Who is the most reprehensible political figure on earth?

Among politicians, who is the most reprehensible swine on earth? That, my friends, is a hard question to answer.

A knee-jerk response in the not-too-distant past might have been to look at parts of the Middle East – Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia – and wince. Across to Afghanistan. Down to Indonesia. Back up to North Korea. Over to Russia.

We might look at Sudan and wonder: is there anyone at all in charge? Or think of Libya and roll our eyes: when will that catastrophic mess get sorted out? We’d consider Erdogan in Turkey. Orban in Hungary. Xi Jinping in China. Dictators are the pits. Ones that pretend to adhere to democratic norms are perhaps even worse. They are an insidious threat to the edifice of democracy itself.

Over the past three years, however, all has changed completely. Vladimir Putin is still indisputably in the Top 3 of the worst of the worst. In 2014, he invaded Ukraine for the first time, illegally occupying Crimea and other parts of East Ukraine. In effect, a few token gestures aside – Russia were expelled from the so called G8, which became the G7 – the world sat idly by and enabled what was a criminal land-grab.

Ukraine resisted, but at international level nothing happened to put real pressure on Russia to retreat behind its own borders. Europe – and Germany in particular – had become too dependent on Russian oil and gas. They chickened out of confrontation. Putin felt that he was king of the castle.

And, in a way, he was.

MASSIVELY IGNORANT

That was the cynical, botched backdrop to his decision to invade Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Putin was convinced that no one cared. That the Russian army would roll all the way to Kyiv and that President Zelenskyy would flee into exile. It was a shoo-in. Except that it wasn’t. Offered the opportunity to evacuate by the US, Zelensky’s response was withering. “The fight is here,” he said. “I need ammunition, not a ride.”

For those who were too young at the time to assimilate fully what was going on, the counter-offensive mounted by Ukraine was powerfully effective. They drove the Russians back across the country, regaining vast areas. But when winter arrived a stalemate ensued. It gave the Russian army the opportunity, and the time, to build ‘defences’: to mine areas widely and generally reclaim the initiative – making it nearly impossible for Ukraine to regain the territory that is now occupied by Russia.

It became a war of attrition.

Most of us will be familiar with at least some of the twists and turns that happened in the war, over the intervening three years. There were brief moments of hope, when it seemed that Putin might be more vulnerable than anyone had assumed – including a few spectacular hits on bridges, ships and war planes by Ukrainian drones.

From the other flank, the rebellion led by Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin, head of the Russian-backed mercenary Wagner Group, provided some short-term amusement. Until, that is, he and his closest associates were blown up mid-air, during a flight from Moscow to St. Petersburgh, on August 23, 2023. No one in the world believes anything other than that it was a Putin-approved mass assassination.

Conservative estimates are that well over a million Russians have been killed or injured during the course of what is a grotesquely asymmetric war. Ukraine was supplied with weapons by President Joe Biden, but on the strict stipulation that they could be used only for defensive purposes. Putin could bomb Kharkiv or Kyiv indiscriminately. Ukraine was prohibited from responding in kind. From the start it was madness: how could Ukraine hope to win a war in which they were stymied at every turn?

They couldn’t and they didn’t.

As the death toll mounted, Europe dithered stupidly. Putin brought in reinforcements from North Korea. The limited firepower afforded to Ukraine, and the constrictions imposed on their use, proved disastrous. Ukrainian forces had to fight a war of survival with one arm tied behind their backs.

Oblivious to the mounting death toll among Russian troops, Putin ground on, becoming ever more reckless in his targeting of civilian infrastructure – and civilians themselves. And then Donald Trump was elected as US President for the second time.

Watching the clowns appointed by Trump – among them the massively ignorant Special Envoy Keith Kellogg, absurdly self-regarding Vice President J. D. Vance, hopelessly inept Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth and bullish Secretary of State, Marco Rubio – and indeed Trump himself, say and do all the wrong things as they immediately conceded ground in their attempts to ‘negotiate’ with Putin made you realise that these guys really are irredeemably incompetent.

Not to mention the vindictive ambushing of President Zelenskyy by Trump himself and J. D. Vance in the Oval Office. Putin was rubbing his hands in glee while the body-count of dead Russians – and Ukrainians – mounted.

THE GREATEST GHOUL

Looking at his numbers, and the war crimes committed against children, for sure you think: it’d be hard to match Putin.
Until you look at what has been happening in Gaza.

There is no doubt about the genocidal intent of the Israeli government under Benjamin Netanyahu. It has been obvious, really, since the early days of the onslaught in Gaza, which began after the atrocities carried out by Hamas, when they murdered 1,274 Israeli citizens and foreign nationals on October 7. There is no doubt that Hamas, and the associated groups who were involved in the attack, committed war crimes in that initial atrocious assault. However, there is no justification whatsoever for the utterly brutal campaign of indiscriminate murder and destruction carried out since by the Israeli state and the Israeli army.

Netanyahu himself, and other Ministers in the government, have openly declared their genocidal intent. They have even used their sham ‘humanitarian’ mechanism for giving out food as a new opportunity to gun people down arbitrarily. It is also evident, in images coming through from Gaza every day – and from statements made by Israeli government Ministers – that they are deliberately using starvation as a way of killing even more Palestinians.

This week they ordered Palestinians to move en masse to a small area around Rafah, into which they will be penned – and only allowed to leave if they are departing for another country. In an example that is typical of the shameless lying being practiced by right wing governments everywhere, they are calling this a “humanitarian city”. But the former Israeli President, Ehud Olmert, described it for what it really is, naming it a “concentration camp.”

As the Palestinian ambassador to Ireland, Jilan Wahba Abdalmajid, said in her Hot Press interview: “We are the victims of the victims.”

Palestinian ambassador to Ireland Dr Jilan Wahba Abdalmajid. Copyright Miguel Ruiz.

They may not like to hear people saying it, but the reality is crystal clear: the Israeli government are engaged in a brutal, ongoing campaign of genocide. Why it took the world so long to waken up to it is impossible to fathom – but, the bullying efforts of Donald Trump notwithstanding, it is happening.

Last week, Trump hit the UN rapporteur Francesca Albanese, from Italy, with sanctions, for what it claimed was her “shameful promotion” of action by the International Criminal Court against the US and Israel.

Albanese will not be intimidated. She spoke this week at a meeting in Bogotá of The Hague Group, formed by South Africa and Colombia, but now also including Algeria, Brazil, Spain, Indonesia, China and Qatar, among other states.

“For too long,” she said, “international law has been treated as optional, applied selectively to those perceived as weak, ignored by those acting as the powerful. This double-standard has eroded the very foundations of the legal order. That era must end.

“The world will remember what we, states and individuals, did in this moment – whether we recoiled in fear or rose in defence of human dignity. Here in Bogotá, a growing number of states have the opportunity to break the silence and revert to a path of legality by finally saying: enough. Enough impunity. Enough empty rhetoric. Enough exceptionalism. Enough complicity. The time has come to act in pursuit of justice and peace – grounded in rights and freedoms for all, and not mere privileges for some, at the expense of the annihilation of others.”

Behind all of this genocidal evil is the criminal figure of Benjamin Netanyahu. Alongside him in the dock is the US President Donald Trump, who is quite separately busy systematically demolishing – aided and abetted by a disgracefully bent and ideologically motivated Supreme Court – almost every pillar of democracy in the USA.

So who is the greatest ghoul? Maybe we don’t need to decide, but rather do every single thing in our power, individually and collectively, to oppose those who have chosen to abuse power so flagrantly and in so many different, monstrous ways.

TATTERED REMNANTS

There is one other character I want to mention here: Keir Starmer. He is, of course, not at the same level of degeneracy, corruption and direct involvement in murderous violence as Putin, Netanyahu or Trump. But there is no question, either, but that he is complicit in the genocide that is taking place in Gaza.

My reading of it is that he is so pitifully determined to curry favour with Donald Trump that he will do nothing that might risk pissing off the narcissistic monster in the White House. And so he creeps around, bowing and scraping.

His silence on Israel’s butchering of just under 60,000 people (and the real figure is probably a lot higher), mostly women and children – and the murderous daily toll they are currently taking at food distribution centres – not to mention the clearly deliberate campaign of bombing into dust and debris every aspect of society in Gaza is utterly impossible to justify.

In the same spirit, the decision to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation – which has seen priests and pensioners arrested at protests for holding simple placards saying “We Are All Palestine Action”  – is an attack on democracy of which Donald Trump would himself be proud.

To say that the performance of this Labour government is the greatest betrayal ever of the guiding spirit of the party is, I suspect, to put it very mildly. The bottom line is that Keir Starmer looks increasingly likely to lead Labour into oblivion. The party needs to act now, before it is far, far too late to rescue the tattered remnants of their once proud reputation.