Mick Hartley

Nick Cohen – The uses of terror:

Under the Tsars, Bolshevism and now Putin’s mixture of gangster capitalism and orthodox nationalism, hatred of the West has always been a defining feature of Russian ideology. When a Turkish police officer killed a Russian diplomat in Ankara this week – yelling ‘Don’t forget Aleppo!’ moments after the murder – Russia’s politicians and lickspittle ‘journalists’ instantly blacked out his real motives so they could fit him into their anti-Western story.

Even by the abysmal standards of Russian propaganda, the response to the assassination was breathtaking. It was either the result of Western protests about the Russian destruction of Aleppo or the direct result of a plot by ‘Nato secret services’. Despite helping Donald Trump to victory, and despite having the support of every far right party in Europe and Jeremy Corbyn’s contemptible British Labour party, Russia still has to regard the West as an enemy with supernatural powers. The propaganda is too deep-rooted and too useful to change. The naïve who think that Putin can be placated should watch it. Russia is telling us that not only that it cannot be appeased, it does not want to be appeased either. I doubt even a Trump presidency will stem the paranoid hatred.

The lie that the Turkish regime reached for was to implicate Fethullah Gulen, the Trotsky for Erdogan’s Stalin, and at once blame one of his followers for the murder. The purge of real and invented Gulen supporters is the excuse the Turkish regime is using for extinguishing all centres of opposition to Erdogan after the failed coup. Thus, and before they could possibly know the truth, the authorities denounced the terrorist as a Gulenist.

If you think about it, Russia’s idea that he was a Nato agent, and Turkey’s idea that he was a follower of a banned Sunni cult are incompatible. But Russia and Turkey see no discordance, and the assassination is bringing them closer together. They show that the similarities between dictatorial regimes are always more important than their differences. They look at the shared interest in conspiracy theory and propaganda, the shared loathing of liberal democracy and find a common feeling that transcends divisions in religious and political ideology. This freemasonry of the oppressive, incidentally, explains why nominally left-wing politicians such as Jeremy Corbyn and Seumas Milne are so ready to ally with Trump and Le Pen and defend Putin. To their minds, any dictatorship is preferable to no dictatorship at all. It is better to stand alongside thieves, racists and imperialists than defend hard won freedoms…