We denounce Putin’s bombs – then pay homage to rulers behind an even filthier war
ON MY daily bike rides through the lovely city of Oxford, I notice that the rainbow banners of the sexual revolution, which normally fly from the ancient colleges, are now being replaced by Ukrainian flags. For anyone who has actually been to Ukraine or knows about its less-than-charming nationalist militias, this is something of a puzzle. I cannot see my old friend Peter Tatchell getting on very well with the dogged fighters of the Azov Battalion (and let’s face it, these neo-Nazis can fight), or their friends in the Right Sector.
But life is so much more complicated than it looks, and politics even more so. We have barely escaped from the rigid conformism of the Covid panic, when dissent was perilous. Yet we are already embarked on a new cult of Ukraine worship which it is risky to challenge. And it is, yet again, the same people, and the same movement.
Whichever one of these tribes it is – Extinction Rebellion with its furious intolerant Greenery, the rainbow flag people, the fanatics who wear face masks as they stride across high hills in howling gales – they all require obedience from the rest of us and have no time for any voice of dissent.
Of course any civilised person is disgusted, as I am, by Vladimir Putin’s lawless and barbaric invasion of Ukraine. Any civilised person wishes to help the civilians whose lives have been cruelly ruined by Russian bombs and artillery. And who cannot be moved by the fight of a small nation against a large one?
But must we then stop thinking? How did we get into this mess? How do we get out of it? Not, I think, by embracing Ukrainian nationalism ourselves. And must we also cease to recognise any faults in ourselves, citizens of a country which recently took part in a brutal and lawless invasion of Iraq? Gordon Brown, who was in the Cabinet which launched that disaster, calls without embarrassment for a war crimes tribunal. And BBC interviewers do not take him to task.
What I say will be denounced as ‘Whataboutery’ by conformists in the hope that I will shut up and you will not heed it. But I will not shut up, and I beg you to listen. For ‘Whataboutery’ – the denunciation of hypocrisy – is actually part of the Christian religion. It is urged on us in the Bible by Christ himself in that famous passage: ‘And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
‘Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam
out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.’
So I pay a good deal less attention than I otherwise would to the moral posturings in this conflict of Western politicians (you know who you are, Johnson) who travel happily to Saudi Arabia, to abase themselves before its rulers, when that country is still hosing away the blood of more than 80 people murdered in sectarian, lawless ‘executions’.
I might also point out that Saudi Arabia, helped and equipped by us, has for years been conducting a filthy aggressive war in Yemen which is at least as vile as the one now being carried out by the Kremlin in Ukraine. I should say it was even viler.
You will have to ask yourself why we care so much less about this than about Ukraine. But you know the answers. As for our muchexpressed and just outrage over
the Salisbury poisonings, why are we – and by this I mean the conformist chorus of media pundits as well as our political class – so much less concerned about the obscenely gruesome murder of the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, obviously the work of the Saudi state from which we pathetically beg help and to which we send our Royal Family, to pay homage.
Yet it is this wholly hypocritical moral outrage which gives such force to the new conformism.
It has turned Ukraine from an issue about which we could think, into a cause, which allows only one opinion. No, our methods of suppressing dissent are not remotely like those of Russia. But the effect is increasingly the same.
We have the outward forms of democracy and freedom, but none of the content. Only one view is allowed. No good ever comes from such conditions.