Month: July 2024

On Monday, the town of Southport in Greater Manchester witnessed a horrific crime. A young Muslim broke into a children’s dance class and began to lay about him with a knife.

Three little girls died, eight others, along with two adults, were stabbed. Six of those victims are in a critical condition.

A reaction came within hours. A report appeared on Twitter/X saying that the murderer was an illegal migrant who had arrived in Britain by boat. He now sought asylum and was on an MI6 watch list. That report was as false as the criminal’s name it circulated.

Never mind. Two million people read the news, and hundreds of them, mostly in Manchester and Liverpool, got on Southport-bound trains. Many of those travellers were either members of the English Defence League or its supporters.

The EDL was co-founded in 2009 by Tommy Robinson, a thug with a long list of convictions for crimes ranging from mortgage fraud to football hooliganism and a drunken assault on a police officer. Since then, he has shown a knack for organisational activities, and the activities he organises are mostly riots.

Eventually Tommy decided the confines of the EDL could no longer contain his bubbling personality and struck out on his own. He is currently out on bail after showcasing his talents yet again in Folkestone and London.

A curious aside: Americans supporting Trump, those who regard him as the messiah and not just the lesser evil, see Tommy as their own. There are only two possible explanations there: one is that they are ignorant of British realities, the other is that there is indeed some kinship between Donald and Tommy. I sincerely hope it’s the former.

Anyway, Tommy had no hands-on involvement in the riots that broke out in Southport following the knife attack. He was there only in spirit, and it did what spirits are supposed to do: inspire.

So animated, the mob besieged the local mosque and the fun started. Yobs were pelting the mosque with stones, bricks and everything else they could get their hands on: privately owned wheelie bins, parts of the garden wall they tore apart, fireworks. Windows shattered, worshippers cowered inside, cars burned.

When the police arrived, the same weapons were turned against them, their vehicles and even their dogs. Eight cops suffered serious injuries, as fires broke out all over the town centre. To keep up with the fine tradition of such outbursts, many shops were looted.

Three police dogs were also injured, one of them supposedly bitten. If so, this shows that fair play isn’t alien even to our thugs. Eschewing indigenously human achievements, they chose to fight their canine enemies only with the same weapon the dogs had at their disposal.

The masked or hooded yobs were shouting “No surrender!” (a Unionist slogan popularised during the strife in Ulster), “Stop the boats!” and “English till I die!” That last one upset the pedant in me because it was a bowdlerisation of the football song England Till I Die, typically sung at international matches together with the immortal classic If It Wasn’t for England, You’d All Be Krauts.

The police issued their own report, denying the criminal had arrived by boat. In fact, they said, he was born in Britain, Wales to be exact. However, since they hadn’t denied he was Muslim, the mob felt that was a moot point, and they may be right.

Unlike some other ethnic and religious groups, Muslims, wherever they were born, have trouble assimilating, or even integrating, into British society. Many perceive themselves as strangers in a land they refuse to see as their own, and one can’t deny the accuracy of that observation.

Islam is incompatible with the West, even in its present secular incarnation. Individual Muslims can become perfectly British, but only if they are Muslims in name only, not ardently devout followers of Mohammed. That’s why I often say that the only good Muslim is a bad Muslim.

As you may have gathered, I detest any violent mob, whether it’s described as far-Right, far-Left or far-anything. They are violent not in support of a cause, but in search of a cause.

The same people who scream “Stop the boats!” today may well use their mobiles to set up football brawls tomorrow. And the same ‘protesters’ who block motorways in defence of ‘our planet’ may the next day scream “From the river to the sea!” as they clash with police outside the Israeli embassy.

A civilised society is civilised partly because it offers its members many legal ways of venting their grievances and demanding restitution. We can write to our MPs, petition the whole government, demonstrate in an orderly fashion. If we feel the government isn’t listening, we can vote it out. And so on, so forth – I can keep spinning out truisms till the ministers come home.

Yet there may come a moment when people – and I mean civilised, law-abiding subjects of His Majesty – feel that an intolerable situation is getting worse, and licit protest isn’t making any impression on the government.

Such people then decide they have no recourse and try to put up with the situation as best they can. Yet there exist whole swathes of the population to whom such docility is alien.

They are the creepy-crawlies lurking in the woodwork and looking for any opportunity to come out. Anomic violence is boiling inside them and, given the right pretext, it blows the top off.

Such people then act as illegitimate catalysts of potentially legitimate protests, as they are in this case. For, while no decent person can treat Tommy Robinson types with anything other than squeamish contempt, the cause in the name of which they parade their feral tendencies has merit. They give it a bad name, but the cause is real.

The situation with Muslim immigration, legal or illegal, has become intolerable – and not just in cities or boroughs that have become predominantly Muslim. For example, Southport’s population is only about 5.5 per cent Muslim, which is the national average.

When hundreds of thousands feel that Sharia has precedence over the English Common Law, and when many children born in Britain honestly believe they live in a Muslim country, the rest of the population becomes restless.

Some feel new arrivals put severe pressures on jobs and public services. Others justifiably fear the ensuing increase in crime rates. Still others cast a glance at Bradford, Leeds or Leicester and see something that resembles a kasbah more than the Britain they used to know.

Most deplore the collapse of legality and HMG’s failure to protect the country’s borders, which is after all one of the few fundamental functions of any government. Yet all such civilised people justifiably feel helpless to do anything about it.

They may not know the details, but they sense they are up against not just an ineffective policy or an incompetent ministry, but what’s called ‘the establishment’. That term used to stand for an upper-class elite, predominantly Tory, who saw themselves and were seen around the world as the quintessence of Englishness.

Today’s establishment is different. It’s a nomenklatura of Left-wing, internationalist apparatchiks who seek to incorporate Britain into some pan-European socialist utopia. They correctly see any vestiges of genuine Englishness as obstacles to overcome. Diluting such oases with an influx of cultural aliens is an effective way of eliminating them – and any mass resistance to the creeping subversion.

Lord Mandelson, cabinet minister in the Blair and Brown governments, openly admitted that some 10 years ago, when he said Labour had sent out “search parties” to get immigrants to come to Britain.

This outrage isn’t party-specific. During their 14 years in power, the mock-Tories did nothing to stem the influx.

Hence Britons have a legitimate grievance, which is unresolved by the government and taken advantage of by illegitimate thugs like Robinson and other EDL types. When civilisation fails, barbarians come out in force.

My own view is that thuggery can’t and shouldn’t triumph. Any victory won by them is defeat simply because they are the ones who have won it. The cause of controlling our borders is just, but we should still deplore the thugs who champion it. If they are our only hope, the hope is already forlorn.

A Britain more Islamised than it is already will be nightmarish, but then so will be a Britain run by Tommy Robinson types. If our civilisation can’t avoid such extremes, it’s no longer civilised.       

…the more you beat them, the better they’ll be” – so goes the old ditty. Before I proceed, I want it on record that I unreservedly repudiate this sentiment as utterly objectionable (Penelope agrees).

But apparently the International Olympic Committee (IOC) doesn’t share my distaste for the message of that rhyme. I don’t know what position that august body takes on dogs and walnut trees, but it wholeheartedly approves of men beating women.

That’s why it sees nothing wrong with Algeria’s Imane Khelif, and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-Ting competing in the Olympic boxing competition – for women.

Now that I’m sharing with you my tastes and distastes, women’s boxing definitely falls in the latter category. Call me an inveterate romantic or, if you’d rather, a male chauvinist and report me to the Equalities Commission, but my ideal of femininity doesn’t leave much room for two damsels pummelling each other to a bloody pulp.

That said, those dainty creatures fight against my stereotypes with gusto, in pubs. According to a recent statistic, women are involved in pub brawls more often than men. And they take up boxing with alacrity – why, even our French friends’ daughter is a pugilist.

However, as far as I know, she only fights other women. The opponents of Khelif and Lin don’t enjoy the same privilege. Because – how can I put this without offending anybody – those two boxers are, well, men.

That’s why they were both disqualified from last year’s World Championships for having XY chromosomes, which makes them biologically male. That decision was taken after the International Boxing Association (IBA) introduced what the press unanimously called controversial DNA tests at its championships.

IBA president Umar Kremlev couldn’t quite understand what was so controversial about those tests. They were introduced, he said, to expose “athletes who were trying to fool their colleagues and pretend to be women”.

That troglodyte is well behind the times if he thinks that men identifying as women pretend to qualify for that honour to cheat their way into women’s competitions. Doesn’t he know they are women, bred if not necessarily born?

We are what we say we are. If someone with a black great-grandparent identifies as black, that’s what he is. And, as the American teacher Rachel Dolezal insisted some 10 years ago, even having no black ancestry whatsoever didn’t mean she wasn’t genuinely black if she said she was.

Now, you can think whatever you want about such abominations, but I’ll say one thing for them: they’re unlikely to have lethal consequences. That sort of thing may offend the sensibilities of people of taste and conservative disposition, but at least no one will die.

Biological men boxing against women is something entirely different. Research shows that, all other things being equal, men pack 162 per cent more punching power than women do. As anyone who has ever laced on a pair of boxing gloves will tell you, that difference may well be a matter of life or death.

But hey, any revolutionary movement must have its heroes, and so must every religion. Sanguis martyrum semen Ecclesiae (“the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church”), as Tertullian wrote.

The current transsexual madness barely makes it to a pagan cult, never mind religion. Yet it too demands the lives of its adherents as a building material of its ethos. So if men pretending to be female kill a few women in the ring, those girls will die so the ideology can live.

In that spirit, the IOC has withdrawn its recognition from the IBA, citing good and bad reasons for that censure. The good reason is that it’s apparently funded by Russia. The bad reason is that the IBA has those antediluvian ideas about men and women.

The primary sex characteristics are these days seen as irrelevant details getting in the way of a creed that towers over mundane concerns. The chief of them is that men and women aren’t just equal but, barring some architectural fixtures, the same.

This is a self-fulfilling ideology, for men are growing increasingly feminised, with women meeting them halfway. The hope is that eventually the differences will disappear, and if those appendages get in the way, well, it’s nothing that an expert surgeon can’t handle.

This is just one reason the Paris Olympics look more and more obscene from where I’m sitting. That started with the opening ceremony that belied the French reputation for good taste. I wrote about it the other day, but I forgot to mention one nice touch.

By the looks of it, one athlete set out to prove, consciously or otherwise, that some physical differences between the sexes still survive. During the ceremony, he wore such skimpy shorts that one of his testicles fell out for all to see. The public gasped and applauded, and the press treated that testicular episode as a major sensation.

Not as major, however, as its burst of hysterical enthusiasm about the French diver Jules Bouyer, whose tiny swimming trunks emphasised his bulging masculinity. Judging by the reaction in the media, Pierre Coubertin’s Olympic slogan, citius, altius, fortius (“faster, higher, stronger” should now be augmented with et maxima (“…and bigger”).

I wonder if the French have made such a big deal out of this because they see Bouyer as a reassertion of national virility, an asset that lately has been somewhat compromised by their president. If so, more power to them – and to Mr Bouyer.

Meanwhile, the triathlon competition has had to be cancelled because the water in the Seine is too polluted for the swimming part of the event. That’s not surprising because in France, unlike Britain, both sewage and drainage use the same conduits. (A few years ago, we found that out the hard – and malodorous – way in our own house, but I’ll spare you the details.)

Just before the Games, Anne Hidalgo, Paris mayor, publicly swam in the Seine to prove its water is pristine. Now all our Parisian friends hope she drinks it next.

One last detail before I get off the subject of the Olympics. I haven’t seen any statistics on the number of tattoos per competitor, but the briefest of looks suggests it’s higher than one – even if we regard a whole tattooed arm as just one such ornament rather than several of them together.

Treating the human body as a canvas to paint on has traditionally been associated with the primitive tribes inhabiting faraway fragments of the earth in various oceans. Now Olympians are making a visual statement asserting that all tribes on earth have become primitive.

Conversion is proceeding apace not only between men and women, but also between civilisation and barbarism. Actually, the two processes are parts of the same thing.

Can you name a few sciences off the top? Right, physics. Chemistry, certainly. Biology, definitely. Astronomy? Yes, of course.

But what about philosophy? Or, God forbid, theology? No, of course not. These, as any modern man weaned on the Enlightenment knows for sure, aren’t sciences. Because, even if the modifier ‘natural’ is sometimes omitted before ‘sciences’, it’s always assumed.

Science is something that deals with various aspects of matter. If it deals with anything else, it’s not science.

Now, the French philosopher Jacques Maritain disagreed. Not only is philosophy a science, he argued, but it’s superior to natural sciences because it deals with first principles. And theology sits above even philosophy, while towering over natural sciences.

Both philosophy and theology deal with questions that natural sciences can’t answer, nor even ask. How could something come out of nothing? Why did it happen? To what end? Is there a purpose to life? What’s good or evil?

Answers to these questions have to exist, but they can’t be found in the material world. They inhabit a different reality that’s easy to notice but hard to understand. So hard, in fact, that some two centuries ago Western Man decided not even to try. As a result, he became Modern Man.

He lost interest in things that are outside the remit of natural sciences, insisting instead that such things don’t exist. And if they do exist, then sooner or later natural sciences will explain them. All it takes is time. How much time? As much as it takes. Millions of years if need be. We’re in no hurry, are we?

Meanwhile, natural sciences can explain everything of interest in life, including life itself. What’s there not to understand? Life is progress, constant movement from the primitive to the simple, from the simple to the complex, from the worse to the better.

Subatomic particles become atoms, atoms become molecules, molecules become matter, matter becomes cells, cells become biological life, biological life produces single-cell organisms, they in turn produce more intricate biosystems and so on all the way to Shakespeare and Bach. True, science hasn’t yet got around to explaining where those first subatomic particles came from, but it’s early days yet. Give us another few millennia, and your curiosity will be satisfied.

This line of thought inevitably had to lead to the notion of axiomatic progress. Everything is in flux, things change, and they always change for the better. Natural science says so, and whatever it says applies to everything: man, society, morality, politics – every little thing.

Once that understanding of life got to be accepted as indisputable orthodoxy, Darwinism absolutely had to appear and feed the orthodoxy the way tributaries feed rivers. Darwinism was the biological expression of all-encompassing progress, and, since natural sciences reign supreme, human progress can only be understood in Darwinist terms, those of continuous meliorative development.

The needle of progress was stuck in Modern Man’s vein, and he became a junkie in short order, needing his fix all the time. His view of the world had to boil down to the certainty that newer means better. And if reality refused to be forced into that intellectual straitjacket, then so much the worse for reality.

Man’s everyday life is made up of myriads of things, but man himself has to be both the starting point and the destination of analysis. And there our progress junkies have to deal with an uncomfortable truth. While man has indeed managed to improve gradually every thingamajig propping up his everyday existence, he himself hasn’t progressed at all since the time he painted those sublime drawings in Santander caves.

Anyone arguing against this observation will be on a hiding to nothing. He’d have to insist that Derrida is a better philosopher than Plato, Emin is a better painter than Rembrandt, Boulez is a better composer than Bach, Pinter is a better playwright than Shakespeare, the Lloyd’s building is better architecture than Lincoln Cathedral, Kingsley and Martin Amis are better novelists than Dickens and Tolstoy.

No? Then what about morality? Does Hemingway’s morality (“If it feels good, it’s moral”) strike you as superior to, say, the Sermon on the Mount? Does Rousseau’s fallacy that man is born in primordial goodness lead to a more moral world than the doctrine of original sin?

At this point, any modern man worth his salt will whip out his laptop, key in a few words and triumphantly show you the screen. We now have more food than ever, more and better medicines, we live longer, travel the world faster, have painless dentistry and instant access to information. Isn’t that progress?

Don’t ask me. Ask respondents in regular polls around Western Europe. They’ll tell you what they unfailingly tell those pollsters: their lives are worse than the lives their parents had, but better than the lives their children will have. That sounds more like regress than progress to me.

People, even those hooked on progress, realise that quality of life is made up of many imponderables that can’t be expressed numerically. They notice, for example, that, while their parents spent their spare time reading serious books or playing cricket, and they themselves reading potboilers or playing football, their children don’t read at all and play computer games. The rest of the time, the youngsters remain glued to their high-tech gadgets, chatting in monosyllabics and acronyms to friends they’ll never meet.

As a result, they gradually lose the gift of speech and any ability to function socially in civilised society. They also lose the lean physique of their parents’ generation, acquiring pillows of fat around their girth and all sorts of attendant diseases. But not to worry: our better medicine and pharmacology will control those diseases nicely. That’s progress for you.

However, if you say anything against progress, you’ll be bombarded with variously inane sound bytes. Don’t you prefer driving a car to riding in a carriage? Yes I do, though more people are killed in car accidents than ever were killed in carriage accidents.

Isn’t it better for surgery to be painless? Yes it is, though as a result we probably have more surgery than is strictly necessary.

Wouldn’t you hate to write with a quill? Yes I would, though more great books were written with that implement than ever will be written with a word processor.

But all those drugs, nuclear power stations and cars only constitute progress if they are used to good ends by good people. When this condition isn’t met, progress begins to look rather less progressive.

Suddenly we notice that the same company that gave us the VW Beetle also gave us the V1 rocket. The same conglomerate that first synthesised aspirin also mass-produced Zyklon B gas. The same American automaker who pioneered mass production of cheap cars also delivered 20 per cent of all vehicles used by the Wehrmacht, not to mention thousands of lorries that carried millions to Soviet concentration camps. And, as some unfortunate Japanese could have testified, the same technology that can heat our houses can also incinerate them.

Of course, the moment we mention human goodness as a necessary precondition, we leave the domain of material, quantifiable progress and enter the realm of things metaphysical but nonetheless real. It’s there that we see not progress but ever-accelerating failure. And it’s this failure that’s putting dents, soon to become holes, into material progress as well.

Meanwhile, we’ve replaced religion with (at best) religionism, freedom with liberty, wisdom with cleverness, sentiment with sentimentality, justice with legalism, art with pickled animals, music with amplified noise, statecraft with politicking, love with sex, communication with sound bites, self-confidence with effrontery, equality before God with levelling, sensitivity to others with wokery, self-respect with self-esteem – in short, everything real with virtual caricatures.

That’s progress for you, as I’m sure Darwin would argue if he were around. While at it, it would be nice if he could explain why some 99 per cent of the species that have ever inhabited the world have become extinct, and why modern biology shows that most mutations are degenerative rather than meliorative.

Progress has become the faux god of modernity and, like real God, it moves in mysterious ways. But I’ll leave them for our progress junkies to explain.

I’ll give you a few tips, but I’m warning you – you’ll still have to connect the dots. So here goes:

Tip 1. I currently hold one of the most important political posts in the West.

Tip 2. My forename starts with a K. I didn’t say ‘Christian name’ because any link to Christianity is, well, I wouldn’t say abhorrent to me, but certainly uncool. Moreover, my use of such a committal term might offend much of my core support.

Tip 3. I’m a firm believer in a nationalised, universal health system. If it were up to me, I’d do away with private medical insurance altogether, but I need to consolidate my power before I can pull something like that off.

Tip 4. I’m opposed to hydrocarbon fuels as a matter of high principle.

I firmly believe that all offshore drilling must be summarily stopped, fracking must be banned, nuclear power stations phased out, and all energy must be supplied by solar panels and wind farms. What if the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow? Trust you to ask that subversive question.

You miss the point. It’s not about energy supply, and it certainly isn’t about the science behind the idea of global warming. I don’t care if the science is wonky, and I don’t even care if we’ll have to freeze in the dark from time to time. It’s not about such trivial things, is it? It’s about human virtue and a way of signalling it loud and clear.

Yes, my stance may result in us importing more hydrocarbon energy produced elsewhere. But let those other countries show how backward they are.

Tip 5. I think our police are institutionally racist. If you don’t believe me, just look at the proportion of racial minorities in the prison population. What better proof of racial bias do you need? I’m sympathetic to the idea of defunding the police, but, whether or not we go that far, their power to harass minority people must be curtailed.

Tip 6. I’m in favour of expanding the franchise as much as we can. For a start, prisoners should get the vote. Their right to vote trumps their victims’ right to keep their property or indeed life.

Tip 7. This one is less concrete than the others. It’s more in the nature of a credo, a statement of faith. I believe the government should spend much more than it does, and if that involves raising taxes, then so be it. You see, the more a central state spends of its citizens’ money, the more power it acquires over them. That has to be a good thing.

That’s it. How are you doing so far? Have you established my identity yet? I’ll give you five more seconds.

Here comes the buzzer. Ready? Good, let’s hear it.

If you guessed that I’m Sir Keir Starmer, congratulations. You have a sound knowledge of politics, and you’ve been following press reports with unflagging attention.

However, congratulations are also in order if you guessed I’m Kamala Harris. You are right, all those tips lead to me as surely as to Sir Keir. And oh, by the way, my forename is stressed on the first syllable. If you put the accent anywhere else, you are a bigot, ignoramus or Donald Trump.

Here ends our game, which really has no winners. It does, however, have plenty of losers: almost 400 million of them if you combine the populations of Britain and the US. Or twice as many if we recall that just about every other Western country is cursed with similar leaders pursuing similarly wicked and even suicidal policies.

Now on a seemingly unrelated subject: the obscene Walpurgisnacht called the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics plumbed new depths of depravity.

As part of the entertainment offered for the benefit of retards the world over, the pageant featured a scene of 18 half-naked drag queens mocking Last Supper, as rendered by Leonardo.

One degenerate in the middle had a halo over his/her/its head. Another, a man who is probably transitioning (or should be if he isn’t), was painted blue and had only vine leaves covering his genitals that hadn’t yet been removed.    

Why did I call this subject seemingly unrelated? Because it really isn’t. Never mind the blasphemy of that disgusting show – few people do nowadays. But even atheists should cringe at the armour-piercing tastelessness and vulgarity of it. To the applause of the baying throng, that scene throws a bucketful of faeces at the aesthetic picture lovingly assembled over centuries by discerning and talented men.

A quick surf through the net shows that only pious Christians seem to have found anything wrong there. Most people accept that sort of thing as par for the course. But the course is charted to lead to the civilisational rocks just over the horizon.

As all that was going on, the skies opened and a mighty rain came down on that parade, drenching the performers, athletes and gawpers alike. Perhaps God was trying to tell them something.

‘Hybrid war’ is often in the news these days. The papers use this term to describe the Russian strategy of combining military aggression with information warfare.

The impression an uninitiated reader may get is that this is a novelty developed by Putin’s strategists in the FSB. True, that attempt to rape and seduce the West alternately or even simultaneously was indeed concocted by that organisation.

But this happened not in the 2020s but in the 1920s, when that sinister setup was still called the Cheka. Since then that state within a state has undergone seven or eight name changes. But neither its evil essence nor its strategy has ever changed for over 100 years.

Both, however, have always displayed great elasticity in responding effectively to the vicissitudes of foreign and domestic politics. The core was immutable; the periphery wasn’t.

Outside observers who can’t trace this continuity or even realise it exists have no chance of understanding modern Russia. They are destined to remain for ever exactly what Lenin called them: useful idiots.

This breed reacts with enthusiasm to every zig and zag of Russia, accepting each at face value. Useful idiots don’t realise they are being duped – after all, no one has ever done it to them on such a scale for so long.

It all started in 1920, when the Bolsheviks felt they were already strong enough to KO the West with a quick punch. The Red cavalry yelling “On to Berlin and Paris!” rode west, but only got as far as Warsaw where Marshal Pilsudski’s horsemen chopped their historic enemies into mincemeat.

Clearly, the Red Army was too blunt a weapon for what was developing into a delicate task. More perfidious subtlety was required if what Sidney ‘the Ace of Spies’ Reilly called a “hideous cancer” was to spread. And perfidious subtlety was something only the Cheka had.

The first few years of the Bolshevik era saw the formulation of two policies which, mutatis mutandis, Russia has been following ever since: Military Communism and New Economic Policy (NEP).

The purpose of the former was to rape first the country and then the world into submission. The chief objectives of the latter were to mitigate the effects of the former, backpedal a bit, let some steam off, and set up the next round by presenting to the world a picture of ‘change’, ‘liberalisation’, Stalin’s ‘perestroika’ (let’s give that term its true provenance), Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’, Gorbachev’s ‘glasnost’ and so forth.

Sudden shifts in Russian policy can never surprise anyone familiar with this alternating pattern: the bloodthirsty collectivisation followed by Stalin’s caution against “vertigo from success”; post-war purges followed by ‘the Thaw’, which was bound to adumbrate Brezhnev’s reaction, which in turn set the stage for the on-going NEP-like binge. 

But it’s not enough to execute this policy of two steps forward, one step backwards domestically. The West’s support, or at least acquiescence, is a sine qua non. That means disinformation and strategic deception don’t just lie at the heart of Russia’s policy. They are Russia’s policy – and that’s what really makes the Cheka “the essence of Bolshevism”, in Lenin’s phrase.

This organisation has demonstrated its ability to string the West along. Its strategic debut in the early 20s was an auspicious event: Operation Trust. It was designed to neutralise the White emigration that remained a formidable force, especially with Western support.

The OGPU, as it was then, created a bogus anti-Bolshevik network inside Russia and dropped a few telling hints in the West that the ‘hideous cancer’ was about to go into remission – given inactivity on the West’s part and a little help with financing and technology.

The West swallowed the bait and was immobilised at a time when the ghouls were at their most vulnerable. OGPU ‘ops’ were being financed by their targets and, as an additional benefit, the Trust lured some prominent émigré leaders, Reilly among them, into Russia, where they were murdered.

The history of the Cheka is one continuous string of such successes. An extremely abbreviated list would include:

The post-war peace movement, as a result of which Western atomic scientists, such as Oppenheimer, Szilard, Fermi, Pontecorvo and Bohr, felt called upon to share their secrets with the Russians.

The bogus anti-communist guerrilla movements in the Baltics in the late 40s-early 50s, which pre-empted any real resistance.

The detente and SALT of the 70s, during which the Soviets embarked on an unprecedented military build-up.

The ‘Prague Spring’, a perestroika rehearsal possibly designed to test the West’s reaction.

The Polish Solidarity movement, infiltrated by the KGB from the start.

And even to a large extent the dissident movement of the 60s and 70s which too was infiltrated by the KGB, and many of whose leaders are now known to have been KGB plants. 

Secret police was the cutting edge of the Party, but the two were often at odds. The Party was committed to its ideological rigidity; its head was in the Marxist clouds. The Chekists, on the other hand, had their feet on the ground. They were pragmatists and as such always championed more flexible means to achieve the same end.   

The Cheka’s most outstanding figure was Lavrentiy Beria who in effect led that organisation from 1938 to 1953. In that capacity he displayed requisite monstrosity, but also certain administrative abilities. Beria ran not only the secret police and intelligence, but also the vast GULAG empire, where emaciated inmates supplied the country with vital commodities, from gold to uranium.

During the war, GULAG’s economic value increased no end, and so did Beria’s power. In addition, he was put in charge of the atomic project and brought it to a successful conclusion in 1949.  

After Stalin’s death, which Beria welcomed and, according to circumstantial evidence, might have accelerated, he proposed to his Politburo colleagues a glasnost and perestroika programme that anticipated the ‘op’ of the late 1980s in such details as the introduction of private enterprise, abolition of collective farms, withdrawal from Germany, a greater accent on the production of consumer goods, etc.

The objective was all-familiar: presenting a human face to the West, luring it into disarmament, blackmailing it into a massive transfer of funds and technology, finlandising first Europe and then the rest of the world.

While the rigid Party apparatchiks welcomed those objectives, the means made their heads spin, and Beria was knocked off in gangland style. But, as Bolshevik obituaries used to say, “Our comrade is dead, but his cause lives on.”

Beria’s people were purged from the organisation (just as Beria purged Yezhov’s people in 1938), but his plan survived. It was passed like a relay baton to subsequent KGB leaders, from Shelepin to Semichastnyi to Andropov.

When the latter became Secretary General in 1982, the secret police finally got to run the country unimpeded and put Beria’s designs into effect. A few years later the Russian language contributed the words ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika’ to the OED. It’s useful to remember that the principal players of that game, Gorbachev and Yeltsyn, were closer to the KGB than most of their Party colleagues.

Gorbachev owed his ascent to Andropov who plucked him out of the wilderness of the Stavropol region, where Gorbachev was Party secretary. He moved to Moscow and jumped several steps up to a position in the Politburo. Andropov, the custodian of Beria’s plan, was dying and he needed a safe pair of hands to succeed him.

Before moving to Moscow, Yeltsyn had run the Sverdlovsk region, the site of numerous defence installations, including nuclear bomb factories. These were under the auspices of the KGB, whose massive presence made Yeltsyn’s leadership strictly nominal.

It was these two men who succeeded in realising Beria’s plan in broad strokes, if not in every detail. At some point their control might have slipped, and they allowed the Soviet Union to fall apart. But Beria’s overall design remained intact.

When Russian émigré writers tried to explain what was going on, their words fell on deaf ears. Western useful idiots sat behind the first line of defence: “What you are saying is groundless nonsense”.

When, in the spirit of glasnost, the Russian government itself released some of the relevant facts, the useful idiots fell back to the second line: “Yes, you were right in factual details, but there’s no sinister subtext there. Beria and his disciples Andropov, Gorbachev and Yeltsyn simply realised that the people wanted change.”

That version is now coming across in everything useful idiots are writing, including the book on Beria by the American writer Amy Knight. She actually argued that Beria (who, unlike Himmler, tortured and murdered his victims personally) cared for the people’s well-being. That shows a lapse not only in historical knowledge but also in understanding human nature.

What we are witnessing at the moment is the downswing of the Beria rollercoaster. The KGB/FSB fronted by Putin is trying to regain control partly relinquished by Gorbachev and Yeltsyn, and they are doing it by the same hybrid methods as those the Cheka devised a century ago.

This will doubtless be followed by an upswing. The war will stop, new people will take over, and a new round of perestroika will kick in – to the hosannas chanted by useful idiots unaware that they are being duped yet again. Another rude awakening will then come with a bang, for that cancer never stops metastasising.

Westerners find it hard to fathom a behavioural stereotype that’s dramatically different from their own. They think that if their leaders are benign ignoramuses whose idea of a long-term objective is a minuscule growth in GDP, then Russian chieftains must be like that too.

Well-meaning philistines are incapable of understanding unalloyed evil, which is why they’ll never understand modern Russia until it’s too late – just as they never understood Nazi Germany until it was too late.

“It’s the economy, stupid”, was how Clinton’s strategist James Carville defined the key message of any electoral victory.

He therefore thought that people voted not so much their hearts and minds as their wallets. This is an utterly cynical view of the American electorate and, like most other cynical views of humanity, it’s by and large correct.

Moreover, this concept easily crosses the Atlantic and goes to work in England’s green and pleasant land. A strategy based on the economy wins almost every time, but ‘almost’ is the operative word. This time around, the Tories floated their economic record before voters and were shot down in flames, giving Labour a landslide hardly ever seen in Western politics.

Such a crushing defeat means a change in leadership, and contestants are off the starting blocks. At present, Shadow Security Minister Tom Tugendhat is the favourite, and he rejects Carville’s prescription.

Mr Tugendhat is a general good egg boasting perfect Tory credentials. He grew up in Westminster, where his father was a High Court judge. St Paul’s School for boys, Cambridge, Master’s in Islamic Studies, journalism, military service in Iraq and Afghanistan (terminal rank major), MP for Tonbridge, good age (51).

He is seen as someone in the centre of the Tory Party, meaning that under Mrs Thatcher he would have been seen as loony Left. But Mrs Thatcher hasn’t been around for a while, and things have changed. Let’s accept that and hear what Mr Tugendhat has on his mind.

It’s not filthy lucre that matters, he says, or rather implies, but principles. And here is the good news: while Labour are “squabbling” already, the Tories stand united on their core tenets.

To be fair to Labour – and I never thought these words would cross my lips – they have 411 seats in the Commons, to the Tories’ 121. Numerically speaking, it’s much harder to establish a common ground among 411 MPs than among 121.

Still, such base calculations aside, every Tory heart should rejoice. All God’s children love principles, and having a parliamentary party boasting such cohesion and uniformity is a good start on the road to regaining power.

Or rather would be, if Mr Tugendhat was speaking English. But he was speaking political, and in that language seemingly the same words mean something else. In this case, the word ‘principles’ as Mr Tugendhat uses it isn’t just different from its dictionary definition but the opposite of it.

Now in opposition, the Tories will concentrate on regaining trust with voters, not on policy debates, says Mr Tugendhat. Out of interest, how can such trust be regained if not by offering promising, realistic policies that would appeal to the electorate?

You see, in the language of politics, ‘sound principles’ stand for sound bites. Never mind policies, never mind issues – just tell voters anything that caresses their ears. That’s how you win their trust.

Mr Tugendhat helpfully listed the issues that are off limits for discussion:

“The ECHR. Gender. Tax rates. Defence spending. Net zero. These are things that aren’t up for debate in this leadership election. Why not? Because politics is about principles and all Conservatives are guided by our basic principles here.”

If we stubbornly insist on words meaning what they are supposed to mean, one is expected to applaud Tory unity on all such issues. What’s there to argue about if they all agree?

Yet I for one would like to see what it is that the rump Tory Party agrees on. Let’s look at the list cited and slide our finger all the way down.

The ECHR (European Convention on Human Rights) is one of the key documents of the European Union, of which we are no longer a member. More Britons voted to leave that organisation than have ever voted for anything else.

Mr Tugendhat, however, voted Remain, and so did most of the high-ranking Tories, who thereby parted ways not only with over half of all Britons but, more ominous, the majority of their party’s rank-and-file. This, along with his dual British-French citizenship, probably means he has a warm spot for all European institutions, including the ECHR.

He now says that, if the ECHR stopped serving British interests, he’d be prepared to leave it. That commitment isn’t especially binding because it presupposes that, under normal circumstances, the ECHR is a good thing to keep.

It’s not and never has been. To begin with, Britain’s historical record on human rights stacks up favourably against every major member of the EU, emphatically including Germany and France. Hence we need neither lessons nor diktats from them on this subject. And nor do we need the ECHR.

It lists free movement of people as an essential human right, which is fine in theory. But in practice it makes controlling national borders much harder, and that’s one issue on which the Tories have lost voters’ trust, leaving us at the mercy of Labour’s open-door policy.

Ditching the ECHR should be one principle the Tories qua Tories should agree on – it should be obvious to anyone other than a rank Remainer that the ECHR can serve British interests neither in theory nor in practice. Instead, Mr Tugendhat joins the chorus of wishy-washy waffle we are used to hearing from politicians.

Next on his list is “gender”, and I assume he isn’t talking about grammatical categories. If he means transsexuality, then I’d like to know what it is that the Tories agree on.

The only proper Tory position is that transsexuals should enjoy all the same Englishmen’s rights, as they used to be called, as everyone else.

But they should have no rights specifically reserved for them: not to puberty blockers, not to surgery at public expense, not to their own pronouns, not to be legally or institutionally recognised as belonging to any other than their chromosomal sex. If the Tories agree on this, fine. But if they don’t, some debate would come in handy, if only for the public to know where they stand.

“Tax rates” is next. Under the Tories, the tax burden on the populace was the greatest ever suffered in peacetime. If Mr Tugendhat wishes to imply that the Tories are now uniformly committed to lowering it, he should say so outright. Otherwise, voters may think he means more of the same.

Then comes “defence spending”, and here Mr Tugendhat commendably campaigns for raising it to 3 per cent of GDP. However, having been in government for 14 years, the Tories had ample opportunity to do so. Instead, they chose to degrade defence of the realm to a risible level. Have they now seen the error of their ways? Do they all now agree with Mr Tugendhat? Somehow I don’t think so.

And finally, “net zero”. There’s nothing I’ve ever heard from any Tory frontbencher about this economic suicide that might suggest they regard it as such. On the contrary, every pronouncement makes it clear they agree with this basic policy and only wish it were pursued fervently, rather than fanatically.

In fact, this commitment to net zero reflects an explosive combination of scientific ignorance and ideological zealotry. Is that what the Tories are united on? Or do they merely hope we’ll agree to cut our collective economic throat inch by inch, rather than with one quick slash?

There’s something to discuss there, but not as far as Mr Tugendhat is concerned. This and all other vital issues “aren’t up for debate”. Nor is the issue of the Tories’ electoral chances for the next generation.

After all, of the potential leaders, Tugendhat really does seem the best. The parliamentary Tory Party is indeed united – in its mediocrity, absence of any principles (much less conservative ones), amoral powerlust. United they fall, and we are stuck with Labour.

Can we please have some “squabbling”?  

The political season is upon us, and though politics can’t be the entirety of one’s current interests, it can certainly inspire ratiocination. And that dangerous pastime can take one in all sorts of directions.

When I was reading up on J.D. Vance the other day, I noticed that he had been raised an evangelical Christian but converted to Catholicism at an emblematic age of 33.

For me, that’s a sign that he had outgrown his insalubrious background and achieved intellectual and cultural maturity. As a man now in full command of his faculties, he must have realised that Catholicism is the only Western confession that’s the true heir to the early Church.

St John Henry Newman reached the same conclusion and made the same journey, although his starting point was High Anglicanism, the most Catholic of the Protestant denominations. “To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant,” he wrote.

People who are deep in history tend to be highly educated, and Anglophones boasting such credentials, especially if they also happen to be writers, tend to turn to Catholicism tropistically.

The list of such converts is long: Dryden, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh, Kirk, Muggeridge, Spark, Clair Booth Luce, Fr. Richard Neuhaus and so on. At the same time, I can’t think offhand of a single writer or thinker who made the journey in the opposite direction.

One is tempted to define a Catholic as a thinking Christian, but that would be unfair to many serious Protestant thinkers. On the other hand, defining a Christian strikes me as easy, but even such a seemingly simple task defeated one writer I’ve mentioned, Malcolm Muggeridge.

In his moving book Jesus Rediscovered, he described Leo Tolstoy as “not only one of the greatest writers of all time, but also one of the greatest Christians of all time”. That one sentence inspired me to write my own book, God and Man According to Tolstoy, arguing that Tolstoy wasn’t a Christian at all (nor much of a thinker), never mind one of the greatest ever.

Tolstoy rejected Christian doctrine wholesale, starting with the divinity of Christ and Virgin Birth. Mary simply got pregnant by someone the usual way, and Joseph kindly agreed to marry her and accept her illegitimate child as his own.

Tolstoy rudely mocked every sacrament and described the Holy Trinity as incomprehensible and nonsensical. Jesus, whom Muggeridge rediscovered, was to Tolstoy simply a good man, and he regarded worshipping him as blasphemous. Nonetheless, he considered himself not only a Christian, but the only true one left in the world.

In that spirit, Tolstoy set out to write what he called “the gospel of Christ the Materialist”. He merged the four gospels together, excised all the miracles and everything supernatural, and gave a general impression that God was just like Tolstoy, if a bit older.

A similar project had been undertaken a century before Tolstoy by Thomas Jefferson. He too practised a selective approach to Christianity: some of it was acceptable to him, some wasn’t. So he clipped the acceptable passages out of the Bible and pasted them into a notebook, thus creating his own Scripture. One can argue that possibly all Protestants go through the same exercise in their minds, if not literally.

St Augustine warned against such voluntaristic arrogance half a millennium earlier: “If you believe what you like in the gospel and reject what you do not like, it is not the gospel you believe in but yourself.”

In other words, the Scripture must be accepted in its entirety. But does the Scripture include the entirety of Christianity? Evangelical Protestants, from Zwingli to Vance in his youth, believe so. Sola scriptura is one of the founding tenets of Protestantism.

But which scriptura? St John, who first quotes Jesus as saying “I and the Father are one”, but then quotes “My Father is greater than I”? St Luke’s Annunciation to Mary or St Matthew’s Annunciation to Joseph? St Mark who wrote about James and John approaching Jesus with a request or St Matthew who states it was their mother who was the supplicant? Mark and Luke who talk about demons being cast out of a man, or Matthew who says there were two men? St Luke who has shepherds visiting the manger at the Nativity or St Matthew who says it was the kings who followed that star?

The four gospels are four polyphonic themes, similar but not identical, that are then woven into a glorious whole with the rest of the New Testament. But who can be that weaver? Just about anybody, if we agree with Tolstoy, Jefferson, Martin ‘Every Man Is His Own Priest’ Luther, and all evangelical Protestants.

In the end, we’ll end up with many different Christianities, and true enough: in addition to the main Protestant denominations, there exist, at the latest count, 35,496 independent or non-denominational churches, all of them Protestant.

At some point, one becomes justified to ask the question in the title above. Does Christianity even exist as a single religion? Not according to Hilaire Belloc, who wrote in his book The Great Heresies that:

“There is no such thing as a religion called ‘Christianity’ – there never has been such a religion. There is and always has been the Church, and various heresies proceeding from a rejection of some of the Church’s doctrines by men who still desire to retain the rest of her teaching and morals.”

That’s a cogent, if somewhat radical, expression of the Catholic view and a profound rejection of Protestantism as one of the eponymous great heresies. By equating Christianity with Church doctrine, Belloc was arguing that only the Church preserves the Revelation in its entirety, without fracturing it into pieces appealing to various sects.

J.D. Vance talks about a mystical experience that drew him to Catholicism, which makes him one of many communicants who were thus inspired to travel to Rome, whither, as we know, all roads lead. But it’s possible to pave one such road with nothing but rational thought.

Other Western confessions simply don’t make sense, historical, philosophical, cultural or any other. I’d add social and political to this list, for the seditious Reformation was really the anteroom of agnosticism, which the subsequent Enlightenment converted into mass atheism.

That was an attempt to harness man’s sinful nature and lead mankind to virtue by DIY means, secular and political. The attempt failed, which John Adams either diagnosed or prophesied as early as in 1798:

“We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net.”

Amen.

In case your command of American slang is less than perfect, a twofer is someone who ticks two boxes on the list of woke credentials. A threefer is someone who ticks three such boxes, and so on, although not quite ad infinitum.

Thus Kamala Harris is a twofer, or even a twoandahalfer. She is a woman – tick. She is also racial minority – tick. And then perhaps another half-tick because, in addition to being half-black, she’s also half-Indian. That’s two racial minorities for the price of one, can’t beat that.

Now she has the Democratic nomination more or less sewn up, barring a likely dip in the polls, all those ticked boxes are supposed to establish – dare I say circumscribe – her presidential credentials.

Having twice indulged their appetite for diversity candidates, American voters may not be quite sated yet. After all, by being black, Obama ticked only one such box.

By the way, both Jim Crow segregationists and woke ‘liberals’ have an identical racial criterium: a drop of tar, all black. Hence Barack and Kamala are universally accepted as black even though their mothers were, respectively, white and Indian. That’s as if mothers – women! – didn’t count, which strikes me as rank misogyny. Tell me where to report such reprobates.

Some naysayers still insist that, in the absence of any other discernible qualifications, being a twofer may still not be sufficient to take Kamala to the White House. Now, if she were a threefer… Wait a minute.

True, Kamala is neither a cripple nor a lesbian nor a trans, but presidential candidates never walk, or for that matter run, alone. They have a VP candidate in tow as part of the ticket. And if Kamala herself can’t be a threefer, her ticket certainly can be.

The choice of her running mate therefore makes itself: Pete Buttigieg, the openly homosexual Transport Secretary. And as an extra benefit, he’s a white Midwesterner, thereby adding both chromatic and geographic balance to the ticket. Sorted, as they say on our side of the Atlantic. Hail, President Harris.

This reminds me that there’s no such thing as corrupt politicians, not in democracies at any rate. There are only corrupt, or rather corrupted, electorates. Yes, what I’ve written so far today is a mocking spoof. But you can only mock something that exists, and what exists is Kamala Harris who may well become the next president of the United States.

This at a time when the West is in what Americans call clear and present danger. Russia, inflamed by Nazi propaganda, is waging brutal war against the West’s eastern flank. In that undertaking she’s supported surreptitiously yet unequivocally by China.

Also, according to recent intelligence reports, China is about to invade Taiwan, thereby disrupting the supply of silicon chips to the West and holding its economies to ransom. And at this critical time, political analysts are discussing the woke boxes Kamala ticks or doesn’t.  

It takes a thoroughly corrupted electorate to vote for Kamala strictly on the basis of such extraneous qualifications. And if any other basis exists, I’m at a loss to see what that might be.

I’m not an enthusiastic admirer of Trump, but he is beginning to look better by the minute. Say what you will about him – and I’ve said plenty – at least he doesn’t play the ticket-balancing game.

Trump chose as his running mate a likeminded man he thinks will be a good vice president and potentially president. J.D. Vance is an eminently capable chap who doesn’t balance Trump’s ticket in any way: he is white, conservative (as the term is understood in the US), populist – and he doesn’t come from any swing state.

My opposition to Trump is largely a matter of style and rhetoric but, compared to Harris, he comes across as a present-day Demosthenes.

For example, here’s how Kamala communicated the idea that the present must be viewed in a historical context: “I think it’s very important… for us at every moment in time and certainly this one, to see the moment in time in which we exist and are present, and to be able to contextualise it, to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates not only to the past but the future.”

Or this is how she expressed her resolute support for Roe vs Wade: “I think that, to be very honest with you, I do believe that we should have rightly believed, but we certainly believe that certain issues are just settled. Certain issues are just settled.”

I read up on such verbal problems when working on my book about Tolstoy’s philosophy and religion. One chapter was devoted to the writer’s mental health, as analysed and recorded by psychiatrists.

They reached the conclusion that Tolstoy suffered from epilepsy, one of whose symptoms is perseveration, a tendency to repeat the same words and phrases within the same sentence. This may be a symptom not only of epilepsy but also of some other organic disorder or brain injury. And Kamala does perseveration with the best of them.

Joe Biden’s tenure has brought the issue of mental health into focus, but now the focus can be profitably shifted to Kamala, who doesn’t seem to be quite compos mentis either.

Just look at this passage where she explains Artificial Intelligence to the uninitiated: “It’s about machine learning, and so, the machine is taught – and part of the issue here is what information is going into the machine that will then determine – and we can predict then, if we think about what information is going in, what then will be produced.”

I’d be curious to hear what a psychiatrist would have to say if exposed to that text without attribution. He’d probably notice perseveration and might conceivably even diagnose mental retardation – that gibberish sounds as if it was delivered by someone half a century younger than Kamala.

If her oratory is laughable, her record is well-nigh non-existent. Politically, she won the 2017 Senate election in California, where having a pulse is the only requirement for a Democratic candidate to win. When she ran solo as a presidential candidate in 2020, Harris was blown off in the early primaries. Even impeccably Democratic commentators openly mocked her tendency to talk drivel and laugh uncontrollably at the most inappropriate moments.

(An interesting aside: in America political candidates run; in Britain they stand. Can one extrapolate that the American national character is more dynamic?)

Kamala then provided that vital balance to Joe Biden’s ticket and became his VP. Now, it’s commonly believed that US Vice Presidents’ responsibilities are seldom more onerous than those of a doorstop. There is some truth to that belief, but it’s not the whole truth.

Sometimes presidents assign specific tasks to their VPs, which was the case with Kamala. She was given the immigration brief, specifically that of controlling the eternally porous southern border to stem the influx of illegal migrants.

On her watch, at least seven, and by some estimates as many as ten, million illegals crossed the border with Mexico. The situation that had always been dire became catastrophic. But not as far as Kamala is concerned.

Proud of her accomplishments, she said: “We have a secure border in that that is a priority for any nation including ours in our administration.” Mrs Cicero strikes again but, rhetoric apart, if Kamala thinks the Mexican border is secure, there are some properties I’d like to sell her west of Malibu in her native California.

How this nonentity can be considered as a possible candidate for presidency is beyond me. Yet the problem isn’t just with Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party or the thoroughly corrupted US electorate that can be swayed by woke credentials even in the absence of any other.

For similar outrages are happening all over the West, with manifestly unfit candidates rising to power on the basis of irrelevant criteria. My view is that we are reaping the crop planted by the Enlightenment, but this is something to ponder not in an article but in a book (such as any of mine, apart from the aforementioned one on Tolstoy).

“Europe will never be like America. Europe is a product of history. America is a product of philosophy,” said Margaret Thatcher.

That was a memorable aphorism, and it was almost right. Yet, like all such adages, it needs unpacking, which is what I’ll try to do.

Thatcher meant specifically the Enlightenment afflatus that inspired the American Revolution and its founding documents. And it’s true that, while European polities developed organically over centuries, the American state was created in one fell swoop as a political embodiment of Enlightenment philosophy, or rather ideology.

However, this doesn’t mean that European history was free of philosophical inputs. Any state probably, and any Western state certainly, is a physical expression of a metaphysical fact. It’s just that the metaphysical core of Europe took more time to develop – after all, as an older civilisation Europe did have more time at its disposal.

America’s Founders, on the other hand, were men in a hurry: their task was to form not just a new state but a new nation, and to do so quickly. And a nation has to have not only genetics but also metaphysics at its foundation, for without that symbiosis of body and soul it would remain stillborn.

That’s where the Founders ran into a problem. After all, their country was first settled by religious dissenters who had to believe God was on their side because no one else was.

The new continent greeted them with the fangs and claws of wild animals, and the tomahawks and scalping knives of irate natives. The new settlers had to find inexhaustible resources of strength, and they found them in a sense of their messianic mission.

As early as 1630 their leader, the Puritan lawyer John Winthrop, delivered an oration in which he alluded to Matthew 5: 14 by describing the new community as a “city upon a hill”. That was the beginning of American exceptionalism: the neonatal nation saw itself as a messiah destined to lead the world to goodness – after all, Winthrop and his friends knew the rest of that proselytising verse: “Ye are the light of this world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.”

Such was the country’s metaphysical heritage, and the Founders had to take it into account. Yet their Enlightenment provenance left no room for divinity. Most of them were deists at best, if not agnostics or downright atheists (to me, the differences there are anyway slight).

Hence they faced the task of wrapping their secular project in religious verbiage. Having started with the message of a nation worshipping God and doing his work on earth, they gradually replaced it with the idea of a nation worshipping itself – while paying lip service to God.

In 1809 Jefferson tried to express the principle of America as a beacon without relying on biblical references: “Trusted with the destinies of this solitary republic of the world, the only monument of human rights, and the sole depository of the sacred fire of freedom and self-government, from hence it is to be lighted up in other regions of the earth, if other regions of the earth shall ever become susceptible of its benign influence.”

Tastes differ but facts shouldn’t: America wasn’t “the only monument… and the sole depository… of freedom and self-government”. England, to name one other country, had form in those areas too. But then the puffery of political pietism knows no bounds.

Subsequent American politicians have had to find a workable blend between their secular desiderata and requisite quasi-religious cant. Even today every political speech in America has to have divine references, if only “God save America” at the end.

In his acceptance speech the other day, Trump – who has never been accused of excessive piety – acknowledged that tradition by saying: “I stand before you only by the grace of almighty God.” Though rather tame by the standards of American politics, that statement tugged on the heart strings of the nation. The country stood ready to believe that Trump had been saved by divine interference rather than by Crooks’s poor marksmanship.

At least Trump didn’t ascribe divine powers to his country, as did, for example, Thomas Paine in his revolutionary gospel Common Sense: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand…”

Later the lexicon of American exceptionalism was expanded by the journalist John L. O’Sullivan who in 1840 coined the term ‘manifest destiny’. Said destiny was according to him divine: it was incumbent upon America “to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man”.

At about the same time, John Quincy Adams averred that America’s founding document was a simulacrum of Genesis: “Fellow citizens, the ark of your covenant is the Declaration of Independence.”

Such sentiments had to find an artistic expression, not just the verbal kind. That’s why sacral visual imagery abounds in American politics, as do mock-religious shrines to past leaders.

George Washington in particular is worshipped in a religious manner as the ‘Great Father of the Country’. The interior of the Capitol dome in D.C. displays a fresco entitled The Apotheosis of Washington, where the sainted Father is surrounded by Baroque angels and also representations of other Founders in contact with various pagan deities, such as Neptune, Vulcan and Minerva.

In the same vein, the Lincoln Memorial is designed as a Greek temple and is actually identified as such in marble: “In this temple, as in the hearts of the people, for whom he saved the Union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever.”

The Jefferson Memorial, not far away, is also a replica of a pagan shrine, with various quasi-religious references inscribed. Cited, for example, is a quotation from Jefferson’s letter to Washington preaching that: “God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? … Commerce between master and slave is despotism”.

It’s useful to remember that these ringing words were uttered by a man who had his chattel slaves flogged to mincemeat for trying to escape. Jefferson also openly despised every Christian dogma and sacrament.

The statement would therefore be either hypocritical or even cynical if we were to forget that by then ‘God’ had become the shorthand for ‘America’. Thus the sacred shrines in Washington’s Tidal Basin attract millions of secular pilgrims every year, those eager to worship at the altar of American exceptionalism.

Margaret Thatcher was right: Europe will never be like America. Europe has abandoned her religious heritage; America has converted hers into pagan self-worship.

It’s hard to say which is worse. But it’s easier to understand why British conservatives wince every time an American politician waxes quasi-devout to an audience happy to put their hands on their hearts.

Yet by now that reaction is more aesthetic than philosophical. Which, of course, makes it much stronger: taste runs deeper than any philosophy. One thing for sure: contrary to Churchill’s quip, it’s not just the common language that divides the two nations.

There’s no such thing as a good ideology, as far as I’m concerned. All ideologies are wrong practically by definition.

They are all political constructs built out of such materials as rancour, powerlust, sentimentality, envy and other deadly sins – never out of high intelligence, common sense and morality as laid down in Exodus and Matthew.

Ideologies are secular religions that, on false pretences, demand the kind of obedience and worship that real religions command as of right. This creates an incongruity that offends any developed aesthetic sense. All ideologies are in bad taste, which is even worse than being downright subversive.

That’s true even when they are preached and practised by good people full of good intentions. For example, I know and like quite a few people who support Trump. However, whenever they talk or write about their hero, I wince as if touching a slug by accident.

They all have good reasons for supporting Trump, and they can discuss them quite rationally and persuasively. Alas, one can detect another layer either above or beneath their reason, that of ideological, messianic devotion. They worship Trump as if he were Moses guided by God to lead them into the promised land of right-wing rectitude.

Hence they treat any criticism of Trump not as disagreement but as heresy or even apostasy. Trump, like Caesar’s wife, is above suspicion. He is the messiah embodying God’s will, someone who can only be worshipped, not decorticated.

Whenever any politician – and I do mean any, throughout history – is talked about in those terms, I smell a rat, the kind that died in one’s basement at the beginning of a hot summer. An ideology raised to the level of cult is at play there, and that cancels out in my eyes any sound policies Trump has in mind – and many of them are indeed sound.

Let’s not lose track of the historical fact that Moses wasn’t a candidate for the presidency of Judaea, nor was Jesus an MP for Galilee South. Both of them signposted their territory way above politics, and any politician claiming or receiving similar devotion is a trespasser. This, no matter how attractive his policies or sterling his record.

Now we are on the subject of Moses and his people, the Jews suffered a tragedy in the 20^th century for which one struggles to find any close parallels in history. About half of the world’s Jews were murdered by satanic ghouls in the name of a satanic ideology.

It’s testimony to the fortitude of the Jewish people that they have risen Phoenix-like yet again, having recovered from the worst wounds few nations have ever suffered. Yet wounds leave scars. These may become paler and less achy with time, but they never disappear.

In this case, the scars are mental. Just imagine 35 million Britons murdered within a few years (the same proportion as the Jews murdered by Hitler and his henchmen), and you’ll know that such scars demand treatment, for otherwise the wounds will fester for ever.

The Nazis, those from Germany and occupied countries, especially but not exclusively in Eastern Europe, defined Jews by their ethnicity. A Christian or an atheist Jew was still a Jew to them, and as such slated for extermination as a member of the lowliest race.

Such a descending scale of racial ranking was a purely ideological construct, abhorrent not only to Jews and other putative Untermenschen, but also to Christians and any decent people whose moral compass hadn’t gone haywire.

Unfortunately, Jews and other decent people reacted to that ideological savagery with an ideology of their own. Their ideology isn’t savage and, in fact, it’s perfectly understandable. Yet it’s an ideology nonetheless, and therefore impervious to facts, common sense and in fact to the evidence before our very eyes.

The essence of that ideology is that Jewishness has no ethnic or racial component whatsoever. The logic is, as I said, understandable, but it’s still shabby.

Since Hitler treated Jewishness as ethnicity or race, and Hitler was a murderous monster, Western Jews and, in due course, Westerners in general decreed that thenceforth any such characteristics no longer applied. A Jew is a synonym of a Judaist. If he isn’t a Judaist, he isn’t a Jew. And anyone who insists on an ethnic component to Jewishness is a Nazi sympathiser.

This gets me back to the title above. If we follow this logic to its natural conclusion, then an atheist Jew, or one espousing any other religion, is a contradiction in terms. Yet anyone with eyes to see knows that’s not so. One doesn’t have to be a Nazi to observe that, say, the late Dr Ruth Westheimer looked Jewish and, say, the late Grace Kelly didn’t.

Yet it’s meaningless to say that Joe Biden looks Catholic or Donald Trump Presbyterian. Religion lives in the mind and soul only and doesn’t produce any physical characteristics.

If, however, many members of a large group do share such characteristics, they have some genetic commonality. This observation doesn’t exonerate Hitler or other anti-Semites, whose name is legion, and a rapidly growing one at the moment. It’s just a statement of fact free of any ideological overtones.

Israel is a religious state in ways that in the West are things of the past (one is tempted to say unfortunately). Hence it has a state religion, and more power to it. But, unlike the state religion of England, Israel’s is interlaid with ideological strands, and this is evident in its Law of Return.

According to it, any Jew living in any part of the world is automatically entitled to settle in Israel and receive Israeli citizenship. This noble law was a direct response to the Holocaust. Jews of the world had to be told that they could always find a safe haven in Israel, no matter how persecuted they were in their native lands.

All that remained was defining a Jew, and that’s where ideology crept in. The Law of Return applies to any person who has a Jewish mother, and also to the children and grandchildren of Jews, as well as their spouses and the spouses of their children and grandchildren.

Any atheists within that group are welcome, which suggests that the criterion at work there is purely ethnic. However, the Law doesn’t cover any Jew who espouses any religion other than Judaism. This is illogical on many levels.

Historically, the Nazis treated Jewish Christians the way they treated all Jews – with murderous hatred. Today’s anti-Semites also ignore religious nuances (as the Russians say, it’s not your passport but your mug that gets punched), meaning that, push come to shove, Jewish Christians would be as much in need of a refuge as Jewish atheists.

Moreover, the former are religiously, philosophically and typologically closer to Judaists than atheists are – after all, the Old Testament is part of the Christian canon. An atheist Jew isn’t an oxymoron, but then neither is a Christian Jew.

This is what happens when ideology barges in: logic goes right out of the window, as does factual evidence. When queried on this subject, Israelis simply walk away from an obvious infidel.

By the same token, Trump’s right-wing admirers refuse to discuss some demonstrably left-wing policies he favours, such as protectionism. Ideology has a way of cauterising one’s brain, at least the part of it where capacity for dispassionate analysis resides.

So no, an atheist Jew isn’t an oxymoron. But a good ideology is.