The extreme intolerance of Tolerant Liberals

When emotional arguments preclude a reasonable debate

Last night I had an unpleasant experience that has stuck with me, and since it's related to this very blog and it's still fresh and raw in my mind, I'm going to share it here. I was in Brighton, staying for a couple of days with one of my oldest friends and his family (wife and two kids, whom I also love like my own family). Last night I went out with just the grownups, for which they got a babysitter in to look after the kids.

All was well until about ten o'clock. We were in a cosy whiskey bar - which also has a decent selection of beers on tap - and a bloke came in the pub with a long white pointy beard, and a little cloth cap on that looked to me like a kufi, a kind of skullcap worn by Muslim men (see below).

My friends seemed to recognise this guy but not know him, and I said that he slightly reminded me of the commander of the Akhmat Battalion (and deputy PM of Chechnya) Adam Delimkhanov, whose name I couldn't remember at the time but who I thought was fairly well known for being part of the force that got the Ukrainian Azov Nazis out of Mariupol. I guess he is less well known amongst people who haven't been following the Ukraine conflict as closely as I have. Mostly I just found it incongruous that someone wearing one of those skullcaps would come into a pub.

I think it was the mention of 'Ukrainian Nazis' that triggered my friends. My friend said that he'd read some of my blog (this blog you're reading now) and thought that although it was well-written, there were bits he didn't agree with. I thanked him for complimenting my writing, and asked him which bits he didn't agree with. This was where it all started to get rather uncomfortable. He couldn't say specifically which bits, but both he and his wife did what so many people do at this juncture: get defensive and act incredulous that I could defend a person like Putin ("a dictator" who couldn't possibly be popular enough to hold onto power for 20 years democratically) or a country like Russia, with its much-vaunted ‘oppression of gay people’.

So already, we're no longer talking about what my friend didn't agree with on this blog. I tried to bring the conversation back to that, but every time I said anything they would speak over me and talk about Russia in generalities and media talking points. Every time I asked for an example of why they thought this or that, they became angrier and more defensive, as if I was being disrespectful to them and ignoring the reality of what Russia is like. They have a Russian friend who is gay, and apparently he hates Russia and Putin; this fact constituted most of their argument for hating Russia and Putin. The other part of their hatred for Russia on cultural grounds was the Russian ban on 'LGBT propaganda'. This is a law that's very open to interpretation, but my friends were convinced that this law means that there can be no gay characters in books in Russian schools. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but The Bell and The Moscow Times (citing Novaya Gazeta) have said that it’s happening.

I have no particular knowledge of this law or what it's been used to get banned from Russian schools. I've never mentioned it in any of my blog posts. And yet, from me trying to find out what my friend didn't like or agree with about my blog, that was their reply. They were quite happy to say that they hated Russia because of its ruling party, and when I said that that was a very racist thing to just openly admit, they got even more angry with me. The whole argument had nothing to do with anything I'd written, and everything to do with how I refuse to hate Russia because of what's been written about the country in the liberal corporate media.

They also brought up how The Moscow Times is ‘forced’ to operate from outside Russia, and how this clearly shows that they don’t have a free press; I said that the reason for that is that The Moscow Times lies about Russia, and it’s not unreasonable for a government to do that. Strangely, my friend was of the opinion that the press should be allowed to lie, although I assume he would believe that the Moscow Times are not lying about LGBT books being removed from Russian libraries and schools. Our western ‘free press’ all just so happens to toe the party line, especially when it comes to demonising Russia.

I won't pretend that we hadn't had some drinks by then, but I feel I would have said everything I said even if we hadn't. I had to go for a walk around the block twice, first when my friend told me that I was "getting in his wife's face" (asking her to give an example of one of the assertions she was making about Russia) and second when my friend said that no, he couldn't say exactly what he disagreed with about my blog, because he hadn't spent the last year "wanking and watching videos on Telegram" (like me, presumably) but he too could find horrifying testimony on Telegram to prove that our news are telling the truth¹. That second one was so incredibly rude, and yet he still said it like I was the one being rude to them. Obviously he hasn’t written a blog in which he uses videos found on Telegram to prove that the media aren’t lying, whereas I have done the opposite.

We were sitting outside when I came back from leaving the first time, and I tried to keep the conversation calm, but I also refused to apologise because I was just trying to get them to explain any of the things they were saying, none of which had anything to do with my blog. I tried to cut through the cultural propaganda that they kept bringing up, and just tell them that Russians in Donbass had been under attack by self-confessed neo Nazis since 2014, because this is what my blog is about, but this just led to even more dismissive hand waving. A member of bar staff came out and asked us to leave, and the bar staff and my friends were all in agreement that I was the one who had caused this unpleasant scene. This was when my friend told me I'd spent the last year or two 'wanking and watching videos on Telegram', when I had to leave to keep my cool.

I walked around Brighton for ten minutes or so, and found them on the route back to their house. They told me that they loved me but I had to stop thinking that mine was the only opinion. I told them that if I didn't love them I wouldn't care that they believed things based on lies. I said that they can think what they like now, about Russia and about me, but they should be ready for the reality of Biden, BoJo and others being convicted in Russia for war crimes, because Russia is going to conduct its own version of the Nuremberg trials when they win this conflict, which they will.

I've come up against this wall of disbelief and disdain before, and I've been prepared to drop friendships when the other party refused to engage with anything I was saying, endlessly derailed the conversation to irrelevant cultural propaganda points, and said really rude things to me. Ultimately I felt that a friend wouldn't speak to me like that, so I wasn't really losing a friend. I can't lose these friends the same way, but I also can't just shut up and acquiesce to beliefs that I know are based on untruths and, frankly, anti-Russian racism ginned up by a complicit media. I felt awful for having apparently ruined an evening that my friends had had to pay a babysitter to enjoy, but I can't just take insults from my friends without saying or doing anything.

Posting stuff on the Internet isn't brave or difficult. Getting into arguments with strangers online is pointless (they might not even be a real person) and counterproductive. Convincing people you actually care about that they have been deceived for a long time is hard, unpleasant and, in my experience thus far, utterly thankless. But this is the reality of fighting for truth and against groupthink in a thoroughly propagandised society, and we shouldn't shy away from it.

1. Obviously he shouldn’t need to do this, because the news should provide that proof themselves. The fact that they don’t do this still isn’t enough to convince believers that they might be lying, but any evidence or first-hand testimony to the contrary will instinctively be dismissed as Russian propaganda.