Author: Alexander Boot

It has taken a TV series for HMG to cotton on: Russian money doesn’t just smell; it poisons. We seem to be ready to abandon Vespasian’s principle of pecunia non olet.

I haven’t watched a single episode of McMafia, and nor am I likely ever to do so. But hey, if it takes popular entertainment to spur our government into action, then long live popular entertainment.

HMG is ready to invoke unexplained wealth orders (UWOs) to seize the UK assets of rich Russians suspected of having profited from the proceeds of crime. This goes further than simply compiling a list of such people, as the US government has done.

Predictably, the ‘oligarchs’ are running scared, while their shills are raising a hue and cry. The gist of their protests is no longer that good people are suspected of being gangsters. It’s that good gangsters are suspected of being gangsters.

Actually, figuring out which Russian billionaires have acquired their lucre in criminal ways is easy: they all have. It’s like tossing a grenade into a room full of murderers. You can’t miss.

Even the Swiss are beginning to act, and not even their worst enemy can accuse them of being overly fastidious in opening their banks to criminal loot.

After London’s own Roman Abramovich found himself on the US list, he realised, with his unerring survival instinct, that Britain would soon follow suit. To give himself a bolt hole he applied for Swiss residency. However, having then found out that his application would be rejected, he hastily withdrew it.

Some 60 other Russian gangsters in London have asked Putin if they could please return home without being arrested. This suggests they fear exactly that fate should they remain in the UK.

The practice of refusing to accept dirty money isn’t new. Back in the 80s I met two Russians in New York, who had made millions forging works of art. Yet they continued to live in Queens because their every attempt to buy, or even rent, properties in upmarket Manhattan condominiums had failed. Their money smelled.

The other day I talked to a rich young Russian, who shuttles between London and Moscow. Although no champion of Putin, he was waxing indignant about what he called “an act of war”.

He’s a junior partner in a firm whose senior partner merited inclusion in the US list. When I voiced approval of that measure, my interlocutor accused me of tarring all rich Russians with the same brush. His company, for example, had nothing to do with organised crime.

“Do you pay protection money?” I asked. He gave an evasive answer (“Not me personally…”) that made it clear that they did. “This makes you at least an accomplice of organised crime,” was my unkind comment.

Most people to be subjected to the UWOs are guilty of more than just paying protection. For, when the whole economy is criminalised, it’s only possible to make vast amounts by criminal means.

Paul Klebnikov, who later found himself on the receiving end of rather extreme literary criticism administered with submachine guns in the centre of Moscow, wrote a book The Godfather of the Kremlin: Boris Berezovsky and the Looting of Russia. In it he described the criminal activities of the eponymous hero and his then partner, later enemy, Abramovich.

The two of them were buying up companies wholesale, trying to corner a segment of the energy market. One factory owner flatly refused to sell. The next day he fell out of his window, after which the deal went through smoothly.

Klebnikov didn’t use the word ‘murder’, but he used many other words that left no doubt about the moral profile of the two gentlemen, who eventually moved to London.

Both of them were Yeltsyn’s closest advisors, in which capacity they recommended Putin as his successor. The partners thought they’d be able to control the KGB man, but he turned the tables on them.

When Putin became, well, Putin, Abramovich wisely fell in with him, but Berezovsky fell out. The former became Putin’s London friend and moneybag, while the latter became his London enemy. In due course Berezovsky was found hanged under unexplained circumstances. I’d suggest they’re about as unexplained as the oligarchs’ wealth.

Putin and his gang must be credited with creating history’s unique state. Fascisoid dictatorships had existed before, as had states run by secret police or those in cahoots with organised crime.

One can think of a few governments here and there that combined a couple of those elements. But only Putin’s junta has managed to fuse them all together.

In common with all faschisoid regimes, the Russian economy is subjugated to politics, and Russian politics is subjugated to its leader. Yet Putin’s regime differs from Mussolini’s, Stalin’s or Hitler’s. They stamped out organised crime; Putin is its absolute godfather.

In common with traditional gang chieftains, he uses global criminal activity as a way of creating a coterie of close accomplices who owe their wealth to him personally. Even if they had made their money before Putin took over, they’re only allowed to keep it as a reward for absolute loyalty.

Just like Russian tsars were the ultimate owners of all Russia by patrimonial right, so is Putin the ultimate freeholder of all Russia’s wealth. The nominal owners can only have a leasehold contingent on good behaviour. When they begin to misbehave, their wealth can be repossessed in a second.

Hence every sizeable business in Russia pays protection money, which eventually zigzags its way up to the Kremlin, having shed bits and pieces along the way. Putin’s personal wealth is variously estimated between 50 and 250 billion US, which is nice, as far as by-products of politics go.

But by-products they are: the ‘oligarchs’ are allowed to rob Russia blind in exchange for their blind obedience. Putin feeds off organised crime, and organised crime feeds off Putin. Together they’ve created the only totally criminalised major economy in history.

Putin likes to describe himself as a Russian traditionalist, and in this aspect at least he’s not far wrong. Malfeasance was always tolerated, indeed encouraged, in Russia even under the tsars.

In a well-known anecdote, Alexander I once asked his court poet and historian Karamzin how the provincial officials were doing. “Thieving, Your Majesty,” replied Karamzin (“Ils volent, Sire” – Russian spirituality was at that time expressed in French.)

Russian public servants were paid derisory salaries, especially in the provinces. Catherine II stopped paying them altogether, correctly assuming they could handsomely survive off the fat of the land.

Yet, though those chaps could have misappropriated state funds and taken the odd bribe, they weren’t murderers – and neither did they run global criminal empires. Even savage satires, such as Gogol’s play Inspector General, never went beyond portraying local officials as anything worse than petty crooks.

Crooks today’s lot may be, but there’s nothing petty about them. US authorities estimate that a trillion dollars has been laundered through American banks, and about as much in the rest of the world.

With their characteristic myopia, Western bankers and governments accept pilfered billions with alacrity. They fail to realise that packaged with the visible short-term money come invisible long-term side effects.

A society can survive only so much poison injected into its veins. At some point the receiving organism may develop fatal effects. The toxic presence of hundreds (thousands?) of Russians throwing their ill-gotten loot at London’s property developers and banks corrupts Britain.

Once the point of no return is reached, the whole country may well become fatally infected, effectively turning into a fence and money launderer for Russian criminals.

I don’t know if HMG fully realises all this. More likely, political expedience is trumping any moral considerations. But in this case the two happily coincide.

I do hope that those stolen assets will be seized, detoxifying Britain. Who knows, perhaps the US Congress will prevail on Trump to do the same and go beyond just listing Putin’s caporegimi.

Every time a conservative speaker is either disinvited or, if appearing, shouted down by a braying mob, the subject of free speech comes up.

The latest such incident occurred at Bristol University, and the speaker subjected to a riotous assault was Jacob Rees-Mogg, MP.

It has to be said that Mr Rees-Mogg asks for it, as far as our masses are concerned. The blighter doesn’t even bother to conceal that he was born with a silver spoon in every orifice of his body.

Mr Rees-Mogg speaks with the kind of patrician accent that even those born to it try to push downmarket not to provoke class war, and he wears Savile Row suits as if he came out of his mother’s womb sporting one.

That sort of thing is by itself enough to provoke a riot. And when he starts to speak, only those stuck in the same mud can possibly resist the desire to commit, as a minimum, ABH against his person.

Mr Rees-Mogg is one of the few politicians who can actually string together several sentences containing no obvious non sequiturs. He limits his rhetorical fallacies to a maximum of one per speech, rather than the more customary one per sentence (sorry, Mrs May). And he makes cogent arguments for Brexit without sputtering spittle all over the rostrum.

This explains the enthusiasm with which masked youngsters disrupted his speech and attacked Mr Rees-Mogg for being a ‘fascist’, ‘Nazi’, ‘racist’ and some such. I don’t know if homophobia and misogyny came up as well. If not, one can only put this glaring omission down to the heat of the moment.

Having dived headlong into the melee, Mr Rees-Mogg later admitted this was the first fist fight of his life (remember those silver spoons?), and it showed in his rather chaotic pugilism. But there was no shortage of courage and backbone – again rare traits among his colleagues.

Anyway, he emerged unscathed, and yet another debate about free speech kicked off. Many a commentator reasonably suggested that free speech only means something if we disagree with the speaker. If we agree, granting such freedom is no hardship.

Even more commentators quoted Voltaire’s maxim: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Stoutly spoken, as befits the master of the epigrammatic genre. But quotations do not a serious argument make.

If we wish to argue seriously, we must start by accepting that freedom of speech isn’t a natural or, if you will, absolute right. There exists an infallible test that proves this.

A real (natural, absolute) right is one that doesn’t presuppose a concomitant obligation on anybody else’s part. The right to life is one such. So is the right to secure property, provided it’s acquired legally. So is… well, I can’t think of any others offhand.

All other rights, including the one to free speech, are a matter of consensus, which can be granted or withdrawn. That means they aren’t really rights (to use the term rigorously) but contracts. One party claims freedom of speech; the other agrees to grant it – but never without qualifications.

Remove all qualifications, and we’ll be begging for freedom from speech, not of it. In other words, some speech is  allowed and some isn’t – always.

The incident at Bristol University was an attack on the kind of speech that so far hasn’t been proscribed by consensus reflected in the law. So by all means do let’s defend it – but only if we recognise that some other kinds of speech may be so proscribed.

For example, I wouldn’t defend to the death the right of a jihadist mullah to make a speech entitled “Let’s build a caliphate on the bones of British infidels”. A neo-Nazi should also be stopped if delivering an address along the lines of “Holocaust never happened – but it will if we try”. The same goes for a fire-eating patriot screaming: “Let’s deport, or ideally kill, all Muslims including (especially?) Baroness Warsi.”

The question will inevitably arise as to where do we draw the line, and who draws it. The only realistic answer available to us today is the government. This, however, implies faith in the government’s unbiased sagacity and its unerring sense of the demarcation line that can never be overstepped.

However, I doubt that many of us share this faith. (Sorry, Mrs May.) And even those who used to have it must feel betrayed by the conveniently broad definition of ‘hate speech’ enforced by HMG.

Good people will appreciate that incitement to kill, say, all Muslims definitely qualifies as such, but they’ll still demur when simply saying that we should prevent the Islamisation of Britain constitutes culpable ‘hate speech’. And, to remove any semblance of objective criteria, a racial insult is defined as anything perceived as such by the person on the receiving end – another example of the government’s incompetence in this matter.

So how do we decide where free speech should begin and end? And who, if not the government, can do so?

Two or even one century ago, it was understood that there was only one  institution whose moral judgement was capable of rising above the short-term expediency by which the state lives: the Church.

Yet giving this answer today would brand one as an even greater reactionary than Mr Rees-Mogg. Hankering after the past is like reaching for a pie in the sky long after salmonella has set in.

However, it’s impossible to answer those questions satisfactorily in the absence of an absolute moral authority, empowered to adjudicate secular diktats. Without it, any answer will be arbitrary, and vital issues, such as free speech, will be left at the mercy of those manifestly unqualified to solve them.

(Sorry, Mrs May.)

 

Several commentators have recently voiced their objections to TV advertising for on-line gambling. Predictably, the advertisers disagree.

The objectors emphasise the growing addiction among children, some of whom gamble on line through the night. The seven-digit number of such adolescent addicts is hard to believe, but then so is modernity.

Advertisers point out that they’re only allowed to run commercials after the 9 pm watershed. Moreover, they don’t encourage gambling. All they do is promote their own brand against competition.

The cinematic Cockney Ray Winstone, after informing credulous viewers that Bet365 is one big family that crosses “conninents”, even says that “we gamble wes-PON-sibly”. What more can one ask? Of course that disclaimer is a legal requirement, but, when the talented Ray says it, it appears to come from the heart.

Now I hope my libertarian friends won’t burn me in effigy if I say that I’d ban all such advertising, and not just because children become addicted. And not even because the campaign for the ban is led by Lord Chadlington, né Peter Gummer.

(I have for Peter that affectionate feeling I reserve for people who contributed to my comfortable retirement from advertising: his company bought the agency in which I was a partner.)

It’s just that I can see through the advertisers’ little tricks with ease. Of course they don’t promote gambling as such in so many words. But I’d like to know why Bet365 chose Ray Winstone as their spokesman.

Actually, I do know. Ad agencies have casting departments, and casting departments have thick books of all celebrities categorised by their credibility rating in every product category. Matching gambling to various potential spokesmen, they obviously found Ray’s credibility to be right up there.

For one thing, he’s a lovable, middle-aged bear of a man with much avuncular appeal. Then he speaks with an accent that’s more pint mug than cut crystal. This suggests that market research identified the demographics of the target audience as C to B-. If it were A to B, they’d have someone who sounds like Gary Oldman in his Churchill role.

In addition to being a wonderful actor and a genuine Cockney, Ray is what the target audience would describe as cool. That wouldn’t be the case if the spokesman were a Cockney actor mostly known for playing serial murderers.

Ray’s job isn’t only increasing his employer’s market share, but also growing the market. Encouraging the target audience to gamble, in other words. Advertisers use glamorous spokesmen because they know that this glamorises not only their product, but also what the product does.

As to the 9 pm watershed, it’s risible. First, I haven’t seen many teenagers who obediently go to bed at nine. And even those meek souls who do may well have a TV (pronounced tey-vey in this market segment) in their rooms. Also, the watershed is suspended on live sports broadcasts, mainly football.

We wouldn’t have much advertising left if such tricks of the trade were disallowed. Most advertisers use them. However, most products aren’t inherently pernicious. Though switching from one brand of toothpaste to another won’t improve anyone’s sex life, at least a toothpaste isn’t immoral in se.

Gambling is. And here again I speak from personal experience and observation.

These suffice even if we disregard the seven deadly sins, some of which a gambler commits. It’s just that anyone who has ever gambled or at least watched others do so knows that this activity encourages the worst parts and the basest passions of human nature.

Now I don’t have a gambler’s personality. My pain of losing £1,000 is much stronger than the joy of winning £1,000. Having said that, I used to bet relatively large amounts on myself in games of skill, such as the more cerebral card games, chess and tennis.

Many years ago I got interested in beating the casino at blackjack. Having played thousands of hands at home, I tried my luck a few times in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. And sure enough, working hard for several hours, I managed to convert the in-built house advantage of seven per cent to a 10 per cent advantage for myself.

That would have been most welcome had I started with a gambling capital of $100,000. However, since my capital was more in the nature of $200, the mass wasn’t worth the candle.

Later in life I went to a few race courses in Britain, mainly as client entertainment. There I played with the company’s money, which made the losses easier to bear. Perhaps because of that I won a hundred or two each time, even though I know nothing about horses.

Yet at both the casinos and race courses I indulged in my favourite pastime: watching people. That wasn’t a pretty sight: thousands of faces contorted with greed, the anguish of losing much-needed money, the ecstasy of winning large sums that will then be lost with interest. I heard shrieks, moans, weeping, hysterical laughter, sounds of triumph and devastation. It was man close to his worst.

Then again, offering or promising something for nothing inevitably corrupts both the buyer and the seller. Gambling is always corrupt – be that at a Mayfair casino or a Brixton street corner.

It’s not by chance that both Las Vegas and Atlantic City owe their prosperity to the Mafia. A casino isn’t something a Franciscan charity would want to build.

On-line gambling is a case in point. I know some accomplished poker players who have been unable to collect their winnings. And most punters don’t realise that, when they gamble on-line, they’re up against a computer, not another punter.

Incidentally, the lottery run by the biggest gambling outfit of all, the state, operates on the same principle, magnified no end. The odds of winning are much lower than at the blackjack table. Thus the lottery is a computer-calculated rip-off, or else a tax on people poor at maths.

Yet I don’t think gambling should be banned. Rousseau’s pronouncements notwithstanding, legislating the good parts of human nature isn’t the state’s job.

But preventing others from encouraging the bad parts may well fall under the state’s remit. Hence, even if the odd flutter shouldn’t be banned, ads for gambling should be. This is one of the areas in which the libertarian argument doesn’t work.

At last there’s someone who shares my aesthetic evaluation of the Pre-Raphaelites.

Every painting produced by the Brotherhood is a sugary, pseudo-Classical, pantheistic, cloyingly sentimental exercise in artistic demagoguery as vacuous spiritually as it’s mediocre technically.

Hence it’s from the bottom of my heart that I congratulate the curators of Manchester Art Gallery for their bold decision to remove John William Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs from its walls, and postcards of the painting from its shop.

That way they declare their unwillingness to pander to English tastes starved of true native greatness and therefore ready to embrace and  overrate third-rate art. This serves as yet another reminder that the English genius finds its sublime expression in literature, not in…

Hold on a second. My wife has just indulged her rotten habit of looking over my shoulder, and she’s saying I got it all wrong. “Why don’t you read the bloody article to the end before jumping to conclusions?” she asked archly and ever so contemptuously.

My male pride badly hurt, I’ve obediently read the article to the end. And I’ve found begrudgingly she was right. So right, in fact, that I must reconsider my hastily proffered congratulations.

Curator Clare Gannaway explained that the reasons for the banishment weren’t aesthetic at all. The problem – and not just with this painting, but with the whole In Pursuit of Beauty room where it hung – isn’t artistic but existential.

She then manfully, or rather non-gender-specifically, admitted her mistake in not having done something about it sooner: “Our attention has been elsewhere… we’ve collectively forgotten to look at this space and think about it properly. We want to do something about it now because we have forgotten about it for so long.”

Now that Miss Gannaway has got around to pondering the pernicious image properly, she’s shocked by everything it shows and, above all, implies.

This and many other such paintings interpret beauty as nude female form used to entice innocent youths to their fall. That means that Waterhouse and his Victorian contemporaries committed the egregious oversight of failing to anticipate our brittle modern sensibilities.

Modern viewers are offended, or rather presumed by Miss Gannaway to be offended, by any pictorial hint at the very possibility of women shedding their clothes and trying to seduce men.

They know that every man is a crypto-raping, bum-pinching, breast-squeezing aggressor out to humiliate and dominate female victim-persons in a brazen show of sexism (accompanied by fascism, racism and homophobia).

No woman having, or about to have, sex with a man may under any circumstances be depicted as a seductress. No woman will ever display her nudity voluntarily or, God forbid, playfully. Thus any depiction of a naked woman is a violent fantasy, an extension of rape by artistic means.

This simply won’t do, will it? Of course it won’t, and, as a lifelong champion of every new-fangled moral imperative, I agree wholeheartedly. My only regret is that Miss Gannaway displayed her righteous indignation so timidly.

I have images flashing through my head of her as a present-day Girolamo Savonarola, tossing Botticelli’s paintings into his bonfire of the vanities. Even though Miss Gannaway isn’t a Dominican, and Waterhouse isn’t exactly Botticelli, his canvases would have been as vulnerable to fire.

However, as a sop to our soft liberalism, the offensive painting wasn’t destroyed. It was only exiled, and even then temporarily.

“We think it probably will return, yes, but hopefully contextualised quite differently. It is not just about that one painting, it is the whole context of the gallery,” explained Miss Gannaway, displaying an enviable knack for converting nouns into verbs and misusing ‘hopefully’.

If I weren’t so unreservedly on her side, I’d opine that no one who uses English that way is fit to pass judgement on, well, anything and certainly not on art. But as an admirer of her cause, I’d like to help with a few modest suggestions.

By way of hopefully re-contexualising, re-backdropping and re-frameworking the painting, its title should be changed. I propose Hylas Spying on Bathing Nymph Persons to Indulge His Rape Fantasies And Risk Being Dragged Before Courts. What this title loses in brevity, it gains in sensitivity to the modern ethos and Miss Gannaway’s innermost convictions.

In parallel, the room should be renamed In Pursuit of Criminal Male Dreams of Chauvinist Domination. That way, Manchester Art Gallery won’t have to hire an artist who could touch the painting up by clothing all the nymphs in sensible trouser suits, complete with ties and men’s watches.

These measures would provide a short-term solution only. Over the long haul, our museums should hopefully re-contextualise – ideally burn – all paintings depicting female nudes. All those Botticellis, Rubenses, Velazquezes, Modiglianis et al proceeded from a chauvinist male perspective that has no place in Miss Gannaway’s world, or mine.

We ought to follow the lead of American educators who’ve rid school libraries of the toxic presence of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, out of which, according to Hemingway, all American literature came.

American literature can no longer be allowed to have come from a book featuring a character called Nigger Jim. Never mind that the novel is manifestly anti-slavery – Twain should have anticipated the advent of new morality by naming his character African American Person Jim.

(Huck saying ‘Hey, African American Person Jim’ really rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?)

I’d suggest that copies of this offensive tome should be not only expunged but publicly tossed in the fire. Though perhaps not yet: this would evoke images more recent than Savonarola’s bonfire.

Anyway, Godspeed to Miss Gannaway and her Mancunian colleagues. Call me if you need someone to strike that match.

Having attacked the Soviet Union on 22 June, 1941, the Germans were racing through Eastern Poland (or Western Ukraine, as it had become after the Nazi-Soviet Pact) at march speeds. The Soviets, routed all along the frontline, hastily left Lwów on 29 June, 1941.

The Nazis occupied it on 30 June. During the one day of interregnum, the Poles and Ukrainians inhabiting the city were left to their own devices – and vices.

One such vice was the almost universal hatred of their 200,000 Jewish neighbours. The glowing embers of that unenviable sentiment were fanned into a violent flame when the locals broke into the three NKVD prisons, only to find out that their 8,000 inmates had been massacred by the Soviets before their retreat.

The mob blamed the Jews, even though many of the victims were themselves Jewish. However, when the heart speaks, reason falls silent – especially when people renounce their individuality to join a herd.

That particular herd went on a stampede, and, when the Germans entered the city, they found out that much of their work had already been done. Some 10,000 Jews had been murdered by their gentile neighbours in ways that must have made the victims beg to be simply shot.

But the job wasn’t done yet. Einsatzengruppen and the local collaborators began to round up and shoot Jews. Most of the firing squads didn’t include a single German – there was no shortage of local volunteers. By the end of the war, only a couple of hundred Lwów Jews were still alive.

Thus three times the number of Jews were killed in that one city than in the whole of occupied France, where local enthusiasm wasn’t exactly in short supply either. Why such disparity? What made Lwów so much more efficient?

Actually, it wasn’t just Lwów. Simply compare the numbers of massacred Jews relative to their overall numbers in a small sample of European countries.

Western Europe: Germany, 142,000 out of 565,000; Austria, 50,000 out of 185,000; Denmark, 60 out of 8,000; Finland, 7 out of 2,000; Italy, 7,500 out of 44,500; France, 77,000 out of 250,000.

Eastern Europe: Greece, 65,000 out of 75,000; Hungary, 550,000 out of 825,000; Latvia, 70,000 out of 91,500; Lithuania, 140,000 out of 168,000; Czechoslovakia, 78,000 out of 118,000; Poland, 3,000,000 out of 3,300,000.

You’ll notice that a much higher percentage of Jews were killed in Eastern Europe than even in Germany, which after all initiated the Holocaust and built the death camps.

Why such disparity? I can think of only one answer: Eastern Europeans didn’t mind the Holocaust as much, and were more than willing to lend the Germans a helping hand.

Another question: why did the Nazis set up all the extermination (as opposed to concentration) camps in Poland? Auschwitz, Belzec, Chełmno, Jasenovac, Majdanek, Maly Trostenets, Sobibor and Treblinka were all there.

To some extent, it must have been a matter of logistics: most of Europe’s Jewish population lived there or thereabouts, in what used to be the Pale of Settlement.

But it couldn’t have been just logistics. After all, the Nazis didn’t mind using hundreds of trains badly needed for military freight to transport Jews from, say, France all the way to Poland. It would have been more efficient to kill them in situ.

Also in the back of the Nazis’ mind must have been the issue of post-war deniability for the Germans. Had those crematorium chimneys been spewing clouds of black smoke in, say, Hamburg, it would have been hard for its denizens to claim they didn’t know.

As it was, such claims weren’t all that credible anyhow, as Daniel Goldhagen demonstrates convincingly in his instructive book Hitler’s Willing Executioners. But he also shows that the Nazis were wary of a potential backlash from the Germans had they had to watch mass murder committed on their own doorstep. No such fears in Poland.

This is the backdrop to the bill recently approved by the Polish parliament that will outlaw any public association of “the Polish nation” with crimes committed by the Germans. In other words, had a Pole written the previous paragraphs, he could get three years in prison – the kind of literary prize that’s rapidly gaining popularity in the low-rent part of Europe.

Poland’s president Andrzej Duda navigated the perilous undercurrents with laudable celerity. Yes, he admitted magnanimously, some individual Poles did do “wicked” things to their Jewish neighbours (like hacking them to death with shovels, but the president didn’t go into such graphic detail). But there was no institutional Polish participation in the Holocaust.

Actually, as far as I know, no one has ever suggested that the Polish government in exile issued an order to kill Jews. So Mr Duda is on safe grounds there.

But he then went on to bemoan that Poles are being “vilified” with “false accusations”. I suppose Mr Duda believes that any accusations against Poles ipso facto constitute unfounded vilification.

He also objects to the death camps being referred to as ‘Polish’. I agree that ‘German camps in Poland’ would be more accurate. But those camps wouldn’t have been in Poland if the locals had detested them.

They didn’t. At best, they shrugged their shoulders with indifferent acquiescence. At worst, tens of thousands of them took an active part in the atrocities. And those who deny these facts are the murderers’ accomplices after the fact.

The Poles are Catholics, so perhaps they should begin to act accordingly in this painful matter. Redemption won’t come from denying their sins – it can only come from confession and repentance. Especially since history lays their sins bare for all to see.

There’s only one thing the British hate more than being hectored, and that’s being hectored by Germans. Yet that’s precisely what the outgoing German ambassador Peter Ammon did in his valedictory interview.

His Excellence is upset about the frequent references to the war made by Brexiteers, who draw an unwarranted parallel between the Third Reich and the EU:

“History is always full of ambiguities and ups and downs,” he said, “but if you focus only on how Britain stood alone in the war, how it stood against dominating Germany, well, it is a nice story, but does not solve any problem of today.”

Herr Ammon should have got out more when in London. Had he visited, for example, any international football match, he’d know that such sentiments transcend political boundaries.

When England plays Germany, many an English fan holds the index finger of his left hand across his top lip, while raising his outstretched right arm in a well-known salute. And when England plays any other European team, tens of thousands sing as one: “If it wasn’t for England, you’d all be Krauts”.

In fact, before the 2006 World Cup held in Germany, the departing England fans had been briefed on this sensitive issue and told not to mention the war. In compliance, during the opening ceremony many of them sported T-shirts saying “Don’t mention the war”.

One can always rely on any EU ideologue to intersperse truisms with banalities, bromides and platitudes. So yes, history is indeed full of ambiguities. But Germany’s quest to dominate Europe isn’t one of them. It’s an observable fact rooted in national psychology.

The Germans seem to think that their indisputable talents don’t get the recognition they deserve. Western music, for example, is practically all German, which is an unparalleled cultural achievement.

While one can’t say exactly the same thing about Western philosophy, the Germans arguably contributed more to it than anyone else. They also hold their own in literature and science, while their ability to mass-produce premium products is second to none.

Germans do have much to be proud of, but here’s the rub. People in general, and the British in particular, don’t like high achievers who flaunt their accomplishments too openly. They admire such people only if their success is leavened with diffidence and self-deprecating humour.

Germans aren’t exactly known for these traits, which is why they’re more often mocked than praised. To be sure, envy has a role to play there as well, but it’s not nearly as prominent as the Germans will have you believe.

I’d venture a guess that the Germans’ desire for respect, which they felt they merited and weren’t getting, was a contributing factor in both world wars. It’s also possible that, had, say, Italy been the defeated aggressor in the First World War, the peace treaty imposed on her would have been less harsh than Versailles.

When Nazi German and Vichy French bureaucrats were drawing the blueprint for the EU towards the end of the Second World War, they were both driven by their national desiderata. Having experienced a de facto single European state, they felt the concept was promising.

France, having lost two wars to the Germans in the preceding 70 years, and won a Pyrrhic victory in another, wanted some guarantee of a lasting peace – and a chance to mend her badly dented pride by riding the resurgent Germans’ coattails .

Germany, having lost any possibility of launching military conquests in the foreseeable future, welcomed the chance of rising to a highly predictable economic, and therefore political, dominance in Europe.

Things have panned out as the two parties planned, especially for Germany. She has emerged as the most politically powerful, and the only economically virile, country on the continent. And Germany foots the bill for most EU members in a sort of supranational welfare state.

Here it’s useful to keep in mind that, all the touchy-feely noises aside, the real objective of any welfare state, national or supranational, is to increase the political power of the state over the individual (or country). And Germany does much to vindicate this statement.

In common with all fire-eating ideologues, the good ambassador is adept at denying obvious facts. Hence he mocks the very idea that the EU is basically a German fiefdom:

“When I tell people in Germany I am confronted by this narrative occasionally in public debates they say, ‘This cannot be true. You are joking. This cannot be true. That is absurd.’.” Well, they would, wouldn’t they.

“I spoke to many of the Brexiteers, and many of them said they wanted to preserve a British identity,” laments the ambassador.

Shame on those retrogrades. Preserve a British identity when they could have a German one instead? There’s no understanding some people.

Being a German, he probably doesn’t realise how much political sovereignty determines the British national identity. Germany, after all, became a single political entity barely a century and a half ago, while Britain has been just that for more than a millennium.

Hence Germany has made a rather understated contribution to the art of politics, and what she has made is largely negative. She has been much more successful at churning out food processors and electric shavers.

Neither is France fit to teach politics to the world – any more than a man divorced several times is fit to offer marriage advice on the basis of that experience. While England has had roughly the same constitution since 1688, France has had 17 different ones since 1789.

If France taught the world how to build cathedrals and make wine, and Germany how to compose music and make toasters, England has shown how to run a state without too much social conflict. Germany and France are glued together mainly by culture; Britain mainly by politics.

Hence, throughout their political flip-flops, France and Germany preserved their national identity. France managed to do so even when being part of Germany. As the Nazis were rounding up Jews, Jean-Paul still held court at Les Deux Magots, and his plays were still produced at the Théâtre du Vieux–Colombier.

Conversely, Britain without her political sovereignty is no longer Britain. But the good ambassador is either insufficiently bright or too German to understand this.

Such failings don’t prevent him from patronising the British: “If you say the words ‘single market’ or ‘customs union’, probably 99 per cent of the population would not understand.”

Let’s see if I can pass the test. Customs union is like the Zollverein, isn’t it? That devious stratagem Prussia used to coerce other German states to come together under her aegis, am I getting it right? Well then, it’s hard not to notice that today’s Germany has absorbed this lesson of history rather well.

And British football fans, for all their supposed ignorance, have absorbed others much better than the good ambassador. They may not be able to define a Zollverein, but when they see it they know it.

What do you call a country where the government can seize legally acquired private property? (I’ll entertain no obscene replies.)

Fascist? Totalitarian? Lawless? Communist? Correct. Or else you can call it Britain after the next general election.

Considering the criminal ineptitude and irresponsibility of the Tories and the disintegration of UKIP, it’s likely that Comrade Corbyn will form the next government. And he doesn’t even bother to conceal his intention of turning Britain into a BSSR.

The latest instalment came in an interview the other day, when Corbyn promised to house all homeless people by seizing luxury flats ‘deliberately kept vacant’:

“There is something grossly insulting about the idea you would build a luxury block… deliberately keep it empty knowing that with property price inflation the investor is going to make 10 per cent or 12 per cent a year…”

I find Corbyn himself ‘grossly insulting’, but I don’t propose he should be killed to spare my feelings. Yet this is precisely what he’s proposing to do to property rights, which more or less define our post-Christian civilisation.

His concern for the 5,000 people known to be sleeping rough is touching. This is indeed a problem, but one that could be largely solved by tightening immigration controls and deporting illegal aliens.

Just walking around London it’s hard not to notice that most rough sleepers don’t really belong in Britain. Those few who do must be helped (many of them psychiatrically) – but not at the cost of blowing up the very foundations of our commonwealth.

It’s indeed regrettable that hundreds of luxury residential highrises going up in London aren’t fully occupied. And it’s true that many of them are bought by foreign absentee owners specifically for the purpose that vexes Corbyn so.

This undeniably has a deleterious effect on the infrastructure in the whole area. If most flats stay empty, so will most shops, restaurants and drycleaners. But their plight doesn’t strike me as sufficient justification for converting Britain into a communist hell.

Yet this is precisely what will happen if Corbyn has his way. How does he see the practicalities involved? Has he at least done his sums?

A whole city of luxury highrises has grown up on the Thames, mostly its south bank, from Putney to Vauxhall. Flats there start at £1,000,000, but they certainly don’t end there.

Now will Corbyn seize 5,000 flats with no compensation or will he pay the absentee owners off? As a free tip, his Bolshevik role models favoured the former option, typically accompanied by the summary execution of the bloodsucking capitalist.

Killing the rich may be a step too far in the next parliament, but robbing them seems to be on the cards – especially since the second option will involve finding a few loose billion to compensate the acquisitive Johnny Foreigner.

And supposing the owner doesn’t want to sell? Barring the sanguinary possibilities, will Corbyn’s stormtroopers kick the door in and claim squatting rights? I can’t help thinking the owners will sue – provided we still have independent courts, which is far from certain. If we do, there may be billions’ worth of settlements against the government.

But even the first option isn’t free. For flats like those carry a five-digit service charge. Multiply 5,000 by £12,000 a year and you get a helluvalot. Will Comrade Corbyn force the building freeholders to forgo the charge?

Then there’s the small matter of local and property taxes, which the erstwhile homeless will probably be unable to pay. And the lawsuits will multiply…

There’s also the problem of those owners who do live in their expensive flats. How will they like seeing a homeless Romanian move in next door? Call me a snob, but those chaps are slightly deficient in sanitary and hygienic practices. Their approach to fire safety may also be less rigorous than what’s expected in such buildings.

It doesn’t take many such occupants to make property prices plunge. But I’m sure the present residents will be happy to eat those losses. A few hundred thousand is a small price to pay to see social justice done.

In addition to this massive raid on the cornerstone of British legality, Corbyn is promising to build 8,000 houses to accommodate the 5,000 homeless. Coupled with the luxury flats he’ll expropriate for the same purpose, this will turn the poor wretches into absentee landlords themselves – they’ll each have several properties.

But never mind the sums – this isn’t about arithmetic. It’s not even about the homeless. When socialists talk about helping the less fortunate, what they really want is to punish the more fortunate, those who work hard their whole lives to make sure they don’t end up sleeping in the street.

The very idea of money making money is abhorrent to socialists. They’ll just about tolerate a chap who makes a good living by running a grocery – but they won’t let him invest the surplus into non-productive areas.

That, incidentally, partly explains the congenital anti-Semitism of socialists, manifestly including today’s Labour. Following their patron saint Marx, who used the words ‘Jew’ and ‘capitalist’ interchangeably, they identify non-productive investment with Jews. Of course Marx was only marginally better disposed towards even productive private investment, but that’s the second order of the day.

This whole thing brings back fond memories of my Moscow youth. There most accommodation was owned by the state, and the state decided who was entitled to what and how much.

The maximum space allowed was nine square meters (about 90 square feet) per person. Hence a family of four could luxuriate in 36 square meters. ‘Maximum’ is the operative word because most families didn’t have that, but that’s a separate matter.

Now what happened when Grandpa died, turning it into a family of three and creating a surplus? That inequity called for restitution, and the family could be ‘densified’, meaning forced to share their space with at least one stranger.

Corbyn’s evident hatred of property rights means there’s every chance the word ‘densification’ will enter the English vocabulary, along with other lexical contributions made by Russia, such as ‘nihilism’, ‘vodka’, ‘pogrom’, ‘bolshevism’, ‘Soviet’, ‘Cheka’, ‘zek’, ‘gulag’, ‘disinformation’, ‘resident’ (spy handler), ‘collectivisation’, ‘sputnik’, ‘glasnost’, ‘perestroika’ and so forth.

All you have to do is wait until the next general election and then tick ‘Labour’ on your ballot paper. The BSSR will be just round the corner.

This statement is probably an exaggeration. But not nearly as much as its oft-used opposite, starting with ‘everybody’.

Britons who say it mean that it’s now possible to exchange basic Anglophone units of information with French waiters, Italian shopkeepers and Spanish museum guides.

Language is just a communication tool, isn’t it? If so, most Europeans are indeed capable of communicating in English – or producing write-ups such as the one above, on the wall of Rouen’s Palais de Justice.

The write-up does consummate an act of communication, although not without an effort on the part of a visiting Englishman. But if he’s willing to do a bit of Enigma-style deciphering, he can figure out what this eccentric prose means.

On the other hand, it also casts doubt on the premise. Yes, language is a means of communication. But it’s not just that.

If we bring down to earth the Biblical statement about the Word that was in the beginning, perhaps language is what creates and defines a nation. And if we believe the Babel story, then language is definitely what separates one nation from another – and not just linguistically.

English and Russian, for example, are different in exactly the same ways as the English and the Russians are different. One example: an English sentence is based on the verb, the action word, whereas the centre of a Russian sentence is the noun, surrounded by numerous modifiers.

A Russian sentence can function without a verb – just like a Russian man can function without doing anything much. (However, in jest, it’s possible to make a Russian sentence of nothing but eight verbs in a row. For the Russophones among you: посидели, поговорили, подумали, решили послать пойти купить выпить.)

Hence classical Russian literature, from Pushkin to Goncharov, from Gogol to Tolstoy, abounds in indolent layabouts who talk much and do little. On the other hand, Russian boasts a vast variety of affixation, ideally suited to conveying the shades of emotions in which the layabouts endlessly indulge.

English grammar is formally rigorous, which reflects a propensity for sequential logic and rational thought, just as its reliance on the verb reflects action-oriented pragmatism. The set word order of the English language can only be violated for stylistic effect, while Russian word order follows no rules whatsoever and is entirely stylistic.

That stands to reason. For the Russians despise rigid forms into which their much-vaunted spirituality can be squeezed. Hence they’ve so far been unable to come up with stable statehood or reasonable legality.

Characteristically, Nikolai Lossky’s History of Russian Philosophy devotes 57 pages to the mystical thinker Soloviov and only two to all the Russian philosophers of law combined. Justice – defined as a set of codified laws, not arbitrary feelings – has never interested the Russians much.

According to Lossky (d. 1965), this disdain for form even penetrated the Russians’ gene pool, producing ill-defined facial features so different, say, from the chiselled North European profile. It’s as if, having drawn a sketch of a Russian face, God then went over it, smudging every line with his thumb.

Lossky’s observation may be too sweeping, but it’s certainly evident that the Russians’ amorphousness extends to the way they treat every public institution, political, legal or religious.

Pavel Florensky, the polymath thinker murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1937, commented on the Russian character in essentially the same way: “There is no sun in the Slavs, no transparency, no definition! Clarity and serenity are lacking… It seems to me that this is meaningfully related to their failure… to find the sublime in the here and now and not strain to seek it in the nonexistent or the far-away.”

All this explains why the genre of the rigorously argued philosophical essay is as alien to the Russians as it’s natural to the English. The English vocabulary is three times the size of Russian, which makes the language more precise: a concept can be fractured into many specific fragments, each expressing its own nuance.

Russian, on the other hand, is ideally suited to poetic expression. Poetry imposes discipline on the Russians willy-nilly, while the loose grammar and practically endless morphology of their language open up infinite poetic possibilities.

The morphology of Russian words is so rich phonetically that Russian poets don’t have to rely on consonant endings to produce rhymes: they can find them in the words’ roots themselves. That’s why rhyming patterns are more interesting and less obvious in Russian, and vers libre, though not nonexistent, is rare there. By contrast, rhymed English poetry can easily sound like doggerel.

To be sure, the English have produced more than their fair share of great poets (including the greatest of all, Shakespeare), but one almost has to be that to write superb verse in English. By contrast, Russian poets of even modest talents can often produce excellent poems – their language does much of the work by itself.

Because their language and therefore their mentality don’t encourage philosophical self-expression, Russian thinkers often seek refuge in poetry or the novel.

Dostoyevsky’s novels, for example, are basically philosophy minus the intellectual discipline of the essay. And Tolstoy, possibly the greatest artist among world novelists, often indulged in tedious philosophical asides of the kind that would have destroyed the prose of a lesser artist.

The Russians welcome that sort of mongrelisation – it capitalises on their strength, poetic language, while downplaying their weakness, intellectual amorphousness. But Tolstoy’s Western contemporaries reacted differently. For example, Flaubert, having read the first French translation of War and Peace, exclaimed indignantly, “Il se répète! Il philosophise!”

So yes, an increasing number of Europeans and even Russians are now able to communicate in English, after a fashion. But to speak English for real one has to have the mental, emotional and spiritual makeup the language reflects or – arguably – creates.

Some – I’d like to suggest self-servingly – may perhaps be able to achieve this without being raised in an English-speaking country. A certain intellectual and emotional predisposition developed by lifelong study and decades of using English almost exclusively may see to that.

But such rare cases apart, I stand by the title above. If you juxtapose two sentences, “Everybody in Europe speaks English” and “Nobody in Europe speaks English”, the second is closer to the truth.

Over 5.3 million crimes were committed in Britain last year, which shows a healthy annual increase of 14 per cent – the biggest since 1990. Robbery, violent crimes and sex offences are doing even better, growing at 29, 20 and 23 per cent respectively.

You’ll find this hard to believe, but gun crime also went up by a fifth. Didn’t HMG do the right thing by banning handguns in 1997? Surely this ought to have put paid to gun crime once and for all. What do you know, before long some inveterate reactionaries may agree with the self-explanatory title of John Lott’s book More Guns, Less Crime.

I’d love to blame Brexit for this, and believe me I’ve tried. However, hard as I try to analyse the issue from every angle, I simply can’t figure out how the very possibility of reducing the importation of cultural aliens could boost crime.

Establishing a causative link between the number of such imports and crime presents an easier task. For example, the population of Malmö, Sweden’s third largest city, is almost half Muslim – and the city boasts more murders than the rest of Scandinavia combined.

 And, as a life-long champion of multi-culti probity, it saddens me to observe that the parts of London with the greatest Muslim population have the most crime, although, credit where it’s due, Eastern Europeans work hard to make a meaningful contribution too.

But not to worry: help is on the way. Elect a Labour government, and our streets will become crime-free. Such is the solemn promise issued by shadow home secretary Diane Abbott, Corbyn’s former squeeze: “These statistics are an indictment of this Conservative Government’s policies. Labour will address this crisis and recruit 10,000 new police officers.”

True enough, the Tories have inexcusably cut some 20,000 policemen in England and Wales, bringing their total number down to 121,929 – the lowest for a generation. However, the Nazis managed to police occupied France with only 100,000 men – in spite of the supposedly widespread armed resistance. (Isn’t that why every French village has a Place de la Résistance?)

Much as I admire Miss Abbott’s God-given combination of brains, beauty and integrity, a simple increase in the number of officers isn’t going to do the trick. Neither will a drastic reduction in the number of immigrants achieve this purpose, although it’ll certainly help.

The problem is more complex than that, lending itself to neither simplistic explanations nor simplistic solutions. After all, a propensity to commit crimes is an ontological human condition, which it’ll remain until someone repeals Original Sin.

A healthy society starts out by mournfully acknowledging the sinful nature of man. This sounds fairly straightforward, but it certainly isn’t. Today’s Britain makes much better use of Rousseau’s postulate that man is perfect to begin with and is only ever made imperfect by civilisation.

From this it logically follows that, to put it in the language of defence counsel all around Britain, it’s all society’s fault. A poor chap slashes an old woman’s throat for her pension money because we’ve let him down, probably by giving him insufficient handouts. This collective culpability doesn’t wholly excuse the crime, but it certainly mitigates it.

And even after the first offence, we, society, fail to learn our lesson. That’s why half our prison population are habitual criminals, with an average of 15 convictions to their credit. And most of the rest aren’t really first-time offenders but first-time convicts – big difference.

For example, it takes something like 50 burglaries for the poor victim of society to see the inside of prison. The rest of the crimes are unpunished – and typically even uninvestigated.

Hence I agree with those who suffer cardiac haemorrhage at the sight of criminals going to prison, where paid sports channels aren’t always available. It’s indeed all society’s fault – well, most of it.

But it’s not the criminals who’ve been let down, but society itself. It’s our fault that so many crimes go uninvestigated or unpunished. That prison is seen as an educational facility, rather than a punitive one. That police are being transformed into social workers. That officers are prevented from doing their job by political correctness: PC hamstringing PCs.

And yes, there aren’t enough officers. But we could double their number without having the slightest effect on crime if the police are deprived of the tools of their trade. Or if they have little incentive to pursue criminals, rather than chaps who’ve had one lemonade too many.

Disarm 100,000 soldiers, and 100 chaps armed with machine guns will cut them to ribbons. And even if you don’t disarm the soldiers, they’ll still be routed if they aren’t allowed to use their weapons and are encouraged to doubt the validity or morality of their task.

Defence of the realm against foreign and domestic evildoers isn’t just the first task of any government but almost the only one. That’s what brought the state into existence and continues to legitimise it.

However, our spivocrats prefer to follow the road signposted by Rousseau, which is why they cut investment in both defence and law enforcement. They seem to believe – against every bit of available evidence – that creating a huge underclass dependent on the government for its livelihood will open paths to goodness. Original Sin has been replaced by Original Virtue.

Yet that’s not how society works because it’s not how man is. A culture of getting something for nothing produces a broadly shared disdain for the property, indeed lives, of others. The history of every country where welfarism has been tried on a massive scale proves this convincingly.

Back in the 1890s, at the height of the dog-eat-dog Industrial Revolution, people in the East End of London left their doors unlocked – crime was too rare to bother with locks and bolts. This though the welfare state was still half a century away.

Today, after some 70 years of socialism, Britons and their grateful guests are committing 5.3 million crimes a year, and London comfortably leads New York in every crime category, except murder (the gap is closing fast).

When Jeremy’s gorgeous ex claims that Labour will sort this problem out, anyone endowed with a logical mind must cringe. Socialism manifestly begets crime, so what effect will a party have that promises even more socialism?

Alas, the Tories are still the lesser evil. But make no mistake about it: evil they are.

Before you accuse me of malignant racism, this notion doesn’t come from me. Nor does it come from any member of the Ku Klux Klan, the BNP, Front National or any other such organisation.

The originator of this astonishing idea is Dr Kimani Paul-Emile, law professor at Fordham University and a black woman herself.

Fordham Law Review describes her as a “foremost thinker and writer in the areas of law and inequality, race and the law, law and biomedical ethics, and health law,” who provides “a fresh perspective on racial discrimination.”

From the vertiginous height of such qualifications, Dr Paul-Emile argues that a black is disabled in exactly the same sense as a blind person or one missing a limb or two. Therefore this state of affairs must be legally recognised.

Hence, whenever the slightest whiff of discrimination can be smelled, disability laws can be invoked to protect the chromatically challenged. Moreover, blackness “was designed” as a disability. “Racial categories were created explicitly to serve as a caste system to privilege some and disadvantage others,” she maintains.

This complaint is best addressed to God, methinks. However, Dr Paul-Emile’s arguments are so persuasive, and her style so elegant, that I hope you won’t mind a long quotation: changing her prose would only mean making it sound less poignant. So:

“Rather than focusing on malicious intent, disability law accepts the impact of even neutral actions, policies, and programs, directly confronting the ways in which social structures, institutions, and norms can ‘substantially limit’ a person’s ability to perform ‘a major life activity’.”

My command of legalese isn’t perfect, so correct me if I’m wrong. But what I think this means is that disability laws should cover all blacks with an infinitely wide shroud, with no attention given to the presence of actual discrimination.

Dr Paul-Emile accepts that at present race laws are “relatively effective”, which, however, hasn’t been the case “historically”. Begging your forgiveness again for my being slow on the uptake, does this mean that the effectiveness of race laws should be averaged out over the past 200 years?

Is there some quotient calculated by finding the average between today’s “relatively effective” laws against discrimination and the nonexistent such laws prior to the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation? If so, there’s a definite cause for concern, especially for those who take such idiocy seriously.

Or perhaps I only think this stuff is idiotic because I don’t understand what it means to be black in America. Fortunately, Dr Paul-Emile is on hand to provide an explanation, and again I have to give the full quote – one can’t add anything to perfection, nor subtract anything from it:

“To be Black means facing increased likelihood, relative to Whites, of living in poverty, attending failing schools, experiencing discrimination in housing, being denied a job interview, being stopped by the police, being killed during a routine police encounter, receiving inferior medical care, living in substandard conditions and in dangerous and/or polluted environments, being un- or underemployed, receiving longer prison sentences, and having a lower life expectancy.”

Allow me to see if I’ve got that right. So a black neurosurgeon is more likely to suffer all those awful things than an habitually unemployed white lout. Correct? No?

Then perhaps the issue is class, not race. Having lived for many years in Texas, “historically” not the most racially tolerant part of the US, I never heard the lapidary phrase “there goes the neighbourhood” uttered when a black doctor or lawyer moved in next door.

True, back in the early ‘70s, Mohammed Ali was unable to buy a house in River Oaks, Houston’s most exclusive quarter, even though he was prepared to pay $3,000,000 cash. At the time I thought it was terribly unfair – until I ran into the boxer at the airport.

He was impressive: a tall, handsome man splendidly attired in a three-piece navy blue suit, white shirt and polka-dot tie matching the suit. Strutting regally through the crowd, Ali looked like a man who’d be welcomed at Buck House, never mind River Oaks.

The trouble was that he wasn’t by himself. Following him was a retinue of a dozen men, wearing pimp clothes and gyrating as they walked to the deafening din coming from their ghetto blasters, of which each had his own.

My finances didn’t stretch to River Oaks. If they had, I would have been happy to live next door to Ali. But, knowing that he came packaged with his acolytes, I would have blackballed him too. A sleepy, affluent neighbourhood can’t really accommodate loud, drug-fuelled all-nighters accompanied by what passes for music. And I would have felt the same way if the group had been all-white and led by, say, Rocky Marciano.

But back to my favourite legal scholar. “Understanding Blackness as disabling,” she writes, “brings to the fore a surprising new approach to addressing discrimination and systemic inequality that has been hiding in plain sight: disability law.”

‘Surprising’ is one modifier that comes to mind, but it isn’t the only one. May I suggest cretinous? Deranged? Insane? Fatuous? The list could be quite long. It would certainly include ‘ignorant’, for surely a law professor must know that a raft of racial equality laws already exist in the US, and they even include provisions for affirmative action, otherwise known as reverse discrimination.

And how would black people like to be seen as disabled simply because of their skin colour? If I were black, I’d think that in this context ‘disabled’ is perilously close to racially inferior. Surely the good professor didn’t mean it that way?

But the real question is what a person capable of extruding this gobbledegook  is doing teaching law at a reputable Catholic university. Especially considering that it’s run by Jesuits, an order that has produced such great minds as Luis de Molina and Francisco Suárez.

Is this the best they can do these days? Probably. Modernity is a contagious disease against which no inoculation exists.