The Age of Hypocrisy

As I am expert in nothing, anything I say is probably rubbish. In that context, I predict that there will be no invasion of Ukraine by Russia any time soon. (Note 1) 

I don't know what, if anything, Putin is up to - not much, quite probably. What I suspect is that actually it is the Biden administration that is beating up the Ukraine question, hoping that, having done so and got enough people panicking, if there is no invasion, they can claim they have achieved something, (quite a few governments have discovered the usefulness of frightening voters over the last two years).

Meanwhile, the Johnson administration is also beating up the idea that there will soon be a Russian invasion - for them this is simply a "look-over-there" strategy designed to make the public think that Johnson is a statesman and not a party going, spineless arse (not a strategy with any chance of success, I predict, as a non-expert).

Whatever Putin's intention, what this episode has exposed exceptionally clearly to me is that the part of the world where one might once have claimed there was something called Western civilisation is now not civilised at all. It has become the zone of Western hypocrisy, ruled over by a bunch of posturing, greedy, self-serving mugs - or are they thugs? I suppose they can be both. 

Once upon a time, the West did have principles and values (oh shut up about slavery, we didn't invent it and we abolished it as soon as we thought about it carefully). At the beginning of the Second World War it recognised - if reluctantly - that Adolf Hitler was exceptionally wicked and it was necessary to stop his advance. During the Cold War, it recognised that the Soviet Union was an appalling machine for grinding down innocent souls. Looking at Cultural Revolution China, it recognised that a dangerous murderer was in charge - and, ineffectively but not necessarily wrongly, tried to stop the spread of that dangerous murderer's system of government throughout South-East Asia.

Now things are different. We pretend to disapprove of Russia and China, while making our economies daily more dependent on them, intertwining ourselves with them so thoroughly that we have become complicit in every single wicked thing they do. 

Despite knowing that Mr Putin's regime is rotten to the core, Europe has allowed itself to become utterly dependent on the gas that regime produces. Britain meanwhile has a financial sector that is so riddled with dirty Russian money that no one in power dares do anything serious in retaliation to any monstrous action that Putin cares to dream up (not even in response to a nuclear attack on British soil, which is what the murder of Alexander Litvinenko was). 

Similarly, despite disapproving of China - its coal-fired stations, its treatment of its minority peoples - the West welcomed it into our trading sphere, ostensibly on the naive assumption that by doing so Chinese rulers would suddenly see the error of their ways and establish genuine democracy where the Chinese people would be the true rulers rather than merely the thoroughly brainwashed ruled. 

But we didn't insist on any changes in China, strangely. Perhaps we didn't really care what happened to the Chinese people, provided they kept doing our dirty work - and doing it wonderfully inexpensively so that we could fill our houses up with mass-produced stuff. We turned the blindest of blind eyes to China's vile approach to human rights and its frightful treatment of the environment, in exchange for having our shops filled with bright shiny cheap things, which many of us too late discovered that we could no longer buy, since our jobs had been taken by slaves in China. 

But who cares really? Who cares if China is opening multiple coalfired power stations, provided they can make our solar panels, without our ever having to become aware of the pollution that is a consequence of every panel made. And isn't it wonderful to be able to go into a Tesco superstore and buy a cheap television to while away the hours we are no longer working, even if it is made by slave labour. 

The great thing is the profits of big Western companies are up, black lives matter, and we don't have any slaves. And we believe in human rights and our police don't beat us up for expressing opinions that differ from the government line.

But hang on. Whoops. What happened to our moral high ground? Look at the emergency measures just introduced in Canada, look at the footage from across the world in the last year or so, showing police in France and Germany and other so-called democratic nations beating up those who dare to come out on the street to question government measures that have never been taken to a democratic election to be approved. 

Mr Putin this week, whether he intended to or not, has shown that the West isn't going to do anything to curtail his excesses, because it is caught in his web, it is party to everything that he does. In exactly the same way - possibly even more troublingly, - the West is party to all China's excesses as well, because we have farmed out our manufacturing to that country, where workers' rights, health and safety, anti-slavery rules, can all be ignored without us noticing and we can continue our addiction to endlessly shopping for more and more cheap things. 

In short, what the situation with Putin has highlighted is that we live in an age of hypocrisy - and I don't like it. 

I said at the start that I know nothing, but actually there are two things I know: firstly, I know that I've never felt the resonance of Auden's phrase about "a low, dishonest decade" more strongly, and, secondly, I know that the state of the West and the calibre of its current leaders makes me sick.

No. 1 - that went well!