Dr Strangehack

The UK's worst columnists see Russia's attack on Ukraine as another chance to prosecute the culture war.

Previously | The Telegraph’s Taliban: The paranoid style in British newspaper commentary...

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Some people in the West believe that an aggressive elimination of entire pages from their own history, “reverse discrimination” against the majority in the interests of a minority, and the demand to give up the traditional notions of mother, father, family and even gender, they believe that all of these are the mileposts on the path towards social renewal.

So said future Daily Telegraph columnist Vladimir Putin in his Valdai Discussion Club speech in March 2021. If he’d thrown in some attacks on the BBC, a few references to an imagined 1950s, and the word “woke” for both SEO reasons and its proven ability to fire up the paper’s senescent Home Counties rage addict readership, it would have been the perfect Telegraph comment piece.

Brendan O’Neill turned to the Valdai speech as inspiration for a Spiked column blaming Russia’s further invasion of Ukraine on “our weak elites”. After quoting Putin — no doubt hearing echoes of his own output through the years — he compares Russia’s “traditional, straight, history-appreciating domestic way of life” with “the West’s domestic moral disarray”.

Spiked promoted O’Neill’s piece on Twitter with a line that identified what he (and it) see as “Western weakness”:

Putin has unquestionably been emboldened by the incoherence of the West. He openly mocks the West for erasing its own history and buying into the nonsense of transgenderism.

While O’Neill went through the motions of denouncing the invasion (“As an anti-imperialist publication, a publication that fully supports nations’ right to self-determination, Spiked is implacably opposed to Russia’s actions.”), it’s hard not to conclude that he feels Putin has a point.

The same sense of barely concealed fellow feeling lurks in Sarah Vine’s latest column for The Daily Mail. After some self-obsessed burbling about meeting a friend for coffee¹ (“‘First Brexit, then Covid, now this,’ she said. ‘Will it ever end?’”) and her son asking her if he’ll be conscripted (of course not, his mother’s rich and his father’s a cabinet minister) zeroes in on the real enemy:

Is it really any wonder Putin thinks he can do whatever he wants? He looks at the West — not just the UK, but once mighty America — and sees democracy weakened by petty infighting and trivial rivalries, scoffs at our obsession with human rights, our self-flagellation over climate change, the endless march of the woke brigade…

… he has witnessed the mollification of our once-great institutions — from the BBC to the Armed Forces. There is a weakeness in us that cannot be denied.

So here we are, arguing about unisex toilets while teenage conscripts my son’s age are dying for the sake of an old man’s ego…

… while we’ve been fighting a pointless culture war, he’s been preparing for the real thing.

Putting aside the impossible question of who exactly has been in charge of all those “once-great institutions” for almost 12 years, you might conclude that an authoritarian dictator’s invasion of a democratic nation should make us keener on human rights rather than willing to toss them out the fucking fenêtre.

Sarah Vine’s entire career is based on writing about “petty infighting and trivial rivalries”. And, in an example of the guppy-like amnesia which all long-serving columnists must develop as a professional necessity, Vine’s previous column was about… unisex toilets.

… we are turning our backs on the values that made us great. Support for capitalism is dwindling at the very time when every other society has embraced it, and many would rather see mob rule than the rule of law…

There is growing scepticism about reason and the pursuit of truth. Universities are going back to their obscurantist roots, putting identity politics before knowledge. Many believe meritocracy has gone too far…

The woke ideology is the greatest threat to freedom since communism, and it is gaining ground by the day, fragmenting and dividing society, and pitting group against group better to undermine the West.

That’s not another quote from Putin’s speech but a column by a current Daily Telegraph talking head, Allister Heath, from August 2021 (Decadence and hubris have finally brought down the American Empire). Like The Daily Mail, which dedicated its front page on the day that Russia’s renewed invasion began to howling about pronouns at MI5, Putin may be the Telegraph’s big bad today but he’s nothing compared to the imagined ‘woke’ army it truly wants to defeat.

Elsewhere in the Mail today, Richard Littlejohn returned to the security services pronouns story, howling beneath the headline I bet they're not checking their spooks pronouns in the Kremlin that:

… this kind of woke grandstanding is a peacetime, end-of-history indulgence which has no place in a grown-up world where war is once again the answer at least as far as the madman Vlad the Impaler is concerned.

Writing no doubt from his winter dacha in Florida, Littlejohn’s attention has been turned to Ukraine like a baby distracted by rattling keys. The world’s other wars don’t matter much to him. This one does because he can use it on his personal affront in the culture war.

For the culture warriors of the British press, the invasion of Ukraine is merely another front in the real war. It’s another data point to prove that only speech of which they approve should be free and that a colder, crueller society is required to keep ‘us’ — don’t think too hard about who that includes — ‘safe’.

These opportunists will ventriloquise the talking points of the enemy without all day if they allow them to attack those they see as the enemy within.

1. That’s in Kensington rather than Kyiv, mind.