When Lenin wrote about eliminating whole social classes, everyone thought it was a figure of speech. Surely not? Alas, most definitely yes. The chap wasn’t carried away by his own evil rhetoric, he really was evil.
Neither did people believe Hitler was going to exterminate all Jews. Fine, he didn’t like them, but then who did? But murdering millions of people? Preposterous. Of course he wouldn’t. But he did.
In that spirit, I suggest you take mainstream Russian propagandists at their word. When they say Britain has no right to exist, and it’s up to Russia to do something about that, they mean it.
Such is the view of Gen. Andrey Gurulyov, a member of the State Duma, Russia’s parliament, where his low opinion of Britain is shared widely enough to be considered mainstream.
The other day the Ukrainian Army launched its biggest rocket attack on Russian territory, and Gen. Gurulyov believes that the wages of that sin should be a complete obliteration of that bothersome neighbour. But all in good time.
Because the Ukrainians used British Storm Shadow missiles in the attack, the good general insists Britain should be wiped off the face of the Earth first. “This attack,” he insisted, “is a direct reason for Britain simply not to be on Earth”, but to be nuked out of existence, a view he believes is universally shared all over the world.
“I think 80 per cent of the world will clap for us. Make it 100 per cent,” he said. With all due respect, I have to disagree with the general’s calculations. I have no data at my disposal to contest the 80 per cent estimate, but 100 per cent means everybody. However, I probably know a couple of hundred people in various countries personally, and I can guarantee that none of them wants Britain to suffer such a gruesome fate.
Still, far be it from me to hold against anybody a slight exaggeration caused by polemical zeal. We’re all capable of saying things in the heat of an argument that we later regret.
In this case, however, Gen. Gurulyov has a bit of previous. Unleashing nuclear holocaust on Britain is his recurrent theme, which either means emotions have little role to play in his statements, or else the general’s emotional state is permanently febrile.
When Russia invaded the Ukraine in 2022, and it became clear that all NATO members supported the victim of the aggression as best they could, Gurulyov suggested they should all be nuked. But already then he put Britain at the top of his pecking order.
Yes, he said, Russia should definitely bomb Warsaw, Paris and Berlin. But let’s take out London first.
Later that year, Gurulyov encouraged Putin to “launch missile strikes on the British Isles,” which “would spell the end of the British Crown.” At that time, my good and worried friend in Holland suggested I should move out of London for the duration of the war. He’d rather I wasn’t incinerated by a nuclear bomb.
In June last year I was able to return the favour when Gurulyov suggested that Russia attack the Netherlands with nuclear weapons to disrupt energy supply to Europe. However, both my friend and I courageously stayed put, displaying the resolve of the British royal family who refused to depart for Canada during the Blitz. So you see, commoners can be brave too.
Gurulyov offers penetrating geopolitical insights in support of his explosive ideas. As he explains, Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine is “a war for survival, for the survival of civilisation, for the survival of our Russia, but not just of Russia – of the countries around us too.”
Let me see if I understand correctly. And correct understanding is essential because a man of such high rank can’t be just talking drivel. He must have a serious argument to put forth, and it behoves any analyst to get to the bottom of it.
So, Russia is coextensive with civilisation. This view has been enunciated so often and by so many Russian officials that it has to be axiomatic. Thus any existential threat to Russia is tantamount to putting civilisation in peril, and it’s precisely that kind of threat that the Ukraine posed and still does.
Hence, Russia’s aggression was a selfless act, a noble attempt to save civilisation, along with 14 countries at Russia’s borders, from Ukrainian depredations. There, I hope I got that right.
Hence the whole world is clearly demarcated between good and evil. Russia represents the former, and everyone who doesn’t see her as the saviour of civilisation, the latter. I know I’m not just speaking for myself when thanking Gen. Gurulyov for clarifying the previously complex view of civilisational geopolitics.
Forces of evil are at work not only in the Ukraine and the 141 countries that voted against Russia in the UN (compared to seven voting in favour) but regrettably within that citadel of civilisation itself. Thankfully, very few such vermin dare speak out blasphemously against Russia’s demiurge and his deeds.
But ‘very few’ doesn’t mean ‘none’, which is why back in 2023 Gen. Gurulyov advocated the idea that Putin should outdo Stalin’s internal terror of the 1930s. All Russians who disagree with his policies should be imprisoned or, better still, exterminated.
The good general is a regular fountain of such constructive ideas, but Britain is never far from the front of his mind. It doesn’t matter how the war goes, nor how persistent Britain remains in her dastardly assault on the guardian of civilisation.
One way or another, “There’s still going to come a point where we’re going to strike. It is inevitable. The question is simply a matter of time and decision-making. And there is no other way.”
Anyone dismissing Gurulyov’s animadversions as simply deranged rants would be making a serious, possibly fatal, mistake. He is the voice of the Russian mainstream, not only in the Kremlin but in the country at large.
Spurred on by the death cult that used to be known as the Moscow version of Russian Orthodoxy, many Russians – and certainly most parliamentarians – share Gurulyov’s views and hail his plans. They know that the demiurge in the Kremlin thinks along the same lines, and they never question his right, nay sacred duty, to strike out with vengeance against anyone or any nation that dares to think differently.
Gurulyov’s tirades are no more extreme than those pouring into Russian ears from every TV channel around the clock. The desirability of turning, say, the US into “radioactive ash”, thereby creating an empty space called the American Strait between Canada and Mexico, was first mooted on Russian television in 2014. Since then it has become the leitmotif of official propaganda, and Putin himself has seconded the motion many times.
Don’t know about you, but I’m tired of this wicked nonsense. Such unvarnished barbarism hasn’t been seen and heard in Europe since the blessed time of Stalin and Hitler.
When I was growing up in Moscow, anti-Western propaganda was standard and uncontested fare. But neither Khrushchev nor Brezhnev maintained their hysterical nuclear threats at anywhere near the current level. Khrushchev did say once that he could wipe out the US with just one huge bomb developed by Soviet scientists, but that was child’s play compared to today’s rhetoric.
All I can do is beseech Western governments to take the Gurulyovs of this world seriously. The West made the mistake of not doing so with Lenin and Hitler, and paid an awful price for it.
And Putin enjoys a greater popular support in Russia than his evil predecessors did in their countries. It appears from where I’m sitting that the proportion of Putinistas among today’s Russians is much greater than the eight per cent of the Nazis in Hitler’s Germany or roughly the same percentage of communists in the Soviet Union.
If evil could express itself with wars and murder camps in those countries, it may yet express itself with nuclear weapons in Russia. This is reality, not just Gurulyov’s or Putin’s bluster.
Unfortunately, these days forewarned doesn’t necessarily mean forearmed. That takes more than an early warning.
We must arm ourselves in such a way that Russian evildoers realise it’s not the West but Russia that will be razed to the ground in any nuclear exchange.
I don’t know how this can be achieved, but I hope that we have enough experts in relevant offices who do. And that, push come to shove, they’ll have the nerve to act.