The last refuge of a scoundrel

That was how Dr Johnson described patriotism in a quip that’s often taken out of context. He was talking not about patriotism as such, but about politicians screaming patriotic slogans as a way of gaining power.

Little has changed since then. Patriotism is still often used to dupe the innocent. But in that ignominious function, democracy runs it pretty close.

Assorted scoundrels use it, or more typically its absence, to promote their own desiderata or to vindicate their own pet falsehoods. The usual stratagem is to proceed from a set of demonstrably untrue assumptions.

First, that every democratically elected government is ipso facto legitimate and good. Second, that any government that isn’t democratically elected is ipso facto illegitimate and evil.

Every conclusion emerging from those wrong premises is going to be wrong too. Thus, corollary to those two fallacies are three others: one, deposing a democratically elected government is always wrong; two, keeping a democratically elected government in power is always right, no matter how many crimes it commits.

The third link in that chain is insistence that the absence (or ousting) of a democratically elected government justifies invasion by a foreign power.

Lurking underneath all those fallacies is some kind of self-interest that has nothing to do with democracy or lack thereof. That can’t possibly be otherwise because the case against all those fallacies doesn’t even have to be argued. It can just be shown.

An abbreviated list of democratically elected monsters should put paid to all those idiocies and shift the discussion into a sensible area: Hitler, Perón, Mugabe, Putin, Lukashenko, Ahmadinejad, Yanukovych, Macîas Nguema (who gratefully murdered a third of the population of Equatorial Guinea that had voted him in).

That roll call alone should prove that democratic and good aren’t always coextensive. Hence the right question to ask about a government isn’t whether it’s democratic, but whether it’s just.

If it isn’t, any domestic coup to unseat it is virtuous, however that government gained power. But not any foreign invasion. That can only be justified if it can be credibly shown that the evil government is trying to export its evil, threatening the vital interests of the potential invader. A deficit of democracy alone doesn’t constitute a casus belli.

These home truths are so obvious as to be homespun. Any argument that starts from denying them can only be put forth by a scoundrel – especially if he denies them selectively.

Thus Peter Hitchens correctly regards the 2003 invasion of Iraq as ill-advised, not to say criminal. If you recall, the immediate pretext for that foray was the false claim that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, primed and ready to go at any moment.

But the propaganda offensive behind it, especially in the US, centred around the proselytising mission of carrying democracy to the Middle East, starting from Iraq. That was supposed to provide a moral justification for that calamitous folly.

It’s to Hitchens’s credit that he saw through it. He thus tossed aside the misconception that affection for democracy is a sufficient reason to kill hundreds of thousands of people who have done us no wrong.

He is equally right when observing in today’s column that: “In Cuba, you can vote at 16, but only for the grisly Castro regime.” That’s another fallacy biting the dust: it’s not method of government that counts, but its nature. When all the available candidates are cannibals, the resulting democratic government will indulge in devouring human flesh.

But then Hitchens undoes all his good work by writing, in the same column, this paragraph:  “Lord Hague of Richmond, when he was Foreign Secretary, condoned the lawless overthrow of Ukraine’s legitimate, elected president, Viktor Yanukovych. This was the event which triggered the large-scale violence which has ever afterwards gripped Ukraine.”

This is a scoundrel speaking, a man who for some nefarious purpose stamps into the dirt the very same arguments he himself has just made.

Lord Hague was indeed Foreign Secretary in 2014. Every other word in that paragraph is either a fallacy or, in its second sentence, an outright lie. No large-scale violence has gripped the Ukraine since 2014. The violence was visited on her by the foreign Nazi regime Hitchens adores.

Yanukovych, a career criminal with several convictions on his record, was elected in the predictable turmoil that followed the Ukraine gaining independence. The new democratic institutions were so inchoate and unformed that the country was at sixes and sevens.

Corruption was rife, as it was – and in most cases still is – in all ex-Soviet republics, including the most corrupt one of all, Russia herself. The Ukrainians were happy to have won their sovereignty, but they were still unsure what to do with it.

But it didn’t take them long to realise it was precisely their sovereignty that Yanukovych was betraying. His whole government was infiltrated from top to bottom by Putin’s agents, of whom Yanukovych himself was one.

His government did its best to outdo the corruption of his predecessors and undo the country’s independence. The people could just about live with the former, but not with the latter.

They took at face value Putin’s pronouncements about his mission of restoring the Soviet Union to its imperial grandeur. These weren’t empty words: Putin had already launched sanguinary assaults on Chechnya and Georgia, killing hundreds of thousands and successfully installing puppet regimes in both.

The Ukrainians correctly sensed that the Yanukovych government was trying to deliver their country to Russia by subterfuge. Hence they rose in a popular revolt called the Orange Revolution and ousted the treasonous clique of Putin’s agents.

Since then, power in the Ukraine has invariably been changed by orderly democratic succession, which should satisfy even Hitchens’s passionate, if selective, affection of elective procedures.

Instead he commits all the fallacies I enumerated above – including, by the looks of it, the belief that, if his idol Putin doesn’t like the way politics works in any sovereign neighbouring country, he has the moral right to bomb it to smithereens.

Lord Hague, unlike Hitchens, understood the true nature of Putin’s Russia and correctly identified it as an enemy power, at least potentially. Also unlike Hitchens, he didn’t stand on window-dressing procedure, looking instead at the moral and geopolitical essence of the Orange Revolution.

He saw in it the success of the long-suffering Ukrainian people in asserting their true independence – which Lord Hague considered morally right. He also saw that revolution as a successful rollback of an evil power with imperial ambitions – which Lord Hague considered strategically beneficial.

Hitchens, on the other hand, describes how he kept pestering Hague with written protests, only receiving vague replies or none. Lord Hague was doubtless aware of Hitchens’s unwavering championship of Putin’s regime that long predated any frictions with the Ukraine.

He must have correctly discerned he was dealing with a sympathiser (to say the least) of a malevolent regime with global aggression coded in its DNA. That’s why he fobbed Hitchens off or simply refused to reply to him.

Lord Hague may be many things, but a scoundrel he isn’t. Hitchens is, and he is tireless in his efforts to prove it.