IT’S TRULY TERRIFYING HOW MANY SWALLOW PUTIN’S LIES

ALL instruments of death are ugly, but chemical weapons invite special repugnance. In syria on saturday, such horrors were nonetheless unleashed. scores of civilians died, many of them women and children. If President Bashar Assad was the immediate perpetrator, Vladimir Putin is his mentor and armourer.

The Us has led Western nations in promising a fierce response if the allegations are confirmed, as were earlier charges of the same kind. Britain seems almost certain to make a military contribution to an exemplary Western reprisal operation. Yet it is doubtful that more than a fraction of the peoples of the Western democracies take this enormity as seriously as it deserves, because they find it so hard to decide whom to believe, about syria or anything else.

Here is an amazing reflection of our 21st century lives. We receive daily dumper-trucks of information, on a scale unprecedented in history. We are bombarded with film, satellite images, Instagram shots, bulletins, news flashes about all manner of happenings worldwide, private and public.

Yet instead of being the best-informed generation of all time, we become ever more baffled about what is true, and whom to trust. The old, calm certainties that once derived from the BBC’s Nine O’Clock News and the pronouncements of the Good and Great have been displaced by a cacophony of rival claims, competing narratives advanced by spokesmen and interest groups, tweeters and Facebookers.

One of the foremost beneficiaries of this info-chaos is Russia’s president. Contrary to the foolish remark of Foreign secretary Boris Johnson, Putin is not Adolf Hitler, nor even Joseph stalin. He is, instead, the boss of a sprawling gangster state.

The Russian leader has made a cold calculation. He has no ideas about how to make his own country stronger. He can exert global influence, however, by making others weaker. Thus, he pursues a brilliantly sophisticated programme of mischief-making, some of it lethal, backed by propaganda and falsehoods which command an audience among gullible Westerners led by Jeremy Corbyn.

THESE people are likely to believe yesterday’s Russian denials of complicity in the syrian gas attack, just as they are attracted by Moscow’s crazy assertion that British agents tried to kill the skripals in salisbury.

In a new book entitled The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, europe, America, the Yale historian Timothy snyder explains the systematic campaign by Putin to undermine law-based democracies. As for the lies that the president peddles to his own people, the author describes the success of the crazy Kremlin narrative: that Russia is threatened by a mix of Nazism and Western decadence symbolised by homosexuality.

The election of Donald Trump and the fracturing of the EU are hailed by the Kremlin as important successes for its own gameplan, though I personally do not believe that the Us election was swung by collusion between Trump and the Kremlin.

In the Middle east, Putin empowers Assad to clamber over an ever-rising mountain of corpses, because having adopted syria’s president as his client, he is determined that the brute should be seen to prevail.

Russia values its syrian naval base on the Mediterranean. even more important, given its fear of its own Muslim minority, it wants to see syria’s Islamic state fanatics crushed. Finally, Russian cosiness with Turkey and Iran dismays the West, and thus pleases the Kremlin.

so far, the cost has been low, of creating this cocktail of misery and anarchy. Many Westerners still feel no great animosity toward Putin, because they believe that all national governments behave as badly as each other – think of Bush, Blair and Iraq.

Those of us fortunate enough to live in countries where freedom and law prevail need constantly to remind each other that we do not exist amid an international equipoise of wickedness. Our system offers its peoples incomparably more than life under the tyrannies of Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, the mullahs of Iran or Turkey’s Recep Tayyip erdogan.

To sustain civilised societies we must preserve an international order with some obedience to rules, including those that ban chemical weapons. The attack on the skripals, assuredly by Russian agents, was an outrage not merely against the victims, but also against Britain, because Putin sought to demonstrate that his killing writ runs in Wiltshire as in siberia.

We must not accept either the salisbury poisoning or the gas attack in syria as the new normal, merely because some tyrants – for Putin is only the foremost – behave in such ways. Instead, we need to fight back. Our principal weapon must be truth, restoration of faith among Western peoples that our values deserve to prevail; that our leaders can be trusted, as Putin and his kind cannot.

Last year an American academic named Tom Nichols published an important book about the decline in respect for expertise and leadership of all kinds, whether in the field of human health or international relations.

He wrote: ‘Conspiracy theories are attractive to people who have a hard time making sense of a complicated world and little patience for boring, detailed explanations. Unless some sort of trust and mutual respect can be restored, public discourse will be polluted by unearned respect for unfounded opinions. In such an environment anything and everything becomes possible, including the end of democracy.’

It is, of course, a challenge for the West to launch a counter-attack in the name of honesty and decency when its foremost standard-bearer, Donald Trump, himself makes no pretence of fidelity to truth. His popularity with his own partisan constituency has been created by exploiting the very weapons employed by Putin and Xi.

The President of the United states daily presents a narrative of events unrecognisable by most objective observers – yet which his followers embrace uncritically. He generates his own travesty of truth. Meanwhile, our own Foreign secretary makes Britain appear ridiculous by habitually inserting a foot in his own mouth before opening it, in the name of this country.

With such people responsible for making the case for the democracies, it is unsurprising that many Western voters struggle to believe that their own governments’ pronouncements deserve more respect than those of the Kremlin, whether about chemical weapons, Ukraine, or whether it is Monday or Tuesday.

This is a shocking state of affairs. We have entered a world in some ways scarier than that of the Cold War. In those days, for all their nuclear terrors, few among us, or even those who lived under communist regimes, doubted that Western freedoms deserved to prevail.

Today, those with access to platforms in the media as well as politics need to launch a new crusade, to persuade our own peoples that, for all the limitations of our societies and many of their current leaders, Western values remain vastly superior to those of our enemies.

WE do not use chemical weapons, nor do we have our domestic critics murdered. such people as Vladimir Putin do both. We must become far more savvy in combating Kremlin disinformation, so that the BBC website realises the folly of leading its story on the gas attack – as it did yesterday – by headlining Russia’s denial. This is not objectivity, but instead mere naivete. It is unnecessary to understand the wild complexities of the syrian war to see that those seeking to win it by gassing women and children deserve to become global pariahs.

It is welcome that the British Government appears willing to join in a reprisal operation against the monstrous syrian regime. Yet it needs also to do more, here at home: The friends of the Kremlin with lavish homes in Kensington need to be sent packing from London.

And the leaders of the Western democracies must understand that we are now in a struggle with Russia that embraces not only resistance to its acts of aggression, but also to make our truth prevail over Putin’s falsehoods.