Putin’s faithful mouthpiece

You don’t have to know Russian to read Kremlin propaganda. If you have the stomach for such emetic agitprop, all you have to do is read Peter Hitchens.

Sometimes he regurgitates Putin’s hysterical shrieks, at other times, such as today, he just repeats them straight as they come, word for word. That way there’s no risk of distorting the message on its way to the gullible Western public.

He starts out by bizarrely claiming that both Britain and the US would be police states if they weren’t protected by variously wide waterways. Taking similar subjunctive liberties, I can aver with equal justification that the two countries would be run by cannibalistic tribes.

If we leave the subjunctive territory, we’ll notice that Scandinavian countries haven’t become police states even in the absence of an ocean separating them from, say, Russia. So it’s not just about geography, is it? Let’s just note that this venerable columnist is mouthing arrant nonsense and move on.

Actually, Hitchens uses the time-dishonoured Russian trick of blaming geography for the country’s long history of tyrannical regimes. That poor nation simply had to become the scourge of the world and of its own people because she “has no natural defences of any kind.”

Having regaled us with this startling geographical discovery, Hitchens proceeds to explain its geopolitical ramifications. Or rather psychological ones: unprotected as they are by waterways, the Russians perpetually and rightfully feel insecure.

Oh, is that why Russia has been pouncing on all her neighbours throughout history? Why she voraciously gobbled up whole countries in the 18^th century, when Catherine II said: “If we didn’t have an ocean to the north, we’d run out of soldiers”? Why Russia was called ‘the gendarme of Europe’ and ‘the prison of nations’ in the 19^th century? Why she grabbed half of Europe after 1945?

Hitchens’s view of European history can only charitably be called misguided. More to the point, it’s precisely the excuse Russian rulers have always proffered for their own aggressive acquisitiveness. Serious historians laugh at such clumsy musings. But Hitchens isn’t any kind of historian. On this evidence, he isn’t even a journalist. He is a propagandist.  

Then comes his favourite trick of establishing his bona fides as a connoisseur of the innermost crevices of the Russian soul. Back in the 90s Hitchens spent a few months in Moscow, which experience is supposed to have given him a unique insight into the country’s people and language.

“The Russian word for ‘safety’ is quite unlike its English equivalent. That word is ‘bezopasnost’. It is wholly negative. It means ‘without danger’. Because, in Russia, danger is the normal default position. Western statesmen and media, mostly knowing nothing of Russia, fail to grasp this.”

Now we are into lexicology, that word also means ‘security’. It’s the ‘B’ in KGB/FSB, an organisation that, among other things, is charged with the responsibility of spreading disinformation. That word of Latin origin came into Western languages courtesy of Kremlin propagandists, among whom Hitchens can claim pride of place.

Having established his psycho-geopolitical premises, Hitchens smoothly links the past with the present. And at present, Putin is running scared because the Ukrainian army has launched a remarkable counteroffensive in the Kursk Region.

Putin’s (and Hitchens’s) line is that Russia’s monstrous assault on the Ukraine was merely a preventive strike designed to check NATO’s eastward expansion. And British Challenger 2 tanks rolling into Russia prove that Putin has been right all along.

This is something else NATO leaders fail to understand because they don’t listen to Hitchens (and Putin): “Don’t they grasp that this attack hands a gigantic long-term propaganda victory to the Moscow tyrant Putin? For years, he argued that eastward expansion of NATO would place a hostile alliance, armed by the Western powers, on Russia’s border, 500 miles from Moscow.”

And now he has been proved right: the presence of British-made armour on Russian soil is an act of NATO aggression. But what’s that about “the Moscow tyrant”? For years, Hitchens has been extolling Putin as the leader of “the most conservative and Christian country in Europe”. And now he’s a tyrant? Vlad must have given Peter a special dispensation to use that term for credibility’s sake.

Now, those British and American armoured vehicles aren’t being driven by Britons and Americans. The drivers and gunners are all Ukrainians who gratefully use imported kit. This point can’t be ignored, not in good faith that is. No NATO invasion of that hypersensitive country is taking place.

By the same token, in the 1960s thousands of American servicemen were killed by Soviet-made weapons. But because it wasn’t the Soviets who wielded them, the Americans didn’t see that as casus belli. Since then, Russian-made AKs and other weapons have been used by evildoers to murder thousands of Western citizens. Yet Russia hasn’t been held culpable for such crimes – and neither does she have any right to complain about those Challenger tanks.

Yet Hitchens has the gall to write about “Ukraine’s invasion of Russia – in which British-made tanks are trundling through Russian villages.” That’s repeating the line that even some Kremlin apologists are embarrassed to utter. After all these months of mass murder perpetrated by Russians, talking about “Ukraine’s invasion of Russia” in any context is worse than immoral. It’s indecent.

Having delivered the Kremlin message, Hitchens goes back to probing the Russian psyche and, while he’s at it, distorting history along the lines first laid down by Stalin. Kursk, he explains, is “a city that has huge emotional and historical significance in the Russian mind, especially thanks to the cruel, incredibly bloody fighting in and around it in the 1940s,” when the Soviet Union was “doing most of the actual fighting against Hitler”.

Reading that, I experienced a touch of nostalgia mixed with reflux. For that was the version of history that Soviet chieftains, from Stalin onwards, were drilling into millions of Soviet heads. Hence most of my classmates were sure that the USSR bore the whole brunt of the war – and unsure whether the Allies actually took part in the fighting and, if yes, on which side.

We weren’t told that Stalin entered the war as Hitler’s ally, and so he remained for almost two years, while Britain stood alone in opposing evil in Europe. We didn’t know that Soviet oil was powering Nazi tanks and Soviet-made bombs were raining on London. Nor did we ever hear such names as El Alamein or Midway. We knew what we were told, which was exactly what Hitchens is telling his readers now.

Instead of waffling on about the “huge emotional significance” the Russians attach to Kursk, he should be talking about the huge emotional significance Ukrainians attach to their cities demolished, their children killed, their civilians looted, raped and murdered, their sovereign country attacked without any provocation (other than ‘emotional’ and ‘psychological’, that is) by a vile aggressor… sorry, I mean “the most conservative and Christian country in Europe”.

At the end, Hitchens throws down the gauntlet to Boris Johnson: “I am still keen to debate this issue with you, at your earliest convenience.”

A few years ago, I wrote about the Russians poisoning the Skripals, after which Hitchens graced me with an e-mail. There’s no proof of Russian involvement, he insisted, again repeating the Kremlin line. In response, I issued to him the same challenge he is now issuing to Johnson.

That was 2018, and I’m still waiting for a reply. But the offer stands, and I’ll even leave the choice of venue to Hitchens – provided it’s not the Russian Embassy, where the audience would be much friendlier to him than to me.