Putin’s propagandist co-opts an ally

This season is ideal for setting aside old animosities and finding new friends, but not only for that, by the looks of things.

Getting into his version of the Easter spirit, Peter Hitchens keeps resurrecting his lies, while at the same time finding an unexpected ally in his opponents’ ranks.

He also takes a customary swipe at his detractors of whom, thank God, I’m manifestly not one. That too is testimony to his capacity for Christian forgiveness, for I know he reads my virulent attacks on everything he holds dear.

To wit: Hitchens sneers at “all those who have been calling me a ‘Putin apologist’ for the past month or so.” That exculpates me beyond even a shadow of doubt.

For I don’t call him a ‘Putin apologist’. I call him a ‘Putin agent’, usually adding that whether he acts as such wittingly or otherwise is of no practical significance.

The difference between an apologist and an agent is that the former looks for plausible arguments and supports them with selectively chosen facts. The latter cares nothing about either arguments or facts, however selectively chosen. He simply repeats verbatim whatever lies his idol mouths. Plausibility isn’t even an issue.

Whether such an agent acts in that capacity because he has been ordered to do so or out of some inner need for sycophancy is important to his priest, family and close friends. Everyone else should only be concerned about the effects of such actions, not the motivation behind them.  

In addition, I’ve been saying all this not “for the past month or so”, but for the best part of 10 years. Hitchens has been writing emetic panegyrics to the strong leader we should have, who has created “the most conservative and Christian country in Europe”, for at least as long as that. He only began to qualify his admiration for Putin’s fascist regime when its crimes became too blatant and numerous to ignore.

Usually he employs the old ‘yes, but’ trick, saying things like “yes, Putin is a tyrant, but…” – he is still the strong leader we should have, and he has still created the most conservative and Christian country in Europe.

However, Hitchens doesn’t feel compelled to mitigate his lies. On the contrary, he keeps ratcheting them up.

Yesterday, for example, he described Victor Yanukovych as “the non-aligned, legitimate” president of the Ukraine. I can understand ‘legitimate’, in the same sense in which Hitler was legitimate, for both men were elected, and we are all supposed to believe in the redemptive power of the ballot box.

But it takes an unalloyed contempt for the readers’ intelligence to describe that Putin stooge as ‘non-aligned’. Yanukovych was about as non-aligned as Vidkun Quisling and Pierre Laval.

Yet those mendacious modifiers are essential to set up Hitchens’s favourite trick of describing the Ukraine’s 2014 revolution as a “coup d’état” and a “violent mob putsch”. This echoes Russian propaganda, according to which the Ukraine is badly in need of de-Nazification.

All this is old hat – Hitchens repeats himself week in, week out in the monotonous, humourless drawl of someone who suffers from a bad case of perseveration.

But this time around he found an unexpected and welcome ally in Robert Kagan, a prominent American neoconservative, whose credentials for infallible objectivity Hitchens establishes by describing him as an “anti-Russian hawk”.

Now, if there is one thing Hitchens and I agree on, it’s our loathing of neoconservatism. I even wrote a whole book about that political breed (Democracy as a Neocon Trick), where I describe it as a temperamentally left-wing movement with an added element of proselytising American supremacism.

Apparently Mr Kagan has opined that Putin’s attack on the Ukraine was caused by American provocations. “He is far too intelligent to pretend,” writes Hitchens, “that America’s relentless expansion of Nato since 1998 has not infuriated many Russians, even moderate ones.” 

Hitchens craves allies so badly that he even quotes Kagan as saying: “Although it is obscene to blame the US for Putin’s inhumane attack on Ukraine, to insist that the invasion was entirely unprovoked is misleading.” [My emphasis.]

Hitchens is even willing to overlook the demonstrable fact that he himself is guilty of the sin Kagan accurately describes as an obscenity. But, acting in the same Easter spirit of conciliation, I’m ready to agree with Kagan.

The invasion indeed was provoked, if not just by the expansion of Nato. But fair enough, that too infuriated Putin, no doubt about that. This, however, is irrelevant if true.

A lowlife in a bad part of town may be infuriated by the sight of a gentleman wearing a pinstriped suit. A husband may be infuriated by his wife serving coffee less hot than he likes. A Chelsea FC supporter may be infuriated by someone who walks down Fulham Road wearing an Arsenal scarf.

However, if such fury leads to a physical assault, no jury will accept that emotion as an extenuating circumstance. Mitigation will only come into play if the emotion was plausibly justified.

So did Putin’s fury have a legitimate geopolitical concern behind it? Did he feel threatened by, say, Estonia, joining Nato? To answer these questions in the affirmative, we have to accept as real Putin’s oft-stated belief that Nato expansion threatens the very existence of Russia.

In other words, the more Nato members border on Russia, the more precarious her geopolitical security.

Well, if so, I find it hard to explain Putin’s attempt to conquer (sorry, I mean to de-Nazify) the Ukraine. If that plan succeeds, Russia will get to share her borders with four more Nato members (Hungary, Slovakia, Poland and Romania).

One would think Putin would do his utmost to make sure a strong Ukraine acts as an impregnable buffer between Russia and Nato. Yet he is desperately trying to eliminate that buffer.

Obviously, Putin doesn’t believe Nato will ever launch a devastating first strike to wipe Russia off the map. In this case, his strategic judgement is sound: no such calamity will ever happen.

Nato can only ever threaten Russia’s geopolitical aspirations by checking her westward advance aiming to recreate and expand the Russo-Soviet empire. Rather than conquering Russia, Nato may prevent her from conquering others. It’s only thus that Putin’s fury at Nato’s expansion can be explained.

His hatred of the Ukraine is more complex than that. It’s akin to the hatred East German chieftains Ulbricht and Honecker felt for West Germany or assorted Kims for South Korea.

Before the invasion, the Ukraine was just beginning to show signs of recovering from her gruesome Soviet past. She still suffered from the same legacy of corruption and inefficiency that’s so ruinous to Russia, but she was firmly on the path to better things.

The Ukraine has oriented herself towards the West not just in her economics, but also in her domestic politics. She has created a truly pluralistic culture with real, as opposed to fake, political parties and real, as opposed to bogus, elections.

Ukrainian media are free to criticise the government as they see fit, and no religious confession claims dictatorial sway – the Ukraine is truly ecumenical. (‘Unlike Russia’ could have been tagged on to all those statements.) Even now, Ukrainian adherents to the Moscow Patriarchate are in no way molested.

Thus conditions are in place for the Ukraine to become freer and more prosperous than Russia, especially since she too is blessed with rich natural resources. Because the Ukraine in no way threatens Western interests, never mind Western security, she can confidently count on Western support – just as West Germany and South Korea could.

That’s what really infuriates Putin, the prospect of a free and rich country in his back yard, inhabited by what he insists are the same people. That of course is a lie, for Ukrainians aren’t Russian twins. But they are undeniably siblings or at least first cousins, which is close enough.

If the Ukraine matches Poland, to say nothing of, say, Italy or Spain (which is far from impossible), the Russians would be aghast. They can tolerate, say, Estonians living much better, for they have always been perceived as more, well, Western than the Russians. But Ukrainians?

That’s what would really threaten the survival of Russia as a country with imperial ambitions. If Ukrainians can do it, how come we can’t? That question would eventually be asked loudly and persistently enough to bring down not only Putin’s government, but also any other sharing the same desiderata.

Such is the real provocation that has elicited Putin’s monstrous response. And all his Western allies, emphatically including Hitchens, should be subject to the same sanctions. If RT has been banned from Europe, and Hitchens says the same things as RT, then… The conclusion seems obvious.