The Mail has a fine tradition of rooting for evil regimes. That goes back to the 1930s, when the paper, owned at the time by Lord Rothermere, was a champion of appeasement.
It refused to acknowledge that, translated into plain English, that policy screamed “Give Hitler what he wants, whatever he wants!” In reality it was a pro-Nazi effort, emetically masked as abhorrence of bloodshed and desire for peace.
Munich happened as a result – and I don’t have to remind you of what happened as a result of Munich, not so soon after the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
The Mail is proving that, whatever else it might be, it’s certainly not inconsistent. Almost a century later it’s lending its pages to the typological equivalent of the pro-Hitler propaganda of ‘peace’, meaning surrender to evil.
The perpetrator is Peter Hitchens, who seems to compete against himself in how many disgusting lies he can concoct to shill for Putin’s fascist regime, one he used to describe as “the most conservative and Christian in Europe”.
Week in, week out Hitchens tests himself to see what new depths of mendacity he can plumb. Week in, week out I think that’s it, he can’t possibly sink any lower. Yet every week he proves me wrong.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the new layer of depravity Hitchens (affectionately called Haw-Haw on Instagram) has dredged up out of what passes for his soul.
Deflecting the charge that he denies Putin’s monstrosity, Hitchens protests in his own well-drilled manner: “Far from ‘denying’ Russian atrocities, I underline the fact that (as is horribly normal in war) both sides have done wicked things.”
This sentence alone should one day put Hitchens in the dock next to the Kremlin monsters – and I pray for that outcome every day. For no one can genuinely be so detached from reality as to put an equal sign between the Ukraine and Russia in this war.
I’m singling this sentence out because the rest of the article is a monotonous rehashing of Putin’s propaganda. It drifts from the Kremlin straight onto Hitchens’s keyboard, bypassing any mediation from his mind and conscience.
Nato provoked Russia, “offensive weapons” being supplied to the Ukraine may well trigger a global Armageddon, Ukraine is no better than Russia, its “democratically elected president was lawlessly overthrown” in 2014, it’s “run by billionaires”, the war is a local conflict of no interest to us, the Russian army is so weak that there’s no danger of the conflict escalating beyond the Ukraine (perfect timing: in the past two days Russian missiles crossed into Moldova, forcing her government to resign) – that sort of thing.
By now you know this guff as well as I do. And if you don’t, look up the Kremlin’s English-language website – it’s all there, chapter and verse. All Hitchens does is add his inimitable megalomaniac touches.
In today’s piece he yet again uncorks his patented anaphora, with three consecutive paragraphs starting with “I’ve shown…”, “I’ve pointed out…” and “I’ve noted…” The only stylistic flourish missing so far is “Verily I say unto you”, but I’m sure it’s coming.
Anyway, you know all that – from Hitchens, if you read his output; or from me, if you read my comments on it, which by now must be running into dozens. (I consider it my duty to oppose evil, even at the risk of boring you to tears.)
But the sentence I’ve singled out today reaches new lows, unprecedented even in Hitchens’s oeuvre. Let’s savour it again, I love it so much: “Far from ‘denying’ Russian atrocities, I underline the fact that (as is horribly normal in war) both sides have done wicked things.”
Suppose you’ve had a year-long holiday on Mars and hence know nothing about the ongoing war. You’ve read nothing about it, not Hitchens’s pieces, not mine, not anyone else’s. All you know is what you get from that one sentence. So what would that be?
There’s a war going on. “As is normal in war,” neither side is especially nice. “Both sides have done wicked things”, and there’s nothing to choose between them in that department.
What wicked things might they be? Oh well, attacking a sovereign state with the declared aim of destroying its sovereignty, launching genocidal bombing raids on cities, trying to annihilate the infrastructure hoping that thousands of civilians will freeze to death, looting private residences, torturing both civilians and POWs, murdering civilians en masse with bullets or anything else that comes in handy, raping people of both sexes (victims’ ages range from four to 81), deporting thousands from occupied territories and forcing them to change nationality, threatening the world with nuclear holocaust…
Having looked up all those wicked things, you go back to my favourite sentence to satisfy yourself that both sides have done them all. Then your eye slides a couple of paragraphs up and you agree with the author that one shouldn’t “see the war as a simple battle between good and evil”.
It’s a battle between two evils and, since the Ukraine’s corruption is mentioned explicitly and Russia’s isn’t, you’ll have to assume that Russia’s is the lesser one. One way or the other, “is war – savage, merciless, atrocious war – with its handmaids of poverty and relentless state control, so wonderful that we cannot even contemplate a negotiated peace?”
But you haven’t spent the past year taking in the cultural highlights of Mars, have you? So you know that only one side, Putin’s, has done and is doing all those “wicked things”.
You’ve seen piles of corpses with their hands tied, in Bucha, Mariupol, Severodonetsk, Kherson and everywhere else where Putin’s bandits invaded. You’ve seen TV coverage of cities reduced to ruins. You’ve heard the weeping of orphaned children. You’ve seen pictures of Putin’s mercenaries executing their own stragglers with sledgehammers.
Hence you can see through Hitchens’s lies. Why can’t his paper?
The Mail returneth again according to its circles. It championed the appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s, and, through its star columnist, it’s championing the appeasement of Putin today. The situations are eerily similar, as are the two gentlemen mentioned.
Yet today, any peace treaty that doesn’t result in Putin withdrawing his murderers, looters and rapists from every inch of Ukrainian territory is tantamount to abject surrender to evil.
Hitchens acknowledges as much: “Of course, that means give as well as take. Sometimes we might give more than we want.” Quite.
Sometimes a country might swap its freedom and honour for servitude to an evil conqueror. Sometimes it might hand victory to a brutal invader when it’s still perfectly capable of fighting and winning. Sometimes it might embolden the conqueror to march on, setting the whole world aflame.
All those things might happen. But if Hitchens and other Putin flunkeys genuinely think they’ll happen to the Ukraine, they are stupid and ignorant, in addition to being mendacious.
I have no time for Hitchens, but would point out that the apparent surrender of Munich can also be seen as a saving strategy in an otherwise hopeless situation. If that is what was in Chamberlain’s mind (and I certainly do not know if it was) then he does not deserve all the obloquy that has been heaped on him over the years. Munich won us time to start rebuilding our armaments and defences. Necessary time.
There’s that old moral equivalence again. I’m sure I’ve read whole articles about that somewhere.
Hitchens et al keep it up because they know it is working. I think U.S. support for the Ukraine is slowing subsiding. Who knows, in another few months most of our people – or just our elected representatives – may be persuaded by Hitchens or Carlson.
This comment is outside the scope of your piece on Hitchens, and I will of course respect your decision not to publish it. You may have heard that the investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, has recently published, privately, a report that the United States took out Nordststream in a covert operation authorized by President Biden. Its extensive background information about covert diving, training facilities, and involvment of other governments’ clandestine operatives, among other things, lends it credibility. Its account of the actual planning for and execution of the destruction of the pipelines, is, however, based primarly on a single anonymous source. How do you assess the likely accuracy of Hersh’s report? Assuming that it is accurate in its essential details, do you think that the destruction of the Norstream pipelines by the U.S. was justified and prudent as a war measure? See https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream
I’ve never treated Mr Hersh as a reliable source, and I’m not going to start now. Especially since I don’t believe for a second that President Biden is capable of issuing such a decisive order. However, if he did issue it, the measure was certainly justified, though I’m not sure it was prudent. As the French say, à la guerre comme à la guerre. Putin has declared war on the West, in so many words. And he definitely tried to weaponise oil and gas. Disarming an enemy, at least partly, is par for the course.
Or, to quote the proverb attributed to the Sixteenth Century English dramatist, John Lyly, “All’s fair in love and war.”
Not all — the mass murder, looting and raping of civilians widely practised by Russians, for example, shouldn’t be part of warfare. But war is definitely fair in war, and targeting the enemy’s economic strength qualifies.