Author: Alexander Boot

A year before he starved to death in February 1919, the Russian writer Vasily Rozanov published the essay The Apocalypse of Our Time. Looking at the events of the previous few months, he not so much wrote as wept: “Russia faded away in two days. At most – three.”

In 1925 TS Eliot wrote the poem The Hollow Man, where he too sounded an apocalyptic motif, albeit its different variation: “This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper.”

A major country fading away in two days, three at most, testified to the world (for which Russia was a metaphor) indeed ending with a bang, an instant violent outburst. Yet the two writers weren’t at odds; their themes meet at counterpoint.

It isn’t either a bang or a whimper, it’s both. What finishes off civilisations is indeed a protracted whimper, a slow erosion of will and atrophy of self-confidence. This brings a civilisation down to its knees (or one knee, as the case may be). When a bang arrives, as it usually does, it merely administers a coup de grâce.

This is exactly what happened to the Roman Empire. The Romans no longer understood their own society. They no longer knew what role they themselves had to play in their community, or what role their community played in the general scheme of things.

Mired in confusion, they resorted to decadence. Misguided in their overall direction, they got lost in a warren of blind alleys. They tried to probe every path, but there was no way out – they were running in place. Fatigue set in. Step by step, the stuffing went out of their previously taut muscles, and they fell prey to barbarian attacks.

Such is the aetiology of the senility to which historians usually ascribe the demise of Rome. And not only Rome. RG Collingwood, our underrated philosopher, extrapolated to a general principle:

“Civilisations sometimes perish because they are forcibly broken up by the armed attack of enemies without or revolutionaries within; but never from this cause alone. Such attacks never succeed unless the thing that is attacked is weakened by doubt as to whether the end which it sets before itself, the form of life which it tries to realise, is worth achieving. On the other hand, this doubt is quite capable of destroying a civilisation without any help whatever. If the people who share a civilisation are no longer on the whole convinced that the form of life which it tries to realise is worth realising, nothing can save it.”

Collingwood died in 1943, but if he were alive today, he’d no doubt observe every symptom of the collective disease he so perceptively diagnosed.

We too are no longer certain of our fundamental convictions. We too have replaced stern resolve with decadence. We too have lost the will to defend ourselves.

The major difference is that we haven’t yet had this point hammered home by a barbarian onslaught. But few are the optimists who maintain that such a development is improbable. Even fewer are the realists who point out that the barbarians have already attacked and won. Except that in our case they came from inside the city walls.

The vandals may fly any number of flags, each of them false in the sense that none would be faithful to the barbarians’ impelling animus. They may inscribe whatever slogan seems promising: anarchism, racial and sex equality, BLM, global warming, anti-nuke – whatever actuates mass passion at the moment, whatever makes the walls totter.

Arguing against the slogan of the day is pointless, especially since, taken at face value, some of them are unobjectionable, what Karl Popper would have called unfalsifiable. For example, who in his right mind would object to the slogan ‘black lives matter’ by saying no, they don’t?

Accepting slogans at face value, or rather pretending to do so, is a time-proven mechanism of craven, abject surrender. A robust civilisation with an intact will to defend itself would be strong enough to see through the slogans and respond with all it has to the murderous intent they camouflage.

Shifting history to the proscribed subjunctive mood, how do you suppose any Victorian prime minister, say Peel, Disraeli or Salisbury, would have responded to an orgy of rioting and looting accompanied by attacks on the Union Jack and other cherished symbols of the nation?

Would they have failed to see the rioters as the deadly enemies of our very civilisation? Would they have instructed the police to show solidarity and only use force when absolutely necessary or not even then? Of course not. They would have seen themselves as the strong arm of a collective will and acted accordingly.

Such a collective will no longer exists. That’s why it’s really useless to invoke the names I mentioned. Those prime ministers would have acted decisively and ruthlessly not because they were better men than today’s lot, but because they had the power of society’s convictions.

Today’s governments are reaping the harvest of defeatism and acquiescence nurtured over many decades. Having lost a unifying centre – spiritual, cultural, social and therefore political – our civilisation has been ceding one by one its positions at the periphery.

No politician can these days have a career unless he professes affection for whatever false flag is hoisted by the enemies of our civilisation. No one in public life can let slip that he sees the hatred and murderous intent hiding behind the flags.

Any idiocy, ignorance or madness merits serious discussion, or what passes for it nowadays. If our enemies insist that there exist 57 sexes, not just two; or that it’s perfectly normal for a man born as a woman to produce a child by a woman born as a man; or that capitalism is destroying ‘our planet’ with carbon dioxide; or that women constitute an oppressed minority; or that various ethnic groups are being targeted for institutional violence; or that children should vote and therefore add their gonadal input into government – we can’t just tell them to shut up and go back to work.

We no longer have the power of our convictions because we have neither convictions nor power. What we have is boundless confidence that what happened in Russia, circa 1917, or in Germany, circa 1933, or for that matter in Rome, circa 410, can’t happen here.

Oh yes it can, ladies and gentlemen: the whimper has been going on for too long to preclude a bang.    

As a lifelong champion of progress, I welcome the new world order. For, as anyone who worships progress knows, new always means better.

It was Joseph Schumpeter who gave us the concept of creative destruction. But we should go the old man one better and declare that all destruction is creative, rather than just some.

Therefore the new world order, spearheaded by the BML and Extinction Rebellion movements, should sweep all remnants of the old order into what another champion of progress, Trotsky, called the dustbin of history.

Our path lit by this enlightened general goal, we can easily work out the specifics, starting with the offensive statues to be removed and/or spray-painted with new-order graffiti and/or smeared with faeces. Here I propose a solution that will in one fell swoop put an end to arguments about which statues are offensive and which aren’t.

They all are, with the possible exception of Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi and Karl Marx. Mandela, Mahatma, Marx – a neatly alliterative acronym MMM can function as a stamp of approval, and it will look good superimposed on a red flag.

All other statues commemorate men who were irredeemably mired in the old order. Hence they were all complicit in its crimes.

For a start, look at the Houses of Parliament adorned with the statues of Richard I and Oliver Cromwell. Richard led an islamophobic crusade, a sin only partly redeemed by his homosexuality. And Cromwell practised not only the death penalty but also genocide. Of course the Irish are racially similar to whites, but they may be elevated to honorary blackness for the purpose of our exercise.

Now what’s George Washington doing in Trafalgar Square? He was a slave owner and one of the founders of an eternally racist state. His statue belongs in a skip, or perhaps on the bottom of the Thames.

And don’t let me get going on Napier, Clive, Rhodes, Mountbatten, Churchill, Smuts and other imperialist, colonialist, racist scum. Their statues should be not just removed but smashed up, with the fragments used as projectiles tossed at police cars and through the windows of Bond Street boutiques.

That Nelson, correctly described by my friend Afua Hirsch as a ‘white supremacist’, should be brought down from that column goes without saying (now that Afua has said it). But who should take that racist’s place?

You know the answer: George Floyd, with angel’s wings attached to his back. The design already exists, so transferring it to stone is dead easy. Of course, the column will have to be renamed after Floyd, and Trafalgar Square should thenceforth be known as Minneapolis Plaza.

Anyway, why bother mentioning historical villains by name? Did any of them speak out against racism, colonialism, homophobia, transphobia, capitalism and global warming? No, they didn’t.

Since we now know that silence is violence, none of those violent criminals merits a statue. Their vacated plinths can accommodate statues of new-order martyrs, black people killed by the police returning fire.

Such mass iconoclasm is a time-honoured practice of every revolution of the past. Statues of saints were destroyed during the Reformation, statues of tsars during the Bolshevik revolution, statues of Jews, such as Heine and Mendelssohn, during the Nazi regime.

The last two also set other worthy examples to follow, such as the bonfires of books. Today’s revolutionaries are too timid: they merely remove racist tracts like Huckleberry Finn and Gone With the Wind from circulation.

I much favour public immolation, ideally also to include the master copies of offensive films and, once the process has gathered speed, Tory MPs. A true revolution can’t stop halfway; it should keep and increase its momentum.

Up the Revolution! ladies and gentlemen. Or Up the Revolution’s, if you’d rather. 

Daniel Finkelstein has written an article full of empathy, good will and compassionate understanding. It made me want to throw up.

Under the influence of the American feminist Peggy McIntosh, Lord Finkelstein looked at the world and experienced a Buddha-like moment. One day young prince Gautama walked out of his palace, looked around and realised that disease, old age and death were inevitable. He was so shocked that he became Buddha.

Lord Finkelstein must have started from less auspicious beginnings, and the shock he experienced must have been less earth-shattering. But a shock it was nonetheless.

His eyes descaled by Peggy, he looked at the world through the eyes of a black man and realised that “minorities experience multicultural societies very differently to majorities. And there are lots of ways in which this is a burden, some less easy to see than others.”

While acknowledging that “Britain was never a hotbed of racism”, Lord Finkelstein still feels “grateful… to McIntosh for helping me see the world more clearly.”

At least he didn’t have to go to extreme lengths to clarify his eyesight. His colleague John Griffin did.

In 1959 he had his skin temporarily darkened to pass as a black man. Griffin then travelled for six weeks through the racially segregated states of the American Deep South.

He was shocked by the hostility he encountered as a black man, and the humiliations he suffered. In 1961 he published a book about his experience, Black Like Me, which became an instant bestseller.

But the book also attracted a hostile reaction from certain quarters. Eventually Griffin had to flee his home in Texas because he no longer felt safe. Considering that he was treated to the spectacle of his figure hanged in effigy, I’m not surprised.

In 1975 the Ku Klux Klan finally caught up with Griffin. He was severely beaten and left for dead, but survived. Jim Crow was by then extinct legally, but the legacy still survived in many underdeveloped souls.

The situation in America has changed greatly since 1975, and unrecognisably since 1959. Today Griffin might catch a few unkind glances here and there, but he certainly wouldn’t experience overt aggression and discrimination. He’d be more likely to suffer abuse at the hands of other blacks than white racists.

Move from Alabama, circa 1960, to Britain, circa 2020, and examples of racism would be well-nigh impossible to find this side of heavily tattooed, plankton-brained yahoos. There are, however, many examples of white privilege that is seen as such by the likes of Lord Finkelstein, but in fact isn’t.

This is one such example he dredged up: “Anybody who looks out for whose cars the police are more likely to stop, for example, can see that in theory we’re all equal before the law but in practice we aren’t.”

The police have neither sufficient resources nor indeed a mandate to stop every suspicious car (or pedestrian) they see. Hence they have to narrow their targets on the balance of probability, by deciding which vehicle is more likely to be transporting a law-breaker.

Alas, the balance of probability tips heavily towards the black population. For example, even though blacks make up only about 10 per cent of London’s population, in one typical year they accounted for 54 per cent of street crime, 58 per cent of robbery and 67 per cent of gun crime.

Hence cars driven by whites proceed unmolested not because of ‘white privilege’ but because whites commit fewer crimes. If this is privilege, it’s certainly not unearned.

However, Lord Finkelstein thinks it is, even though he finds the term ‘white privilege’ unhelpful: “[Talking about white privilege] makes you reflect on the advantages you have and where they come from. It prevents you being carried away with the idea that all you achieve is on merit.”

Well, I feel I deserve the ‘white privilege’ of not being stopped by cops. I’ve earned it by having lived a life free of crime – and deporting myself as someone who can legitimately make this claim.

Then we come to the heart of the matter, the reason Lord Finkelstein took pen to paper in the first place: “The great power of the assertion that black lives matter is that it correctly argues that they haven’t mattered enough: to the police, to the justice system, to businesses. It demands that this be changed. White privilege instead makes white people the centre of attention.”

Over the past week, I (and many others) have cited reams of evidence showing that even in America black lives matter much more to policemen than to other blacks. American policemen still kill 20 per cent more whites than blacks, which, considering that blacks account for 85 per cent of violent crime, suggests not white privilege but black.

Finkelstein is in default of his remit for not pointing this out, choosing instead to pick old liberal chestnuts. And then he adds a new one of his own: “Britain’s experience of racism is different from America’s. I think, however, that the reaction to George Floyd’s death has been appropriate.”

Which part exactly? Burning the Union Jack? Looting and vandalising shops? Defacing and destroying statues that are the landmarks of our history? Attacking policemen? Putting some of them in hospital? Arson? Or are they all an appropriate reaction to the unlawful killing of a black criminal 4,000 miles away from Britain?

The problem is that our pundits don’t feel they have to hold up their output to any test of reason or veracity when enunciating wokish claptrap. One expects better from a peer of the realm.

It’s not only the same language that separates Britain and America. I could name hundreds of differences, but the one currently relevant has to do with race relations.

In that febrile area Britain and the US are even further apart than in language, which obvious fact is wilfully ignored by the BLM mob and its ‘liberal’ ventriloquists.

For, though both countries can be retrospectively tarred with the slavery brush, the strokes are wider and more lurid in America.

Slavery was practically nonexistent in metropolitan England, though it was important to the economies of her colonies, including the American ones. Already in Elizabethan times slavery was seen as abhorrent.

A report of a case as far back as 1569 states that: “… it was resolved that England was too pure an air for a slave to breathe, and so everyone who breathes it becomes free. Everyone who comes to this island is entitled to the protection of English law, whatever oppression he may have suffered and whatever may be the colour of his skin.”

And in 1772, ruling on the case of a slave suing for his freedom when brought to Britain, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield declared that “no court could compel a slave to obey an order depriving him of his liberty.”

Such statements weren’t heard in many other places at that time. And it wasn’t just words. Though Britain officially banned the slave trade only in 1807, unofficially the Royal Navy had been harassing slave traffic for decades.

Some historians believe that the American colonies rose in insurgence partly for fear that slavery, having been disavowed in the English Common law, would be abolished in America. And the colonists’ feelings about slavery were entirely different, to a point where blacks weren’t believed to be fully human.

Hence the signatories to the Declaration of Independence sensed no incongruity in proclaiming equality and liberty as inalienable rights, while at the same time owning (and in Jefferson’s case also multiplying) slaves. Dr Johnson, who abhorred slavery, was quick to spot the contradiction: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

Had Lincoln not chosen abolition as the false flag for his attempt to enshrine the supremacy of the central state, God only knows how much longer slavery could have survived in America.

My guess is that this outdated institution would have died out fairly soon anyway. After all, even in Russia, a place not widely known for its commitment to liberty, the serfs were emancipated in 1861, two years before Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation.

However, abolition of slavery where it’s economically significant raises many legal issues, specifically those involving property rights. These, according to the godfather of Enlightenment politics, John Locke, have to be an inviolable bedrock of just society.

Immoral as chattel slavery might have been believed to be, confiscation of legally acquired property went against the grain of the English Common Law, which applied in the colonies as much as in the metropolis.

The two sides handled this hot potato differently, which to this day affects the huge difference in racial relations between the two. In America the North smashed the South, dispossessed all plantations with no compensation, freed all the slaves and encouraged them to embark on an orgy of violence against white southerners.

That inflicted awful wounds on the American psyche, and they are still festering. This isn’t to say that most white Americans hate blacks, far from it. Universal racism, private or institutional, is a figment of ‘liberal’ imagination. Yet anyone who has ever lived in the South will testify that racist flames aren’t fanned by black activism exclusively.

In Britain the issue was solved in a civilised and amicable way, which left a legacy of more emollient racial interactions. When the Slavery Abolition Act was passed in 1833, the government borrowed £20 million to pay off the dispossessed slave owners.

To put that sum in perspective, it equalled 40 per cent of the country’s budget and five per cent of her GDP. Considering that last year’s GDP was £2.2 trillion, you can figure out the modern equivalent.

That loan was finally paid off only in 2015, meaning that I and other adult Britons had to service it through our taxes throughout most of our working lives. In addition to fostering much healthier race relations, this ought to remind us of the long-term burden imposed by runaway borrowing.

To paraphrase ever so slightly, amici nigri, sed magis amica veritas. And the truth of the matter is that equating the race situation in Britain and America is pernicious demagoguery at its most soaring. When ignorance meets ideology, only idiocy will result.

And ignorant, ideologised idiots are deaf to rational arguments and serious advice. Such as, chaps, let Americans sort out what goes on in America. It really has nothing to do with you.

P.S. One of the statues targeted by the BLM mob is that of Sir Thomas Guy, whose crime was to invest in the South Sea Company around 1720. By all means take the offensive statue down, but why stop there? Do proceed to razing the hospital Sir Thomas endowed, which still bears his name. Now is just the right time.

That’s how many black people have been killed in assorted Central African genocides over the past few decades. An appalling number of black lives have been lost in Sudan, the Congo, Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda – to name just the deadliest massacres.

On a smaller scale, thousands of American blacks are killed every year by other blacks. That’s more lives that matter, stamped out.

Yet one can’t recall offhand any outbursts of public wrath to match those prompted by the death of a single black criminal unlawfully killed by white cops. Do you get the impression that the on-going mayhem has been inspired by reasons other than touching concern for human lives?

Wise people know that to murder masses is the only real reason for mass murder. Similarly, discounting the self-righteous drivel emanating from all the usual quarters, rioting is the only immediate reason for riots.

Whatever pretexts are put forth by way of justification are just that, pretexts. Every mass riot, especially one underpinned by woke slogans, is a false flag operation.

Faced with a marauding mob, Britain goes down on one knee, and it’s not long before the other one is bent too. Looters and vandals are demanding mass genuflection as a gesture of surrender, and their demand is met with alacrity.

This emphasises the mock-religious nature of woke demonstrations and remonstrations. By eliciting a ghastly caricature of a Christian ritual, the mob is extorting worship of their secular deities, not just tacit agreement.

So-called liberals are Frankensteins observing with paternal pride the monster they have created. The monstrous sub-culture of resentment and discontent has been lovingly fostered for decades, as an essential prong of the ‘liberal’ attack on Western tradition.

Now they are trying to conceal smug QED smiles, but the grins force their way onto their faces. Using brainwashed, dumbed-down masses as their weapons, the ‘liberals’ have shown how easy it has become to bring the West, including Britain, to its knees.

Black lives don’t really matter to them. Neither do lives of any other colour. What matters is the rat of self-righteous resentment running around their hollow minds. They won’t have a moment’s rest until they release the creature to infect the world. Now they know they can.

When growing up, I suffered the delights of totalitarianism first hand.

That experience, while crippling in many ways, was also helpful. It left me with a lifelong love of freedom, loathing of totalitarianism, sensitivity to its manifestations and a realisation that no country is immune to this blight.

Watching the mob attacking and injuring policemen, befouling statues in Parliament Square and Whitehall, and trying to burn the British flag at the Cenotaph may be seen as anarchy and hence a harbinger of totalitarianism to come.

The choice of defaced statues is curious. Gen Haig, Allied commander during the First World War, may at a stretch be seen as a hireling to British colonialism. But Abraham Lincoln’s racial offences aren’t immediately obvious. After all, he led a fight against slavery, ostensibly at any rate.

And Churchill inspired and led one against the most racist modern regime. True, I’ve met some people who believe that Britain backed the wrong side in that war. However, that belief usually comes packaged with some others that are unlikely to appeal to the BLM crowd.

It takes many adhesives to glue a nation together, and one of them is surely respect for the nation’s history, signposted and highlighted by heroic figures like Churchill. Spray-painting WAS A RACIST on his statue makes it clear that large swathes of the British population don’t identify with their nation and feel no allegiance to it.

That, as far as I’m concerned, entitles the government to invoke the ancient principle of  protectio trahit subjectionem, subjectio projectionem (protection entails allegiance; allegiance, protection).

If some people deny allegiance to the Crown, the embodiment of the nation, they forfeit the right to its protection. The most visible protective document is the UK passport, and its possession has always been contingent on loyalty.

That was, for example, the principle that led the Nazi collaborator William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) to the gallows in 1946. Though a US and Irish citizen, he used a British passport to travel to Nazi Germany, where he became the leading Anglophone propagandist.

Despite having got that passport on false pretences, Joyce was under the protection of the Crown on his travels and could therefore be judged as a traitor to it. Had he used one of his other passports, he would have got off with a small fine. On the same principle, I think HMG should withdraw its protection, and hence British passports, from the spray-painters.

However, their manifest disloyalty may presage totalitarianism, but isn’t yet totalitarianism in itself. The slogan SILENCE IS VIOLENCE, on the other hand, is totalitarianism at its purest.

When I lived in Russia, I was a dissident, but not the most outspoken one. However, I always got in trouble with every tier of authority, all the way up to the KGB. That happened even when I kept my hatred of the Soviets to myself.

I realised why that was. For there exists a vital difference between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. Both enforce acquiescence, but only the latter demand vociferous sycophancy.

I was more or less ready to offer acquiescence or at least a credible pretence of it. But I balked at vociferous sycophancy, knowing that it would have killed my soul, leaving me with no right to self-respect.

Yet silence wasn’t good enough for the authorities. They too treated it as tantamount to violence against the regime – and violence begat a violent response.

That’s why, when I see this sinister slogan, I shiver with terror – on top of the revulsion I feel at the sight of the revolting mob. I fear for the country, not so much for myself: if the KGB couldn’t force me to toe the line, then this lot certainly won’t.

But their very insistence that everyone should make transparently cretinous noises along the BLM lines, while perhaps also ‘taking the knee’, brackets them together with the KGB, Mao’s Red Guards and Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. How long before they begin to respond to this putative violence with the real kind?

All the rioters need is the power to enforce their totalitarian demands. That they haven’t yet got. But any confrontation between law and lawlessness is a zero sum game. The more power does one side have, the less has the other.

Our law enforcement is demonstratively impotent in the face of mob violence, which empowers the mob no end. God only knows how far they’ll go this time if certain of immunity. One thing for sure: next time they’ll go even further.

In 1791 Haitian slaves rose against their French masters. Like most other revolutions, that one vented many febrile emotions, hatred of the whites prime among them.

Yet there was an interesting twist there. Since a majority of the freed slaves had been baptised, they added a Christian touch to their racial animus. “The whites crucified Jesus,” they chanted. “Let’s kill all whites!”

That was the first uprising I can think of where the concepts of race, collective responsibility and religion came together in one explosive package. But, judging by the current events, not the last.

Though a secular cult has replaced Christianity as a constituent, the other ingredients remain in place. It’s not just Derek Chauvin and his accomplices who are being held responsible for George Floyd’s death, but all white policemen in general – and by extrapolation all whites.

Mocking that sort of thing is easy, and I myself have succumbed to the temptation. Yet it does raise deeper questions than the idiotic chants of a crazed mob can ever pose.

I often talk about the larcenous shift of modernity, akin to looters burning somebody’s house down but moving some of the furniture into their own home.

Thus modernity was brought to life largely – I’d even say mostly – by a revolt against Christianity and the civilisation it had begotten, Christendom. That house was razed in short order, but some of its fixtures, those that looked useful to the victors, were stolen and, after being thoroughly perverted, shifted over to the new residence.

Thus freedom, the centrepiece of Christianity, was repainted into liberty and then licence; equality before God became economic and social levelling, often by violent means; brotherhood of all in Christ became a licence to kill and dispossess those unworthy of secular kinship.

Collective responsibility is one such stolen property, for it used to be essential to the scriptural sources of our civilisation, indeed our civilisation as a whole. The Old Testament story of Adam and Eve gave rise to the Christian, especially Augustinian, theology of original sin.

Roughly speaking, we all bear the onus of responsibility for the sin of defying God committed by our progenitors, and it doesn’t matter whether Adam and Eve were merely a symbol of mankind or its sum total. One way or another, original sin is on all of us.

Yet it isn’t irredeemable. A Jew can cleanse himself by living according to the Law, and a Christian by living in Jesus Christ, who died to redeem mankind of original sin and show a path to eternal salvation.

Thus, for all practical purposes, collective responsibility becomes individual. We can exercise our individual free will and do certain things that will ease our way to life everlasting – or not, if our individual choices are bad.

For a Christian, the greatest individual choice is to accept Jesus Christ, but that option can’t be taken up collectively. Even if a person was unwittingly baptised at birth, the choice to stay faithful in adulthood will always remain individual and free. 

One may choose to believe all of this or not, but intrinsically the system is sound on every level – theological, philosophical, logical and practical. Everything within the system, including the notion of collective responsibility, is also sound. Anyone is free not to accept it, but no one can seriously claim the system doesn’t make sense on its own terms. 

Not so with collective responsibility, as invoked by modernity in general and particularly the looting mob reinforced by its bien pensant camp followers. Like all metaphysical concepts purloined by modernity, it stops being sound and noble, becoming instead stupid and pernicious.

White skin as such is seen as a sin, and one that can’t really be propitiated, although some have tried and more will do so in future. If a man can decide to identify as a woman and vice versa, why can’t a white person identify as black?

Some have done so, but there’s no evidence that real blacks accept such trans-racialism as anything other than patronising. Many others have been driven by guilt to which they weren’t entitled to march in step with black crowds, wherever they were going.

It can be a civil rights march or a looting expedition or a cross between the two – it really doesn’t matter. Blacks of course see through white guilt and exploit it, which is the natural thing to do. But as often as not they despise such fellow marchers. Turncoats are always despised by both sides.

Unless we talk about original sin and its relation to our salvation, collective responsibility in the secular context is at best disingenuous and at worst idiotic. Usually the two together.

It could be argued that membership in a criminal organisation, such as the SS or the KGB, makes one collectively responsible regardless of any personal wrong-doing. Even that argument isn’t always easy to sustain, what with endless nuances coming into play.

As to insisting that all whites should feel guilty for race crimes committed by evil men, be it slavery or the murder of George Floyd, this sort of thing belongs in the madhouse – or in the smarter salons of Manhattan and Kensington.

When it spills out into the streets, drawing tens of thousands to rallies, peaceful or otherwise, this nonsense is related to its professed cause only tangentially, if at all. At the heart of it lies deep general resentment, a ball of hate bouncing about in the cavernous spiritual emptiness of modern life.

No matter how he dissembles, a racist will always betray himself.

All he has to do is use the expression ‘black as the devil’, refer to a ‘black sheep in the family’ or describe besmirching a person as ‘the pot calling the kettle black’ and everyone will know he’s a crypto-racist.

He can then protest till the protesters come home that he has never described anything as an Afro-American in the woodpile, and that he has always defied zoology by changing a popular counting rhyme to suggest that tigers have toes. All to no avail.

A racist is bound to let his mask drop, like that wartime German spy who spoke perfect English but eventually went to the gallows for saying ‘vishing vell’ just once.

This brings us to Joe Biden, whose welcome presidential bid is wholly based on portraying Trump as a divisive racist. Yet the other day Joe proved he was in fact the pot calling the kettle… well, you know.

He made this statement: “There are probably anywhere from 10 to 15 per cent of the people out there that are just not very good people.”

That left this observer wondering how Joe had arrived at that figure. What kind of poll established that proportion, on what sample, with what margin for error?

How was the questionnaire worded? “Are you a good person?” You better believe it, pal, would be the only possible reply, true or false.

Anyway, I don’t think such a poll was ever conducted – unless Joe put that question to his family members and campaign workers. He probably didn’t, to the regret of those who’d like to hear his son’s answer to that question.

Sweeping aside the seditious suggestion that Joe simply mentioned the exact proportion because it sounded good, one has to delve deeper to uncover the hidden meaning. So I did.

I began by asking myself: “Why did Joe, a great if not always original orator, leave himself open to mockery by mentioning an arbitrary proportion? His insight would have lost none of its poignancy had he simply said ‘…some people out there aren’t very good’.”

Then I remembered a story dating back to the time I lived in Texas. A chap suspected of holding racist views was campaigning for a senate seat, and he desperately needed to court the black vote.

His standard word for members of that race was ‘n*****s’, enunciated in full. That’s the term he used when his adviser told him to praise publicly some great black of the past, say Booker T Washington.

“Who’s that n*****?” inquired the candidate. “A great black American educator,” said the adviser. “Just quote ‘it is better to be alone than in bad company’ and then say ‘These are the words of Booker T Washington, the great black American educator’.”

“I don’t want to quote any n*****s,” objected the candidate. “Don’t think of them as n*****s, for crying out loud,” cried the adviser out loud. “They are voters!”

“For me they are n*****s,” said the enlightened politician. “Oh well, what the hell, I’ll do it.”

The next day he cited the above quote in his speech, beamed broadly and said: “These are the words of Booker T Washington, the great black American n*****.” That put paid to his campaign, none too soon.

The trouble of course was that the offensive word was always on the tip of his tongue, waiting to slip out. So I thought, what if something like that had happened to Joe? What if the 10 to 15 per cent proportion was always in his mind and on that occasion forced its way out?

I did some number-crunching research and found out – are you ready for this? – that blacks make up 12.1 per cent of the US population. Almost exactly in the middle of the range mentioned by Joe!

Could it be that he was so preoccupied with that proportion that he let it slip out inadvertently? It’s only a guess, but an educated one: of course it could. That’s what people mean by a ‘Freudian slip’.

If that’s the case, look at the context in which the slip occurred. A simple rhetorical exercise, of the sort favoured by Biden supporters everywhere, would then yield a startling result.

If, according to Joe, the proportion of bad people exactly corresponds to that of blacks, his subconscious (or is it ‘id’? – I always get those Freudian terms wrong) spoke loud and clear, branding Joe as a crypto-racist.

There, I hope I’ve made my case with the same logical rigour for which Joe himself is universally known. In November America will face the choice of two divisive racists, both proved as such on similarly unassailable evidence.

The Diana virus is infecting the world. The symptoms of the resulting pandemic include mass hysteria, grossly sentimental effluvia, acute self-righteousness, moral torpor, aesthetic paralysis and highly contagious loss of taste.

And by George, the disease is lethal. As in George Floyd, hailed as a hero and martyr in the US and beyond. This strikes me as incongruous.

After all, heroes and martyrs are role models for all to venerate and follow. Yet I’m not sure that a drug-addled career criminal is suited for that role.

In fact I’m sure he isn’t, especially considering that Floyd’s crimes included such distinctly unsaintly acts as aggravated assault and armed robbery. Not to mention that the fatal incident resulted from Floyd, flying high on meth, being caught red-handed by a green-handed sales clerk (whose fingers turned green from contact with a $20 note George had counterfeited somewhat clumsily).

There exists a semantic distinction between a hero and a victim, which seems to be lost on the mob. Floyd was as far from a hero as it’s possible to get this side of Jack the Ripper, but a victim of a crime he undoubtedly was. So by all means demand maximum prison terms for the criminals, and I hope they get them, but please, please, spare us the emetic displays.

But they won’t, will they? Once the Diana virus gets out of hand, it’s unstoppable.

Unlike other popular viruses, however, it produces a curious side effect. The carriers  demand that the unaffected individuals, especially those in the public eye, submit to the infection willingly and with a broad smile on their faces or, better still, tears filling their eyes.

Disgruntled Gen Mattis, ex-Defense Secretary unceremoniously fired by Trump, vented his rancour by attacking the president for being infection-free. Writing in The Atlantic, a magazine not generally known for Republican sympathies, the good general got his own back:

“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people… Instead, he tries to divide us… Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens…”

Allow me to propose a factually correct ending to the last sentence: “… to burn cities down, throw Molotov cocktails at police cars, loot shops, attack policemen and force an imposition of curfews in major cities.”

Actually, the last time I looked none of these rights was mentioned in the US Constitution. Peaceful protest, however, is indeed protected by the First Amendment to that document. So does the general think that Trump called for the National Guard and troops to be deployed in response to the people exercising their right “peaceably to assemble”? If he does, he justifies the mad part of his ‘Mad Dog’ nickname.

As to Trump being divisive, that is the common leitmotif in the liberal press, which is to say the press. Chaps working for the New York Times, The Washington Post, most TV networks and, for that matter, The Atlantic brainwash the gullible populace, successfully, with messages of Trump’s divisiveness.

What supposedly makes Trump have that deplorable effect is his open contempt for the Beltway establishment and also his tendency not only to sound conservative (in the American sense), but even to implement some conservative policies.

The liberals know that the voting public won’t be repelled by Trump’s real failings, those I find repellant, such as his narcissism, illiteracy, bumptiousness, vulgarity, dubious dealings with Putin. Hence they have to repeat ad nauseum that Trump divides the nation, meaning doesn’t let it sink into the morass of ‘liberal’ uniformity. 

How, according to Mattis and other victims of dianafication, is Trump supposed to heal the wounds of the nation? By being photographed hugging a black woman, like Terrence Monahan, NYPD Department Chief? Why, he’d be accused of sexual harassment faster than you can say Harvey Weinstein.

Anyway, if a soppy speech, a strategically placed hug and a tear or two can unite a nation torn asunder, how disunited was it in the first place? Not very, I’d suggest.

Do people really expect Trump to turn touchy-feely in his advanced age? If so, they are in for a let-down. At least he never pretended to be an old softie when they voted him into the White House. Or is Trump expected to tell those arsonists and looters that he feels their pain, shares it and – by George! – he’d be tossing Molotov cocktails too if only he weren’t president?

Would that unify the nation Trump has so egregiously divided? I don’t know how many Americans would wish to be united with the crazed mob, but I suspect not many.

When Trump talked tough, he was threatening not peaceful demonstrators but looters. And force is the only way to deal with a rampaging, marauding mob. When looting talks, conciliation walks.

If some people have a craving for nauseating spectacles, they don’t need the president to provide them. The sight of policemen ‘taking the knee’ in abject surrender to the horde in American cities and even in London (!) should satisfy that appetite – especially if accompanied by cops marching with the multitudes and even giving the Black Power salute.

The only reason for policemen to go down on one knee is to create a more solid platform for firing a rifle – unless of course they are being knighted. If they wish to express solidarity with the protesters, they should do so off-duty, not when trying to stop an onslaught with riot shields.

Does it ever occur to the guardians of the peace that the very fact they have to wield riot shields suggests that the demonstrations aren’t entirely peaceful? And hence kowtowing to the mob represents a gross dereliction of duty? No, obviously not.

The world is in the grip of the Diana virus, ultimately more toxic than Covid-19. The latter can only kill the individual body and lighten the wallet. The former is killing the collective soul.  

Both politics and war can serve good ends, as well as bad. However, current views of past politics and wars change. In line with current expediency yesterday’s good may become today’s evil, and vice versa.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with historical revisionism as such. It can correct a wrong perception and put forth a correct one. It can also do the opposite.

Two current examples illustrate both possibilities. One restores a truth, the other perpetuates a lie. In both cases a statue of a military leader has been seen as offensive in today’s political climate.

Two months ago, a statue of the Soviet marshal Ivan Konev was taken down in the centre of Prague. That created a stir both at home and abroad.

Putin and his mouthpieces screamed bloody murder, accusing the Prague mayor of retrospectively fighting on Hitler’s side. Czech President Milos Zeman, Putin’s acolyte, echoed the screams, as did the Communist Party leader Vojtech Filip.

Putin’s totalitarian propaganda includes an historical component: the entire history of the Soviet Union, brought close to reality in the 1990s, is being rewritten again according to the previous Stalinist model.

That especially includes the war, with the Soviet Union portrayed by Stalin and his heirs as an innocent, peaceful victim of dastardly aggression. The Secret Protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, kept under wraps until the 1990s, is now again praised as the acme of morality and sagacity – not what it in fact was, a collusion between two predators to divide Europe between them.

At the end of the war, the Soviets liberated half of Europe – and Marshal Konev was one of the principal liberators. The liberators commemorated their advent by disfiguring European capitals with the stigmata of statues (the most disgusting one, an obelisk adorned with quotes from Stalin, still stands in the centre of Vienna).

However, most liberated people didn’t regard Soviet occupation as particularly liberating. Seeing it as one revolting oppressor replacing another, they rebelled occasionally and seethed all the time.

Konev led the Soviet troops that occupied Prague in 1945, and perhaps if his career had ended then, a statue to him would be appropriate. But it didn’t.

In 1956 his troops drowned the anti-Soviet Hungarian Uprising in blood. In 1961 Konev, then in command of the Soviet forces in East Germany, supervised the construction of the Berlin Wall.

And, more to the point, in 1968 he masterminded the crushing of the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia. Hence the removal of his statue in Prague corrects a historical wrong pepetrated by the Soviets and perpetuated by the present regime.

Score one for truth. But the decision of Virginia’s governor Levar Stoney to remove a statue of General Robert E Lee from the centre of Richmond evens the score.

Robert E Lee, who led the Confederate army during the Civil War, was a brilliant general. Before the war he had served in the US Army for 32 years, distinguishing himself during the Mexican-American War.

When his native Virginia announced its secession from the Union, Lee (incidentally married to George Washington’s great-granddaughter) was upset. He wanted to keep his country intact and, on a more personal level, had just been offered a senior Union command.

However, Lee felt he was honour-bound to fight for his native state. He thus accepted the Confederacy command and led his army to some great victories against prohibitive odds. Eventually the South was crushed and Lee survived the Confederacy by only five years.

His place in history depends on understanding the Civil War for what it was, not how it’s depicted in popular mythology. And mythology insists that the war was fought against slavery. This is a fallacy.

Interestingly, some Northern commanders, such as Grant and McClellan, were themselves slave owners, while many Southern generals, such as Lee himself (who had freed his slaves two years before the shooting began) weren’t.

This emphasises what has to be obvious to any unbiased observer: the war wasn’t about slavery. True enough, the Southern states seceded largely because the federal government had put obstacles in the way of spreading slavery into the newly acquired territories.

However, Lincoln and his colleagues had no quarrel with slavery in the original Southern states. Their bellicose reaction to the secession was caused not by slavery but by their in-built imperative to retain and expand the power of the central state.

“If that would preserve the Union, I’d agree not to liberate a single slave,” Lincoln once said. Note also that his Gettysburg Address includes not a single anti-slavery word – and in fact Lincoln dreaded the possibility that he himself might be portrayed as an abolitionist.

The war was fought for political centralism, characteristic of post-Enlightenment modernity, against political localism, characteristic of pre-Enlightenment Christendom. The North’s aggression denied the Southern states’ right to secede, stipulated in the Constitution. Thus the South, though itself a sinner, was sinned against even more.

That slavery is a blot on American, especially Southern, history is beyond doubt. And, judging by his actions, Lee would have agreed with that.

But the North’s conduct during the war and in its aftermath was equally inhuman. The aim wasn’t just to win the war but to destroy the South. That desideratum added to the conflict the distinctly modern touch of total annihilation.

The term ‘scorched earth’ entered the language courtesy of Gen Sherman’s March to the South that left whole cities burned down to ashes, not to mention countless manor houses and plantations.

What happened after the war was equally vile. The South was left at the mercy of carpetbaggers (poor whites moving down from the North) and freed slaves. Murder, vandalism, rape and looting were actively encouraged as a way of finishing the job started by Sherman.

Even though America suffered greater casualties in the Civil War than in all her other wars combined, it was that orgy of encouraged violence that left festering wounds in the American psyche. And in the South the wounds aren’t just festering but still bleeding.

The South, with its despicable Jim Crow laws, made a bad situation much worse, but the 1964 Civil Rights Act was supposed to heal the racial lesions. So it would have done – but for the existence of powerful groups with a vested interest in continued racial strife. Parallels with the on-going mayhem are irresistible.

Yet again white liberals are conferring an eternal status of victimhood on the blacks, tacitly encouraging conflict. In the 1960s this used to take grotesque forms, such as Lenny Bernstein treating his liberal guests to the delicious presence of Black Panthers (Tom Wolfe brilliantly sent up that event in Radical Chic).

Today’s white liberals are less inclined to make fools of themselves. Instead they rely on more subtle and less direct incitement, mainly by implementing policies guaranteed to perpetuate, enlarge and enrage the black underclass.   

As in the case of Putin’s current attempts to rewrite history the Stalin way, US history is conscripted to serve the cause of social disintegration. Hence the historically false account of the Civil War, taught as gospel truth in American schools.

Hence also the distortion of Robert E Lee’s role in history. The honourable and courageous general is shamelessly portrayed as a white supremacist who would have had Martin Luther King lynched had their lifespans overlapped.

Rather than closing the racial rift, this conscious policy serves only to widen it. That, evidently, is its intended purpose, rather than an unfortunate side effect.

Unlike the Czechs, who removed a statue to uphold historical truth, the governor of Virginia is removing one to serve a lie. He ought to be ashamed of himself.