Rhodes on the Hollywood slap, the power of envy and how dictators can't get enough culture

After Will slapped Chris, the organisers of the Oscars issued a pious little statement declaring: “The Academy does not condone violence of any form.” Oh, please.

For well over 100 years Hollywood has been portraying violence in the most grisly and graphic fashion and making millions of dollars in the process. From The Birth of a Nation to No Time to Die, the film industry has exploited, romanticised, exaggerated and sexualised violence. Hollywood is a shrine to violence. Yet confronted with real violence, even something as harmless as a bit of man-slapping, the Academy has a fit of the vapours. Oh, the hypocrisy, dahlings.

Still on the arts, Vladimir Putin accuses the West of trying to destroy 1,000 years of Russian culture in a campaign which includes the banning of music by great Russian composers including Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and Rachmaninoff. Putin the culture-lover? It's what dictators do.

When they've spent enough time wrapping themselves in the national flag, despots immerse themselves in national culture. So what gives you more joy, Comrade Putin? Is it an evening of Tchaikovsky's greatest hits or the sight of a cruise missile slamming into a theatre being used as an air raid shelter?

The tragedy of Ukraine is that it looks like ending with Putin, against all international law and natural justice, profiting from aggression. Any “compromise” will involve the old borders of Ukraine being re-drawn, with Putin bringing Russian-supporting enclaves back into Moscow's fold. And if the Russian-speaking people within those territories are happy to be under Russian rule, who's going to spill blood to keep their towns and fields within Ukraine?

But consider the longer term, when the new, smaller Ukraine becomes a free, democratic and prosperous state, the sort of place that eastern neighbours envy? How then will Putin or his successor hang on to their new client states? In the 1970s, people in the Communist bloc began to see how well the West lived. They wanted the same. Never underestimate envy. It helped topple the Berlin Wall.

How to generate envy? I visited Russia in 1976 in the depths of the Cold War. A friend who knew the place well told me: “If you want to bring down the system, just leave a copy of Ideal Home magazine on a park bench.”