Month: December 2016

In a ‘70s song, ‘mother’ was half a word. To Cherie, it’s not even that (although, as a throwback to my American past, I sometimes use it to describe her hubby-wubby).

Obsolete words ‘mother’ and ‘father’ should, according to her, be replaced by ‘parent’. This constitutes a seminal contribution to our language, rivalling those made by Shakespeare, KJB and Dr Johnson.

Cherie hasn’t quite enlarged on the full ramifications of her proposal, but then it’s too sweeping.

Love Labour’s Lost would have to be rewritten to say “My parent’s wit, and my parent’s tongue; assist me!”, while Hamlet would first talk to the ghost of his parent and then make his parent poison themselves [sic].

And don’t get me started on the Bible. About time we upgraded those texts to say “Parent, forgive them” and “Our parent who may or may not be in heaven”. All in all, ‘father’ appears in the Bible 879 times, and ‘mother’ 245, so there’s work to be done.

Actually, Cherie’s proposal has more to do with politics than linguistics, as she explained: “I think we shouldn’t be talking about mothering or fathering – we should be talking about parenting… what I think is very encouraging… is we see young men now who are much more hands-on fathers than their own fathers.”

The statement springs from deep conviction, and Cherie is much more committed to progressive doctrine than Tony is. Tony would apply for dual membership in UKIP and BNP tomorrow if it suited his purposes.

Cherie, on the other hand, isn’t a politician but a greasy eminence (as they say in French). So she can afford to have the power of her feeble convictions, one of which is that men and women aren’t just equal but identical, some physical fixtures notwithstanding.

Actually, making that qualification Cherie inadvertently struck some reactionary notes: “… obviously women physically give birth…”.

That’s being shamefully retrograde. Thanks to modern science, a man can now give birth too, provided he used to be a woman who decided she was really a man, had herself modified accordingly, but kept her uterus as a little keepsake.

Essentially Cherie is proposing to change God’s design. That’s fine, it’s even commendable, but what’s reprehensible is that she also proposes to overlook the real gospel of modernity, Darwin’s slipshod theory, which, according to Richard Dawkins, explains everything.

Actually, one feels ashamed even to mention science, which has produced piles of microbiological, physical, cognitive, behavioural, physiological evidence on the differences between men and women.

Science is nowadays an extension of politics too. If science says or, worse still, proves that male and female brains, among other things, are different, it must be ignored or ideally outlawed.

For example, physiology tallies with my empirical observation that men’s minds are more logical. This isn’t to say that no woman is capable of sequential thought – only that in my long life I’ve met 10 men endowed with that ability for every one woman.

That makes men better at philosophy, while women are better linguists (witness Cherie). Offhand, I can only name one significant woman philosopher (Elizabeth Anscombe) and perhaps half a dozen insignificant ones. But women hold their own in management and politics, which both benefit from their innate housekeeping skills.

But we aren’t talking about the face value of the argument. We’re on the subject of its politics, and Cherie’s views put into practice have produced a social equivalent of Chernobyl.

An ideological commitment to making women work full-time is greatly responsible for the destruction of the family. For it takes about £35,000 a year to replace the services provided by a full-time mother (female parent?).

Given our tax brackets, a woman would have to be on at least £50,000 just to break even, more to get ahead. These days, such salaries require commitment above and beyond – so who’s going to look after the children? An emasculated man, half-committed to his own job, and therefore half-paid?

A family where both parents go to work doesn’t get two salaries: typically it gets one salary split into two. That certainly happened in the only industry where I ever drew a salary: advertising.

When Cherie’s bra-burning progenitors drove women to work back in the late ‘60s, it became legally unacceptable to keep them out. Agency bosses were perplexed: they could create the odd job here and there, but certainly not enough to accommodate the influx.

Hence they started paying men less, which had the knock-on effect of forcing women to work: men were no longer capable of providing for the family. This destroyed the organic family relationships wired into our DNA by the combined efforts of God and Darwin. That’s to say it destroyed the family.

This is definitely a factor in more than half the marriages ending in divorce and half the children being born out of wedlock. It’s also a factor in zero-sum population growth: every time a baby is born, a man disappears.

Words are cheap, but dear at the price. Progressivist nonsense spouted by the likes of Cherie is sociocidal every which way, but what does she care? Ideology comes first. Really, Cherie and Tony deserve each other.

“The hero of my youth was just another tyrant,” writes Mr Aaronovitch of The Times with a note of nostalgia for his youth and Castro, now both departed.

Fair enough, we’re all stupid in our youth. For example, when I was 20, I thought A Hundred Years of Solitude was a great novel. How much dumber can one get?

Until 25 or so, our brains aren’t even wired properly, so what do you expect from youngsters? As long as they realise the error of their ways upon reaching maturity?

Aaronovitch evidently has. He has called Castro a tyrant, hasn’t he? As an adolescent, he thought Castro was a romantic hero, but now he knows better. Nature has taken its course.

Here he is, writing about his silly youth: “In 2001… I was still prepared to defend Fidel.” And: “… a little bit of salsa and cigar remained in my soul until that day in 2008 when it vanished.”

This gives an insight into Aaronovitch’s developmental timeline. Still an impetuous child in 2001, he had grown up by 2008, having purged his soul of all that salsa and cigar nonsense.

One infers that Aaronovitch’s biological maturity occurred somewhere in between those chronological milestones. Still a teenager in 2001, say 19 years old, he turned 26 or so in 2008, his brain now functioning at full capacity, all inane illusions left behind.

Just in case, I googled Aaronovitch to confirm the chronology. And what do you know? He was actually born in 1954. That makes him 47 in 2001, when his soul was still filled with salsa and cigars.

By any medical standards this has to be a case of retarded development. Aaronovitch’s youth lasted into his mid-40s and still lingered on seven years later. Must be some kind of hormonal imbalance, or else perhaps his mother dropped baby Davie on his head when breast-feeding him.

So what Damascene epiphany happened to young David, now 54, in 2008? He went to Cuba and was warned at a police station to watch whom he was talking to – or else. Flash! The retarded youth fell off his high horse and saw an image of Castro in the sky, saying: “Why do you love me so? Can’t you see I’m a tyrant?”

That experience broke through the dam of ignorance, and Aaronovitch started writing about Castro’s concentration camps, executions and boat people, rather than just Cuba’s free medical care.

Of course until 2008 he hadn’t known about Castro’s concentration camps, executions and boat people, although he had known about Cuba’s free medical care. Until then Aaronovitch must have been working down in the mines, where his access to information was limited and it was too dark to read anyway…

Hold on, the same Wikipedia article says he had by that time been a top journalist for at least 30 years, having enjoyed a brilliant career at the BBC, The Independent and The Times.

Thus he had access to some of the best data banks in the world, which means he knew all along about Castro’s concentration camps, executions and boat people. Curiouser and curiouser.

Hence, until he grew up in 2008, young Davie saw nothing wrong about a regime that murdered and imprisoned political opponents, spied on everybody, destroyed free press and – while at it – a previously thriving economy. A regime so ghastly that people were prepared to risk their lives to run away – with 77,000 dying in the process.

Therefore his sudden change of mind means he either didn’t have much of a mind to begin with or didn’t change it at all – or, actually, both. Aaronovitch was in 2008 and still remains an inveterate, unreconstructed leftie, whose understanding of the world hasn’t advanced from the time he indeed was a child.

Having tried to sell one cock-and-bull story, he then tries to flog another: “Now I know I am a latish convert to liberal democracy, though I don’t think I’m overzealous for all that; one lesson I learnt was to eschew heroes and over-complete ideologies.”

What matters in this instance isn’t so much what he converted to as what he converted from. Once a communist, always a communist, I say (making an exception for those undergoing a religious conversion).

Specifically on the subject of Latin America, Aaronovitch’s newly discovered commitment to liberal democracy didn’t prevent him from adoring Hugo Chávez, albeit with less ardour than Castro.

You see, unlike Chile’s Pinochet, who saved his country from Castro’s proxy Allende, Chávez was democratically elected, as indeed was Allende. Riding the wave of their electoral success, both Allende and Chávez nationalised industry, collectivised agriculture, supported every terrorist regime or organisation on earth, had their opponents silenced or arrested, and plunged their countries into penury.

But that’s fine with our new, not overly zealous, convert to liberal democracy. Chávez and Allende were democratically elected, so what’s the problem?

Of course they share that distinction with Messrs Hitler, Perón, Mugabe, Putin and Ahmadinejad, whom Mr Aaronovitch probably dislikes. Yet that doesn’t make him ponder that perhaps it’s not method of government that matters but what kind of society it brings forth.

That would be delving too deep for our eternal adolescent. Anyway, you can’t expect him to find time to think. He’s too busy forming opinions.

The Guardian’s obituary on Castro reads like hagiography, understandably. Castro was merely a radical exponent of the same ‘philosophy’ The Guardian preaches in slightly muted tones, which is at base hatred of every founding tenet of our civilisation.

The Guardian has never seen a left-wing despot it couldn’t love, nor any leftie slogan it wouldn’t happily run up its flagpole. Naturally, Castro’s Cuba has always been one of its cherished causes.

Yet even I was surprised to see who wrote that revolting panegyric. If I were The Guardian’s editor, Richard Gott would be my last choice for this commission. Call it decorum, call it prudence, but I wouldn’t want someone exposed as a KGB agent of influence to write a eulogy for a Soviet puppet.

One would think that Gott’s 1994 exposure by KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky would have destroyed the hack’s credibility even in the eyes of Guardian readers. Apparently not.

After the truth came out, Gott, at the time the paper’s literary editor, admitted being in the pay of the KGB and resigned: “I took red gold, even if it was only in the form of expenses for myself and my partner. That, in the circumstances, was culpable stupidity, though at the time it seemed more like an enjoyable joke.”

Gott shares his sense of humour with Philby, and I’m sure he enjoyed the joke at the time. Yet in some quarters such jesting is called treason – the Soviet Union at the time was, as Russia still is, an avowed enemy of the West.

Soviet missiles were, as Russian missiles are, trained at us and our NATO allies. Soviet chieftains were, as Russian ones are, issuing threats of nuclear annihilation. The Soviet Union was, as Russia is, the deadliest enemy the West has had since Genghis Khan, although Islam is vying for this distinction too.

For a Western journalist, selling his services to the KGB was, and still is, tantamount to selling his soul to the devil, a transaction that can sometimes be regretted but never revoked.

Gott claims he got nothing but expenses, £10,000 or so in total. Yet, even if that’s true, it’s the thought that counts. The sum is peanuts by the KGB’s standards, and not a fortune by Gott’s. Yet some questioned that his services, whatever they were, would have been worth even that pittance to the KGB.

Such doubters simply don’t understand the nature of that sinister organisation. Weaned on spy novels, they see KGB activities as cloak-and-dagger stuff, stealing secrets, running agents high up in Western governments, ‘whacking’ (in Putin’s parlance) leading anti-Soviet figures.

True, the KGB did, and still does, all those things. But its principal function always has been, and still is, not just subverting the West’s military strength, but poisoning its mind and thereby paralysing its will.

Agents of influence like Gott were the toxic bacilli, they were, and still are, the slow-acting poison building up within the West’s brain. When it has reached a deadly concentration, the body will die. Without the brain to move it, the military muscle atrophies.

Any country that deserves to survive would have locked Gott up for life. But hey, even Anthony Blunt, exposed as one of the ‘Cambridge Five’, remained at large. Losing his knighthood was the spy’s only punishment, as his resignation was Gott’s.

Selling one’s soul to the devil is bad enough, but offering it for free is truly satanic. I’m certain that Gott did the KGB’s bidding not for a few pieces of silver but out of an innermost conviction. He genuinely believed, and still does, in the cause promoted by history’s most murderous cabal.

The KGB no longer serves Russia; it’s now the other way around. What with 85 per cent of Russia’s ruling elite made up of KGB officers, whatever they call themselves now, the KGB isn’t an arm of the country’s government. It is the country’s government.

Its status has changed, so have its slogans, but the objective of destroying the West hasn’t. And, as in the past, it has no problem recruiting Western quislings, mostly voluntary ‘useful idiots’ serving the cause with disinterested alacrity.

Since the KGB has changed its tune, the choir of its witting or, typically, unwitting shills has to intone different songs. The dominant parts are carried not by leftie falsettos but by rightie bassos, the booming voices of Fillon and Le Pen, Trump and Berlusconi, Hitchens and Booker – all those who are just as useful and idiotic as their leftie precursors.

But the nostalgic notes of admiration for the Soviet Union are still being struck by the likes of Gott. Hence his 4,000-word hagiography of Castro, with nary a mention of the tyrant’s tens of thousands of victims.

Not one word about Castro’s driving a sixth of Cuba’s population into exile and reducing the rest effectively to penal servitude. Nor about the destruction of a previously sound economy. Nor about the suppression of the free press, spreading military subversion all over Latin America and Africa – not even a single rebuke for bringing the world to the brink of nuclear catastrophe.

This time the panegyric is paid for by The Guardian, not the KGB. One may be excused for wondering if there’s a valid difference.