapons and shout encouragement from a safe distance.” How much better it would be if we stopped those supplies and let Putin take over the Ukraine. That would instantly solve her real problems:

“What Ukraine actually needs is action to cure its festering, universal corruption. It would also benefit from the pushing to the margins of the ultra-nationalist fanatics who have far too much influence in its government and armed forces. The war will make these problems worse, not better.”

First, the Ukraine didn’t start the war hoping thereby to rise to Hitchens’s lofty moral standards. She didn’t start it at all; Russia did. Or, if you believe Hitchens, it was actually America that provoked Russia into precipitate action.

The rest of that passage comes straight out of Kremlin briefings, starting with the Ukraine’s “festering, universal corruption”. Corruption does exist in the Ukraine, as some members of the Biden family can confirm. But it’s not even remotely as festering and universal as in Russia, whose regime is formed by history’s unique fusion of secret police and organised crime.

It’s true, however, that Kremlin Goebbelses are encouraged to emulate a thief who runs away from his pursuers, screaming “Stop thief!” louder than anyone else. By the looks of it, that order is obeyed not only by the Goebbelses, but also by the Lord Haw-Haws.

The same goes for the line about “the ultra-nationalist fanatics”. I can only quote the numbers I’ve quoted before: said fanatics garner a mere three per cent of the Ukrainian vote. Similar groups in Russia collectively poll over 20 per cent.

Even though such groups do exist in the Ukraine (as they do almost everywhere), they’ve partly redeemed themselves by their self-sacrificial heroism over the past six weeks.

For example, the notorious Azov Battalion was indeed fascisoid before the war. Its members were often photographed making inappropriate salutes against the backdrop of inappropriate flags.

They aren’t doing it now. Those youngsters are heroically defending Mariupol, trying to save at least some of its denizens from annihilation.

In addition to going about their military duties, the Azov fighters ring children with their own bodies to shield them from murderous fire. They risk (and lose) their own lives trying to save civilians from the ruins of bombed buildings about to collapse. And they do so without first securing the upper tiers with cables and winches, of which they have none.

Does this strike you as Nazi behaviour? And which side is fascist here?

Again Hitchens is loyally recycling the Kremlin line about denazifying the Ukraine. And what better way of achieving this laudable outcome than by bombing hospitals and kindergartens, torturing and executing civilians at will, looting and raping a swathe through the country?   

Then comes that old chestnut about Putin being provoked by Nato’s expansion, especially by “the taunting of Russia by President George W. Bush’s 2008 suggestion that Ukraine should actually join Nato… when Putin was still more or less open to reason”.

So was it more or less? If you read Hitchens’s own effluvia from that period, Putin was more than just open to reason. He had turned Russia into “the most conservative and Christian country in Europe”. Yet if you simply study history, you’ll find that Putin’s regime was every bit as fascist then as it is now.

Putin came to power by the expedient of blowing up apartment blocks in Moscow and elsewhere, killing more than 300 and injuring more than 1,000. That was blamed on Chechnya, which enabled Putin to consolidate his power by doing to that breakaway republic exactly what he is doing to the Ukraine now.

A year before Mr Bush’s infuriating suggestion, Putin brought nuclear war to London, where his hitmen poisoned Alexander Litvinenko (a British subject) with polonium in Grosvenor Square. It was a miracle that Litvinenko was the only one to die.

A massive cull of Russia’s own journalists had been going full pelt for years before Mr Bush spoke out of turn. For example, Putin, still “open to reason”, had the journalist Ivan Safronov defenestrated in 2007 for investigating the sale of Russian arms to Iran and Syria.

It’s the ever-increasing threat of “Russian power” that made Eastern European countries, including the Ukraine, seek the protection of Nato membership. Contrary to what Hitchens and his Kremlin ventriloquists claim, those long-suffering countries had every right to do so – and, as the current events prove, every reason.

Naturally, Hitchens’s piece wouldn’t have been complete without his rehashing the Kremlin mantra about the 2014 “mob putsch which overthrew Ukraine’s legitimate President Viktor Yanukovych… This putsch was the true beginning of the war now raging, the initial act of violence which triggered everything else.”

The word ‘putsch’ harmonises neatly with Hitchens’s Kremlin-inspired motif of the Ukraine being a Nazi state. In fact, the Maidan Revolution overthrew a Putin puppet to claim real, as opposed to bogus, independence.

Yanukovych was a career criminal who in his impetuous youth had served two prison terms for robbery and assault. When that worthy individual rose to power, he became largely responsible for fostering the very corruption that so upsets Hitchens.

That thug himself lived in a palace with a private zoo, taking lifestyle tips from his Kremlin masters. When the people finally rose against Yanukovych, he had his police kill dozens of demonstrators and then fled to Russia, begging Putin to intervene militarily.

Putin obliged, and days later Russia invaded the Ukraine for the first time. Yanukovych wasn’t reinstated though, and in 2019 a Ukrainian court found him guilty of treason (in absentia).

It’s useful to remember, that, unlike their Russian equivalents, Ukrainian courts are independent and Ukrainian elections are verifiably honest. The country has a long way to go before she shakes the Soviet dust off her feet, but at least she is making a real effort.

The American goal, “the elimination of Russia as a major country”, may well be achieved, moans Hitchens. But “someone had better be careful about what happens to all its nuclear weapons if that comes to pass.”

This is an enunciation of Putin’s nuclear threat, as expressed both by him and his henchmen thousands of times. But Hitchens ought to pay attention in class: Putin promises a nuclear inferno to prevent “the elimination of Russia as a major country”, not to avenge that tragedy.

In any case, forget Russia. It’s China that’s the real threat. Her “police state… grows in strength and power, biding its time.”

So the man does pay attention to the Kremlin’s briefings. The odd lapse here and there notwithstanding, Hitchens is a conscientious pupil. He also knows how to add a touch of verisimilitude to his lies.

China is indeed a police state, and it’s indeed a factor of strategic danger. But alas, the West is threatened from more than one direction. It takes a warped or else mendacious logic to maintain that, because China is a threat, Russia isn’t.

In fact, that’s what Putin’s useful idiots in the West have been shouting for years, trying to divert attention from the rise of expansionist Russian fascism. Persisting with that ruse now, when thousands of Ukrainians are being massacred and the very system of European security is creaking at the seams, betokens staggering immorality.

Or else treason. Wars have always been fought not only with guns but also with words, now more than ever. Warring parties seek to undermine each other’s resolve by carpet-bombing whole populations with propaganda.

I find it hard to understand why a wielder of such weapons within our own country is less of an enemy than the monster who threatens to turn the West into “radioactive dust”, to quote one of Hitchens’s Russian colleagues.

Since Britain isn’t at war with Russia de jure, there are no legal grounds for charging Hitchens with treason. But since Russia is waging de facto war on Britain, along with what’s left of the civilised world, there is every justification for cutting off his access to mass media.

For Hitchens isn’t supporting any side in any argument. His weekly articles are enemy action. Pure and simple.