RAF is about to bomb Moscow

No? You don’t believe me? Then read Peter Hitchens’s latest piece of pro-Putin propaganda. You’ll find out that “a frantic lobby in this country and in the USA wants to get us into… war against Russia.”

And what do you know, “A war on European territory could be a truly terrible thing.” You could see me wipe my brow in relief even as we speak.

For ‘could be’ means there has been no war yet. Those 14,000 people killed since Russia’s 2014 aggression against the Ukraine must have committed suicide. And those two million displaced Ukrainians must have fled their homes just for the hell of it. Thank God for peace.

I sometimes wonder why Hitchens regularly repeats word for word the effluvia of Putin’s Goebbelses, acting in effect as an agent of influence. In the past, I explored various possibilities, but by now they’ve crystallised into two: a) he is paid to do Putin’s bidding or b) he is unhinged. I hope it’s the latter: a medical problem rates sympathy; treason, only contempt.

In either case, one has to regret that The Mail on Sunday continues to provide a forum for enemy propaganda. Surely its editors can’t possibly think that Hitchens’s outpourings on this subject are sound?

Today he follows his usual pattern. First he establishes his bona fides as a Russian expert: “As I know a bit about Russia, and once lived there…”

Take my word for it: Hitchens never lived in Russia. He was posted there as a foreign correspondent, which means that for a couple of years he shared the same bubble with the upper echelons of the Soviet chieftains. Truly living in the Soviet Union meant feeling every second that one’s life was in the hands of Yahoos who had already murdered 60 million of one’s countrymen.

Then Hitchens issues his customary disclaimer clumsily designed to defang any accusation of bias: “Yes, Russia is ruled by nasty, sinister despots. But…” The disclaimer out of the way, that little conjunction at the end is the key opening the door to the most blatant pro-Kremlin propaganda this side of RT.

We have nothing to fear from Russia because “it is a defeated, poor country with an economy about the same size as Italy’s”. This doesn’t pass muster as a valid argument even at Hitchens’s primitive level. Surely he must know enough history to realise that poor nations with lean and hungry looks can not only threaten their wealthier enemies but actually defeat them?

Two great empires of the past, Rome and Byzantium, were brought to their knees by relative paupers. Too far back?

Fine, then look at Nazi Germany whose GDP was but a fraction of the combined wealth of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Benelux and France. Hitler still managed to overrun all those countries in about 10 months, driving the British Expeditionary Corps into the sea while he was at it.

Or consider the Soviet Union in the 1930s, when its people were actually starving. That didn’t prevent the Soviets from creating the biggest and best-equipped army in the world, which managed to regroup after being practically wiped out in June-December, 1941, and win a war against a formidable adversary.

Still too far in the past? Then cast your eye back to the 1970s, when the USSR’s economy was much smaller than it is today. That still didn’t prevent the Soviets from amassing a force of 50,000 tanks aiming their cannon at the West, and threatening the world with nuclear annihilation (a legacy lovingly maintained by Putin’s Russia).

Comparing the economies of civilised countries and Russia is a fruitless task. What matters there is not what’s in the shops, but what’s in the silos.

Authoritarian regimes have the luxury democracies can never enjoy at peacetime: they can concentrate all their resources in the military area. Both Stalin’s economy in the 1930s and Brezhnev’s in the 1970s did just that. Hence they managed to put together formidable armies – to the accompaniment of fellow travellers’ bleating about the country being poor and therefore unthreatening.

According to Hitchens, another factor of our safety is that Britain has no common border with Russia. Citing that as a serious consideration betokens an antediluvian concept of warfare that certainly predates even Napoleon.

Britain didn’t have a common border with France either, and yet she suffered a suffocating continental blockade and a sanguinary war. Neither did Britain have a common border with Nazi Germany, which didn’t stop those Luftwaffe bombs (many of them Soviet-made, by the way) falling on London.

Talking about war strategies from the standpoint of territorial proximity is especially inane now, in an age of Russia’s ICBMs and Mach-2 Tu-160 bombers. Yet this is Hitchens’s pet argument he lets loose in practically every article.

In that spirit, he echoes not just Putin’s propaganda, but also Stalin’s, circa 1939. Then Stalin cited Finland’s proximity to Leningrad as a justification for pouncing on that tiny country. Now Hitchens implicitly justifies any future aggression by Russia by saying almost exactly the same thing.

“Nato troops,” he writes, are now often to be seen in Narva, Estonia, and “Russia’s second city St Petersburg [is but] 99 miles from the Estonian frontier.” So what?

Estonia is a Nato member, in case Hitchens hasn’t noticed. Nato is a defensive alliance put together to thwart any Russian aggression against Europe. Hence some exchanges of military personnel among member countries is a normal practice.

At present, a formidable force of 1,112 Nato soldiers are deployed in Estonia, serving as potential sacrificial pawns in a tripwire mode should Russian hordes strike. Kremlin propagandists – echoed by Hitchens – scream their heads off about Nato’s eastward expansion, moaning about the threat this presents to Russia’s security.

The underlying assumption is that those 1,112 Estonia-based soldiers may one day drive across the border the way Napoleon’s 500,000 soldiers did in 1812 and Hitler’s 3,000,000 in 1941.

If he and Putin are genuinely worried about that, they should ponder the likelihood of any Western country launching an unprovoked attack on Russia. If they think, or pretend to think, that this probability is greater than zero, one has to doubt either their honesty or their sanity.

The rest of the piece is an exercise in the old Soviet stratagem of moral equivalence. Yes, we have the KGB, but you have the CIA. We murder people abroad, you poison Castro’s cigars. You put rockets into Turkey, we put them into Cuba.

Hitchens’s version of that trick is comparing the 2014 Soviet thrust into the Ukraine with America’s 1845-1847 conquest of Texas and California. Using that as his canvas, he paints a dystopic picture of sick fantasy:

“Imagine that the USA had lost the Cold War and the USSR had won it.” Then “instead of Ukraine being detached from Moscow rule, and slowly reeled into Nato and the EU, imagine that an equally huge, fertile, productive and strategic chunk of the USA, including Texas and California, was encouraged to declare independence and form a new Spanish-speaking nation hostile to the USA?”

This is a variation on the old Soviet theme: don’t accuse us of murdering millions of our own people when you have Jim Crow. Moral equivalence all around.

America’s theft of Mexico’s territory was indeed illegal and immoral. So were Sweden’s attacks on Russia in the 17^th century, Napoleon’s continental blockade, Hannibal’s forays into Rome and Alexander’s conquest of Persia. If we look back far enough, we can uncover any number of beastly acts committed by most of today’s countries and their precursors.

However, using such findings as an excuse for today’s aggression is cloud cuckoo land. Yes, America sinned against Mexico and international law. But she has partly redeemed her sins by helping to defeat Hitler and then, as the lynchpin of Nato, protecting Europe against the Soviets, now Russians, ever since.

Contrary to Hitchens’s animadversions, Putin’s Russia presents an existential threat to Europe’s security. She has already started two aggressive wars in Europe, against Georgia in 2008 and the Ukraine in 2014. Any further aggression eliciting nothing but a token response from the West will put paid to the post-war system of collective security, leaving Europe at the mercy of Russia’s blackmail.

Both Putin and Hitchens detest the Ukraine’s popular uprising, which Hitchens invariably describes as a “putsch”, against the Kremlin’s puppet regime. How dare those marginal people rise against what to Hitchens is “the most conservative and Christian country in Europe [albeit run by “nasty and sinister despots”]?

Hitchens is another illustration to my yesterday’s piece on ex-communists. His loins ache for the kind of strong Russian leader he worshipped in his youth. We never forget our first love, although sometimes we pretend to. As Hitchens does each time he spins his faux-conservative yarns.