Month: July 2025

It was in America 50-odd years ago that I first followed the heated debates between ‘evolutionists’ and ‘creationists’.

In those days, I hadn’t yet pondered those issues as assiduously as I have since. But even in that larval stage of my intellectual development, I was appalled at the paucity of the arguments put forth by both sides.

The warring parties didn’t even realise they were at cross purposes. The confusion began by both insisting that Genesis and Darwin are mutually exclusive, whereas no contradiction between them exists: being omnipotent, God is capable of creating things gradually as well as instantly .

In fact, when Darwin published his Origin in 1859, some English theologians, such as Charles Kingsley, praised the book for providing another peephole allowing us to catch a glimpse of God’s design.

But Kingsley, sorely misguided as he was in most other areas, was immeasurably cleverer and better-versed in philosophy than those American jousters of my youth. They just screamed themselves hoarse, making spectators believe that one could be either for science or religion, but never both.

With all my respect for Americans, and this isn’t just a phrase, philosophical training doesn’t rate close to the top of their list of priorities. France, on the other hand, is different. There, philosophy, from atomism to Thomism and onwards, is taught at school. French youngsters can be overheard arguing about the relative merits of Foucault and Derrida, for example. (Both are considered philosophers in France.)

One would expect such education to elevate the discussion of life’s origin to a higher level than I encountered in America, c. 1975. Alas, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Talking to some French youngsters, intelligent ones who have gone to all the right schools, I was surprised to find out that they haven’t advanced the argument one bit. It’s still creationists versus evolutionists, and devil take the hindmost, as long as it’s the former.

The intellectual level is just as poor, and the emotions just as febrile. In fact, those French youngsters wouldn’t even discuss such self-evident things, refusing to stoop to the level of someone as insanely reactionary as me.

This adds another piece of evidence to my observation that, evolutionally speaking, the Enlightenment has gradually created an intellectual catastrophe affecting the world at large, not just any specific country. Most people aren’t just unable to think properly – they don’t even know what constitutes proper thought.

If they did, they’d know that it’s not theologians but scientists (many of whom, such as Hoyle, Watson, Creek et al., were themselves atheists) who identify problems with Darwin’s theory. In that spirit, try to guess which insane reactionary was the author of these two statements:

“Not one change of species into another is on record… we cannot prove that a single species has been changed.”

And, “To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”

No, it wasn’t a charismatic fundamentalist preacher in America’s Bible Belt. It was Darwin himself, pointing out two of the gaping holes in his theory.

In the intervening 175 years, science has never proved a single one of his conclusions of a more sweeping nature, those concerning macroevolution, one species becoming another. (Microevolution, a species developing to adapt to its environment, isn’t disputed by anyone — and hasn’t been since Plutarch and Lucretius.)

Unlike Darwin himself, today’s politicised Darwinists don’t even try to see how his assertions tally with the most elementary scientific data, such as the dearth of intermediate forms of living creatures in the fossil records. In fact, empirical evidence supports not the appearance and development of new species but the degradation and disappearance of the old ones.

Scientists now agree that about 99 percent of the species that have ever inhabited the earth are no longer with us. Really, that book ought to have been called The Disappearance of Species.

In fact, Darwinism, as a universalist, materialist explanation of the world, has been refuted not only by logic but also by every natural science we may wish to consider, from microbiology to physics, palaeontology, cosmology, biochemistry and geology.

Darwinism is taught as fact at schools in America, France and elsewhere not because it’s scientifically irrefutable but because it’s politically indispensable. Not only does it attack traditions of Christendom more effectively than Marxism does, but it also rivals Marxism for far-reaching social and economic implications.

One no longer has to leave the realm of seemingly objective biological science to explain both socialism, with its class struggle, and capitalism, with its dog-eat-dog struggle for economic survival. Even more fundamental is Darwinism’s demotic insistence on the purely animal nature of man.

In Christendom, man was regarded as unique among all living beings because his life was believed to have a higher transcendent purpose. As long as that view was more or less universally shared, no consumer society in our modern sense could arise.

There were in-built limits to man’s consumption because it was recognised that there were no in-built limits to man’s being. Obviously, man has always consumed, but that activity couldn’t have been paramount for someone who believed he was created in the image and likeness of God and would therefore live eternally.

For consumption to be elevated to the defining feature of society, the very concept of man had to change. For consumption to reign supreme, the whole society had to become consumptive.

That is precisely the service Darwin provided, though not single-handedly. If we are nothing but highly developed apes, then we aren’t qualitatively different from animals.

We differ only in the range of our activities that all reach their resolution and apotheosis in consumption. Thanks to our evolved minds, we don’t have to stick to bananas. We can consume cars, computers, jet travel – and we can feel good about ourselves while devoting our lives to the pursuit of animal-like happiness.

Modern people are ever prepared to shrug their shoulders with indifference whenever yet another length of flimsy yarn is spun at them. They open their arms to such primitive fallacies as Marxism and Darwinism not because they are persuaded by their rational arguments but because at heart they don’t really care one way or the other.

They hear vague materialist noises in those doctrines, and that’s all they want to hear. Having created our modern, virtual world, materialism needs virtual science to vindicate itself. 

As long as money remains tangible and plentiful, people feel no need for any other reality. The assumption is that Chimaera’s fire may singe everything else, including supposedly objective science, while sparing the only reality that really matters. Alas, this reality is no less inflammable than any other, and more so than some.

History will obligingly provide empirical proof of this observation but, until it does, people will continue to cling to their uncritical faith in Darwinism. It’s no less fideistic than Genesis but, unlike the latter, has the advantage of easy appeal to immature minds happy to boil the whole complexity of life down to primitive binary choices.

Such as the one between ‘creationism’ and ‘evolutionism’ – yes or no, black or white, no other hues anywhere in evidence, no nuances entertained. Oh well, as long as those people are happy, for as long as they are happy.

This question pops up in my mind every time I fail to explain Trump’s action in a way other than the one the question implies.

Fact 1: The Ukraine is a victim of Russian aggression. Since February, 2022, the country has been desperately fighting for her survival as a sovereign nation.

Fact 2: Putin has built a fascist regime in Russia whose declared aim is the restoration of the Soviet empire along Stalin lines.

Fact 3: Large swaths of that empire are now NATO members, supposedly presenting a united front against any aggression.

Fact 4: The Ukraine, unlike Russia, has been developing civilised institutions with the clear intention of shedding Russia’s tyranny and joining the West.

Fact 5: This gives the West a vested interest, both moral and strategic, in helping the Ukraine in her fight against Russia’s brutal invasion.

Fact 6: Western countries, including the US, have been acting in that spirit since the first foray of Russian troops into the Ukraine’s territory in 2014.

Having renounced direct military involvement, they’ve been assisting the Ukraine with armament supplies and intelligence data. These have been coming in a steady trickle sufficient to keep the Ukraine in the fight, but not to enable her to win.

Fact 7: The Ukrainian army has acquitted itself with courage and skill, beating the Russians to a virtual standstill and making them pay dearly for every inch of Ukrainian territory they claim.

After three-and-a-half years of desperate fighting, and having lost over a million soldiers dead and wounded, the Russians have barely managed to occupy 20 per cent of the Ukraine – this in spite of their huge numerical superiority and vast reserves of military hardware.

Fact 8: Over the past few days, the Russian offensive has begun to escalate. In keeping with their usual practice, the Russians target residential areas of Ukrainian cities, especially Kiev.

This morning, they hit the Ukraine with 550 Shahed drones and ballistic missiles, the biggest such attack since, well, a few days earlier, when 537 drones and missiles were launched.

Fact 9: The Ukraine can use her home-made AA defences to ward off drone attacks, more or less, but not to intercept ballistic missiles.

The country heavily depends on Western missile defences, such as the Patriot systems. But the rockets for those systems are running out, leaving the country’s civil population at the mercy of Russian brutality.

Fact 10: At the same time, the Russians are stepping up their preparations for escalating another major summer offensive. North Korea has sent over another 30,000 contingent to reinforce her evil accomplice. Moreover, German and Dutch intelligence shows that the Russians are increasingly using chemical and other weapons banned internationally.

Add these 10 facts together, and ask yourself what should be the only rational and moral action on the part of the Ukraine’s most important ally, the US.

Correct. The US must step up its supplies of armaments to the Ukraine, especially the defensive weapons required to protect civilians. At the same time, the US president should use the available communication channels to exert maximum pressure on Putin.

If you don’t desist, the message should be, we’ll arm the Ukraine to a level sufficient for winning the war, not just keeping the invaders at bay. The US economy is ready for the long haul. Is yours, Mr Putin? Especially if we hit all your foreign customers with huge secondary sanctions?

Yet Donald Trump has done exactly the opposite. He has been trying to practise his much-vaunted art of the deal to bring the two parties to the negotiation table.

President Zelensky has stated publicly that the Ukraine is ready. President Putin has stated, both publicly and privately, that the war will continue until its root causes have been eliminated. He didn’t mean the real root causes, himself and his fascist regime. He meant the Ukraine’s sovereignty.

The last time Putin told Trump to mind his own business was in a long phone conversation yesterday. Trump expressed (feigned?) disappointment, saying: “I didn’t make any progress with him at all.” 

And nevertheless, the US, meaning Trump, announced the suspension of arms supplies to the Ukraine, especially those of missile and air defence systems. Moreover, America looks as if she is going to thwart Germany’s plan to buy two Patriot systems and hundreds of rockets from the US for the Ukraine.

Doing this at the crucial point in the war runs so contrary to America’s strategic interests, along with her moral and contractual obligations (remember the Budapest memorandum?), that it’s hard to find a rational explanation.

The one Trump has put forth, that America has sent so many weapons to the Ukraine that she hasn’t enough left to defend herself, doesn’t cut much ice. The US has demonstrated its capacity to step up armament production to any level, almost instantly.

That’s why FDR described America, correctly, as the Arsenal of Democracy. Trump’s frustration with America’s NATO allies not pulling their weight is perfectly understandable. That problem must be solved, and those countries have already taken some steps in that direction, albeit meek ones.

But first things first: let’s stop this fascist attack on the West and, that done, sort the accounting out. Trump’s action, taken at this moment, is inexplicable rationally.

This brings back the question in the title. Since long before his first term, Trump has always acted as an admirer and champion of Putin’s regime. A compendium of his panegyrics of Putin would run several pages of small type, and one could detect genuine sympathy there.

Ever since the beginning of Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine, Trump has been the most prominent putinversteher, someone who feels Putin’s pain and sympathises with his bogus concerns. Considering the broad pro-Ukrainian consensus in America, Trump has had to couch such sentiments in moderate terms, but not enough to conceal them.

Even now, after Bucha and Mariupol, Trumps talks of Putin as a friend, a slightly wayward one but a friend nevertheless. Suspicions of bad faith have been persistent, although an investigation of Trump’s dealings with Putin didn’t reveal any indictable offence.

That could mean that no offence had been committed or that the parties involved had been good at covering their tracks. I incline towards the second possibility.

Before he entered politics, Trump had aggressively pursued business with Russia. Now, Russian commerce is controlled – actually owned – by organised crime fused with the ruling KGB elite. Hence Trump had to lie with those dogs, and catching their fleas would have been hard to avoid.

This is conjecture, but it’s borne out by Trump’s subsequent behaviour. He incessantly talks about ending the war, but one gets the distinct impression that he’d see the Ukraine’s capitulation as an acceptable conclusion.

When discussing the causes of the war, Trump and some key members of his cabinet routinely repeat Kremlin propaganda, often word for word. At the same time, they treat Zelensky as an annoying supplicant, rather than as the leader of a country heroically trying to stem the fascist onslaught on the West.

Whatever Putin may have on Trump has to be something major. The Donald isn’t exactly known as a choirboy in matters fiscal or sexual, and many of his transgressions are in the public domain already.

For the Russians to have real clout they’d have to possess a dossier of earth-shattering misdeeds. I for one find it possible to believe Trump might have provided material for that file.

Still, I’m prepared to entertain other explanations of Trump’s actions. But not any other explanations. Those suggesting that, by helping the Ukraine, America has denuded her own defences, needn’t apply.

Israel isn’t just the embodiment of evil, but its sum total in the world. And if you believe otherwise, you may find yourself on the wrong side of the UN.

Since its founding, that august organisation has passed twice as many resolutions against Israel as against the rest of the world combined. For example, between 2015 and 2023 that score stood at Israel, 154, all other countries, 71.

It so happens that the Russian aggression against the Ukraine started in 2014 and escalated to a full-blown invasion in 2022. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have since been murdered for their audacity of being Ukrainian.

If you follow the events there as closely as I do, you are familiar with hundreds of speeches in which Russian chieftains have denied that a legitimate Ukrainian nation exists and claimed that Ukrainians are racially inferior.

To prove their own racial superiority, the Russian invaders have been razing Ukrainian cities, murdering, torturing, looting and raping civilians. And whom does the UN consider the greatest villain during that period? Why, Israel, of course.

Some 10 million people have been murdered in Central Africa over the past few decades. That, as far as the UN is concerned, is a minor peccadillo compared to the unspeakable audacity of Israel’s attempts to survive in the face of Muslim brutality.

Over 2.5 million have perished in Sudan’s civil war, which is still raging. That’s most regrettable, the UN seems to think. But not as criminal as Israel’s self-defence.

However, until now the UN has had in its sights mostly Israel herself and those other countries that assisted her in any way. Now that guardian of world peace has narrowed its focus to target private companies that do business with Israel, however tangentially.

Companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Caterpillar, our own BP, Barclays and University of Edinburgh and countless others have been named as culprits for benefitting from “the Israeli economy of illegal occupation, apartheid and now genocide.”

One implication is that one of the world’s most advanced economies celebrated for its contribution to technology and science depends for its survival on “illegal occupation”. The author of the document can’t even do diatribes properly.

The indictment’s conclusion is damning: “Genocide, it would seem, is profitable.”  

I’m sure the board members of the guilty companies will start wearing hair shirts under their Savile Row suits. Their own black hearts have been bared for the world to see. There they were, trying to do the best they could for their customers and shareholders, only to find out they are complicit in genocide.

And their governments are complicit with the companies, making the circle truly vicious. Only the other day, our Parliament voted (385 for, 26 against) in favour of proscribing the direct action group Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. One nay vote was cast by Diane Abbott censured by her own Labour Party for anti-Semitism.

Last month, members of Palestine Action broke into an RAF base in Oxfordshire and sprayed two planes with red paint, the latest crime in its history of using or threatening violence or serious damage to property to advance a political cause.

The vote makes the Mother of All Parliaments complicit in genocide. Britain’s membership in the UN, including its Security Council, has to be incompatible with such evil.

Now, according to Al Jazeera, hardly a pro-Israel source, since the Hamas massacre of 1,195 Israelis on 7 October, 2023, about 1,000 Palestinians have been killed during Israel’s subsequent attempt to protect her citizens. If this is genocide, the Israelis are rather poor at it. Perhaps they should take an advanced course in Russia or Rwanda.

The UN has 193 member states. And only one of them, Israel, has its legitimacy denied by most other members. This is odd, considering that Israel came into existence as a result of Resolution 181 adopted by the UN on 29 November, 1947.

One could be forgiven for wishing the UN got its own act together before castigating a heroic nation, the sole oasis of civilisation in the Middle East. Brushing up on the definition of genocide wouldn’t go amiss either.

International organisations in general span the full range from useless to pernicious. The UN is both, and has never been anything but.

I was a boy when I first began to follow the UN, specifically its 1961 fiasco in the Congo. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld tried to intervene in the ongoing massacre, only to die in a plane crash that the CIA believed was engineered by the KGB. The carnage proceeded unabated.

Since then, every attempt by the UN to mitigate similar massacres all over the world has only succeeded in making them worse. Kashmir, Cambodia, Somalia, Burundi, Rwanda, Sudan, Syria, Yemen, Burma, now the Ukraine – take your pick.

To single out one typical event, in 1995 the Serbs murdered more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica, the UN-declared safe zone. As the genocidal massacre went on, UN troops were looking on in sheer impotence.

What is the UN actually for, other than providing sinecures for bureaucrats superfluous in their own countries? It’s nothing but a talking shop, with most of the talk being anti-Western invective. The UN has no legal or moral authority, and venting anti-Israeli vitriol seems to be its principal raison d’être.

Israel is an easy target because she is the focus of two pet hatreds prevalent among UN members: Muslim (and other) anti-Semitism and anti-Western, anti-capitalist animus. And if Israel is the target, the UN is the firing range.

If there were any justice in the world, that malignant organisation would be kicked out of New York and Geneva and moved to, say, Kashmir or Ramallah. All civilised nations would walk away, leaving the UN to its own devices: sputtering spittle at Israel and other Western countries – and supporting itself by its own fundraising in Central Africa.

Alas, there is no justice in the world, so those beasts will continue to bite the hand that feeds them: all those capitalists profiting from genocide.

Sarah Vine, poor Michael Gove’s ex, loves what Glastonbury used to be and hates what it has become: “It’s not really a music festival at all, despite the line-up. It’s just a sprawling outdoor echo chamber for a self-selecting group of champagne socialists.”

True. And Miss Vine ought to be commended for the expert flogging she administers to that loathsome, hypocritical group, especially the celebs within it.

For all their bleating about the environment, they turn Glastonbury into a helipad housing fleets of choppers. Those ecowarriors don’t mind paying £13,950 for a return ticket to fly to the festival from London in one of those carbon-spewing monsters.

Nor are they really music lovers: “Hardly anyone’s there for the music any more, sometimes not even the musicians,” writes Miss Vine. “Everyone has an agenda. And it’s always tediously Left-wing.”

The article is well-written and makes good, poignantly phrased points. However, as I reach up to doff my non-existent hat, my hand stops in mid-air. You see, I have a need to ask not only ‘What?’ but also ‘Why?’.

‘Why’ questions tend to uncover causality links: events setting other events in train, ideas causing a chain reaction, social and cultural trends developing to their natural conclusion. A lifelong exercise of such inquisitiveness has led me to believe that, if something ends up unspeakably rotten, some rot had to be there from the beginning.

Miss Vine clearly doesn’t think along such lines, which is why she waxes nostalgic for the wonderful early days of Glastonbury:

“Remember when festivals were just about having fun and listening to some great music? When the acts went on stage and did their thing, for better or worse, and then just headed back to the trailer to pass out with a couple of accommodating groupies and a bottle or two of Jack Daniel’s?”

Listening? Great? Music? Oh, come off it. If we refer to pop excretions as great music, then what terms do we reserve for Mozart and Beethoven?

Performers at Glastonbury and other such gangbangs have never played any music. They’ve merely screamed the shamanistic chants of an anomic cult, satisfying not an aesthetic need but a thirst for a quasi-religious experience expressed in orgiastic terms.

If you don’t believe me, just gauge the audience’s response to that pop din. When real music is played, people listen in silence. Sometimes, when it’s played exceptionally well, the listeners have tears in their eyes. When the music stops, they applaud.

I’ve been to concerts of some of the best musicians in history, yet never once did I see the audience at places like Carnegie Hall or Salle Pleyel jump up and down, screaming hysterically while the music was played, with the women throwing their knickers and/or bras at the performers. Yet this sort of behaviour is expected and encouraged at pagan orgies like Glastonbury.

That’s not how you listen to music, chaps. That’s how you dance around a totem pole, whipping yourself to orgasmic frenzy. And if music elicits this sort of response, it isn’t music. It’s something entirely different.

Miss Vine’s tender recollections of Glastonbury as it was in her youth bring to mind the French playwright Emile Augier, who in 1855 coined the phrase nostalgie de la boue, which can be loosely translated as my title above.

That sort of ‘music’ was exactly the same in 1970 as it is in 2025. Perhaps back then there was a smidgen more musical content in those pagan rites, something missing altogether these days.

In fact, traces of swing or rhythm and blues, primitive music but music still, are prominent in the output of the early pop stars, such as Elvis Presley or Chuck Berry. But even in those salad days of rock ‘n roll, music played second fiddle to the cult. Presley in particular became a Christ-like figure, even acquiring aspects of resurrection after his death.

This religious-surrogate aspect of pop became particularly prominent with the Beatles who started out as singers of cute little songs and ended up as false prophets, cult leaders of a civilisation gone to pot, in more ways than one.

Somewhere along the way they acquired the help of musically trained assistants, so their later records display competent harmonies and even direct quotes from real composers, including Bach and Beethoven. Paradoxically, it is precisely in their late albums that music, even at its most primitive, no longer mattered.

No one listened to it any longer anyway. Instead, hysterical audiences of youngsters were hanging on to every garbled word of the semiotic message they discerned behind the expertly harmonised pulse. Unlike real music, the Beatles had no spiritual content as such.

Theirs was a glossocratic appeal, the marching orders screamed by a victorious modernity. In some extreme cases, the orders were literally understood and faithfully followed.

Charlie Manson and his ‘family’ went on a rampage of horrific murders partly as a result of the message they had perceived in the songs of The White Album. Charlie, aka ‘Jesus Christ’, claimed he was in extrasensory communication with his gods, John and Paul. Perhaps he was at that, for he heard nothing in the music of the Beatles that wasn’t there.

While the Beatles still tried to preserve a semblance of musicality, their followers have abandoned any such attempts. More and more, pop began to acquire overtly satanist characteristics. More and more, it began to appeal not just to the darker side of human nature but to the sulphuric swamp splashing underneath it.

The appeal continued to be quasi-religious, in the same sense in which the antichrist is the negative image of Christ. While Jesus redeemed his followers by dying on the cross, the messengers of the new god would commit suicide or else die of alcoholism, drug overdose or in due course AIDS. Improbably, they were all portrayed as innocent victims of some unidentified enemy who, contextually, could only be ‘the establishment’.

In the process, pop has become a big business, perhaps the biggest of all. Illiterate, tone-deaf adolescents can become billionaires overnight, provided they can tickle the naughty bits of their mass audiences in a particularly effective way.

They belch their anti-capitalist invective all the way to the capitalist bank, and many critics sneer at the alleged paradox. Yet none exists. The drug-crazed pop stars simply demonstrate the nature of modern business activity.

Businessmen no longer sell products. They create markets and sell brands. They slap together sub-cultures. They fuse the markets and the sub-cultures into a uniform whole. In this case, pop music is only a part, although the most important one, of what passes for the modern ethos.

It is the heart of the new glossocratic Leviathan whose tentacles are numerous and ever-reaching. Pornography, fashion, show business, a great part of the publishing and record industries, electronic media including the Internet, drugs – all reach for the immature hearts and minds of the modern young.

It was Prof. Allan Bloom who in his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind commented on the unprecedented importance music had assumed in modern times. All his students seemed to define their personalities in terms of pop music. Music was ever present in the background of people’s lives; it was their philosophy, their love, their secret, their true essence.

Above all, ‘music’ provided food for the ogre of modernity: anomie, an aggressive attack on social, moral, cultural and political norms. This is the essence of the dominant sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll culture of modernity.

The central element of that triad is ubiquitous. That deafening, incoherent, electronically enhanced noise can be neither produced nor listened to without one’s mind being addled by narcotics.

“A bottle or two of Jack Daniel’s”? Seriously, Miss Vine? What about mainlining heroin, popping Ecstasy, freebasing cocaine, smoking meth? Or, in your day, puffing on weed and snorting the odd line of coke?

Memory does play tricks on people no longer in the first flush of youth. Yet the kind of ‘music’ played at Glastonbury is and always has been an extension of the pharmaceutical industry more than anything else.

The drugs go in and out of fashion, the chants change words. But the inspiring animus never changes: hatred of the West as it now is and especially of the Christendom that it used to be.

Muck is always muck, and Glastonbury has always been “tediously Left-wing”. It’s nothing to feel nostalgic about.