Author: Alexander Boot

If the country in question is the Ukraine, the answer is simple: accept Trump’s proposal for ending the war with Russia.

No Ukrainian president this side of the Russian agent Yanukovych could accept that deal without being rightly branded a traitor. Zelensky certainly won’t, and neither would any opposition leader baying for his blood.

Trump has gone President Wilson twice better: the latter only had a 14-point plan for post-war peace. Trump’s plan has 28, but then the Donald thinks on a large scale.

There is another difference: the war that prompted Woodrow Wilson into action had a clear-cut winner, the Entente, and a woeful loser, Central Powers. Europe was thoroughly exhausted by the war, her armies exsanguinated and demob-happy, her spirit broken.

In the current case, the situation is different. The Ukraine has heroically limited the Russian aggressor to only marginal gains for almost four years, and the country is still fighting and hurting Russia all over her territory.

I submit that no one but a Russian agent – whether de facto or de jure is irrelevant – could come up with those 28 points, which the Ukraine would rather die than accept. They include the surrender of the Donbas, including the parts of it that the Russians have been unable to capture in 11 years of fighting, and the abandonment of the fortified line of defence the Ukraine has constructed.

Trump has put a property-developer’s spin on that idea, in that the Ukraine would retain the legal ownership of the area, charge rent and act as the absentee landlord to Russian invaders. What would happen if the tenants were late with the rent, say by a year or two? Would the Ukraine be expected to evict them?

That would be hard to do because the Ukraine is also expected to halve the size of her army, relinquish her long-range weapons currently wreaking havoc on Russia’s energy infrastructure and decline any Western assistance.

In exchange, the US would offer some unspecified security guarantees, doubtless ones as iron-clad as the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. It was in exchange for those guarantees that the Ukraine gave up her nuclear weapons, and we know how brilliantly that has worked out.

Some other points are cultural. The Ukraine would be obligated to accept Russian as a state language and welcome back the ecclesiastical extension of the FSB, the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church, currently banned.

Incidentally, our papers misled their readers by suggesting that it was the ROC as such that is banned in the Ukraine. That’s simply false, and it’s up to you to decide whether this falsehood springs from bad faith or, more likely, ignorance. The ROC is a house with many mansions, and the FSB Patriarchate is only one of them.

When it was still active in the Ukraine, it was involved in a massive propaganda effort for the benefit of its sponsor. No sane country would have tolerated such a malignant presence in wartime. Still, the current coverage constitutes progress: a few years ago our papers led their readers to believe that all Eastern Rite confessions were ousted from the Ukraine, or perhaps all Christianity altogether.

Another falsehood widely peddled is that the Russian language is banned in the Ukraine. It’s true that official business is transacted in Ukrainian, but Russian is still widely used and its users aren’t harassed. I can testify to that: every day I follow Ukrainian analysts and podcasters, all of whom speak a Russian as good as mine, or even better for being more current.

Since Putin’s first objective in this war is expunging the Ukraine’s sovereignty, it’s easy to see that each of those 28 points will do much to advance that goal and nothing to thwart it. If that ‘peace’ plan were accepted, Russia would catch her breath for a few months, replenish her arsenal, beef up her army and come again, rolling over the Ukraine’s enfeebled and disarmed rump forces.

Putin’s first objective would be accomplished; the Ukraine would exist only as a Russian protectorate, not a sovereign state. It would be time for the Russians to take the next step, attacking a NATO country. That’s what fascist aggressors do when they sense weakness: they pounce.

I call this a Trump plan, but that’s not quite accurate. The president so far hasn’t endorsed that travesty, leaving it for his envoy Steve Witkoff and his Russian counterpart to thrash out the details. Now, the only way for Witkoff to be more closely allied with Russia would be to prance around in an FSB uniform, complete with a general’s insignia.

The poor man may not even be aware of how he comes across. His sole qualification for the job is a long career in property development and friendship with his colleague, Trump. He knows how to say “The same deal I’d give my own mother I’m gonna give you”, but I doubt that geopolitics had ever detained him for long before he got perhaps the world’s most important diplomatic job.

It’s still possible, I’d even say likely, that Trump will disavow his envoy after Zelensky tells him exactly where he can put those 28 points. The Donald is smart enough to leave himself an out, and he may need one.

The position of both presidents, Ukrainian and American, can’t be properly understood without the background of two scandals, one each.

Some high-ranking energy officials in the Ukraine have been caught in massive corruption, at the time when many Ukrainian cities are left without power, when those Ukrainians who aren’t dying at the front are donating their last pennies to the war effort.

A scandal of that magnitude has to rebound on Zelensky, even though there is no evidence of his involvement. More important, it gives the Russians and their stooges the world over the pretext to say that no aid should be sent to a country where it’s likely to be purloined, ending up in fat offshore accounts.

Granted, the Ukraine is as corrupt as any former Russian colony in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe – although much less corrupt than Russia herself. Russia is run by an OCG (organised crime group) made up of the FSB/KGB and assorted mafias. As such, it’s corrupt ontologically, and the only way to change that is to throw the ruling gang out and start afresh.

The Ukraine is corrupt not at her core but at its periphery, which she has proved by flashing the corrupt officials out after a thorough investigation. In any case, we ought to support the Ukraine not because she is a paragon of virtue but because a) she is a budding democracy, a pro-Western country and our friend, b) she is a victim of brutal aggression making a mockery of international law and c) she is fighting against an evil power that wishes to subjugate not only her but the rest of Europe as well.

Still, the scandal has made Zelensky’s position a bit shaky, meaning that under no circumstances can he accept the terms of surrender dictated by Putin and transmitted by Witkoff. He’d be branded a traitor and put in the slammer faster than you could say abuse of power.

The other relevant scandal involves the Epstein files, which Trump has magnanimously agreed to release knowing he didn’t have the congressional votes to stop them. I don’t know what is or isn’t in those files, but their contents doesn’t really matter.

We’ll find out within 30 days, but meanwhile rumours are rife that Epstein transferred to the Russians some compromising information on Trump, what the Russians call kompromat. That has strengthened the hand of those detractors that have been claiming all along that Putin has something on Trump to make him toe the line.

Whether or not that is so makes no difference. The very fact that such a possibility is mooted means that Trump can ill-afford to ram Witkoff’s blackmailing terms down Zelensky’s throat. If he did so, the ghost of Epstein would emerge from his grave and point an accusing finger at Trump – there, Donald, I knew all along you were a Russian agent.

All things considered, the Witkoff deal looks like a non-starter, but appearances may well be deceptive. What seems to be certain is that Putin is broadening his subversive operations to include NATO countries.

The other day, his operatives blew up the railway line in East Poland that carries much of the military aid to the Ukraine. Bizarrely, 40 per cent of the Poles blamed the Ukraine for that sabotage, which strikes me as counterintuitive. Why would the Ukraine cut off her own blood supply?

Then it turned out that the two saboteurs involved were indeed Ukrainian nationals, which added more grist to the mill of the country’s enemies. That’s ridiculous: there is no shortage of pro-Putin Russophile, Russophone Ukrainians happy to do Putin’s dirty work. Recruiting such traitors is a doddle for a country run by career KGB officers.

It is, however, reasonably clear that this crime will only be the first in a series of other acts of sabotage aimed at communicating to Europeans that, if they want to live in peace, they should throw the Ukraine under the bus. I’m sure the Polish government will stand firm – the Poles know exactly what to expect from the Russians.

I’m not so sure about the American government or indeed ours. Wait and see is all I can suggest. But make no mistake about it: if that fascist juggernaut rolling out of Russia isn’t stopped by force, God only knows how far it will go.

The first group to be exterminated needs no introduction: you all know that homophobia has been moving up the list of the most serious crimes for years.

Unlike other serious crimes, this one is defined broadly, covering the whole range between physical assault and simply quoting Leviticus or Romans in public. At either end of the range, the offender can expect no mercy – he’ll definitely lose something: his job definitely, his family probably, his liberty possibly.

Nor can such a villain expect to remain undetected. If he quotes St Paul at his most offensive in public, at least one listener will shop him to the authorities. That’s what civic virtue demands – we must all protect society from those seeking to undermine it.

But I bet you’ve never heard of gumphobia, and I don’t blame you. I’ve just coined this word for the same reason words are ever coined: new concepts, in this case forensic ones, demand new words.

You may be perplexed: ‘phobia’ means inordinate fear, and you’ve never heard anyone scream with horror at the sight of chewing gum. Wince squeamishly, maybe, but not scream.

Let’s kick etymology into the long grass, shall we? Someone citing Romans 1: 18-34 isn’t necessarily scared of homosexuals either, which doesn’t prevent him from being tarred with the homophobic brush.

Now that, following the advice of great rhetoricians, we’ve established the terms, let’s see the context.

John Wright, 54, spent 10 years teaching physics at Marlborough College, one of our top public schools. His professional record was spotless, which is probably why he was chosen to accompany his pupils on a school trip to Singapore and Malaysia. (You understand that parents able to pay school fees of £60,000 a year could afford the airfare.)

Both countries have laws that don’t exist in Britain: Singapore bans chewing gum, while Malaysia criminalises homosexuality. Commenting on those laws, Mr Wright summed them up in a terse alliterative phrase: “No gum, no gays”.

That blatant display of gumphobia (you can thank me for learning a new word) and homophobia (not to mention racism) couldn’t go unpunished. You’ll be relieved to know that it didn’t.

One pupil identified the offence for what it was and, doubtless with his parents’ blessing, dutifully reported Mr Wright to the headmaster. The transgressor was summarily sacked, with no elaborate inquiry deemed necessary.

According to a colleague, the racist gumphobic homophobe had some previous: “He said some other things, but none as bad as that. John was a lovely teacher and friend. He was known for making flippant comments and would often do that in front of pupils and senior teachers. But he didn’t mean any offence, it was just him being cheeky and silly.”

How naïve can one get? Britain is rapidly turning into a Marxist state, and in such countries joking is no laughing matter. But it’s good to know where the line is drawn: none of Mr Wright’s “cheeky and silly” wisecracks had been as bad as his seemingly innocuous “no gum, no gays”.

So it was for that verbal crime that he lost his job and any prospects of getting another one. He also lost his life: unable to handle the blow, the teacher hanged himself.

I’ve seen it all before in the country I left, hoping never to see it again. Not only did I observe it in the Soviet Union, but I myself suffered a similar fate, although self-evidently without killing myself.

Before emigrating, I had taught English literature at a specialised school and, part time, the art of translation at university. I lost both jobs because some of my charges did their civic duty and reported me to the administration.

The literature course included the Angry Young Men, English novelists of the 1950s. John Braine’s book Room at the Top was the flagship of that movement, and I recommended it for the reading list, as the curriculum required. Alas, that novel contained a few sex scenes, mild even by the standards of that time, never mind ours.

Still, when the parents of one pupil espied him reading that capitalist filth, they informed the administration that I was purveying pornography. Since I had already been reprimanded for making sly anti-Soviet remarks, the headmistress kindly gave me the option of resigning, so that she wouldn’t have to contact the KGB.

At the university, a student asked me about Finno-Ugric languages, and I explained that the most prominent users of that group were Finland and Hungary. They must have been the same people in the distant past, I said. But then they split up, and today one half lives God knows where, and the other God knows how.

Since Hungary was a fellow communist state, that little bon mot was reported up the line, spelling the end of my academic career. In Marxist countries, words are deeds.

It also works the other way, just about. When jokes are criminalised, we know we live in a Marxist state or, if you’d rather, a fascist one – distinction without a difference.

Marxist states may be carnivorous like the Soviet Union or relatively vegetarian like Britain, but both can kill. Back in the old country, not everyone of the millions murdered by the regime was executed, starved to death or sent to the uranium mines. Many died of strokes or heart attacks caused by public persecution and vilification, or fear of becoming an unemployable pariah.

Informing on friends, family and colleagues wasn’t just encouraged – it was demanded as a sacred civic duty. Failure to do so was itself a crime — the Russians referred to the appropriate law as “knew but didn’t tell”.

People responded in their millions, denouncing anyone uttering an incautious word or simply rolling his eyes when a sanctified name was uttered. Semiotic irreverence was as bad as the semantic kind.

Those denounced would be shot at the nearest wall under Lenin, tried and either executed or imprisoned under Stalin, turned into non-persons under the subsequent chieftains. Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Pasternak all died before their time as a result of public demonisation.

(Of the Big Four of Soviet pre-war poetry, only Mandelstam died in a concentration camp. Tsvetayeva killed herself after her husband and son perished in the purges; Akhmatova was silenced for decades; so was Pasternak, who died to the accompaniment of thunderous attacks in the press.)

Parallels with today’s Britain are screaming to be heard. Is anyone listening?

The differences from the Soviet Union are receding into the background, whereas the similarities are moving into the forefront. Our list of punishable offences isn’t exactly the same, but that’s immaterial.

Marxist regimes are glossocratic, using words to bully the population. What kind of words doesn’t really matter – they are simply the wires pulled to move the puppets. In the Soviet Union, one could get in trouble for implying that communist countries are impoverished; in Britain, the mandated code is different.

But the primary reason for it is exactly the same: the ruling elite putting its foot down on the throat of a supine populace.

Neither the little scum who denounced  Mr Wright nor his parents, who probably egged him on, were truly offended by that “no gum, no gays” comment.

Nevertheless they felt obliged to act that way because totalitarian glossocracy demands not only benign acquiescence but active demonstrations of loyalty. Once glossocratic simulacra of ethics are accepted as real, those on the receiving end leave actual reality and enter a virtual world, one in which old certitudes no longer apply.

But our despots who use wokery as herd-controlling bullwhips will end up whipping themselves. As their scourges crack all over the land, people are fleeing in horror and disgust.

Last year, 257,000 people fled the country, and this year we may expect double that number. Those fugitives are the kind of people who generate much of our tax revenue, use private medicine – and pay exorbitant fees at public schools, such as Marlborough.

I suspect that most of those people have left for strictly economic reasons, but many also cite their revulsion at emetic wokery and the climate of fascistic tyranny it produces.

Public schools are struggling to find pupils, and most they do manage to recruit come from places like China. And, during my current tour of London’s private hospitals, I’m amazed to see empty waiting rooms. Squeezed by Marxist despotism, Britons can no longer afford private education and medicine, and those who can are running away in droves.

Things are only going to get worse – they don’t call Left-wing tyranny progressive for nothing. People who today lose their jobs for disloyalty to woke glossocracy, may lose their liberty tomorrow, and their lives the day after.

Or, as John Wright so tragically showed, we may not have to wait that long. RIP.

It wouldn’t be a gross exaggeration to say that Donald Trump is a litigious man.

He sues at the drop of a hat and, according to those who used to do business with him, doesn’t mind being sued. They testify that “Sue me” was his stock response to any disagreement, especially when he was in the wrong and dealing with opponents whose pockets weren’t as deep as his.

Many took Trump at his word. Between 1973 and 2016, he and his businesses fought over 4,000 legal cases in federal and state courts, including battles with casino patrons, million-dollar property lawsuits, personal defamation lawsuits and over 100 business tax disputes.

I don’t know whether this amounts to a world record, but one thing is indisputable: Trump knows his way around courthouses. That’s why his threat to sue the BBC for up to $5 billion ought to be taken seriously.

The bone of contention is a BBC Panorama broadcast in which Trump’s 2021 speech was cut and pasted to make it sound as if he urged his supporters to march on the Capitol and “fight like hell”. Edited out was a section where Trump told his fans to demonstrate peacefully.

When Trump screamed bloody murder, or rather “reputational and financial harm”, the BBC apologised for that “error of judgement”, promised never to air the episode again, but refused to offer compensation. Hence the lawsuit may be on, making the questions in the title above relevant.

The UK’s one-year deadline to bring a defamation suit expired long ago. That’s why Trump said he’d file “someplace in the US”, probably Florida.

That means American criteria, more restrictive for plaintiffs than in Britain, will apply, and the BBC has already laid out its line of defence.

Trump would need to prove that the content aired was factually wrong and defamatory; that he suffered harm as a result; and that the BBC knew the video was false and hence acted with “actual malice”. According to the Beeb’s lawyers, he’d be on a losing wicket.

First, since the episode didn’t run anywhere in the US, it couldn’t possibly harm Trump. Second, it demonstrably didn’t harm Trump since he was elected anyway. Third, there was no malice involved, just the innocuous desire to shorten the speech.

I’m not qualified to judge the legal niceties involved, but on a purely logical level those arguments appear weak.

First, there is something touchingly retro about the BBC’s claim that whatever is aired in the UK can’t be watched in the US. Surely the Corporation must be aware of the Internet, YouTube, social media and other such newfangled innovations?

Second, reputational damage to a public figure acting on the global stage is real no matter where it was suffered. Even assuming that no Americans saw the show, Trump’s ability to negotiate with, say, other NATO members may be diminished if he is seen as a chap who tried to foment insurrection in a democratic country.

That he was elected anyway is God’s own truth, but that’s like saying that firing a gun at a man is perfectly fine as long as he doesn’t die of his wounds.

As for ideologically inspired malice, I don’t know how hard it is to prove. However, I could take a decent shot at showing that the BBC is a consistent mouthpiece of Left-wing propaganda and, as such, loathes everything Trump stands for. And surely a professional news organisation could have shortened Trump’s speech without making him sound like the Pancho Villa of DC?

At the time the show aired, various ‘liberal’ media were flogging the idea that Trump sought to undermine democracy by having his fanatical stormtroopers take over the Capitol, oust the elected representatives, lynch Biden and install Trump as dictator.

Against that noisy background, the BBC’s “error of judgement” takes on a different dimension, that of besmirching the reputation of a presidential candidate and branding him for ever as an aspiring dictator. This doesn’t strike me as a particularly hard point to argue logically if not forensically, but I did say I’m no legal expert.

If I were the BBC, I’d launch a different defence, either in addition to the points it has made already or instead of them. My defence would pivot on connotation, not denotation – not only the literal meaning of Trump’s words but also the likely inference his fans took out.

Knowing as I do some MAGA fanatics personally, they were likely to suffer from selective hearing. When Trump said something to the effect of “let’s march on the Capitol, demonstrate peacefully and fight like hell”, they probably didn’t hear the middle entreaty or else thought Trump didn’t really mean it.

When Henry II said to no one in particular “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”, he might not have meant that the knights within earshot should ride down to Canterbury and murder Becket. But they did anyway.

For four years, from 2020 to 2024, Trump was screaming at anyone willing to listen, and quite a few of those who weren’t, that the Democrats had stolen the 2020 election from him. Regardless of whether or not that was true, his shrieks injected enough electricity into the air to galvanise his fanatical supporters into action – even against his explicit wishes.

This is a reminder of something that’s obvious to me: the style of politics is as important as its substance – and the style can nullify the substance. That’s why I demur whenever Trump is described as a conservative.

He isn’t. He is a Right-wing radical who promotes some conservative ideas. Apart from his madcap urge to wage a trade war on the world, most of his domestic policies strike me as sound. I wish we could borrow some of them, such as his struggle against wokery, net zero idiocy and illegal immigration.

But in promoting his conservative policies, Trump displays his anti-conservative traits, which I fear may eventually undermine his initiatives by causing an equally radical Left-wing reaction.

There is no doubt that America, along with every other Western nation, is badly in need of conservative reforms. But if such reforms are to have a lasting value beyond any short-term gains, they ought to be introduced in a conservative way: incrementally, prudently and, if possible, quietly.

Trump is incapable of any such moderation. His natural language is that of tasteless, loudmouthed demagoguery, which makes people want to disagree with him even when they think he makes sense. That sort of politicking divides the population into friends and foes, two extremes who are always at daggers drawn.

Trump’s political style exposes him to the same dangers that proved the undoing of many other radical movements. They tend to attract fire-eating zealots who put their minds on hold and respond to shamanistic shrieks, not so much to the underlying arguments.

Demagogues like Trump exude powerful energy that whips up fanaticism in his supporters, turns politics into a cult, and even solid ideas into mere slogans one can scream at the top of one’s voice.

Before long, MAGA, like many other radical movements in the past, will break up into three factions: those who think it’s too radical, those who think it isn’t radical enough, and those who think it’s radical in a wrong way. That fate befell all other revolutions, and a revolution is what Trump is undertaking.

French, Russian and Nazi German revolutionaries, having got rid of the offensive establishment (‘deep state’ in MAGA speak), started to kill one another. Once the genie of radicalism is let out of its bottle, it’ll refuse to go back in. (It’s only on this issue that I equate Trump with those others, by the way.)

That’s the kind of atmosphere Trump has created in what Americans call their conservative movement, and one can already see MAGA fracturing. The signs are everywhere: the breakup between Trump and Musk, the bitter clashes between the late Charlie Kirk and Nicholas Fuentes, the apostasy of Marjorie Taylor Greene.

And of course the passions of the loathsome Left are running as febrile as those of the righteous Right – this is the common ground on which all radicals converge. In the process, enough electricity has been generated in the political atmosphere to heat up debate for a generation at least.

It’s against that background that I’d launch the BBC’s defence if I were its lawyer. I don’t know whether it would carry the day, and I suspect the BBC can win without my help. But I hope Trump sues and the BBC loses.

That organisation consistently violates its Royal Charter, which states that “The Mission of the BBC is to act in the public interest, serving all audiences through the provision of impartial, high-quality and distinctive output and services which inform, educate and entertain.” Impartial? High-quality? Distinctive? Instead of informing and educating, the BBC brainwashes and indoctrinates.

Trump will never collect the astronomical sums he mentions even if he wins, but if he manages to pin the BBC’s ears back, he’ll be doing us all a service. Good luck to him – even if his taste in interior decoration runs towards the aesthetic excellence of a Turkish bordello.

(No, Penelope, I’ve never been to one; this is just a figure of speech.)

After that libellous, incendiary comic opera Princess Ida was accidentally allowed to appear on the London stage, the Crown Prosecution Service brought criminal charges against the librettist, W.S. Gilbert.

The trial concluded the other day at the Old Bailey, and the jury convicted the defendant unanimously. If any member of the panel harboured doubts about Mr Gilbert’s guilt, these were put to rest by Crown Prosecutor, I.M. Wokeman KC.

In addition to securing a conviction, his closing remarks have such a far-reaching instructive value that I hope you’ll appreciate their significance.

M’lud, ladies and gentlemen, you sit in judgement of the ophidian writer W.S. Gilbert who, together with his accomplice Arthur Sullivan, committed heinous and, dare I say it, subversive crimes against everything we all hold dear.

Acting with malice aforethought, the defendant penned a comic opera Princess Ida, a seditious scribble that, dare I say it, besmirches the very foundations of British society.

You may suggest, however meekly, that the defendant exercised his right to free speech and that, moreover, satire doesn’t always constitute a crime against the Crown and, dare I say it, everything we hold dear.

However, I submit that certain values are so sacred that they must be held beyond the reach of satire, malicious or otherwise. We no longer live in the Dark Ages of old Europe, when Messrs Boccaccio, Rabelais, Voltaire and, dare I say it, Swift poked fun at the Church, Christian doctrine and, dare I say it, God who, as Dr Darwin proved conclusively, doesn’t exist.

No, ladies and gentlemen, I submit that our progressive time must ring-fence certain subjects, keeping them sacrosanct and not open to libellous scribbles, such as those of Mr Gilbert.

His Princess Ida launches a vicious attack on such subjects, including but not limited to feminism, women’s education and Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, that bedrock of our education and, dare I say it, society.

In broad strokes, the opera depicts a war between the sexes, or rather genders, as they must be appropriately called. I beg the court’s indulgence to allow me to remind you of the plot.

The eponymous princess founds a women’s university, where female persons are taught that they are superior to men in that, unlike men, they don’t descend from apes. When the princess was an infant, she was betrothed to Prince Hilarion, himself an infant, and I know that the paedophiliac subtext didn’t escape the court’s attention.

Now an adult, the prince and his two friends sneak into the university to claim Hilarion’s bride. They disguise themselves as women but are found out, which leads to the aforementioned war of the sexes, nay genders.

You’ve heard Mr Gilbert’s fulsome assurances that, rather than poking fun at the simian descent of man, he himself is a Darwinian. That may be, ladies and gentlemen, but his is an heretical brand of Darwinism, one that reaches wrong and, dare I say it, subversive conclusions.

This heresy originates with Herbert Spencer, the next case in your docket, m’lud. He egregiously denied that the two genders are equal, and only allowed that genders are two in number, thereby underestimating by two orders of magnitude.

According to Dr Spencer, women expend so much energy in childbirth that their brains never reach “the latest product of human evolution”, namely abstract reasoning. Therefore, higher education and the mental effort involved therein disrupt reproductive processes, eventually consigning personkind to extinction.

It’s from that misogynistic premise that the defendant saw fit to satirise feminism. His Princess Ida facetiously says that “man is nature’s sole mistake”, whereas a woman occupies a higher rung on the evolutionary ladder  (“A lady fair of lineage high”).

This, dare I say it, is an old trick of libellous satire, putting in the mouth of the satirised object a grossly exaggerated statement of his position, thereby leading to vicious mockery thereof. To that end, the defendant concocted the notion of Darwinian Man, essentially still an ape:

“For the Maiden fair, whom the monkey craved,/ Was a radiant Being,/ With a brain far-seeing – / While a man, however well-behaved,/ At best is only a monkey shaved.”

I’d like, if I may, to remind you, ladies and gentlemen, of Exhibit 1, the defendant’s pictorial illustration to his scandalous and, dare I say it, subversive text. It shows said Darwinian Man, still an ape, wooing his princess, and I know that you unfailingly detected the vicious, vindictive and, dare I say it, subversive mockery conveyed by that caricature.

I submit, ladies and gentlemen, that Princess Ida is a sexist, misogynistic, evolution-denying and generally subversive play that belittles the very foundations of our society and makes mockery of its sacred values, thereby undermining those foundations.

Yes, it’s only a satire, but I submit it does more damage than such crimes as burglary, robbery and, dare I say it, murder, which puts it on the par with transphobia, homophobia and global warming denial.

I am second to none, ladies and gentlemen, in upholding freedom of speech, even, dare I say it, satirical speech. But any decent society ought to draw a line that no satire must be allowed to overstep. Princess Ida, however, not only oversteps that line but erases it altogether.

For these reasons, I ask you to find the defendant guilty as charged. And I hope, m’lud, that you will impose a lengthy custodial sentence, which alone could constitute punishment commensurate with the crime.

At that point, I woke up with a jolt. That nightmarish dream was so realistic that it took me almost a minute to realise it wasn’t indeed reality. Just to make sure, I had to check the dates to verify that Princess Ida was first produced in 1884, not 2025.

If Sigmund Freud were still with us, he’d be able to interpret that dream. Without his help, I can’t even begin to figure out where such a phantasmagoria could have possibly come from. Nothing short of bizarre, that.

Tracing back the roots of today’s rampant atheism, many analysts believe that the rot set in with the Renaissance. I agree. By reviving the aesthetic standards of Hellenic antiquity, the artistic giants of that period also brought back the pagan sensibility animating Hellenic art.

Greek gods busily copulating with human women on the slopes of Mount Olympus began to demand equal pictorial time with Christian imagery. As a result, art soared to new heights of brilliance, whereas people’s perception of God plummeted to new depths of vulgarity.

Let’s illustrate this observation by juxtaposing three acknowledged masterpieces by that sublime Renaissance artist, Michelangelo. We’ll end up with the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel on one side and the two Pietàs, in Rome and Milan, on the other.

The one in the Vatican was finished, the one in Milan’s Sforza Castle wasn’t, but here’s an interesting thing about Michelangelo. His unfinished sculptures tend to be more moving.

The finished Slaves exhibited at the Louvre are perfect, so much so that they leave me appreciative, admiring even, but cold. By contrast, his unfinished slaves at Florence’s Accademia touch me deeply.

(I know this isn’t a valid criterion of art criticism, but after a lifetime of contemplating art I usurp the right to equate my emotional response with the object’s quality.)

The two Pietàs are different, in that both are heart-rending. But the one in Milan, on which Michelangelo worked until a few days before he died, conveys the tragic scene even more poignantly than the other sculpture does. Still, this isn’t the comparison relevant to my subject today.

Bracketing the two sculptures together, let’s then follow the ubiquitous herds of tourists and have a look at that celebrated ceiling. I’ll try to consider its substance, not form, although it’s worth mentioning that, though Michelangelo was one of history’s greatest sculptors, I don’t think he was one of history’s greatest painters.

Then again, while his sculptures are now exactly as he left them, that Sistine Chapel ceiling has been retouched, restored and generally altered so many times (the last time from 1984 to 1990) that it’s hard to know how far the present has deviated from the past.

Yet the subject-matter certainly hasn’t changed, and the Catholic Church endorsed it enthusiastically. The scenes depicted all over the Chapel, including The Creation of Adam, were accepted as appropriate, theologically sound illustrations of doctrine.

Personally, I could have done without the depiction of Adam’s flaccid penis, but Michelangelo never did manage to conceal his amorous predilections even when broaching sacred subjects. However, the real damage was done by his portrayal of God the Father.

Judaism bans graven images of any kind, and creating pictures of God was a stonable offence in Palestine. It was the Incarnation that made iconography possible.

After all, Jesus Christ lived as a man for thirty-odd years, and painting or sculpting men wasn’t seen as creating graven images. Jews, and to a large extent Protestants, never issued such licence, but the two Christian orthodoxies, Eastern and Western, encouraged religious images both in and out of church.

But not the images of God the Father. Christian artists avoided pictorial depictions of the Father throughout the first millennium. Gradually, some such portrayals began to crop up in late medieval art, but only in the Renaissance did artistic representations of God the Father gain wide currency. (The Russian Orthodox Church banned that practice in 1667, during the Great Schism.)

Had the Catholic Church been blessed with foresight, it would have nipped that tendency in the bud. But the Church didn’t anticipate the massive assault on Christianity throughout Europe in the centuries following the Renaissance. That’s why it inadvertently armed the attackers.

More and more the masses shifted towards times heathen by imagining God just as Michelangelo and his contemporaries depicted him, as a muscular old man with an unkempt beard. That was straight Hellenic paganism, except that God’s living quarters were moved from Mount Olympus to a fluffy cloud in the sky.

Fast-forward to 1961 and the hysterical festivities all over Russia on the occasion of Gagarin’s flight. I remember Khrushchev, habitually tipsy, screaming from the tribune of the Mausoleum in Red Square that Gagarin had gone 327 kilometres up into space and seen no God. No fluffy cloud, no shaggy beard – hence no God.

Unlike Newton, Khrushchev stood on the shoulders of dwarfs, not giants. One such dwarf was Lenin’s Commissar for the Enlightenment, Lunacharsky, who staged a debate with a pro-Soviet prelate who was a neurophysiologist by previous trade.

The debate was held at the Bolshoi and it was well attended. A crowd of Red Army soldiers with an average of two years of schooling cheered Lunacharsky on. So encouraged, he shrieked: “Where is your God? Who has ever seen him?!?” The audience roared its approval, but the bishop came up with a good retort.

“I’m not only a priest,” he said, “but also a neurophysiologist. In that capacity, I’ve often held a human brain in my hands. I touched it, I felt it, I saw it. But a mind I’ve never seen.”

Communist godlessness was an extreme manifestation of a widespread phenomenon: malignant anthropomorphism vulgarising God and leading directly to atheism, via neo-paganism. But both Lunacharsky and Khrushchev built on a tradition going back to the Renaissance.

Even such accomplished thinkers as Hume demanded proofs of God’s existence. Creating his notorious ‘fork’, Hume postulated that all justifiable beliefs fell into two categories: provable either by logic and mathematics or by empirical experience. Religion was neither. Ergo, God doesn’t exist.

Unlike Lunacharsky and Khrushchev, Hume wasn’t a vulgarian, but that thought was vulgar. A man can neither prove the existence of God nor comprehend him by definition. A higher system can understand a lower one, but not vice versa.

Had Hume known how to think about such matters, he’d have realised that God doesn’t exist. It’s because of God that everything else exists – God is an unfathomable, life-giving force that can only be worshipped but not understood. Even a mind as intricate as Hume’s was inadequate to that task.

Such is the orthodox Christian response to demands for the kind of proof one expects in a laboratory. However, an anthropomorphised God, that bearded old man on the cloud, acquires a physical shape, thereby adding validity to demands for physical proof, especially if such demands spring from atheistic zealotry.

Getting back to Michelangelo, could it be his metaphysical premise that explains why, to me, his two Pietàs are artistic triumphs and that anthropomorphised ceiling an artistic failure? The two sculptures depicted the depictable, whereas the fresco didn’t.

Michelangelo’s genius was better revealed in a different, three-dimensional medium. However, even a truly great painter, such as Leonardo, could only show what the eye could see. Had he been given the Vatican commission, Leonardo would have been as stymied.

No, it wasn’t all Michelangelo’s fault, I wrote that in jest. But some of it was – he and his colleagues pushed the button, and the countdown is rapidly approaching zero.

Before he died of cancer in 2001, Nigella Lawson’s first husband, the journalist John Diamond, had chronicled his demise in his newspaper column and then in a best-selling book.

Since I was suffering from the same disease at around that time, a different version but a similarly late stage, my publisher had a bright idea. Why don’t I do a John Diamond and write a book about my ordeal? Anything he could do, I could do better.

My reply “Absolutely not!” came before he finished that sentence, which proves that no prior thought was involved. It was a visceral reaction whose origin wasn’t intellectual but aesthetic. It was for considerations of taste that I turned down my shot at publishing stardom.

Now, I’m not a tight-lipped introvert who wouldn’t talk about his troubles even to friends and family. I admire such people, the salt of the English earth, but I’m not like them.

That’s why my family and friends knew exactly how my cancer progressed, if that’s the right word, and whether my “prognersis” remained as “puer” as my Scottish haematologist had declared in an upbeat tone and with a scary gleam in his eye.

(I hope my Scottish friends will forgive this attempt to reproduce their accent. That’s a notoriously hard task in writing.)

However, the thought of vouchsafing any such information, however sketchy, to all and sundry, complete strangers, was abhorrent to me – whatever the potential rewards.

But then regular visitors to this space know that I am a fossil, a troglodyte, perhaps a fossilised troglodyte. Time hasn’t just outpaced me but lapped me several times over.

Those who keep pace with modernity tend to be free of such old-fashioned inhibitions. Among many diseases afflicting today’s world, the pandemic of exhibitionism is perhaps the most pervasive.

Not just ‘celebrities’ but ordinary folk take to the social media to share urbi et orbi variously pornographic details and images of their lives. Some pornography is just old-fashioned exhibitionism: women and, incomprehensibly, men take full-frontal selfies of their bodies and put them on the net for universal delectation.

This is portrayed as pride in the human body, a feeling that animated antique art. Now, the Greeks had two words for pride, one of which was hubris. And it’s this kind, known as a deadly sin in some shrinking quarters, that our YouTube nudists suffer from.

Most of them fall short of the aesthetic standards established by Venus de Milo and Apollo Belvedere, but even those who don’t are still tasteless, narcissistic exhibitionists. Still, far be it from me to deny people the pleasure of ogling bared female flesh (the less said about bared male flesh, the better). Not all of us are lookers, but most of us are voyeurs.

Medical exhibitionism is much worse. If public nudism caters to instincts wired into our DNA, the medical kind appeals to morbid curiosity, or else to the spirit of ‘there but for the grace of God go I’ (with ‘God’ used strictly figuratively, as I hope you understand).

Even that isn’t so bad as the universal acceptance of such medical pornography as an honest, brave attempt to help others in the same boat. Chaps, you aren’t helping anybody. Medical help is provided by medical personnel, not by a bunch of self-centred exhibitionists raised in the belief that any private problem has a public appeal.

The underlying dishonesty is emetic, but by the looks of it not many people suffer from that reflex. Nor do they suffer from that rapidly disappearing condition: good taste. Just look at this excerpt from an article in today’s Mail:

“Yet in recent years, a selection of celebrities have bravely been sharing their deeply personal and often heartbreaking stories in order to help others. 

“Just this week, model Kelly Brook reflected on the heartbreak she faced when she suffered a miscarriage while six months pregnant. 

“And she isn’t alone in sharing her experience, with Lena Dunham revealing her pain at undergoing a double hysterectomy at just 31 years old, while Jennifer Aniston has detailed her 20-year battle to conceive.” 

I don’t know Miss Dunham from Adam or for that matter Eve, but I admit to having had impure thoughts about Jennifer and Kelly in the distant past. Hence, I’d suggest that, if those ladies have an unquenchable thirst for denuding themselves, they should stick to baring their bodies, not their souls. But only if they must.

Otherwise, I can’t imagine who in his right mind would care whether famous models and actresses are impenetrable, impregnable and inconceivable.

One would expect that mindless ‘celebrities’ (and most actors I’ve ever met were mindless – comes with the territory, I suppose) can’t realise how cosmically tasteless such medical striptease is. But that even our conservative papers should encourage that vulgarity is worrying.

P.S. Speaking of modernity’s madness, tastelessness and vulgarity, here’s a headline in today’s Times: “UK troops to be trained on ‘consent, misogyny and incel’ culture.”

Apparently, “unacceptable sexual behaviour” is rife in the military. Male soldiers routinely bang on the doors of their female comrades and demand sex. Fancy that: young men pursue young women with whom they share cloistered lives, who has ever heard of such indecency.

One has to assume that training in more traditional military subjects has been so successful that our defenders can spare the time for woke indoctrination, whose only conceivable outcome will be another tick on the DEI agenda.

The only reliable way to save female soldiers from harassment is not to have female soldiers, but I did tell you I am a fossil. Conscription could then plug the holes in numerical strength, with young ladies looking for other conduits to channel their patriotism.

Still, I’m grateful to that article for enlarging my vocabulary. Thanks to the author, I’ve learned a new word: ‘incel’. It stands for ‘involuntary celibacy’, in case you’re wondering. 

Consent of the governed is one of those political clichés that people utter without thinking. They refuse to go through the exercise I call ‘the art of the next question’.

In this case, the next question is: “Yes, but what does it actually mean?” The question isn’t rhetorical – I genuinely struggle with the concept.

And I’m sure many people must have felt the same during the centuries the term has been either used or alluded to. Quite a few centuries, actually.

Thus, for example, Tertullian (d. 240 AD), the first major theologian to write in Latin: “It is not enough that a law is just, nor that the judge should be convinced of its justice; those from whom obedience is expected should have that conviction too.”

Tertullian, however, didn’t express that attractive idea in political terms. That achievement had to wait until the Enlightenment that, among its other failings, sought to redefine the source of a government’s legitimacy.

As it did with everything, the Enlightenment replaced something concrete and time-proven with a freshly baked abstraction.

In the past, it was widely accepted that political power derived from some sort of hereditary claim, sometimes but not invariably expressed as the divine right of kings. People generally regarded dynastic rule as just and only rebelled when kings turned into tyrants.

However, words like ‘divine’ and ‘kings’ were repulsive to Enlightenment thinkers, starting with their guiding light, John Locke. Locke argued that a government is only ever lawful if the people agree to be governed.

They express that agreement in a social contract, thereby they consent to be governed in exchange for the state’s undertaking to protect their natural rights to “life, liberty and estate”. The first state constituted on Locke’s principles, the US, changed ‘estate’ to ‘happiness’ and protection to ‘pursuit’, which I don’t think was an improvement.

Still, like most abstract ideas, this sounds good in theory, but what does it mean in practice? Let’s leave the past for the present and look at Britain, circa 2025.

Starmer and his accomplices are running the country into the ground, which is now clear even to most people who voted Labour in last year. Starmer’s current approval ratings make him not only the most unpopular prime minister in British history, but even the least popular leader in today’s West.

Yet he won the election with a 174-seat majority, which is supposed to give him the mandate to reduce the country to a Third World status. By voting Labour, the people honoured their part of the social contract and agreed to be governed.

But how many people? I’m not going to compare our electoral system of first-past-the-post with proportional representation. Both have pluses and minuses, and in this world we aren’t blessed with perfect systems.

Still, it’s worth mentioning that Starmer got his mandate from only a third of those who exercised their right to vote (33.7 per cent, to be pedantic about it) and just over 20 per cent of the whole population. Neither I nor any of my friends nor, more important, almost 80 per cent of the people voted Labour, yet those who did expressed consent on our behalf. Does this strike you as odd? At all?

Labour’s vote share was the lowest any majority party has ever received on record, which makes it the least proportional winner in British history. Thus, if we use words in their real, rather than virtual, sense, consent of the governed was neither given nor really sought. A small minority sufficed.

Most people will just shrug their shoulders. This is the way the system works, live with it. Any system is bound to malfunction now and then, such is life.

The problem with this system is that it malfunctions not occasionally but invariably. The minority of those who feel entitled to give consent on behalf of the majority may at times be higher than in 2024, but it hardly ever gets to even 50 per cent.

Thus Thomas Jefferson was right substantively but not numerically when he wrote: “A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.” (Parenthetically, Americans who see Jefferson as a champion of their democracy ought to read what he actually wrote on the subject of what Aristotle called a “deviant constitution”.)

Fifty-one per cent? You wish. What about twenty? My point is that the very term ‘consent of the governed’ has glossocratic value but no other. The same goes for ‘social contract’, first mentioned by Hobbes if I’m not mistaken.

It’s not a real contract, is it? Any contract I’ve ever seen or signed had a cancellation clause, conditions under which it could be terminated. So how can the British people, most of whom realise they made a terrible mistake in 2024, withdraw their consent?

They could vote Labour out, but the next opportunity to do so will present itself in 2029. Once elected with a large parliamentary majority, a government can do as it pleases for five years. This brings back times olden, when a city taken by military assault was given over to the victorious soldiers for three days of rape and plunder.

In theory, a government could be driven out by a parliamentary vote of no confidence, but this isn’t going to happen when the majority is as high as it is now. If another general election were held today, most Labour MPs, including cabinet members, would lose their seats. Hence, anyone who thinks MPs could ever vote for their own political suicide shows a touching but misplaced trust in human goodness.

A revolution becomes the only choice. Not to cut too fine a point, by pushing their theory Hobbes and Locke were issuing a carte blanche to arbitrary violence as the only option for withdrawing ‘consent’ never given in the first place.

You may argue that, although it’s next to impossible to oust a particular government laying waste to the country, the social contract endorsing our system of governance remains valid.

This sounds even more preposterous. In effect, it means that a small minority of the population may issue consent not only on behalf of all their contemporaries, but also for the generations to come. So let’s say that, when the perpetrators of the Glorious Revolution agreed in 1688 to a certain constitutional arrangement, they effectively removed the right of the people to terminate the contract centuries later. Sounds illogical, doesn’t it?

A wise man once told me that, when there is always something wrong with the way a system works, there is probably something wrong with the system as such.

Yet anyone who these days suggests there may be something systemically wrong with democracy (‘consent of the governed’, ‘social contract’ and so on) is likely to hear Churchill’s pronouncement that: “Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

However, it’s useful to remember that Churchill’s view of democracy was formed in Victorian and Edwardian times, when only a third of the men and none of the women were qualified to vote.

Surely, Churchill’s less publicised statement, that “the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter” was closer to the truth, which is another example of a putative admirer of democracy either having second thoughts or not being such a fervent admirer in the first place.

You’ve doubtless noticed that my thinking on the subject contains more questions than answers. But then that’s the case with any serious thought on political subjects, as opposed to that dread word, ideology.

Talking about his tortuous journey to the truth of Christian orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton wrote: “I am that man who, with the utmost daring, discovered what had been discovered before.”

The International Olympic Committee could say the same thing, if less wittily and on a less momentous subject, ‘transgender women’ competing as women.

The IOC has finally discovered the pre-discovered fact that a) men have physical advantages over women, b) such advantages are physiologically innate, and therefore c) male and female athletes compete in separate events and should continue to do so.

The IOC reached these conclusions after a long, and doubtless expensive, scientific study, which makes me sad. All that time and money could have been saved if only the Committee had asked me first.

I could have told them for a fraction of the cost that men are naturally stronger, faster and more aggressive. Hence, even though professional athletes of both sexes go through the same training regimens, the men will win any direct confrontation.

Had I not been available, the Committee could have picked any random man or woman out of a crowd and got exactly the same reply – provided those respondents weren’t habitual Guardian readers.

If the sports administrators had still remained unconvinced, all they would have had to do was compare world records for men and women in the same sports. In the 100m dash, for example, the men’s record stands at 8.58 seconds, whereas, at 10.49, the women’s is almost two seconds slower.

What the Committee had difficulty getting its collective woke head around was that it was all nature, not nurture. Everything else being equal, XY chromosomes will beat XX every time – predictably and ineluctably.

The XY creature, otherwise known as a man, may call himself a woman or anything else he fancies. He may wear skirts without being Scottish, he may grow up to his parents’ chorus of “Who’s the gorgeous girl then?”, but he’ll remain a man in every characteristic relevant to sporting contests – even if some irrelevant characteristics have been lopped off.

That’s why every man taught in his youth that he shouldn’t beat women had to wince watching two burly chaps, Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting, pick up Olympic gold medals in women’s boxing last year.

I’d ban women’s boxing altogether, but those deaf to the difference between ‘equal’ and ‘the same’ insist that young ladies have a sacred right to bash one another’s brains out, destroying one another’s nasal cartilages, turning one another’s faces into scar tissue and courting breast cancer.

Fine, if they insist. But at least they shouldn’t offer their bodies as men’s punching bags.

If a man can’t resist the urge to punch a woman, he should do so in the privacy of his nuptial home, not in the boxing ring. However, if he does do that at his nuptial home, he may receive a prison sentence, not a gold medal. Yet last year’s Olympics allowed men to beat up women with impunity, which upset me.

Now the IOC finally seems to have seen the light. If rumours are to be believed, its new president, Kirsty Coventry, is going to impose a blanket ban on newfangled women in all sports. Better late than never and all that, but one has to suspect that geography had something to do with that change of heart.

The 2028 Olympics will be held in Los Angeles, when, barring accidents, Donald Trump will still be in the White House.

Say what you will about him, and I’ve said a fair amount, but he has no more time for wokery than I do. That’s why Trump has banned all XY athletes from competing in women’s events. Of course, a US president has no jurisdiction in international sports, but, knowing Trump’s truculent nature, he can make life difficult for the IOC should it continue to allow male violence against women.

Still, the IOC’s mind being more nuanced than Trump’s or mine, the Committee, while banning ‘transgender women’, still refers as ‘controversial’ to the issue of DSD (Differences of Sexual Development). This describes athletes who have male chromosomes but were raised as female. It was through this loophole that Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting climbed into the Olympic ring to abuse women.

My primitive mind operates in straight lines on this issue. An XY girl is a boy, not a tomboy. However that boy was brought up and whatever pronouns he favours, a boy he remains. If he wants to do professional sports, he should man up and compete against men.

While we are on the subject, I’ll climb farther out on a limb and point out that the relevant differences between men and women aren’t only physical but also psychological. And the psychological differences are largely predicated on the physical ones.

Numerous studies have shown an irrefutable link between testosterone and aggression. Thus, female mice injected with the male hormone began acting like males, doing the rodential equivalent of “Wha’ you lookin’ at, mate?” and attacking other mice.

And aggression is essential not only in such obvious sports as boxing, but in just about any confrontational activity, even chess. This is one reason only Judit Polgar has ever been able to compete with top male players (since I can’t afford a costly divorce, I shan’t mention some of the other reasons). This, though thousands of women play chess professionally and, in places like China, receive unlimited state support.

How times have changed since 1977, when Renée Richards (né Richard Raskind), a strong amateur player as a man, made it to the finals of the US Open women’s doubles, thereby proving it was possible to play tennis without balls.

That was a solitary such case at the time, and it caused a furore. Renée (the erudite Richard took that name after his transsex surgery because it means ‘re-born’ in French) had to sue the United States Tennis Federation to force his way into the women’s draw.

I wonder if Messrs Imane Khelif, Lin Yu-ting et al. will do the same to the IOC. If they do, things could turn interesting in 2028, but I trust Donald Trump to put his foot down. I also hope he acts on his threat to sue the BBC for a billion dollars, but this is a separate subject.

P.S. Speaking of tennis crossing sex barriers, world number one, Arina Sabalenka, will play an exhibition match against Nick Kyrgios, currently world number 652 (actually 1,292 on the up-to-date computer), in December.

Miss Sabalenka is making macho noises about planning to “kick Nick’s ass”, and I’m sure this latest instalment in the Battle of the Sexes saga will be lucrative for both players and entertaining for the spectators. But it’ll prove nothing.

For the match won’t be competed on equal terms. Since men have been calculated to be nine per cent faster than women, Kyrgios’s half of the court will be nine per cent larger. And both players will have only one serve, to negate the extra 25 mph Nick can put on his first delivery.

Now Kyrgios was once ranked number eleven in the world, but he hasn’t played much for two years due to injuries. Still, the organisers correctly decided that some adjustments were necessary for the women’s number one to stay in the match for a while.

I wonder if the IOC has heard about this. Tennis, after all, is an Olympic sport too.

Yesterday was Remembrance Sunday, when the nation fell silent to commemorate those who died defending our… what exactly? That question can’t arise in relation to the Second World War, but Remembrance Sunday has more to do with the First one.

And there a question implying doubt is legitimate. What did those millions die for? There was no real reason for the First World War, apart from words. It was to glossocratic messages that the masses responded, not to any fundamental need.

Such messages can’t be dismissed easily. Their power is irrational and therefore has to be absolute to have any effect. And nothing promotes absolute power as effectively as a war can, the bloodier, the better. “The strongest chains for the people are forged from victorious swords”, as Clausewitz put it.

Neither side was averse to making cosmic claims. They were both fighting to save civilisation, making the world safe not just for democracy (the demented Wilson was welcome to that one) but also for true faith, world commerce, family, security, children, church and prosperity. Both sides were out to defend those in their own eyes, and to rape them in the eyes of the other side.

Almost instantly the war acquired a character that went beyond any national grievances or economic interests. The world was rife with proposals for unifying the control of global resources in a single body that could also administer international taxes aimed at levelling inequalities among nations.

The air was dense with phrases like ‘World Organisation’, ‘The United States of the Earth’, ‘The Confederation of the World’, ‘A World Union of Free Peoples’ and, finally, ‘The League of Nations’. And both sides saw themselves as defenders of international law.

The British, for example, eschewed self-interest as the reason for joining the conflict, opting instead for depicting the war as a holy crusade for the law of the nations. Not to be outdone, the French organised a Committee for the Defence of International Law.

The Germans were at first taken aback by this sudden outburst of affection for global legality, but they quickly recovered to fight back. Belgium, according to them, wasn’t neutral in the international-law sense of the word. It was conducting secret military negotiations with the British aimed against Germany. The British weren’t squeaky-clean either. They were systematically violating the trading rights of neutrals on the high seas.

So Germany was really fighting for the freedom of the seas and the rights of smaller nations to engage in peaceful trade without being harassed by the dastardly Royal Navy. However, the Entente wouldn’t allow Germany to claim the monopoly of defending the small and weak.

It was the allies who were after liberating the oppressed nations, by which they no longer meant just Alsace and Lorraine. This time they meant the oppressed minorities in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Polish minority in Germany (not to be confused with the German minority in Poland, whose plight was a casus belli for Germany’s next war).

Funny you should mention oppressed minorities, replied the Germans who hated to be outdone by anybody, especially the British. It was they, the Germans, who were fighting to liberate the small nations of the world. More specifically, such small nations as India, Ireland, Egypt and the entire African continent.

Each side was out to save civilisation, nothing less. A week after the war began the London Evening Standard was already carrying headlines screaming Civilisation at Issue. France was fighting a guerre contre les barbares, while Germany was laying about her for her Kultur.

Germany, the nation of composers and philosophers, had established a spiritual ascendancy thanks to her industry, fecundity, wisdom and morality. The British were usurers (a role they were to cede to the Jews before long); the Germans were Teutonic heirs to Arminius and Alaric. The British were unable to see beyond their utilitarian little noses, as demonstrated by their philosophers; the Germans had the sagacity to penetrate the meaning of life, as proved by their thinkers. The war was fought for heroic, self-sacrificing Bildung and against the pecuniary British.

Not at all, sale Boche, objected the French. The war was waged by one (good) race against another (bad) one. The Gauls of France and Belgium were fighting the Hun, and never mind Bildung. This racial argument secretly appealed to the Germans who decided to store it for future use.

While every belligerent country claimed that God was on her side, La Croix in France made the case with a forthrightness not normally associated with the French: “The story of France is the story of God. Long live Christ who loves the Franks.” “La Guerre Sainte”, echoed L’Echo de Paris, and La Croix agreed in principle but wanted to expand: it was “a war of Catholic France against Protestant Germany”.

Hold on a minute, the British begged to differ. The French, though on the side of the angels in this one, couldn’t claim exclusive possession of God.

The Bishop of Hereford explained this succinctly: “Amidst all the burden of gloom and sorrow which this dreadful war lays upon us we can at least thank God that it brings that better day a long step nearer for the generations in front of us.” (Which generations were to lose, conservatively, 200 million in assorted wars and purges, but then, to be fair, the good bishop had no way of knowing this.)

To a British musical promoter, that was really a war between different types of music: “The future belongs to the young hero who will have the courage to exclude from his library all the works of Handel, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Brahms and Richard Strauss…, who will draw from the depths of his own being tone pictures of all that is beautiful in the wonderful poetry of Great Britain, and find the vigorous rhythms that will tell of the dauntless spirit of those who go to death singing ‘Tipperary’.”  Or rap, as it eventually turned out.

Still, the impresario displayed much insight: the underlying aims of the war weren’t geopolitical but cultural.

America’s role is instructive. President Wilson wasn’t bashful about his desire to replace the traditional order with a modern world led by America.

That’s why the message spewed out by the Creel Committee (the world’s biggest propaganda outfit) went beyond amateurish attacks on the bloodthirsty Hun. Every piece of promotional literature put out by Creel, every speech by Wilson, was an incitement to revolution, both political and social, across Europe.

Thus America had no quarrel with the industrious people of Germany; it was the oppressive Junkers class that was the enemy. No peace, no armistice was possible until the existing social order and political arrangement were destroyed – in other words, until a revolution took place.

Likewise, Wilson had no quarrel with the quirky people inhabiting the British Empire; it was the Empire itself that he abhorred. Even though for tactical reasons that particular message couldn’t yet be enunciated in so many words, dismantling the offending institution was clearly one of Wilson’s, and later Roosevelt’s, key objectives.

A fanatic of a single world government, Wilson was at the same time a great champion of national self-determination. Anticipating a possible confusion on the part of the reader, there was no contradiction there at all. The first was the end; the second, the means.

The marginal peoples of the empires, all those Czechs, Poles, Finns and Serbs couldn’t make good any promise of self-determination without first destroying all traditional states. QED.

Thus, when the Tsarist regime collapsed in Russia, Wilson was ecstatic. Here was another democracy hatched out of the dark recesses of absolutism. That the new ‘democracy’ was so weak that it couldn’t keep her troops at the front mattered little. This wasn’t about winning the world war but about winning the war for the world.

That’s why Wilson, Lloyd George and their followers constantly downplayed the risk of Bolshevik takeover, and failed to respond to it properly once it took place. They had much greater affinity with the Bolsheviks than with any traditional empires.

The Great War is often described as Europe’s suicide, and in some ways it was just that. Above all, however, it was the murder of Christendom within Europe’s borders, the triumph of crass, soulless modernity.

Whatever trust had existed between Europeans and their governments was gassed out of existence in Flanders and shot up to pieces in East Prussia. Trust was replaced with cynicism at best, hatred at worst. As a result, Europe was left at the mercy of glossocratic tyranny, which in short order ushered in the two most infernal regimes in history.

So yes, we must remember our fallen heroes, thank them posthumously, pray for them. But every time we fall silent on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, we must also remember the only way to make sure they didn’t die in vain.

And that’s learning the lessons their tragic fate taught. Lest we forget.

Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán are birds of a feather, although neither looks particularly avian.

They feel a natural affinity for each other, and also for Putin. Putin is in some ways an aspirational figure for Trump and Orbán. They both envy the Russian dictator’s freedom of action, unrestricted by parliamentary pressure, judicial oversight and other annoyances.

However, because of such irritants, neither Orbán nor especially Trump can be too effusive in their admiration for that indicted war criminal. A few years ago, Trump could still afford the luxury of lauding Putin’s ‘genius’ in public, but now that Putin has reminded the world in Bucha and Mariupol that ‘genius’ and ‘genocide’ are cognates, his Western admirers have to be more restrained.

Moreover, they have to bow to the pressure exerted by their legislatures and impose tougher and tougher sanctions on Russia (Trump), or at least to go along with them (Orbán).

In that spirit, Trump has slapped a virtual embargo, supported with secondary sanctions, on the imports from Russia’s two biggest oil companies, Lookoil and Rosneft. The idea is to limit the flow of money into Putin’s war machine, which that ‘genius’ uses to commit genocide in the Ukraine.

As Cicero explained some 2,300 years ago, “Infinite money is the sinews of war” (nervi belli, pecunia infinita). Other thinkers have expressed the same idea in slightly different terms, referring to money as the lifeblood of warfare. Hence the idea behind the sanctions is to exsanguinate Putin’s aggression.

The idea is sound, but an attack on Russia’s oil exports creates collateral damage. Countries that depend on cheap Russian oil for their energy sustenance now have to get it elsewhere and pay considerably more.

Hungary could suffer more than most. The country gets 86 per cent of her oil from Russia, which explains why Orbán hopped on the plane and flew to the US to scream bloody murder, hoping that Trump’s hearing is acute enough to hear.

The route is Orbán’s well-trodden flight path. Even when Trump was between presidencies, Orbán, with the foresight of an intuitive apparatchik, often flew to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Ferney.

During those pilgrimages, the two men found out they spoke the same language, even if one did so in crude English and the other in Hungarian (which, looking at Orbán, I suspect, though can’t verify, is crude too).

Orbán realised that Trump saw politics as a global extension of his property development business, transactional and based on personal relationships. The kind of personal relationship the president favours is the other chap paying gluteal respects, and Orbán was happy to oblige.

He’d return home with sore lips but high hopes for the future, provided Trump got back into the White House. The latter obliged, and Orbán’s osculatory investment began to pay off.

It again did so the other day, when Trump granted Hungary a one-year exemption from the new batch of oil sanctions. “It’s very difficult for [Hungary] to get the oil and gas from other areas,” Trump said at the joint press conference. “They don’t have the advantage of having sea. … They don’t have the ports. They have a difficult problem.”

The US could easily solve that problem, and in fact has begun to do so by selling Hungary $600 million worth of liquefied natural gas, of which the US has a practically unlimited supply thanks to fracking. Doubling the volume of gas exports and perhaps lowering the price would go a long way towards relieving Hungary’s land-locked ordeal, but sanction-busting seems easier and cheaper.

“Pipelines are not an ideological or political issue. It’s a physical reality …,” said Orbán, proving he has nothing to learn about demagoguery from his idol. Another lesson he has learned well comes easily to all populists, Right or Left. They, nationalists or globalists, believe their audience is generally stupid and, judging by their electoral success, they may have a point.

Pipelines, and economy in general, are always a “political issue” – it’s not for nothing that economy uses ‘political’ as its forename. This is the case even in peacetime, and infinitely more so at wartime.

It’s for political, or rather geopolitical, reasons that sanctions on Russian oil were imposed in the first place, and surely Orbán understands this. So the “physical reality” of the oil pipeline from Russia is as irrelevant as it is indisputable.

Orbán has been a consistent Putinversteher, one of the sincerest and most passionate among European leaders. According to him, Putin is right when blaming NATO for provoking the conflict, and this is something other Western leaders “misunderstand”.

The Ukraine, explains Orbán, can’t win the war in the battlefield, so the West might as well stop propping up the regime both his role models, Putin and Trump, dislike. Like Trump, Orbán wants to put an end to the war immediately, and if that can only be done on Putin’s terms, then so be it.

Orbán is a fierce opponent of the Ukraine joining European alliances. He has said he’d veto her joining the EU, and the very idea of that long-suffering country ever joining NATO makes him shudder with revulsion.

Viktor feels deep empathy for Vlad not only for emotional reasons but also for pragmatic ones. Both he and Putin have to stay in power in order to survive, and not just politically. Should they lose office, both Orbán and Putin are certain to face charges of corruption, and the latter also of war crimes.

Putin is in the enviable position of not being accountable to the electorate – he can only lose power to a coup, in which case he may not live long enough to face those charges. Orbán, on the other hand, has to win elections, and the next one is in April.

Had Hungary not got Trump’s exemption, Hungarians’ living standards would have dipped immediately, and people usually make their leaders pay for that at the polls. Thus Trump has done Orbán a life-saving favour, but then that’s what friends are for.

That exemption is wrong on many different levels, from moral to geopolitical. Ukrainians pay with their blood for every barrel of oil Putin manages to flog, but neither Orbán nor Trump cares about that. Their electorates may, but not as much as they care about the price of petrol and heating oil.

Still, I haven’t seen a single printed word of opprobrium of this latest exercise in the art of the deal, to borrow a phrase. Even if our conservative press no longer thinks in terms of good and evil, or even right and wrong, we are all in even deeper trouble than we know.