Although Churchill in his later life couldn’t conceal his admiration for Stalin, he accurately described Lenin as a ‘plague bacillus’ transported by the Germans from Switzerland to Russia.
The bacillus caused an outbreak of a deadly disease that claimed more lives than any other pandemic in history.
Calculating the exact number of those devoured by the Bolsheviks over decades of tireless labour is difficult: the Russians have never been the most meticulous of record keepers, and those records the Bolsheviks did keep are still largely classified.
However, difficult doesn’t mean impossible, and in his books Lethal Politics and Death by Government Prof. Rummel used demographic analysis to come up with a plausible number of 62 million – way in excess of the 20 million Khrushchev acknowledged.
One way or another the physical damage caused by Bolshevik infestation is possible to calculate with various degrees of precision. What’s utterly incalculable is the metaphysical, moral damage.
Yet I submit, while praying for the millions of innocent people slaughtered by the ghastliest regime in history, that the moral damage it caused is even greater and longer-lasting.
Years of brutal, murderous slavery corrupts slaves and masters alike. The two groups intermingle, and after a few decades their members become largely indistinguishable. The slaves often think, occasionally act, like their masters, and the masters are themselves slaves in their mentality, morality and tastes.
The mark of Cain isn’t indelible, and the same book that tells us the story also shows ways in which the ugly imprint can be expunged. Yet, though a person can do so quickly, a society can’t.
The disease that infected it in the first place may go into remission for a while, but then it’ll always flare up – and it’ll remain for ever contagious.
In its acute phase, the bacillus of Leninism reinfected the West whence it had come. And it wasn’t just thousands of ‘useful idiots’ who were the carriers of the contagion. Russia in her Bolshevik phase vastly expanded the boundaries of the possible and trampled over the old taboos, which affected not just witting individuals but also unwitting societies.
By elevating institutional amorality to a level of secular religion, Bolshevism claimed millions of post-Christian Western victims, now bereft of the only source of collective morality possible in the West.
Those at the epicentre of the pandemic, the Russians, suffered immeasurably more than anyone else. But Westerners reinfected with the bacillus suffered too – and they continue to do so.
Russia is undergoing a new massive outbreak of the plague, with the bacillus of Leninism having returned in a modified version called Putinism. But those at the periphery of the pandemic, Westerners, aren’t free of the disease either.
The West is smiling smugly at the ego-stroking thought of being safe from a direct physical attack by Putin’s kleptofascist state. This sense of security may or may not be false, and I’ll leave it to the experts to weigh our military capabilities against Russia’s.
But the West has neither any natural immunity nor any effective vaccine against the bacilli of moral corruption emanating from Putin’s Russia.
These are carried and spread by Russian ‘oligarchs’ who don’t just gobble up properties in London’s better boroughs. These messengers of Putin are buying up, both retail and wholesale, Western politicians and their parties, journalists (along with their papers), businessmen, present and former heads of states and even members of our royal family.
Every purloined banknote passed on by the gangster ‘oligarchs’ (and all their banknotes are purloined) is crawling with the germs of moral plague. These infect the recipients as surely as the real physical bacilli would.
An article in today’s Mail doesn’t tell me anything I don’t know or haven’t written about. But it catalogues nicely the British VIPs who have fallen victim to the germs that have rubbed off on them from dirty Russian money.
The contagion doesn’t discriminate along party or class lines. It affects with equally lethal power prominent Tories like Douglas Hurd and Lord Powell, Labour grandees like Lord Mandelson and Lord Myners, independent leftie Lord Owen, Lord Ponsbie, George ‘I’ve-never-seen-a-disgusting-cause-I-couldn’t-love’ Galloway, Lord Truscott – and it even reaches our royal palaces, infecting their past and present inhabitants, like Sir Michael Peat, until recently Prince Charles’s Private Secretary, and Prince Michael of Kent, who has been taking Russia’s rouble since the time Putin was a student at the KGB academy.
It’s not just about the individuals though. The disease pervades the whole society, for we all sully our hands with filthy Russian lucre, even if it’s not passed into our proffered palms directly.
The City of London, which produces almost a quarter of our GDP, receives and launders billions in infected cash, as does the booming property sector of London and the Home Counties. Our pension funds are awash with dirty money, and there’s enough sewage left over to float our football clubs, newspapers and chains of bookstores.
With money comes political influence. Since Putin’s kleptofascism veils itself in the mantle of democracy, however threadbare, even the Tory party doesn’t flinch when accepting millions in plague-infested cash.
By taking money from Russian disease carriers, our tennis-loving politicians Dave and Boris are spreading the disease as surely as does Germany’s ex-chancellor Schröder who’s paid millions by the Russians, France’s president Hollande who’s selling Mistral helicopter carriers to the Russian fleet based in the annexed Crimea – as surely as all those European governments who won’t do anything to stop Putin’s aggression because they want Putin’s gas.
They are all doing an Esau and a Faust simultaneously, by selling both the West’s birthright and its soul to the highest bidder, in this instance Russia.
Money doesn’t just talk, ladies and gentlemen. When crawling with plague bacilli, it also infects.