David Pratt: It’s time to call out Putin’s useful idiots in Scotland

In part, my decision was also borne out of my admiration and respect for the likes of the great Jimmy Reid and those other former party members from across the world that I was fortunate enough to meet at that time. My staunch anti-fascism, which survives to this day, was another motivating factor.

Today my admiration for the likes of Reid remains undiminished and most of my friends are among those who could best be described as leftist in their politics as I too still identify.

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But looking back now, the time has long since passed when I like so many other former CPGB members would give our almost unquestioning support to anything emanating from Moscow or Beijing. For just as the repressive nature of such regimes became ever more apparent, I realised that this was not the politics for me.

Communism died in Russia – at least - with the demise of the Soviet Union despite what Russian president Vladimir Putin would like to world to believe today. The old KGB man still does his damnedest to convince those gullible enough to swallow the nonsense that Russia through its invasion of Ukraine is simply standing up to “Western aggression.”

This, as any sane person knows, is patently untrue, which brings me to the question as to why so many of those on Scotland’s left and elsewhere still seem more than willing to defend Putin’s Russia as if it somehow offers a legitimate and acceptable alternative.

It’s not as if you need look far to identify such people. The comments and letters sections of almost every newspaper – including this one – each have their quota. On more than one occasion face-to-face too, I’ve been told by people – who up until then I thought were politically astute – that Putin is “fighting Nazism” in Ukraine or “liberating it from NATO encroachment” and “a malign western influence.”

To such people, the problem is never Putin’s murderous invasion or the war crimes that have resulted but is instead yes, no prizes for guessing – the West. In their response, these Putin cheerleaders invariably point the finger at the United States.

Whether it’s something going down in Ukraine or Timbuktu, Washington according to such thinking is always the evil one, a sort of Great Satan as the demonising epithet for the US used by Iran’s Ayatollah once dubbed it.

It’s as if all these Putin apologists under the ridiculous guise of being “progressives” can’t shake their old-time association with a past when what Moscow said was writ.

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It’s as if too in response to every world crisis they simply take down from a dusty old shelf some treatise containing the “answer” which almost invariably blames the CIA and proves that the West is up to no good again. I’m under no illusion about what the CIA or America is capable of having witnessed it first-hand over many years.

But never once do these old died-in-the-wool leftist apparatchiks veer from the diktats with which they have lived by all their lives. Never once do they pause and recognise that the world in which we now live might have moved on and the powers that currently shape it are not necessarily the way they once were.

No one doubts that Russia made huge sacrifices fighting fascism during the Second World War, but it appears beyond the capacity of those who have become Putin’s de-facto mouthpieces to understand that his Russia embodies the very fascism such old communists and “progressives” would claim to decry.

In this regard, those of this supposed left are no different than those ragbag figures of the populist right who have long supported Putin and his ilk while claiming that the Russian leader’s demands were reasonable if only, we would take the time to listen.

All of that “reasonableness” of course was drowned out by the rumble of Russian tanks on February 24 this year when the invasion of Ukraine started, much as it was when the tanks of Nazi Germany began rolling into Poland in September 1939.

Right now, the stubborn insistence of those who maintain that we should be engaging with Putin has become not only tedious but dangerous.

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Let me be clear about what I’m saying here, it’s not that we should give up on diplomacy but that we should not give up the fight and supporting Ukraine in favour of a misguided notion that “dialogue” and “negotiation” is the only way to deal with Putin.

In the Washington Post this week one headline proclaimed: “The uncomfortable need to talk about diplomacy with Russia”, while one in the Financial Times insisted: “Diplomacy should not be a dirty word in Ukraine war.”

But what kind of diplomacy can you have with a Russian dictator who orders the firing of missiles and kamikaze drones into cities against civilian targets during the morning rush hour?

This is a despot who at every turn threatens nuclear conflagration, is willing to send his own citizens untrained into a meat grinder of a war and only yesterday declared martial law in four Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine that Moscow last month illegally claimed as its own territory.

There is a time and place for diplomacy but not while war crimes are being committed daily.

Putin needs to understand this and those who do his bidding and act as mouthpieces on his fascist regime’s behalf must also understand how complicit they are in such crimes.

To my old former “comrades” who cannot see that history has been turned upside down and who continue to make excuses for Russia and its leader I say it’s time to take a long hard look at yourselves.

The Soviet Union has gone, but sadly the fascism it once fought against so courageously has found a new home and new dictatorial leader in Russia and Putin respectively As for those so-called “progressives” who openly express their support for Russia’s leader and his rapacious regime while glossing over the war crimes carried out under his orders in Ukraine, I say shame on you.

The time has come to call out Putin’s useful idiots here in Scotland and wherever they are to be found.