Saints speak out for Jeremy Vine

TV presenter Jeremy Vine got in trouble for doing his job well.

During a phone-in on his morning show, a gentleman with a strong northern accent shed a tear for those poor Russian soldiers led to slaughter by Putin’s lies.

Such empathy is a laudable sentiment, and indeed watching those weeping Russian POWs, some of them barely post-pubescent, is heart-rending. And didn’t Christ tell us to love our enemies? Of course he did, and his commandment echoed through that phoned-in comment.

As it did, more truly if less obviously, through Mr Vine’s reply: “But the brutal reality is, if you put on a uniform for Putin and you go and fight his war, you probably deserve to die, don’t you?”

The northerner exploded in a fit of fury. They are just innocent conscripts! How can you say that?!?

After that the comments came in thick and fast. “What a pathetic excuse for a human being. This guy needs taking off the air,” ranted one viewer. Another fumed about “rancid and vile comments from Vine.”

Before I make moral points, a factual one is in order. Two-thirds of Russia’s armed forces aren’t conscripts but professional contract soldiers (kontraktniki in Russian). But that’s a minor quibble. After all, in our egalitarian times people don’t have to be familiar with the subject to pass a strong opinion on it.

Yet Mr Vine’s detractors are wrong not only factually, but also morally – while his “rancid and vile comments” are consistent with Judaeo-Christian morality.

Christian love of one’s enemy doesn’t presuppose pacifism. It only means that we must pray for the souls of our enemies in heaven. Yet first things first: the order of the day is to make sure they get there – but with an important proviso.

Killing is justified only in the context of just war. That was first made explicit by St Paul: “But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.” (Romans 13:4)

Thus killing evildoers is God’s work for, as Mr Vine put it, “they deserve to die”. St Paul’s was the first saintly advocacy of Jeremy, but far from the last.

The Christian doctrine of just war naturally spun out of St Paul’s teaching. Its most consistent exegetes were St Augustine of Hippo and, centuries later, St Thomas Aquinas.

Augustine writes in his City of God: “They who have waged war in obedience to the divine command, or in conformity with His laws, have represented in their persons the public justice or the wisdom of government, and in this capacity have put to death wicked men; such persons have by no means violated the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill’.”

And, “But, say they, the wise man will wage Just Wars. As if he would not all the rather lament the necessity of just wars, if he remembers that he is a man; for if they were not just he would not wage them, and would therefore be delivered from all wars.”

Since Russian servicemen are waging an unjust, criminal war, they are personally responsible for every Ukrainian killed, every block of flats, kindergarten or school blown up, every desperate person leaving everything behind and trying to run away from the carnage. (Millions of them, mostly Russian speakers, are running towards the West and away from Russia. Don’t they know that Putin has come to defend them?)

Only fools, knaves and Messrs Hitchens, Farage et al. agitate against the justness of the Ukraine’s cause. But if some decent people still harbour doubts on that score, they should consider that yesterday heavy Russian artillery shelled Zaporozh nuclear power station, the biggest in Europe.

Mercifully, the resulting fires were contained before they reached the reactor. But Putin’s aim was clear. He wanted to create a nuclear disaster 10 times worse than Chernobyl, which, depending on the wind direction, could have irradiated not just the Ukraine but also most of Europe or much of Russia, possibly all the way to Moscow.

I can’t easily discern any moral or legal difference between that evil crime and the actual use of nuclear weapons. If anyone still thinks that Putin would have qualms about resorting to such doomsday armaments, he has another think coming.

The other day I tried to understand why Putin is cowering in his Altai bunker. One possible explanation, I suggested, is that he is planning to launch a nuclear strike and, knowing that a retaliation would come, wants to hide away from Moscow. His yesterday’s attempt to commit yet another crime against humanity makes that explanation plausible.

While we are on the subject of morality, Joe Biden should stop wearing his Catholicism on his sleeve. Instead he should consider his handling of the situation in light of basic human decency, never mind Christian doctrine.

Allow me to recap: he had known for weeks that Putin’s criminal assault was coming. The rest of us feared, doubted, hoped for the best – but he knew. His ironclad intelligence sources had unimpeachable informers: the families of Putin’s henchmen who lived in the West.

There are hundreds of them, sons, daughters and wives of Kremlin bandits, and their daddies and husbands had to forewarn them. Get out, liquidate the assets, take all the cash out of the bank, buy Bitcoin – that sort of thing.

As any intelligence operative will tell you, when hundreds of people know a secret, it’s no longer a secret. Moreover, some of those westernised Russians might have gone native, enough to have their loyalties divided. Staying on the right side of Western authorities would have been important for such people.

Hence Biden and his Nato colleagues didn’t have to indulge in guesswork like the rest of us. They knew for sure – and yet didn’t take any preemptive measures, beyond their hackneyed expressions of deep concern. The only thing they did was assure Putin that no possibility of military response was on the table come what may.

The first tranche of sanctions should have been imposed, in a staggered mode, the moment they knew the invasion was definitely coming. By way of avuncular advice, Putin ought to have been told that the first tranche would have follow-ups. Each step in the direction of the Ukraine would be punished by new, more draconian sanctions – including the ultimate one: trade embargo on Russian hydrocarbons.

Perhaps Putin would have thought twice before ordering the invasion. Even if he hadn’t, at least the sanctions would have had some more time to bite deep into the flesh of the Russian economy, undermining the war effort.

As it is, the ultimate sanction hasn’t been imposed even now. European countries continue to pay cash for Russian gas while, even more incomprehensibly, Americans continue to import Russian oil. The Western allies are punishing Putin’s war with one hand and financing it with the other.

So yes, by all means let’s pray for the souls of everyone killed in this war, Ukrainian, Russian or other. But at the same let’s make sure our moral compass isn’t going haywire.

Because those Russian soldiers are dying for an unjust cause, they deserve to die. Jeremy Vine was right about that.

P.S. I’m looking forward with eager anticipation to Hitchens’s Sunday column. What excuse for Putin will he concoct next? My guess is, it’ll be based on moral equivalence. We bombed Belgrade and invaded Iraq, so what’s the difference? I’ll answer this question when he actually poses it. For the time being, I’m just trying to preempt another attack on our intelligence.