Author: Alexander Boot

In June, our part of France is pestered by mosquitos. In July, one sees the odd snake. And in August, the Dutch come.

They overrun the area, driving their caravans, vans or cars with trailers attached. Like tortoises, they carry their houses on their backs.

These mobile shells are filled to the gunwales with every necessity of life: tinned food, slabs of mediocre cheese, booze and even bottled water. Bread is the only thing they have to buy. The Dutch may be among the world’s wealthiest people, but why waste their hard-earned on frivolous purchases? God created money to keep, not to spend.

Such frugality run riot doesn’t endear the Dutch to the locals, particularly those who sell things, from food to hotel beds. They call them ‘moy-moys’ – this is how the Dutch word for ‘nice’ sounds to the French. Those Netherlandish misers utter that shibboleth when browsing in shops without ever buying anything.

Lately there have been violent rallies against mass tourism in places like Majorca and Barcelona. That’s an extreme manifestation of resentment seething all over Europe.

Locals everywhere detest seeing their home becoming a receptacle for swarms of boisterous, ogling tourists turning streets into bottlenecks and befouling what they see as tourist attractions. What helps the locals put up with the influx without too much grumbling is the soothing thought of the money poured into their pockets by those rampaging throngs.

Since the Dutch offer no such redeeming excuse, one can overhear our villagers describe them in terms covering the entire lower tier of French argot. The Dutch don’t care. They’re proud of their parsimony.

Now German tourists don’t mind spreading around their Deutschmarks disguised as euros. Why are their Germanic neighbours so different?

I’d suggest two reasons: unlike the Germans, the Dutch have little aristocratic past to inoculate them against the extremes of bourgeois ethos; also unlike the Germans, they’re mostly Calvinists.

Actually, the two reasons easily morph into one: Calvin reformed the Reformation, making it even more egalitarian and therefore bourgeois than Luther did.

Calvin pushed Augustine’s idea of predestination married to his ‘prevenient grace’ theology to an absurd extreme. We’re predestined for either salvation or damnation, pronounced Calvin and, as we live in “total depravity”, we can do nothing to affect the outcome. The idea of good works as restitution for sin is dangerous Catholic nonsense, a way of keeping the masses in check.

Frequently asked to put a number on the lucky winners of this divine lottery, Calvin tended to change his mind, presumably depending on his mood. The range varied from a miserly one in 100 to a generous one in five. In any case, how can we know which of us drew the lucky ticket?

It’s Calvin’s answer to this question that led Weber to regard capitalism as a predominantly Protestant phenomenon. God, according to Calvin, gave those to be saved a sign of his benevolence by making them rich.

Their wealth would be acquired not the Old Testament way, as God’s gift; not the aristocratic way, through inheritance, martial valour and pillage; but the bourgeois way, through hard work and thrift.

That’s why God wouldn’t just rain gold on the elect. Rather he’d guide them to a way of life that would deliver wealth as a reward. Hard work would be an important part of it, but frugality and austerity also had a role to play, if only as a way of thanking God for the lucre he had allowed the righteous to make. Virtuous conduct was thus an equivalent of a thank-you note to God.

This was nothing short of a revolution, a crucible of class war. For the first time a major Christian figure upgraded wealth from an object of bare toleration to a sign of divine benevolence. Grace became quantifiable in pieces of gold.

In common with all other successful revolutionaries, Calvin sensed the mood of the masses and told them exactly what they yearned to hear. For the good burghers of Geneva had already come to believe what Calvin so clearly enunciated.

Money was for them a tool of self-assertion and a road to political power. And the only way for them to make money was by offering sweat in return. So they worked their fingers to the bone, resenting prolonged fasts and other Church restrictions on hard work.

Secretly they had always known that God rewarded righteousness with money, just as he did in the Old Testament. Now they no longer had to be secretive about it.

Frugality, spending money only on necessities and never on whims, was an essential part of it. The burghers were happy to eschew opulence both out of inner conviction and also to emphasise the difference between themselves and the idle, degenerate aristocracy, secular or clerical.

Calvin taught other things as well, such as piety and a life of virtue. But those fell by the wayside with the advent of our predominantly atheist modernity. However, selfless, disinterested love of money qua money has survived, having left a particularly adhesive residue in the Dutch soul.

They do pay homage to Calvinist virtue by eschewing curtains on their ground floor windows, letting inquisitive passers-by peek into their drawing rooms. We have nothing to hide, seems to be the message; naughtiness is reserved for the bedroom, and only at night.

In parallel, windows in Amsterdam are used for the less righteous purpose of exhibiting semi-nude whores flogging their wares. Calvin meets Hegel here: thesis – Calvinist asceticism; antithesis – vulgar sleaze; synthesis – a country pioneering every possible modern perversion: euthanasia, legalised drugs, homosexual marriage, even cannibalism on live TV (see my post of 13 January, 2012).

Some American Protestant sectarians sport bumper stickers on their cars saying “Jesus is my navigator”. Replace Jesus with Calvin, and those miserly Dutch tourists would be well-advised to display that message on their caravans. Nothing like truth in advertising.

Some 20 years ago, Barry Levinson made a prescient film Wag the Dog, where spin doctors distract the electorate from the president’s sex scandal by creating a virtual war and flooding every available medium with fake reports and pictures.

Parallels with today’s situation are begging to be drawn. President Trump is in serious domestic trouble, if not of a sexual nature. Hence suspicions are voiced all over the papers that perhaps he wants to muffle the grand jury investigation by sabre rattling. There’s also the danger that he wants to swing the sabre, and neither possibility should be dismissed.

Trump may indeed be issuing bellicose threats with the cynical purpose of deflecting preoccupation with his Russian shenanigans, and he may indeed act on his threats for the same reason. However, if seen in the context of American history, Trump’s actions may appear in a different light.

Talking about the political chaos in Venezuela, the president said that “a military option is certainly something we could pursue.” Why? On what authority?

The riotous chaos in Venezuela constitutes no “clear and present danger” to the United States. There’s much violent turmoil there – yet it’s strictly internal, with little potential of spilling beyond the country’s borders or threatening the US.

That Maduro’s government, so beloved of Comrade Corbyn, falls short of the democratic purity demanded by Americans is undeniable. Equally obvious is America’s belief in her messianic mission to shove democracy down the throats of even the most unfit or reluctant nations.

Any hope that the country would learn the lesson of her disastrous 2003 attempt to inculcate the Middle East with democratic rectitude would be forlorn. Countries in general and the US in particular never heed history’s lessons, certainly not when they teach something contrary to the country’s ethos. America’s ethos is nothing if not messianic, and has been since the time Puritans first settled the Massachusetts Bay colony.

In 1630 their leader, John Winthrop, delivered an oration in which he alluded to Matthew 5:14 by describing the new community as a “city upon a hill”. Thus he implicitly equated it to the beacon that shone the word of God onto the rest of the world, whether or not it welcomed such elucidation.

When the colonies became independent, the new country began to parlay such proselytising intentions into a frankly imperialist policy, at first aimed at her own neighbourhood only.

The 1823 Monroe Doctrine was a statement of geopolitical intent, a quasi-legal justification of US domination over the Western Hemisphere. It was only quasi-legal for being unilateral: other countries both within and outside the Monroe Doctrine sphere never recognised America’s legal or moral right to police the hemisphere.

Thus, for example, when in 1895 the United States insisted on her right to mediate a border dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana, she was rebuked by Britain. Countering the US Secretary of State’s insistence that his country was “practically sovereign” in the Western Hemisphere, Britain responded that the Monroe Doctrine wasn’t international law.

All things considered, Trump’s ill-advised threats of military action against Venezuela spring not only from a transient political need, but also from the formative American ethos, combining elements of democratic proselytism and imperialism. The threats may not be empty: it’s not only its spots that a leopard can’t change, but also its compulsion to devour weaker animals.

The situation with North Korea is entirely different, and here Trump’s behaviour is unobjectionable. Yesterday the president said, speaking of Kim: “And if he utters one threat in the form of an overt threat… or if he does anything with respect to Guam or any place else that’s an American territory or an American ally, he will truly regret it…”

It’s hard to imagine any American president acting or talking differently in a similar situation. Kim Jong-un has issued several threats of missile attacks against Guam, which is an American territory. Also finding themselves on the receiving end of Kim’s threats are America’s allies, Japan and South Korea – not to mention the West Coast of the US proper.

It would be criminally irresponsible of Trump not to issue a stern threat of massive retaliation should any such attack occur. Acting irresponsibly here are the president’s numerous critics who accuse him of making threats he has no intention of acting on. This is nonsense.

Do they think that, if a North Korean missile hits Los Angeles or even Guam, Trump’s threats will remain empty? If so, they’re not only irresponsible but also insane. Of course, such an act of aggression will be met with overwhelming force – nothing else is imaginable.

Naturally, the best thing to do is not to respond to aggression but to deter it. And how do those critics fancy that can be done, other than by issuing a threat backed up by a demonstration of power, in this case B1 overflights?

By telling North Korea that the US nuclear deterrent is “locked and loaded”, Trump is doing just that, and we should all support him, while holding our breath in the hope that the stratagem works.

The issue of preemptive strike is more complex, but not by much. If intelligence reports prove that an enemy attack is imminent, the president is duty-bound to prevent it by every means at his disposal. The Six Day War showed convincingly that the aggressor isn’t necessarily the side that fires the first shot – it’s the side that makes firing the first shot the only feasible option.

China ostensibly refuses to adopt such a nuanced stance. Her communist leaders promise neutrality only if North Korea pushes the first button. They haven’t specified what they’d do in case of a preemptive US strike, and I for one am curious to know. Are they threatening war against Nato? Somehow I doubt it, and I’m sure Trump’s people are talking to Xi Jinping’s round the clock.

Meanwhile Frau Merkel treated us to one of her stock platitudes, to the effect that peace is better than war, and diplomacy is better than threats. Rebuking her, Trump bizarrely said that, although she’s Ivanka’s friend, she’d better be talking about Germany and not the United States. But then Trump can’t be easily confused with Demosthenes or Cicero.

Does Merkel seriously doubt that every diplomatic effort is being made to avert nuclear holocaust? But a credible threat of military chastisement is a time-proven tool of diplomacy, and Trump is absolutely right to wield it.

This is an interesting time, isn’t it? Actually, a bit too interesting for my taste.

The historian John Julius Norwich describes himself as an “agnostic Protestant”.

Having read that, I wrote to a close friend, a brilliant theologian, wondering whether that self-description was a tautology or an oxymoron. Now one doesn’t ask such questions, even facetiously, if one doesn’t already know, or at least can predict, the answer.

It duly arrived: “Surely, since Schleiermacher, Baur and Strauss – and arguably Luther – all Protestants have been agnostic. So I would say tautology.”

Now the first three men my learned friend mentioned were Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment Protestant thinkers with liberal leanings. In religion, liberal more or less equals agnostic, so few would take exception to those gentlemen finding themselves on that list.

But putting Luther in that company is more contentious. It’s tantamount to saying that Protestantism has been ab initio a form of agnosticism. Since most of us like to have our views confirmed, that brought a self-satisfied smile on my face.

Indeed, by declaring that “every man is his own priest”, Luther was echoing the humanist noises resonating through Europe since the Renaissance and reaching him via Erasmus. As the anonymous wit correctly put it, “Erasmus laid an egg that Luther hatched”.

Protestantism jammed the square peg of man into the round hole vacated first by the Church and then eventually by God. Man was becoming not just his own priest, but also effectively his own God.

The Church steadfastly resisted that development. Hence it was increasingly seen as a dead weight holding man down in his quest for elevation.

As any reader of Renaissance writers from Boccaccio to Machiavelli will confirm, anticlericalism was already common currency then. The Church was doubted as the depository and teacher of the Revelation because implicitly so was the Revelation.

Depending on one’s presuppositions, the Church is a human institution either wholly or at least partly. As such, it’s fallible. Thus there were many practices that laid the Church open to criticism, and many popes who were weak or corrupt.

Yet criticism can proceed from either love or hate, and it was the latter emotion that animated humanists and Reformers. They focused on things like indulgences, choosing to ignore that the Church was so fused with Western civilisation that the two were well-nigh synonymous. And when it came to popes, they talked about John XII and the Borgias, not Leo the Great or Gregory the Great.

Luther had a knack, shared by all heretics, for refuting himself. On the one hand, he insisted that man was so irreversibly corrupted by original sin that nothing he did during his lifetime could possibly affect his salvation one way or the other. On the other hand, he trusted man to be self-sufficient enough to understand, and communicate with, God.

In other words, what he regarded as a vile, irredeemably corrupt puppet, whose free will was either non-existent or irrelevant, was deemed capable of working out the immensely involved subtleties that had for 1,500 years been confounding some of history’s greatest minds.

Boundless contempt and equally boundless respect for man thus came together within one self-refuting heresy. Luther first brought man down then patted him on the head, and it swelled.

Rather than relying on the aforementioned great minds to guide him, man was invited to tread every spiritual path on his own. The most inviting one led straight to agnosticism.

Cartesian solipsism beckoned at the end: an invitation to self-sufficiency was an invitation to doubt. Descartes was expressing an exceedingly prevalent mood when he urged people to doubt everything – except their own existence manifested through (caused by?) their own thinking.

Just as the Church united Jerusalem and Athens to create Western civilisation, modernity united Luther, Descartes and Rousseau to create history’s only atheist civilisation. Max Weber correctly identified Protestantism as the driving force of capitalism, but it was more than that. Weber’s book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism could have benefited from the broader title of Protestantism and the Spirit of Modernity.

Starting from Luther and proceeding via two gentlemen of Geneva, Calvin and Rousseau, Protestantism exerted a formative influence on the Enlightenment and thus on pan-European agnosticism. The Enlightenment absorbed the Protestant notion of man’s self-sufficiency bordering on self-deification and translated it into every political, social and cultural aspect of modernity.

For example, if every man is equally capable of communicating with God without outside help, then why not assume that every man is equally capable of governing a state by passing judgement on things he knows nothing about? Our politics of universal suffrage democracy is based on this counterintuitive assumption, which explains the abysmally low grade of human material observable in our elected officials.

The profound concept of free choice between good and evil has been replaced by the vulgar notion of free choice between one consumer product and another. Consumer products are all on the table equally, and they include not just deodorants and watches, but also religions and cultures.

I choose Islam, you choose Christianity, he chooses Buddhism, they choose atheism – who’s to say which choice is right? I choose Puccini, you choose Bach, he chooses the Beatles, they choose rap – who’s to say one choice is better than another? In such equations, all things are always equal.

Humanism left man to his own judgement; Protestantism left him to his own devices; post-Enlightenment modernity left him to his own perdition: all these links clasped together to make an unbreakable chain.

Many historical developments have gone into forming what’s these days accurately called ‘post-truth society’. Of these, agnosticism inspired by Protestantism may just claim pride of place.

Edward of Woodstock acquired his chromatic adjective for his supposed 1370 massacre of 3,000 people in Limoges. Trust the French to besmirch the reputation of a great English hero.

Originally responsible for this calumny of the victor at Poitiers was the contemporaneous French chronicler Jean Froissart, who clearly had it in for Edward. In fact, as the English historian Michael Jones has established, the massacre was perpetrated by French soldiers, who went on a rampage because the denizens of the besieged Limoges had opened the gates to Edward’s troops.

By that time Edward had ruled Aquitaine for 10 years, and his Limoges subjects clearly preferred him to the city’s bishop Jean de Cros, who had treacherously delivered Limoges to the French the previous month.

Actually, the French like to play fast and loose with military history. Possibly driven by the same national inferiority complex that makes them enjoy playing second fiddle to Germany in the EU, they insist on describing most of their defeats as victories – if not of the military, then of the moral kind.

Much as I admire the French, the ability to lose graciously isn’t their most salient trait. Nous sommes trahis (we was robbed, in colloquial English) is their blanket explanation of all French defeats.

They never lose battles to superior, better-led armies. They only ever lose them to treason committed by the enemy, their own generals or, as at Waterloo, God. In any case, the moral victory is always theirs, and surely morality trumps brute force, n’est ce pas?

In that spirit, all appearances to the contrary, Edward didn’t really win the battle of Poitiers. He suffered a crushing moral defeat by using longbowmen of common birth to wipe out the chivalrous French knights. Every ping of those bow strings not only cut down yet another flower of French nobility (la fine fleur de la noblesse Française), but also testified to the triumph of French morality over English perfidy.

For all that, it’s good to see Britain and France for once acting as good neighbours rather than sworn enemies. This has been mutually beneficial.

The French have taught us gastronomy, Gothic architecture, scholasticism, advanced sexual variants, the use of long words that sound weird, tax avoidance, how to stay thin in spite of gorging ourselves (I haven’t learned that particular lesson) and how to sound sophisticated by slipping into the conversation the odd je ne sais quoi or tout court.

They haven’t yet taught all of us that the ‘s’ is actually pronounced at the end of fleur de lis and coup de grâce, but I’m sure they will, given time. It won’t be long before our socially aspiring countrymen will learn that grâce and gras, as in foie gras, sound different in their native habitat. But I’m relieved to see it hasn’t all been a one-way street (sens unique).

The patriot in me rejoices at the evidence of the French learning from us as well. For example, even 10 years ago there were no tattooing and piercing parlours in provincial France, but now they are spreading like chanterelles after a summer rain.

Also, French youngsters now routinely get drunk every weekend, and not just on wine. More and more often they fall into an alcohol-induced coma after consuming gallons of vile concoctions the British have perfected, if not invented. Lager is also becoming a favourite coma-inducer, and it’s good to see that the EU is succeeding in its stated goal of encouraging cultural exchange.

A French friend was commiserating the other day about the growing lager consumption in his native land, and he even chuckled politely at my feeble pun “à lager comme à la guerre”. He was also gracious enough not to suggest that the French are picking up English habits, so it fell upon me to elucidate the point.

It has to be said that, when I pass a group of French youngsters in our local village, they still say “Bonjour, Monsieur”, rather than an equivalent of “You wha’, mate?”, so cultural exchange isn’t as brisk as all that. Manny Macron has work to do, but we can rely on him to do his internationalist best.

Before long French youngsters, who naturally drop their aitches (though admittedly they didn’t learn that phonetic quirk from us), will be shouting “On me ‘ead, son” during their kickabouts, while the English will learn how to enunciate “Sur ma tête, mon vieux” or some such.

But all that is the future. It’s the past that interests me today, and specifically the posthumous reputation of Edward of Woodstock, who must henceforth be called the White Prince.

As Michael Jones writes, “It is time to remove this unwarranted stain on Edward’s reputation and restore one of our great heroes to their rightful position.” Hear, hear (shame about the grammar).

Yesterday I argued that the jury system is becoming inoperable in the West because it’s increasingly hard to find 12 people who understand what justice is.

To be fair, it’s not just the potential jurors’ fault. More and more of our laws are being devised to project state power rather than protect public safety.

Now which of these crimes should be punished most severely: beating a stranger to death, armed burglary, supplying weapons to terrorists or a woman in her thirties having sex with a 15-year-old boy?

However any sane person arranges these crimes in a descending order of enormity, I bet the last one will be at the bottom of the list. Not so, say our courts, and by ‘our’ I mean not just British but also American since both countries’ jurisprudence is based on common law and the jury system.

In recent years, the first three crimes I mentioned have drawn sentences of around five years. Yet a good-looking Michigan woman, 38, has just been slapped with up to 15 years in prison for having sex with two teenage boys, 14 and 15. The boys, said the judge, were traumatised for life.

It’s only one man’s experience, but a zillion years ago I too was 15 and even 14. Most of my energy in those days was spent on trying, desperately and unsuccessfully, to fulfil assorted sexual fantasies.

Older women figured prominently in those – as they do, I’d suggest at the risk of generalising, for most straight boys. Once or twice I even tried to make a tentative pass at a woman twice my age, only to be rebuked with richly deserved contempt.

Now, indulging in a bit of retrospective fantasy, had one of my advances succeeded, I would have been ecstatic, grateful, proud, elated – choose your own adjective. One thing I absolutely guarantee I wouldn’t have been is traumatised.

It’s hard to believe that today’s teenagers, who are infinitely more savvy and precocious in such matters than I was at their age, will forever bear emotional scars after doing a pretty and, to them, sophisticated 38-year-old woman in the back of her car. More likely they’ll remember her with warmth and gratitude for the rest of their lives.

I’m not suggesting that a grown-up shouldn’t be rebuked for doing something unethical or illegal. Dura lex, sed lex, as the Romans used to say. But the severity of punishment ought to be commensurate with the crime, and surely any just jurisprudence must distinguish between malum prohibitum and malum in se.

The latter, such as murder or theft, is a transgression against higher and therefore universally just law; the former, such as speeding, contravenes only made-up, what Aristotle called positive, laws, not all of which are universally just.

So why are testosterone-drunk youngsters encouraged to report on older women whose favours they’ve enjoyed? Why are such crimes punished more severely than burglary or sometimes even manslaughter?

Why do our broadsheets, to say nothing of tabloids, cover such cases at inordinate length and with obvious approval of any draconian punishment? Do the hacks, many of them young men themselves, seriously think that those teenagers suffered serious trauma?

There’s a one-word answer to all these questions: modernity. Specifically the post-Enlightenment modernity that has to proceed from Rousseau’s assumption that we’re all born perfect.

If most of us demonstrably don’t grow up perfect, it’s somebody else’s fault: our parents’, our schools’, capitalism’s, socialism’s, society’s, the climate’s – choose your own culprit. This puny mind-set naturally encourages seeing everyone as a potential victim, which in turn intensifies a search for perpetrators.

Youngsters are reared in that poisonous atmosphere and, being impressionable, inhale it with their lungs wide open. Victimhood is top of the mind, which naturally makes it top of the news coverage.

This is illogically and hypocritically combined with the blanket sexualisation of education, mass communications and society at large. Children are implicitly invited to plunge headlong into a life of sexual activity, and yet they’re somehow told to see themselves as victims when their paramours are older than they are.

Kindergarten pupils are taught how to use condoms; a few years later they’ll take courses in variously acrobatic sexual techniques. Now can anyone seriously expect that a boy taught at age 5 how to contain ejaculation within a latex sheath will at age 15 be traumatised by having sex with an older woman?

We must also remember that today’s woman in her thirties has received the same education. She too was taught in her infancy about the birds and the bees, or indeed the birds and the birds. She too was taught, implicitly or explicitly, that sexual urges are perfectly natural and should therefore be indulged, provided things like pregnancy and VD can be avoided.

Expecting her in her thirties to remain prim under such circumstances is presuming too much on human goodness, à la Rousseau. By all means, she should be reprimanded, perhaps also punished, for laws are there to be obeyed. But treating her transgression as a worse crime than some I’ve mentioned is hypocrisy at its most soaring.

The culture of victimhood thus gets a steady influx of fresh blood, while similarly educated newspaper readers get their prurient instincts properly satisfied. The circle becomes truly vicious and it’s society that falls victim, not those randy teenagers.

Today is the birthday of the revolutionary Vera Zasulich (1849-1919), whom a French magazine named “the most famous woman in Europe” in 1878 .

Raised in a provincial gentry family, Miss Zasulich was still in her teens when she got involved with a terrorist organisation People’s Reprisal led by Sergei Nechayev (its widely publicised trial inspired Dostoyevsky’s novel The Possessed).

Since Zasulich was only on the periphery of that gang, she spent a mere year in remand prison, followed by a short exile. In took her several more years to become an international star, but she got there in the end.

In 1878 Zasulich was tried for an attempt to murder Fyodor Trepov, Petersburg’s governor, and the case got a wide coverage throughout Europe.

Trepov was chosen for target practice because he had ordered that the prisoner Bogolyubov be flogged for insubordination (refusing to remove his cap when ordered to do so). This although the law banned corporal punishment for noblemen, which Bogolyubov was. That enraged the legally minded Miss Zasulich enough to pull the trigger. On second thoughts, perhaps she wasn’t as legally minded as all that.

More critically, neither was the court. The defence successfully turned the proceedings into a trial not of the terrorist but of Trepov, and the jury found Zasulich innocent on the grounds of her political, rather than simply criminal, motive.

That miscarriage of justice demonstrated the uselessness of jury trial in Russia, and from then on crimes with political implications were mostly tried by military tribunals. Those proved only marginally less lenient, at least until nihilist terror reached pandemic proportions in the early twentieth century.

Russian judges came to their senses then and, in return for the murders of 1,600 officials, including some members of the royal family, passed several thousand death sentences in 1905-1907. But by then it was too late. The country’s madness had flared up, and in a few years she’d go on a murderous rampage the likes of which the world had never seen.

That trial emphasised the brittleness of any political system that isn’t based on the rule of just law – something to which the Russians have been indifferent throughout their history. Characteristically, Nikolai Lossky’s The History of Russian Philosophy devotes 57 pages to the metaphysical thinker Vladimir Soloviov and only two to all the Russian philosophers of law combined.

Those with eyes to see will learn much about Russia from the concluding statement of Zasulich’s defence counsel. Here it is for your delectation (the emphases are mine):

“Gentlemen of the jury! It’s not for the first time that finding herself in this dock of agonising suffering is a woman tried for a bloody crime before the court of civic conscience. There has been many a woman here who punished her seducer by death; many a woman who spilled the blood of her unfaithful beloved or her lucky rival. Such women have left here acquitted. Those just verdicts echoed God’s judgement that takes into account not only the physical act, but also its inner meaning, the defendant’s underlying criminality.

“Yet by exacting bloody vengeance, those women fought for themselves only. Standing before you for the first time is a woman whose crime wasn’t motivated by personal interests, personal vengeance – a woman whose crime reflected her struggle for an idea, on behalf of someone who shared the misery of her young life.

“If the motive for this deed proves less weighty on the scales of civic truth, then her punishment will have to be considered just, a triumph of law, of society – and may your justice be done! Don’t think twice! Your verdict won’t add much suffering to this broken, smashed life. She will accept your decision without reproach, without bitter complaints, without offence, serene in the knowledge that her suffering, her sacrifice might have preempted the possibility that the incident causing her act will be repeated.

“However much one may decry her deed, it’s impossible to deny that it was motivated by an honest and noble impulse. Yes, she may leave here convicted, but she won’t leave shamed. One can only wish that there would be no more provocations causing such crimes, begetting such criminals.”

That a country in which such a speech could produce an acquittal isn’t ruled by law is clear enough – moreover, such a country has no concept of what a law is. That makes her ripe for the advent of savage, unrestrained lawlessness, which duly arrived 37 years later and is still going strong.

Zasulich’s bullet fired into Trepov’s stomach didn’t kill him. But it did kill Old Russia, or at least proved she was moribund.

The failure of Russian courts to save the country from ideologically motivated outrages could have taught a useful lesson to posterity even in the West: institutions are only as good as the people who man them. Trial by jury, for example, can’t survive as an instrument of justice in the absence of a broadly based group of people who understand what justice means.

Today’s British criminals, expertly guided by their barristers, recite the mantra “it’s all society’s fault”, knowing that the twelve good men may well nod their assent. Yet no country can have real justice if such statements can be made, never mind accepted. Such a country has discarded individual responsibility – and therefore individual liberty.

Nevertheless, the argument that a criminal had an impoverished childhood has been known to produce mitigated sentences or even acquittals in British courts, race has been seen as an extenuating circumstance, and political motives have been viewed as being more noble than simple brutality.

As a result, courts are beginning to act as rubber stamps of egalitarianism, rather than agents of justice. Society predictably responds by a climbing crime rate that only statistical larceny can pass for anything other than a social catastrophe. One example: in 1954 there were 400 muggings in all of Britain; one month of 2001 produced the same number in Lambeth, a small South London borough.

So happy birthday, Vera. Thanks for the lesson. Shame it wasn’t heeded.

 

Eight US senators have written to FIFA, expressing their “serious concerns about the exploitation of North Korean workers at a World Cup stadium site in Russia.”

Those workers, write the senators, “faced appalling work conditions that almost certainly amount to forced labour. Those conditions may have included inhumane working hours and living conditions, constant surveillance by North Korean agents, threats to workers’ families still living in North Korea, absence of freedom of movement, wage garnishment by the North Korean government, and other similar features. News reports further suggest that one North Korean worker has died… possibly due to overwork. Such working arrangements are completely inconsistent with FIFA’s human rights policy and international law.”

In other words, St Petersburg’s Zenit arena was built by slave labour generously provided by one criminal state to another. Yet again, Putin’s Russia finds herself in refined company, this time forming the new axis of evil with North Korea and Iran. One wonders how long before those North Korean slaves will inspire books like Uncle Soo’s Cabin and Loots.

What I find amusing is the reference to “FIFA’s human rights policy”. It ought to be remembered that, to paraphrase Lord Acton, all international organisations are corrupt, and international sports organisations are corrupt absolutely.

‘Absolutely’ means to the exclusion of everything else, including human rights. Those football chaps aren’t about back passes – they’re about backhanders.

Why do you suppose they awarded the 2018 World Cup to Russia and the 2022 one to Qatar? I’ve been looking at the Qatar weather charts in June, when the World Cup is traditionally held, and the temperature there hardly ever drops below 45C.

Playing football in such conditions isn’t just uncomfortable, it’s life threatening. I can confidently predict that many players will suffer strokes and heart attacks. Some will probably die, and so will some fans, especially those unused to such cauldrons.

And some proposed sites for the Russian World Cup are 2,000 miles apart, with most places featuring antediluvian facilities and infrastructure. Conceivably the stadiums can be improved – there are more slaves where those North Koreans came from. But it would take millions of them to make places like Saransk fit for human habitation or indeed for hospitality expected by football fans from civilised countries.

So on what criteria was Russia selected ahead of the other bidders, Portugal/Spain, Belgium/Netherlands and Britain? Or Qatar ahead of the US, South Korea, Japan and Australia? Only one criterion comes to mind. It’s for a good reason that FIFA president Sepp Blatter was banned in 2015 following a corruption scandal.

As to slave labour, Russia in general and St Petersburg in particular enjoy a rich tradition of it, and the conservative in me rejoices at seeing it so lovingly upheld.

The great historian Vasiliy Klyuchevsky (d. 1911) probably exaggerated the human cost of building the city named after Peter’s patron saint when suggesting that more people died in the process than had ever been killed in any war. But modern historians cite a death toll close to 300,000, which is still fairly impressive by the demographic standards of the time.

Nor was it a one-off tragedy: at least another 60,000 were to die erecting Petersburg’s hideous St Isaac’s Cathedral in the mid-nineteenth century. By comparison, Putin’s slave masters look like humanitarians trying to get in touch with their feminine side.

After the revolution, whose centenary the Russians will be ecstatically celebrating later this year, forced labour became co-extensive with the country’s borders. Like Dante’s Inferno, that hell had different circles, of which GULAG proper was the innermost but far from the only one. The whole country was one giant slave camp.

Some of those slaves were imported from countries that fell under the Soviets’ sway during the Second World War, but not only from there. Many British, French and US POWs  were ‘liberated’ from Nazi camps only to find themselves in Soviet ones. At least in the German camps they could receive food parcels from the Red Cross, a privilege that didn’t exist in Russia.

Southeast Asians also experienced Soviet servitude, during and after the Korean and Vietnam wars. In both instances, the recipients of Soviet aid had to pay for it, just like the Spanish loyalists did in their Civil War. The Spanish paid with their entire gold reserves, shipped to Russia and never returned. The Koreans and the Vietnamese were poor in gold but rich in human fodder, which they offered to their Soviet benefactors in part payment.

As to corruption, that too has a fine tradition in Russia, as any reader of Gogol or Saltykov Shchedrin can confirm. When Nicholas I asked another great historian, Karamzin, how things were in the provinces, the latter replied laconically: “Thieving, Your Majesty” (Ils voles, sire).

That again was child’s play compared to what the modern historian Sean McMeekin calls “history’s greatest heist”, when the Bolsheviks looted Russia on a scale never before seen anywhere in the world. History’s second greatest heist came and is still going on after the so-called collapse of communism, with Lenin’s slogan “loot the looter” turned into “loot the looted”.

Russia’s corruption ratings are at the top of every international list, where the country finds herself next to places like Zimbabwe and Gabon. Yet even against the background of rampant corruption from top to bottom, the sports establishment can confidently claim pride of place.

Doping and bribery are rife in Russia’s sports, as witnessed by the wholesale international ban of her entire athletics team. Add corruption to a rich history of slavery, and one can’t think offhand of any moral or legal constraints that could have prevented the Russians from using slave labour – or indeed the North Koreans from providing it. As to FIFA shutting its eyes to this charming practice, that too is par for the course.

In this context, the senators’ appeal looks touchingly naïve. But at least they’ve drawn my, and vicariously your, attention to this outrage.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The other day, I questioned Richard Dawkins’s intellectual credentials as related to the issue of God. Not only is he ignorant of basic philosophy, but he can’t even think logically, routinely relying instead on the full complement of rhetorical fallacies.

One of them is argumentum ad populum: because many people believe something to be true, it is. Thus Dawkins never tires of citing “the overwhelming preponderance of atheists” among top scientists.

This betokens his belief that truth is democratic, like Western politics. A simple show of hands is sufficient to determine what’s true and what’s false. That’s nonsensical even in politics, and even more so in philosophy or indeed natural science.

In fact, all major discoveries started as minority propositions, held by few scientists or even one. That possibly apocryphal apple fell on Newton’s head only – it wasn’t a hail of apples bombarding the arithmetic majority of contemporaneous scientists.

Dawkins’s assertion would be irrelevant even if it were true. But it isn’t. I have this on good authority: Lewis Wolpert, as strident an atheist as Dawkins but a much more accomplished scientist, mournfully admits in one of his own agitprop books that over half of today’s scientists are believers.

And even those who aren’t still know that Darwin’s slapdash theory not only doesn’t “explain everything”, in Dawkins’s illiterate assertion, but in fact explains very little. Its principal attraction isn’t scientific but political.

Here’s a random selection of statements made by top scientists, most of whom believe in neither God nor Darwin:

Sir Fred Hoyle, astronomer, cosmologist and mathematician, Cambridge University: “The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number with 40,000 noughts after it… It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution … if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence.”

Dr Robert Millikan, Nobel Prize winner: “The pathetic thing is that we have scientists who are trying to prove evolution, which no scientist can ever prove.”

Dr A Fleishmann, Erlangen University: “The theory of evolution suffers from grave defects, which are more and more apparent as time advances. It can no longer square with practical scientific knowledge.”

Prof. R Goldschmidt , University of California: “It is good to keep in mind… that nobody has ever succeeded in producing even one new species by the accumulation of micromutations. Darwin’s theory of natural selection has never had any proof, yet it has been universally accepted.”

Prof. J Agassiz, Harvard University: “The theory of the transmutation of species is a scientific mistake, untrue in its facts, unscientific in its method, and mischievous in its tendency.”

Dr Ambrose Fleming, President, British Assoc. Advancement of Science: “Evolution is baseless and quite incredible.”

Gerald Aardsman, Ph.D., C-14 dating specialist: “It is possible (and, given the Flood, probable) that materials which give radiocarbon dates of tens of thousands of radiocarbon years could have true ages of many fewer calendar years.”

Dr Edmund Ambrose, evolutionist: “We have to admit that there is nothing in the geological records that runs contrary to the views of conservative creationists.”

Dr Pierre-Paul Grasse, evolutionist: “No matter how numerous they may be, mutations do not produce any kind of evolution.”

Dr Michael Denton, molecular biologist: “Is it really credible that random processes could have constructed a reality, the smallest element of which – a functional protein or gene – is complex beyond … anything produced by the intelligence of man?”

Lyall Watson, Ph.D.: “Modern apes … seem to have sprung out of nowhere. They have no yesterday, no fossil record. And the true origin of modern humans … is, if we are to be honest with ourselves, an equally mysterious matter.”

Dr N.H. Nilson, botanist: “My attempts to demonstrate evolution by an experiment carried on for more than 40 years have completely failed.”

Wolfgang Smith Ph.D.: “The evolutionist thesis has become more stringently unthinkable than ever before.”

David Kitts, Ph.D. Palaeontology and Evolutionary Theory: “Evolution requires intermediate forms between species, and palaeontology does not provide them.”

Dr Ludwig von Bertalanffy, biologist: “The fact that a theory so vague, so insufficiently verifiable, and so far from the criteria otherwise applied in ‘hard’ science has become a dogma can only be explained on sociological grounds.”

Dr Soren Lovtrup, Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth: “I believe that one day the Darwinian myth will be ranked the greatest deceit in the history of science. When this happens, many people will pose the question: How did this ever happen?”

Dr Tom Kemp, Oxford University: “As is well known, most fossil species appear instantaneously in the fossil record.”

Dr Gary Parker, Biologist/palaeontologist: “In reality, fossils are a great embarrassment to Evolutionary theory and offer strong support for the concept of Creation. If Evolution were true, we should find literally millions of fossils that show how one kind of life slowly and gradually changed to another kind of life. But missing links are the trade secret, in a sense, of palaeontology. The point is, the links are still missing. What we really find are gaps that sharpen up the boundaries between kinds. It’s those gaps which provide us with the evidence of Creation of separate kinds. As a matter of fact, there are gaps between each of the major kinds of plants and animals. Transition forms are missing by the millions. What we do find are separate and complex kinds, pointing to Creation.”

And finally, Darwin himself: “Not one change of species into another is on record … we cannot prove that a single species has been changed.”

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

When Dawkins says that “evidence is the only reason to believe anything”, he displays a deficit of intellect. And by shilling for a theory that’s contradicted by infinitely more evidence than there is to support it, he displays a deficit of integrity.

It’s most unfortunate that Lenin’s League of the Militant Godless is no longer in business. Dawkins could be its honorary chairman.

Donald Trump is beginning to look, walk and quack like a lame duck barely eight months into his presidency.

First both houses of Congress imposed new sanctions on Russia, which Trump had no option but to endorse. Much as he might have wanted to veto the bill, he couldn’t do so for two reasons.

First, the bill passed both houses almost unanimously, rendering any subsequent veto an exercise in futility. Second, given the on-going investigation into his campaign’s alleged collusion with Putin’s junta, Trump couldn’t have vetoed the bill even had it passed by only a slender margin. Doing so would have played into the hand of his accusers, and they already seem to hold enough aces.

Even more critical was another congressional action: depriving Trump of the authority to repeal the sanctions in the future. The decision fires a constitutional shot at Trump’s presidency: Congress – including Trump’s own party – showed in no uncertain terms that it doesn’t trust the president to handle the most critical aspect of US foreign relations.

As part of the sanctions package, the bill calls for the US assets of the 180 sanctioned Russians, all Putin’s acolytes, to be made public within 180 days. The intention is clearly to impound those assets, which really got Putin’s junta to squirm.

Its whole raison d’être is to plunder Russia’s natural resources at home but to invest the loot in the West. For one thing, this gives them access to luxuries unavailable in Russia: those 300-foot yachts are intended for cruising in the Mediterranean, not in the Caspian Sea.

More important, assets sitting in Western banks are seen as a security blanket: members of the junta know that sooner or later they’ll have to run for their lives. Offshore assets are their way of turning a panicked flight into organised retreat.

In this they tread the path signposted by their typological ancestors, the first Bolshevik leaders. That gang too suspected that their days at the helm were numbered, and they too transferred vast amounts into Western banks.

In April, 1921, The New York Times reported that in 1920 alone 75 million Swiss francs were transferred into Lenin’s account in a Swiss bank. According to the newspaper, Trotsky had 11 million dollars and 90 million francs in his accounts; Zinoviev, 80 million francs; Dzerzhinsky, 80 million francs; Ganetsky-Fuerstenberg (Lenin’s financial agent), 60 million francs and 10 million dollars – and so forth, ad infinitum.

It’s likely that, when push comes to shove, the ousted junta won’t be allowed to enjoy their lucre (the Bolsheviks certainly weren’t), at least not all of it. But that moment still hasn’t come, whereas the US Justice Department may well impound their assets within six months.

Putin’s name doesn’t appear on any offshore accounts because the KGB colonel prudently operates through proxies, such as Gennady Timchenko, affectionately nicknamed ‘Gangrene’, or the cellist Sergei Roldugin who was found to have $2 billion in a Panama bank (take my word for it, orchestra musicians aren’t that well-paid).

All in all, Vlad is reported to have accumulated personal wealth variously estimated in the $40-200 billion range, most of it in offshore investments. So he too is squirming.

All in all, this swathe of sanctions strike at the very heart of Putin’s junta, and this is a blow Trump is powerless to soften. Hence he responded to the congressional bill with much gnashing of teeth. “I could,” said the president, “get a much better deal than Congress”.

That’s probably true: unlike most congressmen, Trump has spent a lifetime making deals. In property development a deal is the non plus ultra, and Trump is evidently good at wheeling and dealing.

But he should stop thinking of his current remit in terms of deals: they’re among many tools of a wise foreign policy, but certainly not its aim. The aim is to protect the country’s interests, and not all deals serve this purpose. Some are downright detrimental to it – just think of all those SALT deals that the Russians violated with monotonous regularity.

Immediately following that downturn in Trump’s fortunes comes the news that the Justice Department’s special counsel Robert Mueller has empanelled a grand jury to investigate Russia’s interference with the US elections, and Trump’s possible complicity in it.

This is bad news for the Trump retinue. For the grand jury has already issued a raft of summonses, and it can allow Mueller to depose witnesses under oath.

Thus, for example, if Donald Trump Jr. repeats the same lies he told journalists about his meeting with Putin’s agents, he may be charged with perjury. And since his original statement was dictated by his loving father, he too could find himself under criminal indictment.

Mueller and his people have emphasised that Trump personally isn’t under investigation, but that reassurance hasn’t fooled many people. If Trump’s entire team get in trouble, some of it is bound to rub off on the president one way or another.

He defended himself by suggesting that Mueller would be better off investigating Hillary Clinton and her missing e-mails. The president has a point: Hillary’s links with the Russians are as suspicious as Trump’s, possibly more so.

It’s likely that Russia’s junta, 85 per cent of which are professionally trained in KGB tradecraft, hedged their bets by cultivating both candidates in the presidential election and I for one would love to see Hillary on the rack.

However, that Hillary might be guilty doesn’t exculpate Trump. He might well find himself on the rack next to Hillary, provided he promises to keep his hands to himself.

Innocent until proven guilty and all that, but the situation is fraught in any case. Even if Trump is as pristine as Mother Teresa, the investigation has already jeopardised his ability to govern. In due course, it may render his job impossible to do.

This may have dire consequences not only for the US but for what’s left of the free world, such as it is. Since Western governments have finally identified Putin’s Russia as a serious threat, the US president shouldn’t be hamstrung to counteract it.

I’ll be surprised if Trump serves out his term – and even more so if he manages to pass through Congress any serious legislation, especially concerning foreign policy.

Supping with the devil is dangerous even for someone who remembers to bring a long spoon. I’m afraid that Trump may soon find this out the hard way.

I’m beginning to worry about my friend Vlad Putin, the great leader so many putative British conservatives (otherwise known as ‘useful idiots’) wish we had.

That may still come about, though probably and regrettably not in my lifetime. However, if Vlad ever does find himself at 10 Downing Street, or perhaps Buckingham Palace, I hope his mental health doesn’t deteriorate beyond its present rapidly sinking level.

What gives me cause for concern is Vlad’s latest contribution to the debate about the future of the Lenin mummy. Actually, perhaps ‘debate’ is a wrong word: Vlad is such a strong leader that whatever he says goes (within Russia only, at this point).

So let’s call it discussion instead, and there are some people still extant in Russia who have reservations about Lenin’s role in history. They ungratefully mention the 15 million or thereabouts killed on Lenin’s watch.

Admittedly that only puts Lenin in the bronze medal position, behind Mao and Stalin, who managed to dispatch, respectively, 60 and 45 million. But Lenin still deserves an honorary first place.

First, he only had about five years to run up his score, as opposed to Stalin’s 30 and Mao’s 20. Second, and most important, he inspired the other two, showing them the way. It’s not for nothing that most of the thousands of Lenin statues adorning Russia show him with an extended right arm pointing to the future: way to go, comrades.

Yet some fossils in Russia are less than impressed with Lenin’s achievements. They point out that the great leader, his mind inflamed by syphilis, was consumed with hatred and bloodlust. Lenin, they claim, not just broadened the limits of the allowable but eliminated them.

The syphilitic maniac, they say, beggared the country with his wholesale looting of national wealth. In the process, he created the worst tyranny the world had ever known and even set the scene for the second worst one, by financing, arming and training the extremist and militarist elements in Germany (“the icebreaker of the revolution”, in Lenin’s phrase).

That’s why, insist those Russophobes (the term designating anyone whose position on anything differs from Putin’s), his mummy should be taken out of the Red Square mausoleum and reburied.

That ziggurat-like structure, incidentally, didn’t get off to a promising start when it was built in 1924. At first, while construction was going on, the mummy stayed in a temporary mausoleum. Alas, the builders carelessly punctured the sewer underneath, flooding the sacred remains and giving Patriarch Tikhon, then under house arrest, an opening for a witticism: “The incense fits the relics.”

His Holiness was understandably upset about some of the things the newly canonised saint had done. Lenin was even more atheistic than Richard Dawkins, or at least more prepared to act on his convictions. About 40,000 priests were murdered while he was in power, and God only knows how many lay parishioners.

In addition, Lenin ordered the plunder of church valuables when he felt the time was right, which is to say when the peasants were, in his phrase, “swelling from starvation… and reduced to cannibalism” and therefore too weak to resist.

But it was not all about money: Lenin never ignored the human factor. In his secret order of 19 March, 1922, he wrote that “…removal of valuables… must be carried out with merciless resolve and in the shortest possible time. The more representatives of the reactionary bourgeoisie and clergy we shall manage to shoot in the process, the better. It is now that we must teach that scum a lesson so that they will not even dare think of any kind of resistance for several decades.”

The lesson was taught, but some descendants of the original pupils still believe that the mummified teacher doesn’t belong in Red Square. And even those who are more ambivalent about Lenin still find the open sarcophagus a tad distasteful.

But Vlad has stopped them in their tracks, explaining, so far good-naturedly, that the plans to re-inter the mummy are barbaric. “While I’m sitting here, there will be no barbarism in Red Square,” said the current Strong Leader.

And he had something to say to the aspiring barbarians, those who have aesthetic and religious objections to what they call an obscene display (those who have moral objections aren’t worthy of a reply, not with words at any rate).

It’s this response that made me fear for Vlad’s psychiatric well-being. Citing the ancient Christian practice of cave burials, Vlad said that the tomb satisfied Russian Orthodox requirements for burial.

Personally, I wouldn’t invoke Christian rituals when talking about Lenin – for reasons that ought to be evident from some of his deeds I’ve mentioned. Christian burial is traditionally reserved for Christians only, isn’t it?

But the conservative in me rejoices: it’s time Russia reverted to her ancient burial rites. Some of them were described by the tenth century Arab envoy Ibn Fadlan in his book Risala.

In broad strokes, when a chieftain died, his numerous wives and concubines were asked to come up with a volunteer to be cremated with him. One would inevitably step forward, after which the lady, before she was incinerated, would be given wine and drugs. She would then, in her semi-conscious state, dance and have sex with all the male relations of the deceased.

It would please me no end to see this ancient custom revived, albeit with mummification replacing cremation to stay in tune with Christian practices. For example, when Vlad goes – and so many ‘conservatives’ pray it never happens – I for one would like to see a reassuringly conservative rite.

Ex-gymnast Alina Kabayeva, widely reputed to be Vlad’s secret wife, should get drunk and high, and then have sex with all of the hundred Russians whom Putin appointed billionaires. She could take her time but, being a fit young lady, she could probably manage the feat in one go. She should then be killed, mummified and placed into the Red Square mausoleum between two Vlads, Lenin and her beloved.

This would tally not only with Vlad’s take on Christianity, but also with the old Russian superstition that finding oneself between two namesakes is a good omen.

The idea may be a bit farfetched, but one should rejoice at the zeal with which Vlad protects the best in Russia’s heritage. He should also be complimented on the forthrightness with which he reminds the world of his political lineage.