Juncker is right and Farage is wrong

“There will be no Brexit,” announced Jean-Claude Juncker or Junk, as he’s known to his friends. He then helped himself to a snifter of the finest brandy southwest France can offer.

Ukip leader Nigel Farage begged to differ, and the two men’s views on the situation are as opposite as their tastes in liquid refreshments: cognac by the bottle for Junk, beer by the bucket for Nige.

“Insufferable ignorance,” said Farage, blowing some foam off his pint. “The British people will decide for themselves and I’m confident they’ll vote for prosperity and freedom.”

This goes to show that cognac out of a desk-drawer bottle is more conducive to clear thinking than bitter at the Coach & Horses can ever be. For Mr Farage based his retort on all the wrong assumptions.

First, he assumes that the British people will associate Brexit with ‘prosperity and freedom’ as unshakeably as does Mr Farage himself. That may well be wishful thinking.

Come the referendum, the British people will be on the receiving end of tonnes of propaganda chaff, burying the kernels of Brexit wheat. God, said Napoleon, is on the side of the big battalions, and the god of publicity is on the side of the big budgets.

While Brexit campaigners depend on a million here or there generously donated by chaps blessed with both pounds and sense, Junk’s British acolytes will have billions of freshly minted euros pouring into their coffers courtesy of Junk and his friends.

Pounds won’t be in short supply either, what with Dave eyeing Junk’s job as an alternative to flogging around the world like his idol Blair, to spout gibberish after black-tie dinners. For Dave to have Junk’s job, it has to be there when Dave retires, which simple thought lies at the heart of Dave’s principled commitment to Britain staying ‘at the heart of Europe’.

People capable of understanding what’s what well enough to withstand a massive propaganda offensive would indeed be able to make up their own minds. But does Mr Farage seriously think that, after 60 years of oxymoronic comprehensive education, the British people en masse fall into that category? If so, that’s another wrong assumption.

This misapprehension, however, pales by comparison with the folly of his apparent belief that, even should by some miracle the British people vote right in the referendum, Britain will leave the EU.

If history shows anything, it’s that referendum results are only ever binding if they go the EU way. If Angie et al. don’t like the outcome, they either ignore it or tell the offending nation to vote again until it gets it right.

Actually, my friend Junk has other aces up his sleeve, apart from pumping billions into a Goebbels-style propaganda campaign aimed at explaining to us that Brexit will mean we’ll be dying in the street like stray dogs.

He could pretend to offer some meaningless concessions, while Dave could pretend they are meaningful. In fact Junk hinted at this stratagem the other day, in between his seventh and eighth snifterfuls.

One day, he said, specifically when Turkey and the Balkan countries join the EU to expand its membership to “33, 34 or 35” nations, “we should rethink the European architecture with a group of countries that will do… all things together and others who will position in the orbit different from the core.”

To give material substance to Junk’s metaphor, bodies that move in orbits around the core are called satellites. That clearly is the role Junk plans, and Dave accepts, for Britain.

Sharing the orbit with Her Majesty’s former realm will be such European powerhouses as the Balkan countries and Turkey, which qualifies on the strength of five per cent of her territory actually being in Europe.

The possibility of revolving in such auspicious circles will probably sway our undereducated populace into supporting Junk’s vision and rejecting Nigel’s. That’ll only prove that Junk has a better grasp of the general geopolitical thrust of modernity.

Modern democracy is so intertwined with the notion of unlimited drifting of power towards the centre that for all intents and purposes they are one and the same. Logically, when most power is already concentrated at the centre, while the urge for more is still unquenched, powerlust has to leave national confines to seek a ganglion of intersecting urges at an outside site.

The EU thus represents a logical development of unlimited democracy, which effectively vectors political power away from individuals and their local institutions towards an inevitably denationalised elite that has more in common with similar groups abroad than with its own people.

Junk’s mind is probably too befuddled by all that cognac for him to grasp such philosophical niceties, but his instincts are of bloodhound acuity. That is more than I can say for Nigel’s instincts – though I do pray that I’m wrong and he’s right.

 

P.S. You can find many such subversive thoughts in my book How the West Was Lost, now available in its second (paperback and electronic) edition.  

   

 

 

The madness of King Charles III

At least George III waited until he was on the throne to go bonkers. The Prince of Wales has already given an indication of a premature onset – along with the hope that his accession to the eponymous title won’t happen soon.

Prince Charles ascribes the blood-soaked chaos in Syria, and generally in the Middle East to – brace yourself – climate change, “one of the major reasons for this horror.”

The disorder must still be in an early stage, for otherwise HRH would have said ‘the only reason’. But the condition is degenerative, and we have much to look forward to.

It’s hard to keep pace with the runaway train of Charles’s thought, but he does try to support this bizarre statement: “What we’re doing to our environment [creates] greater conflict over scarce resources”.

Our wanton disregard for the environment caused “five or six years of drought” in Syria; the drought caused the 2011 uprising; the uprising caused the civil war; the civil war caused 250,000 deaths; the deaths caused 11 million to run away from home; and the combined effect of all those disasters presumably caused the hundreds of massacres perpetrated by Muslims over the last 20 years (to keep the temporal perspective narrow).

All this is traceable back to anthropogenic climate change, believes our future king, so next time you whip out that aerosol spray, I hope you’ll be suitably ashamed of yourself. The blood of all those Muslims and their victims will be on your head, vicariously at least.

HRH modestly credits himself with saying those same things “twenty-something years ago”, which belies my belief that his condition is still in an early phase. Perhaps it’s only passing from chronic to acute.

This is one of the rare moments when I no longer regret that our royals aren’t allowed to play a bigger role in running the country although, to be fair, Charles couldn’t possibly be worse than Dave.

However, his firm commitment to this madcap idea is worrying. After all, the anthropogenic nature of warm weather is the first discovery in the history of science made not by scientists but by a political body, the UN as it happens.

Much as one has to respect the epic successes this organisation has achieved in its own field (Yugoslavia springs to mind, among many other examples), one has to say that the evidential base of the theory is, to be charitable, weak.

The political base, however, is massive, and the banners of fictitious global warming have drawn all the same people who oppose nuclear energy, shale gas, medical experiments on animals and everything else that can improve and prolong human lives.

However, an attempt to connect the current upsurge in Muslim aggression with this slapdash theory leaves the domain of ill-advised politicking and inability to assess evidence to enter one of a clinical problem.

To realise this, all one has to do is look at the map of the Middle East, where Israel looks like a tiny strip on Syria’s south-western edge. Indeed, the territory of Syria is nine times that of Israel, but this isn’t the point.

The point is that, since Israel is right on Syria’s border, her climate has to be roughly the same. Israel, in other words, must be suffering the same effects of climate change (at least the even more idiotic ‘global warming’ is out of fashion) as those driving so many Syrians and other Muslims to mass migration and mass murder.

Yet none of this is happening. No droughts, no uprisings, no civil wars, no urgent desire to mow down people in Western capitals. The only thing Israel seems to be suffering from is the same Muslim aggression that has been with us for 1,400 years, ever since Mohammed and his jolly friends rode out of the red-hot Arabian sands.

Perhaps HRH should reconsider the whole issue and reroute his train of thought to a track where the danger of hitting intellectual buffers is less imminent. But then his mind seems to have only one track at the moment.

 

P.S. You can find many such subversive thoughts in my book How the West Was Lost, now available in its second (paperback and electronic), edition.  

 

 

Two priestly reactions to one ghastly massacre

A little boy, a friend’s grandson, was asked at school what word, starting with an ‘A’, describes a person who neither believes nor disbelieves in God, but says he just doesn’t know.

It took the precocious tot a split second to come up with the answer: “Anglican”. I don’t know whether or not the boy had ever come across the word ‘agnostic’, but in either case his, correct, understanding of modern Anglicanism is telling.

This is rather worrying, for Western Christianity has only two apostolic confessions: Roman Catholicism and, as I acknowledge when in a generous mood, Anglicanism. That’s why communicants in either ought to feel empathy for each other’s plight. And even cultured agnostics, along with – God forbid – atheists, should feel the same way, for the West can’t survive without its founding creed.

The plight of the C of E is highlighted by its hierarchy. That one doesn’t detect any present-day Richard Hookers among them is both understandable and forgivable: all priests can no more be expected to be great theologians than all soldiers to be heroes.

Anglicans, however, would be within their right to expect that their archbishops firmly believe in God. One would think that even agnosticism, never mind atheism, would be a disqualifying circumstance for a prelate in the same sense in which pacifism would be for a general. Every job has its requirements.

Alas, the present Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby echoed his predecessor by saying that his faith was shaken by the Paris massacre, which, as he put it, “put a chink in [his] armour.”

One wishes someone put some armour in his chink, for his present battle suit seems to be made not of steel but of wet lavatory paper.

“Where are you [God] in all this?” asked the Archbishop and obviously received no answer that satisfied his curiosity. My contention is that any priest, never mind a prelate, who can ask this theologically illiterate question and then leave it unanswered should be summarily unfrocked.

I’m not always happy with the way the present Pope answers what Dostoyevsky called ‘the accursed questions’. But, commenting on the same tragedy, His Holiness inadvertently taught the Archbishop how to respond to such enquiries:

“We should ask for the grace to weep for this world, which does not recognise the path to peace. To weep for those who live for war and have the cynicism to deny it. God weeps, Jesus weeps.”

Implicit in this comment is the kind of understanding that, as my brilliant friend the Rev Peter Mullen says, ought to be confidently expected from any Sunday school pupil.

Such a youngster would know that God endowed man with free will, which presupposes but doesn’t predetermine the free choice between good and evil. Being omniscient, God knows which way the person will go, but he doesn’t force him to go one way or the other.

That’s where God is in all this, Your Grace. Showing us how to choose right; weeping when we choose wrong. Hoping we’d choose good, weeping when we choose evil.

Having established his theological ignorance and at best uncertain faith, the Archbishop then displayed equally shaky secular credentials.

“Two injustices do not make justice,” he said. “If we start randomly killing those who have not done wrong, that is not going to provide solutions.”

This sounds suspiciously as if he thinks that any armed response to any injustice is by definition unjust. While in theological terms this betokens woeful ignorance of the basic principle of just war, first enunciated by Augustine, in secular terms such pacifism represents a shortcut to extinction.

Oh for the Anglican bishops of yesteryear, who blessed battleships sailing off to Jutland or, in the next war, Lancaster bombers taking off to do quite a bit of ‘indiscriminate killing’ of their own.

They knew exactly what needed to be done – and where God was in all of that.

 

P.S. You can find many such subversive thoughts in my book How the West Was Lost, now available in its second (paperback and electronic), edition.  



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Je ne suis pas Diesel

The world is barking mad and yes, it’s meant to be a pun. This melancholy observation took shape at the sight of the outburst of cloying sentimentality following the death in Paris of a police sniffer dog named Diesel.

It’s as if the tawdry response to Diana’s death came back to remind us of the salient difference between sentiment and sentimentality, real grief and PC effluvia, dignity and vulgarity. It’s as if the mob’s capacity for screaming slogans starting with ‘Je suis…’ wasn’t exhausted by the PC-mandated sorrow about the victims of Charlie Hebdo.

Even as in 1997 a mob, whipped up to frenzy by Blair’s government and the Blairite press, was bellowing at the Queen “Ma’am, show us you care!!!”, so are today’s lot busily decorating canine and sometimes even their own chests with Je suis Diesel signs.

Diesel died during a French police assault on a Jihadist stronghold, when a Muslim ‘it’ girl detonated that essential fashion accessory, the suicide vest. As a side theme, the girl herself is quite interesting, for before she tarted herself up according to the latest Islamic haute couture, she had drunk like a beached sailor, smoked like a chimney, uploaded semi-nude selfies and took men by the dozen.

Such behavioural patterns aren’t normally associated with fundamental Islam. In fact they are so contrary to it that one can be forgiven for thinking that the young lady was motivated not so much by her love of Allah as her hatred of the West.

That of course greatly exonerated her sins in the eyes of Allah, for evidently having such venomous emotions is more germane to his will than even abstinence from the basic pleasures of life. But that is by the bye, for it’s not the slapper-for-Allah who’s my main theme today, but Diesel.

By all accounts the Belgian shepherd was a nice little doggie. Well, not really little but definitely nice, a good pet when he wasn’t at work. When on the job he’d turn into a son of a bitch in more ways than one, but then that’s what he was trained to do.

On the basis of what I can glean from too many confusing reports, Diesel was the only member of the French police force to die in various shootouts. Except that, and I don’t know how to put this without offending the dog lovers among my friends, Diesel wasn’t really a member of any police force.

He was but a tool. Typologically and functionally he was closer to a police truncheon than to a police officer. Diesel was many good things: lovable, trainable, obedient, effective. There was one thing he wasn’t though: human.

Hence he wasn’t a free agent when he was picked out of many puppies to be trained for sniffing duty. He no more chose to sniff his way to glory than a truncheon chooses to come down on a truculent head. And it pains me to have to repeat that the ability to make free choices is the exclusive property of man – a simple fact known for at least 2,000 years but now well-nigh forgotten.

Neither did the anthropomorphised Diesel choose to rush towards his death. He was sicced by his trainer to do that on the correct assumption that, unlike police officers, Diesel was expendable.  

A canine life is worth next to nothing when compared to the cosmic value of a single human life, and those on the cutting edge of the on-going fight know this because to them such knowledge is a matter of life or death.

But even policemen have bosses, and some of them are more interested in public relations than in public safety. Hence Diesel was decorated with service medals for his distinguished career, and I hope he barked all the right sounds when receiving his awards.

More menacing is the general public reaction to Diesel’s death. Someone who puts a Je suis Diesel sign on his own chest, or even for that matter his dog’s, is denying his own humanity. Someone who praises Diesel for his ‘heroism’ and ‘bravery’, knows the words but not their meaning.

Both concepts derive from free will, that unique property of man that Diesel didn’t possess. The human victims of the Muslim atrocity did, yet even they can’t be legitimately described as heroes because their free will was disengaged.

They were victims – an important distinction. Similarly, most passengers of the 9/11 airliners were victims, not heroes. The heroes among them were those few who feely chose to fight the murderers, thereby probably preventing their plane from falling on the political heart of Washington.

Such little semantic nuances aren’t the whole edifice of our civilisation, but they may well be the nails holding it together. It’s for want of such nails that our civilisation has been lost, or as near as damn.

 

P.S. You can find many such subversive thoughts in my book How the West Was Lost, now available in its second (paperback and electronic), edition.  

 

 

 

 

They still sputter venom at Franco

Francisco Franco died 40 years ago today, but our ‘liberal’ media still can’t leave him in peace. Thus, for example, the BBC:

“Franco fought a brutal war against democracy with the aid of Hitler and Mussolini and thereafter presided over a regime of state terror and national brainwashing through controlled media and the state education system.”

This is nonsense. Franco didn’t fight against democracy as an abstract principle. He fought against the Popular Front that was about to turn Spain into Stalin’s satellite.

Having destabilised Primo de Rivera’s transitional regime, the Popular Front, inspired by Stalin’s Comintern, installed its own government that was eventually taken over by the ‘Spanish Lenin’ Largo Caballero.

In short order, Spain sank into anarchy, with every traditional institution being destroyed and even the army disintegrating. In Stalin’s eyes, that made the country ripe for a Bolshevik takeover: the ‘revolutionary situation’ seemed to be in place.

That the Soviet chieftain didn’t get away with it was owed to the invisible hand of historical serendipity that plucked the right man out of relative obscurity and put him in the right place at the right time.

Franco landed with a small force and saved Spain from the on-going communist mayhem: the torture and murder of priests, the rape and evisceration of nuns (not always in that order), the mass murder of the ‘rich’, the almost total elimination of the traditional ruling classes, the looting and destruction of property.

The last time I looked at his photographs, Franco didn’t have wings on his back. He wasn’t an angel, far from it. It would have been so much better if the man picking up the banner of anti-Stalinism had been a Mother Teresa or, at a pinch, perhaps even a Neville Chamberlain.

However, that option wasn’t on offer. The choice wasn’t between Mother Teresa and Neville Chamberlain. It was between Franco and Stalin. Given that stark option, I’d take Franco any day: history shows that wherever the communists take over, they instantly wipe out about 10 per cent of the population, to begin with.

No doubt trendy Beeb lefties would still prefer Stalin. And to support this morally defunct preference, they are as ready as ever to misrepresent facts – even those few they get right technically.

Yes, as a pragmatic man, Franco looked for help anywhere he could find it. Internally, that led to an alliance with the Falange; externally, to one with Mussolini and Hitler. Actually, an alliance is an inadequate word to describe what essentially was a one-sided arrangement.

Franco accepted Hitler’s help having scored the diplomatic coup of promising nothing except money in return. Not only did Spain under Franco refuse to enter the Second World War on Germany’s side, but his government even denied Hitler the right of passage to Gibraltar.

Franco eagerly traded salutes with the Nazis, but balked at trading favours. It was by design that he was so unreceptive to Hitler’s overtures that the latter likened talking to Franco to having his teeth pulled.

Paris was worth a mass to Henri IV, and Madrid was worth an outstretched right arm to Franco. But he was far from being the fascist of leftie mythology. He was the last throwback to Christendom among the great leaders of the modern world, which earned him its undying enmity.

Today’s lot detest such men above anyone else. Hence they always talk about Franco’s alliance with Hitler, somehow forgetting to mention that the Republican side was financed, armed, trained and led by Stalin.

Soviet pilots were flying Soviet I-16 fighter planes over Madrid; Soviet tank crews were driving Soviet BTs into battle; the Soviet NKVD was butchering other leftist groups, including Orwell’s POUM anarchists; Soviet ‘advisers’ were leading divisions and armies.

Had Franco not stepped in, Spain today would be like Romania, and many in Spain realise this. Franco’s tomb in the Valley of the Dead remains a national shrine, and hundreds of Spaniards come every day to pay their respects.

Are they all lovers of tyranny? Some no doubt are. But a majority have a firmer grasp of history than the BBC, which proves that an ideology, especially a wrong one, can never allow a compendium of facts to become valid history.

BBC-type woolly thinking has become typical in the West. And since our politicians mostly come from the same genetic stock as Beeb hacks, it often lies at the foundation of foreign policy.

By peddling the falsehood that all regimes failing to emulate our sainted ‘democracy’ are equally rotten, they lead our countries into wars designed to unseat assorted tyrants in the name of universal suffrage – only to realise that each subsequent tyrant is much worse.

We ousted (or helped oust, or at least cheered from the sidelines) Batista to get Castro, the Shah to get the Ayatollahs, Mubarak to get the Muslim Brotherhood, Saddam and Qaddafi to get the current bloodbath, which we’re trying to make worse by ousting Assad.

The fog of mendacious verbiage descends and we no longer see reality. Il Caudillo did and, if I lived in Spain, I’d today be praying for his soul.

 

P.S. There are many such subversive thoughts in my book How the West Was Lost, now available in its second, paperback and electronic, edition.

 

Let’s hear it for student power at Cambridge

Now it’s David Starkey’s turn. This eminent Tudor historian has been dropped from the Cambridge University funding campaign after students called him ‘racist and sexist’.

The stinging accusation came in an open letter of heartfelt and hare-brained protest: “Any institution making this choice of representative would seem to care very little about its appearance in the eyes of Black and Minority students and staff, current and future.”

The future of our intellectual life added that they were ‘deeply offended’. So, actually, am I – among other things, by their capitalisation of ‘Black’ and ‘Minority’. This implicitly elevates the groups thus designated to a divine status: they, like God, call for an initial cap.

Never mind the grammar, feel the depth of emotion, along with the delicacy of sensibilities so egregiously offended.

If PC is divine, then Prof. Starkey is either an apostate or a heretic. Out comes the Holy Inquisition to judge his sin and pass its verdict.

The sin can only be redeemed in the pyre of flaming indignation. For back in 2011 Prof. Starkey had the audacity to say that Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of blood’ speech was right “in one sense”.

For those of you too young or too foreign to know what it was, the Tory minister Powell (who was a classical scholar among other things) warned about the dangers of mass, uncontrolled immigration of cultural aliens.

In it he had the temerity to quote Virgil’s Aeneid in making his prophecy: “I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.” Political correctness was embryonic in those days, but it gestated quickly enough for Powell to be summarily sacked from the government.

Not having a position from which I could be sacked, nor featuring in any film from which I could be excised, I’d say that Powell was right not just in one sense, but in just about all of them (he was wrong in his adulation of Wagner, but we’re all allowed one unaccountable weakness).

The Tiber has so far been spared a sanguinary infusion, but the Thames hasn’t been, and neither has the Seine. These rivers have received their share of blood spilled by cultural aliens, both freshly arrived and native-born. Surely the Paris carnage, among so many others, vindicates Powell?

Not only that, but Starkey went out on a limb to protest against the negrification of whatever little culture we have left: “The whites have become black; a particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion.”

Now if this doesn’t take the Bounty bicky, I don’t know what will. This statement is so much more objectionable for being true.

Witness for example our Chancellor, professing his affection for one of the nastiest rap groups out there, Niggas with Attitude. The group regales his Eaton- and Oxford-trained ears with such lyrics as “Squeeze the trigger, and bodies are hauled off// You too, boy, if ya f*** with me.”

But forget the Chancellor. Just take a short walk through our council estates (preferably in daylight) – you’ll see that Prof. Starkey was absolutely right. Or if you’re too prudent to undertake such an expedition, open the arts section of any of our broadsheets to see what kind of music takes pride of place.

In response to the epistolary witch hunt, Prof. Starkey issues a dignified statement: “If it raises any question about the nature of academic enquiry and academic freedom, I shall reserve the right to comment freely but without recrimination.”

This outrage does raise such questions, among many others. Such as, how did one of our most venerable universities turn into an asylum, run not so much by the lunatics but by politicised, fire-eating morons who debauch the very idea of university?

Actually, I attempt to answer some of such questions in my books. The first one, How the West Was Lost, has just come out in a second (paperback and electronic) edition, available from Amazon UK, various other websites, some of the more discerning bookshops, or direct from the publisher, I.B. Tauris, London.

That’s your Christmas shopping sorted

In the spirit of unabashed dog-eat-dog, no-holds-barred capitalism, I hasten to inform you that the second edition of my first book, How the West Was Lost, is now available from Amazon UK, various other websites, some of the more discerning bookshops, or direct from the publisher, I.B. Tauris, London.

Moreover, to take some pressure off your Christmas shopping, it comes in paperback and electronic versions, whose derisory prices mean you won’t need to take out a mortgage to buy a copy (which regrettably was the case while the book was out of print).

My publisher might object to the adjective ‘derisory’, opting for ‘reasonable’ instead. But he’s unlikely to read this, his capacity for absorbing my prose having been exhausted by this book. What he definitely will welcome is this abbreviated list of the over-flattering accolades the book drew the first time around:

“How the West Was Lost argues that all modern upheavals – the Reformation, the English, American, French and Russian revolutions, the Napoleonic wars, the American Civil War, both World Wars – can only be seen in the context of an assault on the core values of the West.” I.B. Tauris

“There are many wise ideas in this book.” – Roger Scruton

“A startlingly clear analysis of why we have become what we are, written with such admirable clarity and wit that news of humanity’s defeat seems almost bearable. No one who claims to know anything should open their mouth in public without reading it.” – Fay Weldon

“Highly original… an extremely important argument even for those who have no religious belief, and Alexander Boot puts it more unflinchingly, more courageously, than anyone else.” – Theodore Dalrymple

“Those reading Alexander Boot’s vigorous and witty assault on the modern superstitions of progress and science will never see the world in the same way again. A refreshing and original voice.” – James Le Fanu

“At last! Someone with the courage to say the unsayable: that we can be for liberty while detesting some of the ways in which liberty is achieved.” – Digby Anderson

“Alexander Boot puts his finger precisely on the malaise affecting Western societies. His book is the most readable account of the decline of the West since Spengler, and serenely free from contamination of academic jargon. It should be read by politicians, teachers and anyone who has anything to do with public administration. We should all read it. Twice.” – Peter Mullen

“A second Spengler.”Kontinent Magazine [I don’t take this as a compliment, but it was meant that way.]

There are quite a few more, but you get the idea. Don’t you?

 

P.S. How the West Was Lost gives a broad overview of various aspects of modernity, establishing an intellectual base for making the whole intelligible. This system of thought provides a starting point for delving more deeply into those aspects one by one. Two of my subsequent (or, in relation to this second edition, previous) books did just that. The Crisis Behind our Crisis ponders economics, while Democracy as a Neocon Trick looks at politics, and both or either would be a useful complement to The West (to say nothing of your Christmas shopping).    

 

 

A shot of HIV to treat syphilis

This admittedly unpleasant analogy came to mind at the sight of Obama and Cameron playing lickspittle to Putin before and during the G20 summit.

Come back into the fold, Vlad, they are saying. All is forgiven. Never mind the Ukraine, feel the Middle East.

Vicious attacks on neighbours, Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, East Ukraine, a spate of political murders all over the world (including London), turning Russia into a kleptofascist country unparalleled in history, regularly threatening the West with nuclear extinction – none of this matters any longer.

“We are meeting together after the appalling terrorist attacks in France,” said Dave with that carefully rehearsed statesman’s expression on his face, “and it is clear to me that we must work together to defeat the scourge of terrorism that is a threat to Britain, a threat to Russia and a threat to us all.”

The gap between us and Putin still exists, lamented Dave who managed to use the word ‘gap’ half a dozen times in a couple of sentences, but it’s getting smaller. One would think that the Russians had withdrawn from the Ukraine and Crimea, stopped their massive rearmament programme and adopted a modicum of civilised behaviour.

They haven’t. They aren’t going to either, not while the country is run by the KGB junta fronted by this murderous gangster. If there’s a gap anywhere, it’s between Dave’s ears and, judging by his cowardly submission to Putin, between his legs as well.

What separates us from Russia isn’t a gap between our ideas on Assad’s future, but a chasm between civilisation in decline and barbarism in ascendancy. On that there can be no compromise (another catchword Dave repeated several times). There can only be surrender.

The West has form in joining Russian monsters to defeat other ogres. In fact, the Putin propaganda, otherwise known as the Russian press, is screaming itself hoarse about the anti-Hitler coalition and how history is repeating itself.

If my analogy in the title is unpleasant, this one is spurious. Since neither side to that coalition could have defeated Hitler on its own, it could be plausibly presented as essential to survival.

Are Barack and Dave, with François bringing up the rear, seriously suggesting that the situation is the same now? That the combined might of the West can’t on its own handle a bunch of crazed mullahs?

If that is indeed the case, we might as well go further than merely legitimising what should be seen as an evil pariah state. We might as well apply for admission into the Russian Federation and pledge allegiance to Putin (which probably wouldn’t turn off some ‘useful idiots’ on our political right who wish we had a ‘strong leader’ like this proud KGB veteran – Peter Hitchens, ring your office).

That isn’t the case though. To use Dave’s word of the moment, there is no gap in our military capability vis-à-vis ISIS, el-Qaeda or, should it come to that, the whole Islamic world.

We could easily incinerate every ISIS stronghold with everyone in it. We could believably threaten to do the same to any country that offers logistic, financial and intelligence support to the terrorists (a demonstration or two would help to focus their minds). We could not only cut off the terrorists’ access to our banks, but also, if need be, take over the Middle Eastern oilfields, thereby starving terrorism of any financial sustenance.

We could do all those things by way of administering antibiotics to treat the syphilis of Muslim aggression. But such actions would take plenty of steel, not just to build our weapons but, infinitely more important, to strengthen our backbone.

That’s what’s missing, and hence we are treated to the cringe-making spectacle of our ‘leaders’ injecting us with a far deadlier contagion by opening the door to Putin.

We count on him to provide the resolve we ourselves lack, and he may well do that. However, his aims are different from ours.

Just as Stalin used the wartime coalition to set up his conquest of half the world, so will Putin try to use this embryonic anti-terrorist coalition to advance Russia’s ideological and territorial offensive.

That’s all he and his gang want, and it takes either a gross misunderstanding of the nature of Putin’s Russia or clinical idiocy to keep drawing parallels between the Paris carnage and the downing, by the same lot, of the Russian Airbus.

The difference is that we care about our dead and Putin doesn’t give two flying BUKs about his. What’s 224 deaths to a man who has the blood of thousands on his hands directly and, as a proud KGB man, that of millions by association?

Putin is cynically exploiting the situation to spread the Russian contagion high and wide. And our craven, mindless ‘leaders’ are falling all over themselves to proffer the syringe. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A warm welcome to our prodigal sons from Syria

The news that 450 nice British lads are on their way back home after cutting a few throats in Syria is slightly ambivalent.

On the one hand it’s good to welcome back the sheep we feared were lost for ever, or at least our government thinks it’s good. On the other hand there’s this gnawing fear that they are more lupine than ovine. What if they haven’t got throat-cutting completely out of their systems? Doesn’t bear thinking about.

A few other things do, such as today’s useful information that there are 44 million Muslims in Europe already. If they were all gathered together in one country (may I suggest Belgium?), it would be the eighth most populous country in Europe – or seventh, if we finally accept that Russia is typologically more Asian than European.

One would think that this number is already more than adequate even on general principle, never mind the current context in which it’s inevitably being considered. Such a pernicious thought, however, wouldn’t be consonant with Jean-Claude Juncker’s ideas on the subject.

My friend Jean-Claude sees no reason to reconsider his stand on what he calls Europe’s ‘generosity’. That’s one way to describe it, but not the only one. ‘Death wish’ rolls off the tongue more naturally.

A duellist who hands over his pistol to the other chap so that he can have two goes at it may be described as generous at a stretch, but ‘suicidal’ sounds more apt.

Jean-Claude likes a drink, which is the only plausible explanation for his next statement. “There is no need to review the whole European refugee policy,” he said. There’s no link between our ‘generosity’ and the Paris carnage.

Not even a teensy-weensy link, mon ami (or is it mein Freund)? After all, two of the murderers were among the recipients of Jean-Claude’s ‘generosity’. They came to Europe armed not only with AKs and hand grenades but also with Syrian passports.

How many others? I don’t know, and neither does Jean-Claude, though we both realise that there must be many. The difference between us is that I don’t mind saying it, and he does.

That Europe has ever-accelerating suicidal tendencies has been known for at least 100 years, ever since those August guns opened up. But all of us hope that this collective madness will take a while to implode our lives. Our lifetime, as a minimum. Our children’s lifetime ideally.

Such hopes may well turn out to be forlorn. For the lunatics have taken over the asylum, and they are playing Russian roulette with an automatic.

One such unbalanced person is our venerable Home Secretary. All refugees, she said, will be so thoroughly checked by the United Nations that no terrorist will ever slip through.

I do realise that the UN, as its record shows so graphically, is a paragon of brutal efficiency. However, in spite of its sterling performance during – to name just one glaring example – the Yugoslavian wars, does Mrs May seriously think it’s possible to screen hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of new arrivals?

Individually? So that not even a dozen terrorists would reach our shores? Really, Mrs May. One realises that attending all those cabinet meetings can give a girl a skewed view of humanity, but we aren’t all stupid, you know.

All this unfolds to the ever-present accompaniment of buzzing noises helpfully informing us that most Muslims aren’t terrorists. True, wrote a reader of mine. However, it just so happens that most terrorists are Muslims. I hope he doesn’t work for the BBC, where such witticisms are grounds for summary dismissal.

A man standing on a 10th floor ledge outside his window may be talked out of jumping to his death. Is there anyone out there to perform the same service for Europe? Not Theresa May. Not Dave. Not François. Not Angie. Not even – dare I say it – my friend Jean-Claude.

If history is anything to go by, then a gap thus left by our so-called democratic politicians, is likely to be filled by fascist, or at least fascistic, parties along the lines of France’s Front National or worse. This is a dangerous remedy that can be worse than the desperate disease.

The wicked concoction going by the name of the EU will fall apart sooner or later, and its house will lie in ruins. God only knows what kind of creepy-crawlies will creepy-crawl out of the rabble. The disintegration of an artificial construct always produces natural disasters.

Meanwhile, 450 murderous Muslim thugs, having quenched their bloodlust in Syria, are coming back home, to Britain. Will they be arrested on arrival? Have their passports revoked? Electronically tagged?

Not a chance. They’ll be admitted and sent on their way with mild admonishment, go and sin no more. But they will, you can count on it – with most of their young co-religionists jubilantly dancing in the streets.

The usual drivel the mourning after

Every fresh Muslim atrocity seems to push a button on the console controlling the flow of effluvia (decorum prohibits my using the bovine word that first sprang to mind).

Even as Paris morgues, hospitals and priests work overtime, identifying the dead, trying to save the still living and praying for them all, a noise as deafening as the rat-tat-tat of those AKs is gaining in volume.

Westernised Muslims and bien pensant Westerners fall all over themselves, screaming themselves hoarse about the massacre having nothing – or, when they are in a generous mood, little – to do with Islam.

Dr Qanta Ahmed’s Spectator article is typical: it mixes a soupçon of magnanimity with a bucket of mendacity to produce a rancid stew of pro-Islamic propaganda.

In the same sentence, he first adds a dash of honesty, “The repugnant seed of the Islamic State is certainly related to Islam…” and then drowns it in a lie, “…but it is also inimical to Islam.”

Dr Ahmed and the whole peace-loving Muslim community are filled with “repugnance… and a sense of desecration” when they “hear of gunmen shouting ‘Allahu akbar’ before committing the very acts of murder explicitly prohibited by the Koran.”

The good scholar no doubt has made a deeper, more professional study of that book than I have. Yet even the rankest amateur can’t fail to notice enough in the Koran to doubt either Dr Ahmed’s reading skills or his honesty.

He paints with a master’s hand a picture of a generally moderate community whose reputation is besmirched by a few rotten apples. Now I’ve met a moderate Muslim once; his name was Asif. But perhaps I haven’t been looking in the right places, an oversight to be corrected immediately. So let’s look at the Holy Book itself, the Koran. Let me see…

“Love your enemies…” Oh I do apologise, got into the wrong book. Now, here we go:

“Slay them [unbelievers] wherever ye find them…” (2:91)

“We shall cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve.” (3:151)

“Take them [unbelievers] and kill them wherever ye find them. Against such We have given you clear warrant.” (4:91)

“The unbelievers are an open enemy to you.” (4:101)

“As for thief, both male and female, cut off their hands.” (5:38)

“Take not the Jews and the Christians for friends…” (5:51)

“Slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them captive, and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush” (9:5)

“Whoso fighteth in the way of Allah, be he slain or be he victorious, on him We shall bestow a vast reward.” (4:74)

“…If they turn renegades, seize them and slay them wherever ye find them…” (4:89)

There are 107 verses like these in the Koran, conservatively counted. And, unlike the rather violent passages in the Old Testament, all of these are open-ended, not tied into a particular situation or historical context. This should be enough to show that Islam, for all its sterling qualities, doesn’t foster moderation in its adherents.

The Koran is a long book, and calls to murder and mutilation are of course leavened there with peaceful dicta as well. But it’s sheer larceny to suggest that horrific violence is ‘inimical to Islam’. It is not – especially when mullahs around the world, emphatically including France and Britain, preach a message of hate with ample scriptural support.

A moderate Muslim, in other words, is an oxymoron. A pious believer can’t possibly ignore the 107 verses calling for cannibalistic violence. And if he does ignore them – as Dr Ahmed seems to be doing – then he’s not a pious believer.

As we mourn the Paris casualties of the Muslim war on infidels and anyone else they dislike, allow me on this Sunday morning to refer to the book that emphatically doesn’t call, in any part of its canon, for the slaying of idolaters, apostates and nonbelievers:

“But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and prosecute you;” Amen.