The Sane Hitchens on Russia

Peter Hitchens, the younger (and saner) brother of the late Christopher, offers a refreshing view of the entire Ukraine mess, writing in the Mail on Sunday. Excerpts followed by my comments:

Any visitor to Sevastopol will find it contains many monuments to genuinely heroic defences of that city against invasion (one of those invasions was our more or less incomprehensible incursion into the Crimea 160 years ago, which achieved a good deal less than nothing and cost a great deal of lives). The biggest memorials commemorate the 1941-44 invasion by Germany, which was resisted and eventually expelled at great human and material cost, in battles whose names and nature are unknown to most in the ‘West’.

If they knew more about it, they might understand why Russians are ‘paranoid’. The country has no natural defensible borders. A street in southern Moscow, Ulitsa Bolshaya Ordinka (the street of the Great Horde) commemorates to this day the five-yearly visits to Moscow of the Great Horde, to collect tribute from that frontier city. We tend to think that the Urals, supposedly mountains but really rather unimpressive hills, form Russia’s eastern boundary. But it isn’t really true. From every direction, the heart of Russia lies open to invaders. Moscow has been invaded or occupied by Swedes, Poles, Lithuanians, The Golden (or Great)  Horde, Crimean Tatars, Napoleon,  No wonder the Russian word for ‘security’ (Byezopasnost) is a negative construction (‘Byez’ means ‘without’ ; ‘Opasnost’ means ‘danger’). The natural state of things is danger.

Contrast this with the British and American world view, predicated on having a large body of water as a moat securing them from any attack. In the Anglo-American mind, war is something that happens "over there". Russian wars generally begin with someone invading Russia, and generally end with the Russians gloating in the defeated invader's capital.

One might add that states which supported the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the attack on Libya, cannot really get very hot under the collar about Russia’s intervention in Ukraine.

But they are - because their worldview is Who/Whom, where they can do no wrong, and the designated Other can do no right.

It’s also interesting that Ukraine, while giving Crimea a great deal of autonomy, always strove to prevent a referendum on the region’s future, knowing for certain that it would lead to open calls for a return to Russian rule. Were I a Ukrainian politician or citizen, I would actively support the return of Crimea to Russia, because it was always bound to lead to trouble...

In fact, a fellow blogger suggested just yesterday that Russia may not want to take Crimea out of Ukraine, as that would only strengthen the Banderovtsi.

What continues to strike me about this whole row is the inability of most people to view Russia as a country, or Russians as people. Russia is portrayed as a bogeyman, and its people as either oppressed or as tools of a new Hitler.

This should actually not be so surprising. Isn't the key characteristic of the postmodern Western mind the lack of actual empathy, and the tyranny of the false one? Other people are never seen as having agency, they are either oppressors or oppressed.

Let me remind readers that Russia existed as a civilisation long before Lenin turned it into a Communist slum.... Russia still contains a large, educated, cultured middle class, who of necessity care more about history, literature and patriotism than their complacent, spoiled, semi-conscious western equivalents.  They, their parents and their grandparents have seen with their own eyes what can go wrong with a happy life, how suddenly it can happen, how little you can do about it, if invaders come, or if fools are in charge of your country, or both.

This is why "Pussy Riot" is rightly condemned by most Russians for what it really is - a group of spoiled, entitled brats acting like animals in public to get attention. Meanwhile, the "liberals" - the kind of Russians favored in the West, who don't even like to call themselves Russians - go so far as to complain the Nazis had lost the war, because had Germany won, they'd all be driving BMWs and making German wages. I kid you not.

For years now, trivial-minded, historically ignorant, efficient, glinting people have tried to turn Ukrainian independence into an attack on Russia. They did it in the ‘Orange Revolution’ and failed because the victors turned out to be as corrupt and divided as those they replaced (a problem which may well emerge again now they have had a second go). And now they have done it again.

As I've said before, this is not about the Ukrainians, just as Kosovo was not about the Albanians. This is about the Empire seeking to destroy Russia. And Imperial officials have admitted as much.

...I suspect that Mr Putin, and most Russians do not really regard Ukraine as a proper sovereign state, and I think they may be on to something.  They view its existence  as an artificial and accidental result of a moment of Russian weakness, which has since been maintained, for cynical reasons, by Western interference. Is Ukraine really sovereign, economically, diplomatically, militarily or in any other important way? Has it ever been?

I might add that Russia, bound by the modern rules of diplomacy, has refrained from compelling Ukraine to return to Moscow rule by naked force, as it would not have hesitated to do 50 or 100 years ago.  Instead the Russians have sought to ensure that Ukraine remains very much under their influence, while Kiev retains formal independence. Something very similar can be said of the EU’s treatment of many of the former countries now under its rule, including our own. The polite fiction of sovereignty is maintained for the convenience of ruler and ruled.
But, because of the EU’s (and NATO’s, and the USA’s) aggressive and repeated attempts to disrupt this tactful arrangement,  Russia feels the need to take some firm concrete action, both to stop this going further, and to deter future attempts to disaffect areas which Moscow believes are in its sphere of influence.

Compare and contrast: the West (Empire, EU, etc.) keeps meddling, keeps pushing for "reforms" that enrich (their) oligarchs and impoverish everyone else, keep treating Ukraine as a puppet or a piece on the gameboard. Yet Russia, that does nothing of the sort, is accused of "meddling" and "aggression." Typical propaganda tactic, blaming the target.

Such disaffection has gone quite far enough already, thanks to the weird, selective anti-Russian prejudices of so many in the USA. What exactly do these people see as the concrete reason for their hostility to Russia? What is it actually about?
[...]
This is about globalism versus national sovereignty, and the curious anomaly of Russia, an old-fashioned European country that is too big to be sucked into the EU, too small to be a superpower (and so invulnerable, like China) , too patriotic to be persuaded to dissolve itself. 

Spot on. There are other factors involved, to be sure - a Russophobia prevailing in the Anglo (and later American, by extension) ruling circles since the 1800s; a passionate hatred for the Orthodox nurtured by Rome for a thousand years - but Hitchens has zeroed in on the intersection of both.

The current Western model of "liberal democracy" and "capitalism" is said to be the pinnacle of human political evolution, the "end of history" and the inevitable state of Man. Yet the existence of Russia - almost vanishing under Yeltsin's wholesale adoption of the Western model, then flourishing rapidly as soon as Putin abandoned it - proves this is not so. As with any system based on blind dogmatism, any deviations from the dogma must be eradicated, lest someone start doubting. So even though Russia is not seeking to export its system, or impose its values, or control the world - its very existence is a threat to those that do. In a world of meddlers, minding your own business is the cardinal sin.