Author: Alexander Boot

Since Cicero thus quoted another Roman consul, this question has figured prominently in forensic investigations. Proceeding from that starting point, many observers have concluded that Erdoğan himself organised the coup, the better to Islamise Turkey.

Erdoğan has certainly profited, having increased his power to dismantle the quasi-secular republic created by Atatürk. It was only quasi-secular because many Turks never doused the Islamic fire in their loins.

I recall finding myself in Istanbul’s business district some 20 years ago. The street was crawling with young men sporting Armani suits and other questionable off-the-peg garments, and carrying attaché cases.

Suddenly a muezzin began singing from the nearby minaret, and all those Armani-clad chaps prostrated themselves where they stood. In a few seconds the street became a sea of heaving backs, something one seldom observes in the City of London.

Secularism may have existed in government for almost a century, but it has never made inroads into many Turks’ hearts. Devout Muslims, which most Turks are, don’t mind an Islamic state, and Erdoğan had no trouble drumming up popular support against the coup.

Did he organise it? Not literally, I don’t think. Staging such a giant spectacle is probably beyond Erdoğan’s directorial talents, especially since he would have had to recruit many suicidal volunteers, some among his close friends.

It’s easier to believe that Erdoğan merely provoked the coup. The army, the only force in the country still predominantly loyal to secularism, had legitimate grievances, and most rebels acted in good faith. But many agents provocateurs must have been quietly working behind the scenes, egging on those anti-Erdoğan officers.

Thus encouraged, they marched but were easily routed by the loyalists, who then started a major purge. So far 60,000 people have been arrested or sacked, with the army beheaded, independent judiciary ditto, and the school system brought to heel. Domestically the question in the title has a single-word answer: Erdoğan.

But it’s the international aftermath that interests me most, and there the answer would be both longer and impossible to provide without historical parallels. Many observers draw those, mainly with the 1933 Reichstag fire in Berlin.

The Nazis used it to consolidate their power. Hitler profited to such an extent that it’s commonly believed he himself had instigated the arson. The evidence for this is scant, but Hitler definitely took maximum opportunistic advantage of the situation.

In that sense, the parallel with the Turkish coup is valid, especially when it comes to the domestic ramifications. But an earlier parallel, involving Germany and Russia, elucidates the strategic impact of the coup much better.

Russia ended the First World War (and, incidentally, started the Second) as Germany’s ally, which turned both into pariah states, treated as such at the 1922 Genoa Conference, especially since Soviet Russia repudiated the Tsar’s debts.

German and Russian diplomats then slipped away to Rapallo, a nearby resort. There they signed a treaty, agreeing to “co-operate in a spirit of mutual goodwill in meeting the economic needs of both countries”.

Just like the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 17 years later, the Rapallo Treaty had secret clauses. The Germans agreed to provide the technology and the know-how the Bolsheviks needed to create a modern military industry. In their turn, the Russians undertook to help the Germans circumvent those provisions of the Versailles Treaty that limited the country’s military capacity.

As a direct result, German and Russian tank officers and pilots trained together at Russian schools built and financed by the Germans. It was at the Kama School near Kazan that Russian and German officers (including Guderian and Manstein) worked out the tactic of flanking armour thrusts, which both used to devastating effect against each other later.*

Today’s situation is eerily reminiscent of Rapallo, 1922. Both Erdoğan’s Turkey and Putin’s Russia are rapidly turning themselves into pariah states, bereft of Western allies. This is drawing them closer together, and a Russia-Turkey axis, which may or may not also include Iran, is becoming a distinct possibility.

The relations between the two countries soured on 24 November, 2015, when a Turkish F-16 fighter shot down a Russian SU-24M bomber that had violated Turkey’s airspace. Russia demanded, and Turkey offered, an apology, which was rather perfunctory.

Talk of another Russo-Turkish war was in the air, as if the 12 such wars the countries fought between 1568 and 1918 didn’t suffice. However, the coup changed all that.

The mayor of Ankara, a staunch Erdoğan loyalist, declared that the pilot who shot down the Russian jet was among the rebels. Hence his Russophobic action had been inspired by Fethullah Gülen, the anti-Erdoğan dissident. Since Gülen is currently living in Pennsylvania, he’s obviously a US puppet. “Our relations with Russia were spoiled by these bastards!” screamed the Mayor.

The tone of Russian propaganda has also changed noticeably since the coup, with Turkey routinely portrayed as an ally against the US.

Considering the critical importance of Turkey to NATO, her possible alliance with Russia is deeply worrying. Just like the Germany-USSR alliance of yesteryear, it can only be aggressive, with the West its target.

Something needs to be done fast, before things get out of control. As they did in 1939.

*The Russophones among you may be interested in the documentary evidence of this cooperation gathered by Yuri D’yakov and Tatiana Bushyeva in their book Фашисткий меч ковался в СССР (The Fascist Sword Was Forged in the USSR). I don’t think it has been translated.

Though sporting success is among the most trivial of man’s achievements, rooting for one’s national team is relatively innocent. People want their teams to do well at the Olympics, and even a fossil like me, who doesn’t really care one way or the other, would rather see a British athlete winning than, say, a German one.

However, when fascist dictators crave Olympic success, it’s neither innocent nor trivial: for them every medal won is an affirmation of ideological superiority. Leni Riefenstahl conveyed this in her masterly, if morally evil, film Olympia, showing the grinning Führer presiding over the pagan pageant of the Berlin Olympics.

The Germans got more medals than the Untermenschen of other nations and especially other races. The Aryan superman powers were thus confirmed, and young Germans were ready to charge into the slaughterhouse of a great war.

Putin is another fascist dictator, if in a state of flux. He hasn’t quite graduated to murdering his enemies openly and en masse. Poor Vlad still has to rely on Al Capone’s, rather than Hitler’s or Stalin’s, methods of dealing with dissent, such as the odd surreptitious bullet or a car bomb, such as the one that killed the journalist Pavel Sheremet in the centre of Kiev yesterday.

Yet Vlad needs his sporting success too, mainly to keep the natives from getting restless. He can’t put food into their bellies, but fire can work even better, if expertly stoked. When Vlad’s role model Stalin told his starving, enslaved people that “Life has become better, life has become merrier”, many felt a surge of exhilaration – they were prepared to believe the leader rather than their own eyes looking at their hungry children.

Vlad doesn’t have much in the way of a mind, but his fascist instincts are of sterling acuity. Russia’s declining sporting powers just weren’t on: Vlad wanted success, and he wanted it at any price. The price he has paid is the greatest doping scandal in history.

It wasn’t about winning fairly; it was about taking drugs. That was one event in which Russia had no rivals, not with her entire resources focused on stealing Olympic medals. The project had two major parts: first, coming up with drugs that worked; second, covering up their universal use.

The first part was easy: Grigori Rodchenkov (who later blew the whistle on the scheme), director of Russia’s anti-doping laboratory during the 2014 Winter Olympics at Sochi, developed a steroid cocktail of metenolone, turinabol and oxandrolone, mixed with whisky for men and vermouth for women. This heady mixture turned the fiasco at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics into a glorious victory in 2014, with hundreds of athletes having enjoyed the Putin cocktail hour.

Concealment was harder, but that’s where the expertise of Putin’s alma mater the KGB came in handy. Those boys can break into vaults, never mind a few supposedly tamper-proof bottles of urine samples.

At first they succeeded famously: between 2012 and 2015, at least 312 positive tests were covered up across 28 sports. Overall there were 577 positive samples, including 139 in athletics, 117 in weightlifting, 26 in cycling, and 11 in football and rowing.

And a ‘mouse hole’ in the Sochi testing laboratory enabled FSB agents to break into ‘tamper-proof’ bottles and replace steroid-laced samples with pristine ones.

However, whistles were blown, bottles were analysed by independent experts, and the conspiracy was uncovered. What little was left of Russia’s reputation was drowned in a sea of dodgy urine.

As a result, the Anti-Doping Agency recommended that Russia be banned from this year’s Rio Olympics for “mind-blowing levels of corruption”. Russia’s subsequent appeal was turned down, but Putin’s response was refreshing in its impudence.

Like a thief screaming “Stop thief!” louder than his pursuers, Vlad described the impending ban as a “dangerous relapse into the interference of politics in sport”. In fact he ought to be proud: Russia has maintained her leadership as one of the world’s most corrupt countries, sharing the pedestal with the likes of Nigeria and Uganda.

To put it plainly, Putin’s kleptofascist junta is stealing the country blind, with 111 people owning 19 per cent of all household wealth. Back in 2001 INDEM (Information Science for Democracy) estimated the volume of corruption in Russia at $30 billion. By 2005, that figure grew by an order of magnitude, to $300 billion.

More recent INDEM data are unavailable but, judging by the billions laundered through Panama by just one modest cellist, there’s no reason to believe that the Olympic-calibre speed of growth has slowed down.

If Leni Riefenstahl came back, her creative genius would be severely tested. Leni was ready to glorify mass murderers, but she’d be stymied by the task of glorifying mass thieves. Say what you will about the Nazis, but they thought bigger than doctoring urine samples and laundering cash.

One only hopes that FIFA will take the 2018 World Cup away from Russia. Let Putin’s lads compete in drug-pushing tournaments, they’d be odds-on.

 

 

 

 

The other day I talked about hate crimes, but I left out an important proviso. Apparently killing white people or policemen doesn’t qualify as hate crime even if explicitly perpetrated out of hatred for those groups.

Thus Micah Johnson, who murdered five Dallas policemen and wounded seven others, didn’t commit a hate crime even though, according to Police Chief David Brown, “The suspect said he… wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.”

That to me qualifies as a hate crime or specifically a crime motivated by racial hatred. However, Jamilah Lemieux, Ebony’s editor, disagrees:

“When we use a phrase like ‘hate crime,’ we’re typically referring to crimes against people of colour, people of various religious groups, LGBT people, people who have been historically attacked, abused or disenfranchised on the basis of their identity. To now extend that to the majority group and a group of people that have a history with African-Americans that has been abusive, and we can apply that to either police officers or to Caucasians, I think gets into very tricky territory.”

The ability to use English with anything resembling professional expertise is clearly not a job requirement for the editor of that venerable publication. Neither is logic or any reasonable frame of moral reference. Hostility towards whites and policemen, offset by an all-abiding love of sexual deviants and Muslims (her name suggests that’s the religious group Jamilah had in mind) seems to be a sufficient qualification.

“Don’t shoot until you see the whites” appears to be a philosophical premise with which Ebony sympathises, even if the magazine doesn’t manifestly call for putting it into practice. Now I’d suggest that there’s something wrong with any society that fosters a climate in which such scurrilous rags can thrive or indeed survive.

Slavery hasn’t existed in America for over 150 years, and race discrimination has been outlawed for over half a century. One would think this is long enough for the blacks to bury the hatchet (or the rifle, as it were) and for the whites to assuage their sense of guilt and start treating blacks as equals, not as retarded children to be mollycoddled lest they might harm themselves and others.

My dictionary defines racism as “prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior”. There isn’t one word there to suggest that black prejudice against whites is exempt from this definition.

Yet such an exemption is openly demanded by black ideologues, such as those at Ebony, and eagerly accepted by white ‘liberals’, a group that dominates the US opinion-forming media, including all TV networks bar one and all major newspapers bar none.

Hence Miss Lemieux’s statement wasn’t a rant by a marginalised nutter: it was a measured expression of vox populi, that dummy seemingly enunciating words actually being uttered by a wire-pulling ‘liberal’ ventriloquist.

This is lamentable on too many levels even to mention here, never mind to enlarge upon in any detail. I’ll still mention a couple, such as the very concept of hate crime.

Not only in America but also in Britain, hatred by category is treated as an aggravating circumstance in, for example, murder. Yet I can’t see any valid moral distinction between a murder committed out of, say, greed and one perpetrated out of racial or any other hatred.

Or rather I can see a distinction but not a difference. Murder, the unlawful taking of a human life with malice aforethought, is a capital crime seen as such in the founding moral code of our civilisation, the Scripture. How murdering a man just because he’s chromatically different is any worse than murdering a man because he’s richer escapes me entirely.

In fact, drawing such a distinction does untold damage to the very principle of – and therefore respect for – the law, by implicitly denying the absolute value of a human life. Human lives can’t be listed in the descending order of importance. The life of a white policeman is no more or less valuable than the life of a black handyman – and hatred by the latter towards the former is every bit as reprehensible as the other way around.

This is so basic that it pains me even to have to mention it. One should, however, ponder the tectonic shifts in society that have made this a legitimate topic for discussion. Some invisible plates clamped together to produce an earthquake whose shockwaves have never been attenuated. On the contrary, they seem to be getting more destructive as they spread out.

Alas, it’s impossible to do anything about this without revising the founding concepts of Western modernity, starting with those enunciated during the American and especially French revolutions.

All such principles are expressed in words that turn out to mean exactly the opposite of what they really mean. Hence liberty means bondage, equality means inequality and brotherhood means egotism. What Messrs Orwell and Huxley wrote was meant to read as dystopic fantasy. Instead it reads as reportage.

As founder, president and so far the only member of the Charles Martel Society for Multiculturalism, I’d like to thank my friend Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for reminding us of the wonders of diversity.

Specifically he has highlighted the exquisitely exotic taste of Turkish delight, a delicacy as sweet as revenge. Recep, being like me a religious man (and we know that all religions are at base the same), has served his God well.

“Alex, people don’t really understand God, or to be precise Allah,” Recep told me this morning over some fine raki, drunk out of tea cups for decorum’s sake.

“They think he’s all about mercy and loving your neighbour and in general being like a social worker with a stupid smile pasted onto his mug at all times.

“But Allah can also be jealous and wrathful, when need be. It’s like the Hegelian unity and struggle of opposites, catch my drift?

“Such a lopsided understanding of God creates a dangerous theological imbalance, which Islam in general, and I in particular, are out to correct – as a favour to our NATO partners and, in the near future, our fellow EU members. Different cultures learning from one another, that’s what multiculturalism is all about, isn’t it? Your health, my friend.”

“Yes, Recep,” I nodded, draining my glass as he drained his. “But people may get the wrong idea. They may think you’ve tipped the balance a bit too far the other way. Pictures of all those battered, naked men trussed up, all those beatings and beheadings in the streets…”

That got Recep agitated beyond control. “Men?!? There are no men among those plotters! They’re pigs! Dogs! Shaitan’s spawn! May a bridge break in half under their feet and they drown in a river of dog’s dung! I’m going to cut them up into little pieces and make doner kebabs out of their… whatsit!!! They went against me! Meaning against Allah!”

“Are you saying you’re Allah?” I asked, looking around uneasily. Fortunately, all the other Muslim drinkers in our nice Edgware Road bar were too preoccupied with their own tea cups to pay any attention to us. “Isn’t that kind of blasphemous?”

“Blasphemous, you filthy piece of pig’s dung?” objected Recep, who always addresses me and his other British friends by this epithet, designed to conceal the depth of the affection he feels for us.

“I’ll tell you what’s blasphemous, you glob of dog’s urine. It’s not recognising that cultures are different. Call yourself a multiculturalist? Well then, this is what our culture is all about.

“I may not be Allah, nor even Mohammed, but I’m their messenger. Like Allah, I’m prescient, catch my drift?

“That’s why I knew in advance who the 50,000 plotters would be. Had the list of them on my hard drive, may Allah turn them inside out and a scorpion sting them into their bare livers. That’s before they themselves knew their own fiendish plans, catch my drift?”

“Yes, Recep, I hear you’ve so far had some 6,000 officers and judges arrested, and 15,200 teachers sacked.”

“Those Shaitan’s spermatozoa are jolly lucky they only got sacked in this sense. Personally, I’d rather sew them up into burlap sacks and drop them into the Bosphorus, but that’ll have to wait until the passions have quieted down.”

“But Recep,” I asked, “what is it I hear about your reintroducing the death penalty and having thousands of conspirators executed in public? Some in the West may think…”

“I don’t give a sow’s penis what some in the West may think,” explained Erdoğan. “I only care about what Allah tells me. And Allah tells me these wouldn’t be executions. It would be pest control. So don’t call them conspirators – they’re a blight, may Allah shove their noses into their own rectums, so what comes out goes up their nostrils.

“We will continue to cleanse the virus from all state institutions, because this virus has spread. Unfortunately like a cancer, this virus has enveloped the state,” added Recep.

“Actually this gives me an idea… Can cancerous cells be implanted into people? I mean you strap them down, out comes the syringe, and Mohammed’s your uncle, Fatwa’s your aunt…”

“I don’t know, Recep,” I confessed. “I’m into multiculturalism, not medicine…”

“Oh well, never mind, you ignorant piece of boar’s droppings. There’s a toast I want to propose. To multiculturalism! Allahu akbar!”

We both drank, I gratefully, Recep triumphantly. Between us we had the whole issue of multiculturalism sorted out. Live and learn, I say. So here’s to you, Recep, may Allah sprinkle rose petals on every path you ever tread, and may you deflower those 70 virgins before you meet Allah in heaven.

And oh yes, if you, or any of my readers, would like to join my Charles Martel Society for Multiculturalism, I’ll be pleased to send you an entry form.

I’ve made my decision to come clean and I feel better already. So here it is: the story of my criminal life, in every lurid detail.

I first committed a hate crime when I was 14 or so, and one supposes this could be put down to the impetuosity of youth. Except that it didn’t end there. Once I found myself on the wrong side of the law, the lure of illicit activity proved irresistible.

Since then I must have committed hundreds of hate crimes, possibly thousands – I’ve lost count or rather, truth be told, never bothered to count. The crimes varied in detail, but the motivation was always the same. Misogyny. Expressed through countless acts.

Mercifully, I can’t yet be tried and convicted for, Britain still being a comparatively free country, we can only answer to laws that were in force at the time the crime was committed.

Luckily for me no appropriate law existed at the time I was involved in multiple criminal activities, and even now it’s coming into existence only in Nottinghamshire. But such pioneering efforts never go to waste, and I’m sure that before long other police departments will join forces to stamp out vermin like me, serial misogynists.

Even though this initiative could conceivably clamp me in prison, I must say I admire the effort. It’s time we put an end to misogyny, and the best way of doing so is to define the crime as broadly as possible, casting the net so wide that no wrong-doer can get around it, nor slip through.

This is what Nottinghamshire Police have done but, credit where it’s due, they received invaluable help from Nottingham Women’s Centre. Together these two bedrocks of East Midlands probity worked out a definition of misogynistic hate crime that’s guaranteed to inculpate not only me but also potentially every post-pubescent male in the country.

According to the initiative, misogynistic hate crime includes: complimenting a woman on her appearance, texting or otherwise communicating unwanted amorous interest, any “unwanted or uninvited physical or verbal contact or engagement”, including such heinous crimes as “wolf whistling”.

But don’t let me indulge in fragmentary quoting. This is what a spokesman for the force actually said: “Unwanted physical or verbal contact or engagement is defined as exactly that and so can cover wolf-whistling and other similar types of contact. If the victim feels that this has happened because they are a woman then we will record it as a hate crime.”

One can only applaud this statement for being not only legally precise but also stylistically elegant. ‘Jane feels she was raped because they are a woman’ – who can argue against such usage? No one, for it’s consonant with the same spirit that animates this whole initiative, aimed at eliminating not only misogyny but also singular personal pronouns.

If a woman feels they is a victim of a crime, they is. What’s startlingly attractive about this idea isn’t just its (their?) grammar, but also its endless opportunities for expansion.

Defining any crime as an act seen as such by its victim makes it possible to charge every one of Her Majesty’s 65 million subjects with some sort of felony, and this includes babes in arms, who tend to soil their clothes and disrupt their parents’ sleep.

Such legal wisdom is already applied to race crime, which is just that if the victim feels offended. So why not misogyny?

But let’s not imagine things that might happen. Let’s concentrate instead on something that has happened: my lifelong criminal activities, as defined by Nottinghamshire Police.

I committed my first crime in a Moscow courtyard when I was 14, by planting an unwanted kiss on a neighbourhood girl. She called me something that doesn’t easily translate into English and told me to wait until I grew up.

Having thus stepped on the criminal path, I’ve since travelled it all the way. Of the criminal activities specifically mentioned by Nottinghamshire Police, I’m only innocent of texting (because that wasn’t an option for most of my life, and I still haven’t learned how) and wolf whistling (because I’ve never worked on a building site.)

Neither have I ever suggested to a woman that one didn’t get many of those to a pound, nor asked her if her legs go all the way up to the top. But I’ve complimented probably hundreds of women, many of whom didn’t look pleased. In my youth, I’d often make improper suggestions by way of testing the waters, only to find many waters to be reluctant or even downright contemptuous. I’ve been known to say scabrous things to female colleagues, and not all of them were pleased to receive such attentions.

I… well, I don’t want to spoil your appetite by more of such gruesome confessions. Just remind me to keep my mouth shut and my hands to myself next time I’m in Nottingham.

“Nottingham is leading the way with this – it’s not happening anywhere else in the country…yet!” said a Women’s Centre spokesman. Hear, hear! I’m sure the implied confidence isn’t misplaced.

The coup in Turkey is another victory for Islam – and another proof that the West is hoisting itself with the petard of its own folly.

Having abandoned the content of our civilisation, we’re obsessed with the form. Hence the fetishistic worship of the democratic shell, regardless of what it contains, from unbounded corruption to downright despotism.

This explains the reaction of Western leaders to the failed coup. Divided as they may be on many issues, they stand united in shallow understanding of their own field, coupled with an understated intellectual and moral integrity.

Hence our new Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, the token Etonian in May’s class-war cabinet, expressed HMG’s support for Turkey’s “democratic elected government and institutions”.

So did the French Foreign Minister Ayrault: “France hopes that… Turkish democracy will emerge reinforced by this test and that fundamental liberties will be fully respected.”

Merkel added her pfennig’s worth: “Tanks on the streets and air strikes against their own people are injustice.”

The White House ploughed right in: “The President and Secretary agreed that all parties in Turkey should support the democratically elected government of Turkey.”

Chaps, I know it’s difficult, but do try to understand that it’s not method of government that matters, but what kind of society it brings forth.

The greatest achievements of our civilisation came when democracy was either a far cry from today’s one-man-one-vote madness or didn’t exist at all. Conversely, democratic governments either perpetrated or abetted the greatest calamities in history, such as two world wars.

Nor does democracy automatically preclude tyranny, as shown by the democratically elected Hitler, Perón, Mugabe, Putin and Macîas Nguema (who gratefully murdered a third of the population of Equatorial Guinea that had voted him in).

It was in the name of democracy that a neocon-inspired US ousted secular Middle Eastern regimes to watch on gleefully as feral-looking Muslims flocked to voting booths. As a direct result, the whole region is aflame, with millions dead or dying, and bloodshed spilling over into Western streets.

Like all philistines, democracy fetishists believe that everyone is, or wants to be, like them. Since they themselves regard religion as an annoying irrelevance, they assume that Muslims are similar. But that assumption is wrong: the green banner of Islam still has more unifying power than any other current institutional symbol. And history shows that Islam has been doctrinally hostile to the West for 1,400 years.

The conclusion is straightforward: the more fervently Muslim a state is, the greater danger it presents to the West. Therefore it’s in the West’s interest to support the most secular Muslim regimes, while trying to undermine those run by proselytising fanatics.

In practice this means supporting undemocratic regimes, for most Muslims, unlike most Christians and Jews, are active believers. A democratic election is therefore likely to bring to power an Islamic theocracy – and this is exactly what happened in Egypt, to cite one example.

In 2012 Egyptians voted for the Muslim Brotherhood, installing Mohamed Morsi as president, much to the delight of Western democracy hounds. That eccentric gentleman believed that Muslims had nothing to do with 9/11, and the explosions that brought down the Twin Towers “happened from the inside”.

Overnight Egypt was transformed from a reluctant ally of the West into its deadly enemy, and few were the Westerners who didn’t heave a sigh of relief when a year later the army overthrew that evil, democratically elected regime.

Historically the army is the only force in the Islamic world that’s capable of keeping Muslim piety, and concomitant savagery, in check. Yet the generals seldom take over by democratic process. It’s military coup that’s the normal expedient.

This has been the case in Atatürk’s Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lybia – in every place where variously vile but generally secular regimes were installed. Of course democratic demagoguery wouldn’t wear it.

Anyone with elementary knowledge of history will know that an Ayatollah is the only realistic alternative to the Shah, the Muslim Brotherhood to Mubarak, tribal cannibals to the Ba’athist regimes in Iraq and Syria – and Erdoğan to a secular government beholden to the army. A Winston Churchill isn’t an option in any of those places.

Hence the only intelligent reaction would have been for Western leaders to support the coup in every way they could. What we get instead is vacuous drivel on the delights of democracy and the evil of military coups as such. When the West was still led by nation-serving statesmen, rather than self-serving spivs, things were different.

For example, when the 1944 Generals’ Plot against Hitler was unfolding, one can’t picture Churchill, Johnson’s professed role model, saying something like: “Admittedly, Herr Hitler is an implacable enemy of this country and her allies, and we are aware of the crimes his regime has perpetrated. However, we must not lose sight of the fact that, unlike the military junta trying to oust it, Herr Hitler’s government was democratically elected. Therefore, we cannot welcome the Generals’ Plot unequivocally. In fact, we denounce it for the denial of the democratic principles that HMG is here to uphold.”

“Tempora mutantur”, the classically educated Mr Johnson would doubtless say. Yes, and usually for the worse, as he has so ably demonstrated.

Yesterday I described the French Revolution as a prominent landmark on the road to perdition. A few hours later came an awful illustration.

Or rather 84 illustrations, which is how many people were murdered in Nice by yet another exponent of what we’re under orders to call a ‘religion of peace’. So far I haven’t heard any new reassurances on the peaceful nature of Islam, given a bad name by a few rotten apples. But that’ll come.

It’s a macabre coincidence that the carnage happened on Bastille Day, when France was celebrating the priming of delayed-action mines buried under our civilisation. One of them went off in Nice, with the French – and the rest of us – watching on helplessly.

It’s impossible for a civilisation to defend itself without a sense of its own righteousness. If a conflict is seen as a clash between good and evil, the combatant can feel empowered to take on even a superior foe. In the absence of that perception, no amount of brawn can repel even a small, determined force.

I’m writing this a few miles from the Burgundian town of Vézelay, where on 31 March, 1146, St Bernard of Clairvaux delivered his famous oration on responding to the Muslim threat:

“…Will you allow the infidels to contemplate in peace the ravages they have committed on Christian people? …Fly then to arms; let the holy rage animate you in the fight, and let the Christian world resound with these words of the prophet: ‘Cursed be he who does not stain his sword with blood!’ ”

Thus spoke a civilisation sufficiently self-confident to defend itself against a mortal threat – and sufficiently clear-headed to realise that a mortal threat did exist. Every ringing word was striking a note no modern leader would be able to produce.

For the event France celebrated on the day of the appalling tragedy signposted the protracted suicide attempt of our civilisation. The snowball of wishy-washy anomie was pushed down the slope, to get bigger as it rolled towards the abyss.

Absolute truth was declared nonexistent, and a multitude of truthlets, roughly equal to the number of individuals, each endowed with inalienable rights, were all pronounced equally valid – provided they had nothing to do with the founding truth of our civilisation.

The snowball went over the edge and disintegrated into a myriad fragments, each supposed to be equal in substance, if perhaps slightly different in detail. Eventually God was swiped off his perch and replaced with the Demiurge of Diversity.

No one can go against this vengeful deity and get away unscathed. Our will has eroded and our mind has dimmed – we simply can’t enunciate the only thought that, once uttered, would enable us to stop Islam in its tracks: we aren’t at war with ISIS, Islamic fundamentalism or Islamofascism. We’re at war with Islam.

Except that it’s a phoney war, waged by our enemies only. They know they’re at war and they know who the enemy is. We aren’t fighting the war because we don’t even acknowledge it’s under way.

The Demiurge of Diversity demands that we atomise every group into its individual constituents. Some individuals may be quite nasty, and we can resist them, if only half-heartedly. But no group can possibly have anything wrong with it, and certainly no religion.

They’re all equally good, which is to say equally irrelevant. Only the creed of the Demiurge of Diversity is worshipped in earnest.

Without a clear understanding of what we’re fighting for or against, no war can be either just or successful, as proved by the criminal 2003 foray initiated by the US neocons.

Refusing to acknowledge that Islam is a religion of war, and has been since 627 AD, when its founder personally murdered hundreds of Jews in Medina, they singled out a few bad Muslims for punishment. Once the bad ones were deposed, the good Muslims would supposedly enjoy an American-style democracy in their newly built nations.

Show me a wrong strategic goal and I’ll show you a lost war. Now, 13 years later, we’re still suffering casualties, and there’s no end in sight. The Demiurge of Diversity doesn’t let us do what has always been done at wartime.

We must prevent any Muslims from entering our countries and regard every Muslim resident here as an enemy alien. Those who’ve already shown their hand by voicing support of jihad must be summarily deported, and every mosque in which such words were uttered summarily shut down and razed.

At the same time Islamic states must be held responsible for every atrocity committed by Muslims against Westerners – with appropriate punitive measures. My favourite one would be taking over their oilfields and holding them until Islamic passions have quieted down, but I’m sure we have people better qualified than me to work out the appropriate tactics.

We have an overwhelming physical superiority over Islam, but it takes a clear sense of purpose to bring it to bear. That’s what we’re lacking, which is why we must brace ourselves for more enemy action, such as the atrocity in Nice.

Because our enemies are stronger than us metaphysically, they’re prepared to die for their beliefs. We aren’t even prepared to live for ours – in fact, we aren’t even sure what they are. The Demiurge of Diversity doesn’t let us have any.

The telltale sign of ideological contrivances is that their origin – unlike that of organic commonwealths like England – can be pinpointed to a concrete date. One should always be wary of such states, especially if their date of birth is associated with a revolutionary outburst.

The three dates bemoaned by everyone who despises our vulgar, soulless, materialistic modernity are the dates on which said modernity found its quintessential physical embodiments: 4 July in America, 7 November in Russia and 14 July in France.

(One could legitimately add to this roster 31 October, 1517, when the Reformation started, but today is the occasion for focusing on specifically political subversion.)

‘Liberty’ arrived in France exactly 227 years ago, when 300 thugs stormed the Bastille, kicking off the revolution. The event inspired Edmund Burke to write his seminal work Reflections on the Revolution in France, which should be at the top of the reading list for anyone interested in modern politics – or wishing to understand the inherent evil of revolutions.

By the looks of it, Reflections wasn’t on Immanuel Kant’s reading list at all, which is why he lied by writing that “…this revolution finds in the heart of all observers the kind of sympathy that borders on enthusiasm.”

Not quite all, Herr Professor. The only enthusiastic hearts were those stuffed to the brim with the ideology of hatred and destruction going by the misnomer of the Enlightenment – the denial of the very reason it inscribed on its banners.

Such hearts ruled their possessors’ heads, overriding reason regardless of whether it was of a high order, like Kant’s, or an abysmally low one, like Robbie Burns’s. Scotland’s national poet responded to the upheaval with the poem The Tree of Liberty:

“It stands where ance the Bastile stood, //A prison built by kings, man,// When Superstition’s hellish brood //Kept France in leading-strings, man.”

At the time of its demise, the ‘prison built by kings’ and sanctified by ‘Superstition’s hellish brood’ (Christianity, that is) kept ‘in leading-strings’ a grand total of seven prisoners: four counterfeiters, one sexual deviant, a failed regicide, along with a chap who believed he was Julius Caesar and, once liberated, was immediately transferred to a lunatic asylum.

Now that liberty has had a free run for 227 years, France boasts a prison population of 66,678, which is impressive, if paling by comparison to the corresponding figures for the other two reference countries of modernity, Russia (651,360) and the US (2,217,947). The US leads the way, but then it is the world’s leader.

However, that disastrous event is best assessed in philosophical terms, rather than arithmetical ones. For, while the French Revolution didn’t produce intellectual, cultural and social perdition either immediately or singlehandedly, it was surely one of the foremost landmarks on the road to it.

The Enlightenment, whose pent-up animus burst out 227 years ago, was inspired by hatred of Christianity (‘Superstition’s hellish brood’) and the urge to destroy the civilisation begotten by it. The vestiges of that civilisation are still hanging on by the skin of their teeth, but something vital was indeed destroyed: humanity as a cohesive entity.

It’s an idiotic modern perversion to perceive man in strictly physical terms. The destructive consequences of such a puny misapprehension are clear, for possessing the same number of limbs or internal organs doesn’t bring people any closer. Only metaphysics can do that, by imbuing most people with the same understanding of truth.

This can only happen when truth is perceived as absolute and hence, by definition, the same for all. To act in that capacity, truth has to be infinitely higher than quotidian life: it must be accepted as the end, not the means.

Once such truth is shunted aside, it’s not just religion that suffers. Reason itself is compromised, deprived as it now is of a teleological aspect. Dostoyevsky wasn’t talking about reason when he wrote that “without God everything is permitted”, but he might as well have been.

Absolute truth is the gauge by which thought can be verified; it’s also a control valve by which thought can be regulated. Remove it, and reason loses discipline, meaning it also loses definition and ultimately any kind of sound content.

Suddenly anything, no matter how illogical or downright stupid, can be said, and inanity demands equal time with intelligence. It’s only in such an intellectual atmosphere that our politicians can rise to power: any brainless slogan mouthed by brainless nonentities can appeal to brainless masses.

What goes for reason also goes for morality: relativism damages both, with moral egotism joining intellectual solipsism to reign supreme. The Enlightenment ordered man to look for truth only inside himself – which he did, but to his horror found only himself there.

For having to spend an eternity with oneself only, as an atom disconnected from its molecule, is a working definition of hell – doing so in this life defines hell on earth. That the hell in which we live is physically comfortable makes the contrast between the physical and metaphysical even more terrifying.

It was that ultimate Reign of Terror that was adumbrated by the French Revolution. This is what the French are celebrating today, along with other victims blissfully unaware of their victimhood.

 

 

According to Jean-Claude ‘Junk’ Juncker and Martin ‘Papa’ Schultz, heads of the European Commission and Parliament respectively, we have a crisis on our hands. Britain is holding the whole continent hostage, and it’s up to Junk and Papa to negotiate its release.

Having donned their bullet-proof vests, Junk and Papa whipped out their trusted megaphones and offered a penetrating analysis of the situation.

Junk led the way: “In the end, the British didn’t vote to leave because of the euro. They’re not even members of the currency union.”

It’s reassuring to know that Junk has his facts down pat: he knows that only 19 EU members are in the euro and nine aren’t. Moreover, his perusal of a huge corpus of data yielded the startling discovery that Britain is one of the nine and not of the 19.

“Even the refugee crisis hardly affected the country,” continued Junk, somewhat less convincingly. In the last 10 years Britain’s population has grown by five million, almost exclusively due to immigration. I suspect what my friend Junk really meant was that, since the EU is one continuous refugee crisis, there’s no point singling out the current peak.

Having thus explained what didn’t cause Brexit, Junk then kindly told us what did: “Britain has never been able to decide whether it wants to fully or only partially belong to the EU.”

Junk is much better at splitting infinitives than hairs. Actually, the referendum has shown that Britain wants to belong to the EU neither fully nor even partially, but that’s what Junk doubtless meant. He doesn’t always express himself clearly, and never after his first breakfast Scotch – but then I’m always there to act as his trusted interpreter.

Then Papa chimed in, in his unique plaintive way: “For many people, politics in Brussels and Strasbourg might as well be happening on another planet.”

Hence the current situation, with Britain having abducted the continent, nay the whole planet, and now holding it for ransom. “First,” said Papa, “David Cameron initiated the referendum in order to secure his post. Now, fellow Conservatives want to delay the start of exit negotiations until they’ve held a party conference.”

The first sentence shows impeccable judgement: it’s true that Dave called the referendum because a) he was sure of victory and b) he thought that as a result he could bring the whole party under his heel by finally making those sceptics shut up.

The second sentence is factually true too. But there Papa wasn’t so much complaining as rejoicing. He knows that the longer the delay, the more time he and Junk will have to bring in the rescue team armed to the teeth.

Actually, the EU’s SAS are already making headway. Under their tutelage more than four million Britons have signed a petition to vote again and keep voting until the EU hostage has been released by its captors. Patience is a critical virtue in a hostage situation, and the feeling is it doesn’t matter how many polls this is going to take – as long as the EU stays alive, there’s no giving up.

As a result, Parliament (our own, not Papa’s) is about to debate the situation and decide whether the four million who demand another referendum outweigh the 17.4 million who decided to take the EU hostage by leaving it.

The four million have called on the Government to introduce a rule that, if the vote was less than 60 per cent to either side, there should be another referendum. By inference, they’re also demanding that, once introduced, the rule be made retroactive, which takes jurisprudence to an exciting new level.

This raises interesting questions. Are we going to re-run any elections failing to produce a landslide result? If so, I’m all for it: what can be more fun than reading a dozen opinion polls every day of one’s life? After all, landslide victories are rather rare, and we may well be regaled by a few general elections every year.

With this particular hostage crisis, what if a second referendum produces roughly the same result, a four-percent victory for Leave? Sorry I asked – the answer is obvious: the stern examiner will tell us to re-sit the test until we get it right.

But what if Remain were to win, by a similar margin? Would we go two out of three, or again keep voting until the widely grinning EU hostage is released safe and sound? Or perhaps decide that it’s only wrong votes that should be invalidated?

The opportunities are as exciting as they’re endless. But somehow I’m sure Junk and Papa will take full advantage of them. They’ve got their hostage-release tactics spot-on in Ireland, Denmark, France and Holland. If it worked there, why not in Britain?

And this once they’ll be able to deputise local support, starting no doubt with our new prime minister. Britain, that vile abductor, stands no chance: Junk and Papa will never countenance defeat.

 

The Darling Bud’s surname starts with the same letter as Mrs Thatcher’s Christian name, and vice versa. By the sound of her, this is as closely as Theresa will ever resemble Maggie.

A new government must be given the benefit of the doubt, and I’m not going to offer macabre predictions for Mrs May’s tenure. However, contrary to Bertrand Russell’s view, the past is the most reliable predictor of the future – and the immediate past even more so.

Mrs May’s record as Home Secretary doesn’t fill one with confidence that she’s anything other than an unprincipled apparatchik in the Blair-Cameron vein: (http://www.tfa.net/judge-theresa-may-on-her-record/). However, that article omits Mrs May’s belief that “many Britons benefit a great deal” from Sharia law.

Many Britons may also benefit from devil worship, but one would think that a Home Secretary should be concerned with the general good of society, rather than obscure practices at odds with that good. One hopes Mrs May was talking only about some aspects of Sharia law, rather than its entirety. Support for the stoning of adulterers, for example, might erode her popularity.

But my today’s subject is a past even more immediate than that, namely the speech Mrs May delivered yesterday. It’s not immediately obvious that, had Jeremy Corbyn suddenly ascended to 10 Downing Street, his speech would have been any different.

Mrs May pledged to deliver “serious social reform”, which would fill every conservative heart with horror even if no clarification were on offer. This promise dovetails neatly with Mrs May’s previous brainwave at whose crest she repudiated George Osborne by declaring that Britain needs “not austerity but prosperity”.

She clearly thinks the two concepts are mutually exclusive, whereas in fact the latter is impossible without the former. Mrs May seems to hint at reverting to promiscuous public spending, which has been the cause of every economic disaster over the last century.

What George meant by austerity was merely slightly less profligacy, but even that trumps what Mrs May appears to have in mind. Abandoning austerity would have not only dire economic consequences but also profound social ones, even without the “serious social reform” Mrs May is promising.

In broad strokes, she seems to think that the answer to our economic woes lies in squeezing the fat cats until they disgorge their ill-gotten gains. If I were Jeremy, I’d sue Theresa for stealing his thunder.

The thought of restricting executive pay and bonuses may be appealing, but any reasonable person must realise that the only way for the state to achieve this outcome would be to increase its power to a catastrophic level.

The same goes for Mrs May’s idea of forcing companies to put consumers and staff on the boards. She calls it standing up for the working man, which is sheer demagoguery. Mrs May ought to study the experience of France, where such measures are among the nooses suffocating the economy.

The demagoguery was liberally etched with the usual waffle, along the lines of “We believe everybody – not just the privileged few – has a right to take ownership of what matters in their lives.”

Apart from the fact that, being a singular antecedent, ‘everybody’ requires a singular personal pronoun this side of the PC assault on language, her statement comes straight from the Corbyn (or Marx) catechism. For all the state’s efforts over the last few decades, the British are still among the world’s freest and wealthiest people.

This would have been impossible if only “the privileged few” had “a right to take ownership…” – which has been proven in every place where socialist flimflam was put into practice. Mrs May’s oration makes one wonder what she has to do with conservatism, but then she did say that “This is a different kind of Conservatism, I know. It marks a break with the past.” New Conservatism is indistinguishable from New Labour.

Then of course there’s Brexit, which Mrs May reassuringly promises “means Brexit”. That’s like saying liberty means liberty: to some it means licence, to others anarchy, to still others (French and other revolutionaries come to mind) the state putting its foot down.

As a Cameronian apparatchik, Mrs May is viscerally attached to the EU, which she proved by campaigning for Remain. Hence it’s possible that to her Brexit doesn’t mean the country recovering her full sovereignty.

It may mean, for example, leaving the EU de jure but complying with all its laws de facto, thereby suffering all the evils without having even a 1/28^th of the voice. It may also mean a gradual sabotage of the referendum results.

One possible scenario: when the reforms Mrs May promises deliver a major recession, as they certainly will if they’re as serious as she claims, this could be blamed on Brexit. Brexit does mean Brexit, Mrs May might then say, but are you my fellow Britons sure you don’t want to change your mind? Let’s vote again, shall we?

All this may prove unfounded, and I do pray it will be so proved. TM may yet become like MT or even better. Time will tell, but the early signs aren’t encouraging.