Right-wing populists' betrayal of West's values may have deadly consequences for Ukraine and beyond – Joyce McMillan

If we value truth and justice, peace and freedom, we should always choose an imperfect politician over a hate-filled demagogue

The week before Christmas, 2023, and across the Western world, and beyond it, the ghosts of the bad old ideologies that were supposed to have been laid to rest in 1945 rise from their graves, and roar and gibber across the political landscape. Brutal, reactionary forms of nationalism are on the rise – not everywhere, but in far too many places; and the signs of this grim rightward lurch, above all in the relatively wealthy north, can be seen all the way from the European Union – now struggling to contain a handful of far-right leaders who openly defy the rule-governed international order on which the EU is based – to the current government of Israel, now conducting a scorched-earth policy in Gaza so violent and shocking that the world seems incapable of any effective response.

This week, both the government of France, and the EU as a whole, passed new anti-immigration measures which sail close to the limits of international law on refugees and asylum. And here in the UK, we were not only early adopters of that insidious anti-immigration narrative – succumbing to the festival of duplicity that was the Brexit Leave campaign – but are now faced both with a Prime Minister who flies to Rome for a public love-in with Italian premier Giorgia Meloni (a self-proclaimed heiress of Mussolini), and with a Labour opposition which, on immigration, often does little more than echo the government’s right-wing attitudes.

Brutal, backward-looking dictatorship

Nor does the new vogue for 19th-century-style nationalism only affect international affairs. It also encourages illiberal attitudes at home, including the kinds of repressive measures on civil rights which the Westminster government has been enacting in recent years; and of course, the current nasty war of attrition against the devolution settlement of 1999, a nuanced deal which jars hopelessly against the post-Brexit “muscular unionism” now in vogue at Westminster.

It’s in the two former Cold War giants of the United States and the Russian Federation, though, that this shift in the landscape appears in its most ominous forms. Under Vladimir Putin, post-Communist Russia has morphed into a brutal, backward-looking dictatorship, which shocked the world in February 2022 by mounting an all-out invasion of its neighbour Ukraine.

In the United States, meanwhile, Donald Trump continues to dominate the politics of the Republican party, which has deteriorated within a decade from a mainstream party of the right and centre-right to an alliance dominated by reactionary religious fanatics and conspiracy theorists completely impervious to fact or persuasion.

Convinced that Joe Biden somehow “stole” the 2020 presidential election, they have high hopes that Trump will return to the White House in January 2025. And if he succeeds, the consequences for global security could be shocking, as he and many of his supporters have made it clear that they will not continue US support for Ukraine, in its essential effort to resist Russian aggression; and that the United States may consider leaving Nato altogether.

So we could, as this year turns, be facing a gradual or rapid end to all the taken-for-granted international structures that have delivered peace in our part of the planet for the last eight decades; and if we add the current nightmare in Gaza to this picture, it begins to seem all but hopeless.

Israel’s actions in Gaza

It is clear that Israel’s response in Gaza following the shocking Hamas attacks of October 7, and the US administration’s support for it, has – in the eyes of most of the world – made a mockery of the global human rights norms which Western democracies claim to uphold. This utter failure, in turn, gives anti-democratic autocrats like Putin a chance to portray themselves as being on the “right side of history”, in opposing US and Israeli power in the Middle East; and it therefore also risks throwing Ukraine to the wolves, since the Ukrainians have thrown in their lot with Western powers and values at a time when too many Western leaders seem ready to betray or abandon those values – and with them, the vital idea that Putin’s naked aggression in Ukraine can and must be resisted.

So as the Christmas bells ring out, this year, we need to think – each of us, as citizens – what we can do to keep a little light alive in such a darkening world. Valuing peace and co-operation, expressing gratitude for it, and even praying for it, is a start not to be underestimated. In the end, though, peace is only possible where there is some hope of justice, some chance of economic stability and security, some prospect of a better future won by peaceful means.

And now, in the most profound sense, we owe it to ourselves, to our parents and grandparents who fought and voted to give us that kind of world after 1945, and above all to our children and grandchildren, to embrace a politics which seeks to uphold truth and justice, to choose the imperfect politician over the hate-filled demagogue, and to truly value what we have, or have had, in the way of peace and freedom, in order to be able to sustain it, and to pass it on to others.

In a continuing and harsh cost-of-living crisis, it is a tall order to ask people to think about their civic responsibilities, as citizens of this bewilderingly complex world. Christmas, though, is a time for reflection, as is the turn of the New Year. So let’s meditate, this year, on those things that bring light among so much darkness, and on what we can do – as human beings, as citizens and as voters – to keep that flame of hope alive; for peace on Earth, and for all the generosity, hard work, love and goodwill, at every level of our world, that might still make it possible.