Month: January 2022

This isn’t a hubristic boast based on some achievement. It’s just that I added my signature to the million-odd others under the petition to strip Tony Blair of knighthood.

Actually, if there were a petition to have him publicly eviscerated, I’d sign it too. I’d even volunteer to perform the procedure myself if I could hone a kitchen knife sharp enough.

I don’t know if Blair was the worst prime minister we’ve ever had. He’d be right up there among other contestants for that accolade, but he wouldn’t be the only one. Yet he is by far the most revolting creature to occupy that office, and there no other contestants need apply.

Looking at his life, one could be forgiven for thinking he has dedicated it to damaging Britain as much as he could. That commitment shines through his career before, during and after his tenure as PM.

His youth was spent serving Britain’s enemies by agitating for the CND, a transparent Soviet front. There he mastered the art of using radical politics as a steppingstone to the heights of career climbing.

Blair was a Trotskyist in those days. That means he shared Leon Trotsky’s plans for the world, which revolved around the axial idea of densely covering the whole globe with concentration camps, execution sites and hard-labour colonies.

“I came to socialism through Marxism,” he’d write later, getting his readers into the maze of finely nuanced terminology. At the centre of the maze is the fallacy that, while all Marxists are socialists, not all socialists are Marxists. In other words, Marxists don’t mind murdering millions to enslave the world, while socialists would rather achieve that end without democide.

When elected to the Commons in 1983, Blair delivered a speech, explaining that “socialism corresponds most closely to an existence that is both rational and moral”. That, I suppose, explains why every country that has tried it in earnest ended up impoverished and tyrannised.

On the plus side, our Tony didn’t believe a single word he was saying. He didn’t care two flying hoots about rationality, morality, socialism or anything else other than Tony.

In the early eighties, his career was best served by socialist cant. Later, when he had to appeal not just to Labour members, but to the country at large, he affected respect for free enterprise. If his own interests had called for raising his arm in a Nazi salute, he would have done that too.

Blair was, and still remains, the quintessential modern hero: an important nonentity. Politics to him was nothing but politicking, an activity that requires much animal cunning but no real aptitude for statesmanship. He succeeded because people have been trained to accept make-believe as real, appearances as substance, slogans as thought.

Virtual reality barged in, cruelly relegating the actual kind to the lower leagues. Hence the rising of virtual stars, short on real qualities and attainment, but long on the ability to create a self-aggrandising image. As one such, Blair is a typological equivalent of Kim Kardashian, not of Margaret Thatcher.

He came to power in 1997, having invented a chimera called New Labour (Labour pretending to be something else) and a very real technique others called spin. Tony (never a formal Anthony – a man of the people, he, a lad next door) could spin anything with the legerdemain of a crooked croupier able to stop the roulette ball on any number he wishes.

During his 10 prime-ministerial years, Blair finally acquired a broad canvas on which he could paint a pornographic picture of himself fiddling with spin while Britain burned. The damage he caused is incalculable, and the criminal war in Iraq is only the most visible outrage.

Willingly playing poodle to George W Bush, “Yo Blair” volunteered to apply his spinning talents internationally. One thing he spun was the fake ‘45-minute dossier’, stating on falsified evidence that it would take Saddam that length of time to hit British targets in Cyprus with WMDs.

No such weapons were discovered after the US and Britain lost hundreds of soldiers deposing Saddam, killing over a million Iraqis and causing one of the most catastrophic demographic shifts since 1945. As a minimum, we’d expect an abject apology from Blair – if not to all of us, then at least to the families of the 185 Britons killed in Iraq and 456 in Afghanistan.

Instead we got more spinning bluster. Yes, acknowledged Blair, we went into that war on false pretences. But never mind, “the world is better off without Saddam Hussein”.

Is it indeed? Tell it to the millions who fled their homes – and to the Europeans who then had to accommodate those refugees, legitimate or otherwise, in their countries. Tell it to the Syrians suffering untold miseries as a direct result of that action. Tell it to all of us who had to pay – and are still paying – for that foray, foolhardy at best, criminal at worst.

It’s not just the war either. PM Blair left no turn unstoned, starting with the economy. In the fine tradition of all Labour governments, New or Old, he increased public spending from 39.9 per cent of GDP to 48.1. Taxes went up as did borrowing, which came precious close to beggaring the country towards the end of Blair’s tenure.

In parallel, he encouraged his chancellor Brown to dump Britain’s gold reserves when the price of that commodity was at a 20-year low, leaving the country even more at the mercy of currency speculators. That was less damaging than his predecessor’s ruinous attempt to get the pound into the ERM, but only Brown managed to keep Blair from going Major one better, or rather a million times worse.

Tony, partly nostalgic for his Trotskyist globalism, but mostly eager to secure a pan-European stage for him to act on, desperately tried to replace the pound with the euro. That would have tied Britain to that wicked European contrivance with barely breakable tethers, causing a disaster both economic and political.

Blair could also do constitutional vandalism with the worst of them. He attacked the hereditary House of Lords with youthful gusto, successfully reducing it to a militantly politicised body and a trading floor of patronage and handouts. (He also politicised and thereby debauched our civil service, which used to be the envy of the world partly because of its apolitical nature.)

He then tried to abolish the position of Lord Chancellor, in existence since the Conqueror. Yet even Blair had to realise that it was impossible to snip every synapse of that constitutional ganglion.

He did much better trying to loosen the ties making the Kingdom united, divesting too much power to devolved administrations and capitulating to the IRA in Northern Ireland. That last disgrace, known as the Good Friday Agreement, delivered Westminster seats to the mass murderers Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness (who, to their credit, refused to take Blair up on his generosity).

Some 20 years ago, our top spun out of Westminster and started building his own evil empire, exchanging his Westminster connections for hard cash. There was no despot criminal enough for Blair not to love him, provided the cheque didn’t bounce.

I mentioned yesterday that Blair made millions helping Kazakhstan’s dictator Nazarbayev spin his bailiwick into some sort of legitimacy. After Nazarbayev’s troops fired at a peaceful demonstration in 2011, killing 17 officially and more in reality, Tony trained his paying friend how to talk to Western audiences.

Tell them this, he advised: “These events, tragic though they were, should not obscure the enormous progress that Kazakhstan has made”. I’m surprised Nazarbayev needed that advice – that’s what all Stalinists say. “Yes, he might have killed millions, but look at [a long list of bogus achievements].”

Blair also helped Nazarbayev secure a beneficial deal with the EU, where some residual gratitude for his devotion still exists. In that spirit, Blair came precious close to treason by training Macron how to torpedo Brexit, thereby siding with a foreign government against the British people.

On and on our top continued to spin, buzzing all over the wicked regimes of Asia and Africa. Azerbaijan, Kuwait, Mongolia, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam and many others eagerly poured millions into Blair’s coffers, making him easily the wealthiest retired politician in history. Not a single friend of Britain in that lot, and quite a few sworn enemies.

All in all, I had to join that supplication to Her Majesty, begging her to correct the unfortunate oversight of bestowing the Order of Garter on that spinning top. Let Blair enjoy his millions – unless of course that public evisceration is on the cards. But do let’s agree that there’s nothing knightly about this amoral nonentity.

Excellent. How about Chechnya, 1999, Georgia, 2008, the Ukraine, 2014? Well, in that case, you remember that the quisling government officials of all those countries put down popular uprisings by inviting Russia and her satellites to invade.

Congratulations. You have better memory than the leaders of just about every Western government, who are falling all over themselves trying to ‘understand’ Putin and find an ‘accommodation’ with him.

At the moment, they aren’t even doing that, since few of them understand what’s really happening in Kazakhstan. When they look at the map, their eyes slide from that vast space (larger than Western Europe) to a smaller one, the Ukraine.

Is the Russian invasion of Kazakhstan a prelude to a larger-scale invasion of the Ukraine? Is it merely a diversion manoeuvre? Or is Putin hoping to use Kazakhstan as a pretext to withdraw from the Ukrainian borders without losing face?

Good questions, all of them. So good in fact that no one knows the answers. Not the US, not Britain, possibly not even Putin himself. So let’s concentrate on what we do know.

Most people have heard of the Goldomor (Holodomor in Ukrainian) of the early 1930s. That was the time of an artificially created famine, when millions of people were didactically starved to death for failing to grasp the benefits of collectivised agriculture.

Less known is that Kazakhstan was also on the receiving end of that genocidal treatment. Over two million Kazakhs died then, which put the two Russian colonies in the same boat floating on waves of resentment.

There used to be much goodwill towards the Russians in both places, especially in the east of the Ukraine and the north of Kazakhstan. That largely evaporated in the malodorous miasma rising from the millions of corpses.

All Soviet republics, not least Russia herself, suffered untold misery at the hands of the Soviets. Yet it could be argued that the Ukraine and Kazakhstan suffered perhaps even more than most.

Their populations offered much stubborn, if hopeless, armed resistance. The basmachi liberation movement in Central Asia, including southern Kazakhstan, lasted for 20 years after the 1917 revolution, and it took the Red Army to quell it.

Ukrainians also fought against the Bolsheviks for several years after the revolution and, amazingly, for a decade after 1945. Their guerrillas were prepared to take on the might of the Soviet Union and die in the attempt.

That spirit has never quite gone away. I remember visiting Kiev in 1967, where my Ukrainian colleagues, all of them perfectly bilingual, insisted on speaking Ukrainian to me as a gesture of defiance to their Soviet masters. What I lost in comprehension they gained in national pride.

I also visited Almaty roughly at the same time, when my relation was the manager of the opera house there. Since that position put him into the rarefied atmosphere of the local elite, we were invited to a bash at the country house of a local bigwig, second secretary of something or other.

Yet even he, a Moscow appointment, made a point of flaunting Muslim paraphernalia (like introducing his several wives as cousins or nieces). A Muscovite had to be shown what’s what, and never mind the bigwig’s impeccable communist credentials.

When a pressure cooker is at a maximum setting, it doesn’t take much to cause an explosion. And that appliance has been bubbling in Kazakhstan for decades.

For at least three of those, until a few days ago, the country was ruled by Nursultan Nazarbayev, the jewel in the crown of Tony Blair’s evil clients.

When the USSR was still in business, Nazarbayev was a full-time functionary in Komsomol (Young Communist League). Though officially a junior branch of the Communist Party, Komsomol was in fact the breeding ground for the KGB. Interestingly, most Russian ‘oligarchs’, especially the original ones, come from the same background.

In 1990 Nazarbayev was appointed president of the republic, just in time to see the Soviet Union fall apart. He then proceeded to create a curious cocktail of a Stalinist dictatorship, Muslim sultanate and Mafia family.

Kazakhstan was richly adorned by Nazarbayev’s portraits and statues, while he and his family were getting rich on a scale that would have put Harun-al-Rashid to shame. I shan’t bore you with many details, but one is worth mentioning.

Nazarbayev appointed his son-in-law as head of the customs service and border troops. As such, he exacted duties from Chinese lorries carrying goods to Russia. There were about 1,000 of them every day, each paying $10,000. That’s $10 million a day that went straight to the Nazarbayev clan.

At the same time he maintained friendly, if rather subservient, relations with Russia, whose mafioso practices he was successfully emulating, though adding a few unmistakably Muslim touches. Kazakhstan joined the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), then the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) and, critically, Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO).

Whatever their declared mission, all those setups were created to keep in place the skeleton on which the flesh of a Russian empire could grow in due course. Meanwhile, Nazarbayev became one of the world’s richest men, never forgetting to send little tokens of his appreciation to the capo di tutti capi in the Kremlin (this Italian term describes their relationship quite accurately).

Against that background, the Kazakhs were getting more and more impoverished, with prices going up, the value of their wages going down, and taxes being squeezed out of them at an accelerating rate. Hence the first outburst occurred in 2011, when the people took to the streets.

In the good Soviet tradition, Nazarbayev issued a shoot to kill order. His stormtroopers promptly fired at the crowd, killing 17 officially and Allah only knows how many in reality.

Tony Blair helped him spin that atrocity internationally, but nationally it set the tone for all subsequent discourse between the people and their government. Elections were held in name only, dissidents imprisoned or worse, free information suppressed – there was nothing Putin could teach Nazarbayev.

Then, in 2019, when Nazarbayev was getting on a bit, and the unrest in the country was growing, he relinquished his presidency, becoming instead the éminence grise of the government in his new capacity of Chairman of the Security Council for life. The new president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, was to Nazarbayev what Medvedev was to Putin – a lapdog happily doing his master’s bidding.

Meanwhile, the people seethed and finally they had had enough. Over the past year, the price of LNG, which powers most private cars in Kazakhstan, doubled. That was the last straw. Another explosion occurred, this time on a massive scale.

Most of the demonstrations were peaceful, but not all. Armed rioters occupied and trashed several government buildings, including the capital’s administration, courthouse, airport and the headquarters of the Committee for National Security.

Tokayev delivered a speech claiming that the culprits were 20,000 bandits specially trained by, or possibly coming from, some unidentified foreign power. He offered no evidence whatsoever for either the number of those paramilitaries or their provenance. Suffice it to say that even the government TV channels disputed those data.

On the basis of those lies, Tokayev ordered his troops to fire at will, which they did, killing hundreds if not thousands (reports vary).  He then ordered the Internet to be cut off, which meant most Kazakhs lost access to their banks.

Then Tokayev appealed to the CSTO for help, begging for a foreign invasion. Putin and his poodles obliged with indecent haste, with 2,500 heavily armed Russian paratroopers landing in Kazakhstan, supported by contingents from Putin’s client states Armenia and Kirghizstan.

The claim that the CSTO is acting according to its charter is another lie. The organisation was created to thwart foreign invaders only, not to help Kazakhstan fight the Kazakhs. Thus, when Armenia was losing her war with Azerbaijan, her government also asked for CSTO’s help, but was turned down.   

That, however, didn’t prevent Armenia’s PM Pashinyan from now sending a token contingent along for the ride, thereby enabling Putin to claim it was the CSTO, not just Russia, that committed this act of aggression.

Now, even Lukashenko, whose power hung by a thread in 2020, after yet another stolen election was followed by a popular uprising, didn’t ask for a CSTO invasion. The events in Kazakhstan are sui generis in that they mark yet another milestone on Putin’s road to mayhem.

Not only is the invasion criminal in itself, but it sets, or rather revives, a precedent for new, greater crimes. The pattern was first established in 1939, when the Soviets formed a bogus Finnish communist government, which then asked the Red Army to invade.

As a student and admirer of Stalin, Putin has learned his lessons well. He is setting up future developments along the same lines, with ‘friendly’ governments of the former Soviet republics to be formed in Moscow. They’ll then beg Putin to restore order in their countries, with any independent national governments seen as factors of disorder.

Every time that happens, Western leaders can be counted on to express ‘deep concern’, offset by a parallel ‘understanding’ of Russia’s problems. They don’t realise, or rather pretend not to, that the only language that international thugs, such as Putin, understand is that of force.

No, I don’t advocate such a measure, this though I do think that anti-vaxxers are being both silly and asocial.

But it’s not what I think that matters, is it? It’s the deep thoughts of our leaders that carry serious weight, because their musings, unlike mine, can be translated into policy, and policy into action.

And Manny Macron has come precious close to proposing the punishment in the title above. No, he didn’t say that in so many words. Yet he did say that the unvaccinated Frenchmen “aren’t citizens” because they are acting irresponsibly.

Now, if acting responsibly were a conditio sine qua non of citizenship, most people I know, including yours truly, would become stateless before reaching the legal drinking age and certainly thereafter.

Who among us has never smoked, drunk to excess or driven dangerously? I bet every reader of mine has committed at least one of these indiscretions, and the worthiest among them must have been guilty of all three. There you are then. If you were French, Manny wouldn’t regard you as a citizen.

That statement of dubious legal value is a follow-up to the campaign against vaccine shirkers that Manny inaugurated the other day.

At that time he decided to add a touch of vox populi to his vocabulary. Hence Manny stated in no uncertain terms his intention to “piss off” the unvaccinated. That’s how the papers translated his colloquialism, but the French word he used, emmerder, is stronger, what with its excremental, rather than merely mingent, derivation.

The French papers are arguing whether or not it’s seemly for a president to use street jargon ex cathedra, which isn’t a debate I’m going to join – other than saying that we’d all be infinitely better off if our leaders abused their office with swearwords only.

What’s of greater interest is how French doctors responded to that call to arms. A large group of them signed a petition demanding that unvaccinated Covid patients be denied access to ICUs. Since those asocial vermin have only their own irresponsibility to blame, let them croak. See if French medics care.

This is a recurrent motif in the medical circles of various countries, including Britain. Until now it has usually involved smokers, with some NHS doctors refusing to treat them for pulmonary diseases.

One would be interested to know how such principled physicians reconcile that proposed policy with the Hippocratic oath they all took. I already know it’s irreconcilable with logic.

If self-inflicted diseases disqualified patients from treatment, we’d have to exclude smokers suffering from emphysema or lung cancer, drinkers afflicted with liver problems, overweight people with hypertension or diabetes – and let’s not forget athletes seeking treatment for injuries.

Add to this bad drivers who hurt themselves, clumsy construction workers who fall off scaffolding, swimmers bitten by sharks… I don’t want to let my phantasy run wild, but you get the picture.

Doctors take the oath to treat people in distress. Sanctimonious self-righteousness isn’t, as far as I know, an essential job qualification.

I’d rather doctors just swore at the unvaccinated, not withheld treatment – especially from those needing intensive care. Refusing to admit them to an ICU is practically tantamount to pronouncing a death sentence, and I don’t think that falls into the medical remit.

Having said all that, I do think anti-vaxxers should suffer the consequences of their folly. In that spirit, I’d ban unvaccinated athletes from competitions, especially those where the risk of spreading the virus is high.

Just look at our Premier League, where matches are being postponed en masse because many teams simply run out of players. Yes, ban the holdouts from playing by all means and, if such is your wont, swear at them, even in a language worse than Manny’s.

But taking away their access to proper medicine or, for that matter, rescinding their citizenship is immoral and despotic. Actually, these are two of the adjectives richly merited by most governments. Inane is another one.

My advice to my fellow wrinklies and crumblies: don’t despair. You too can become a sex god by following my example.

Your declining looks should be no obstacle to beefing up your score of lifetime amorous conquests. Just listen to me and you’ll do fine. More than fine, actually. Young women will pursue you as aggressively as in your youth you pursued them.

Pursuing is what I had to do quite a bit of when I was young and on the make. Since my short, solid frame (sometimes compared to a most unflattering garden structure) didn’t instantly recommend me to young girls’ fantasies, I had to do some work. Not always a lot, but some.

Well, no more. In the past 10 years or so, just when my interest in such adventures has waned, women have been pursuing me with unrelenting gusto. And I can tell you how that change came about.

Ten years ago I started putting my articles on Facebook, which instantly began to attract swarms of girls, most of whom didn’t seem to be my natural target audience. The minimum requirement for my readers is that they should indeed be able to read.

Yet most of those nubile lasses didn’t look as if they satisfied that requirement, even though they looked eminently capable of satisfying many others. Never mind – every day I’m contacted by dozens of such girls, each wishing to become my friend.

Judging by their messages and attached photographs, the kind of friendship they evidently have in mind won’t be based strictly on a leisurely exchange of thoughts and witticisms over a cup of tea. The friendship they offer in such a forthright manner is more sensual, not to say erotic or even – if some of their selfies are anything to go by – gynaecological.

I wonder what attracted them. My photograph? It’s doubtless flattering, but I still can’t be confused with George, or for that matter Amal, Clooney. I’d like to think that the young ladies were seduced by the style, wit and intellectual content of my prose, but that would be too presumptuous and hubristic.

One way or another, the propositions are so numerous that I can’t respond to every one individually. Nor do I wish to subject any of the young ladies to personal rejection. I remember from my younger days how traumatic that could be.

So my response has to be collective, if no less heartfelt for it. Girls, I wish I could accommodate your youthful urges, but I’m just too busy with my Rs: writing and reading, though shunning rithmetic. Moreover, I’m married, which doesn’t allow much leeway for non-stop assignations.

Accept therefore my apologies and a very respectful no in response to your flattering offers. Do keep trying though: my circumstances may change, and you never know your luck.

One request though: by all means send me selfies of your delicious bare flesh and Botoxed lips, but please refrain from trying to seduce me with closeups of your open pudenda. Call me old school or faddy-daddy, but they don’t arouse me or, if they do, it’s only in a wrong way.

So there you go. If you feel more vigorous and less squeamish than I do, join Facebook. It’ll make the wildest of your dreams come true, provided you have the energy, desire and – most important – a few quid burning a hole in your pocket.

Go for it, and do mention me in your prayers. I am, as a Bill Murray character says in one of his films, a facilitator of your dreams. And while you are at it, offer a prayer of gratitude for Facebook, the provider of this invaluable service.

P.S. I’ve attached some of the more sedate photos of my would-be friends.

P.P.S. Speaking of prostitutes, I’d happily add my name to the 750,000 signatories of the petition to revoke Tony Blair’s knighthood. Anybody know how I can do that? 

Thus, according to Boswell, spoke Dr Johnson in response to some specious statement. Our great savant clearly didn’t anticipate the arrival of Edward O Wilson two centuries later.

Prof. Wilson, who died at 92 on Boxing Day, wasn’t exactly the founder of sociobiology, as some describe him. But he certainly was its tireless populariser and glorifier.

His original field was myrmecology, the study of ants, and he made seminal contributions to that science. How seminal, I can’t judge. But judging by the 150-odd scientific prizes Wilson won, he was highly rated by his fellow professionals.

Being a rank amateur, I’m more interested in the second phase of his career, when he extrapolated onto humans his knowledge of ants. Essentially, he found that all animals, from ants to us, have their behaviour not only skewed but indeed predetermined by heredity.

Free will is then a dangerous illusion propagated by the likes of Dr Johnson, ignoramuses who had never studied the social behaviour of ants. And they get their cue from religion, that dangerous exercise in deception.

“So I would say that for the sake of human progress, the best thing we could possibly do would be to diminish, to the point of eliminating, religious faiths,” Wilson said in 2015, displaying refreshing ignorance about the history, and also the meaning, of progress.

Prof. Wilson didn’t suggest expedients by which that laudable end could be achieved. Experience, however, suggests that the best, if short-lived, way of eliminating religious beliefs is to eliminate religious believers, but to his credit Prof. Wilson advocated no such measure.  

He famously used a photographic simile to make his point. A man’s personality, and consequently his behaviour over a lifetime, he explained, is like an undeveloped photo negative. It contains the whole picture, with no detail omitted.

In the course of his life, a man may develop all of the negative, some of it or none of it – but he can neither add anything to it nor take anything away (Wilson was writing in the pre-Photoshop days). He thus added his name to the list of determinists who have had a founding, and pernicious, effect on modernity: Marx, Darwin and Freud.

When Wilson first unveiled that theory in 1978 he became a target for vicious attacks from the Left, especially ‘progressive’ students. They were appalled by any suggestion that human behaviour is in any way affected by biology.

They gobbled up Marxist determinism, hailed Darwin’s and especially welcomed Freud’s because it dealt with their itchy naughty bits. But Wilson’s genetic determinism smacked of racism too much for their liking.

Wilson himself never even hinted at the possibility of some races being inferior to others, but the noses of enraged youths possess nothing short of bloodhound acuity. Prof. Wilson started to be cancelled long before the term was coined.

He was a Nazi, personally responsible for genocide! A racist! A eugenicist! So screamed those progressive students, as they picketed Wilson’s lectures. “Racist Wilson, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide,” sang the chorus of young firebrands.

One girl emptied a jug of water over the scientist’s head, and I’m only amazed he was never subjected to a less symbolic but more wounding attack.

For it’s an article of faith for the progressives that every person starts out as a tabula rasa, on which economics and sociology then scribble their messages – and progressives have been known to kill defending their right to that patently unscientific opinion.

Now, I don’t mind dismissing scientific theories, but dismissing scientific facts betokens the kind of stupidity that doesn’t even merit a refutation. That we are all, to some extent, a product of heredity is one such fact, and one doesn’t have to be a scientist to know it’s true.

But ‘to some extent’ are the operative words. To claim that we can’t act against our genetic predisposition isn’t just to deny our religion. It’s to deny our humanity.

Wilson’s determinism reduces people to puppets whose wires are pulled by their ancestors’ traits, or else to fish swimming in their genetic pool and lacking both the need and the ability to come up for air.

It’s from this intellectual premise that one could launch a devastating attack on Wilson’s soulless determinism. Accusing him of genocide is so perverse that it’s hardly sporting to aim one’s slings and arrows at those who mouth such gibberish. They should be told to shut up and stay silent until they’ve extricated their brains from the cesspit of bubbling emotions.

Yet it’s that unsporting target that Daniel Finkelstein has picked in The Times. Wilson, he writes, “was achingly, obviously right. How likely is it that human beings are the one species whose capacities and behaviour aren’t largely influenced by biology? If every other animal’s behaviour demands an evolutionary explanation, how can it possibly be that ours does not?”

Do you notice a copout? Wilson didn’t just maintain that our capacities and behaviour are “largely influenced by biology”. According to him, they are so influenced wholly.

That is a folly as glaring and, if you will, ‘progressive’ as the insistence on the genocidal nature of genetics. This folly springs from the materialist obscurantism involved in treating man as just another animal.

An animal man may be, but he is “achingly, obviously” not just an animal. Unlike a cat, a dog or for that matter an ant, man isn’t a walking replica of his genetic make-up. He is “achingly, obviously” endowed with faculties that transcend materialism.

Christianity uses terms like ‘soul’ and ‘free will’ in this context, while neuroscientists prefer talking about consciousness. They have spent untold billions in any currency you care to name on all those Genome Projects and Decades of the Brain, trying to find a material explanation for that extra-material factor – and predictably failed.

If anything, they’ve uncovered new barriers on the way to that destination. It was like a desert mirage: the closer neuropsychologists got to the oasis of knowledge, the farther it moved away.

Tarred as they are with the brush of our materialist, deracinated modernity, those scientists resort to the cardsharp’s trick of saying that yes, unfortunately they can’t yet prove that consciousness has a purely material explanation. But since we all know that’s the case, they’ll find the truth sooner or later.

The only thing they’ve found so far is that sometimes their scanner screens light up, and sometimes they don’t. It’s political bias, not scientific integrity, that prevents them from acknowledging that Dr Johnson, unburdened as he was by oscillographic technology, was right in his a priori statement.

Lord Finkelstein is commendably merciless to those brainless youngsters who didn’t see much difference between Wilson and Hitler. Yet he doesn’t realise that, by accepting the premise of man being just a bigger ant or a cleverer ape, he is one of those ‘progressives’ in every way that matters.

“We must defend good science against bad politics,” he writes. I agree. So do let’s start by defending good common sense against crude, hare-brained, demonstrably defunct materialism. As exemplified by Edward O Wilson, his gonadic detractors – and Lord Finkelstein.

I can’t claim to have studied the case in any detail. Then again, I don’t think such perusal is needed to reach the conclusion in the title.

Merely on general principle, these days it’s impossible for anyone accused of crimes involving sex (of any variety), rape or race to be judged fairly.

A fair trial is one in which truth comes out – or at least every attempt is made to ensure that it does. Yet when the defendant’s crime touches on the cherished – and typically transient – tropes of modernity, truth retreats, tail between its legs.

Many roads lead to truth, but there is one guaranteed to lead away from it: ideology. And in this age of a total, not to say totalitarian, avalanche of information, no one can possibly remain untouched by ideological afflatus. Not the judge, not the jury – and certainly not ‘public opinion’, a term I’m always compelled to put in quotation marks.

That said, I’m sure Ghislaine is ghastly, her ego and sense of self-worth blown out of all proportion by her birthright to entitlement. On the folk theory about an apple and the tree, any progeny of Robert Maxwell would have to clear an insurmountable barrier of heredity, for he was an inveterate villain.

Moreover, he was a man trained in the dark arts of indoctrination, which he had to practise on his children. Under such circumstances, Ghislaine would have had to be touched by God to escape Robert Maxwell’s malignant influence. Instead she was touched by Jeffrey Epstein.

I’m sure that those who have followed the story more assiduously than I have know all there is to know about the perverse relationship that has proved the undoing of both parties. But even a cursory glance at newspaper articles leaves one in little doubt that Ghislaine indeed procured for Jeffrey.

Some of the girls in her stable were underaged, or close to it. That’s of course naughty, but none of them strikes me as an innocent lamb led to debauching slaughter at the hands of Jeffrey and his friends.

One such victim particularly caught my eye. She was a trainee masseuse who catered to Ghislaine’s need to be kneaded. Impressed with the service she had received, Ghislaine then invited the girl for a weekend at one of Jeffrey’s love nests.

There a tragedy occurred: Jeffrey raped the girl. Rape is a crime, but these days it’s not like any old crime, is it? Utter the word, and it instantly acts as a magnet attracting ideological shibboleths lodged in people’s minds.

Women have been house-trained to believe that rape is the worst possible thing that can happen to them. Worse than a beating, mutilation, even death.  

No doubt our masseuse grew up with that indisputable knowledge. She fell victim to a crime than which nothing worse exists. So what did she do?

Did she call the police? No. Did she complain to her family and friends? No. Did she at least escape from that den of iniquity, taking a vow to give it a berth at least a mile wide in perpetuity? No.

Instead she continued to visit the house on multiple occasions for four (!) years, getting raped each time. Queried by the perplexed defence, she explained that the memory of her ordeal was so awful that she blanked it out.

Oh well, that happens. My doctor friends confirm that a deep psychological trauma can produce amnesia. As a credulous man, I therefore accept that she had forgotten the first rape when she paid Jeffrey a second visit. But what about all subsequent rapes, spaced out at regular intervals over four years? Did she push the amnesia button each time?

I don’t believe that, you don’t believe it, no sensible person will believe it. But it’s not sensible people who sit on modern juries but automata programmed by ideological agitprop. They are predisposed to believe any nonsense once they’ve heard one of the key words: rape, racism, hate, homophobia, transphobia.

These words are magic wands. When waved, they sweep away common sense or indeed any understanding of what constitutes reasonable doubt. At best, they create a slight bias. At worst, or perhaps most normal, they doom the defendant.

Once again, I’m not trying to vindicate Ghislaine. I really don’t care about her, although it takes a madman to accept that her crimes, such as they are, merit the prison terms bandied about. Sixty years, in effect meaning she’d die in prison? Even many killers don’t get that.

Just put manslaughter on one side of the scales and inviting girls for a romp or two on the other. What’s that doing to the balance?

I repeat: I don’t care about Ghislaine. But I do care about justice, for without it the West will stay Western only in the purely geographic sense. It’s not democracy but justice that is the salient, formative aspect of our civilisation.

When justice isn’t done, especially when it isn’t done for ideological reasons, we all lose, not just the defendant. That’s why I feel some sympathy for Ghislaine, something I never thought I’d ever feel for a Maxwell.

When I opened our conservative broadsheet this morning, I had to rub my eyes to make sure I hadn’t misread. No, there it was, in large bold type on the front page: Apologia pro imperium nostrum.

I translated mentally, to come up with Vindication of Our Empire. But as I read on, the article went far beyond a mere vindication.

“Lest we forget,” it said, “few of our colonial possessions were acquired strictly by military conquest. Yet even those that were derived infinite benefits from what Lord Palmerston so aptly called ‘liberal interventionism’. However, whatever method of entry into the Empire, each of its members was infinitely better off in it than at any time before or since…

“The other day I spoke to a prominent member of the Indian parliament, who told me he blamed the British for all of his country’s woes. ‘How so?’ I asked, readying myself for a heated argument. ‘I blame you for leaving,’ he explained…

“We have a moral and I daresay legal right to reclaim the Empire we lost, much to the chagrin of its former subjects. India and Pakistan, much of Africa (including the RSA), most of the West Indies received from Britain the priceless gifts of parliamentary democracy and independent judiciary, free markets and free elections – above all, the most precious gift of the sublime English language.

“And let us not forget the delights of Anglicanism, the true Christianity for our time and of all time – the confession for all seasons. It is the Anglican English who are the God-chosen people, and we must restore our mandate of the territory currently inhabited by those with an unsustainable claim to that distinction…

“Instead of besmirching the reputation of our empire builders, we should worship their names – the names of Drake and Nelson, Gordon and Roberts, Rhodes and Napier…”

And so on in the same vein. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Can you believe yours? No? Good. Because I made this up. No such article has appeared in the British press, broadsheet or tabloid, nor even on one of those loony-fringe websites.

Yet this wasn’t just a puerile prank on my part. I simply wanted to give you a little taste of what the Russians read in their papers and watch on their TV.

Replace the British Empire with either the Russian or Soviet equivalent; British empire builders with Ivan III, Ivan IV ‘The Terrible’, most of the Romanov tsars, plus Stalin and Zhukov; Anglicanism with Orthodoxy; former British colonies with the Russian possessions; multiply the volume by any factor it takes to exclude any contradicting information, and you’ll begin to get some idea of the propagandistic swamp in which the Russians are immersed around the clock.

Stalin in particular is hailed for leading the Soviet Union to victory in the great war, which achievement is supposed to outweigh the tens of millions murdered, starved to death or “turned to camp dust”, as the popular idiom went.

Proving yet again that Russia’s past is unpredictable, the media omit to mention that the Soviet Union entered the Second World War as Hitler’s ally. Nor have I seen too many references to the 1.5 million Russians serving in the Wehrmacht and the SS, or indeed to the tens of millions who perished in the war due to Stalin’s incompetence and brutality.

Their brains scoured to blankness, many Russians gather together in fair imitations of the Nuremberg rallies and scream themselves hoarse, shouting “We can do it again!” What exactly? Murder tens of millions of other Russians? Plunge half of Europe into a tyranny as revolting as the Nazi one, but outdoing it in the body count?

It’s not just the media that does the brainwashing either. The same jingoistic, bellicose messages come across in films, plays, novels, poems – and of course songs.

Over the past century and a half, but especially since 1917, Russian singers have been blessed with a vast repertoire of drum-beating, bugle-blowing, nationalistic, racist and anti-Semitic songs to warm the cockles of every heart disconnected from a brain.

Specifically, the songs’ number and frequency always increased immediately prior to Russia’s pouncing on yet another neighbour. For example, before Soviet aggression against Finland in 1939 the radio waves were inundated with a song specially commissioned for that event.

Alongside a promise to help the Finnish workers mete out reprisals on their capitalist oppressors, the song featured a poetic refrain, saying “Do accept us Suomi, you beauty, into the necklace of your limpid lakes.” Suomi chose not to, and the song stopped blaring from every loudspeaker.

One of today’s most celebrated purveyors of that genre is Zhanna Bichevskaya, People’s Artist of the Russian Federation, frequent performer at Kremlin concerts, Putin’s favourite, ubiquitous star on radio and TV, host of her own TV show, one of the most recorded and best-selling singers, laureate of numerous… – please tell me where to stop: the list of the lady’s medals could go on and on.

Since we are in a tasting mode today, I thought you’d like a soupçon of Miss Bichevskaya’s delicious output. Here I am translating excerpts of her current hit Kulikovo Field.  

For the outlanders among you, especially those who never studied Russian history, Kulikovo Field was a battleground that has been turned, for no sound historical reason, into a Russian shrine. There, In 1380, a contingent of Russians and Mongols under Prince Dmitri Donskoy and the Tatar Khan Tokhtamysh defeated another Tatar contingent under Mamai.

Soviet pupils (and Russian, both pre- and post-Soviet ones) were taught that thus ended the Tatar-Mongol yoke of Rus, which is a mythological solecism. For, two years later, Moscow surrendered to Tokhtamysh, who took Donskoy’s son Vasily I hostage. Muscovy remained a vassal of the Horde for another two centuries.

But never mind history, feel the patriotism. Kulikovo Field has become a symbol of Russia’s martial grandeur, her mighty response to enemies. It’s against that background that you can fully appreciate these excerpts from Zhanna’s song (I’m translating just the words, not the rhyme and metre).

“How did we allow this to happen, brothers? Russia again is moaning under the yoke of black locusts. That means the Russians must take up arms again…  

“We’ll sweep the vampires from the body of our land, and there won’t be any zones [another word for Stalin’s concentration camps], camps or prisons, all the enemies of Russia will be slain…

“Russia will reclaim the Russian Sebastopol, the Crimean peninsula will again become Russian, as will the majestic Bosphorus, our Constantinople and the world’s shrine Jerusalem! And, to spite the Masons and other villains [no prizes for guessing who the other villains are], all those who are seething with hatred of Christianity, we’ll remember Kulikovo Field, and the scales will fall from our eyes, and this shrine will unite us.”

Rousing stuff, that. Now imagine an ordinary Russian, not much given to exegetic contemplation, who hears the same message round the clock, blaring at him through every medium and every genre.

Then imagine a country where something like that is standard fare, the regular spiritual and cultural sustenance. Have you done so? Splendid. Now imagine a British journalist who thinks that country is “the most conservative and Christian in Europe”. But enough about Peter Hitchens…

On either side of Christmas, I made two points. First, few people these days even understand what conservatism means. Second, because atheism is fundamentally unsound, it diminishes people’s ability to think straight.

Hence I have for The Times columnist Matthew Parris that special feeling I reserve for people who vindicate my assertions by illustrating them vividly and irrefutably.

This time around he has regaled us with a jumbled attempt to go Nietzsche one better on the subject of good and evil. He reiterates (without attribution) Nietzsche’s point that good and evil men aren’t as sharply polarised as some philosophers think.

They both have the same natural impulses, and the difference is that evil men express the bad ones more directly and comprehensively. Somewhat incongruously, Nietzsche then dismissed traditional, Christian morality – even though that concept of good and evil doesn’t negate it at all.

Quite the contrary, Christianity rejects the notion of moral determinism because it contradicts the notion of free will, making an uncoerced personal choice between good and evil. Christianity also recognises that every man is capable of making either choice.

Mr Parris takes this basic idea and turns it into the cat’s cradle of a convoluted mess: “Friends, there are no demons, no Heaven, no Hell, no cosmic forces of good and evil, no battle between darkness and light. There is only us.”

There he conflates the Christian idea of free will with the Manichaean heresy of an externalised evil independent of good and deriving from a parallel deity. This view sprang from the dual cosmology of the world of light being in perpetual conflict with the world of darkness.

Mr Parris seems to think that, by dismissing Manichaeism, he is also dismissing Christianity because they are roughly similar. But Christian theology never treated evil as an external phenomenon emanating from some competitor to God. Good is primary; evil, strictly derivative. Evil is merely the absence of good.

So why drag in the Christian concepts of Heaven and Hell? What on earth do they have in common with Mani’s gnostic nonsense? Neither heaven nor hell predetermine our free choice between good and evil – they merely emphasise, inter alia, the reward for the right choice and the wages of sin.

Having dug himself into an intellectual hole, Mr Parris spurned folk wisdom and went on digging his way into unalloyed drivel: “Manichaeism goes with the grain of human nature. Fear of the unseen is a natural product of evolutionary biology: self-preservation favours the suspicious and, at its extreme, suspiciousness leads to paranoia, of which there’s a streak in us all.”

So not only is he a theologian and a moral philosopher – he is also an evolutionary biologist. I get it: when Darwin created man, he imbued him with an irrational, paranoid belief that evil may imperil man’s self-preservation, whereas in fact all sensible people, exemplified by Mr Parris, believe that evil… what?

Doesn’t exist? Isn’t dangerous? I wish, as Byron wrote about Coleridge, he would explain his explanation. If Mr Parris wanted to say that he detests Manichaeism and Christianity alike, then he should have said so, thereby sparing me the trouble of trying to untangle his intellectual mess.

Apparently, he has been exploring such ideas from an early age: “As a student I was struck by Aristotle’s rejection of the idea that moral qualities can be lodged within us like downloaded apps.”

Mr Parris, who is roughly my age, must have been infinitely more precocious. When I was a student, we didn’t yet download apps. We read books and had no premonition that one day they would be replaced by Wikipedia. Yet Mr Parris (and presumably Aristotle) was in command of computer-age terminology long before the advent of the computer age.

But back to Mani and Christ. “Nobody expressed it better than St Augustine 17 centuries ago, describing (in his Confessions) the error of his earlier thinking: ‘I still thought that it is not we who sin but some other nature that sins within us . . . I preferred to excuse myself and blame this unknown thing which was in me but was not part of me’.”

One has to infer that St Augustine, hereby conscripted under Parris’s banners, also rejected heaven and hell. In fact, he merely says that, as a youngster, he was a misguided Manichaean. However, as he grew up, chronologically, spiritually and intellectually, he became a Christian – meaning a person who believes in free choice between good and evil, and also in the existence of heaven and hell.

Mr Parris acknowledges that, for which he must be commended. Yet he must be rebuked for then adding: “But the heresy is woven into the very fabric of popular and informal Christian and Muslim belief.”

I’m not sure what popular and informal Christian belief is. Is it at odds with Christian doctrine and dogma? If so, it’s poorly informed or even dubiously Christian. Is that what Mr Parris is lamenting? Is he out to return those stray sheep into the fold of doctrinal rectitude?

Not at all, as it turns out. He is merely drawing far-reaching conclusions from colloquial usage: “Behind every red-top or middle-market tabloid headline about the presence of ‘evil’ or (worse) ‘pure evil’ in our midst, you can discern this thinking. You could hear it in George W Bush’s speeches about ‘terror’, the ‘war on terror’, waged against the forces of darkness.”

Yes, people sometimes use words loosely and emotively. One makes mental allowances for that tendency and, for example, a man doesn’t call the cops every time his wife shouts: “If you don’t wipe your feet, I’ll kill you.”

Sometimes speakers also rely on shorthand for brevity’s sake. Any sensible listener would have known that what Bush meant was that he was out to prevent terrorist acts by waging war on those who have made the evil choice of committing such acts.

Is that how Mr Parris wants our politicians to talk? If so, I’m not surprised his own parliamentary career was so short-lived.

Shining through Mr Parris’s prose is the underlying belief, typical of atheists, that good and evil are nebulous concepts even when internalised. In his own example, doesn’t he believe that blowing up public transport is an evil act?

If it isn’t, what is it? An honest mistake? And if it is evil, what’s wrong with describing it as such? On the contrary, such usage has allowed Mr Parris to parade his enviable erudition by referring to St Augustine’s Confessions, even if out of context.

As a journalist, Mr Parris can’t indulge in philosophising for long. A segue to quotidian politics must be instant and smooth.

So here it is: “At the root of this corrosive philosophy is a pull we all feel and to which I wrongly succumbed during the Brexit debate… It’s the impulse to imagine malign forces behind wrong-headedness.”

In the interests of full disclosure, Mr Parris should have added that “during the Brexit debate” he succumbed to that “corrosive philosophy” so thoroughly that this “natural conservative” switched to the LibDems, the most pro-EU party we have. Clearly he regarded any regaining of British sovereignty as evil and European federalism as good.

He then went on to strengthen his conservative credentials: “Natural conservatives like me are pulled likewise by a Manichaean account of the struggle between Labour’s wicked (we assume) Momentum-inclined Corbynites and what we see as the enlightened Blairite centre-left.”

Well, natural conservatives like me detect only tactical differences between the two wings of socialism. But it’s Mr Parris who interests me here. Does he not regard “Momentum-inclined Corbynites” (communists in all but name, for the benefit of my foreign readers) as wicked? Is it Manichaean or Christian to see them as such?

Oh well, picking on someone like Mr Parris is hardly sporting. It’s just that he illustrated my recent points so exhaustively that I couldn’t resist.