Several months ago, I asked a dog walking acquaintance if he’d listened to the new station, Times Radio yet. Something to keep Radio 4 on its toes, I suggested. Absolutely not, he replied. Why would he listen to a mere mouthpiece for Rupert Murdoch and his evil agenda?
Now, I have no love for Murdoch, but still I thought this was a bit much. Times Radio broadcasts under impartiality regulations, and I hadn’t detected any particular bias. I like the fact that it isn’t identical to the BBC in its tone and assumptions, but it doesn’t seem to have an agenda. I tried to strike a conciliatory note with my fellow dog walker: it didn’t seem biased to me, I said, but never mind, at least it wasn’t as bad as Russia Today. I went on to say that I couldn’t understand how humane and clever people shared online content from these Kremlin stooges.
On the contrary, he replied. Russia Today provides a welcome counterpoint to the malign and distorted output of the mainstream broadcast media, by which he meant the whole of the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and Sky News.
I left it there, but his bizarre comments have stayed with me. This chap was a middle aged, privately educated, graduate, living a middle class life in a pleasant enough part of Sheffield. His attitude is far from uncommon. I know many more such types, left wing graduates, living comfortable enough lives, and from comfortable backgrounds, who have spent much of the past decade or more giving more credence to Russia Today, Press TV (Tehran’s mouthpiece) and Al Jazeera (Qatar) than the BBC. My point about their education and privilege is that these people really should know better.
As should the equivalent voices, just as many, from the right of political opinion, who have long been seriously relaxed about the obvious and growing threat from the Russian state. I don’t mix with these folk as much, but of course they’re out there. You only have to look online and they seem to be everywhere.
That some people have an inability to see evil for what it is has been evident on social media ever since it became a thing. And the comments under online articles, floating along, among Russian bots and trolls, are where they really come into their own.
What can they all say now? When you’ve labelled Theresa May a mass murderer you kind of run out of words to describe Vladimir Putin.
And the corrupting influence of Russian money, or should I say money stolen from the Russian people by a few oligarchs and gangsters, has hardly been difficult to spot.
The threat has been hidden in plain sight for so long. Maybe now we will wake up.
Many politicians, and opinion formers have spent the last twenty years either siding with Putin, admiring him, or just being horribly complacent about him. Behind them have been countless keyboard warriors saying idiotic things like Russia wasn’t behind the Salisbury poisonings.
These are the people who see a world of democracies and dictatorships and conclude that it’s the democracies that are the problem.
In 1940, as Europe descended into war, Michael Foot published, Guilty Men, a coroscating attack on prominent individuals who had spent the past seven years playing down the threat from Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. There were many admirers of Hitler in the UK in the thirties, and many others who thought Churchill was a reckless and paranoid warmonger, with his warnings about the menace from a belligerent and rising Germany.
That clackety clack noise you can hear right now is the sound of countless western politicians, opinion formers and keyboard warriors deleting years of tweets and posts saying things about Vladimir Putin that look rather foolish now. Whether their naivety (or worse) comes to be seen in the same light as the appeasing of Hitler depends on what happens next in Ukraine and Russia. Regardless of how bad it gets, though, enough has already happened for it to be clear that the twenty-first century is not lacking in ‘guilty men’. At least, I suppose, we have learned to call them guilty people, not guilty men, but beyond that it’s hard to see what we have learned from history.
And now, as the war becomes bloodier still, we finally see it, with horrible clarity.
It’s Ash Wednesday tomorrow, the point at which Christians give something up for 40 days and nights. The point of this, as I wrote last year, is to prepare ourselves for our life’s calling. Jesus went into the desert, without physical sustenance, to undergo spiritual testing and temptation. It was the prelude to him setting out on a mission that could only lead to the cross.
We are to emulate this in our own way, with our own calling. We have to be prepared, and this includes understanding the price that we may have to pay for the thing that we must accomplish with our lives. So we give things up at Lent, not because they make us fat or poor, though they may do both. We give up the things that keep us from seeing our duty for what it is. We give up the things that are a barrier to us accepting our calling. We give up the things that prevent us from accepting the challenge of the times that we live in. We give up things that stop us from seeing what needs doing, and reckoning with the true cost of discipleship.
What should we give up this Ash Wednesday? Let’s start with our illusions.
Spiritually healthy faith communities must be able to see and name evil in accordance with its presence and its proportion. There must be no more pretending that wicked, authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, whether religious, secular, left wing or right wing are anything other than an affront to God.
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