Month: June 2022

I looked up ochlophobia (a fear of mob-like crowds) and was relieved to find out it’s supposed to be irrational. Excellent. So I’m not psychotic after all.

Yes, I do detest mob-like crowds, and at times I’m even afraid of them. But that fear is perfectly rational, rooted in observation, experience and contemplation.

As a child, I was weaned on the tragic story of my cousin who was trampled to death by a football mob a year or two after I was born. My mother often told me to be especially careful to keep my footing when in a crowd. If I fell down, the crowd could walk all over me, just as it did over my 14-year-old cousin.

Then I grew up and saw crowds in action. Some action was benign, such as rallies or marches for good causes. Some was nasty, such as rallies or marches for bad causes. It didn’t take me long to realise that I hated the first almost as much as the second.

For any crowd is a sort of synergistic organism, except that, rather than being greater than the sum of its parts, it has nothing to do with the individuals making it up. It transcends individuality and therefore humanity.

A mob resembles a pack of wild animals more than any assembly of human beings made in the image and likeness of God. So they are, each on his own. But gather them together in a large crowd, and even God won’t know what they’ll get up to.

A single man, even not a particularly strong or intelligent one, is more impervious to manipulation than a crowd, even if made up of square-jawed holders of advanced degrees. The same  mob can be rallied by a great idea today and an evil one tomorrow, displaying equal enthusiasm for both.

How many of those thousands listening agape to Jesus’s words screamed “Crucify him!” the very next day? How many loyal and enthusiastic subjects of Charles I, Louis XVI and Nicholas II cheered – nay demanded – their execution when evil men began to shriek evil slogans? How many good, stolid burghers, salt of the earth each one, left their Frauen and Kinder to scream themselves hoarse at Nuremberg rallies?

There have been many books written on crowd psychology, notably by Gustave Le Bon, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. I’ve read a few, but found nothing of what I hadn’t already either observed or figured out for myself. Those things that didn’t tally with my thoughts and experience I considered misguided – you decide whether this is comment on those books or my arrogance.

This is a preamble to a comment that I’m sure some people, especially conservatives, will find appalling. After all, many a pundit rejoiced at the sights of the explosive mass enthusiasm caused by Her Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee.

This was held as proof of intuitive monarchism residing at the grassroots of our green and pleasant land. Rather than being cynical materialists, the British people are always ready to salute the royal standard, kiss the Union Jack and shout their love for Queen and country (God has fallen out of that triad).

So they are. But the thought kept gnawing at the far recesses of my mind that, should the very same people be told that the monarchy is an offensive anachronism and they’d be much happier in a republic, they’d be just as enthusiastic – provided a charismatic enough character rallied them together in a herd-like mob.

This afternoon we walked the length of the lovely St James Park, from Horse Guards Parade to Buck House, alongside the Mall. The park, normally one of my favourite places in London, was today dominated by the aftermath of the celebratory pageantry.

There wasn’t much litter about – the cleaners must have been working overnight. Or perhaps there wasn’t enough room left for the litter, for the park was jam-packed with Portaloo cabins, hundreds of them, arranged in clusters of a dozen or so.

Verily I say unto you, the outpourings of affection for the Queen must have reached diluvian proportions. Penelope, her English mind drawn to the concrete rather than general, wondered what they did with all the stuff deposited in the cabins.

For once, I was stuck for a reply. Every possibility that crossed my mind was too grotesquely scatological to enunciate. I just winced, reminded yet again of the hairbreadth separating mob love from mob justice – or mob anything.

The more I love people, the more I hate crowds. Call it ochlophobia if you will (the Russophones among you will recognise the same Greek root in the word охломон, good-for-nothing). Call it anything you wish – but don’t call on me to join any crowd whatever.

For they shall be called Manny Macron, to complete this, possibly blasphemous, bowdlerisation of the Beatitudes.

With his mind’s eye, Manny sees a picture that escapes everyone else: himself as a world leader. This reminds me of Schopenhauer’s epigram on the difference between talent and genius: “Talent hits the target no one else can hit. Genius hits the target no one else can see.”

Manny, alas, is no genius. His problem is that no one else can see his target because it’s not there. That makes everyone else sane and him deluded.

Since the beginning of Russia’s bandit raid on the Ukraine, Manny has felt the urge to talk to Putin. Now, if it’s true that Vlad is seriously ill, those chinwag sessions must have relieved his suffering. A good laugh is known to have that effect.

According to Manny, he told Putin the attack on the Ukraine was a “fundamental error”. Quite. So was the Nazi genocide of Jews.

The difference between a fundamental error and mass murder shouldn’t be lost on anyone with a modicum of intelligence and moral sense. Once grasped, that difference should determine a proper response.

One can talk to a mistaken man, helping him correct his error. But one shouldn’t talk to a mass murderer in the act. One should stop him by every available means.

Putting this thought in the French context, Charles Martel didn’t try to talk to Abd al-Rahman al-Ghafidi in 732. Daladier did try to talk to Hitler in 1938. That simple comparison ought to have taught Manny a useful lesson. If it hasn’t, his teacher cum foster mother Brigitte has her work cut out for her.

Every pursuit of fake political goals comes enveloped in mendacious jargon. Thus the toxic gas of appeasement wafting through France and Germany is masked by cant, along the lines of the imperative to “save Putin’s face” and “avoid humiliating him”.

Manny keeps banging out that tune with the persistence of a maniac. To wit: “I am convinced that it is France’s role to be a mediating power. We must not humiliate Russia so that the day when the fighting stops we can build an exit ramp through diplomatic means.”

If he means that every war sooner or later ends in a peace treaty, then this is a truism not worth saying. But peace treaties differ: some are signed by a Pétain, some by an Eisenhower.

If he means that, once the shooting has stopped, business with Putin can go back to normal, then this is inanity blended with immorality.

If he means that France (also implicitly Germany and conceivably the US) can twist the Ukraine’s arm into trading territory for the dubious privilege of effectively becoming Russia’s dependency, then this plan is both criminal and unrealistic.

It’s impossible to humiliate Putin more than he has already humiliated himself and his country. His bloated face is beyond saving – it can only be bashed in.

The Ukrainians are doing just that and, when the heavy weaponry promised by the West finally arrives, they’ll have the proverbial tools to finish the job. That’s the only possible scenario for peace: driving the Russians back to the line of 23 February at least, to the pre-2014 borders ideally.

This plot can only be realised through the denouement of sweeping political changes in Russia, the ousting of Putin and repudiation of Putinism, followed by a real, not fake, peace treaty.

Any other “exit ramp” would be a springboard to hell. For, even if the West complies with Manny’s innermost wishes and stops arms supplies to the Ukraine, the war will never stop.

The Russians may occupy the country or a large part of it. But Ukrainians will continue to fight the way they fought against the Soviets throughout the 1950s: as guerrillas. Except that this time they’ll fight as a united nation, not as small units of partisans. And they will be much better armed.

During the Nazi occupation of France, less than one per cent of the population joined the resistance, but they still hurt the German war effort, especially towards the end. In the Ukraine, resistance will bring together the whole population.

Russian soldiers will be killed with sniper fire, Russian trains will be derailed, Russian fuel depots will be blown up, terrorist acts will strike Moscow and Petersburg. The Russians will respond the only way they know how: with genocidal atrocities.

The Ukraine will be drenched in gushing blood, and then the flood will spill over to Poland, Moldova, the Baltics – and tomorrow the world, to quote Putin’s apparent role model, Hitler.

Manny refuses to understand this because he suffers from a dual condition: delusions of grandeur and cowardice.

The former makes him believe that France can be cast in the role of peace-maker, rather than simply a loyal Nato member, doing all she can to stop the spread of Russian fascism. This is a woeful misapprehension, considering France’s present ranking in the world power stakes.

The latter makes him fear Putin’s retaliation with big bombs. Putin is doing his level best stoking up such fears among those who scare easily.

He once compared himself and Russia to a rat that has to lash out when cornered. (A note to Vlad: try to compare yourself to more flattering animals. May I suggest a simile involving not small rodents but large felines, such as tigers or lions?)

But Russia, courtesy of her rulers, has cultivated that feeling throughout history, going back at least to the 16th century. The paranoid idea of being encircled by enemies wishing to wipe her out has become part and parcel of the Russian psyche, and it will persist for as long as Russia harbours megalomaniac ideas, which probably means for ever.

Building on that emotional capital, Putin may next claim he feels humiliated and rat-cornered because the three Baltic republics are still independent. They used to be part of the Russian-Soviet empire, and now they play at sovereignty. Come to think of it, the same goes for Poland and Finland. Their independence is a slap in Vlad’s face, which must be saved come what may.

Or he’ll claim that his face can only be saved by rebuilding the Warsaw Pact as a Russia-dominated federation. What will Manny be saying then?

Probably the same things. He is incorrigible, and his diseases are incurable. I just hope he – and his fellow Putinversteher Scholz – doesn’t infect everyone else.

Over the past several days so many millions of words have been written about the Queen that I feel hard-pressed trying to add some of my own. Yet one can’t ignore the Platinum Jubilee for any number of reasons.

The most trivial one first. As someone who has never stayed in the same job for more than eight years, I admire Her Majesty’s staying power. Seventy years – and she wasn’t a child on her accession.

Not only has she stayed in the same job all this time but, largely to her magnificent efforts, the job too has stayed more or less the same. That’s how it should be: the Church, Parliament and especially the monarchy are more than just institutions. They are instruments of historical continuity, binding together our past, present and future.

Hence they are conservative institutions by definition, the kind that, rather than disavowing and repudiating the past, try to preserve and foster everything worthy about it. Alas, both Parliament and our established Church are remiss in this vital aspect of their mission.

Both seem to be hellbent on undermining, corrupting or even destroying every formative tradition of the nation. That leaves only Her Majesty as the sentinel of Britain’s soul, and one has to admire her for doing her best within a constitution that encourages her to do nothing, but do it well.

Nothing, that is, that can in any way affect the affairs of the realm. She is the only person in Britain who can’t even say publicly what she thinks about anything of importance.

Hence we know that Her Majesty likes horses and corgis, but what does she think about the economy? Education? Medical care? Her prime ministers? Nato? Transsexuality? Female bishops?

I can only guess. However, even though I don’t know what the Queen thinks, I know and admire what she does.

Perhaps admiration isn’t a strong enough word. Awe may be more appropriate, for I’m always awestruck by those who perform deeds I wouldn’t be able to manage in a month of Platinum Jubilee Sundays.

Priestly service at the altar of God is perhaps the only approximation of the Queen’s mission. Self-abnegation for the sake of something greater than oneself, offering one’s whole life as a conduit of transcendence, submitting one’s own self to a greater good – that’s what a priest’s job is. And the Queen’s.

Both derive their remit and inspiration from God, and by all accounts the Queen sees her work in precisely such terms. She is known to be a sincere Christian, which so few of her subject are – and considerably fewer than there were at the beginning of her reign.

As their numbers declined, the gap between the Queen and her realm grew. A Christian monarch dedicating every breathing moment to service and sacrifice is desperately at odds with our world. Her subjects are generous in giving Her Majesty their love, but stingy in emulating her and everything she personifies.

They are more likely to misunderstand or even mock everything the Queen stands for, while professing, often sincerely, love for her personally. This dichotomy comes across, unintentionally, in many of the effusive tributes paid to the Queen.

I’ll mention only three, all from an article in The Times, which used to be a conservative paper but now has become an enunciator and promulgator of every modern perversion. Judge for yourself:  

“The Queen has always been a champion of multiculturalism. In her Golden Jubilee address to parliament she delighted in Britain’s ‘richly multicultural and multifaith society’, citing it as ‘a major development since 1952’.”

The Queen’s addresses to Parliament or the nation have little to do with her championship of anything. She merely lip-synchs the words uttered by her cabinet, led at the time of her Golden Jubilee by that revolting Tony Blair.

The reshuffling of our demographic pack has definitely been a major development, but it has been championed not by the Queen but by the ideological zeitgeist rendering our air toxic. It’s not the influx of other races as such that’s sheer poison, but the reasons for which it has been perpetrated, and the perpetrators’ motives.

Unlike America, Britain was never in her past a “richly multicultural and multifaith society”. She has been turned into one by those who loathe everything the Queen embodies and doubtless loves: Britain’s historical tradition, religion, morality, aesthetics, social dynamics. Millions of alien implants are used as siege weapons, designed to bring down the walls that have for millennia protected the nation’s essence.

Moving right along, “And what of the arts?… Within two decades [of the Queen’s accession], Britain had become universally admired for its musicians, actors and artists, many of whom were operating in a world of drugs and sexual liberation a world away from the occupant of Buckingham Palace.”

Not from all its occupants, alas. But I’m sure Her Majesty wouldn’t wish to claim credit, say, for the domination of our musical scene by the tattooed, drug-addled creatures whose music isn’t an art but an extension of erotic pagan cults and the pharmaceutical industry.

Britain used to be “universally admired” for Byrd, Gibbons, Dowland, Tallis, Purcell, Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Britten. Again, I don’t know what Her Majesty’s musical tastes are, but somehow I doubt she’d prefer Sex Pistols to any of the composers mentioned. The article’s author clearly does, so he doesn’t realise his tribute to the Queen is actually libellous.

And then: “In 1953 fewer than 20 per cent of British 16-year-olds were in school. Today more than 85 per cent attend. University admissions have risen exponentially. In 1950 about 17,000 students received their first degree, 14,000 of them men. Today there are more than half a million new undergraduates, most of them women. Learning is no longer the preserve of elbow-patched academics but has become a key part of British culture. Documentaries such as The Ascent of Man, Civilisation, and all things David Attenborough have been viewed by millions.”

That makes Britain a much better-educated country in the author’s eyes. Now, vulgarity comes in many guises, but one of them has to do with assessing education quantitatively and not qualitatively.

Most of those 85 per cent of today’s 16-year-olds who attend school will leave it unable even to read, write and add up properly. Yet most of those 1953 20 per cent left school educated to a standard not only unachieved, but unimaginable by most of today’s university undergraduates, whose number has indeed “risen exponentially”, but whose quality has declined at the same rate.

And, though I adore educated women, having been married to several of them, I, unlike the articles’ author, see the runaway feminisation of our higher education as a symptom of a serious disease, not a sign of rude health.

In general, what to any sensible person constitutes an educational catastrophe is to the author a great triumph. Again, I’m sure Her Majesty would refuse credit, if that’s the right word, for the triumph of what the likes of Tony Blair see as education.

But then she isn’t really of this world as much as she is an envoy from another one, of which the Times hack and his ilk know little, and one they probably hate. So it’s with the mixed feelings of sadness and affection that I congratulate the Queen on her glorious Jubilee.

Many happy returns, Your Majesty. Long may you reign over us for, when you no longer do, God only knows the abyss into which your realm will fall.

A word of special gratitude to Amélie Mauresmo, who risked her life (well, career) by inadvertently letting the truth slip out.

I now have for her that special feeling I reserve for those who helpfully illustrate the central theme of my work: modernity as an advanced form of schizophrenia. This psychiatric disorder comes in many forms, but they all have one thing in common: divorce from reality.

Amélie’s reality is circumscribed by tennis. A top player in the past, she is now the director of the French Open. In that capacity, Amélie is responsible for scheduling matches, and, as far as our woke schizophrenics are concerned, she shirked that responsibility.

Only one women’s match featured in the night sessions, when both live attendance and TV viewing are at their peak. Since Amélie’s remit includes, among other challenges, maximising the commercial potential of the tournament, she packed the night sessions with men’s matches.

When asked point-blank why, she gave the answer blindingly obvious to anyone who has ever struck a tennis ball in anger: “I don’t feel bad or unfair saying that – you have more attraction… for the men’s matches”.

Amélie, it has to be said, is in an ideal position to judge the comparative qualities of the two sexes because… Because she once coached Andy Murray, and what did you think I meant?

All hell broke loose, and not because her detractors had a substantive argument against Amélie’s statement. She was attacked for the same reason Nabokov’s Cincinnatus C. was sentenced to death: in a world where everyone was transparent, he alone was opaque.

Amélie refused to succumb to the pandemic of schizophrenia, and there’s no excuse for such obduracy. When a mania attacks, sanity must retreat.

The other day I was at my TV set, watching a men’s match on one of the outside courts, to be followed by a women’s match. Those who have general-admission tickets for Roland Garros are free to go to any court, except the two central ones that require a different ticket.

Hence the size of the crowd is a reliable measure of how attractive the match is. In this case, the moment the men struck the last ball, the stands emptied out – much to the commentators’ chagrin. Don’t those ignoramuses appreciate great tennis when they see it? They do. That’s why they left.

Those commentators, most of whom are former professional players, know what’s what better than anyone. They know that any decent male college player in the US or a county player in Britain would wipe the court with every one of the top women.

As to the male pros, they’d have to double-fault four times in a row for any woman to get even a game from them. And that’s not just because the men are bigger and stronger.

Some women players top someone like Diego Schwartzman, Number 16 in men’s rankings, by a head, and my money would be on them in a fist fight with the diminutive Argentine. And yet none of those Amazons would get a game from him.

The top women can hit hard or consistently, but, unlike men, they can’t hit hard and consistently. In her quarterfinal match, the world Number 1, Iga Świątek, couldn’t connect with two backhands in a row – her male counterpart Djokovic only ever misses one under extreme duress.

Nor does the women’s game have the variety that makes the men’s game so easy on the eye. Tennis audiences, unlike those of most other sports, are largely made up of people who play the game themselves. They know it well enough to appreciate not just brute power, but also creativity and touch.

One of the men’s quarters, played between Alcaraz and Zverev, would have pleased even the sternest critic. Not only did it feature a barrage of 130mph serves and huge hitting from the baseline, but the two players also treated the gasping audience to delicate drop shots, unexpected lobs, precious few unforced errors – and the kind of defence that would have put those Thermopylae Spartans to shame.

Show me a chap who’d rather watch two women play, and I’ll show you someone who prefers the sight of sweaty, scantily clothed female flesh to tennis played to the highest standard. Amélie, while not immune to female attractions herself, correctly identified their game as not being attractive enough for prime time TV.

When attacked by all and sundry, Amélie had to tender profuse apologies for her sanity. She doesn’t suffer from schizophrenia, but she can simulate the condition with the best of them.

“ I think the people who know me,” she grovelled, “who’ve known me on and off the court, throughout my career, throughout everything that I’ve done, know that I’m a big fighter for equal rights and women’s tennis, women in general.”

Allow me to translate from the schizophrenic to English. In this context, as in most others, the term “equal rights” means entitlement out of proportion to achievement (equal prize money for women is a prime example). Glad to have been of service.

P.S. Speaking of schizophrenia, which Russian dissident, aka traitor, said this? “Constantly blaming the West for all our troubles is wrong, wrong in essence. All our troubles are of our own making. Everything is caused by our own fecklessness and weakness. Wherever you look here, it’s Chechnya all around, figuratively speaking. Look at our economy, and it’s nothing but gloom and doom. Or look at our relations with countries on our borders. Nothing but gaping holes and problems everywhere…” Answer: V.V. Putin, 1999. Don’t tempora bloody well mutantur?

The title is a popular description of an idle brain. That stands to reason: when one’s brain is untutored and indolent, it becomes a tabula rasa, on which wicked mountebanks can scribble any message, no matter how mendacious or evil.

Yesterday I had some fun mocking the totalitarian propaganda zombifying Russians and turning them into eager recipients of insane ideas.

However, Russians aren’t the only people ready to fling the doors of their minds wide open for the brainwashers to barge in with their hoses. Nazi Germany and Mao’s China are irrefutable arguments against any such claim to exclusivity.

However, today’s Britain proves that even brains living in a supposedly free country can fall victim to indoctrinating cant as divorced from reality as are the Russian threats to occupy every Nato country and claim Stonehenge as their own playground.

The proof of this self-lacerating observation came in the post. Directly I pushed the PUBLISH button to send my yesterday’s piece urbi et orbi, I opened the letter from my insurance company.

It contained two promotional brochures with lurid four-colour covers showing ecstatic people whose lives have been transformed by their proper choice of insurance policy. One colour dominated: black. For every happy person depicted was a proud member of the Negroid race.

Now, having spent much of my working life in advertising, I know that any images of people are supposed to reflect the demographic cross-section of the target customer base. Hence the message conveyed by the brochures is that most, or perhaps even all, of the company’s policy-holders are black. But that can’t be true.

About 40 per cent of their customers are over 65, most of them born before the influx of black people in the 1960s. Hence the proportion of black people among them is probably lower, and certainly can’t be higher, than the nation-wide three per cent.

Thus the company is ignoring its commercial interests for the sake of… what exactly?

This isn’t an isolated event. About 37 per cent of British ads feature black people, over 10 times their proportion in the population. Nor is it just advertising.

Most TV programmes systematically, if subliminally, peddle a distorted demographic picture by showing a piebald Britain whereas in fact the country is 87 per cent white. Theatre is even worse: it has gone completely transracial and transsexual. Black actresses routinely play Shakespearean roles written for white actors, leaving pedants like me aghast at the sight of, say, Agrippa being played by a black actress in high heels.

No wonder respondents in a recent survey believed that 20 per cent of Britons were black, overestimating by a factor of seven. This should dispel any doubts about the efficacy of propaganda. It works in Britain just as well as in Russia.

The goal of Russian propaganda is clear: to zombify the people, a third of whom aren’t blessed with indoor plumbing, into enthusiastic support of their fascist government. The purpose of British (or generally Western) propaganda is harder to discern, but that doesn’t mean there is no purpose.

There is, but it hasn’t been set by a cabal of conspirators seeking to undermine the country. Similarly, a pack of wolves don’t need to make a conscious decision to kill lambs. This activity is coded into their DNA. They see a lamb, they tear it apart. That’s what they do.

By the same token, all post-Enlightenment states have a totalitarian impulse programmed into their psychological makeup. They, regardless of what they call themselves or what party is nominally in government, maintain power by a sustained effort to replace thinking minds with jerking knees, thoughts with instincts, meaningful words with signals, denotation with connotation, semantics with semiotics.

A modern (quasi-)totalitarian government is different from a traditional Western one in that it seeks to change human nature, rather than accepting it as a given. A traditional man wouldn’t keep a modern state extant – he would be appalled by its vacuity, bossiness, immorality and transparently self-serving powerlust.

A new man, an Igor, must be concocted by our political Frankensteins, one in whom every old certitude is expunged and replaced with a new orthodoxy. Regardless of the sub-type of a modern state, the new orthodoxy is always forged out of identity politics.

The identities differ from one sub-type to another. They could be the Soviet man, the Fascist man, the Arian man, the Maoist man – but never just man, whose strengths are encouraged and foibles mitigated. All organic, traditional strengths and foibles become hopelessly obsolete. They contribute nothing to the new, desired identity.

The identity promoted by the liberal democratic state is polymorphous, made up of many different sub-identities. All of them are supposed to be equally laudable. All are to be inculcated, asserted and enforced by every means available.

Polymorphous means amorphous in this context. People’s minds are to be scoured of every critical and analytical faculty required to observe reality and form an accurate judgement of it. Yet the human mind resists mindlessness – it is after all one of the traits that make us human.

That resistance has to be suppressed, and here the government converges in its desiderata with our cultural and intellectual elites, which are indeed elites but no longer really have much to do with either culture or intellect.

Such elites pool their resources with the government. Together they are in control of two brainwashing conduits: media and education. Neither sticks to its remit: the media don’t inform, the education doesn’t educate. Both indoctrinate, and they are as good, if not so crude, at it as Stalin’s, Hitler’s or Putin’s propaganda.

That’s why I disagree with laments about the failure of our public education. If we define success as the ability to produce exactly the desired result, then Western education is a resounding success.

Our school leavers may not be able to read, write and add up properly, but they go into the new world as new men, weaned on the new orthodoxies – and especially on the destructive impulse behind all of them.

They are ready to accept make-believe as real, virtual reality as actual fact. Their education, the training of the mind, is nonexistent. It has been replaced by indoctrination, the training of the reflexes. The process is Pavlovian, not Aristotelian, Thomist or even Cartesian.

They see the preponderance of blacks in advertising and on TV, their knee jerks, and they accept racial tolerance as the highest virtue of all. If they are told that Britain has always been a country of immigrants (and rest assured, that’s exactly what they are told), they see no reason to demur – historical reality doesn’t apply. They are told that no sexual perversions or aberrations exist, and they are prepared to tar and feather anyone who suggests that some practices are more normal than others.

The same survey shows that respondents are as likely to overestimate the proportion of transsexuals (an assumed 5 per cent against the actual 0.3 to 0.6) and homosexuals (15 and 1.8 per cent respectively).

As with race, this has nothing to do with empirical observations of reality, and everything to do with propaganda at work. The people’s minds have been rendered idle and turned into the devil’s workshop. Emerging out of his lathe are human beings ready to abandon their humanity and vindicate Darwin – but with one minor proviso.

The ape isn’t our past, but it may well be our future. It’s a grotesque caricature of a human being with the formative human characteristics systematically bred out.

After all, Augustine defined the devil as the ape of God. And you can count on our mass propaganda to provide all the intellectual and cultural bananas this ape needs to thrive.

My problem with British TV news isn’t that it’s woke and left-wing. One just considers the source and accepts the inevitable.

My problem is that our TV news has no entertainment value whatsoever. Why can’t our BBC commentators suggest that we kidnap a Russian minister, say Lavrov or Shoigu, then nuke Moscow and occupy the rest of the country?

Some of us would laugh, some would cry, but everyone would feel the frisson – no one would be bored. No such complaints about Russian state TV. Its news programmes beat Downton Abbey and Better Call Saul hands down.

For example, talk show hostess Olga Skabeyeva explained the other day that the “special military operation” in the Ukraine had ended, and “the Third World War has begun”.

She didn’t know about the West, but Russia had a clear-cut objective to pursue: “the demilitarisation of the whole North Atlantic alliance”. In war as in life, nothing beats setting realistic aims, rather than trying to gorge on an indigestible pie in the sky.

Miss Skabeyeva has done the job of the Russian General Staff by mapping out the war plan. She is prepared to send the Russian army on the mission to occupy 27 Nato members, including the US (there’s no other obvious way to demilitarise them all).

Those of us who have been admiring the performance of the Russian army in the Ukraine know that this objective is eminently achievable. But Duma Deputy (MP) Oleg Morozov demurred.

While approving of the overall strategy, he recommended a low-key start: kidnapping a Nato minister on a visit to the Ukraine.

“The plan is simple,” he said. “A Western defence minister goes to Kiev for talks with Zelensky, but ends up in Moscow. In Russia, that minister could be convicted for supplying arms to the Ukraine,” added Morozov, to a standing ovation from the studio audience.

Another commentator, Vladimir Solovyov, nicknamed ‘Putin’s voice’ has always been good value. But now he has added a few nice anti-British touches to his narrative.

Mr Solovyov focuses his displeasure with Britain on the trim figure of our megalomaniac Foreign Secretary, who seems to claim all the credit for the Ukraine’s defence. “Liz Truss says she is the one fighting this war”, he said.

If Liz doesn’t know that the Ukrainian army is also involved, we are all in trouble. Mr Solovyov explained what kind of trouble. The logical way to rein in our obstreperous Liz would be to invade the British Isles.   

“Well, when we have to, then we will,” Solovyov promised confidently. “Where will we stop? Well, as I was saying today, maybe Stonehenge.”

My only hope is that the mighty Russian army will land at Dover or Folkestone and then take a southern route to Wiltshire, bypassing London or specifically Fulham, where I live.

However, Solovyov’s planned amphibious operation is good news for the denizens of Dorset, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, all of them lying to the west of Stonehenge, Russia’s strategic objective.

Yaakov Kedmi, the Moscow-born Israeli friend of Putin, favours dispensing with that version of D-Day landings. Rather than occupying Stonehenge, he thinks Russia should bomb Britain back to the period that historic site was built, between 3,000 and 2,000 BC.

Russia is a proud possessor of hypersonic Zircon missiles that are just the ticket for sending Britain on this journey to the past: “One, or one and a half launches from a multi-purpose submarine with Zircons will be enough. About 50 or 60 of Britain’s power stations will be gone in 10 minutes. And all of Britain will be back to the Stone Age… Within 10 minutes, nothing else is needed…”

Although I’m not quite sure what “one and a half launches” might be, I’m quaking in my Timberlands even as we speak.

Chairman of the Rodina (Motherland) party, Alexei Zhuravlyov, agreed in principle, but not in the choice of weapons. He’d rather use the MIRVed ICBM Sarmat: “One Sarmat and that’s it – the British Isles existed once, the British Isles don’t exist anymore. I’m serious,” he said.

Deadly serious, I daresay. But another guest on Skabeyeva’s show, her husband Yevgeny Popov, feared that there just might be a retaliatory strike: “But St Petersburg and Moscow would be wiped out within 90 seconds!”

Moreover, this sort of exchange might lead to a global nuclear war. As Skabeyeva’s poor husband put it, “No one will survive in this war when you propose the strike with a Sarmat. Do you understand that no one will survive? No one on the planet.”

Skabeyeva immediately dressed down her mutinous hubby-wubby. He worried too much, seeing problems where none existed. “We’ll start over, from scratch,” said Olga in a derisory way that suggested there would be no hanky-panky that night.

Mr Zhuravlyov felt that a puny little Britain was too insignificant a target for the mighty Sarmat: “I will competently tell you, that to destroy the entire East Coast of the US, two Sarmat missiles are necessary and two missiles for the West Coast. Four missiles, and there will be nothing left. They think… the mushroom cloud will be visible from Mexico.”

Alas, today’s lot aren’t a patch on Nikita Khrushchev in the cataclysmic threats department. Back in the early sixties, Nikita announced that the Soviets had developed a bomb that could wipe out the entire US with a single blast.

Now, 60 years and numerous technological advances later, it’s supposed to take as many as four bombs to wipe America out. I call that regression, not progress.

Mr Zhuravlyov’s immediate plans for the Ukraine are much more humane, practically vegetarian. He only wishes to annihilate five per cent of the Ukrainian population, magnanimously accepting that the rest aren’t really Nazis: “So the maximum five percent are incurable. Simply put, two million people which are ready to recreate the SS.”

Genocide, moi? Take it easy chaps, what’s a couple of million here or there among friends? As Stalin said, dismissing Eisenhower’s commiserations about Russia’s horrific war casualties, “We lost more during the collectivisation of agriculture”.

Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of RT, is philosophical about a nuclear holocaust. “It is what it is,” she said. “Personally, I think that the most realistic way is the way of World War III, based on knowing us and our leader, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin,” Simonyan added.

The upshot of it all is that you should investigate the possibility of receiving Russian programmes on your TV. Never a dull moment, take my word for it.