This article is full of lies

No, not my own. The lies in question are being told in our press by Putin’s agents of influence, witting or unwitting.

Rod Liddle is less pernicious than some of the others because he speaks from the heart only. He doesn’t pretend to make a cogent argument, which does him credit. Liddle laudably heeds Dirty Harry’s advice: a man must be aware of his limitations.

That’s why he simply leaves ignorant statements hanging in the air, expecting (not without foundation, it has to be said) that his readers are even more ignorant than he is.

Thus he bemoans in today’s Times the campaign against Abramovich, one of the men directly responsible for Putin’s arrival in the Kremlin, who has since then combined the functions of Putin’s poodle and moneybag.

“It is not Abramovich’s financial dealings that have caused the problem,” writes Liddle, “it is his nationality.” A credulous reader is expected to infer that Abramovich’s financial dealings have been pristine, and he is merely a victim of visceral British Russophobia.

Now, a small library of books have been written on the variously criminal ways in which Abramovich et al. came by their billions. Putin’s People is the most recent one, but I could think offhand of at least another half a dozen, in both English and Russian.

I strongly suspect Liddle hasn’t read any of them, preferring instead to remain in a state of blissful ignorance. That, of course, is these days no obstacle to pontificating on serious issues, but Liddle isn’t to blame for this cultural collapse. I suspect he’s at base a good chappie who is regrettably misguided.

Peter Hitchens is a different animal altogether. For one thing, he is an egomaniac, which Liddle is not.

Hitchens claims oracular powers he supposedly acquired during the few months he spent in Russia back in the nineties and several flying visits since then. There’s a good Russian saying about people like him: “He lies like an eyewitness.”

“I know” is the anaphoric leitmotif of his writing on that subject. To wit:

“I know too much. I know that our policy of Nato expansion – which we had promised not to do and which we knew infuriated Russians – played its part in bringing about this crisis.”

That’s a lie: the only thing Nato promised on paper was not to site bases in East Germany, which undertaking has been kept. Some Western politicians might have spoken out of turn, but in international relations this doesn’t amount to a binding promise.

Meanwhile: “I know that Ukraine’s current government, now treated as if it was almost holy, was brought into being by a mob putsch openly backed by the USA in 2014.”

Speaking that way about a genuine popular uprising for freedom and against Putin’s puppets is, kindly speaking, crass. But I especially like the word ‘putsch’, Hitchens’s stock shibboleth he has been using ever since the Ukraine won her independence.

The word is designed to evoke Nazi associations, which is consonant with Kremlin propaganda. Putin’s line, echoed by Russian TV every minute of every day, is that the Ukraine is in thrall to Banderite fascists. (Hence Putin kicked off his monstrous crime by announcing he was out to “denazify” the Ukraine.)

This is another lie. Fascisoid parties do exist in the Ukraine, as they do in most other countries, including Britain. However, rather than running the country, they command a mere two per cent of the vote and not a single seat in parliament. Fascist sympathisers are much better represented in the Hitchens household, for the stigma of fascism belongs much more naturally on Putin’s forehead.

That’s not all Hitchens knows: “I know that the much-admired President Zelensky in February 2021 closed down three opposition TV stations on the grounds of ‘national security’…  I know that the opposition politician Viktor Medvedchuk was put under house arrest last year on a charge of treason. Isn’t this the sort of thing Putin does?”

No, it isn’t. This is yet another lie. Putin has completely suppressed free speech and has murdered, by the latest count, 156 opposition journalists. If the Medvedchuk case is all Hitchens and his ilk can dredge up to claim that Zelensky is no better, he deliberately misleads his readers for nefarious purposes.

I shan’t repeat what I wrote on this subject a few days ago: http://www.alexanderboot.com/whats-worse-than-a-moron/. Suffice it to say that not since Lord Haw Haw has there been a media personage as deserving of a treason charge as Medvedchuk. That he has only been put under house arrest is a lapse into weak-kneed liberalism.

After that lies begin to come in a steady stream: “In a country crammed with Russians, they were trying to make Russian a second-class language.”

About 20 per cent of the Ukrainians are of Russian origin, which hardly amounts to cramming. Many of them are courageously fighting Putin’s stormtroopers, while hundreds of thousands of others are fleeing from, not to, the Russians.

As to Russian being a second-class language, that’s a lie too. What Hitchens means is that Ukrainian is the language in which all official business is transacted. Looking at NHS leaflets printed in 28 languages, I wish we displayed a similar commitment to our linguistic heritage.

Linguistic uniformity is an essential unifying factor for a nation, especially one that acquired its sovereignty as recently as the Ukraine. That doesn’t prevent all the Ukrainians I know, and I know quite a few, from being bilingual, whichever language was their first.

The fact that the Ukraine’s president is a bilingual Jew whose first language was Russian should be sufficient to debunk accusations of both Nazism and linguistic oppression – but not for pro-Putin fanatics.  

Now comes the clincher: “And they were teaching history which often had an anti-Russian tinge.” Crikey. Fancy that.

Why would they do a Judaeo-Banderite Nazi thing like that? It wouldn’t be because the Russians deliberately starved millions of Ukrainians to death in 1931-1932? Or because they have historically suppressed Ukrainian culture, language and national identity? Shouldn’t Ukrainians be allowed a teensy-weensy bit of rancour? No, perish the thought.

Having told us what he knows, Hitchens tells us of the pain he suffers at the hands of detractors, such as, well, me: “I am accused of being a ‘Russian shill’ or even a traitor, of parroting Russian propaganda, or things of that kind. These insults make little impact on me personally because I know they are not true.”

If Hitchens has taken any of my statements as insults, I am sorry. They were meant as dispassionate factual statements.

I don’t know what he knows deep in his heart. I only know what he writes: shilling, sycophantic propaganda of Putin’s kleptofascist bailiwick, which to Hitchens “is hardly not the most conservative and Christian country in Europe”.

As we speak, that ‘conservative Christian country’ is indiscriminately bombing civilian quarters. hospitals and schools in Europe’s second-largest country desperately fighting for her freedom. It is committing mass murder in an attempt to spread its evil all over Eastern Europe, for starters. It is threatening nuclear annihilation to the world, including Britain, which Hitchens professes to love so much.

Shilling for that evil monstrosity at this time is in itself evil. Technically speaking, that doesn’t constitute treason: we aren’t at war with Russia yet. Hitchens knows this, as he claims to know so many other things. And he is hiding behind that technicality the way Putin is hiding in his bunker.