Author: Alexander Boot

The other day an impeccably conservative friend (I really have no other) said he didn’t see any problems with Putin. Yes, he’s a bit rough round the edges, but no threat to us.

Mercifully this friend isn’t in the opinion-forming business. Alas, even many who are share the same gross, dangerous, potentially suicidal misapprehension.

Characteristically, none of my Russian friends shares it. This isn’t because they are cleverer than my English or French friends. It’s just that they have one indisputable advantage: they can read the Russian press.

That’s why they couldn’t understand the incredulity implied in the title of a Mail article yesterday: Did Putin Just Threaten to Go Nuclear on ISIS?

Because they aren’t handicapped by the eponymous linguistic deficiency, my Russian friends know that hardly a day goes by that either Putin or one of his henchmen in the government or in the media doesn’t threaten nuclear annihilation – mainly of the US, but also of her allies.

The term that currently seems to be in vogue is ‘turning [insert the potential target, the US for preference] into radioactive dust’, but there are numerous variations, such as Putin’s favourite: “I’d like to remind [anyone who doesn’t like what Russia is doing in the Crimea, the Ukraine, Syria etc.] that Russia is a nuclear power.”

Indeed she is. And nuclear blackmail has been part and parcel of Russia’s foreign policy ever since 1954, when Putin’s role models tried an atomic bomb on unsuspecting live targets at the Totsk testing grounds. It worked as advertised, killing about 50,000 on the spot and God knows how many by delayed action. Since then the Russians have held a nuclear cosh over the West’s head like the sword of Damocles. 

So, to answer The Mail’s incredulous question, of course he did. Why stop now doing what he has been doing every day for at least 18 months, either personally or by proxy?

To Vlad’s credit this time he didn’t mention radioactive dust into which he could turn half the world. Instead he spoke in equivoques, an art he learned in the service of the KGB.

Having fired some submarine missiles 1,500 miles from the Caspian to Syria, Vlad couldn’t contain his glee:

“We now see that these are… high-precision weapons that can be equipped with conventional or special nuclear warheads. Naturally, we do not need that to fight terrorists, and I hope [my emphasis] we will never need it. But overall, this speaks to our significant progress in terms of improving weaponry… being supplied to the Russian army and navy.”

Allow me to translate from the KGB, a language I learned courtesy of my interrogators 45 years ago.

Vlad hopes a nuclear devastation of the Middle East will be unnecessary, but he isn’t quite sure. And make no mistake: going nuclear in a region where different groups fighting different enemies are densely intermingled would indeed be tantamount to indiscriminate annihilation.

You know it, I know it, everyone knows it. Vlad knows it too, which is why he isn’t going to nuke ISIS. His statement was merely the next instalment in the saga of nuclear blackmail written over the last 60 years, with new pages being added every day.

Weapons are after all designed to kill people. Since it’s clear Putin isn’t going to arm his Kalibre cruise missiles with nuclear warheads to fight terrorism, then why emphasise that capability to the world at large? Whom is he threatening to kill?

The answer is, Westerners. Us. Like the street thug he self-admittedly was in his youth, he’s hissing at us: “You may be taller than me, stronger than me, smarter than me. But I can slash your eyes with a razor.”

So he conceivably could. More likely, in the good KGB tradition he wants us to believe he could, to blackmail us into docility. This is all par for the course charted by his sponsoring organisation directly it was formed in 1918. No surprises there.

The only surprising thing is that our papers seem to be surprised. I’m not. But then I’m blessed (or cursed, depending on how one looks at it) with the ability to read Russian.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Following a good showing in the French regional elections, Marine Le Pen has assorted liberal pundits, which is to say most Western media, running scared.

The spectre of a far-right takeover is wafting through the air, leaving fear everywhere in its wake. What if the Le Pens, niece, aunt and possibly even her banished father, form the next government of France?

They won’t, but the fear isn’t wholly unfounded. Our wishy-washy governments can’t, or more precisely won’t, do anything to combat the accelerating Muslim threat. Moreover, as Donald Trump has found, even mooting such a relatively moderate measure as blocking entry to more Muslims causes a violent reaction all over Europe – even though he was only talking about the US.

Trump wasn’t suggesting such radical steps as internment or deportation. All he said was that, until a fool-proof way of vetting Muslim arrivals is found, perhaps it’s unwise to let any more in. This view, incidentally, is shared by the governments of most Muslim countries, such as Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, where they don’t admit any Syrians because they correctly see them as a terrorist threat.

So do we, really, except that the God of Political Correctness won’t let us utter such words. We’d rather take a few casualties and turn our cities into souqs than risk offending that vengeful deity.

The only European groups that dare speak the unspeakable are various nationalist parties, such as the French Front National. And the more craven the policies of European governments are, the louder will the voice of such groups be heard.

For most people are happy to accept the virtual reality stuffed down their throats, but only for as long as they don’t feel personally threatened as a result. However, when they hesitate to go out for fear of being shot, stabbed or blown up, they become less docile. Actual reality barges in, pushing the virtual kind out.

This creates troubled waters in which assorted fascist, quasi-fascist, neo-fascist and crypto-fascist groups can then fish profitably. The Front National falls into that last category and, if the party ever advances beyond local success, the ‘crypto’ part may well fall off, leaving the ‘fascist’ part all on its own.

It’s conceivable, though far from certain, that an FN government could alleviate the Islamic problem, which is more acute in France than in most European countries. But the remedy may well prove to be deadlier than the disease.

Historical analogies are screaming to be drawn. For the economic problems in Germany circa 1933 were easily as catastrophic as the immigration problem is in France now. It was on his promise to solve such problems that Hitler came to power, and he was as good as his word, in the short term. But there were attendant costs, and I don’t need to remind you what they were.

Fascism, neat or whatever prefix one chooses to attach to it, must not be allowed to vanquish in Europe again no matter what the temptation. If it does, Europe will emerge at the other end as unrecognisable as it would even with a greater Muslim presence.

Whatever little is left of Western civilisation must be saved by means indigenous to Western civilisation. As the history of Rome shows, letting barbarians sort the metropolis out isn’t a good idea.

What I find baffling is the tag ‘right-wing’ attached to Marine Le Pen and her jolly friends. Hating aliens, foreigners and Jews (this last hatred Marine doesn’t emphasise as much as her father did, but make no mistake – it’s there) seems to be a sufficient qualification.

This is woolly thinking married to ignorance, which is a union routinely made in our press. For fascism, as represented by the FN or for that matter Hitler or Mussolini, is a socialist heresy. Hence it sits on the left of the political spectrum, not on the right inhabited by God, king and country conservatives in Britain or their republican counterparts elsewhere.

The FN’s economic programme puts the party to the left of Hollande’s socialists whom no one accuses of being right-wing. Apart from being a protectionist and therefore no fan of free markets, Marine believes that the government should nationalise health, transportation, education, energy and banking, which is as far from right-wing desiderata as one can get this side of Joseph Stalin.

So why are the Le Pens, along with Mussolini and Hitler a couple of generations ago, described as right-wing? The reasons for that aren’t rational but emotional and ideological.

Most mainstream media are left-wing, however they choose to describe themselves. Hence in their minds left-wing means good, and therefore, dialectically speaking, right-wing means bad. They don’t like Marine Le Pen (or her typological ancestors), so she has to be right-wing.

Serious thought is as far away from this taxonomy as Marine Le Pen is from conservatism. As to her eventually occupying the Elysée Palace, I can allay the fears of our left-wing darlings.

Barring a global catastrophe, extremist parties don’t ascend to power in the high-rent part of Europe. And if such a catastrophe befalls, it won’t really matter who lives in that palace just off Champs–Elysées.

 

 

Blair’s statement stands to reason: at this rate it won’t take long before Britain is no longer British in any other than the purely legal sense. And even that will be in doubt, when our status as a gau in the EU Reich is finalised.

At that point the word ‘immigration’ will become meaningless. After all, we don’t refer to someone who moves from Sheffield to London as an immigrant. This isn’t quite what Blair had in mind, but it’s a future made possible, nay likely, by him and those like him.

If Hannah Arendt had had the pleasure of knowing Tony Blair, she would have looked at his picture when writing about the banality of evil. For our former PM and, he hopes, future gauleiter, epitomises both banality and evil.

The demons Arendt had in mind, all those Stalins and Hitlers, were unquestionably evil, but they were far from banal. It has taken Tony to show how the two qualities can happily co-exist in one breast.

On Blair’s watch the foreign population of Britain went up by a staggering 3.6 million, while the restrictions on immigration he removed paved the way for millions more to arrive way past his tenure and in perpetuity.

That wasn’t a natural process at all. It was a calculated ploy to drown traditional British conservatism in a deluge of alien admixtures to a point where the original composition is dissolved.

The short-term political aim was clear even before Blair’s lieutenant Peter Mandelson explained what it was: creating a permanent bloc of Labour voters. The logic behind that cynical stratagem was sound.

For immigrants in general, and culturally alien immigrants in particular, tend to vote for parties of the Left that are perceived as being anti-establishment, and the British establishment is associated in their minds with clubbable Toryism.

Of course the traditional taxonomy no longer applies, and mainstream parties everywhere differ mostly in their rhetoric, not substance. However, most immigrants don’t know enough about politics in their adopted lands to realise this.

Because the Tories sing God Save the Queen and Jerusalem at their conferences, rather than the Internationale and Bandiera Rossa favoured by Labour, new arrivals fail to see that both sides of the aisle have more to unite them than to set them apart.

Both are equally committed to sowing with coarse salt the field in which true conservatism, which is to say visceral Britishness, has ever grown or could possibly grow again. In that sense anti-establishment has become establishment, but few new arrivals grasp this straight away.

That’s why all the short-term goals Blair set for himself will be realised when most of his wave of arrivals have qualified to vote, possibly by the time of the next general election. But the elite represented by Blair has long-term goals as well.

He and his ilk come from a long history of resentment against the country as it is, not as they wish it to be. At the back of their mind is the desire not so much to nationalise the economy as to denationalise the nation.

For, if Britain as she is has failed to live up to the warped ideal for which Blair yearns, she must be punished by dissolution. Hence his madcap commitment not only to staying in the EU but also, incredibly, to joining the euro. Only this leap into the economic abyss will satisfy his urge to reduce Britishness to a quaint anachronism devoid of any political outlet.

Hence, while reassuring us that concerns about immigration are a passing fad unworthy of serious attention, Blair then reiterated his other theme: we, he said, would “diminish ourselves” by leaving the EU.

That’s why we should focus all our efforts on becoming a gau in the EU without being side-tracked by ‘short-term’ issues: “There’s a risk we end up having a debate in Britain over the EU that is essentially about immigration and short-term issues to do with the big refugee crisis or the short-term problems of the single currency.”

One is beginning to think that the long-term issue we must focus on is Blair’s self-aggrandisement and self-enrichment, ambitions that can live only if Britain dies. Well, this is a vision of some sort. How widely it’s shared is a different matter altogether.

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

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“House master” is the name by which heads of Harvard’s halls of residence have been known since God was young. Well, no longer.

The name has now been abolished following a number of – justified! – complaints from students blessed with high racial sensitivity. The word ‘master’, they explained, evokes the time of slavery, when black people had to address their owners in this subservient manner.

This link, however indirect it may sound, is so traumatic that the more sensitive students can’t properly concentrate on immersing themselves in such time-honoured academic subjects as Condom Studies, the Jedi Way of Training, Philosophy and Star Trek, Harry Potter Studies and the History of Lace Knitting (such courses are indeed on offer at American universities; I didn’t make it up).

As someone who has devoted his whole life to the tireless fight for every good cause anybody puts up as such, I can only welcome this development. The nature of progress is such that people get more sensitive about more things, and surely heightened sensitivity is a sign of a well-developed personality.

My only regret is that this measure hasn’t gone far enough. However, one does have to start somewhere, and it’s the duty of older people like me to guide our brittle, delicate youngsters farther down the road leading to emotionally safe havens.

In that spirit I suggest that ‘house master’ be changed for ‘my main man’. Also, art courses must stop, effective immediately, talking about Old Masters. What’s wrong with Painters Who Have Been Dead for a Rather Long Time? Nothing at all, I dare say.

While we’re on the subject, what’s that with master’s degrees? What are these degrees in, slave driving? And don’t give me that bunk about the word deriving from the Latin word magister, meaning ‘teacher’. A trauma is anything the traumatised person says it is, and not every traumatised person should be expected to be up on Latin etymology.

Henceforth a Harvard MBA must, repeat must, become  an Advanced Maven of Every Basic Attainment, AMOEBA for short.

Moving right along, a masterly performance by a musician must be referred to as a ‘cool gig, dude’. And if the musician then gives a master class it must be called a ‘mass class’, thus ridding the term of any racial connotations and also emphasising the mandatory egalitarian nature of any relationship between teacher and pupil.

A field of endeavour, or indeed a playing field, brings back the wounding memories of cotton fields south of the Mason-Dixon line, where Afro-Americans (who in those days were shamefully called something else) toiled under the blazing sun to the accompaniment of the whistling sounds produced by their overseers’ bullwhips.

May I suggest ‘my thing’ instead of ‘field of endeavour’ and ‘shake ‘n bake place’ for ‘playing field’? You’re free to come up with your own suggestions if you don’t like mine.

And while you’re at it, think also of an inoffensive term for ‘magnetic field’. ‘That magnetic thing’ works for me, but don’t let me prejudice your thinking.

It’s almost embarrassing to state the obvious, in this case that the word ‘cotton’ has no place in the proverbial groves, even if it only appears on the label inside a shirt collar. Students must be forbidden, on pain of expulsion, to wear cotton garments that run the risk of sending the more sensitive among them into an irreversible tailspin.

Lycra provides a perfect, tasteful substitute to the ‘c’ word, or else I’d recommend those shell suits that are so favoured in the urban hotbeds of sensitivity.

Well, I’m not proposing to mention every potentially offensive word that has no place in the academic vocabulary. My purpose is more modest: to congratulate the faculty of Harvard University on this progressive initiative and outline other possible avenues for advancing therapeutic lexicography.

It’s about time we whipped the English language into shape…. Oops, ever so sorry. Forget I said ‘whipped’. I’ll never forgive myself if I caused a Harvard student to roll on the floor frothing at the mouth.

My ‘the-world-has-gone-mad’ mantra is so repetitive that you may think it’s some kind of idée fixe – that, regardless of the world’s mental state, I’m the mad one.

If that thought has crossed your mind, I suggest you scan various comments made immediately before and after the RAF raids on Syria… sorry, I mean ISIS strongholds.

Pope Francis got the ball rolling by stating that Christians and Muslims “… are all God’s children, we all have the same Father… we need to live peacefully alongside one another, develop friendships.” Stoutly spoken and absolutely true.

The Pontiff then owned up to the lamentable fact that Catholics have their share of fundamentalists too. “Fundamentalism is a sickness that is in all religions,” said His Holiness. “We Catholics have some – and not some, many – who believe they possess the absolute truth…”

One would think that belief in possessing the absolute truth is inherent to faith in Christ, but other than that the statement is irrefutable. There are indeed many Catholic fundamentalists about and, I’m man enough to admit this, some of them are my close friends.

These chaps do all the fundamentalist things. They despise Vatican II, attend Latin mass every Sunday at least, go to confession once a week, pray several times a day, fast at Lent, eat fish on Fridays. One or two have even taken the vow of chastity.

There are, however, some fundamentalist things my friends don’t do, and I haven’t heard of others like them indulging in such things either.

They neither kill nor hate those who have the misfortune not to be a fundamentalist Catholic. They don’t stone adulterers. They don’t throw homosexuals off tall buildings. They don’t castrate, rape and abuse women. They don’t behead infidels on camera. They don’t blow up public transportation. They don’t mow people down by indiscriminately firing automatic weapons at crowds. They don’t fly planes into tall buildings.

Since Muslim fundamentalists do such things on an ever-increasing scale, and have been wreaking non-stop mayhem for 1,400 years, then perhaps the Pontiff’s feel-good message – and I hope I won’t be smitten by lightning for saying this – is pretty much meaningless, at best.

To reconnect with reality, His Holiness should look up the speeches made on a similar occasion in 1096 by Urban II and St Bernard. So don’t call me mad.

Not to be outdone, our illustrious PM Dave opined that Islam is “a peaceful religion hijacked by fundamentalists”. Now please re-read my above comment about the 1,400 years, which, unlike Dave’s logorrhoea, is based on factual evidence, and decide which of us is mad.

Islam seems to have a pronounced propensity to be hijacked by mass murderers, which isn’t surprising considering that, rather than being a crucified martyr, its founder used to behead hundreds of people with his own hand.

Since Dave seems to have drunk his way through university, allow me to explain something for his benefit. Namely that mass violence is always galvanised by an inner core of fundamentalists, a fact as universal as it is irrelevant.

Most Muslims don’t do the things I mentioned above. Neither did most Russians murder millions of other Russians. Neither did most Germans kill millions of Jews. Neither did most Japanese commit unspeakable atrocities. In each case the initiative came from a cadre of truly evil men – yet in each case there was something about the ambient populace that made them acquiesce.

And acquiesce they did, actively or passively, propagating evil into a global menace. That’s why the Allies bombed Germany flat, producing a huge amount of collateral damage before the term was even invented. That’s why A-bombs were dropped on Japanese cities. That’s why Nato was prepared to do the same to Russian cities.

So who’s mad, Dave or me? Who’s guilty of maniacal divorce from reality and every piece of historical and current evidence? Don’t answer that.

Then there’s Tim Montgomerie of The Times, currying favour with his American neocon friends. The neocons combine Trotskyist temperament with American jingoism and adolescent minds, which means they regard any bombing campaign as ipso facto splendid, provided it’s America that does the bombing.

They also like Britain to join in the fun, if only to remind their erstwhile metropolis who’s boss now. 

“That is why,” complains Mr Montgomerie, “the rise of nativist voices in British politics, such as Jeremy Corbyn, Nigel Farage and Nicola Sturgeon — an unholy trinity of withdrawalists — has unsettled America’s foreign policy establishment.”

I’m sure Mr Farage will be overjoyed to find himself lumped together with the other two. In any case, considering that Corbyn and Sturgeon want to transfer their country’s sovereignty to Brussels, I’m not sure how they rate the adjective ‘nativist’.

“Fortunately,” continues Mr Montgomerie, “there are signs that America may be getting over the exhaustion and loss of self-belief caused by the Iraq war.”

I’d be tempted to add that the Iraq war was in its turn caused by exactly the same neocon urges as those Mr Montgomerie is hailing in such a sycophantic manner. It’s largely because of the neocons’ maniacal and ill-founded self-belief that we got into this mess to begin with.

This is yet another example of any touch with reality hopelessly lost, and it’s not to be found anywhere one looks. So I’ll say it a thousand times if I’ve said it once: the world has gone mad. It’s the only sane thing to say.

 

 

 

 

 

The more immigrants we admit, the better George Osborne will look to posterity – and presumably to the voters in the next general election. This observation may sound counterintuitive, but only to those who haven’t lost touch with reality as irrevocably as our spivocrats have.

You see, keeping promises isn’t essential to getting elected and re-elected, but it helps. George knows this, which is why he has done some simple calculations. On that basis, having announced his spending and deficit-cutting plans, he has made promises he has no way of keeping unless net migration stands at 180,000 a year or higher.

Anyone who draws from this the conclusion that the more Syrians and Romanians we welcome to these shores, the healthier the economy will be, would only betray his ignorance of how HMG works. For our spivs operate within virtual reality, where perception is everything and truth is, well, less than nothing – it’s a big negative to be avoided at all costs.

Those who still remember what actual reality looks like won’t understand how admitting millions (the 180,000 number is only the point of departure – for the moon) of cultural aliens maladjusted to life in the West can possibly make us better off.

Wouldn’t they put a huge pressure on the social budget? Well, yes. And the NHS? Yes, now that you mention it. Education? Yes, unfortunately. And the overall infrastructure? You can say that again, though please don’t. And haven’t the government’s own figures shown that the net economic effect of immigration from the low-rent parts of the world is negative? Now that depends on how you look at it.

Here we’ve reached the crux of the matter. For such figures indeed depend on who’s counting, and how.

Of course all those migrants will cost us a pretty penny, trillions of pretty pennies. But none of the rubrics from which the debits will come are George’s department. His performance will be assessed on how the Exchequer is doing. So if the NHS has to stop treating patients altogether, that’s not George’s problem, is it? Let the Health Secretary worry about that.

George’s concern is to make sure the deficit looks small as percentage of GDP, for that’s how it’s calculated. And there George’s logic can’t be faulted: indeed the greater the number of people operating within an economy, the greater its GDP – and the smaller the absolute amount of overspending as seen in relation to it.

This is chicanery on so many levels that even listing them would try your patience. The most obvious one is that, though GDP does give some vague indication of the state of the economy, it can mislead as easily as inform.

For GDP is calculated on the basis of all products and services changing hands within the economy. For example, if you borrow £10,000 from NatWest, Britain’s GDP will increase by that amount. And when you repay the debt, GDP will go up again. Hence though this indicator has gone up £20,000 plus whatever interest you had to pay, it’s not immediately clear how the economy has become any healthier.

Of course adding a million new arrivals every couple of years will increase GDP – they all have to consume even if they don’t necessarily earn. George will then be able to continue spending like a beached sailor, driving the economy towards those huge rocks out there, without fearing for his electoral chances.

QED. That the economy is running the very real risk of ending up as flotsam on a beach is no concern of his – provided the wreck doesn’t happen within the next four years.

And we haven’t yet begun to talk about the irreparable social and cultural cost of mass, uncontrolled immigration. But let’s not. It’s just too depressing for words.

 

 

 

 

 

There has never been such a rotten deal in history, but then there has never been such a rotten contrivance as the EU either.

There have been other evil empires, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in the most immediate past, but those were held together by violence. The EU, on the other hand, is more or less a voluntary association, even though blackmail and bribery had something to do with its founding.

This means that the Commission, headed by my friend Junk, as Mr Juncker likes to be known, governs by consent. Not of the governed, mind you: I for one can’t recall consenting to this arrangement. The blanket consent was given on our behalf by monumentally corrupt and mentally challenged spivocracies known as national governments.

On the logical Lockean assumption that consent means pre-agreeing to anything, including collective suicide, the European spivs now feel empowered to destroy what little is left of European civilisation (provided they themselves are sitting pretty).

This laudable aim can be achieved in any number of ways but, not to leave anything to chance, the surest method is to kick Europe’s door open to millions of cultural aliens full of hatred for everything Europe stands for, except perhaps free access to social services.

This is precisely what the EU has done by offering a huge bribe to Turkey.

Of course bribery is coded into the EU’s DNA, going back to the days of the Prussian Zollverein on which the EU is largely based. But at least in those days the suicide element wasn’t the prime motivation.

The bribe starts with offering Turkey €3 billion on the nail and then as much every subsequent year for the promise to keep 2.2 million Syrian migrants off European welfare rolls.

This monetary compensation strikes one as rather excessive – especially since it’s not immediately clear how Turkey can fulfil such a promise against the background of an endless deluge of huddled Muslim masses yearning to receive benefits, while occasionally murdering the benefactors.

Yet all those billions are only a start. In exchange for kindly agreeing to accept the money (a big chunk of which will come from us), the Turks will be allowed to travel anywhere in Europe without visas. For all intents and purposes this means illegally settling anywhere in Europe, yet even this isn’t the whole deal.

In addition, Turkey will be fast-tracked into the European Union, presumably on the strength of her strong attachment to European values, an affection going back to the days of the Ottoman Empire and rapidly growing under Erdogan’s aegis.

In other words, in exchange for the disingenuous promise to bar 2.2 Syrian Muslims from Europe that Turkey neither can keep nor has any intention of keeping, 75 million Turkish Muslims will be allowed to settle in Europe.

I’m sure that keen students of Islamic intricacies will point out the fundamental differences between Syrian and Turkish Muslims, something that regrettably escapes me. However, even such arcane knowledge can’t possibly trump arithmetic.

For, however fundamental the differences between the two groups are, they can’t possibly outweigh the mathematical disparity between 2.2 million and 75 million, or even a significant portion thereof.

In other words, a distinct possibility exists that all of Europe will in short order begin to resemble Malmö, Sweden’s third largest city. A third of its population is Muslim, and the city has more violent crime than the rest of Scandinavia put together.

One detects a causative link between these two statistics. One can also foresee that in a few years all of Europe will be constructed on this proven model, courtesy of the EU. Can’t wait.

 

 

 

 

 

 

By way of illustration, I’m going to quote the headline and lead paragraph of yesterday’s article in The Daily Mail.

The article falls in line with the general thrust of our coverage of Israel in Britain: the Palestinians may be a little rough round the edges, but they have a legitimate grievance. The Israelis, on the other hand, don’t so much react to manifestations of such grievances as overreact.

That is the strategy, now let’s look at the tactics. The purpose here is to communicate the strategic message without hearing from the Press Complaints Commission.

Headline: “Jerusalem streets run red with blood: Israeli police shoot dead man who stabbed border guard at Damascus Gate – the 99^th Palestinian to die in latest wave of violence.”

See what I mean? Jerusalem streets run red with Palestinian blood wantonly spilled by Israelis who probably used the blood for ritual purposes – that is the subtext.

The text is factually unassailable, except for one minor detail: one man shot, even for no provocation, is unlikely to have his blood flowing into the streets, plural. One street, perhaps, and even then, for it to run red with blood an Israeli bullet would have had to sever a major artery, the carotid one for preference.

Then of course any sense of balance would dictate that, now that we know how many Palestinians died while manifesting their just grievances, we should be told how many Israelis fell victim too (224 so far this year, 49 of them dead – and there’s still a month to go).

But hey, there are some high journalistic standards to uphold here. And a sense of balance is prime among them. Hence the lead paragraph:

“A Palestinian man has been shot dead at an entrance to the Old City of Jerusalem after he stabbed an Israeli border guard in the neck this morning. Just two hours later, a woman was stabbed in the back as she waited for a bus in north Jerusalem.”

You can see me wiping my brow even as we speak. Our most conservative newspaper hasn’t lost its objectivity after all, its commitment to truth. So the killing of the Palestinian man who drowned most of Jerusalem in his blood was either self-defence or retaliation? So it was justifiable?

Ah, but I didn’t tell you what the kicker was, coming in the very next sentence. Here it is: “Neither the policeman nor the woman were seriously wounded in the attacks.”

It should have been ‘was’, not ‘were’, but we’re way past the point where we expect grammatical rectitude from our semi-literate hacks and totally illiterate sub-editors. We do expect unbiased reporting though, and it is this expectation that this sentence frustrates, while pretending to be dispassionately objective.

Can you spot how? Of course you can. The sanguinary Palestinian was killed; neither of his victims was (or were, to the victims of our comprehensive education).

It’s that overreaction, you see. It’s that disproportionate response all over again. Well done, The Mail. I wouldn’t call this message subliminal, but it certainly conveys the message less crudely than one would expect from more left-leaning papers.

Never mind that Israel is surrounded by millions of fanatics whose governments are institutionally committed to murdering every Israeli. Never mind that terrorist attacks, successful or thwarted, happen practically every day in Israeli towns. Never mind that Israelis don’t have a moment’s peace.

One Palestinian killed is too many. One Palestinian killed is enough to inundate all of Jerusalem with the congealing red liquor.

If you are planning a career in journalism, this is a useful lesson to learn. Denotation is nothing; connotation, everything. Text trumps subtext. A few nice touches, and truth disappears behind the fog of factual accuracy.

 

Every day brings confirmations to the dawning truth that no satire can keep pace with the modern world.

It seems as if it was only yesterday when I made sly comments on women priests complaining about the sexless attire they have to wear. Responding to the growing demand, a famous designer began to fashion clerical clothes accentuating womanly charms.

I was so impressed with the deeply slit skirts that I let my fantasy flow freely, opining, among other things, that a nicely revealing décolletage wasn’t incompatible with the dog collar. I even went so far as to suggest that the reverend ladies perhaps ought to celebrate mass in the nude (having looked at their photographs, I withdrew the suggestion).

A priest friend took exception to my flippancy, especially when I wrote that such a development could give a whole new meaning to the entreaty “Take, eat: this is my body”. “Blasphemy,” he said, correctly, and I was suitably contrite.

Neither of us realised that I was not only blasphemous but also prophetic. For the world has caught up with my morbid satirical vision, moving it a step closer to reality.

Downing Street has just appointed the Venerable Karen Gorham to the bishopric of Sherborne, and I shan’t bore you with yet another diatribe about female priests and especially bishops.

What’s worth mentioning is the interesting fact that the freshly minted bishop is the author of an impassioned apologia pro vita sua… sorry, wrong book. The apologia the Venerable Karen did write was about the delights of nudism.

Doubtless to spare the aesthetic sensibilities of the outside world, the new bishop no longer practises what she preaches, as it were. But she used to, throughout her youth.

Going buck naked, she wrote a few years ago, “is just about doing things which one generally does with clothes on.” Since Her future Grace generally officiates church services… well, you get the picture.

“It is a natural way of doing things, and gives people freedom,” she added. Far be it from me to debate a theological point with a professional, but Jesus, in whose divinity Her naked Grace presumably believes, talked about the truth making one free.

I think, from my lowly theological position, that he meant the truth of God, not that of walking about with one’s floppy bits flapping in the wind.

Sinking even deeper into the exegetical hole I’ve dug for myself, I may even suggest that going starkers isn’t natural any longer. It was so only before Original Sin, a concept the Venerable Karen must have studied at the seminary but has since forgotten.

When Adam and Eve disobeyed God, they – well, all of us – were punished. “And the eyes of them were opened, and they knew they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.”

Of course the Venerable Karen might have received a personal revelation that Original Sin no longer applies and, if so, by all means she should share it with us.

But in the absence of such a Damascene experience, her advocacy of nudism makes her sound vulgar, ignorant and probably agnostic. Along with her unmarried womanliness, these are just the right qualifications to become a bishop in today’s Church of England.

According to Diane Abbott, Labour’s international development spokesman, “Mao did more good than wrong.” Specifically, he left his country “on the verge of great economic success.”

This shows an enviable consistency of opinion, for back in 2008 Miss Abbott explained to a TV audience that “I suppose that… Mao did more good than wrong. We can’t say that about the Nazis.”

Well, I don’t know about the balance (or rather I do and will get to it later), but the Nazis had their moments too. For example, they were the first to establish a link between smoking and lung cancer, thanks to which cancer rates in West Germany remained lower than in the rest of Europe for decades.

This was achieved without staging any ghastly experiments on animals, to which Miss Abbott no doubt objects. Of course the Nazis had no shortage of eager human volunteers, but at least Hitler looked after animal welfare.

Moreover, Hitler, Hess and quite a few other leading Nazis occupied the high moral ground by being vegetarian. It has taken the idea some time to catch on, but now, even though most of us regrettably still insist on devouring the bodies of murdered animals, we know exactly where true virtue lies.

As to economic success, Hitler eliminated unemployment and energised German industry to a point where it continued to crank out weaponry even when most of it lay in ruins due to Allied bombing campaigns (which I, presumably along with Miss Abbott, deplore). Then again, Nazi industrialists had access to cheap labour generously provided by such work centres as Auschwitz.

So you see, Mao isn’t the only one who did good things as well as bad. Stalin could also boast – and the Russian press is still boasting for him – that he took over a Russia of the plough and left her with the hydrogen bomb. The greatest war industry the world had ever seen was created from scratch in less than 10 years in the 1930s – if that’s not a great economic achievement, I don’t know what is.

As to Mao, he murdered, by executions, privation and artificial famines, 70 million of his citizens, a fact more indisputable than the rather mythical ‘economic success’ on the verge of which he left the country. On which side of Miss Abbott’s ledger does this fact appear?

Naturally, as a communist in all but name, she can justify mass murder dialectically. Thesis: 70 million were murdered. Antithesis: They died in a good cause. Synthesis: Their deaths, lamentable as they must be, left China “on the verge of great economic success”. Marx himself couldn’t have done better, and as to Hegel, he was a rank amateur.

China’s ‘great economic success’ was all about creating a slave economy on millions of corpses. That someone like Abbott would be ignorant enough to know nothing about economics and amoral enough not to care about millions of victims is par for the course – she is, after all, a communist in all but name and, which is worse, Jeremy Corbyn’s ex-mistress.

Even mentioning this disgusting woman in polite conversation would be pointless and ill-advised – except for one minor detail. She is a member of Parliament. And of the shadow cabinet. And of the elite that governs us.

It pains me that Great Britain – Great Britain! – is governed by an elite including a creature who thinks that creating a slave economy that benefits a small group and leaves the rest starving justifies 70 million dead – and the rest starving.

From here there’s but a small moral step (if a greater physical one) to being governed by ISIS. At least those chaps don’t pretend to be respectable.