Who would fight for Britain?

Confronting Russia in an age of illusion

Landscape from a Dream, Paul Nash, 1936

I don’t use social media much these days (especially not Twitter/X), but I dropped in briefly the other day and was struck by how openly pro-appeasement much of the political right has become when it comes to Russia. ‘We won’t fight for you,’ declared Tommy Robinson (aka Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) in response to a call for Britons to help deter Russian aggression. Such indignant responses were commonplace in the online communities inhabited by the likes of Mr Yaxley-Lennon.

I suspect this is partly down to a shift in the so-called Overton Window because of Donald Trump. There is a growing synergy between US and Russian policy towards Europe which seeks to weaken and divide it from within. Both imperialist powers see our civilisation as decadent and in decline. Both have a fundamentally racist view of non-white peoples. Both worship power, conquest and violence. And both display very little interest in the fates of people living outside of the ‘big powers’.

The recently published United States National Security Strategy talked of ‘help[ing] Europe correct its current course’ and avoiding ‘civilisational erasure’. An earlier version of the document said that US foreign policy should seek to persuade Hungary, Poland, Italy and Austria - four countries already governed by the far right - to leave the European Union. Speaking of which, an AfD deputy (from Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany party) has been described in a strategy memo to the Kremlin as ‘under our absolute control’. And so we find ourselves in a situation where the two largest imperial powers are working to bring fascist parties to power in Europe - one by force, another by blackmail.

There is compelling evidence to suggest that we are already at war with Russia. Indeed, the refrain from some quarters - that Russia would never dare to attack us - is disproved by events. As this informative article from August of last year by Daniela Richterova for War on the Rocks puts it:

Mysterious fires have been ravaging civilian and military facilities across Europe. They follow other seemingly random incidents damaging fiber-optic cables, railway systems, GPS signals, department stores, and ammunition manufacturing plants across Europe that have escalated in frequency following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Most recently, three high-speed rail lines in France were sabotaged before dawn on the day of the opening ceremony of the Olympics. Targets in the United States have also recently taken hits, with a major explosion damaging an ammunition plant in Pennsylvania in April and another deadly explosion hitting a weapons plant in Arkansas in July. While in some cases the target countries are still determining the cause or searching for culprits, Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Denmark have arrested individuals connected to these attacks. What is more, with various levels of confidence, these governments have openly declared Russia responsible.

Not that this has stopped right-wingers from squealing about a warning by the head of the armed forces that Britain’s ‘sons and daughters’ must be ready to fight back if Russia attacks us. ‘Patriots should not fight for the British state,’ declared one Telegraph columnist earlier this week. The long and short of it is that they don’t wish to fight alongside people they deem to be foreigners, including many British citizens. The fact this sort of thing is published in what was once a respectable newspaper shows the extent to which what was previously the far right is today simply the right.

The far-right believes Britain is already at war to be sure - albeit not with Russia. Hence the use of military language when talking about foreign migrants. Asylum seekers are routinely described as ‘fighting age males’ who constitute an ‘invasion’ force. This is a way of dehumanising some of the most wretched people on earth. It also has the added benefit of allowing a pseudo-patriotic rabble to cast themselves as warriors valiantly defending Britain from foreign conquest. And yet when it comes to real war the same people say they will refuse to fight (presumably because their taxonomy of human beings places white Russians above those from Syria or Afghanistan).

The chief problem with the internet is the way it clears the way for this sort of flight from reality. Whatever Mickey Mouse theory of the world one holds, there are sure to be 100 million people who will reflect your own brand of stupidity back at you. Of course, there are also 100 million people who will loudly disagree with you. But you can simply block those voices out - or if you are as rich as Elon Musk you may simply buy the platform in question and game the system so that alternative voices remain inaudible.

Right-wing admirers of Russia frequently defend the country on the basis that it propagates ‘traditional values’. Conservative intellectuals like Jordan Peterson interpret Putinism as some kind of revolt against a decadent west. Russian campaigns against LGBT organisations would seem to support this narrative. However, traditional values in Russia mean little more than the survival of the political regime. Russia has higher rates of divorce, abortion, addiction, and violence than most Western democracies. It is also a more violent and materialistic society. Like some of the ‘useful idiots’ from a previous era, the Kremlin’s contemporary admirers are devoted to a mirage.

Outright Russophilia remains rare on the political left. More common is a kind of equivocation or moral equivalence rooted in parochial isolationism. Readers of both the Telegraph and Tribune would prefer to move on and talk about something else. This finds expression in a torrent of cliches and anaemic language you hear whenever the subject of British support for Ukraine is broached. Last week I watched some Hoxton mullet on PoliticsJoe try to dress up a reactionary argument about the ‘national interest’ and ‘foreign wars’ as something radical and clever. The prospect of war with Russia is an inconvenience and anyone who takes the threat seriously will be accused of warmongering or suffering from amnesia regarding the ‘disastrous military adventures’ of the past. Everything is merely a recapitulation of Iraq or Afghanistan or Libya under different constellations. Anyone who objects is branded an ‘armchair general’ (as if civilian control of the military is a bad thing). It is a substitute for thinking that the left carries around with it like a congenital hump.

It is common to hear the fallacy that deterrence equals escalation when in fact the reverse is true. One of the reasons Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022 (or, indeed, in 2014) is that it does not have an adequate deterrent - i.e. it does not sit under the NATO security umbrella. Bullies only understand force, as any fool can tell you. Dictatorships resemble crime families. As Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, two of Russia’s most respected investigative journalists, now at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), put it:

the only way to avoid a much larger war may be for European deterrence to impose badly needed discipline on the Kremlin.

And so we arrive at the paradoxical position where war becomes more likely because large numbers of people have convinced themselves that the worst possible outcome is ‘escalation’.

Comparisons to Nazi Germany are frequently hyperbolic and are usually best avoided. However just as Hitler styled himself as a sworn enemy of the 1918 revolution in Germany, so Putin considers the breakup of the Soviet Union to be a monstrous crime. Hitler’s resolution that ‘there must never again be a November 1918’ finds its reverberation in the Putinist desire to reverse the humiliations Russia experienced in the 1990s. Therefore anything is justified if it prevents the current ruling class in Russia from losing its power (that ruling class being, in the eyes of Putin and his inner circle, the only people capable of holding things together).

There is a certain irony in the fact that those on right and left who draw, respectively, on Churchillian ‘finest hour’ rhetoric or anti-fascist cliché for propaganda purposes, are much less interested in facing down a despotic ruler in the here and now. This can sometimes come as a shock to those of us who grew up imbibing heroic stories about the Second World War. To be a quisling or a collaborator was seen as something disgraceful. Chamberlain’s name was a term of abuse. But then moral identity only emerges when tested by history; or as Malraux put it, ‘a man knows nothing of himself until he has acted’.

The same is true for you or me of course. But one surely does well not to surrender before a single shot has been fired by one’s own side.

Alternatively, you can buy my book Lost Boys here.