Vlad the Invader is the West’s Moriarty

In Guy Richie’s excellent but wildly non-canonical Sherlock Holmes series, the archvillain Moriarty is significantly less villainous than we’d traditionally seen him portrayed. He was still Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Napoleon of crime”, but one who initially lives among ordinary folk, working as a professor of mathematics. This, we understood, was his genius: the ability to exert a malign influence everywhere but at no scale where he could be fingered as the originator.

It feels, at times, like Vladimir Putin might have been the model for this very modern Moriarty. Putin is ever-present yet nowhere as a malign actor in Western culture. It’s as though this were his unique skill: asserting an influence everywhere except the places we might fear that he is most influential. We are both switched on to Putin’s malignancy but also so paranoid that we elevate it to some superpower.

One of the few silver linings to be found in the black cloud of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine might well be that it brings a sense of moral clarity to our relationship with the Russian leader. The West is finally waking up to the reality that Vlad the Invader might not have our best interests at heart and, maybe, allowing such a man to control our energy supplies might not have been the best idea.

Yet in understanding this, we should also look deeper at our notion of what amounts to malign influence. If Putin has been our “Napoleon of Crime” for the best part of a decade, if not considerably longer, then it has not always been in any overt way. It is more of an ephemeral corruption that brings a quatrain by Emily Brontë to mind:

’Twas grief enough to think mankind
All hollow, servile, insincere;
But worse to trust to my own mind
And find the same corruption there.

Is it too much to blame Putin for our post-truth politics? Perhaps not, given the intellectual and moral slackness that has gripped the West. Even his more benign actions have undermined our faith in democracy and our trust in government. He gave sanctuary to Edward Snowden, who either did America a great service or a terrible injustice, but the effect was to weaken people’s faith in Western democracy. Russia too was involved with Wikileaks and, according to the Muller report, had fingers in the 2016 US election.

Wherever democracies struggle with their most profound and challenging problems, Russian agents can be found inflaming tensions. Whenever free speech arguments are used to beat up governments, the greatest champion for that free speech just happens to be the guy in the Kremlin who has journalists killed, opposition leaders jailed on bogus charges, and has currently has troops deployed across the globe in covert wars. Putin is the master of judo who has translated the art of dojo into geopolitics; pushing only until he feels resistance before he starts to pull us towards him again. We’ve spent decades experiencing the ebb and flow of his influence and all the time our moral compasses have been left spinning.

A prime example is Russia Today. It might not do Putin’s bidding as overtly as its Russian language counterpart, but it encourages division, actively amplifying voices from the margins of our politics, whether it’s George Galloway or Alex Salmond. It’s almost like Russia would like to see the further breakup of the United Kingdom…

Defenders will say this is merely a paranoid projection, but wasn’t it Afshin Rattanski, an RT News host since 2013, who went on the BBC’s Question Time after the Salisbury nerve agent attack and said: “We cannot believe our governments anymore the way we used to just because a prime minister stands up and says ‘the security services have told us’”?

There you have it stated quite brazenly: that poisonous fallacy that too often reduces our politics to playground squabbling. “Don’t trust any government!” Who then should we trust? Maybe the Facebook experts who lie at the root of so much that’s wrong?

RT might not overtly do much to incur the wrath of Ofcom – now apparently looking into their operation in the UK – but they needn’t when the audience has been indoctrinated with postmodernism’s worst messages: that there are no truths and that the line between information and disinformation is merely political. Our moral sense has been similarly corrupted that we casually forgot the red lines that Putin crossed when agents deployed nerve agents in the UK or left a trail of radioactive isotope across London when they murdered Alexander Litvinenko in 2006. Both were heinous and brutal crimes, committed in ways that defied the norms of international relations, but both were never properly punished because we never had the will to make more of them.

Why was that? Russian wealth, perhaps? The much-ignored Russia Report seemed to suggest as much. “The UK welcomed Russian money, and few questions – if any – were asked about the provenance of this considerable wealth,” it said when it was finally published last year. The report was damning but resulted in little change, not even a shift in emphasis. Did the money from the Putin kleptocracy blind too many? Have we sold our politics to the highest bidder?

It isn’t just a matter of the millions allegedly going into Conservative Party coffers. Russian money is everywhere in London where there was never a moral climate that made it unacceptable. “Look at Russia too,” wrote John Le Carre in Our Kind of Traitor, all the way back in 2010. “So where would you rather see that money? Black and out there? Or white, and sitting in London in the hands of civilized men, available for legitimate purposes and the public good?”

And that “public good” was everywhere to be seen. Chelsea fans excused it because they won championships; newspapers fell into the hands of oligarchs, and that was okay because they appeared benign and kept journalists in work.

It will be a consolation if we were now to wake up to this corruption because whatever skill Putin displayed in his work to undermine the West, he has now achieved the exact opposite by invading Ukraine. He has strengthened NATO, ensured that troops will be stationed on the other side of his border for the foreseeable future, whilst European leaders will scramble to address the energy security taken for granted in the times of cheap Russian gas. It must also make us reassess our relationship with oligarchs and their money.

Napoleon of crime? There was a time when Putin could have claimed that title. Now he increasingly resembles the Crimean nincompoop who has foolishly allowed us to see him for who he is. George W. Bush once claimed to have seen into Putin’s soul but this time we can all see inside the heart of this ageing KGB goon. We need to preserve this memory before Putin reverses course and starts to comply. Push and pull: the way of the judoka has been his method of destabilising us. It’s about time we remembered how to stay standing squarely on our own two feet.