It was the founder of the Jesuits, St Ignatius of Loyola, who is supposed to have said: “Give me a child until he is seven years old and I will show you the man.” Those words might have inspired the guiding principle of hostile state propaganda: give me control over the perceptions of foreign leaders and I will decide their policies.
Now that Nigel Farage is a potential prime minister, his views on international crises suddenly matter a great deal; one day British foreign policy might flow from them.
Russia will always strive to manipulate outside perceptions by devising elaborate stories to justify Vladimir Putin’s aggression. And the problem is that Farage has a long record of falling for even the most inventive of Kremlin cock-and-bull tales.
Alas he is not alone. It has emerged that one of Farage’s supporters profited by faithfully reciting Russia’s absurdities. Nathan Gill spent nearly six years in the European Parliament as a member of Ukip and then the Brexit party, before serving briefly as leader of Reform UK in Wales until 2021.
Last week, Gill pleaded guilty to having accepted bribes in exchange for making statements that were useful to Russia. In 2019, the record shows that Gill rose in the European Parliament to accuse Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky of the “repression of freedom” in Ukraine.
There is no suggestion that Farage knew that Gill was taking bribes or had any connection with this case.
There is also no sign that he disapproved of Gill’s public criticism of Zelensky. Instead, Farage’s response to Putin’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014 proved his willingness to believe Russian propaganda.
Putin’s cover story for that war of conquest was that Ukraine had provoked its own invasion by daring to apply to join the EU and Nato.
And what did Farage say? “Amongst the long list of foreign policy failures and contradictions in the last few years,” he told the European Parliament on September 16 2014, “has been the unnecessary provocation of Vladimir Putin.”
As Farage was speaking, Russian troops and tanks were already fighting inside eastern Ukraine, reinforcing separatist rebels in the provincial capitals of Luhansk and Donetsk. Earlier, Putin had occupied Crimea – 10,000 square miles of Ukraine’s sovereign territory – by redrawing a frontier and annexing a chunk of a European state for the first time since 1945.
Who did Farage believe was the expansionist power? Why Brussels of course. “This EU empire, ever seeking to expand, stated its territorial claim on the Ukraine some years ago,” he said.
If you think that he must have retreated from this speech, he retweeted it approvingly in June last year.
In fairness, Farage condemned Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but on the day of the onslaught he could not stop himself from repeating the Kremlin’s cover story that the whole tragedy was a “consequence of EU and Nato expansion”.
Farage’s dogged and instinctive exoneration of Putin should not have come as a surprise. In 2013, the Kremlin’s friendly dictator, Bashar al-Assad in Syria, used poison gas to kill over a thousand people in a rebel-held area of Damascus.
Russia tried to hide Assad’s atrocity by claiming that the rebels had gassed themselves as a “provocation”. Who should endorse this absurdity but Farage.
“I did admire what he [Putin] had done over Syria,” he said in April 2014. “Poison gas had been used and everybody in London and Washington and Brussels assumed it had been used by Assad. And Putin said ‘hang on a second, don’t be so sure’. It turns out it’s more than likely it was the rebels that used the gas.”
One problem: Farage was talking nonsense. By then, United Nations inspectors had already established that the gas in question had been sarin nerve agent (possessed by Assad but not the rebels) and the rockets had been fired from regime-held areas of Damascus.
To believe “it was the rebels” you had to convince yourself that they had manufactured sarin, despite having no such capacity, and then secretly advanced across the frontline into an area held by their bitter enemy, before launching their rockets back into a suburb under their control; inhabited by their own families, and then leaving without anyone noticing.
No wonder a UN Commission of Inquiry later documented 33 chemical attacks by Assad’s regime between 2013 and 2018. Farage not only proved himself a sucker for this pack of Kremlin lies, he later paid fulsome tribute to its author. In May 2014, he had this to say of Putin: “The way he played the whole Syria thing – brilliant. Not that I approve of him politically.”
Farage had the wit to remember the qualifying sub-clause, but his sheer credulity remains astounding. He genuinely convinced himself that Syrian rebels had gassed their own children with sarin nerve agent that they did not possess and the real imperialist threat to Ukraine came from the “EU Empire” rather than Putin.
The fact that Farage could hold such thoughts in his head raises a vital question: is there anything he would not believe if the Kremlin claimed it to be true?
Suppose he was prime minister and Putin invaded a Nato country, probably one of the states whose very membership of the alliance Farage thinks was mistaken.
Would he honour Britain’s treaty obligation to defend this ally? Does he believe in Nato? Every British prime minister in eight decades has backed this alliance to the hilt. Is Farage different?
Does he realise, for example, that the British Army’s biggest overseas deployment is in Estonia, a country he apparently thinks should have been excluded from Nato and left out in the cold. If Russia were to attack Estonia, would a prime minister Farage allow our troops to join Nato in resisting the onslaught?
And how would he respond once Putin had concocted some preposterous cover story for this aggression? Perhaps that Estonia had gassed Siberia? Experience suggests that Farage might fall for the Kremlin’s moonshine, again.
It was the founder of the Jesuits, St Ignatius of Loyola, who is supposed to have said: “Give me a child until he is seven years old and I will show you the man.” Those words might have inspired the guiding principle of hostile state propaganda: give me control over the perceptions of foreign leaders and I will decide their policies.
Now that Nigel Farage is a potential prime minister, his views on international crises suddenly matter a great deal; one day British foreign policy might flow from them.
Russia will always strive to manipulate outside perceptions by devising elaborate stories to justify Vladimir Putin’s aggression. And the problem is that Farage has a long record of falling for even the most inventive of Kremlin cock-and-bull tales.
Alas he is not alone. It has emerged that one of Farage’s supporters profited by faithfully reciting Russia’s absurdities. Nathan Gill spent nearly six years in the European Parliament as a member of Ukip and then the Brexit party, before serving briefly as leader of Reform UK in Wales until 2021.
Last week, Gill pleaded guilty to having accepted bribes in exchange for making statements that were useful to Russia. In 2019, the record shows that Gill rose in the European Parliament to accuse Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky of the “repression of freedom” in Ukraine.
There is no suggestion that Farage knew that Gill was taking bribes or had any connection with this case.
There is also no sign that he disapproved of Gill’s public criticism of Zelensky. Instead, Farage’s response to Putin’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014 proved his willingness to believe Russian propaganda.
Putin’s cover story for that war of conquest was that Ukraine had provoked its own invasion by daring to apply to join the EU and Nato.
And what did Farage say? “Amongst the long list of foreign policy failures and contradictions in the last few years,” he told the European Parliament on September 16 2014, “has been the unnecessary provocation of Vladimir Putin.”
As Farage was speaking, Russian troops and tanks were already fighting inside eastern Ukraine, reinforcing separatist rebels in the provincial capitals of Luhansk and Donetsk. Earlier, Putin had occupied Crimea – 10,000 square miles of Ukraine’s sovereign territory – by redrawing a frontier and annexing a chunk of a European state for the first time since 1945.
Who did Farage believe was the expansionist power? Why Brussels of course. “This EU empire, ever seeking to expand, stated its territorial claim on the Ukraine some years ago,” he said.
If you think that he must have retreated from this speech, he retweeted it approvingly in June last year.
In fairness, Farage condemned Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but on the day of the onslaught he could not stop himself from repeating the Kremlin’s cover story that the whole tragedy was a “consequence of EU and Nato expansion”.
Farage’s dogged and instinctive exoneration of Putin should not have come as a surprise. In 2013, the Kremlin’s friendly dictator, Bashar al-Assad in Syria, used poison gas to kill over a thousand people in a rebel-held area of Damascus.
Russia tried to hide Assad’s atrocity by claiming that the rebels had gassed themselves as a “provocation”. Who should endorse this absurdity but Farage.
“I did admire what he [Putin] had done over Syria,” he said in April 2014. “Poison gas had been used and everybody in London and Washington and Brussels assumed it had been used by Assad. And Putin said ‘hang on a second, don’t be so sure’. It turns out it’s more than likely it was the rebels that used the gas.”
One problem: Farage was talking nonsense. By then, United Nations inspectors had already established that the gas in question had been sarin nerve agent (possessed by Assad but not the rebels) and the rockets had been fired from regime-held areas of Damascus.
To believe “it was the rebels” you had to convince yourself that they had manufactured sarin, despite having no such capacity, and then secretly advanced across the frontline into an area held by their bitter enemy, before launching their rockets back into a suburb under their control; inhabited by their own families, and then leaving without anyone noticing.
No wonder a UN Commission of Inquiry later documented 33 chemical attacks by Assad’s regime between 2013 and 2018. Farage not only proved himself a sucker for this pack of Kremlin lies, he later paid fulsome tribute to its author. In May 2014, he had this to say of Putin: “The way he played the whole Syria thing – brilliant. Not that I approve of him politically.”
Farage had the wit to remember the qualifying sub-clause, but his sheer credulity remains astounding. He genuinely convinced himself that Syrian rebels had gassed their own children with sarin nerve agent that they did not possess and the real imperialist threat to Ukraine came from the “EU Empire” rather than Putin.
The fact that Farage could hold such thoughts in his head raises a vital question: is there anything he would not believe if the Kremlin claimed it to be true?
Suppose he was prime minister and Putin invaded a Nato country, probably one of the states whose very membership of the alliance Farage thinks was mistaken.
Would he honour Britain’s treaty obligation to defend this ally? Does he believe in Nato? Every British prime minister in eight decades has backed this alliance to the hilt. Is Farage different?
Does he realise, for example, that the British Army’s biggest overseas deployment is in Estonia, a country he apparently thinks should have been excluded from Nato and left out in the cold. If Russia were to attack Estonia, would a prime minister Farage allow our troops to join Nato in resisting the onslaught?
And how would he respond once Putin had concocted some preposterous cover story for this aggression? Perhaps that Estonia had gassed Siberia? Experience suggests that Farage might fall for the Kremlin’s moonshine, again.