Dialogues of the Deaf – part two, Russia and the fellow travellers
Before I begin, perhaps I could be told in what way I don’t understand what ‘begging the question’ means? I always love a bit of pedantry.
Now, to business. Some contributors here are engaging in what I regard as a straightforward smear campaign, on the basis that I have offered a limited defence of Vladimir Putin and (much more importantly) an attack on his critics for inconsistency, for being themselves critical of Mr Navalny, as they would be if he were not their ally.
I have also criticised the wider inconsistency of liberal interventionists, who condemn Mr Putin for wrongs he has committed, but overlook identical or comparable wrongs in other countries and other leaders. Once again, inconsistent outrage is phoney outrage.
I will repeat here a comment I placed on the ‘If not Putin, who? thread:
‘A contributor hiding behind the name of 'Dr Finlay' (A.J.Cronin's amusing creation), asserts :'This piece has interesting similarities to those written by left-wing US intellectuals who visited the "workers' paradise" of the USSR in the 20s and 30s and to those written by English right-wingers who visited Herr Hitler in the 30s. They were misguided and so are you.' What an extraordinary claim. I suspect its author, whose real identity we'll probably never know, will never appear here again and so won't answer this. But in case he has the courage of his anonymous convictions, perhaps he could give some evidence of the alleged similarity. I see none ( these people, well-described in David Caute's 'The Fellow Travellers' and , interestingly, also examined in detail in my discussion of the Webbs in my book 'The Rage Against God', closed their eyes to the faults of the Soviet regime for reasons of ideological sympathy. Mr Putin has no ideology for me to sympathise with.
'Nor did I in any way seek to hide or minimise the evils of his regime. On the contrary, as any fair reader must surely accept. Nor was I conducted through Moscow by state officials. Most of those who helped me, and spoke to me were as it happens opponents and critics of Mr Putin, all of them entirely independent of the state, and it was through them that I found Dmitry, which is why I was sure he wasn't a plant. I might also add that Russia still has a surprisingly free press (journals with small circulations can say pretty much what they like, it is only when they become seriously influential that they come under state pressure) and little is hidden. Nor was I an innocent. Unlike the fellow travellers of the 1920s and 1930s, I lived in Russia for more than two years, speak a little of the language, have independent sources of knowledge there, and some experience of the way in which the country works. Unlike the correspondents of the time, I wasn't under pressure to conform to a pro-government line to keep my job (see the accounts of the business by reporters such as Malcolm Muggeridge, Eugene Lyons etc) I will ignore the other comparison, which is simply a stupid insult, and presumably the reason why the contributor lacked the courage to say who he really is. I assume the apparent supporter of Colonel Gadaffi posting here is in fact a fake, trying to be satirical on the 'Borat' model, If he's a real person, perhaps he could say so, and explain a little more about himself.’
I don’t seem to have had any proper response to this, which seems to me to deal with and dispose of the claim that my article is in any way comparable to such stuff.
The allegation is baseless, and purely designed to smear me, by confusing the ill-informed.
Now along comes Mr ‘Candide III’ (what happened to the first two?) to say I suffer from ‘an unwillingness to examine or search for uncomfortable facts’
Oh, yeah?.
Who wrote this then:’ Mr Putin is without doubt a sinister tyrant at the head of a corrupt government. His private life and wealth are a mystery. His personality cult – bare-chested tough-guy, horseman, diver, jet pilot – is creepy and would be laughable if it were not a serious method of keeping power.
The lawless jailing of the businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky is his direct fault. The hideous death in custody of the courageous lawyer Sergei Magnitsky is a terrible blot on Putin’s thuggish state. The murders of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and of ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko are symptoms of the sickness of modern Russia.
‘The general cynicism of the Russian government is breathtaking’ ?
Why, I did. How can this be squared with the accusation above? What unwillingness to search for or examine uncomfortable facts? Precisely the same facts were to be found in an article taking the opposite position by my old friend Edward Lucas, published in the Daily Mail two days after mine had been published in the Mail on Sunday.
I think any search of the laudatory books, articles and statements of fellow-travellers of any or all of the totalitarian or authoritarian regimes of modern history would not be able to uncover a comparable passage. Perhaps one of my critics would care to try.
Now we come to Mr ‘Andrew Wyke’ who in two separate comments (one on ‘Our Laws…’ and one on ’Morals, Mr Putin…’ attempts to suggest that I am in some way allied to National Socialists. He does this with some serpentine subtlety (The old technique of saying that he, Mr Wyke is of course not suggesting this, but that people may think it). Example:
‘Anyone who gives the BNP’s manifesto just a cursory glance will see that Peter Hitchens and Nick Griffin more often than not agree on both ’leftist’ economic and ’rightist’ social policies. This is not for one moment intended to suggest that Peter Hitchens has arrived at his agenda from the same perspective as the overtly racist Ku Klux Klan-styled Nick Griffin. But my point is that the vast majority of casual observers out there may not realize this’
Well, as a swift check of ‘BNP’ in the index will show, they have no actual excuse for 'failing to realise this', and it is a smear that has been rebutted and in my view utterly refuted here many times before. If this is a real person, and he intends to stay here, Mr ‘Wyke’, if such he be, may need to come to some understanding about such claims if he wishes to carry on posting here. But my suspicion is that like ‘Dr Finlay’ we will not hear back from him, at least under that name.
Mr ‘Wyke’ uses precisely the same reptilian technique when he seeks to endorse ‘Dr Finlay’.( who alleged ‘This piece has interesting similarities to those written by left-wing US intellectuals who visited the "workers' paradise" of the USSR in the 20s and 30s and to those written by English right-wingers who visited Herr Hitler in the 30s. They were misguided and so are you.’
Mr ‘Wyke concludes ‘ Despite Mr Hitchens’ protestations, this is precisely how most people (beyond the Daily Mail’s core National Socialist readership) will perceive his comments about Russia.
Ah, they will *perceive* them in this way, will they ? I wonder how he knows (see below) But will they be right and just to do so? Surley that is the point. But is he interested in the pursuit of the truth
Mr Wyke then reveals something interesting about himself, to which I would draw the reader’s attention. He speaks of ‘the Daily Mail’s core National Socialist readership’
I must ask Mr ‘Wyke’, if he exists, what he means by this extraordinary throwaway slur, buried in what appears to be a generally rational argument (this may be too kind, on second thoughts. Quite a lot of the contribution by Mr ‘Wyke’ is swirling pigswill, actually, see below ), what his evidence is for it and if this sort of thing does not reveal him to be some sort of ultra-dogmatic leftist who adjusts the facts to fit his world-view.
It is as if a bank-manager at a Rotary dinner, in the midst of a speech on savings regulation, suddenly begins to take off his clothes and shout ’cock-a-doodle do!’.
Everything that has gone before, and all that comes afterwards, seems in some way less convincing.
He then says ‘Dr Finlay is not calling Mr Hitchens a Nazi-sympathizer or some kind of communist fossil,’
1 . How does he know the inner thoughts of ‘Dr Finlay’? How well-acquainted are they with each other?
2. Actually, it seems to me that this is precisely what ’Finlay’ is seeking to suggest.. ‘They are misguided, and so are you’. Well if we are not misguided in the same way, what does that matter? But that is the insinuation, as who can really doubt?
Interesting that this should be stimulated by an article which points out the dubious and *actual* ultra-nationalist past of Mr Navalny, the hero of the anti-Putinites, who prefer to ignore or avoid this awkward fact.
Mr ‘Wyke’ trundles out the ancient facts about the long-dead Lord Rothermere and his long-ago flirtation with Oswald Mosley and his befuddled remarks about Hitler.Many others, including I think Winston Churchill himself, were willing to say favourable things about Hitler and Mussolini, when they were merely bloodstained killers and tyrants, rather than enemies in war and (in Hitler’s case) a racialist mass-murderer. All regretted it and repudiated their support, I think (unlike many Stalin supporters who continued to their graves making excuses for Communism, as the historian Eric Hobsbawm still does). Generally, those who get exercised about Rothermere don’t get exercised about Stalin’s apologists. I have always thought the worse of both.
Conservatism is not ‘fundamental to fascist ideology’ first because this use of ‘Fascism’ to describe parties and states other than those specifically called ‘fascist’ is itself either a giveaway of Mr Wyke’s political sympathies, or shows him to be very ignorant of the origin of such things.. It is a propaganda concept adopted by the USSR in 1941 to avoid embarrassment over the rather recent (1939) Nazi-Soviet pact, and the phrase ‘National Socialism’. Given that Communist and National Socialist troops had recently marched in a joint victory parade through the formerly Polish city of Brest-Litovsk (film exists) the expression ‘National Socialism’ was unwelcome in the USSR. Also it was itself not all that different from Stalin’s ‘Socialism in One Country’ . Fascism doesn’t really have an ideology, but to the extent that it is sustained by any ideas at all, they are corporate, statist and far from conservative. As for the separate phenomenon of National Socialism, the clue’s in the name.
Mr Wyke continues ‘The Daily Mail even warned about the ‘flood’ of European Jews entering Britain fleeing persecution at the hands of the Nazis. Which does kind of explode Mr Hitchens’ frequent assertion that the British knew little of the Nazi persecution of the Jews at the time we (belatedly) declared war on Germany.’
I have never, let alone frequently, made any such assertion. This is another smear. I have said that the Nazi policy of extermination of the Jews did not begin until after the war had begun (in fact not until after the invasion of the USSR) and that Britain did not go to war with Germany to save the Jews (nor did she succeed in saving any, unless you count as ‘;saved’ those left still alive in the death camps at the end of the war, whom we did not life a finger to save, while busily bombing German civilians. In any case, it is regrettably true that the Red Army played a bigger part in their rescue than we did).
The Daily Mail was obviously wrong to speak in such terms. Who would disagree? Does he think I do? Am I in some way responsible for the repudiated remarks of a long-dead proprietor of the Daily Mail? How? If not, why mention it? (Smear, of course).
I am then accused of saying that ‘Vladimir Putin is some kind of paragon of virtue and common sense when it comes to interference in the internal affairs of other nations’.
No, I did not use such terms. I certainly said nothing about virtue. Nor did I use the word paragon. I was careful to list his crimes. But I explained why he is selectively hated for crimes which , in other countries, and committed by other leaders, western media ignore or excuse. Selective outrage, I say again, is phoney. Mr ‘Wyke’ makes no attempt to engage with this point because he cannot. He prefers the smear.
He winds up with some foolish drivel about religion, which he plainly doesn’t understand, and then says ;’ I find it rather disturbing that Mr Hitchens has nicer things to say about the likes of Putin, Assad and Gaddafi than he does about Cameron, Mandela or Obama.’
I have never said anything ‘nice’ about either Muammar Gadaffi or Bashar Assad. I doubt very much if Mr Putin thinks I have said anything ‘nice’ about him (let me repeat he is ‘a sinister tyrant at the head of a corrupt government’) I have in fact said complimentary things about David Cameron (recently here about his response to the Bloody Sunday inquiry report) , and I am happy to say here again , as I’ve said many times elsewhere, that Barack Obama is an engaging person and a fine writer. I think I have also said that Nelson Mandela’s generosity and forbearance are praiseworthy, as they are, though he also has many faults, including his friendship with, er, Muammar Gadaffi, and has served to provide a front for the very much less lovely ANC.
Mr Wyke writes as if he knows what he is talking about and has researched my past statements and views. But he doesn’t. And he hasn’t. What’s dispiriting about this is that his nasty smears are an irrational and spiteful response to what is basically a reasonable dissenting opinion, thoughtfully expressed. And that I have yet to see any of the more sensible contributors defend me against this sort of thing. I think that if people like Mr ‘Wyke’ get away with this stuff, the whole tone of this site sinks.
I should obviously have dealt with several other subjects. But when I’m smeared I must defend myself, or it goes out on the web unchallenged.
