China shoots democrats dead and crushes dissent - yet the West rolls out the red carpet: PETER HITCHENS

The truth about power is found in actions not in speeches. The sight of the US military literally on their knees as they smoothed the red carpet for China's tyrant at a Washington airbase is the true image of our era.

Peking's leader stands for a regime which murdered democracy in its country by shooting down democrats in the heart of its capital. The same regime long ago seized poor Tibet and is even now crushing the Uighur people in the province of Sinkiang.

Needless to say, it is deeply hostile to the Christian faith we in the West claim to defend, sending out commissars to pull crosses from the roofs of churches.

It has delivered a special insult to us in Britain, breaking solemn promises to maintain freedom in Hong Kong. Instead it has swiftly imposed iron repression. Peking continues to squeeze and threaten democratic Taiwan, hoping to force it to pass under its yoke without a fight.

The USA's pitiful grovelling at the Andrews base is not the first such abasement. In state visits to Britain by Chinese despots our police have been shameful enforcers on behalf of China, squashing the tiniest protests lest the visiting emperor catches so much as a glimpse of opposition.

From these events, evil men round the world learned an important thing. For back in 1989, as China was drowning its democrats in blood, its then Communist twin, the Soviet Union, did the opposite.

True, the Kremlin's hard men did from time to time reach for the bloody weapons of repression.

But, in general, the late Mikhail Gorbachev allowed protest, freed the press, freed speech and replaced one-party rule with multi-party democracy. Abroad, it released subject nations from its rule. When hundreds of thousands took to the streets in Poland, East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, nobody massacred them. Gorbachev prevented it. They got the freedom they demanded. So did the countries of Central Asia, all now independent.

The sight of the US military literally on their knees as they smoothed the red carpet for China's tyrant at a Washington airbase is the true image of our era, writes Peter Hitchens

But no good deed goes unpunished. In the years since, the West, led by the USA, has courted China and pretended not to notice that it is a vicious, censored, lawless police state. It has been very careful not to provoke Peking over

Taiwan (noisy rhetoric conceals weakness of action). But it has treated Russia with incessant suspicion, provocation and hostility, giving it no credit for its vast withdrawal from empire.

In doing so it created and fed the monster, Putin, discrediting the reasonable democrats who had overthrown the Soviet tyranny.

Madly, it described Russia's huge retreat as aggression and expansionism, charges it never nowadays levels at China. How can it have been aggressive to withdraw giant armies from hundreds of thousands of square miles of territory, and recognise new sovereign states in the area you once ruled? Beats me.

Actually, apart from the weird private war which still rages between our spies and Russia's (see for example the Skripal affair), Britain has no especial reason to be hostile to Moscow.

I still see no benefit to us in prolonging and fuelling the terrible Ukraine war, which was, in my view at least, partly the result of our own foolish policies in endorsing the lawless overthrow of a non-aligned elected president in Kiev.

The official British position on Russia, a tinny echo of America's as usual, has now become so ridiculous that the Prime Minister plans to create a special unit to force us to believe it. A new 'National Centre for Information Defence' is to be set up, supposedly to counteract sneaky Kremlin attempts to spread propaganda lies.

I've had some experience of such things, during the great Covid panic. I learned later that Government bodies had been monitoring me and others, under the same pretext of countering 'disinformation'. No doubt it was a coincidence that I also experienced many attempts to smear me on anti-social media.

But I spread no such 'disinformation'. I did what journalists are supposed to do. I examined the Government's claims and actions, and expressed lawful, patriotic dissent – what we used to call 'loyal opposition'. I do the same now, over Russia, and hardly anybody dares to debate with me. So much easier to tip slime on me on the internet.

If you say, in Andrew Burnham's Britain, that our Russian policy has been foolish, I rather think you will now be monitored too.

There is, quite wrongly in a supposed free democracy, an official position which cannot be challenged. If you oppose it, you will be accused of being some sort of enemy agent.

This is a clear step towards thought policing and – I fear – legal restrictions on thought and speech. All this is based on a completely phoney claim, by our leaders, to be in love with freedom and democracy, and to be opposed to aggression. Neither claim is true.

I remember Mr Burnham when we clashed in March 2013 at a Cambridge Union debate, going out of his way to defend the illegal Blair aggression in Iraq ten years afterwards. Last week he gave Saudi Arabia help it doesn't need in a war we have no business supporting. Why? Because it is settled UK policy to kowtow to that grim tyranny.

Monitor yourself, Mr Burnham, and leave me alone.

Two epic films that show us just what we've lost

A brilliant new French film on Charles de Gaulle, called De Gaulle: Liberte, is far better than anything Hollywood has done for years

I need subtitles to watch most modern films in English, not because I am deaf but because the sound is so bad. The words are mumbled and drowned with pointless loud music.

Yet I know many will not usually go to see a foreign film because they will have to rely on subtitles.

Look, two brilliant new French films on Charles de Gaulle (De Gaulle: Resistance and De Gaulle: Liberte, right) are better by far than anything Hollywood has done for years.

As well as being crammed with action, beauty and wit, they are full of intelligent patriotism, an emotion we in Britain have had squeezed out of us by decades of liberal scorn.

I watched the last half-hour of the second film in a mist of tears, mainly for that reason.