Three years ago today, people stopped asking “Will he or won’t he?” The question was answered in no uncertain terms: he will and he has. Moreover, given half the chance, he’ll do it again. And again. And again.
On 24 February, 2022, hordes of Russian murderers, rapists and looters invaded the Ukraine and proceeded to do what murderers, rapists and looters do: murder, rape and loot.
Their declared aim was to stamp out the Ukraine’s independence, turning her yet again into an enslaved satellite of an evil Russian regime. That objective, boasted the Botox Boy, would be achieved within three days, a week at most.
Kiev would fall, Zelensky and his cabinet would be ‘de-Nazified’ (the Putin for murdered) and NATO would be rolled back. After all, the Ukraine was only the vanguard of that dastardly organisation spawned by the West, the perennial enemy of unmatched Russian goodness and spirituality.
As Zelensky called his nation to arms, its cause looked lost. “This is probably the last time you’ll see me alive,” said the Ukraine’s president in a televised address. Three years later, he is still with us – and so is his heroic, long-suffering and still gloriously independent nation.
A country that repels aggression and frustrates the invader’s ends has a right to celebrate victory. The outnumbered and outgunned Ukrainians have every reason to be proud, as does a pusillanimous West. For all its myopic penny-pinching and weak-kneed fear of Russia, it gave the Ukraine just enough to keep her in the fight.
The West could and should have given the Ukraine enough to drive the fascist hordes back to their Kremlin lair, but it didn’t, for being, well, pusillanimous. But the West needed an excuse for its half-hearted effort to arm the victim of an aggression threatening to overrun Eastern Europe, for starters.
Excuses weren’t in short supply. One such was the pretence that Putin’s dread of NATO so close to Russian borders was justified. The Botox Boy supposedly had every right to fear NATO using its new eastern members as the beachhead from which to attack Russia.
When such fears are justified, they are called prudence. When they have no bearing on reality, they are called paranoid delusions, and no sane person thought that NATO, a purely defensive organisation, harboured aggressive designs on Russia.
Yet many Westerners feigned understanding of Putin’s concerns as a way of masking their own cowardice. Courtesy of Angela Merkel, whose sycophancy to Putin was borderline treasonous, that type got to be called Putinversteher, someone who understands the Botox Boy, feels his pain.
In many cases, the more appropriate term would be Putinverehrener, someone who worships Putin and considers his muscular brand of fascism to be a viable alternative to flabby Western wokery. This sort of thing has a ring of familiarity to it.
In the 1930s many American isolationists and British aristocrats voiced similar feelings about Hitler. Read their pronouncements and you’ll see that replacing Hitler with Putin would make them sound like today’s reportage.
Unlike the decadent West mired in sybaritic hedonism, Hitler was strong, patriotic, vigorous, decisive and he was doing wonders for Germany. We should have such leaders, and all this talk about his aggressive plans is nonsense. He just wants to reclaim what’s rightfully German, lands we stole at Versailles. Jews? Well, that’s not nice. But one can understand the Führer: Jews can be rather obnoxious, what?
Such rationalisation was in fact the post-rationalisation of a seething deep-seated craving. Those people had the embryo of fascism gestating in their innards, and Hitler sent them a signal that the situation had become propitious for it to come out. They used the mask of understanding to conceal admiration.
The same goes for today’s mouthpieces of Putin in the West, whose name is legion. They keep coming up with spurious arguments to justify their own need to channel their inner Putin.
Mostly these reprobates come from the ranks of those described by a glaring misnomer of ‘conservatives’, but who are in fact fascisoid radicals. Put a different way, they are like physicians who can correctly diagnose a disease, but then prescribe cyanide to treat it.
Everything they bemoan about the West is correct. We do live in a moribund civilisation showing every sign of accelerating decay. Like a snake devouring its own tail, the West is debauching every virtue that made it Western in any other than the geographic sense. The vertebrae of our unifying spiritual spine are being knocked out one by one, and the body is sagging onto itself.
Yet the way to treat that malaise, progressive in more ways than one, is to take stock of our civilisational core and rebuild its essential features – not to use as the role model a frankly fascist regime that imprisons, tortures and murders its opponents, suppresses every semblance of free speech, routinely executes POWs, makes a mockery of elections, rivals the Nazis for racist claims and also for imperialist aspirations.
To be fair, even some decent Westerners fall into the trap of diagnostic precision combined with therapeutic ineptitude. In their case, it’s not evil longings that are to blame but old-fashioned ignorance and insufficient understanding of such matters. Thus, for example, Tim Stanley, a generally sensible young man, tries to vindicate Trump’s betrayal of the Ukraine:
“His approach might be brutal, but is it irrational? Trump’s claims that Ukraine started the war or Zelensky is a dictator are certainly bizarre and offensive; insisting Kyiv sell its mineral resources suggests a return to amoral imperialism.”
No, it’s not irrational, explains young Tim who clearly knows little about the issue in question and understands even less. “This isn’t the Cold War: Russia doesn’t want to conquer the world, and bullying its neighbours poses no direct threat to the US.”
Enter the new breed, the Trumpversteher. True, this isn’t the Cold War, Tim. It’s worse – the war has been hot for 11 years and red-hot for the past three, or haven’t you noticed? Russia may not want to conquer the world, but she does want to make it hospitable to her brand of kleptofascism, which means exerting an influence bordering on domination.
But at least Stanley isn’t a card-carrying Putin stooge like Peter Hitchens. This utterly objectionable personage has been playing lickspittle to Putin since before the latter’s first injection of Botox.
Putin, to him, was the leader of “the most conservative and Christian country in Europe”, not a murderous ghoul bent on reviving the Soviet empire, but this time run not by the communist party but by history’s unique blend of secret police and organised crime.
Hitchens spent a few months in Russia back in the 90s, which he claims gives him a Gnostic understanding of the country, its leaders and everything they do. Since few people share Hitchens’s idea of himself, he gets more and more defensive, in a hysterical sort of way.
His favourite trick is to claim that his opponents are ignorant. Hitchens, on the other hand, is a polymath savant of Renaissance proportions.
Last week, for example, he wrote that anyone who finds anything wrong with Putin doesn’t know whether it’s Vienna or Prague that’s farther west. “I do,” he announced proudly. Good on you, Peter, you know your elementary school geography. That nonsensical statement entitles you to shill for Putin.
This week came another wild claim. Speaking of the on-going war, Hitchens wrote: “And yet I doubt whether one person in 10,000 can work out why it happened, while nobody at all can point to any good it has done or could ever have done.”
As a service to the hapless 9,999 in 10,000, I’m prepared to fill in the gaps in their education. What happened was that a fascist regime launched an unprovoked aggression against its smaller neighbour trying to preserve its freedom. The why question is easy to answer: that’s what fascist aggressors do. What good it has done is that the smaller country has managed to preserve its independence against overwhelming odds. Glad to be of help.
What’s especially nauseating is that miserable Tuckers like Carlson and Hitchens shed crocodile tears for all those innocent lives lost on both sides. Rather than admitting honestly that they want fascism to win, they claim empathy for human suffering. At the same time, they apportion the blame for the suffering equally at best, and usually assigning the greater portion to the Ukraine.
All that is repeating Kremlin propaganda word for word, and I for one don’t care whether they do so because they are paid by Putin or of their own ghastly accord. The result is the same.
At least all those fascisoid hacks work surreptitiously, by eroding the will to support the Ukraine. The spiritual leader of that tribe, Trump, does nothing surreptitiously. He is Putin’s friend, the Ukraine’s enemy, and he doesn’t care who knows it.
Even so, he doesn’t express his feelings in so many words. Trump too feels the need to explain. In his case, that means lying through his teeth.
Thus it was the Ukraine, not Russia, that started the war (a leaf right out of the Kremlin propaganda book). The US has spent more on supporting the Ukraine than Europe did (a lie). Specifically, Zelensky’s obstreperousness has cost America $350 billion (another lie: the actual number is $58 billion). Zelensky is an unelected dictator (yet another lie: Zelensky was elected by a landslide, and no democratic country holds elections when she is under attack). Zelensky’s public support is four per cent (another lie on top of the others: it’s in fact 57 per cent).
Again, I don’t know and don’t care whether Trump is Putin’s agent of long standing, as some people claim. The important thing is that he wouldn’t be saying or doing anything different if he were.
Collectively, all such small lies add up to a big one: the Ukraine has lost the war and must accept any ‘deal’ Putin and Trump can shove down her throat. Yet nothing could be further from the truth.
In fact, if the West truly understood the existential danger presented by the fascist threat from the east, the Ukraine would have been armed sufficiently to rout the Russian hordes.
She showed her ability to do so even with one hand tied behind her back. Ukrainian troops soundly defeated Russian offensives on Kiev and Kharkov, drove the Russian navy out of the Black Sea having sunk several warships, closed their skies to the Russian air force and even managed to occupy a chunk of Russian territory. When ceding their own land, they make the invaders move in over a carpet of Russian corpses.
The fact that a free Ukraine is still standing is a triumph in itself. If properly armed and spared the defeatist talk of the likes of Stanley, the pro-Putin propaganda of Peter ‘Tucker’ Hitchens, and Trump’s open sympathy for, and support of, Russian fascism, Ukrainians could still rout the invaders.
As it is, this gruesome anniversary is a chance for all decent people to repeat the slogan of Ukrainian resistance: “Glory to the Ukraine!” “To the heroes the glory!”, is the stock reply to that one.
My father occupies the position of being pro-Russia against Ukraine yet pro-Israel against Palestine. This also seems to be the stance of those within the MAGA movement. He’s certainly not a stupid person, but I struggle to understand his reasoning, why is it wrong for Ukraine to resist a Russian invasion but right for the Israeli’s to resist a Palestinian one?
In Britain, the politically correct position is to be pro-Ukraine and pro-Palestine. But again, seldom does anyone explain their reasoning. Indeed, it is not immediately clear who either side in each conflict considers to be their analogue, or if the combatants in either conflict even think about each other. How do you yourself square this 4 way confusion?
What is and what isn’t politically correct couldn’t possibly interest me less. What matters is that in my rather informed judgement, Russia and Hamas represent the absolute evil, while the Ukraine and Israel are forces of a relative good. That decides the issue, but it’s a conclusion reached on the basis of 1) a vast corpus of knowledge, both scholarly and, in the case of Russia, personal, b) a philosophy enabling me to identify good and evil, c) an understanding of the historical processes sometimes described as a clash of civilisations. I consider any conclusion reached on the basis of any other factors to be invalid — regardless of whether or not it coincides with mine.
The main floor of a university I passed through last night had about 50 large photographs separately posted on stands, of very young and beautiful Ukrainian men and women, of an average age of 19 or 20. The photographs were titled “Ukrainian students who could not complete their studies, because they were brutally murdered by Russian aggression”. While below a short bio of each and where/how they were killed. Some were killed at the front, while most were hit by Russian missiles, rockets, while driving, returning from a dentist, going to visit family, etc.
I liked Trump, but unless there’s something more to those appalling comments and lies uttered last week, they should mark the time when any decent person turns away from him.