No peace with the wicked

The other day a friend of mine had dinner with his publisher in Paris. The Frenchman said he supported Putin unreservedly and called Zelensky a “war criminal”.

Before Bucha, such sentiments would have been merely stupid. Now they are evil.

They are also scary when expressed in France, where a Putin agent of influence has a good chance of becoming president and re-enacting the dystopian script of The Manchurian Candidate.

If you question this description of Marine Le Pen, consider her statements the other day. In common with some of our hacks (one in particular springs to mind), she not only expressed solidarity with Putin, but did so by repeating Kremlin propaganda practically verbatim.

Putin’s mole called for “strategic rapprochement” between Nato and Putin’s Russia after the end of the current war. By way of justification, she offered the canard peddled by Putin’s Goebbelses for at least a decade.

If we are beastly to Putin, said Le Pen, he’ll get in bed with China, and we don’t want that to happen: “This is in the interest of France and Europe but also I think the United States… which has no interest in seeing a close Sino-Russian relationship emerging.” Nether does China, on current evidence.

She also added that France must again pull out of Nato’s military command, for starters. Actually, who needs Nato anyway: “We must ask about the role of the alliance after the end of the Warsaw Pact.”

I can only repeat myself. Before Bucha, such sentiments would have been merely stupid. Now they are evil.

At a time when a fascist regime is committing genocide in a major European country, openly threatening to do the same to many others, only two types of people can question the role of Nato: either clinical morons or Putin’s agents. And I don’t think Le Pen is moronic.

As the investigation of Russia’s crimes in Bucha gathers momentum, more and more gruesome facts come to light.

Scenes are emerging of parents tied to chairs and made to watch their children, girls and boys, being tortured and raped, with the whole family executed afterwards. At other times, the roles would be reversed, with the children tied to the chairs to watch their mothers being raped and killed.

Dozens of girls aged 10 to 14 were kept in a cellar for days, being raped all the time and knowing that their parents had been murdered. Those girls, nine of whom are now pregnant, weren’t killed. Instead they were told didactically to remember not to cross Russia ever again.

Hundreds of locals were tortured and then executed in the proven KGB style, with a bullet in the nape of the neck. For the sake of variety, some were hanged.

It’s not just Bucha either. There are dozens of similar places where the atrocities are as bad, or even worse.

Nor are these isolated incidents that tend to happen in all wars. In this war, it’s a deliberate genocidal strategy aimed at breaking the Ukrainian soldiers’ morale by annihilating their families back home. The damage isn’t collateral. It’s intended.

It’s only in this context that the appointment of Gen. Dvornikov as supreme Russian commander in the Ukraine can be properly understood.

Generals are seldom jacks-of-all-trades. Some are better known for their steadfastness in defence, others for their mastery of offensive thrusts.

Gen. Dvornikov is known for neither. His stock in trade is mass murder of civilians with every available weapon, including battle gas.

He first distinguished himself in this type of warfare (and no other) as a regimental commander in the second Chechen War. But he really made his bones as the commander of Russian troops in Syria.

It was Dvornikov who used chemical weapons there, and not just on armed units. He gassed the civilians of Aleppo and then proceeded to raze that city, one of the world’s oldest.

By appointing a commander known for such narrow specialisation, Putin made his intentions plain. Unable to make any headway against the Ukrainian army, he wants to exterminate Ukrainian civilians.

If traditional weapons don’t do the trick, Putin’s hitman Dvornikov will turn to gas, and we’ve already had unproven reports of chemical weapons being used in Mariupol. And if that doesn’t work, he won’t hesitate to go nuclear.

Some knowledgeable commentators doubted a fortnight ago whether Russian officers would comply with the order to use such weapons on Ukrainians. No such doubts now: Gen. Dvornikov will push any button he is ordered to push. And he’ll enjoy doing so.

Calling for a rapprochement with a regime capable of committing such atrocities on a vast scale is beyond evil. It would be downright satanic if Le Pen acted of her own accord.

But I for one don’t think for a second that she is a free agent. She’s Putin’s agent, and her election would deal a severe blow not just to France, and not only to the West, but to our whole civilisation.

Mercifully, other countries don’t share Le Pen’s doubts about the role of Nato. Both Finland and Sweden, which historically tried to maintain neutrality (and Finland, more than just that), are now falling over themselves to join.

Unlike Le Pen, along with other assorted quislings and useful idiots, they understand that the Ukraine is only the first stage in Russia’s war on the West. They know that, had Putin succeeded in his plan to overrun the Ukraine in a few days, he wouldn’t have stopped.

The Baltics would probably have been next, and then Finland and Sweden would have been given a powerful reason to regret their attempts at wishy-washy neutrality.

No neutrality is possible after Bucha, nor any ‘rapprochement’ with the evil, aggressive regime in the Kremlin. The line of moral demarcation has been drawn. The world has gone binary: people are either against Putin’s fascism or for it.

Those who are against may feel that way for all sorts of reasons, not all of them moral or otherwise praiseworthy. Some politicians, for example, may only want to ride the way of anti-Putin sentiment to electoral victory.

But those who still support Putin are unquestionably accomplices to evil, and therefore evil themselves. The middle ground has been annihilated by bombs raining on civilians; it has been strewn with the mangled bodies of innocent people, many of whom had been tortured and raped before they died.

I wish I could vote in the French runoff election. I’d pinch my nostrils and vote for Macron, or rather against Le Pen. More than once, if I could.