Before I left Moscow, I exchanged with Vlad one of those manly Russian bear hugs, and expressed my fervent prayer that never, ever should our sons have to face one another in battle.
This was partly because Vlad is a 6 ft 5 in Siberian who wrestles bears - I’ve seen the video - and keeps a pet wolf (a black one, which he reared from a cub), and if his six boys are anything similar I suspect it’s going to be an unequal contest.
And partly because - have you seen the size of Russia? Are you aware how many natural resources they have? Have you factored in a Sino-Russian alliance? Do you know how much practice they’ve had of late in the kind of war we’d be fighting? - I think it’s a battle we’d lose.
But mainly it’s because there is not a single good reason on earth why we should be going to war with Russia in the first place.
The Russians are not our enemy. They are, as white Christians, our natural allies and soulmates. The only reason that anyone in the West even thinks it makes sense for us to be fighting our brothers in the East is because they’ve been brainwashed into acting against their own interests.
And guess who is behind that brainwashing…
Yes. That’s right. Our true enemies are not the Russians but the people who are doing their damnedest right now to engineer a war between us and the Russians. Call these people what you will: the Cabal; the Brotherhood; the Illuminati; the Powers That Be; the Predator Class; the Rulers of the Darkness of This World. They’re all the same thing when it comes down to it and they all serve the same dark entity.
Of course these people want Christian Americans and Christian Europeans and Christian Australasians dying in their droves in a futile and unnecessary war with Christian Russians. Christians killing Christians is the devil’s wet dream. His servants know this, which is why they’re working overtime right now trying to turn a little local proxy war in Eastern Ukraine into a properly acknowledged World War III.
One of their main methods for achieving this is through the use of misinformation and disinformation. In Britain, as elsewhere, the populace has been bombarded so relentlessly with stories about how plucky and noble and saintly the Ukrainians are, how vicious and ruthless the Russians are, how heroic and principled and role-model-y Zelenskyyyyy is, how oh-so-like-Hitler-but-probably-worse-actually Putin is, that they have been shell-shocked into accepting a narrative - ‘the Russians are baddies and they’re out to get us’ - that a moment’s thought would have written off as ludicrous.
That’s how propaganda works, and why it is so effective. It bypasses the intellect by appealing, though endless repetition, to the subconscious.
Even people who I used to think were clever because we were at Oxford together or because they have high-powered jobs in law or the City or who are name columnists in influential publications have succumbed to this drooling ‘Russia is bad m’kay’ idiocy.
Again and again when I mentioned to people that I was going to Russia I got the same reaction.
“Are you sure that’s wise?” as one of them put it. Which was a polite way of saying: “What the hell do you think you’re doing going to shill for the evil Putin? I suppose after a week’s being fed caviar and vodka by his public relations stooges and oiled and massaged by his honey trap devotchkas you’re going to come back and tell us that you’ve seen the future and it works, like the bloody useful idiot you are?”
Here is the first piece I wrote about my trip to Russia. Unfortunately, it is paywalled but perhaps you can find a way round this. If you can’t you’ll at least get an idea from the provocative headline: “Believe it or not, Russia is great.”
Because I was writing it for a Normie readership in the Spectator, I did so with the assumption that it would go down with my audience like a cup of cold sick.
I was not wrong.
One or two readers got it.
It feels so refreshing to read an article grounded in real experience, observation and insight, instead of just parroting propaganda. Great job!
(Thanks: Salome Vatsadze!)
Good article and a breath of fresh air. I am ambivalent about the war in Ukraine, to my mind, the protagonists, including NATO, are as bad as one another. However, this belief, in the West, that the Western way is the only way needs a swift reality check. Compare our crumbling, delinquent cities to those countries with a personal morality in their society. Their refusal to bow to the self flagellation of Western Wokery and hairshirt repentance, engendered by the corrupted lefty intelligentsia, then countries like Russia, Poland and a lot of our Eastern neighbours can teach us a big lesson in self-esteem.
(You’re a man of discernment William James-Allison!)
But many of the comments below were more in this vein:
Why does this great magazine pay Delingpole to write for it? He is a buffoon as this article shows. Those who frequent the Orthodox church in Moldova belong to a different generation and of course they believe in the old ways. But they will be gone in less than 10 years. Who should the country accommodate, the future or the past? The election has just told us which way the country wishes to turn. A cursory glance at Wikipedia would have told him that the church existed in the Soviet Union. He does the Spectator a great disservice and it’s high time it ditched him.
and
You sound just like Tucker Carlson following his “guided tour” of Moscow, James.
He’s a (useful) idiot too.
Check out the footage from the Ukrainian town of Bucha and revel in the trademark barbarism and savagery of your new Russian friends - who were all awarded bravery medals by Putin for the rape, mutilation and slaughter of innocent civilians.
And just like your colleague and man-child Leith, you think you’re being oh-so funny and clever with your contrived contrarianism.
You’re not. You’re just a pathetic, attention-seeking plonker.
With regards to the ‘footage’ from the Ukrainian town of Bucha: which footage and from what sources?
I looked into that incident in April 2022 and came to the conclusion that it was more than likely a psyop staged by Ukraine and its Western backers to discredit the Russians. Here is the piece I wrote then.
And here is probably the best piece of investigative journalism you’ll read on the subject, by Christelle Néant.
It goes without saying that the kind of people who call me a ‘useful idiot’ and a ‘pathetic, attention-seeking plonker’ aren’t going to waste their valuable time reading such articles. [I’m heroically assuming that they are real people and not just part of the intelligence community which, realistically, a lot of them will be. 77th Brigade and other branches of the state disinformation apparatus infest the comment sections like a bad dose of genital crab lice]. They know what they think about Russia and Putler already and they’re certainly not going to let their views be tempered by exposure to inconvenient counterarguments or facts.
Instead, they’ll just say what they’ve been programmed to say on these occasions. That this is “pure Putin propaganda.”
Now I don’t doubt for a moment that the Russians put out lots of propaganda. They did, after all, invent the term ‘Maskirovka’ - and Pravda (in the sense of the complete opposite of the truth) - and they had the NKVD and then the KGB and now the FSB. So I’m not trying to present the Russian state as a blushing bride, far more sinned against than sinning, whose word on everything is to be trusted.
But one of the differences between people from the West and from the East is that people in the latter, having had first- or second-hand experience of life under communism, are instinctively much less trusting of authority.
There was a good example of this during Covid, recounted to me over dinner in one of the many excellent and buzzing restaurants off Bolshaya Nikitskaya, by my friend Ian who now lives in Belorussia, but who spent some time in Moscow during the height of the scare.
Russia was certainly no bastion of bodily autonomy rights, anti-Big-Pharma scepticism or personal freedom during Covid. [Edward Slavsquat has reported on this a lot: eg
https://edwardslavsquat.substack.com/p/sputnik-v-returns-to-earth?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web
During ‘Covid’, Russia was no better than anywhere, with the state doing its damnedest to bully and blackmail the populace into taking the locally made version of the Covid kill shot, Sputnik V. One way it tried to do this - as in Italy and France - was to make vaccine certificates a condition of entry to bars.
My friend Ian discovered this when he found himself being denied entry to a sports bar to watch a football match. What he noticed, however, was that the bar was almost empty. Muscovites preferred to be relegated to the terraces outside the bars than to take this dodgy injection their government was trying to impose on them.
So the government’s next move was to insist on vaccine-certificates for the terraces too.
This lasted for about a week. No one bothered going out any more. The bar and restaurant industry was dying on its feet.
Not long after that, the city of Moscow rescinded its vaccine certificate mandate and life went back more or less to normal.
If only people in Britain, and the West generally, shared this bracing scepticism towards authority we would be in a much better state than we are now. People may protest that they don’t believe everything they hear on the BBC or read in the newspapers and that they don’t trust politicians. But these are mostly the same people who queued up for a hazardous, experimental drug procedure for no better reason than that they had been told to do so by their government and by some random ‘experts’ on the news.
It’s something I always like to keep in my mind whenever someone accuses me of being a gullible Putin shill: chances are they took the jab (if not several), banged their pots and pans for Our NHS, hung a blue and yellow flag outside their home because a coke-snorting ex-comedian in a khaki t-shirt was hailed as a hero by politicians they know to be serial liars, believed that the world’s most sophisticated intelligence-gathering nation was taken by surprise on October 7…
Being accused of gullibility by these people is like being called ugly by the Elephant Man.
As for the ‘shill’ part, I have no interest in taking sides and I owe my allegiance to no one (save Jesus). I’ll just go wherever the truth takes me. I don’t buy into what I call the “Hitler/Dogs fallacy”. That is, if Hitler says dogs make agreeable companions I’m not going to take the opposing point of view just because Hitler said it. [Here’s my full length essay on this theme. It’s a good ‘un].
None of this would matter, of course, if opinions didn’t have consequences. I would love to live in a world where people like James Delingpole could be right about stuff and where the majority of people - aka Normies - could be wrong about stuff, but where none of it mattered one jot because, hey, we can all agree to disagree. But that’s not the world we live in, is it?
Unfortunately, the one we live in is where Satan is the prince of this world; where a tiny minority of unimaginably evil people set the agenda; and where the only earthly thing that’s going to stop these creatures getting their way is if the majority refuses to co-operate it.
Really, that’s all we need to stop the Satanic elite’s masterplan in its tracks. We are many, they are few. If we all just say “No”, then it’s over for them.
That’s why - a point made by Ole Dammegard on our recent podcast - They put so much effort into mind manipulation. They know that dictatorship doesn’t really work. In the short term, maybe. But not in the long term because oppressed people are inclined to resist. No, the only truly effective form of tyranny is the version in which people imagine themselves to be free.
When I began my journalistic career in the late 1980s I was conscious of how lucky I was to be living in a country which placed such high value on freedom of the press, where journalists could speak truth to power without fear or favour - and with no danger of being bumped off or arrested.
I knew this, mainly, because articles by commentators I looked up to and whose prestige I emulated kept telling me that this was the case. This is how journalism works, by the way. Leading commentators regurgitate what previous leading commentators have written before them. Eventually these received ideas acquire the authority of well-established facts.
Since then, of course, I have become somewhat more sceptical of the integrity of the British press. It is - and probably always have been - a lie machine for the elites, designed not to inform the populace but to frighten them, divide them and mislead them.
This is what our media (and the Western media generally) have been doing for the last few years in their coverage of the war - or Special Military Operation, if you prefer, as I do because it annoys all the right people - in the Ukraine. And to be fair, they’ve done a very good job. At least they have to judge by the number of ‘informed’, ‘educated’ types I meet who, I get the impression, would have absolutely no problem if their government suddenly announced that it had declared war on Russia.
Unofficially, of course, the NATO states have been at war with Russia for years. I asked a senior Russian politician whether the West had engaged ground troops. Of course, he said, somewhat testily - like it was my fault, which I thought was a bit unfair. All the missiles systems and artillery are controlled by the British, Americans, French et al. Our various special forces are heavily engaged. Also, adding to what the politician told me, I hear tales from my children that their young officer friends in the Army occasionally boast about going off for exercises in “Poland”, with great emphasis on the inverted commas.
The Russian politician said: “Sometimes you will read obituaries of British, or Canadian or American generals who died in a skiing accident. They did not die in a skiing accident.”
Did any of us vote to go to war with Russia? Was it ever debated in parliament? What about the stipulation in the Bill of Rights that a declaration of war (other than to defend British possessions overseas) is constitutionally not Parliament’s to give away?
These are important questions, don’t you think? The kind of questions that any half way serious person ought to be asking if they wish to show themselves morally and intellectually fit to venture their opinions in the public square?
But none of our opinion-formers and opinion-relayers is asking them. They don’t even seem to be capable of answering more basic questions, like: ‘What’s in it for us?’
I mean, war is quite a big deal, right? And the kind of war we’d be committing our boys to fighting in Ukraine is especially horrible: like the worst of the World War I trenches combined, say, with that Tom Cruise future war sci fi movie Edge of Tomorrow.
The war has been transformed by drones which hover in their tens of thousands over the grey zone - the vast stretch of no man’s land between the Russian and Ukrainian front lines - where the bodies often lie unburied because it’s too dangerous to retrieve them. Any military asset of consequence - be it a tank or a concentration of infantry - is likely to be destroyed as soon as it tries to advance. Impersonal and relentless, the humming of the drones shreds the nerves of men on both sides. One veteran told me that he only has to hear the sound of a lawnmower to trigger his PTSD. Your life as an infantryman now depends on how quickly and accurately you can wield a shotgun to bring down the suicide drone before it explodes on top of you. A new kind of fighting has evolved, known as ‘trickle warfare’. Units advance in groups of no more than three men at a time, often riding electric motorbikes. Tanks are almost obsolete, only capable of moving if shielded by impenetrable drone cover.
Now this isn’t the kind of environment I’d choose for my sons spend their last days. Nor anyone else’s sons, for that matter. I think it’s tragic enough that Russian and Ukrainian boys are being fed into this meat grinder, perhaps a million of them dead, so far. But the idea that we in the West should add to that tally but throwing our own children (and brothers and fathers) into this overegged border dispute cum Cabal proxy war is depraved beyond measure.
Since when did we hold the lives of our people so cheap? Has anyone conducted any kind of cost benefit analysis? What exactly would we be hoping to achieve by ramping up a Third World War? What would our war aims be? What manner of existential threat does Russia pose to us that we should contemplate such drastic action?
And if it’s being done for ‘moral’ reasons, where is the evidence that we are the goodies? And given that thanks to our propagandising media and our lying politicians we are so pitifully ill-informed about the nature of the war and its origins, how could most of us form a worthwhile judgement?
The more astute reader may have spotted at this point that although this piece is ostensibly about the Russia/Ukraine ‘war’, what it really is is another variation on that endlessly frustrating theme: Why are Normies so incredibly ****ing stupid?
They really are, though, aren’t they? Yes. I know it’s unhelpful and demeaning and divisive lumping the mass of humanity into this contemptuous category. But nonetheless it is true and cannot be stated often enough.
Anyone in the West who think it’s in their interests to go to war with Russia has been taken for a ride by the propaganda of the Cabal. The Cabal loves wars. It needs them to perpetuate its disaster capitalism/fractional reserve banking business model.
See, eg, this summary of G Edward Griffin’s The Creature From Jekyll Island:
5. War Profiteering Through Central Banking Central banks enable wars by providing governments unlimited funding through money creation, removing the natural restraint of taxation that would make citizens resist military adventures. The Rothschild Formula perfected the technique of funding both sides of conflicts, ensuring massive debts that generate interest payments forever regardless of who wins. Without the Federal Reserve, America could not have financed its involvement in World War I, World War II, or the endless Middle Eastern wars—all of which enriched bankers while impoverishing nations. Every major war since the creation of the Bank of England in 1694 has been made possible by central bank funding that hides the true cost through inflation rather than honest taxation.
But the Cabal’s interests are not OUR interests. The Cabal are Satanists. They rape, torture and murder children in homage to their dark gods. They loathe God and His creation, which is why they are so dedicated to poisoning, killing and enslaving us. Their most especial enemies are Christians who, thanks to the Bible and the teachings of Jesus and the Church, are most attuned to the nature of the spiritual war being played out before us and now seeming to approach its apogee. So if these Satanists manage to engineer another scenario in which millions of Christians go to war with millions of other Christians - as They successfully managed in World War I and World War II - it represents a massive victory for them and their dark lord.
The West’s proxy war in the Ukraine against Russia is worth not an ounce of our treasure nor a single drop of our blood. The Russian people are our natural friends and allies, not our enemies. And though I really hate to say this and it’s a terrible way to end a piece and I promise that I’ll never do this again…
