Author: Alexander Boot

Michel Barnier, the EU’s Brexit negotiator, has volunteered to “teach the British people and others what leaving the EU means”.

Well, it’s never too late to learn, and I for one welcome the forthcoming lesson. Why, I’m even prepared to submit to corporal punishment should I prove to be an inept and indolent pupil.

Alas, it saddens me no end that not all English people are as eager to welcome foreigners trying to teach them how to live. Call it small-mindedness, call it jingoism, call it anything you like, but you can’t deny this pig-headed recalcitrance exists.

Not so long ago, for example, a sturdy woman speaking with a broad London accent gave her misbehaving nipper a light smack on the 22 Bus. An even sturdier woman speaking with a broad German accent took exception to that educational practice.

“In Germany,” she said, “ve don’t smack children”. “In England,” replied the Londoner, “we don’t gas Jews.”

One could surmise with chagrin that the child-abusing woman rather inclined towards Euroscepticism – to a point where she was prepared to reject valuable, if unsolicited, tuition. Gasping with horror, one may even guess which way she voted in the subsequent referendum.

There’s no doubt in my mind that the French in general and Mr Barnier in particular have a lot to teach England about running her political affairs. After all, who’s better qualified to be a marriage counsellor than someone who has been married many times? Experience brings knowledge, and knowledge must be passed on.

Now, since 1789, when the modern French state came into existence to the accompaniment of clanging guillotine blades, how many constitutions has England (or Britain, if you’d rather) had? A measly one.

Yes, the country has been stuck in the rut of the same political system for centuries. Is that any way of gaining experience, I ask you? The word stick-in-the-mud springs to mind.

By contrast, France’s mind has been wide-open to new experiences, new knowledge. During the same period, she has had five republics, all sorts of assemblies, directories, dictatorships, empires, monarchies and – I can see you turn green with envy – 17 (!) different constitutions.

If that doesn’t qualify France to teach us politics, I don’t know what possibly could. And when it comes to maintaining close ties with other continental powers, especially Germany, Mr Barnier’s country makes us look like ignorant novices dripping wet behind the ears.

Why, between 1940 and 1944 the two great EU powers, Germany and France, enjoyed such a close relationship that they managed to fine-tune all the requisite institutions and practices. Following a smooth post-war transition, that precious experience contributed to the subsequent unqualified success of the EU, based as it is on a similar type of fraternal cooperation.

While that went on, rather than taking the same finishing classes Britain was playing truant. She resisted attending school and even tossed bricks through the window. Bad girl, wasn’t she?

This kind of bloody-mindedness goes back a long way. For example, in the early nineteenth century, Napoleon, then the headmaster of the French School of Politics, tried to teach England how to stay in step with progress underpinned by the slogan Liberté, Fraternité, Aligoté.

That noble attempt was met with sheer ingratitude, presaging Britain’s current misbehaviour. While welcoming with unbridled enthusiasm the Aligoté part of the triad, the British rejected out of hand the other two parts and instead insisted that Napoleon himself attend the St Helena post-graduate academy.

Like all good schools these days, the EU charges tuition fees, which point Mr Barnier has stressed with a great deal of didactic emphasis. However, other good schools tend not to demand payment once the pupil has matriculated.

Yet the level of education provided by Mr Barnier’s school is of such sterling (euro?) quality that he insists – logically and justly – that Britain should continue to pay 14 per cent of the EU’s budget for the next three years upon graduation.

A reasonable demand if I’ve ever heard one, and yet Britain, this miserly nation de boutiquiers in Headmaster Napoleon’s definition, refuses to comply. Or rather pretends to – I’m sure that eventually Britain will see the light shining out of Mr Barnier’s… well, out of Mr Barnier and pony up.

Meanwhile, in anticipation of the richly deserved punishment to be meted out by Mr Barnier, Britain would be well-advised to line her knickers with cardboard. Then she should bend over and brace herself for six of Mr Barnier’s best.

Alternatively, we could tell him to place his education into the same depository out of which his light shines. That’s the kind of ingrates the British are.

Conservatives believe in tradition. Libertarians believe in less state power. Socialists believe in more state power.

Yet they all accept ‘consent of the governed’ and the resulting ‘social contract’ as words chiselled in stone. In fact, they’re drawn in the sand just before the tide comes in.

As do so many perverse modern notions, ‘consent of the governed’ derives from Hobbes and mostly Locke, the inspiration behind both the American and French revolutions, and therefore the modern world.

An idealised picture Locke must have had in mind was that of ‘the people’ coming together at some instant to decide on accepting or rejecting the notion of post-Christian secular government unaccountable to any absolute moral authority. Upon deliberation, they consented to it. A show of hands must have been involved, all perfectly equitable and democratic.

This idea is doubtless attractive, and it would become even more so if any evidence could be found that this meeting of minds ever took place. Alas, no such evidence exists.

In fact, no attempt to replace a traditional monarchy with a modern state, be that the English revolutions of the seventeenth century, the American and French ones of the eighteenth, or the Russian ones of the twentieth, involved asking for the ‘people’s’ consent.

What they all did involve was unbridled violence unleashed in ‘the people’s’ name by a small cadre of subversives and their variously named revolutionary committees. In most cases, including the American Revolution, ‘the people’ not only didn’t give their explicit consent but in fact withheld even their tacit approval.

When such reticence was detected, the revolutionaries, acting in the name of ‘the people’, would resort to violence, its extent restricted only by expediency, not any moral considerations. They could kill hundreds (Americans), thousands (Englishmen), hundreds of thousands (Frenchmen) or millions (Russians). Whatever was needed.

Since neither Locke nor his French followers could pinpoint the granting of ‘consent’ to any specific historical event, they had to talk about some nebulous ‘social contract’, to use the phrase first used by Democritus and later popularised by Hobbes and especially Rousseau. This idea is false even at an elementary logical level.

According to the legal principle going back to the Old Testament, for any contract to be valid it has to be adjudicated by an authority holding sway over both parties, one whose judgement they accept as binding.

In any reasonable sense, such an authority has to be institutionally superior to the two parties. That’s why, for example, when the seller and buyer of a house sign a contract, they have to have the document notarised by a legal official empowered by the state.

The only authority that can be deemed superior to both the state and the individual is God. Hence frequent, if insincere, appeals to the deity in various founding documents of the early liberal democracies. Yet one would look in vain for any reference in the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures either to ‘government by consent’ or to ‘social contract’.

Nowhere does it say that a third of the electorate, a proportion considered adequate in most modern democracies, can cast their vote in a way that’ll give them absolute sovereignty over the remaining two-thirds. What both Testaments do repeat time after time is that “all power is from God” – not from some mythical compact.

A critical aspect of ‘consent’, as understood by Lockeans everywhere, is that it’s irrevocable: once presumed to have been given, it can’t be reclaimed by any peaceful means. Yet in no conceivable way could it be true that a third or even a fourth of the population voting in a government has given consent on behalf of the rest of the people as well. This is patently ludicrous, as is the whole idea of consent.

Any valid contract includes terms under which it may be terminated. In the absence of a higher adjudicating authority, no ‘social contract’ can possibly have such a clause. Therefore violence is the only recourse either party has, meaning that in a modern state a revolution isn’t so much an aberration as a logical extension of the ‘social contract’, the only way for the people to withdraw their ‘consent’ – just as tyranny is the only way for the state to enforce it.

In any logical interpretation of Locke, a society can only remain peaceful not because of the people’s meaningful consent but because of their docile acquiescence. In other words, the people can give ‘consent’ only passively, not actively – by refraining from overthrowing either the government or the whole political system by force.

Thus Hobbes and Locke, along with their American, English, French and Russian followers, had no option but to sanctify the people’s right to revolution. But the people at large never perpetrate revolutions – this function is usurped by a small group of activists and ideologues (‘professional revolutionaries’ in Lenin’s parlance) who combine radicalism with deviousness.

Those chaps are seldom, and never merely, driven by noble motives. Hatred is always present as a significant animus.

In modern revolutions, this hatred is really levelled not at any particular abuses singled out as pretexts but at the traditional order as such. Depending on the pet issue of the day, this target may be packaged in a box labelled as ‘monarchy’, ‘absolutism’, ‘popery’ (a bugbear for both Hobbes and Locke), religion in general, ‘taxation without representation’ – the tag doesn’t really matter.

Hence Hobbes and Locke were issuing a carte blanche to arbitrary violence as the only option for withdrawing ‘consent’ never given in the first place. The people, or rather those acting in their name, would henceforth feel justified to rebel against any legally instituted authority for any reason exciting them at the moment.

If it’s ‘popery’, that’ll do famously. If it’s ‘taxation without representation’, that’ll work just as well. If it’s ‘bloodthirsty tsarism’, even better. In most instances, the existing government would be predictably replaced by one palpably more abusive.

All modern democracies were originally contrivances with tenuous claims to legitimacy. That’s why the most successful and durable among them always contain elements of the organic, monarchic state.

That state appeared so seamlessly that it was tempting to take a cue from St Paul and believe it was indeed willed by God – in fact Burke interpreted it that way. According to him, the same God “who gave our nature to be perfected by our virtue, willed also the necessary means of its perfection. – He willed therefore the state.”

To see whether a state is organic or contrived, one can apply a simple test that would work in most cases: unlike the origin of a contrived state, the origin of an organic one can’t be pinpointed to a single historical event or, for that matter, any precise moment in time.

We know that the American republic started in 1776, the French one in 1789, the unified German state in 1871, the Bolshevik one in 1917, Israel in 1948 and so forth. But when did the English state begin? We can’t be sure. That’s how we know it isn’t contrived.

Contrivances of any kind demand some kind of plausible justification. They can’t just be accepted; they need to be explained.

Hence, unlike the Decalogue, modern law relies on thousands of recondite, exegetic tomes. Without accompanying stacks of abstruse articles on art theory, most modern painting would be seen as a madman’s scribble. And without the falsehoods of consent and social contract, modern democracies would be seen for the arbitrary contrivances they are.

Thus it’s not only totalitarian states that excel at inculcating false ideas in people’s minds. Liberal democracies do a good job of it as well, and that’s where all modern states converge.

One can’t shake the impression that the EU is trying to fleece Britain not so much for economic reasons as for punitive ones. There’s also the ulterior motive of tangling the negotiations up indefinitely, turning Brexit step by excruciating step into an unrealisable abstraction.

To wit, two recent developments:

The International Trade Secretary Liam Fox apparently received a blackmail note and recoiled with horror. The threat was too awful to contemplate:

“Pay attention, Liam, because I’m only going to say this once. We’ve got Britain and, if you ever want to see her alive again, put £50 billion under the rain barrel outside your Westminster house tonight. And remember: no funny business or Britain will get it. Signed: the EU.”

At the same time David Davis, the Secretary of State for Brexit, filed for divorce from his marriage to Europe, citing loss of sovereignty, his spouse’s excessive bossiness and his own desire to return to his past bachelor ways.

In response, the plaintiff has received a list of demands from the defendant’s solicitor Michel Barnier: “Sale con d’anglais! My client has been suffering for years from your mental cruelty and lack of loyalty, but no? Ze settlement will have to reflect zis a priori, in extremis and in toto. We want 50 billion pounds (or euros, pas de différence these days) up front and your continued commitment to every projet vert – that’s green project to you – ever mentioned in Brussels, Strasbourg or Berlin. If you refuse, we’ll tie you up in litigation for as many years as it takes for you to decide zat perhaps a divorce isn’t such a good idea after all. Say oui, or no deal, you espèce de merde britannique.”

Now I have a confession to make. Though Dr Fox did mention that the EU was trying to blackmail Britain, and Mr Davis does talk about Brexit in the terms normally reserved for nuptial divorce, neither man has received such a missive. The spirit of the EU’s demands, however, may not be far from the letter of those two notes, so the temptation to draw a direct parallel with blackmail or divorce may be hard to resist.

But it must be resisted. For the situation is neither blackmail nor divorce, and the use of such terms has a large potential for obfuscation.

Blackmail presupposes extortion by issuing a realistic threat. The blackmailer finds himself in an ad hoc position of power and uses it to force compliance with his demands.

So whence does the EU’s power come? What realistic threat is hanging like the sword of Damocles over Britain’s head?

Suppose Liam Fox responds that, as far as Britain is concerned, her association with the EU is summarily at an end.

We’ve paid enough entrance and membership fees over the years not to have to pay an exit fee as well. As to all those green, red, pink, rainbow and other variously coloured projects from the EU palette, we’ll assess each one separately on its merits. If we wish to participate, we shall. If we don’t, we shan’t. In neither case can this be a precondition for Brexit.

What’s the worst that could happen? The EU will refuse to trade with us? Impose stiff tariffs on British goods?

That would be cutting off their trade nose to spite their economic face, for Britain would obviously respond in kind. German manufacturers are already moaning that all this Brexit toing and froing is hurting their business. What are they going to say if, due to their government’s stupid intransigence, the damage grows tenfold? They do have business lobbies in Europe that can get bloody-minded, especially around election time.

The level of trade tariffs is regulated by the WTO, and I doubt the EU would wish to flout those rules or especially leave the WTO as a result. Yes, since the EU is an ideological entity rather than an economic one, it’s capable of causing mutual damage pour encourager les autres. But that falls far short of being a deadly threat, especially when Britain’s ancient constitution is at stake.

Blackmail is thus not a precise term. Neither is divorce.

Divorce presupposes an equitable division of both assets and liabilities. So far I haven’t heard one word about the portion of EU assets to which Britain is entitled as the second largest net contributor to EU coffers. All one hears is hissing about the money Britain supposedly owes.

Hence this isn’t a normal divorce but again a kind of shakedown attempt, with the supposed plaintiff bearing all the brunt of the separation. The only logical response would be a demand that terminological precision be restored.

Britain leaves the EU effective immediately, while two teams of lawyers wrangle at their leisure about the assets and liabilities, and how they are to be divided. They can take their time; there’s no particular rush. Meanwhile, Britain and the EU will live their separate lives.

To move from the metaphors of blackmail and divorce to an amorous simile, the so-called Brexit negotiations are like a sexless man pretending to be making love to a sexless woman. Neither of them wants a consummation, but they both go through the motions for the hell of it.

EU laws are drafted for the purpose of making exit inordinately difficult. There exist a myriad casuistic details that can never be worked out, and certainly not within any kind of limited time. That renders pre-Brexit negotiations counterproductive.

Negotiations are only possible when both parties are seeking a speedy and successful conclusion. The EU definitely seeks nothing of the sort, and it increasingly appears that neither does our government, where the two top positions are held by Remainers.

Hence all the talk about negotiations, blackmail, divorce, soft Brexit, transition period and so forth amounts to nothing but a delaying ploy. That whole mass of details will never be worked out because it’s designed not to be.

The only way for HMG to show that it really intends to comply with the people’s wishes is to take an immediate French leave. (Which, appropriately, is called filer à l’anglaise in French.)

And, while banging the door, we should make it clear that Britain won’t be fleeced, certainly not by a bunch of jumped up bureaucrats with learning difficulties and delusions of grandeur.

The bloodiest war in history started on this day 78 years ago, didn’t it? Well, not as far as most Russians are concerned. According to them, the war began on 22 June, 1941, when Hitler’s preemptive strike beat Stalin to the punch by a week or two.

This one date says all you need to know about Soviet and post-Soviet propaganda, compared to which Goebbels’s efforts look like amateur hour. It’s because of this falsification of history hammered into their minds round the clock that most Russians fail to see an obvious paradox.

Before Operation Barbarossa, the Soviets had fought two wars within those that are collectively known as the Second World War. On 17 September, 1939, they attacked Poland from the east just as their Nazi allies were attacking it from the West. On 30 November, the Soviets launched another unprovoked attack, this one against Finland.

In the first war, the Soviets lost 3,000 KIA. In the second, somewhere between 100,000 and a million (they were rather lackadaisical in counting corpses – what’s a hundred thousand here or there among friends?). Yet, while all the Polish and Finnish soldiers killed by the Russians perished in the world war, none of the Russians did. The war didn’t start until 1941, remember?

Such playing fast and loose with history is hard to forgive but easy to understand. The entire post-war Soviet mythology rotates around the hub of what they call the Great Patriotic War. The peaceful Soviet Union was treacherously attacked by the Nazis, having to lose tens of millions to repel the aggression under the wise leadership of Comrade Stalin. To this day one can hear criticism of Stalin rebuked with “Yes, but thanks to him we won the war”.

The twentieth century witnessed many lies, but none so brazen as this one. The whole purpose of it is to absolve the USSR of any guilt in starting the Second World War, portraying it as an innocent victim.

In fact, but for what today would be called the ‘peace process’ between Hitler and Stalin, Hitler might not have started the war at all or, if he had, it certainly wouldn’t have been as protracted and bloody.

The pact signed on 27 August, 1939, wasn’t the sum total of that alliance but only its culmination. The cooperation between German and Russian extremists started in 1917, when the German General Staff transported what Churchill accurately described as the ‘bacillus’ of Lenin’s gang into Russia.

The contagion worked – Lenin usurped power and promptly took Russia out of the war. Germany’s defeat in 1918 turned both countries into pariahs and they fell into each other’s embrace by signing the 1922 Rapallo Treaty.

Several years later the Soviets helped Germany cheat on the terms of the Versailles Treaty. They set up several training facilities for German officers in Russia, the most prominent of them being the Kama tank school at Kazan.

There Soviet and German tank commanders worked out the tactics of pincer manoeuvres at depth. Later, such alumni of that school as Model, Manstein and Guderian put the tuition to good use, first in the West and then against Russia herself.

When Hitler came to power, the schools closed but the cooperation continued in secret. The NKVD and Gestapo even formed a Friendship Society, with the Soviets teaching the start-up organisation the mechanics of mass terror, and the Nazis supplying the latest in torture technology. The Society, incidentally, remained active, if on a limited scale, throughout the war.

Stalin was acting in accordance with the Lenin canon, according to which Germany was to become “the icebreaker of the revolution”. Lenin knew that sooner or later the Germans would light a pan-European fire, out of which the Russians would then pull all the tasty chestnuts.

In preparation, Stalin turned his whole country into a combination of prison, munition plant and boot camp. The mass murders of the industrialisation and collectivisation served that purpose, turning Russia into a single-minded military monster operated by slaves.

At the time Hitler was ready to pounce on Europe, Stalin had at his disposal the largest and best-equipped army in the world. His 21,000-odd tanks outnumbered the tank forces not only of Germany (just over 3,000) but the rest of the world combined, and the top models, the T-34 and KV, remained unparalleled until late 1942.

It was time to push the button, and it was pushed by what’s known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that caught the West unawares. (This despite numerous reports by Soviet defectors, such as Walter Krivitsky, that the Pact was imminent. The West chose to believe not those reports but Soviet anti-Nazi propaganda.)

Stalin’s plan was to have Hitler bogged down in a war of attrition with the West and, when the two sides were near complete exhaustion, to strike from the rear. Meanwhile, it was Hitler’s task to get the ball rolling. However, Germany was short of essential raw materials, and this is where Stalin’s help was invaluable.

Even though the Germans didn’t keep their end of the bargain by never achieving the stipulated level of technological supplies to Russia, the Soviets overshot the quota by a large margin. Thousands of railcars full of cereals and every essential raw material were pouring fresh blood into the body of the Nazi monster, building up its muscle.

Without those supplies Hitler wouldn’t have been able to wage his war – and probably  wouldn’t even have been able to defeat Poland. The Nazis were so overconfident that they didn’t even prepare for the war properly. When the shooting started, they were rapidly running out of supplies, especially aircraft bombs.

Stalin helpfully obliged, later repeating the trick during the Battle of Britain, when most of the bombs raining on London were of Soviet manufacture. But in the autumn of 1939 the Poles were resisting bravely, having managed to regroup after the original setbacks.

Army Group Poznan got entrenched on the eastern bank of the Vistula, and the German offensive began to run out of steam. That’s when the Soviets struck, claiming the part of Poland to which they felt entitled according to the terms of the Pact. Poland quickly collapsed, and the German predator was ready to turn west.

Stalin’s gigantic army was poised to fulfil its historic mission, as outlined by Lenin and Trotsky, and refined by Stalin. But, being by nature a cautious man, Stalin dithered. His plan was to strike only after the Germans landed in England, where they were bound to be tied up in knots.

Yet the Germans had no technical means to launch their much-vaunted Operation Sea Lion. Their transport fleet was woefully inadequate for such a mission, especially considering the dominance of the Royal Navy.

And even their ability to secure a beachhead with paratroops was compromised by their conquest of Crete, which was widely seen as a dress rehearsal for Sea Lion. But that was a Pyrrhic victory because in the process the Nazis lost practically all their airborne forces.

Yet the Germans managed to convince Stalin that the invasion of England was forthcoming, and the Soviet juggernaut poised at their border didn’t roll. But a fully mobilised army can’t stay in a state of readiness indefinitely. It had to go into action, and Hitler realised that.

He, along with every German, was aware of the perils of a two-front war. But he also knew that, once the Stalin juggernaut rolled, it would be unstoppable. Hitler’s only chance was to launch a lightning strike in the hope of destroying the Soviet army within a couple of months.

The plan almost succeeded. And this is where another Russian lie is shown for what it is. For the war didn’t become ‘Patriotic’ until later. At the beginning, the Soviet people didn’t want to fight for their slave masters.

They fled, leaving all that state-of-the-art hardware behind in heaps of useless iron. They deserted en masse. And they surrendered in their millions, often still fully armed. Whole regiments would march into Nazi captivity to the sound of their brass bands; up to 1.5 million happily put on German uniforms.

By December that year the Germans had taken 4.5 million POWs, in a rout never before seen in history. Had Hitler not been poisoned by his racist ideology, he could have won at a canter by proclaiming a war of liberation against bolshevism.

Had he done so, he would have had not 1.5 but 15 million Russians ready to fight against the most satanic regime in history. But Hitler ran a satanic regime of his own. “We are not liberating Russia,” he rebuked Gen. Halder. “We are conquering her.”

The Germans began to commit well-documented atrocities, encouraged by Soviet saboteurs whose main task was to turn the Nazis against the occupied people. Those people initially greeted the Nazis with flowers, food and drink. When the Nazis began to act in character, the mood changed.

At the same time, Stalin started a terrorist campaign of his own, trying to whip up a fighting spirit among his reluctant populace. Retreating soldiers and those who managed to escape German captivity were shot or formed into suicide ‘penalty battalions’.

Altogether the Soviets shot 154,000 of their own soldiers following tribunal verdicts – and at least twice as many even without such travesty of justice. They therefore hold the distinction of inflicting heavier losses on their own army than the Germans and the Japanese managed to inflict on the US forces. It was also explained to the fighting men that their families would be held responsible for their insufficient valour.

Eventually, the Soviets ended up in Berlin, having lost anywhere between 20 and 40 million (it’s that account keeping again). When Churchill commiserated with Stalin over such devastating losses, Stalin shrugged his shoulders nonchalantly. “We lost more during the collectivisation,” he said.

Amazingly, the echoes of Russian propaganda reaching the West aren’t sufficiently attenuated. If asked, most Westerners would still say that the Second World War was started by Germany, with Russia as one of her victims.

Yet the war that started 78 years ago today featured not one aggressor but two: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The latter finished the war as our ally, but then so did fascist Italy.

History doesn’t lie, even though some people do. Let’s listen to history, shall we?

On 28 February, 2015, opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was shot dead on Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge, some 100 yards from the Kremlin. That area probably has more surveillance cameras per square foot than any place in the world – yet by some serendipity they were switched off.

In due course, some Chechens were imprisoned for the murder. Even assuming they were the actual shooters, not a safe assumption by any means, they clearly didn’t act on their own. Yet no attempt was made during the trial to find out who had ordered the murder, who organised it and set up the getaway.

There’s no need: everybody knows the murder had to be commissioned by the Kremlin. That means by Putin, either in so many words or equivocally, along the lines of Henry II’s “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?”

Nemtsov committed a crime for which the capital punishment is the only just recompense: he didn’t love Putin, and he didn’t care who knew it. There are many nay-sayers like him in Russia, but they know how to keep their mouths shut. Yet Nemtsov not only used his for the nefarious purpose of proclaiming his understated love for Putin, but he also encouraged many others to join in.

Moreover, this objectionable individual continues to brew sedition even after his death. Nemtsov screams his dislike of Putin out of his grave, and his accomplices make sure these posthumous shouts are heard.

The site of the murder is marked with candles and flowers. The memorial is a veritable eyesore for the authorities, who are deeply offended by this shortage of love for the strong leader so beloved of Peter Hitchens. You know, the likes of whom he and other useful idiots wish we had here.

That’s why the authorities have had the memorial destroyed with monotonous regularity. Goons would arrive in vans and play football with the candles and flowers. They’d then pick up what’s left and take it away.

To prevent this from happening, Nemtsov’s accomplices in the heinous crime of not loving Putin have established a vigil there, with someone keeping an eye on the memorial round the clock. That’s not the safest job in the world.

For there are enough people out there who take not loving Putin as a personal insult. There are even more of those who can fake an outburst of righteous indignation for a one-off freelance fee, a retainer or, better still, a regular wage.

The memorial guardians thus routinely find themselves on the receiving end of abuse by burly louts unfamiliar with the notion of freedom of speech, assembly or anything else. The abuse varies from swearing (and the Russian language affords a practically unlimited range of such self-expression) to pushing and jostling to assault.

On 10 October, 2016, Moscow councilman (!) Igor Brumel, assisted by a professional thug, savagely beat up the guardian Nadir Fatov. Fatov managed to survive his smashed face and broken nose, even though doctors were denied access to him for two hours.

Ivan Skripnichenko, 35, wasn’t so lucky. A fortnight ago, on 15 August, he was assaulted in a similar manner. A beefy thug demanded to know how Skripnichenko felt about the strong leader. Unsatisfied with the reply, he screamed “So you don’t love Putin?!?” and punched Skripnichenko in the face, breaking his nose.

Proving he was less robust than Fatov, Ivan Skripnichenko died in hospital eight days later. His crime was protecting candles and flowers, and giving a wrong answer to the question that our own useful idiots would have happily answered in the affirmative.

(Preempting pedantic nitpicking by Russophones, the Russian verb любить means both to love and to like. So the thug’s battle cry could also have been translated as “So you don’t like Putin?!?” In this context, it’s a distinction without a difference.)

The CCTV cameras were suffering another malfunction that day, enabling the assailant to walk away from the scene of the crime without undue haste. Actually, there was no need for surveillance. If the authorities really want to find out who killed Skripnichenko, all they have to do is see who was paid to harass the memorial on that day.

The business of not loving Putin is getting more dangerous by the day, and simply guarding candles and flowers has become an act of heroism. Alas, heroes are never thick on the ground, and for every Skripnichenko there are thousands of wild-eyed morons duped by Putin’s brainwashing – and I don’t mean just within Russia.

Those of us whose moral compass hasn’t yet gone haywire should say a quiet prayer for Skripnichenko and, if such is our wont, light a candle in his memory. And perhaps even those Diana idolaters could spare a flower from those they’re heaping up outside Kensington Palace.

Ivan Skripnichenko, RIP

The pictures ring distinct, if distant, bells. For I used to live in Houston, from 1974 to 1984.

Ten years, which meant a couple of hurricanes, a dozen tornados and some half a dozen floods – I had never known nature to be like that. I knew how to handle extreme cold; that sort of knowledge comes with experience, of which I had plenty in Russia. Then once, back in 1967, I saw a massive hurricane in Pärnu, a seaside Estonian resort.

But that was it. All I had to show by way of experience with adverse weather was 25 cold winters and one hurricane. I wasn’t quite ready for Houston, and the very first flood showed me up for the greenhorn I was.

The deluge came, and it reminded me of the biblical story involving Noah. Except that the patriarch had plenty of company on his ark, and I was all alone in my car. It was moving, but only just – water was already some three feet deep, and there was a lot of physical resistance in the car’s way.

In those days I had only a vague idea of automotive mechanics, a cognitive void that has been only partially filled since then. I had heard the word ‘carburettor’ but didn’t know exactly what that device did.

More to the point, I didn’t know what happened if it sucked in water. That ignorance was quickly corrected: the engine coughed once or twice and died.

The water was already only a couple of inches below my window and the car began to pretend it was a boat by undulating gently. I realised it was time to abandon ship.

Now looking at the footage of the on-going flood, I can see that Houstonians know how to perform that simple manoeuvre. With wisdom born out of experience, they open their car windows, climb out and wade home.

Since I had neither wisdom nor experience, I did something incredibly stupid: opened the car door. A second later I knew that had been a wrong decision, which was how long it took for a giant wave, happy to have been set free, to roll into the car, filling it almost to the brim.

A good friend of mine, a Polish woman with aristocratic manners, a keenly intelligent face and large glasses perched on the tip of her patrician nose, found herself in a similar situation, but with a nice twist. She too had to abandon her car and wade home, except that in her part of town flood water ruptured a sewer. Hence she had to walk home waist deep in unspeakable muck, which didn’t at all go with the image she projected to the world.

In due course, I learned how to climb out of flooded cars, and that knowledge stood me in good stead on a few other occasions. But a nagging question just wouldn’t go away: how come just a couple of hours of subtropical downpours could create such mayhem in a city that was forewarned but clearly nor forearmed?

Surely a place with enough resident expertise to put a man on the moon should be able to upgrade the drainage system and provide flood defences?

I put those questions to my tennis partner, who worked for the mayor of Houston. Of course, we could do it, he replied, what d’y’all think we are, backward hillbillies?

So why don’t you? Well, you see, that’s a matter of money, dollars and cents, he explained.

We’ve done our sums and come to the conclusion that it’s cheaper to accept the consequences of a flood from time to time than to undertake the gigantic infrastructure overhaul required to protect the city. It’s like in the army, see? There’s an acceptable casualty rate in every operation.

In those days, I didn’t feel sufficiently self-confident to take issue with the way things were done in the West. My aim was not only to sound like an American but actually to be one, and the best way of achieving that was to accept things as they were, the way the locals did them.

By the looks of it, the locals still do things the same way. But I’m not the same man. I never succeeded in becoming an American, and now I even no longer sound like one. Nor do I think like Americans, at least those who’re paid to tackle such problems in Houston.

What price human misery, chaps? What price human lives? How do you figure the balance sheet? Surely it can’t just be a matter of cost-to-price ratio?

I’d suggest, 40-odd years later, that, if a solution to the problem is technically feasible, it must be solved no matter what the cost. Whatever it takes, even if that would mean imposing an extra two per cent tax on all the oil companies headquartered in Houston.

I realise that neither the Manchester nor the Chicago school of economics would countenance such a statist solution. I know that Friedrich Hayek would accuse me of signposting a road to serfdom and Milton Friedman would call me a crypto-Keynesian.

I could swear back, by calling them totalitarian economists, and arguing that free markets are fine as far as they go, but they don’t go everywhere. Some problems have no free market solution, but they still must be solved.

Those Texas authorities should stop thinking about human misery in terms of economic feasibility. I’d propose a different chain of thought:

A city of 2.5 million souls shouldn’t be devastated by regular floods. Ergo, it must be protected. Its flood defences, drainage system and infrastructure in general are inadequate. Ergo, they must be beefed up, expanded, replaced – whatever it takes. Let’s do a feasibility study and find out how much this will cost. Then let’s find the money – wherever it can be found.

And for God’s sake let’s stop thinking about life (and death) ab oeconomicam. That’s where the socialists and libertarians converge: nationalise the economy, say the former, and everything else will fall into place. Free up the economy, object the latter, and all life’s problems will be solved.

Tell that to those drowning Hustonians, who’ve found themselves on the wrong side of sound economic practices.

“If there is no God, everything is permitted”, wrote Dostoyevsky. Yet he underestimated the despotic potential of godless modernity.

It imposes its own taboos, and they may well be more numerous than those imposed by Christendom. They certainly are different because their purpose is.

Judaeo-Christianity saw man as sinful but capable of becoming better. Both its prescriptions and proscriptions were issued to signpost the road to self-improvement in this world and salvation in the next. The original commandments were chiselled in stone literally, the later ones figuratively, but there was no room left for misinterpretation in either case.

Modernity sees man as perfect, yet tautologically perfectible. But it lacks any moral or intellectual system within which the standards of perfection can be defined.

Having replaced transcendent with transient, modernity has to ad lib commandments as it goes along. In practice, this means replacing morality with a kaleidoscope of rapidly changing fads, some of them mutually exclusive, most of them inane, all of them tyrannical.

The message our herd-driving modernity sends out to the multitudes is arbitrary and therefore despotic: “You must obey what we say for as long as we keep saying it, regardless of how stupid it may be. Tomorrow we may say something else, and you’ll obey that too, even if it contradicts what we’re saying today.”

Moral entropy ensues. Deprived of the absolute, society loses immutable standards of morality, replacing them with variously perverse relativities. As a result, society becomes not only post-truth and post-thought, but also post-morality.

Therein lies madness, and every day brings new evidence of our world resembling the Cuckoo’s Nest, with assorted mini-tyrants in the role of Nurse Ratched. And, thanks to all the advances in information technology of which modernity is so inordinately proud, the onset of lunacy has an accelerator built in.

Things that just a few years ago were seen as criminal, perverse or crazy are now regarded as legitimate, laudable and sane – and vice versa.

Everything is permitted? Far from it. Everything is open to frenzied attack, is more like it. Modernity has found ways to augment its permissiveness with bossiness, and woebetide anyone who rebels – even unwittingly.

For example, ESPN commentator Doug Adler never thought of causing offence when earlier this year he described Venus Williams’s chip-and-charge attack as “guerrilla effect”, a term used in tennis for over 20 years.

Alas, Venus is black, and the word “guerrilla” is almost a homophone of a racial slur. A few years ago, a New York councilman managed to save his job by issuing a grovelling public apology for having used the word ‘niggardly’. But in the interim madness had progressed too far, and Adler was summarily sacked.

It never occurred to anyone that the true racists are those who immediately think of black people when hearing a word that sounds like ‘gorilla’. What about the film Gorillas in Our Midst? Must be Ku Klux Klan propaganda, don’t you think?

Speaking of films, a Memphis cinema has just pulled the 1939 classic Gone with the Wind for being “racially insensitive”. That’s yet another case of PC laws being made retroactive. Neither Margaret Mitchell nor David O. Selznick could comply with injunctions that were another half a century in coming. No one told them that Uncle Tom’s Cabin wasn’t just another version of history, but the only one.

But never mind cinematic classics. Literary ones aren’t faring any better. Libraries all over America are tossing out copies of Mark Twain’s novel Huckleberry Finn, from which, according to Hemingway, all American literature had come.

Henceforth American literature can come from elsewhere. For that emphatically anti-racist novel features a character called Nigger Jim, a runaway slave.

Twain was depicting the way people spoke in those days. He would have happily called his protagonist Afro-American Jim, but unfortunately the term didn’t exist then. And even if it had, the people inhabiting Twain’s pages wouldn’t have used it.

Art is supposed to imitate not just any old life, but today’s life specifically. If it doesn’t, it’ll be banned, the way Dostoyevsky was banned in Stalin’s Russia or Heine in Nazi Germany.

Modernity is at war not only with past masterpieces, but with the past itself. If little in history can pass muster when held to the tyrannical standards of modern insanity, history itself must go.

It’s not just all those Confederate statues that are under attack. That famous racist Christopher Columbus is about to be expunged from American history (and Columbus Circle) as well. And Donald Trump thought he was being facetious when he asked: “Who’s next? Washington?”

Damn right he is. Not only was America’s first president a slave owner, but he also took part in the Indian Wars, more appropriately called Racist Wars of Extermination Against Native Americans. Not only that, but Washington once caused damage to ‘our planet’ by taking a hatchet to a cherry tree.

Nativist. Slave owner. Murderer of ethnic minorities. Ecological terrorist. And Trump thought he was kidding.

Closer to home, statues of Queen Victoria are dotted all over the country. Now if Cecil Rhodes was rotten to the core, what about this empire builder par excellence? Even though Victoria partly redeemed herself by using opiates (laudanum, to be exact), every petrified likeness of her must offend modernity.

And don’t get me started on that white supremacist Jan Smuts, whose statue adorns Parliament Square. If Nelson was bad, how about this precursor of apartheid? Down with him – and bloody well down with the statue of George Washington in Trafalgar Square too, while we’re at it.

Standing next to him is that murderer of Indians Sir Henry Havelock and, a few hundred yards away, towers Clive of India, another racist empire builder. Add to this a gaggle of Napiers, Edward Colston, Nelson, Wellington and Churchill among many others, whose name is legion, and one begins to realise that no piecemeal solution will do.

All London statues except Nelson Mandela’s must go, along with history in general. Every historical figure must offend somebody’s delicate sensibilities, which means they must all be expurgated, swept away by the madness-causing prairie wind.

The dial of history must be zeroed in every generation. That way we’re guaranteed real-time compliance with every generation’s dicta. We’re also guaranteed a world closely resembling a lunatic asylum, but that’s progress for you.

Some of us serve a cause, but rarely do we do nothing else. In that sense, royals have much in common with priests: life and service are for them wholly coextensive…

I’m sorry, did I say ‘are’? I meant ‘ought to be’, and perhaps ‘used to be’. Yes, for the older generation of our royal family, living still means serving. The younger generation serve too, the way royals should. But they also want to live, the way the rest of us do.

They want to be regular blokes and lasses, which these days isn’t invariably a term of praise. For, since they’re constantly in the public eye, the kind of regular people they become don’t resemble either royals or priests any longer. They resemble pop stars.

They want to marry for ‘luv’, not dynastic duty. When young, they want to sow their wild oats on the covers of glossy mags. Inside those publications, they want to pour their hearts out in outbursts of tear-jerking vulgarity.

Their hearts are worn on their sleeves and eventually get coated with grime. Shove a camera and a mike in their faces, and they’ll babble on like… well, like 90 per cent of the population would, given the chance.

Monarchy performs a vital function in our society. Like most things in what used to be Christendom, it reflects the formative synthesis of the physical and metaphysical.

The physical, quotidian life of the country is the responsibility of Parliament and the institutions that radiate out of it. The monarchy’s responsibility is to act as a factor of religious, cultural and spiritual continuity – to act, in concert with the Church, as an adhesive gluing together generations past, present and future.

To serve or not to serve isn’t a question for them as it is for us. We may choose to serve or not; they’re born to do so. Some outsiders are co-opted into that service by marriage, in which case – whatever their legal status may be – they undertake to sacrifice their ‘normal’ lives to public good.

It’s mainly for that reason that royalty has traditionally married royalty. The code of royal behaviour is hard to learn unless one has been imbued with it from birth. It’s a big jump for a girl who has for 20-odd years lived a ‘normal’ life to change overnight into acting as a monastically dedicated public servant every minute of her life.

‘Monastic’ doesn’t mean self-denial in the physical luxuries of life. Quite the contrary, the royals can indulge the most refined or Gargantuan of tastes on a scale that’s beyond most of us. But it does mean checking every step, every word against the ancient code of service.

That’s what the two non-royal girls, Diana and Sarah Ferguson, couldn’t get their rather empty heads around when they married Princes Charles and Andrew back in the 80s. That’s why they wounded the monarchy, possibly mortally. And in doing so, they dealt our constitution a mighty blow.

Diana, in line to become queen, was in a position to do the greater damage, and she didn’t let that opportunity go begging. Having moved from Sloane Square to Kensington Palace, she wanted to remain the quintessential Sloanie, living high on the hog, seeking out paparazzi wherever she could find them (while pretending to be bothered by public attention), demanding ‘luv’ from her hubby-wubby, having highly publicised affairs when that wasn’t forthcoming, and venting her vulgar feelings on national TV.

While devoid of intelligence, that manipulative woman was richly blessed with cunning, which she used to insinuate herself into the kind of public adoration that’s normally reserved for tattooed, drugged-up pop stars. “I want to be me!!!” was the message that dripped from every gesture she made, every word she uttered.

A high aristocrat by birth and a petty bourgeois at heart, she complained to all and sundry about her husband’s unfaithfulness – and set out to punish him by emulating Messalina and Catherine the Great. He wasn’t the sole intended target: Diana sought revenge against the whole royal family, who tried to explain to her what the duties of a future queen entail.

That was a clash of dignified tradition and vulgar modernity, and there was only one winner. Modernity won, to the thunderous cheers of the braying herd of Diana’s admirers. They saw her as a mirror reflecting their own pettiness, solipsism and anomie.

They looked at Diana and saw themselves, as they’d wish to be if they had the dosh. That revolting Blair sniffed out the public mood with a bloodhound’s acuity when he described Diana as “the people’s princess”. That’s exactly what she was.

Some of the poison she injected into our venerable institution has been apparently passed on to her sons, who, in the approaching anniversary of their mother’s death, are hogging the media on a scale that would have done her justice.

They’re both desperate to show that, royal or not, they’re regular blokes, who like a pint, a good party and a televised chinwag with Gary Lineker, in which Prince William effortlessly spoke the ex-footballer’s language.

Now the two brothers are appearing in an ITV documentary and a BBC special, where they share with millions of viewers their anguish about losing their mum [sic] at a young age.

I can sympathise with their sorrow. No decent person would fail to feel for two boys orphaned in their childhood by an accident befalling their doting mother. What I can’t sympathise with is the undignified, unbecoming way in which this understandable emotion is being vented.

“She was the best mum in the world,” says one people’s prince, presumably on the basis of a global poll known to him only. And yes, I know that the old-fashioned word ‘mother’ has been ousted from popular discourse by the touchy-feely ‘mum’. But is it too much to expect a royal to talk – not to mention feel – like a royal, not an agony aunt?

“She was extremely good at showing her love, showing what we meant to her, what feelings meant and how important it was to feel.” Fine, we get it. I just wish she hadn’t displayed her ability to feel maternal (and other) love so effusively and publicly.

Then, “20 years on seems like a good time to remind people of the difference that she made, not just to the Royal Family, but also to the world.” Yes, she well-nigh destroyed the Royal Family, and may still do so by delayed action. As to the world, I don’t think it gives much of a damn. It has its own problems.

Sorry about your mum, lads. Now can you please go back to serving us the way you were born to do? A tough job, I know, but someone has to do it.

I’ve found out that not all statues are being pulled down. Courtesy of the ‘artist’ Phil Collins, the centre of Manchester is now adorned with a 10-foot likeness of Friedrich Engels.

The statue was no longer wanted at its original site in the Ukraine. People there still remember the Holodomor, when millions were deliberately starved to death for having reservations about the creed concocted by Marx and Engels.

According to The Guardian, so do some British Ukrainians living in Manchester. The paper magnanimously acknowledges they just may have a valid grievance against the bearded statue. But no one else may. After all, Engels did live in Manchester for a long time.

By the same token, Jack the Ripper lived in London, the Strangler in Boston and Hitler in Vienna. Hence they too presumably satisfy the residency requirement for sculptural commemoration.

Yet this can’t be the only requirement. The denizens of a place also have to be proud of their erstwhile neighbour to erect a statue in his honour.

So, with the exception of a few Ukrainian spoilsports who refuse to forget the Holodomor, are the Mancunians sufficiently proud of Engels? Should the Viennese be equally proud of Hitler?

The Guardian hack rejects that parallel out of hand: “These comparisons by… rightwingers are crude. Engels was a philosopher, not a mass murderer. A better analogy would be asking whether we would tolerate the presence of Nazi propaganda in Manchester.”

This is a variation on three old themes. One is that communist propaganda is somehow more acceptable than the Nazi kind. Another is that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with Engels’s philosophy, as possibly distinct from its implementation in the Ukraine.

Yet another, a broader one, is that cannibalistic creeds have nothing to do with the ensuing cannibalistic practices. Hence Marx and Engels aren’t responsible for millions murdered in the name of Marxism-Leninism, nor is Islam responsible for terrorism.

This reduces people to the level of dogs, acting out of instinct, not reason. Divorcing philosophies from their implementation betokens a contempt for human nature.

The wheels of any juggernaut rolling over millions of lives are always powered by the engine of ‘philosophy’, with brainwashing acting as the transmission. What people do depends on what they believe, and what they believe largely depends on what they’re taught.

So what did the ‘philosopher’ Engels teach? When you look closely, you’ll know that his teaching was too monstrous even for the Soviets to implement fully.

The Communist Manifesto, which Engels co-authored with Marx, demands wholesale abolition of private property (except his own factories of course), which ideal wasn’t quite attained even in Russia.

“Abolition of all rights to inheritance” is another dictate from the Manifesto. The pamphlet also insists that family should be done away with, with women becoming communal property. Children are to be taken away from their parents, pooled together and raised as wards of the state.

Modern slavery also derives from the Manifesto, which prescribes total militarisation of labour achieved by organising it into “labour armies”, presumably led by Marx as Generalissimo and Engels as his deputy.

Dissenters were to be locked away in what Engels euphemistically called “special guarded places”. Such places have since acquired a different name, but Engels can be credited with coming up with the concept of concentration camps as an expedient for promoting social uniformity.

Now I suspect that Guardian writers can see the fine points of this ‘philosophy’, provided its practical manifestations aren’t too bloody, at least not at their own doorstep. They worship at the altar of the same religion, if a slightly less fundamentalist confession.

However, even they would experience a conflict of pieties if they actually read Engels’s writing. For the ‘philosopher’ deemed worthy of a statue in Manchester was a great proponent of murder by category, based on race, class and political convictions.

Chaps like Engels defy commentary – they must be allowed to speak for themselves. In that spirit, here are some random examples of Engels’s ‘philosophy’:

“All the other large and small nationalities and peoples are destined to perish before long in the revolutionary war-storm … [which will] wipe out all this racial trash. The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples.”

“A ceaseless fight to the death with Slavdom, which betrays the Revolution, a battle of annihilation and ruthless terrorism – not in the interests of Germany, but of the Revolution.”

“… the reconquest of the German-speaking left bank of the Rhine is a matter of national honour, and… the Germanisation of a disloyal Holland and of Belgium is a political necessity for us. Shall we let the German nationality be completely suppressed in these countries…?”

“This is our calling, that we shall become the Templars of this Grail, gird the sword round our loins for its sake and stake our lives joyfully in the last, holy war which will be followed by the thousand-year reign of freedom.” [My emphasis.]

“Justice and other moral considerations may be damaged here and there; but what does that matter to such facts of world-historic significance?”

“In history, nothing is achieved without power and implacable ruthlessness.”

“The plentiful meat and milk diet among the Aryans and the Semites, and particularly the beneficial effects of these foods on the development of children, may, perhaps, explain the superior development of these two races.”

[On Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son-in-law, a Paris councilman representing a district that contained the Zoo]: “Being in his quality as a nigger a degree nearer to the rest of the animal kingdom than the rest of us, he is undoubtedly the most appropriate representative of that district.”

“I begin to understand French anti-Semitism when I see how many Jews of Polish origin and with German names intrude themselves everywhere, arrogate everything to themselves and push themselves forward to the point of creating public opinion…”

“With the Irish… their sensuous, excitable nature prevents reflection and quiet, persevering activity from reaching development – such a nation is utterly unfit for manufacture as now conducted.”

“The Lasalle manoeuvres have amused me greatly, the frizzy Jew-head now very charmingly has to distinguish himself in the red nightshirt and Marquis garb – from which at every movement the Polish kike looks out. Seeing it must give the impression of louse-like repulsiveness.”

Suddenly the ‘philosopher’ emerges as a German nationalist, complete with racism, anti-Semitism and general hatred that he insists must be expressed through mass violence. Moreover, this isn’t just the ranting of an evil loner unheard by anyone: we know that Engels inspired the two most satanic regimes in history.

How do those good Mancunians and bad Guardian writers square this conflict of pieties? Simple.

In such a conflict, the dominant piety always wins. Those chaps are driven by the same hatred for Christendom, what’s left of it, as was their bearded guru. Detecting this, they find redeeming qualities in his ‘philosophy’, as they do for the same reason in Islam, whose exponents after all mistreat women and kill homosexuals.

Hence we know what those people are: in all such cases, observing which piety emerges victorious gives a clue to what’s negotiable and what’s chiselled in stone. As it were.

Modernity is all about levelling – not only of people and groups thereof, but also of tastes, morals and opinions.

Anybody, no matter how ignorant, feels entitled to air any opinion, no matter how inane – and to demand a respectful audience. Freedom of speech is being abused so badly that one begins to yearn for freedom from speech.

Now, though I may disagree with some opinions, I still recognise that they belong in the panoply of self-expression. But ‘some’ doesn’t mean ‘all’.

For example, a person is entitled to opine that the rich should all be taxed more, even though I consider this view economically ruinous and morally defunct. But a person isn’t entitled to opine – except privately and in jest – that the rich should all be flailed alive.

The band of acceptable self-expression can be wide, but it can’t be endless. If it is, society’s intellectual backbone, already showing many slipped discs, will collapse altogether. Society will then die.

It’s in this context that one should look at The Guardian article advocating the toppling of Nelson’s statue in Trafalgar Square. The author is Afua Hirsch, whom I had the displeasure of meeting when we were both guests on a BBC chat show discussing the purpose of imprisonment.

Miss Hirsch, her eyes glistening with fanatical zeal, saw prison as strictly an educational facility, whose sole purpose was saving the poor souls so betrayed by society that they had to resort to crime.

I countered that, though rehabilitation was desirable, it was secondary. Prison’s primary purpose surely was to serve justice by punishing wrongdoers. Miss Hirsch’s reaction was that of hysterical incredulity that someone could entertain such a monstrous idea. She clearly thought that, unlike thieves and murderers, I was beyond redemption.

Now she has ratcheted up her mindset, shifting it from the gear of lefty faddishness into that of deranged fanaticism. Thereby she has crossed the line of possible, if wrong, opinion into the territory where lunacy resides.

Her gripe is that Nelson lacked the foresight to realise that two centuries after his death there would exist a broad swathe of opinion that society should be dedicated to racial equality first and foremost.

Nelson, according to her, had many West Indian slave owners among his friends and – are you ready for this? – defended them in the House of Lords. “Nelson,” she writes, “was what you would now call, without hesitation, a white supremacist.”

That may be, but, as the Russian saying goes, it’s not the only thing we appreciate him for. The laws of political correctness, like any other, can’t be made retroactive. Nelson lived in his time, not ours, and he can’t be judged ex post facto on the basis of Miss Hirsch’s monomania.

Figures of his calibre can only be judged within history, and against that backdrop Nelson towers like the giant he was. Thanks largely to him Britain was spared for over a century the advent of bloodthirsty modernity. Also important is that he helped defer a time when the likes of Hirsch feel entitled to express their febrile idiocy in the mainstream press.

That Nelson was a flawed man was beyond doubt – show me one who isn’t. I’m sure Hirsch counts Martin Luther King, Mandela and Gandhi among her heroes. Yet the first used his wife for a punching bag and was serially unfaithful to her, the second had political opponents tortured and killed, and the third provoked a carnage.

Standards of heroism are different from those of sainthood, real or bogus. And even some saints weren’t exactly saintly before they saw the light. St Augustine and St Francis, for example, were both philanderers in their youth, while St Paul prosecuted Christians even in his mature years – although Hirsch would probably see that as a point in his favour.

I doubt she realises that the treatment of history she proposes would cut our civilisation off its past completely. For few historical figures would pass muster if held to the standards of our multi-culti modernity.

Unlike Nelson, George Washington, along with most Founding Fathers, was a slave owner. Charles Martel, El Cid, and Jan Sobieski were Islamophobes. Richard the Lionheart ditto, though he partly redeemed himself by being homosexual. Cromwell was a genocidal nationalist, certainly in the way he treated the Irish. Louis XIV gave his wife a black dwarf as a present, thereby displaying double insensitivity. Shakespeare, Dickens and Dostoyevsky had their anti-Semitic moments. Brahms was a German nationalist. Cecil Rhodes was a racist who expanded the British Empire Nelson gave his life to protect.

That empire, like its defenders, wasn’t without its fair share of wickedness. Yet on balance it was unquestionably a force for good, specifically in the area so dear to Miss Hirsch’s frenzied heart. For slavery had been deemed abhorrent in England at least since Elizabethan times.

A report of a case as far back as 1569 states that: “… one Cartwright brought a slave from Russia and would scourge him; for which he was questioned; and 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.”

In 1772, ruling on the ‘Somersett’s 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 (66 years before Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation), unofficially the Royal Navy, in which Nelson served, had been harassing slave traffic for decades.

Given the balance of their record, shall we then forgive both Nelson and his employer a few currently unfashionable glitches? Not as far as Hirsch is concerned.

All decent people share her abhorrence of slavery. But if they look at all of history through the prism of today’s faddish obsession with ‘diversity’, they’re no longer decent. They’re mad at best, consciously subversive at worst.

In the past, such ranting fanatics could be found only in lunatic asylums. These days they adorn the pages of broadsheets. Then again, the two institutions are converging so much it’s hard to tell the difference.