By Dr Andrew Kania
In an article for the London Daily Mail, “Russia is sick of being humiliated and pushed around by ignorant outsiders”, the English journalist and Christian apologist, Peter Hitchens announced during the recent and ongoing crisis in Ukraine, that: “We have been rubbing Russia up the wrong way for nearly 25 years. It is hard to see why. Moscow could have been our friend if we had wanted that. We rightly viewed the old Soviet Union as a global menace to freedom. But Russia is no such thing, just a major regional power sick of being humiliated and pushed around by ignorant outsiders. I watched the old Soviet menace vanish on the streets of Moscow in August 1991 when a KGB putsch failed, the Communist Party was shattered in pieces, and the USSR collapsed in a cloud of rust. Russians always believed there was an unspoken agreement that, in return for this, they would be allowed their dignity. They now believe that agreement has been broken. What was left after 1991 was Russia, a proud and courageous people living amid the wreckage left by 74 years of Marxism and hoping to revive their ravaged country. We could have helped them … Senior American, German and EU figures have gone to Kiev to egg on the anti-Russian crowds. Imagine how you would feel if Russia’s Foreign Minister turned up at SNP rallies in Edinburgh, backing Scottish independence.” (Hitchens, Daily Mail, 2/3/2014).
Today a well-known apologist for Christianity, Hitchens was in his youth an ardent Trostkyite, and although now presumably divested of the majority of these opinions, the comment he made regarding Russia’s attitude to Ukraine, would indicate that he harbors still a myopic support for Russian expansionism, and very little sympathy for the national sovereignty of Ukraine.
In fact, in an address that Hitchens delivered at the University of Bristol’s International Affairs Society on October 15, 2013, he stated his reasons as to why he likes Vladimir Putin; a man he believes is no threat to the West, but potentially only a threat to Russia’s immediate geographic neighbours.
Perhaps comforting words for those west of Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, if history be any gauge.
From what we read and hear of Peter Hitchens, communism has certainly gone out of his world paradigm, but political and cultural imperialism, (that was always an integral part of Moscow’s Soviet planning) may yet, it seems, find a resting place in his mindset.
Is Hitchens unaware of the history of the Ukrainian people under both the Tsars as well as well as the Soviets? If he be ‘ignorant’ of these historical events, can Hitchens in fact be classified as one of those, that he describes, as ‘ignorant’ of Eastern European politics – such as those who are criticising Russia today? Has he never heard of the Holodomor – the deliberate starvation of the Eastern Ukrainian people, on what was then, and what is still today, the fertile black-soiled plains of the steppes? Of course to all of these rhetorical questions, Hitchens is far from ignorant. He knows the answers to these questions. So why does he readily side with the powerful over the weak?
In response to Peter Hitchens’ Daily Mail commentary, it would be useful to spend some time considering the writing of another Englishman, the historian Robert Conquest.
In his ground-breaking text of 1986, The Harvest of Sorrow, Conquest concluded that the Stalin Famine was deliberately orchestrated, by Moscow for the specific purpose of destroying within Ukraine and among the heart of the Ukrainian people (including those Ukrainians residing outside of Ukrainian territory, but living within the borders of the Soviet Union), the culture, religion, language and spirit of self-determination of Ukraine.
Conquest concluded in words that seem so prescient today: “the crushing of Ukrainian nationhood was only temporary. Nor is that a local matter merely – if the word local can be used of a nation of nearly 50 million members. Even the true spokesmen of Russia itself, Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, insist that the Ukraine (sic) must be free to choose its own future. And beyond that, Ukrainian liberty is, or should be, a key moral and political issue for the world as a whole.” (Conquest, 1986, p. 347).
Moreover the murder of what Conquest equated to around ten million people was as Conquest well-remarks, not only planned as a basis for destroying Ukrainian identity, but was carried along by the gale of Soviet atheism.
Conquest quotes Vladimir Lenin, who two decades before the Holodomor instructed Maxim Gorki: “Every religious idea, every idea of God, even flirting with the idea of God, is unutterable vileness… of the most dangerous kind, ‘contagion’ of the most abominable kind. Millions of sins, filthy deeds, acts of violence and physical contagions… are far less dangerous than the subtle, spiritual idea of God decked out in the smartest ‘ideological’ costumes … Every defence or justification of God, even the most refined, the best intentioned, is a justification of reaction.’” (Conquest, 1986, p. 199).
No one should have been surprised then, when later during the Holodomor, the Church, both Ukrainian Autocephalic and Ukrainian Catholic, were classified as ‘kulaks’, (a quite nebulous term invented by the Soviets to give a generic name to their enemies), and sent to martyrdom.
Ukraine is, and as the communist regime grew painfully aware, was then, an ardently religious nation.
It is now known, and beyond doubt that thousands of clergy were killed, and millions of the Christian Faithful, and members of other religions within Ukraine, were deported and liquidated, during the Stalin Famine.
The ‘crime’ of these victims was not merely that they were religious Faithful, but of course, that they were Ukrainian, not only by birth, but by identity.
Yet despite all this historical information relating to the suffering and an infamous act of genocide against the Ukrainian people, all we hear from Peter Hitchens in his Daily Mail article, is that the world should consider Vladimir Putin’s feelings.
As we come into the Easter season, perhaps we should consider the Roman soldier who flogged Christ, and as to whether or not he was ever treated for a repetitive strain injury.
Conquest also commented how George Orwell the author of Animal Farm, (poignantly, an allegory based on the Holodomor) appealed to the conscience of the West; in Orwell’s words: “‘Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles.’” (Conquest, 1986, p. 321).
The world knew adequately enough in 1932-1933 what was happening to the Ukrainian people.
Ukrainian wheat was being exported to feed Russians in Russia, while starving Ukrainians who sought food from across the Russian border were turned back by armed guards.
Conquest lists media outlet after media outlet who were speaking out on the Holodomor.
But there was also the alternate and loud voice of dis-information, and none better than another English author, Walter Duranty, a man who would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for his writing that was as the New York Times described: “the most enlightening dispassionate and readable despatches from a great nation in the making which appeared in any newspaper in the world.” (Conquest, 1986, p. 320).
We know today that Duranty lied about life in Ukraine, and deliberately hid the reality of the Soviet terror campaign.
Malcolm Muggeridge, and the Welsh journalist, Gareth Jones, smuggled out from Ukraine in diplomatic bags accurate reports; Muggeridge himself later writing that Duranty was: “’the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in fifty years in journalism’” (Conquest, 1986, p. 320).
So how ironical is it that during the present crisis in Ukraine, Peter Hitchens expresses no concern for Ukraine’s right of self-determination while having received in 2010 the George Orwell prize for journalism.
What would George Orwell say? Well, probably that English Russophile journalists obviously still exist.
But there is still yet a further irony to consider. In 2007, an English journalist went to Stanford in the United States to interview Robert Conquest.
The journalist’s name was Hitchens; that is Christopher Hitchens, the now late, and older brother of Peter.
The meeting that Christopher Hitchens would have with Conquest was later published in The Guardian and The Observer. Oddly enough, Christopher Hitchens, the atheist, was in admiration of Robert Conquest’s writing. Strangely enough, in a public debate at Grass Valley University in Michigan, USA, the two brothers debated Putin; Christopher Hitchens boldly declaring that the Russian leader had been the tyrannizer of Ukraine, Georgia and the Baltic States.
So here we have it, two brothers, one an atheist who decries the acts of the mighty against the weak, and the other a Christian, who defends the right to might of an aggressor against the weak.
The political satirist and cleric, Jonathan Swift, noted in his ‘Polite Conversation’ of 1738, that: “There are none so blind as those who will not see.”
It is one thing being ignorant of history, and yet another being knowledgeable of it, and refusing to admit the reality, for example, in the case of Walter Duranty.
Journalists have the power to shape public consciousness, and therefore must provide both a broad and honest vista for those who listen to, and read their words. They should declare their bias.
The modern history of Ukraine has attracted to it, a variety of journalists, and in subsequence, various standards of journalism, and this should be kept in mind – as a world now watches anxiously on.