Author: Alexander Boot

Merry Christmas to all Christians among my readers, celebrating the day Our Lord was incarnate in the Virgin Mary and came to earth for the propitiation of our sins. You will be saved, definitely.

Merry Christmas also to all cultured non-Christians out there, those who espouse any other religion or none, agnostic or atheist, who don’t believe all that nonsense but do know that the culture they love is Christian. Hence they too have something to celebrate for, even if Our Lord wasn’t born on this day, our culture definitely was. You too will be saved, probably.

Merry Christmas also to all those who don’t believe in Christ or God in general, don’t know much about Christian or any other culture and see Christmas mainly as a retail opportunity. You probably don’t care one way or the other whether or not you’ll be saved, but, what with all the Christmas sales, I’m sure you’ve done enough saving of your own.

Merry Christmas also to those who don’t believe in Christ but hate him anyway, who loathe the culture and civilisation that owe their existence to Christ, and who seek to destroy them as fervently as they have done so consistently for 1,400 years. I only wish you a merry Christmas to see that look on your face, to be honest. And I doubt you’ll be saved, but, lucky for you, it’s not up to me to decide.

And a happy, peaceful new year to all!

The actor has committed the worst sin known to modernity: discrimination. Not against anyone of different race, mental and physical faculties, sex, religion or amorous proclivities – God forbid.

Had he been guilty of that, he’d be dangling off the metaphorical gallows even as we speak. As it is, he’s merely having his wrists beaten to raw meat with a metaphorical ruler. For Mr Damon discriminated between crude flirtation and rape.

Speaking on the current sex abuse hysteria in the time-honoured idiom of his profession, Mr Damon dared to aver that “there are a whole shitload of guys – the preponderance of men I’ve worked with – who don’t do this kind of thing.”

What, not every man is a latent abuser and rapist? Call this nuanced thinking, Matt? I call it a slap in the face of modernity. And modernity can slap back, with interest.

He should have left it at that, but no. Damon pressed on, wearing his nuanced thinking on his sleeve, just above his wrist to be slapped: “I do believe that there’s a spectrum of behaviour, right? And we’re going to have to figure – you know, there’s a difference between, you know, patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation.”

A difference, Matt? Are you discriminating again? Patting the ‘butt’ of an actress whose nude shots and videos adorn thousands of onanistic websites is no different from raping a 9-year-old girl, especially if the perpetrator then marries her?… Sorry, now I’m the one indulging in discrimination, of a worse, religious kind.

It fell upon the actresses Minnie Driver (Matt’s ex) and Alyssa Milano to wield the aforementioned ruler.

Thus Minnie: “Good God, Matt, seriously? You don’t get to be hierarchical with abuse. And you don’t get to tell women that because some guy only showed them their penis their pain isn’t as great as a woman who was raped.”

Let’s see. According to the modern ethos, ventriloquist to Minnie’s dummy, a woman flashed on a bus suffers as much pain as one viciously raped in a dark alley. What if it’s gang rape, Minnie? Accompanied by severe beating? Still no hierarchical discrimination allowed?

Miss Milano added her own contribution to the art of English prose: “Dear Matt Damon, it’s the micro that makes the macro. We are in a ‘culture of outrage’ because the magnitude of rage is, in fact, overtly outrageous. And it is righteous. We are not outraged because someone grabbed our asses in a picture. We are outraged because we were made to feel this was normal. We are outraged because we have been gaslighted. We are outraged because we were silenced for so long.”

I don’t know what ‘gaslighted’ means, but then English is only my second language. For Miss Milano it’s her first, and she uses it with native mastery.

She’s outraged because, according to the culture of outrage, one is supposed to be equally outraged at all outrageous things, regardless of the degree of outrageousness. Therefore having her ‘ass’ outrageously grabbed in a picture (presumably off-screen) is as much of an outrage as the outrage of outrageously raping a 9-year-old girl. Equality rules in outrage, as it does in everything else.

It goes without saying that nothing Minnie or Alyssa does on screen is any cause for outrage whatsoever. If Minnie and Alyssa star in soft-porn scenes, that’s not outrageous at all. (I could provide the links, but won’t: do your own search, you pervert.)

Now ‘asses’ have been fondled, and sex exchanged for roles or credits, since Hollywood came into existence more than a century ago. Anybody who has ever been involved in show business, even as tangentially as my own stint in advertising, knows that there’s hardly a Hollywood actress who hasn’t slept her way to her present status. (‘Hardly’ doesn’t mean they all did it, I hasten to disclaim for fear of lawsuits.)

And everybody in Hollywood has felt “it was normal” until a few months ago. For example, stuck in the middle of a difficult, never-ending shoot on location, Marilyn Monroe famously asked her agent: “Who do I have to f*** to get off this picture?” Doing that to get on rather than off was the norm.

That sort of thing has always been sleazy and sordid, so why have actresses and their bien pensant fans been silent for so long? Why this sudden outburst of outrageously outraged rage?

Simple. It’s the rattling bandwagon of modernity, inviting everyone to jump on. Once the wheels have been set in motion, the modern lot turn into a herd, which is their natural tendency anyway.

They hear the clarion call of modernity in every tonal detail and respond with soldierly obedience. This time the call is accompanied with enticing words: “Now you can! You no longer have to pay PR flacks to do your publicity! You can get it for free – by jumping on that bandwagon! As long as you’re in tune with modernity, you’ll sweep all before you! No one will dare resist!”

The ladies somersaulting on that vehicle don’t even care how ridiculous they sound, even if it’s considerably more so than Minnie and Alyssa, which takes some doing.

One starlet, for example, claimed that Harvey Weinstein raped her against her own coat rack – after which she continued to have consensual sex with him for 10 years. Another said that Dustin Hoffman abused her by public fondling, after which she went up to his room and had sex with him for $20.

Such little incongruities don’t seem to upset anyone. And if yet another psychotic idiocy does bother someone like Matt Damon, off with his head.

It seems like every time a Muslim engages in a bit of mass murder, the media describe him as either alienated or a loner or addicted to drugs or having A history of mental problems.

When mass murder is attempted by driving a large vehicle into a crowd, as it was the other day in Melbourne, no one suggests that the chap was simply a poor driver. That’s still to come.

No one identifies the real motivation either, or, if some intrepid paper does so, it’s always days after the fact. In this case, Australian media did mention in passing, after listing all the requisite mental problems, that the murderer was an Australian citizen, albeit of Afghan descent.

This glosses over the real reason for Islamic terrorism. It’s Islam. No other exists.

That doesn’t mean that a murderer may not also be alienated, on drugs or recently abandoned by his wife. But that’s not why he kills. He kills because he’s a Muslim and, as such, doctrinally committed to killing infidels. Drugs or, Allah forbid, booze, if used at all, are there to make suicide easier. But they don’t cause the homicide.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull so far hasn’t explained to the outraged multitudes that it’s wrong to blame Islam for this road mishap. Why, so far he hasn’t followed the example of his American and British counterparts to declare that Islam is a religion of peace.

He hasn’t even done what his future head of state, Prince Charles, did a few years ago. HRH explained that, though all religions start from different points, they all end up in the same place because at base they’re all the same.

As proof of this uncanny similarity, HRH drew a parallel between Jesus and Mohammed, who both had to flee their native land for fear of religious persecution. He didn’t expand his point further, by stating that Jesus and Mohammed also had the same internal organs and the same number of limbs.

More to the point, HRH didn’t mention that the first thing Mohammed did after moving from Mecca to Medina was behead several hundred Jews, many with his own sabre.

Jesus, if the Gospels are to be believed, never did anything quite so adventurous as that. Nor did he rob caravans, launch bandit raids on neighbours or start wars of conquest.

Jesus taught his flock to love not only friends but even enemies. Mohammed taught Muslims to kill not only their enemies, which is to say all non-Muslims, but even their friends, if the latter were wavering in their faith.

Other than those minor details, yes, Islam is a religion of peace that, though it starts from a different point, converges with Christianity at some point. It manifestly hasn’t quite converged yet, but, given the Royal reassurance, it will someday, soon.

Meanwhile, we all brace ourselves for more terrorist acts, which are, as London’s Muslim mayor suggested rather flippantly, to be expected in a big city. Quite. In a big city with a large Muslim population, but the mayor left that detail out.

Now, the facts show that a) close to 100 per cent of terrorist acts in the West are committed by Muslims, b) the number of terrorist acts, anti-Semitic peccadillos and the amount of violent crime in general are directly proportional to the number of resident Muslims so c) what do you think of a) and b)?

If you’re like US presidents before Trump or British prime ministers after Thatcher or the EU brass or Mrs Merkel, you must think that the only logical answer to the problem is to import even more Muslims, ideally millions of them.

Since millions of Muslims are guaranteed to include tens of thousands of potential mass murderers, that conclusion seems rather counterintuitive. But our leaders function according to a higher logic beyond our ken. Treat like with like, they preach, like having a hair of the dog the morning after the night before.

Except that this particular pick-me-up is bound to induce reflux, nausea and massive internal bleeding. Alas, one has to question the wisdom of our problem solvers at the helm.

To paraphrase Henry II, will anyone rid us of that troublesome Muslim beastliness? No one will, although some fascisoid groups may try, more in word than in deed.

In a recent survey, German Jews were asked which group they’d prefer as the country’s rulers, their home-grown neo-Nazis or the Muslims. After much soul searching they settled on the neo-Nazis. Given that Nazis and Jews have a bit of previous, the choice tells us more than all the claims about the peaceful nature of Islam.

Please join me in the prayer that we won’t have to make a similar choice. If we do, may I suggest a coin toss?

The Pope has much to criticise him for. There are many issues, all springing from his pandering to a secular agenda with a Leftish, which is to say anti-Christian, slant.

His views on the economy, defence, feminism, single world government, homosexuality, euthanasia and so forth could easily serve as planks in the electoral campaign of any socialist party. Hence I sometimes jest that the proper answer to the perennial question “Is the Pope Catholic?” should be “Yes, but…”, followed by the litany of his suspect pronouncements.

Yet criticism should ideally be constructive and definitely fair. Unfortunately, many attacks on the Pope come from people who not so much dislike his views as hate the Catholic Church or, for that matter, Christianity in general.

Now since I object to many of Pope Francis’s views, I’m receptive to similarly minded articles, provided they’re motivated by good will. Yet even I was taken aback by this lead paragraph in an on-line publication:

“Pope Francis was caught attempting to turn his Catholic followers away from Jesus Christ after he warned them that ‘having a personal relationship with Jesus is dangerous and very harmful’.” This “liberal statement”, continues the article, raises “fears that he is, in fact, an illegitimate pope with a sinister agenda.”

The papal statement in fact sounds worse than liberal or even sinister. Since it’s tantamount to telling believers not to pray, it sounds impossible.

No priest could possibly tell that to other Christians. That’s like saying he doesn’t believe in God, and neither should they. Since His Holiness is supposed to have uttered those seditious words to a crowd of 33,000 pilgrims, he must have been off his rocker. Call for the men in white coats.

However, since no one has so far claimed that the Pope is mad, I looked up what he actually said. Sure enough, he did say it’s dangerous to believe one can have “a personal, direct, immediate relationship with Jesus Christ…”

But that wasn’t the end of the statement. It continued: “…without communion with and the mediation of the church.” Suddenly the pronouncement stops being liberal, never mind sinister, and becomes an article of faith in apostolic Christianity.

Rather than turning his followers “away from Jesus Christ”, the Pope decries Protestantism in general and Evangelism in particular, which he obviously and correctly identifies as heretical and therefore divisive and therefore ruinous for Christianity.

But of course subversive types, religious, political or scholarly, always master the art of elliptical quoting. Yet an ellipsis may not only distort the meaning but indeed reverse it.

For example, back in the eighties the US charity United Negro College Fund advertised under the slogan “Because a mind is a terrible thing to waste”. Now abbreviate this slogan to “Because a mind is a terrible thing…” and the well-meaning charity can be accused of rank racism. Such macabre rhetorical tricks are favoured by both Lefties and, as in this case, Evangelicals.

Nailing his 95 Theses to the cathedral door, Luther declared that “every man is his own priest”. That pushed the button on the delayed-action bomb of atheism. And the bomb’s time setting was considerably shortened by Calvin’s Reformation within the Reformation.

For, when a man believes he can be his own priest, his grandson will believe he can be his own God. Eliminating the church, the Body of Christ, as the teacher and mediator means disembodying and thereby marginalising Christ. It’s also an invitation to hubris, the worst kind of pride and the deadliest of the deadly sins.

For Christian doctrine is an extremely complex body of thought, which is why it has taken history’s best minds many centuries to develop. The Evangelical notion, however, is that anyone can glean every doctrinal intricacy straight from the Bible, provided he’s guided by the Holy Spirit. Well, if that’s the case, the Holy Spirit has a superhuman knack at refuting itself.

After all, there are at least 40,000 different Protestant, mainly Evangelical, denominations, each claiming to have been guided by the Holy Spirit to widely diverse, often mutually exclusive, beliefs.

Since they all claim to worship the Bible, they should remind themselves of Mark 3:25: “And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand”. The house of Christianity certainly hasn’t stood, at least in the West. In fact, the West today is the only atheist civilisation ever – which is to say it’s no civilisation at all.

For no civilisation can be formed solely by pursuing materialist desiderata. And conversely, a single-minded pursuit of such desiderata has demonstrated its potential for destroying any civilisation, no matter how great.

A system of belief lies at the beginning of any civilisation, but it’s not the end of it. For faith spins out a cocoon of many sub-systems, moral, social and intellectual.

By atomising Christianity into thousands of sects, most if not all downright heretical, the Reformation set the scene for that great misnomer, the Enlightenment, which in due course produced every modern perversion (including those so ill-advisedly advocated by His Holiness).

Encouraged to work out for themselves the intricacies of Christian worship, people began to think they can also grasp every complexity of quotidian life, no outside help necessary, thank you very much.

Moreover, not only can they arrive at an infallible judgement in such matters by themselves, but they have every right to have their opinion heard and acted upon. The Holy Spirit tells them they’re all equal, so who’s to say their judgement on anything is at fault?

This massively encouraged solipsism has produced a moral and intellectual catastrophe, and we’re all reeling from its effects. At the heart of the catastrophe lies relativism: if truth is sub-divided ad infinitum, it’s hard to accept that absolute truth exists at all.

People used to know that, if X is true, and Y contradicts X, then Y is false. The solipsism initiated by the two reformations has produced the current belief that, if X is true, then all the other letters of the alphabet are differently true.

You can see the results of this thinking in everything, from politics to the economy, from art to science. People no longer seem to pursue the truth – they’re after gaining a short-term jump on the competition, with both sides losing in the end.

I don’t know whether or not the Pope thinks in such categories. I rather doubt it: he seems to be weak at applying orthodox Christian tenets to everyday life. But he does preach such tenets more often than not – and the statement so crassly bowdlerised is one such instance.

Don’t you find it appalling? On 20 December, a supposedly civilised country is celebrating the anniversary of one of history’s most diabolical organisations.

By allowing the festivities to go ahead, Mrs Merkel’s government endorses the murder of 6,000,000 Jews, 2,000,000 Russian POWs, 500,000 Gypsies, thousands of Polish and Russian civilians – it endorses Auschwitz and Treblinka, gas chambers, torture, eugenics, experiments on humans.

The German government not only refuses to repudiate its Satanic past, but it positively glorifies it. In that connection, one is tempted to remember Mrs Merkel’s personal links with the SS…

Got you going for a while, didn’t I? Actually, Mrs Merkel was born nine years after the SS was declared a criminal organisation in Germany, with tens of thousands of its members prosecuted. And in any case, the SS was founded on 4 April, not 20 December.

Say what you will about Mrs Merkel’s government, but it doesn’t treat that day as a national holiday. In fact, anyone who dares celebrate the SS publicly may well have his collar felt.

But 20 December, 2017, is the centenary of another organisation, one much more murderous than the SS, one that annihilated 60,000,000 people in its own country and untold millions abroad, one that turned half the globe into a giant concentration camp. However, unlike the SS, that organisation hasn’t been declared criminal.

On the contrary, its anniversary is widely celebrated all over the country, and no wonder. The country’s president, 87 per cent of his government and the entire hierarchy of the national church are officers or agents of that organisation.

This Satanic anniversary appears in the country’s calendars as Chekist Day. ‘Chekist’ means a member of the CheKa, the Russian acronym for the secret police that was setup by Felix Dzerjinsky on Lenin’s orders.

According to Lenin, the CheKa was “the essence of Bolshevism”. “Every Bolshevik is a Chekist,” declared the syphilitic ghoul, whose mummy still adorns Red Square.

His claim was too narrow. Now, a century later, one can safely say that every Russian accepting Putin’s rule is a Chekist – some by direct association, more as indirect collaborators, most as unwitting accomplices.

Over the past century, Chekism has always been the essence of Russia de facto. But with the advent of the giant disinformation op called ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika’, it achieved that status de jure.

For what happened in 1989-1991 wasn’t the end of history, as was claimed by a particularly cretinous US neocon. It wasn’t even the triumph of liberal democracy, as was – and amazingly still is – claimed by just about everyone else.

It was a transfer of power from the Party to the KGB, with two KGB stooges in the Party, Gorbachev and Yeltsyn, kept on for a while as window dressing. (I usually refrain from ‘I told you so’ boasts, but in my case this isn’t hindsight. As anyone who can dig up my Salisbury Review articles from that time will know, I was writing exactly the same things then.)

That power shift was on the cards. For the CheKa was always a state within the state, and it always fought the Party, and to some extent the army, for the privilege of being the state.

The CheKa struck the first blow in 1937-1938, when it succeeded in wiping out Lenin’s party almost to a man, and also much of the army high command. Beria rose to power then and, after Stalin’s death, he effectively became his successor.

It took the combined efforts of the Party and army to overthrow Beria and take their revenge on the CheKa. The organisation was purged, Beria killed and few of his appointees stayed alive or at large.

The CheKa had to regroup, work behind the scenes and wait for an opening. It finally came in 1982, when the KGB head Yuri Andropov became Secretary General of the Party and virtual dictator.

It was Andropov who, using the blueprint first drawn by Beria, set up the ‘glasnost and perestroika’ op, designed to present a softer image to the West the better to defeat it. And it was Andropov who hand-picked Gorbachev as his successor and the best man to carry the op out. The KGB took over, destroyed the Party and now controls the country.

It’s interesting to look at the name changes this organisation has gone through in its lifetime.

What started as the VCheKa in 1917, became the GPU and OGPU (1922-1934), then the NKVD (1934-1941), then the NKGB for six months, then again the NKVD (1941-1943), then NKGB/MGB (1943-53), MVD (1953-1954) – and only then KGB, which in 1995 acquired its current name of FSB/SVR.

These aren’t just semantics: each change reflected political points scored or lost.

The NKGB/MGB, for example, was broken off from the NKVD to remove Beria from his power base. After Stalin’s death in March 1953, Beria succeeded in reclaiming the security police for his own MVD (Interior Ministry), thus becoming the most powerful figure of the interregnum. After Beria was murdered in June, 1953, the MVD lost the secret police arm because Khrushchev sought to bring it under his own control. Hence, the organisation was downgraded from a ministry to a committee (the K in the KGB).

The people, in their tens of millions, were collateral damage in that struggle for supremacy. It was their blood that fertilised the soil on which grew the most diabolical regime in history.

Lenin, whom H.G. Wells called ‘the dreamer in the Kremlin’, declared that he didn’t care if 90 per cent of the Russians perished – as long as the remaining 10 per cent lived under communism. The CheKa in its various guises has done its level best to fulfil the first part of the prophesy, by murdering millions, enslaving the rest – and outscoring the SS even in murders per year, never mind in absolute numbers.

Any halfway civilised country would go down on its knees, repent, beg forgiveness – and punish the surviving murderers. None of this has happened in Russia. Not a single KGB criminal has been punished; not a single crime repented.

The statue of the mass murderer Dzerjinsky, first removed from Lubianka Square, is about to be re-erected. Col. Putin is proud of his KGB career (“There’s no such thing as ex-KGB,” he once said. “This is for life.”) and is governing the country in the best tradition of his alma mater.

No doubt he’ll deliver a celebratory address today, as he has always done on this glorious anniversary. He’ll be celebrating artificial famines and concomitant cannibalism; Solovki and Kolyma; mass shootings and deportations; genocide and democide – evil at its purest.

Now replace Russia with Germany, CheKa with the SS, Putin with Merkel and imagine how you’d react if SS Day were celebrated in the same manner.

I hope our useful idiots, heirs to Wells, Shaw, the Webbs and other agents of influence, are proud of themselves – and Putin’s Russia, which they see as a shining example for us all to follow.

But forgive me for not raising my glass together with theirs. If I did, it would be only to splash the contents into their stupid faces.

The late Yevgeny Yevtushenko once wrote that “in Russia a poet is more than a poet”. A Western reader would struggle to understand what he meant, but to a Russian that sounded like a truism.

With other media stifled to various degrees throughout the country’s history, it often fell upon poets to expand their remit, venturing into areas of political criticism. By itself that isn’t unique to Russia, but only there has poetry served as the main, at times only, medium for such self-expression.

When Bolshevism arrived 100 years ago, the state began killing poets, including such great ones as Gumilev and Mandelstam. But in tsarist Russia, poets could just about get away with writing things that would get, say, a philosopher in deep trouble.

If the first great Russian poet, Pushkin (d. 1837), would only get a slap on the wrists for writing savage criticism, his friend, the first Russian philosopher Pyotr Chaadayev, was declared mad and consigned to house arrest for his essay Lettres philosophiques.

Many Soviet poets, such as Yevtushenko himself, tried to play both ends against the middle. They’d first write mildly critical verse – only to redeem themselves later by producing nauseating rhymed propaganda.

Yet such duality didn’t start with the Soviets. Even under the tsars, weak-kneed liberals by comparison, poets often displayed almost schizophrenic dichotomies. Thus Pushkin and Lermontov (d. 1841) combined Russian chauvinism with what today would be called Russophobia.

Pushkin, for example, was capable of writing Stances, a fawning panegyric to the tsar, yet also verses saying: “Autocratic villain, you and your throne I loathe; with cruel joy, your demise, the death of your children I foresee.” And in Lermontov’s work the flag-waving patriotism of the poem Borodino happily coexisted with describing his country as an “unwashed Russia, a land of masters, land of slaves.”

Hence Russian poets have always been Russia herself, as refracted through the prism of poetic sensibility. Most have been conformists, few dissidents, many a bit of both. But whatever they were, an attentive reader could use them as a reliable guide to their contemporaneous Russia.

Some poets indeed become more than just poets; some become much less; and some start out as the former and end up as the latter. This brings us to perhaps the most prominent poetic shill for Putin’s kleptofascism, Yunna Moritz.

Back in the old days, she was mostly known for writing good children’s poetry, which was a relatively safe haven. Moritz was also an equally talented translator of verse, which traditionally was a good money spinner even for great poets like Pasternak, who were unable to publish much of their original work.

That way Moritz was spared both penury and the ignominy of being known as a KGB hack. Come Putin’s Russia, however, and the nice Yunna performed an about-face.

To stay attuned to the times, she began pandering to the xenophobic nationalism peddled by the government. And xenophobia inevitably gravitates towards anti-Semitism, even if it wasn’t that way originally.

This state of affairs is at its most virulent in Russia, but it isn’t unique to her. My own, admittedly cursory, familiarity with extreme nationalists in Britain and France suggests an interesting paradox: they hate Muslims but, because most of them also hate Jews, they tend to side with organisations like Hamas in their conflict with Israel.

Having contracted the syphilis of xenophobia, Moritz, with her unerring poetic sense, detected its inner logic of veering towards anti-Semitism. Acting on that understanding must have been difficult because she herself is Jewish.

Yet her concept of civic virtue proved stronger than any personal considerations and, to quote one of her critics, Moritz became blacker than the Black Hundreds. In one of her poems she even enriched the Russian language by coining a useful portmanteau word zlovreistvo, combining the words zlo (evil) and yevreistvo (Jewery).

This is the kind of lexical innovation that was favoured in the past by Julius Streicher, the editor of Der Stürmer who went to his death at Nuremberg screaming Heil Hitler! I don’t know what Moritz’s last words will be, but for the time being she blames zlovreistvo for whipping up global Russophobia, the term Putin’s propaganda uses to describe any objections to Russia’s behaviour.

This is commendably more precise than the usual thrust of such propaganda, where the bogeymen are identified more generally as the US or the West. This poetic preference for the specific rather than general has helped Moritz to pinpoint the latest manifestation of malignant Russophobia: banning Russia from the 2018 Olympics.

The reason for the ban is the state-sponsored doping programme, turning Russian athletes into walking advertisements for various pharmaceutical companies. (The programme was supervised by former Deputy PM and Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko, one of the functionaries personally sanctioned in the West. He’ll be presiding over this summer’s World Cup held in Russia, proving that, in terms of corruption, FIFA can compete with the Russians on equal terms.)

But to the Russian propaganda media, which is to say the Russian media, doping was only a pretext. The real reason was that same congenital Western  Russophobia.

Russian propaganda tends to seek poetic mouthpieces, and Moritz is happy to oblige. Though I can’t translate her response to the Olympic debacle in verse, you’ll get the idea from the word-for-word translation.

“The concentration camp of world sport// They’re making soap of the Russians// This is a sort of Auschwitz// The camp guard is drunk on happiness…//

“Time to stop playing lickspittle// Time to kill the guards// This is a figure of speech for the choice: to be? not to be?”

“How to kill the guards?// With lawsuits in courts?// By pouring money from different taps to camp guards?

“Can’t you punch them in the snout?// Instead of shilly-shallying?// They’re making soap of Russians// Making lampshades.

“This is a figure of speech?// These are bare facts!// Time to stop playing lickspittle// To this Russophobic ghetto!…

“With a poet’s eyes// I see the Auschwitz of sport,// This is a figure of speech// For a different sort of fascism!”

You may think this is just a deranged rant of a crazed old woman, but it isn’t. This is, in both substance and tone, an accurate representation of Putin’s propaganda. That’s why Moritz’s harangues are published in mainstream newspapers and magazines – she’s an idol of Putin’s fans in Russia.

This ought to give Putin’s fans in Britain some food for thought. Always assuming against all evidence that they’re capable of such exertions.

“How can Margaret Court say she spreads love when she is stoking so much division, dismay and anger?” writes Oliver Holt, vindicating yet again my heart-felt conviction that sports hacks should never venture outside their bailiwick.

Mrs Court began to do those heinous things after she ended her tennis career, during which she won 24 Grand Slam titles. That makes her one of the most successful athletes in any sport, and Mr Holt generously acknowledges her accomplishments.

But then Mrs Court committed a blatant double fault: she became a Christian pastor and publicly opposed homomarriage. In spite of her opposition, that abomination was recently legalised in Australia by a two to one margin, showing that her seditious scheme had failed.

But Mrs Court did try, and that attempt alone sufficed to draw the ire of Mr Holt and her fellow tennis players. (I apologise for using the gender-specific term ‘fellow’, but replacing it with ‘person’ just wouldn’t work in this sentence.)

Thus Martina Navratilova issued a stern rebuke: “Margaret,” she said, “you have gone too far. Shame on you.”

Now Martina, wearing a mannish suit, proposed marriage to her girlfriend on bended knee in a crowded restaurant. I’m not asking you to comment on that display, but it’s worth pondering a world in which that sort of thing is normal whereas disapproval of it is shameful and going too far.

I don’t know how Mrs Court answered Mr Holt’s question above, which he clearly considers rhetorical. I only know how I would have answered it.

Mr Holt probably holds the majority view that Jesus never existed or, if he did, he was neither God nor his son, but rather an itinerant preacher trying to incite a rebellion. However, every account of Christ’s ministry shows that he a) ‘spread love’ and b) ‘stoked much division, dismay and anger’, enough to get himself crucified.

Thereby he proved that combining a) and b) is not only possible but indeed likely. Further proof was provided by his disciples who also preached love and yet stoked so much anger that they were killed. And let’s not forget those missionaries in Africa, used for protein intake by the same people to whom they preached love.

Hence the question posed by Mr Holt isn’t so much rhetorical as irredeemably idiotic, which I’d point out to him in so many words, especially if the conversation took place over a drink or two. But he didn’t stop there.

Mr Holt then proved that pursuing non sequiturs is a fine art with no limits to perfection. “If God is love,” he wrote to Mrs Court, “why can you not find it in your heart to accept gay couples who are in loving partnerships?”

If God is love, how can anyone dislike Marmite? If God is love, why doesn’t everyone like rap? If God is love, why do we hate mass murder? You see, Ollie, I can do non sequiturs too.

It takes advanced stages of cretinism to insist, as Mr Holt does implicitly, that Christian love incorporates every expression of profane love, such as, say bestiality, S&M, coprophilia or indeed homosexuality.

I’m not saying it doesn’t, God and the Equality Commission forbid. I’m only pointing out that Mr Holt errs against the simple logic first communicated to me by my uncle when I was eight or so. “If Grandma had balls,” he said in response to my non-sequitur question starting with ‘if’, “she would be Grandpa.”

Mr Holt can’t seem to get his head around the fact that Mrs Court is a Christian, and a pastor to boot. That means she lives her life by the book both parts of which describe homosexuality as an ‘abomination’.

I realise that the book is hopelessly outdated, out of tune with our progressive times. But since it hasn’t yet been outlawed, Mrs Court is entitled to accept it at face value. Moreover, I know many people who don’t accept the Bible at face value and still regard homosexuality as a perversion.

And even many of those who don’t express themselves quite so robustly still think that legalising homomarriage was indeed going too far, to use Miss Navratilova’s vocabulary. (Calling her ‘Miss’ is yet another faux pas, and I’m painfully aware of that. However, I refuse to use the title ‘Ms’ out of sheer bloody-mindedness, and, even though she went down on her knee in the best traditions of male chivalry, she’s not biologically a Mr.)

Dusting off the old logical tools, which Mr Holt doesn’t seem to have in his box, at what point does God’s love stop short of endorsing marriage? Are there any kinds of love that may be tolerated and yet not given contractual legitimacy?

For example, the Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld married his Siamese cat Choupette. I don’t know if the union was consummated or, if so, how. From what one hears, the only way to escape scratching is to stuff the kitty-cat into a high boot head down, but, one way or another, would Mr Holt regard this as a proper expression of Christian love?

None of this should distract us from acknowledging that Margaret Court has committed a crime worse than murder. A murderer attacks only his immediate victim; Mrs Court challenges the whole modern ethos – and, to aggravate matters, refuses to show appropriate remorse.

“I give my beliefs,” she says. “I believe in freedom of speech but you get very persecuted because of what you say.” And prosecuted too, before too long, if not already.

Freedom of speech, indeed. What world is she living in? A free one? Mrs Court ought to have her head examined – and possibly chopped off.

‘Political’ is the operative word, for other types, or shall we say facets, of conservatism, such as cultural and social, are more or less self-explanatory.

It’s indeed political conservatism that has suffered the greatest attrition in modernity’s concerted effort to replace the real meanings of words with whatever modern barbarians wish to read into them.

The other day I came across a 1992 article A Strategy for the Right by Murray Rothbard, the guiding light of American libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism. The article is a curate’s egg, good in parts.

The good part is Rothbard’s economics, based as it is on the ideas of the Austrian School, mainly Ludwig von Mises. These feature a nostril-pinching disgust for big government, with its tyrannical tendency to play an active role in the production and distribution of wealth.

The Austrians and Rothbard would happily sign their names to Burke’s maxim: “The moment that government appears at market, all the principles of market will be subverted.” So they will be, and empirical proof is all around us.

Mises and Rothbard were also contemptuous of ‘scientific economists’, with their models, graphs and econometrics. To Mises, economics isn’t an experimental science like physics, but rather an a priori system of thought based on understanding human nature and how it manifests itself in economic behaviour.

Those parts of the Austrians are close to my heart; some others aren’t. Such as their giving the economy a starring role in the drama of life; indeed effectively turning the drama into a one-actor play. Take care of free markets and everything else will take care of itself is an anti-socialist notion I find almost as destructive as socialism.

Anti-socialism is largely socialism with the minus sign. Though reaching different conclusions, they both proceed from the primacy of economics. Hence, starting from different ends, they both arrive at soulless, materialist utilitarianism.

Mises’s deductive method is sound, while Marx’s pseudo-induction is lame, especially since it proceeds from widely falsified facts. Yet I’d describe them both as totalitarian economists – economics is the hub around which their view of life revolves.

This is where both Mises and Rothbard diverge from conservatives, with whom they converge on the refutation of the big state. Conservatives happily accept the primacy of free markets in the economy – but they reject the primacy of the economy in society.

Economic freedom isn’t really freedom but liberty, a lexical distinction that doesn’t exist in most other languages. For liberty to play its proper role in life it has to derive from the ultimate freedom, the free will given man in the Garden of Eden.

Libertarian economics, like any other system of thought, must proceed from the philosophical foundations on which our civilisation was built. If it doesn’t, it’ll fail even on its own terms, and its failure could be indistinguishable from the ‘success’ of its socialist antipode.

Using economics as the starting point, it’s impossible to arrive at conservatism. However, a proper understanding of our religious and philosophical roots easily leads even to economic and political rectitude.

For example, devolving power to the lowest sensible level, and therefore rejecting the omnipotent central state, naturally flows from the church idea of subsidiarity – while the notion of preserving some safety nets is rooted in the church notion of solidarity.

Rothbard doesn’t really understand conservatism. If he did, he wouldn’t have written that the word “connotes conserving the status quo”.

Looking at his contemporaneous America (the article doesn’t contain any references to other countries, which is typical of many American thinkers), he’s justifiably dissatisfied with the status quo. Hence he calls for destroying it, and there he won’t find dissent in these quarters.

The trouble is that the status quo he’s talking about is certainly not one that conservatives wish to conserve. A Western conservative strives to conserve not the outer trappings of life but the religious, philosophical, moral, cultural and political essence of Western civilisation.

The aspiration to preserve our civilisation not only doesn’t preclude but positively demands making adjustments, sometimes radical ones, along the way. A conservative will exercise prudence in advocating change, but he won’t forswear it. For tactical flexibility is essential to executing a sound strategy.

To quote Burke again, “A state without the means of some change, is without the means of its own conservation.” Replace ‘a state’ with ‘Western civilisation’, and that aphorism debunks Rothbard’s facile remark.

One can sympathise with him, for, when it comes to understanding political conservatism, Rothbard suffers from the handicap of being a patriot of a state constituted on Enlightenment, and therefore anti-conservative, principles.

If the classic triad of God, king and country adequately defines British conservatism, it’s hard for an American to pass the litmus test of political conservatism encapsulated in the question “So what is it about our political system that we wish to conserve?”.

The French have the same problem and for the same reason: both countries, America more or less from birth and France in its present form, came to life as revolutionary republics denying the very essence of conservatism. Hence both are at odds with the real desideratum of conservative politics: preserving the traditional order of Christendom, as applied to our time.

An American thinker would probably answer the lapidary question above by the shibboleth ‘the Constitution of the United States’. But, commendable though that document is in many respects, conservative it isn’t – even though of necessity the Constitution has had to act as the tight boot into which conservatively inclined Americans have had to shoehorn their political instincts.

That’s why, as Rothbard correctly remarks, the word ‘conservatism’ only became common currency in America after the 1953 publication of the book The Conservative Mind by the eminent Burkean Russell Kirk. That excellent book was a noble attempt to find a conservative Anglo-American form to accommodate the amorphous American Right.

But the attempt failed, as it was bound to: the term ‘Anglo-American conservatism’ is an oxymoron, for reasons I’ve outlined. Before long, the Right disintegrated into all sorts of splinters, including libertarianism, anarcho-capitalism, Randian objectivism, fascisoid extremism – and neoconservatism, which relates to conservatism the way Neolithic relates to lithium.

Characteristically, Rothbard was a great admirer of Ayn Rand and her awful book Atlas Shrugged, which he regarded as the greatest book of all time. Rand was the archangel of crude materialism, a nexus at which all strands of modernity, including libertarianism, converged.

Rothbard wasn’t repelled by Rand’s strident tone or the way in which she fused the values of cutthroat capitalism with fascistic aesthetics. At the centre of her musings stood the economically virile superman, towering over a godless world made in his image.

This was couched in the literary equivalent of Nazi and Soviet art depicting, respectively, a muscle-bound chap raising high the swastika or a muscle-bound chap raising high the hammer and sickle. Replace those attributes with a wrench and a balance sheet, keeping every other detail intact, and Rand’s clumsily painted picture will be complete.

It’s fashionable these days, among for example Trump’s admirers, to ignore the significance of tone, style and aesthetics. Yet these are essential to understanding conservatism.

Though conservatism may be a philosophy, it’s not an ideology. The difference is critical: philosophy seeks truth, and therefore good; an ideology ignores truth if it gets in the way of vindicating evil.

But how does one become a conservative? One certainly doesn’t don a ready-to-wear philosophical garment, the first one off the rack.

People are drawn to political philosophies that suit their personality, temperament and general outlook on life. If the style was the man to Buffon, the style is also the conservative man.

Thus a conservative may or may not wear three-piece pinstripes, but he certainly won’t wear camouflage trousers. He may or may not patronise classical recitals and picture galleries, but he certainly won’t patronise pop concerts and tattoo parlours. He may or may not have a well-defined philosophy, but if he does, he won’t express it in a shrill and strident tone.

That’s why, though I detest socialism, I’d prefer the company of a civilised socialist to that of a chap who wants to have all socialists hanged. This is an aesthetic consideration, but not only that. I simply fear that, having hanged all socialists, the same chap may then hang me.

That’s why I don’t share the view of pas d’ennemis à droite, echoing the French revolutionary slogan of pas d’ennemis à gauche. But Rothbard clearly sees nothing wrong with extremist American groups like the John Birch Society, provided they aren’t anti-Semitic.

A British conservative, on the other hand, will find groups like Britain First aesthetically, and therefore philosophically, incompatible with his view of life – even though he may agree with some of their desiderata.

If true political conservatism is difficult, not to say impossible, in the US, British conservatism does exist. It may be moribund, but at least British conservatives can draw interest on the sound political capital built in the past.

Conservatism is the only political force that can stop or, more realistically, slow down the juggernaut of modernity – it’s the only force that can oppose modern perversions from the base of sound philosophy. All other movements of the Right have too much in common with modernity to confront it effectively.

That’s why a brilliant man like Rothbard is as confused as a silly brute like Paul Golding of Britain First. Both cast the political Right adrift by cutting the ropes tying it to the philosophical and therefore political tradition of Christendom.

With that ship consequently lost at sea, no individual brilliance, much less stridency, can navigate a route to a safe haven.

Yet again Parliament voted to have a vote on Brexit. Yet again we’re treated to an obvious ruse to kill Brexit by a thousand delays.

Parliament, its spokesmen say, voted to have not just any old future vote, but a ‘meaningful’ one. The meaning the next vote will be full of is all about turning Mrs May into a lame duck PM, and her whole negotiation team into dummies to Remainer ventriloquists.

While sabotaging Brexit is a likely result of this ploy, putting a Trotskyist government in power is almost a certain one. Nothing like PM Jeremy to make us miss the EU – should we ever leave it.

This debacle mirrors the one across the Atlantic. Both Trump’s presidency and Brexit represent a mass rebellion against the entrenched apparat. In both countries, the apparat has closed ranks, putting aside any party squabbles.

A specific battleground chosen for the clash doesn’t matter. In the US, anything Trump says or does, irrespective of merit, draws the amount of vitriol I’ve never witnessed in a rather long lifetime. In Britain, Mrs May, herself an apparatchik, gets some abuse too, but she’s merely collateral damage. The real target is Brexit.

The Brexit referendum represented the first strategic defeat for the apparat. Yet, having lost, the apparat didn’t accept defeat gracefully. Instead it chose gamesmanship over sportsmanship.

I pride myself on finding a precise term to describe the resulting mess: European leave.

Unlike what we call French leave and the French call English leave (filer à l’anglaise), ‘European leave’ doesn’t mean leaving without saying good-bye. It means saying good-bye without leaving.

Britain said good-bye to the EU in March, by officially triggering Article 50 to the Lisbon Treaty. Now, following a human gestation period of nine months, we still haven’t left. Moreover, No Exit signs are flashing through the fog surrounding the issue.

The fog is thick and getting thicker by the minute. It’s made up of such words as ‘soft’, ‘hard’, ‘deal’, ‘negotiations’, ‘divorce’, ‘bill’, ‘citizens’ rights’ and so forth.

These words aren’t necessarily nebulous in any context, but they definitely are in this one. Not only do they obfuscate the issue, but they’re specifically designed for this purpose. They’re also designed to inflict humiliating punishment on every British subject who dared vote the wrong way and, by extension, on Britain.

Our inept government, in cahoots with their EU counterparts, has elevated mendacity to a height never before seen in British politics. Our ministers pretend that they actually want to leave, that the EU is our friend who genuinely wishes to make the parting of ways painless, and that real negotiations are taking place.

What is in fact taking place is an elaborate charade designed to keep Britain in the EU de facto – and probably de jure as well. Meanwhile HMG is acting like a schoolboy submitting to corporal punishment and manfully pretending it doesn’t hurt.

One mendacious pretence is that the issue is so devilishly complicated that it doesn’t lend itself to a simple solution. And so it is – but only because it’s enveloped in a deliberately laid smokescreen.

Let’s clear it away and look at actual, as opposed to virtual, reality.

1) Membership in the EU compromises British sovereignty. Traditionally, Britain has resisted similar encroachments with all she had. No foreign power representing such a threat has ever been regarded as a friend.

2) Since the EU threatens our sovereignty by peaceful means, it’s possible to resolve the issue without resorting to force. However, no matter how civilly talks are conducted, they should proceed from the premise that we’re indeed talking to a hostile power wishing to take from us something we desire to keep.

3) Since the sole purpose of the EU is political, the political aspect of Brexit should supersede all others. The EU wants to create a single European state; Britain wants no part in it.

Therefore, HMG is duty-bound to leave the EU, effective immediately. Because this issue isn’t negotiable, there’s nothing to negotiate – and nothing to delay the outcome.

4) Only when the separation has become final can we begin to negotiate other things, such as the economic relationship between the two parties. Since the political aspect is in no way contingent on any other, such negotiations should be guided by normal practices involving two sovereign powers.

5) Trade negotiations can only proceed from considerations of mutual benefit. Any attempt by one side to use economic tools to blackmail or punish the other should put an immediate stop to the talks.

6) A side allowing such underhanded tricks to go on or, worse still, pretending that the other side isn’t playing them, is bolstering the other side’s interests and hurting its own. By doing just that, the British government is in effect colluding with the EU to act against Britain’s interests. Such behaviour might in some quarters be described as treasonous.

7) Complying with the EU’s extortionist demand to pay at least £39 billion as a precondition for even considering what’s mendaciously called a trade deal proves that no bona fide negotiations between two equals are taking place.

Britain isn’t legally obligated to pay anything – Brexit is a dissolution of a political entity, not a marital divorce with one party paying alimony to the other. Nor am I aware of any moral obligations to pay a penny, but, if they do exist, Britain may, as a gesture of good will, offer a one-time payment of a billion or two – not the ridiculous amounts being extorted.

As to the trade deal, meaning access to the single European market, Britain should pay for the privilege exactly what the EU’s other major trading partners are paying: nothing. If the USA and China don’t have to pay billions for doing business with EU members, neither should Britain.

Britain doesn’t actually need any ‘deal’. If the EU proves obstreperous, we may simply conduct our European trade by WTO rules. The EU is a protectionist bloc, but there are internationally accepted rules limiting its protectionism. Should it go against them, it’s the EU and not Britain that’ll become the pariah state.

8) Doing business in foreign countries means complying with their laws. However, it doesn’t mean allowing their laws to extend to our internal affairs. No European court can have jurisdiction over those.

Hence, rather than obeying EU laws or incorporating them into our own, we must declare them null and void – while reminding ourselves that, in my parents’ generation, most of Europe was governed by Nuremberg laws or their local equivalents.

9) Having an open border with one EU member means having one with them all. An open border with Ireland therefore defeats two major objectives of Brexit: regaining control over immigration and leaving the single market.

As a minimum, there should be controls over the goods entering the UK and the migration of non-Irish nationals. In any case, Anglo-Irish relations have a long history, predating not only the EU but indeed the Holy Roman Empire. Making Brexit contingent on the resolution of any possible problems is an underhanded scam and nothing else.

There, I hope this simplifies the issue. Glad to be of service, Mrs May.

Donald Trump doesn’t fit the profile of my normal dinner guest. He isn’t a man of culture, taste, refinement or social graces, and he tops business suits with baseball caps, all of which make him, well, infra dig.

That works out just fine because I’m unlikely to find myself in a position where I could extend a dinner invitation to the president. And even if I did, he wouldn’t accept it: I definitely don’t fit the profile of his dinner host either.

Yet, much as I find Trump utterly unsympathetic personally, there are things about him as a politician that I like quite a lot.

First, he drives up the wall exactly the kind of people I like to see driven up the wall. Lefties of all hues, both American and European, turn a most satisfying puce colour at the very mention of his name, thereby giving one a most un-Christian hope that they’ll suffer debilitating strokes.

Even better, Trump makes neocons, both American and British, sputter venom and go into hysterical fits. Now I regard neoconservatism as the most objectionable of the mainstream political trends. This is how I describe it in my book Democracy as a Neocon Trick:

“Neoconservatism is an eerie mishmash of Trotskyist temperament, infantile bellicosity, American chauvinism (not exclusively on the part of Americans), expansionism masked by pseudo-messianic verbiage on exporting democracy to every tribal society on earth, Keynesian economics, Fabian socialism, welfarism and statism run riot – all mixed together with a spoonful of vaguely conservative phrases purloined from the rightful owners to trick the neocons’ way to broader electoral support.”

Hence anyone who makes neocons roll on the floor frothing at the mouth can’t be all bad, and Trump qualifies in spades. Neocons are apparatchiks to a man, and Trump doesn’t even bother to conceal his contempt for the apparat, which is a definite feather in his baseball cap.

Such general, mostly aesthetic, considerations apart, I like Trump’s policies, some unequivocally, some with minor reservations. I also can’t help noticing that there’s next to no divergence between his policies and his campaign promises, which makes Trump unique among modern politicians.

In just 11 months he has put forth several excellent policies, which is several more than, in round numbers, the zero that Obama managed in eight years.

The president is pulling America out of the Paris Agreement, which shows that, unlike the groups I’ve mentioned, he doesn’t accept on faith the hoax of anthropogenic global warming. He may be aware that this is the only discovery in the history of science made not by scientists but by the UN.

Speaking of the UN, Trump has a discernible distaste for all international organisations. Unlike him, I wouldn’t include Nato in the list of useless setups, but at least his heart is in the right place. The UN in particular has done no good I can recall, but much harm – and its fanatical shilling for the phantom of global warming is a good example.

In that spirit, the president has pulled the US out of UNESCO, which recognises the Palestinian territories as an independent member state. US laws explicitly prohibit American financing for any such organisations, and these are the laws that Obama ignored, but Trump upholds.

Trump is trying to limit Muslim immigration, setting a good example that our own spivs are unlikely to follow. He clearly doesn’t share Prince Charles’s belief that all religions are equal, which in practice means equally marginal. One wishes Trump didn’t retweet British fascisoid websites, but no one has ever accused him, nor indeed many other Americans, of excessive sensitivity to the subtleties of European politics.

He also tries to limit illegal immigration, mainly across the Mexican border. I’m not sure about building an American version of the Great Wall of China, but the underlying idea is sound.

A state that has no control of its borders, nor any power to decide who is and who isn’t welcome, relinquishes a great part of its sovereignty. This is another lesson one wishes our spivs could learn from Trump. Actually, even though the wall hasn’t been built yet, illegal Mexican immigration has already been cut by a third.

Trump’s conduct of the Middle East mess isn’t of sterling quality, but it’s much better than any of his predecessors’. He concentrates on a narrowly defined objective, that of defeating Isis, and spares us the emetic neocon effluvia about nation building.

Trump has for all intents and purposes undone Obama’s deal with Iran that was guaranteed to put nuclear weapons into the mullahs’ hands. During the campaign, he described this as the worst deal in American history, and it’s certainly right up there, or down, as the case may be.

The US economy has surged under Trump, following eight years of near stagnation. Thanks to his getting rid of many of Obama’s regulations, the economy is growing at a respectable 3.3 per cent, employment is way up, US share indices are beating all imaginable records.

His new tax package is guaranteed to act as another spur, even though I question some of its protectionist implications. Yet Trump, if anything, has mitigated his protectionist instincts, certainly compared to his election rhetoric.

The president has also tried to demolish Obamacare. Even though Congress hasn’t yet gone along, at least Trump understands the destructive potential of socialised medicine, something our lot don’t.

Alas, much of his good work is in my view undone by his cosy relationship with Putin, about whom Trump has so far not said a single disparaging word. He had to endorse the new sanctions that Congress pushed down his throat, but he wouldn’t have done that had he had an option.

Whether this relationship is just cosy or criminal is up to the Mueller investigation to uncover. If it turns out that Trump effectively acted as Putin’s agent in the run-up to the election (which in my view is a distinct possibility), he ought to be not just impeached but flailed alive.

But I hope Trump will be exonerated – he has the makings of a good president, one who can drain the swamp of apparat politics, or at least make it less putrid. He and I don’t share many friends, but at least – and it’s almost as good – we share quite a few enemies.