Author: Alexander Boot

The moment I heard about the knife attack just behind the British Museum, and before the attacker’s identity was revealed, I sensed that somehow Norwegians were involved.

Sitting on huge oil reserves, those smug Norsemen aren’t satisfied with being the world’s sixth richest country. They also want to commit acts of terrorism all over the world, and specifically in Russell Square.

Then the knife-wielding murderer chose as his target a middle-aged American woman. This must have reflected the pressure Norwegians feel from the US, the world’s ninth richest country, but closing in fast.

The picture was clear in my mind, and when the police did reveal that the murderer was a Norwegian national, I toasted my soothsaying powers. The slight snag was that the killer wasn’t, shall we say, a typical Norseman.

He turned out to be Zakaria Bulhan, a Muslim Norwegian national of Somali origin. This redeemed Norwegians in my eyes, but only partly.

For, the police explained, there’s no evidence that Bulhan was “radicalised” or “motivated by terrorism”. There was evidence, however, that he was “mentally ill”. Hence he must have been motivated by his Norwegian identity. And mental illness is pandemic in Scandinavia. Just look at their suicide rate.

My facetiousness apart, we’ve heard roughly the same official mantra after just about every Muslim atrocity. God forbid we’d make a connection between Islam and terrorism. Let Norway carry the can instead.

Now I’d suggest that the urge to stab people at random is ipso facto fairly radical, unlikely to be motivated by moderation. Nor is a stabber likely to be a well-balanced individual. There exists, however, a gap between some emotional instability, which is widespread, and mental illness, which is relatively rare.

The former doesn’t override the ability to tell right from wrong; the latter may. Our police are clearly under orders to make a blanket claim of mental illness for all Muslim murderers. But what’s the truth of the matter?

Enter Parmjit Singh, Bulhan’s next-door neighbour, who has known the murderer for seven years and is willing to talk. And what do you know? Turns out the youth was “a devout Muslim”. Moreover, his ‘mental illness’ has turned out to be both a red herring and, to mix zoological metaphors, a scapegoat.

“They said he had mental health issues but that was not the boy I knew,” said Mr Singh. “The news of his mental illness is completely new, we never heard that. Honestly, I think his mental health problems are a scapegoat.”

So why did that knife see the light of day? “He wasn’t working, he was hanging around with Somalian boys and I think they had possible links to serious ISIS people – not directly, but they see all this stuff and are inspired by it.”

All that stuff Mr Singh was referring to is jihadist literature of which Bulhan was rather fond, if heaps of it found in his house are any indication.

“I think boys have put pressure on him to go there and do something,” explained Mr Singh. “He was very impressionable growing up”.

Well, this just about gets Norwegians off the hook, as far as I’m concerned. And puts us all firmly on it.

Our police diligently pursue anyone guilty of looking at child porn (the only sexual perversion singled out for opprobrium), while being completely lackadaisical about ‘all this stuff’ that incites ‘impressionable’ young Muslims to murder.

Without in any way justifying that sort of voyeurism, one could still suggest that jihadist literature presents the greater danger. The experience of the last 1,400 years shows that many young Muslims are impressionable enough to heed the murderous message and do what the founder of their creed did with so much gusto.

Any sensible government would realise that its main, not to say only, legitimate function is to protect its people. This is one duty about which there can be no ‘yes, but…’ And there’s only one possible answer to the question of how far a government should go in pursuit of this objective: as far as it takes. Whatever works.

Mass internment and deportation may be necessary if other measures fail. These may include tagging all Muslims, shutting down every mosque or community centre in which one jihadist word has ever been uttered, stopping Muslim immigration, dispersing Muslim ghettos inundating our cities, withdrawing citizenship from any Muslim disseminating jihadists literature, punishing those who read it, prohibiting such Muslim symbols as the burqa, outlawing any practice of Sharia law – you name it. Whatever works.

Above all, the point must be communicated in no uncertain terms that our enemies aren’t jihadists, extremists, Islamic fundamentalists or even Norwegians. It’s Islam that’s waging war on us, and we must fight back.

The operating words there are ‘sensible government’. Alas, our government isn’t sensible, it’s modern. Its metaphysical premises won’t allow it to take physical measures along the lines I mentioned. To paraphrase the old saying, what would Mrs Merkel say?

So let’s brace ourselves for more ‘impressionable’ youths, all mentally ill and non-radicalised Muslims, with hatred in their hearts and weapons in their hands. Let’s follow Hollande’s advice and learn to live with terrorism. And die by it.

Yesterday I wrote to a friend that Putin’s Russia has a unique ability to dumb down even otherwise intelligent conservatives. When this subject comes up, their intelligence vanishes, closely followed by their moral judgement.

It’s not that they reach conclusions different from mine. The trouble is that they reach them on the basis of crepuscular inferences drawn from the well of staggering ignorance.

Since even erudite men are ignorant on some subjects, there’s no shame in not knowing much about Putin’s Russia. There is, however, shame in enunciating strong opinions regardless.

No sooner had I finished my e-mail than I saw an article on Putin in the on-line magazine The Imaginative Conservative. It was as if the author had set out to vindicate every observation above.

Usually this website is quite worthy. But mention Putin, and The Imaginative Conservative instantly becomes neither.

The author Joseph Pearce tries to strike a balance summed up in his last sentence: “[Putin] is not a saint and none but a fool would seek to canonise him, but nor is he a tyrant and none but fools should seek to demonise him.” Fools? Pretty strong stuff from a man who decries demonisation.

However, showing demons for what they are is a moral and intellectual duty of a conservative, imaginative or otherwise. No balance between good and evil can exist, and being unable to tell one from the other is a failure of both intellect and morality.

“Putin… believes that big problems require the intervention of big government,” concedes Pearce. “As such, he has much in common with Barack Obama…” Yes, all Western politicians are more or less statist. Yet what makes this parallel inane is that, unlike Putin, they operate within the law.

Dirigisme unchecked by legal constraints is called tyranny, and Pearce either doesn’t realise this or doesn’t know that Russia is ranked somewhere near Zimbabwe in the rule of law category. That makes him either daft or ignorant.

Pearce has produced a book on Solzhenitsyn in exile, and he tries to squeeze the issue into the confines of his chosen subject. Hence he insists on Putin’s virtue because the KGB colonel put on a show of friendship with Solzhenitsyn and included three of his works in the school curriculum.

Allow me to explain why. Solzhenitsyn, for all his admirable qualities, was a Slavophile jingoist and a believer in Holy Russia’s mission to save the decadent West.

Without doubting that the West is in need of salvation, one may still question Russia’s suitability for the role of the saviour. However, this happens to be the message Putin too hoisted up his flagpole when he realised that Russia would fall apart without some ideology.

Since his predecessors had discarded communism, replacing it with a quest for self-enrichment, the only remaining option was traditional Russian chauvinism with a fideistic dimension. The rallying cry of third Rome was supposed to make the Russians forget that they are third world.

This is where Solzhenitsyn and Putin converged. The writer who had shown the evil of the KGB’s rape of Russia began to hail one of the proud rapists (“There’s no such thing as ex-KGB,” Putin once said truthfully, “this is for life.”)

Having dug a hole for himself, Pearce keeps on digging: “Asked by the German newspaper Der Spiegel how he could have such a friendly relationship with Putin, a former KGB officer, Solzhenitsyn responded that Putin’s work was in foreign intelligence and that, therefore, he was not a KGB investigator spying on Russian dissidents…”

This is either a lie or ignorance. In fact, Putin began his KGB career in the Second Chief Directorate, whose function was precisely ‘spying on Russian dissidents’. It was only later that he was transferred to foreign intelligence.

Nor does foreign spying exculpate membership in a criminal organisation, a principle established at Nuremberg. For example, Walter Schellenberg, head of the SS intelligence service, was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment – and the SS didn’t murder nearly as many people as Putin’s sponsoring organisation.

Pearce approvingly quotes Solzhenitsyn as saying that “George Bush Sr. was not much criticized for being the ex-head of the CIA.” I’ve heard of moral equivalence, but this is obscene: the CIA didn’t murder millions of Americans, while the KGB murdered millions of Russians. Solzhenitsyn went bonkers late in life, as this statement proves. Is Pearce mad too?

He then sticks another feather into Putin’s KGB hat: “He has taken on many of the worst oligarchs, has restored the Russian economy to a position of relative health…”

This again is either a lie or ignorance. Putin hasn’t “taken on many of the worst oligarchs”. He’s the worst oligarch himself, who has surrounded himself with cronies he has turned into oligarchs too, by encouraging them to steal the country blind.

The oligarchs he has slapped down were those who, like Khodorkovky and Berezovsky, dabbled in unauthorised politics. Those who toe the political line have elevated money laundering to the top of Russia’s commercial activity, turning Putin himself into one of the world’s richest men – presiding over one of Europe’s poorest countries.

Only a liar or an ignoramus can talk about the ‘relative health’ of the Russian economy. According to the information issued by the ruling junta itself, 15.9 per cent of the population subsist below the poverty line, more than in such economic powerhouses as Albania, Sri Lanka and Tunisia. And the poverty line in Russia is drawn at a monthly income of less than £100 – with a cost of living comparable to ours.

Pearce graciously allows that “None of this justifies or excuses acts of imperialism on Russia’s borders”. At least he doesn’t say, along with so many of his likeminded colleagues, that Russia claims nothing that doesn’t belong to her by right.

However, it’s disingenuous not to mention that Russia shares borders with several NATO members, meaning that such ‘acts of imperialism’ can trigger a world war. Perhaps ‘criminal brinkmanship’ would have been a more accurate description.

Putin has wiped out free press and had at least 250 journalists murdered (the latest one last week), along with such political opponents as Nemtsov and Litvinenko. Committed in London, the latter crime was the first ever act of nuclear terrorism.

Really, there’s no need to demonise demons. They do a good job of it themselves.

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes one wonders, and the pontiff’s recent remarks on Islam make one wonder about his Catholic credentials even more. His PC credentials, however, are beyond doubt.

His Holiness certainly eschews the inductive method of Catholic thought, whereby a general conclusion is drawn on the basis of particular facts. And the facts are in the public domain, impossible for any sentient person not to know.

Just about every terrorist act over the last 15 years has been committed by Muslims screaming ‘Allahu akbar!’. In one month of November, 2014, the BBC counted 664 attacks producing 5,042 deaths.

Muslims were responsible for 450 out of 452 suicide attacks launched in 2015. And the atrocities Muslims committed this year are still fresh enough in our memory not to need a mention.

Professional researchers would find such facts statistically significant, and professional analysts wouldn’t take long to discern a causal relationship between Islam and terrorism. Why, even a rank amateur, provided his mental faculties are intact, wouldn’t find the task unduly difficult.

The Pope is neither a researcher nor an analyst, and his mental faculties are very much in doubt if his take on the situation is anything to go by. “It’s not right to identify Islam with violence,” pronounced His Holiness, “It’s not right and it’s not true.”

If it’s true, it’s right, and the truth is there for all to see. Yet none so blind as those that will not see, as the saying goes. So, if Islam isn’t responsible, who is?

“I believe that in every religion there is always a little fundamentalist group,” explained the Pope. That’s God’s own truth, but this particular God’s own truth is irrelevant to the argument – unless His Holiness can demonstrate that, say, fundamentalist Lutherans also murder thousands by acts of terror.

The Pope can’t do that, but he can lump his fellow Catholics together with Muslim suicide bombers. “If I speak of Islamic violence, then I have to speak of Catholic violence… this man who kills his girlfriend, another who kills his mother-in-law… and these are baptised Catholics.”

But we aren’t speaking of violence, Your Holiness. We are speaking of terrorism, which is violence specifically committed in pursuit of political goals, in this case the clearly enunciated Islamic goal of establishing a worldwide Muslim caliphate. Surely any halfway intelligent person should see the difference?

Propensity for violence isn’t uniquely Muslim but universally human. It derives from the concept the Pope may be familiar with, that of Original Sin. But Muslims more or less hold exclusive rights to modern terrorism, which they perpetrate in the name of Allah.

Saying that Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Islam is either a lie or ignorance or an ignorant lie. It’s like saying that neither the Koran nor indeed Muhammad has anything to do with Islam.

After Muhammad moved from Mecca to Medina, he wrote down (or rather dictated) 300-odd verses explicitly calling for Allah-inspired terrorism against infidels. And he practised what he preached, killing, for example, hundreds of Jews with his own sabre. Muslim terrorists are thus acting in the spirit of their scripture, and they often choose throat-slitting and decapitation in imitation of their creed’s founder.

It’s true that not all Muslims slit throats, cut heads off or blow themselves up in public places. By the same token, not all Germans were Nazis and not all Soviets were communists. Would His Holiness suggest that the crimes the Nazis and the Soviets committed had nothing to do with Nazism and communism?

Speaking of imams, the Pope said, “I know how they think, they are looking for peace.” Of course they are, Your Holiness. The kind of peace Tacitus was referring to when he wrote: “Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.”

The Pope wouldn’t need a translation but, for those who do, this means “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”

 

 

 

Speaking through one of the eponymous Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky uttered words to the effect of “without God everything is permitted”.

Yet even Dostoyevsky wasn’t prophetic enough to foresee everything that the future, our godless present, would bring. In fact, our reality has outpaced the most macabre prophecies or indeed fantasies of the past, making whole literary genres obsolete.

Political satire is one of them. For example, Swift must have thought he was grotesquely exaggerating when, in A Modest Proposal, he advocated eating babies as a solution to Irish famines. Yet the Dean’s wild hyperbole became a grim reality 200 years later, when the regime for which most Russians are now nostalgic, was starving the Ukraine (and much of Russia) to death, and babies were widely used for food.

Or take dystopian fantasies. The works of Messrs Huxley, Orwell, Zamyatin, Bradbury et al today read like reportage. Conversely, none of them could have fathomed our quotidian reality.

How about the state paying for men to get pregnant? Preposterous, the writers would have protested. Fantasy, they would have said, must have some bearing on reality to produce the desired effect.

To those gentlemen a person capable of childbirth was a woman, the female of the Homo sapiens species, complete with XX chromosomes and all the appropriate body fixtures. Their creative minds wouldn’t have stretched to breaking the link between childbirth and womanhood. To us, however, some links are more honourable in the breach than in the observance.

Enter our dear NHS, with its, or rather our, wallet open wide. It’s not enough that our dystopian state uses our tax money to indulge psychotic freaks obsessed with changing their sex – and the sums involved aren’t trivial: about £30,000 for a mad woman wishing to become a man, half that for the other way around (sewing on must be harder than cutting off).

Now we’re supposed to pay for those ‘men’ to have IVF treatments, so, if they choose to keep their uteri, they can experience the joys of motherhood as fathers. In fact, according to Dr James ‘Frankenstein’ Barrett, three of his patients are about to give birth, those who used to be women wishing to become men and are now men wishing to procreate like women.

The good doctor is proud of his achievement, for the usual procedure merely involves freezing a freakish creature’s eggs before the operation and then implanting the embryo into the equally disturbed woman living with the mad ex-woman pretending to be a man. But a pregnant man is really something to be proud of, the acme of modern medical science.

I’d be curious to be a fly on the wall when the resulting child grows up and starts wondering about birds and bees or, in this case, birds and birds. “Mummy, where did I come from?” “You crawled out of your Daddy’s belly.” “So is Daddy actually my Mummy?” Enough to blow the poor tot’s mind to high heaven.

It’s a salient characteristic of our materialist time that most people’s objections to this abomination focus on its NHS cost, not its essence. Indeed, when patients in pain have to wait a year for gallbladder removal, when hip replacements, cataract surgeries and life-prolonging cancer drugs are rationed, spending millions on such psychoses is insane.

True enough, in a sane society those sideshows would have to pay for their little quirks themselves. And if any NHS funds were involved, they’d be used to pay psychiatrists, not surgeons. For scientists have demonstrated beyond any doubt that a man can’t become a woman. He can only become a man shot full of oestrogen and with his bits cut off. His chromosomes remain XY, which makes him male in any other than a psychiatric sense.

But the fiscal damage is nothing compared to the moral and, if you will, existential kind. A civilisation that can countenance such nightmarish practices testifies to its metaphysical collapse. And, if history teaches anything at all (which it probably doesn’t) such a collapse is ineluctably followed by physical catastrophe. When virtue is replaced by decadence and decadence by degeneracy, civilisations die – to this rule there are no known exceptions.

Our civilisation is moribund already, and only its virtual reality remains, propped up by our phoney prosperity financed by the printing press. When that goes, as it will sooner or later, nothing will be left to hold us together.

So yes, Fyodor Mikhailovich, without God everything is permitted and nothing will survive. But could you have envisioned this nightmare in your wildest fantasies?

 

No, I don’t mean the libidinous poet, although he was wonderful too, at times and in places. Yet the Byron I’m talking about is also deeply attached to Greece, albeit spelled differently.

Well, I won’t keep you in suspense any longer, especially since the picture is a dead giveaway anyhow. The Byron in question is a chain of hamburger joints. It became widely famous within a narrow circle some three years ago, when George Osborne tweeted a photograph of himself at his desk, eating a Byron burger with greasy chips.

That was a ploy, for being prolier than thou is de rigueur for our leaders, especially those who were born with silver utensils in their various orifices. George, supposed to be ‘posh’ because his family sells a lot of wallpaper, thought he could counteract that damaging image by eating plebeian grub. However, the ploy backfired.

Our guardians of proletarian probity calculated that, including the diet soda with which George washed his repast down, he hadn’t got much change out of a tenner – this, even though a Mickey D burger costs an impeccably populist 99p.

Because he could afford 10 quid for his dinner, George was outed as an inveterate posh boy, never to be trusted with a high-level job. His loss was Byron’s gain, for the chain received a tonne of free publicity.

I’ve eaten there once, but wasn’t overly impressed – I can make a better (and bigger) burger at home in five minutes. Nevertheless I’m now going to patronise Byron every chance I get, even if I have to take antacid afterwards.

What raised Byron in my estimation is its participation in a sting designed to flush out illegal immigrants among its employees. The operation was handled with the flair that explains why the French have referred to the English as perfide Albion since the thirteenth century.

The employees of Byron’s 15 London restaurants were lured to work at 9am on the pretext of a training exercise in ‘elf and safety’. When they arrived, they were welcomed with open arms by burly chaps from the Home Office, who demanded to see their work permits and immigration papers.

In many lamentable cases, those turned out to be either nonexistent or forged. As a result, 35 employees from Albania, Brazil, Nepal and Egypt were summarily deported, and some 150 more have gone into hiding.

One would expect that Byron’s management would be congratulated on doing their civic duty at a considerable detriment to the business. After all, filling the new vacancies with legal employees is going to cost the company a pretty penny.

It is of course possible that the Home Office had twisted the burger-flippers’ arm to make them cooperate – a company can be fined £10,000 per illegal employee. However, barring proof to the contrary, one has to assume that Byron acted out of genuine respect for the immigration law of the land, thus displaying a sentiment that’s largely dormant among the lovies of this world. On the other hand, the opposite sentiment is very much awake, which they went on to prove in short order, as it were.

With the speed one has learned to expect from our countrymen endowed with a flaming social – or rather socialist – conscience, they formed a campaign group snappily called ‘Shame on Byron – No One Is Illegal’. They then issued a statement reinforcing such groups’ reputation for sound intellect and impeccable logic:

“No human being is illegal. No one is disposable. Byron have acted shamefully and have made an example of themselves as a deeply disrespectful employer. Our protest aims to shine a spotlight on this unethical behaviour, deter it from happening anywhere else, and to support workers still working at the restaurants to resist exploitation.”

One has to agree: no human being is illegal. Some, however, commit illegal acts, such as forging immigration papers, work permits and some such. Without in any way diminishing their human worth, their transgressions ought to be punished, and deportation strikes one as the most logical method of doing so.

This particular transgression is at the centre of public attention because, largely thanks to legal and illegal immigration, Britain’s population is growing at 500,000 a year. If this demographic trend proceeds apace – and it seems to be, if anything, accelerating – before long we’ll have Russia’s population with one-seventieth of Russia’s territory.

It’s not just the quantity but also quality that’s problematic, for many new arrivals hate the West, even though they aren’t averse to the riches the West can provide. They tend to think that Britain must adapt to them, rather than vice versa.

London has already been turned into a foreign city. Do the Byron shamers want the whole country to go to the same pot?

The uncharitable answer is yes, they do. But, this being Sunday, let’s be charitable and just say they haven’t thought this through. For their benefit, the thinking organ is located in the head, not, as they seem to believe, three feet lower.

See you at Byron’s. Don’t bother ordering your burger medium-rare. It’ll arrive medium anyway.

 

 

The most attractive candidate in the US presidential joust is that elusive personage None of the Above.

The situation is hardly unique to America: such is the universal beauty of universal franchise.

Yet this November’s choice has to drive every sensible person to despair.

Hilary first. Her major selling point is that she’s the first woman standing for presidency. Now who cares if a statesman is male or female (I’d draw the line on ‘other’)? Alas, since Americans have twice demonstrated their willingness to extend affirmative action to presidential elections, there’s no reason to think they’ll feel differently about ‘gender equality’.

If shunning Obama was construed as latent racism, not voting for Hilary may be seen as misogyny and even, if numerous claims are to be believed, homophobia. Such is the deep thought that goes into choosing the leader of the free world, as US presidents like to be known.

Then there’s ‘experience’. Americans attach inordinate importance to it, forgetting that experience may be that of failure as well as success. Hilary’s falls into the first category.

As Arkansas’s First Lady, she acquired the sobriquet ‘The Lady Macbeth of Little Rock’, which hardly betokened unreserved affection. The Clintons’ tenure there was marked by a string of corruption scandals, and Hilary was regarded as an equal participant in the couple’s shenanigans.

Her time in the White House was spent largely on bullying her husband’s mistresses and supporting his Freudian claim that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. In that limited endeavour she enjoyed only a variable success, with the sleaziest news bursting through the wall of Hilary’s threats.

Then on to the US Senate, where she was deservedly described as “one of the most liberal members”. Hilary also supported the catastrophic invasion of Iraq, though illogically opposing the subsequent ‘surge’.

Yet it’s her disastrous record as the Secretary of State that torpedoes the whole issue of experience. Hilary was enthusiastic about throwing American weight behind the iniquitous effort to replace nasty but secular Middle Eastern regimes with nastier Islamic ones.

She directly contributed to an “orderly transition to a democratic participatory government in Egypt”, meaning supplanting the secular Mubarak with the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood. And Hilary promoted military intervention in Lybia, which makes her directly responsible for the on-going bloodbath.

She also advocated supporting the variably cannibalistic Syrian rebels, which, in light of current events, hardly requires additional commentary.

In handling Putin’s Russia, the other major threat to the world, Hilary wasn’t always as firm as she pretends. Nowadays she’s anti-Putin, mainly because Trump seems to love him. But in 2009, following Russia’s aggression against Georgia, she engaged in a cheap spectacle of presenting Russia’s foul-mouthed foreign minister with a red ‘reset’ button. Not surprisingly, Putin later chose a different button to push.

Add to this her cavalier treatment of classified material, which could easily land a lesser light in prison, and the picture is complete – or almost so, for I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump’s campaign had a few other choice bits in store, there to come out should Hilary take the lead.

Now Trump is a loudmouthed populist who makes conservative noises, as conservatism is understood in America. A populist says whatever people want to hear, which seldom produces a consistent message. Hence Trump has done the weathercock by having changed his positions on 17 major issues, which is of course an essential part of his experience.

For some unfathomable reason, many see Trump’s fiscal success as a strong qualification. Hardly. He’s a conniver constantly looking for investors, whom he also tells whatever they want to hear. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t: Trump and his enterprises have been involved in 3,500 legal cases, and four of his businesses have filed for bankruptcy.

Trump is proud of that record: “I do play with the bankruptcy laws – they’re very good for me,” he once said. Considering that many of his businesses are casinos in the Mafia-controlled Atlantic City, some observers wonder what other laws Trump may play with.

His protectionist pronouncements apart, Trump’s views on domestic policy are commendably conservative: tax-cutting, reduced social spending, immigration controls – including, unfashionably, Muslim immigration. Then again, it would be odd to expect one of America’s richest men to favour, say, a higher corporate tax.

Nor is Trump likely to confront Putin, and again his affection for the Russian dictator may not be entirely disinterested. Trump’s son Don was frank about it: “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets… We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

Paul Manafort, Trump’s political guru, previously worked as adviser to Putin’s Ukrainian stooge Yanukovych. Manafort was accused of facilitating Yanukovych’s prodigious money laundering, though the court case was dismissed. The moment Trump appointed him, Putin’s press began to hail the Donald as the world’s best hope for peace.

Carter Page, Trump’s foreign policy adviser, is an investment banker, with Gazprom his major partner. Page complains that he suffered losses as a result of Western sanctions against Russia. Not surprisingly, Trump said the other day that he’d “look into” ending those sanctions.

Trump softened the Republican platform’s promise to come to the Ukraine’s aid should Russia pounce. He also stated that he wouldn’t necessarily come to Europe’s aid under similar circumstances, which could spell the end of NATO.

Trump is playing the isolationist card as part of his populist suit, when, for example, correctly accusing Europe of not pulling its military weight. “Why should we pay to defend those who won’t defend themselves?” he keeps asking, assuming that the question is rhetorical.

But it isn’t: overseas influence has to be bought, as Britain discovered when running out of funds to bankroll her own empire. America has been pursuing imperial ambitions for over a century, and this costs. Nebertheless the isolationism message has never quite succeeded with Americans, who sense viscerally that seeking to control a global empire is their country’s raison d’être.

As someone who often proceeds from aesthetics, I find Trump brash, boorish and vulgar, which must give him an edge with the kind of voters he hopes to attract. (As an offshoot of his vulgarity, he tends to marry the kind of floosies a gentleman would only see as one-night stands at best.)

Hilary, on the other hand, is just as vulgar, but she pretends not to be, seeking to please the kind of voters she hopes to attract. America does have more vulgarians than pseuds, but the latter control the media. So it’ll probably be a close-run thing.

The strongest argument in favour of Trump is that the neocons sputter spittle at the very mention of his name. So he must be doing something right.

 

Image courtesy of VectorOpenStock

 

 

 

 

 

 

That line appeared in a circular e-mail showing an old painting of Turks storming Byzantium’s capital in 1453. I laughed, but somewhat sardonically: the joke cut too close to the bone.

The message is clear: every atrocity committed by Muslims has to be ascribed to a madman acting alone or, at best, to a particular Muslim group. We refuse to portray the ongoing carnage for what it is: Islam’s war on the West.

In that spirit François Hollande declared an “all-out war on ISIS”, making one wonder what was wrong with his previous such declarations over the last couple of years. Once declared, a war should proceed apace, with no further declarations necessary.

Another historical analogy, if I may. On 14 October 1939, Günther Prien’s U-boat sank HMS Royal Oak at Scapa Flow. Yet Chamberlain didn’t announce that, as a result of that cowardly act, Britain was declaring war on Germany’s Unterseeboote Command.

Had he done so, he would have been laughed out of Westminster and into a madhouse, for Britain wasn’t at war with German U-boats. She was at war with Nazi Germany.

Incidentally, why are Muslim suicide murderers always described as cowards? Since when do people prepared to die for their beliefs qualify as such? They’re all sorts of things, Muslims prime among those, but cowards they aren’t. One wishes they were.

Pope Francis haltingly specified what kind of war is under way: “The real word is war… yes, it’s war… I only want to clarify, when I speak of war, I am really speaking of war… a war of interests, for money, resources. …I am not speaking of a war of religions, religions don’t want war. The others want war.”

Your Holiness, those murderous savages don’t shout “Long live our oil wells!”. They scream “Allahu akbar!” Shouldn’t we take them at their word?

And how do you explain those hundreds of churches, synagogues, Christian and Jewish cemeteries being desecrated throughout Europe? Who do you think is doing it? I’ll give you a clue: the vandals often spray-paint a pig’s head, and I don’t think Methodists treat pigs as evil incarnate.

It’s also amazing that the Pope talks about religions generically, just like Richard Dawkins does. Religion in general doesn’t exist. Christianity is as different from Islam as either of them is from the totemistic cult of the Aranda tribe.

It defies sanity to claim that Islam, which has been waging a continual war on the West for 1,400 years, doesn’t “want war”. The Centre for the Study of Political Islam (CSPI) estimates that the ‘religion of peace’ has killed 270 million infidels during this time. The Koran, especially its later part written after Mohamed moved from Mecca to Medina, contains 300-odd verses explicitly calling for the killing – or, at a quieter moment, ostracism – of Christians and Jews, and Muslims practise what their scripture preaches.

Moreover, ever since St Augustine defined the doctrine of just war, Christians too have been prepared to fight wars, provided they were indeed just. His Holiness is therefore mouthing meaningless platitudes that wouldn’t be out of place in The Guardian.

In fact, ISIS, the vanguard of Islam, has for a long time been pledging an attack on what in the colloquial Muslim parlance is called ‘crusaders’, meaning churches. Why, they’ve even threatened to assassinate Pope Francis, one suspects for his symbolic value rather than for any danger he presents to Islam.

If only today’s Catholics really were crusaders, the Muslims wouldn’t be able to terrorise today’s answers to Constantinople. In fact, the Church has lost its backbone, along with its influence in Europe.

It’s a tragic misnomer to refer to today’s France as a Catholic country. Even occasional church attendance in France stands at a generously estimated 12 per cent of the population. It’s normal for one priest to cover 20-40 parishes, and many churches are boarded up. Some, such as the beautiful Gothic church in a village down the road from us, are being pulled down.

As indirect proof, Fr. Hamel was butchered when celebrating Mass before merely four parishioners, two of them nuns. This in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, a town of 28,000 people, most of whom doubtless describe themselves as Catholics.

No wonder the pontiff talks as if he were in charge of social services, not the Holy See. In fact, various departments of social services are becoming the central institutions of modernity, forcing their bulk into the slot once occupied by the Church.

It’s characteristic of our philistine age that any conflict has to be described as “a war for money, resources”. Yet it’s not for money or resources that Islam is waging war on the West. It’s for Allah.

The West too used to be able to fight not only for physical lucre but also for metaphysical intangibles: faith, freedom, honour. Now we’re prepared to do an Esau, by selling our birthright, or a Faust, by selling our soul to Satan. Both transactions are – and will continue to be – anointed with the blood of Western martyrs murdered by a religion that does want war.

Père Jacques Hamel, requiescat in pace.

 

 

The young man who hacked 19 people to death at a care home in Japan is exotic of method but modern of purpose.

Crazy or not, his motives sound perfectly sane and rational to anyone inhaling the Zeitgeist of today’s medicine: “My goal is a world in which, in cases where it is difficult for the severely disabled to live at home and be socially active, they can be euthanised…”

Satoshi’s rationale sounds as if it might have been borrowed from some major cultural figures of the past, George Bernard Shaw for one.

Already in 1910 GBS advocated a wholesale cull of the old and disabled. With the prescience one expects from a great writer, he specified gas chambers as the best expedient of getting rid of the people who are “more trouble than they are worth”:

“A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people’s time to look after them.”

What better reason does one need for mass murder in our progressive world? Shaw must have taken his cue from Darwin, the guru of modernity, who advocated euthanasia to accelerate otherwise slow natural selection:

“It is the selection of the slightly better-endowed and the elimination of the slightly less well-endowed individuals, and not the preservation of strongly-marked and rare anomalies, that leads to the advancement of a species.”

Margaret Sanger, the pioneer of birth control, saw not only euthanasia but also infanticide as beneficial: “The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”

Our contemporary Peter Singer, bizarrely described by some as a philosopher, asks a rhetorical question: “Why… should the boundary of sacrosanct life match the boundary of our species?”

Of course according to Prof. Singer our sex life shouldn’t ‘match the boundary of our species’ either. He’s a vociferous advocate of heavy petting, as it were – no one can accuse Peter of specism, although perhaps poor Mrs Singer might accuse him of something else.

Milan Kundera doesn’t see much difference between people and animals either: “Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death.”

Satoshi thus has his finger on the pulse of modernity. The pulse beats universally, even though his method of administering mercy must owe something to the Japanese obsession with knives – where else is self-evisceration seen as the preferable method of ending one’s life?

But one could argue that stabbing old people is more merciful than the practice common in our dear NHS, where those seen as hopelessly ill are simply left to die of starvation, thirst and neglect. This is supposed to be consonant with the doctor’s sacred right to withdraw therapy.

It’s also supposed to be consonant with the Hippocratic oath, whose modern version endorses euthanasia: “If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.”

The hypocritical disclaimers to the Hippocratic oath aside, one can safely say that inside every philosophically modern doctor lives a Dr Kevorkian, or perhaps a Dr Mengele, trying to get out. And modern laws conspire to make sure he does get out.

As seems to be the case with every modern perversion, it’s Benelux that leads the way – they don’t call those countries low for nothing. In Holland, euthanasia is responsible for two per cent of all deaths.

In 1990 alone Dutch doctors killed 20,000 patients without their prior consent. Shortly thereafter euthanasia was legalised, and doctors began to kill in earnest. Moreover, two-thirds of euthanasia cases aren’t even reported, in 20 per cent of the cases the patients don’t ask to die, and in 17 per cent potentially life-saving treatments are available.

With the government’s endorsement, both tacit and explicit, doctors thus play not so much God as Satan. Brainwashed Dutchmen approve, though the old people not so much: many of them are scared of going to hospital because they think the doctors may kill them. They sense unerringly that, when euthanasia becomes legal, before long it’ll become compulsory.

Active euthanasia still isn’t legal in Britain, as it is in Benelux and Switzerland. But one hears complaints all the time that our aging population is putting a great burden on the state’s fragile shoulders. A wholesale cull of the crumblies and hopelessly ill is increasingly broached as a valid solution.

To a godless, philistine society it’s not human life but physical comfort that’s sacred. When the former diminishes the latter, what was unthinkable before becomes desirable now – and pragmatic post-rationalisation is never in short supply.

Satoshi Uematsu will doubtless be sent down for administering euthanasia without proper credentials. But once he’s out, he should come to Europe: there are jobs for men like him.

One hears rumours that Russian citizens are stocking up on soap, salt and other staples, those that always disappear whenever a war starts. Such authoritative sources as Moscow cabbies confidently predict that one is just around the corner.

Admittedly, Moscow cabbies have been wrong before, for example during the Cuban crisis, when one couldn’t buy a bar of soap for love or money. However, even marginally more authoritative sources share their concerns, and to them we should listen.

Some 1,500 years ago a Roman writer uttered a strategy statement that has since been amply proved and never disproved: Si vis pacem, para bellum. If you want peace, prepare for war.

According to NATO’s former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, General Sir Richard Shirreff, that’s exactly what we aren’t doing – thereby jeopardising the peace we want.

Sir Richard isn’t an ideologue. He’s a top military professional trained in analysing things like strategy, tactics, logistics, supplies, speed of mobilisation and deployment.

On this basis he has produced a briefing document issuing a scary warning: Putin is preparing for war, and NATO isn’t: “It is clear that Russia is capable of surprising the West… with potentially devastating implications for eastern Poland and fatal consequences to the Alliance”.

The general highlighted Russia’s growing militarisation over the last 18 months, her aggression against the Ukraine, her action in Syria, including last week’s bombing of an airbase used by British and US special forces, frequent clashes between NATO and Russian warplanes, incessant simulated air attacks on NATO vessels, the massive concentration of Russian troops along the western frontier.

According to Sir Richard, NATO would be defenceless against a Russian lightning strike at the Baltics and Poland. Putin’s Western Military District could establish a beachhead within hours, with massive reinforcements arriving from other areas in a day or two.

A mobilisation has already begun, under the guise of exercises, Russia’s traditional method of camouflaging war preparations. “Turning one of these exercises into an operation against one or several of the Baltic states would give very little or no early warning time for NATO,” warns Sir Richard.

His concerns are echoed by Canadian spies who believe that Putin is openly preparing for war with the West, and his intervention in Syria is a capability test for his forces.

The forces seem to be efficient enough to take over the Baltics and Eastern Poland before NATO could reinforce its formidable force of a few hundred soldiers, 200 of them British, already stationed there. That would establish a fait accompli, leaving NATO with only two response options: nuclear or none.

Both would be catastrophic: the latter would spell the end of NATO; the former, possibly the end of Europe.

It’s in this context that Theresa May’s commitment to retaining the Trident deterrent must be understood. This also explains why she’s the first PM to confirm unequivocally that she’d be prepared to order a nuclear strike.

Unfortunately, HMG sees the constantly dwindling defence budget as a zero sum: every billion more spent on Trident is a billion less spent on the conventional army and navy.

Foreign aid is considered a higher priority than defence of the realm. Gen. Shirreff points this out: “NATO members are not spending enough on defence to rebuild the range of capabilities necessary to deter a resurgent and aggressive Russia.”

Sir Richard is talking about spending more on defence overall, not robbing the Peter of nuclear deterrence to pay the Paul of conventional forces. He doesn’t see choosing life over death as a zero sum game.

However, Peter Hitchens, whose understanding of matters martial is less proven than his ideological attachment to Putin’s junta, begs to differ. According to him we don’t need Trident at all:

“Spending £100 billion on Trident and neglecting conventional forces is like spending so much on insuring yourself against alien abduction that you can’t afford cover against fire and theft…

“Trident,” explains Gen. Shirreff’s rival in military expertise, “was designed to deter the USSR, a state that ceased to exist 25 years ago.” Yes, but Russia’s nuclear weapons didn’t, and they’re still targeted at us.

Having thus displayed his impressive knowledge of modern history, Hitchens then kindly dirties his hands with a bit of logistic nitty-gritty: “All we need to do is to hang on to a few H-bombs and the planes to drop them and we can have all that Trident gives us, for 100th of the cost.”

Such effrontery can only come from staggering ignorance, bolstered by ideology. The few planes required to deliver “a few H-bombs” would almost definitely be shot down – which is hard to do with in-coming MIRVed missiles fired from constantly moving and virtually undetectable subs.

What Hitchens is suggesting is tantamount to having no nuclear deterrent at all, but then we aren’t supposed to need any: the USSR is now called Russia, so no problem there.

Don’t know about you, but I’d listen to Gen. Shirreff before Peter Hitchens. Sir Richard knows what he’s talking about, which of course doesn’t mean he can’t be wrong. But he could also be right – a possibility it would be criminal folly to ignore.

That’s what the Darling Bud of May is supposed to be, and she should receive the benefit of the doubt so early in her tenure. However, Mrs May imprudently asked to be judged on her past, and her record doesn’t make one feel overly optimistic.

Far be it from me to suggest that a Western statesman must be a pious Christian. Desirable as this may be, considering the Christian foundations of our civilisation in general and statehood in particular, it’s such an unrealistic expectation that one would be ill-advised to hold one’s breath.

However, it’s plausible to expect that, if a statesman claims to be a pious Christian, that’s what he – or in this instance she – is. The Darling Bud indeed so claims, but the ensuing expectation is instantly frustrated by her campaign speech.

Here are some choice bits: “I believe marriage should be for everyone, regardless of their sexual orientation…”

Or species? All right, let’s not indulge in reductio ad absurdum – what Mrs May said is absurd enough in light of her claim to Christian piety and indeed conservatism.

A devout Christian can’t support this profanation of marriage by definition. An educated conservative can’t, also by definition, follow the singular antecedent ‘everyone’ with the plural personal pronoun ‘their’.

The first aberration betokens adherence to political correctness, which is in part a concerted assault on Christianity and its civilisation. The second aberration also betokens adherence to political correctness, which is in part a concerted assault on Christianity and its culture, including linguistic aesthetics and precision.

But do let’s press on: “Equal marriage was a hugely significant social reform. And it also made a powerful and important statement that as a country we value and respect everyone.”

A Christian, or indeed any averagely intelligent person, ought to understand that respecting everyone shouldn’t mean respecting everything. The distinction was made by St. Augustine: “Cum dilectione hominum et odio vitiorum” (roughly, “With love for mankind and hatred of sins”). The phrase is usually rendered as “love the sinner but hate the sin”.

On her supposedly regular attendances of church services, Mrs May must have heard of the Sermon on the Mount, specifically Matthew 5: 43-48, where Christ taught loving not only our friends but also our enemies.

Yet nowhere did he or any of his apostles or any intelligent person ever say that loving sinners also involves loving what they do. The Darling Bud’s statement was thus an ignorant non sequitur.

Then: “For me, equality is about fairness. It is simply wrong for anyone to face discrimination or abuse because of who they are or who they love.”

This is neither grown-up nor conservative nor clever (nor grammatical: one should say ‘whom they love’ in formal speech). Equality, Mrs May, other than equality before God, is about unfairness.

Modern egalitarianism is emphatically about overriding what’s fair. Fairness is giving everyone his just desserts without prejudice or discrimination. If today’s governments practised this concept, half of our population would starve. It’s only by discriminating against talent and enterprise that a government can enforce any semblance of equality.

And surely we’re allowed to discriminate against, say, those who love children inappropriately? Or against kleptomaniacs? Or those who love animals in other than sentimental ways?

Nor does opposing homomarriage, which is the context of May’s statement, constitute discrimination. On the contrary, state licence for it discriminates against those holding traditional, decent, intelligent and, well, Judaeo-Christian views on such subjects.

Let’s go on: “A Conservative government under my leadership would be unequivocally committed to supporting LGBT people, and continuing the vital task of tackling hate crime, homophobia and transphobia – both in the UK and around the world.”

I have to thank Mrs May for enriching my vocabulary, for I haven’t heard ‘transphobia’ before. ‘Homophobia’ I’ve heard, all too often, but wish I hadn’t.

According to its dictionary definition, a phobia is “a type of anxiety disorder, usually defined as a persistent fear of an object or situation”. Lacking psychiatric training, I can’t state with certainty that this anxiety disorder, a persistent fear of homosexuals, doesn’t exist. I can only say that I’ve never met anyone so afflicted.

I have, however, met many extremely intelligent people, Christian or otherwise, who think homosexuality is wrong and homomarriage is a travesty of a traditional and vitally important institution. It’s such people who are accused of ‘homophobia’ by leftist trendies. Such trendies may be any number of things, but they can be neither conservative nor Christian nor intelligent – all those things the Darling Bud is supposed to be.

Moving right along: “I firmly believe in an open, inclusive, One Nation agenda of social reform which will change our country for the better.”

The kind of social reform Mrs May talks about has been going on for at least 70 years, and it has manifestly failed to “change our country for the better”. In fact it has made it a whole lot worse.

A conservative, intelligent and – God forbid – Christian statesman would know this. But Mrs May is none of those things. She’s a modern politician. Say no more.