Author: Alexander Boot

Voting Ukip, said Iain Duncan Smith, Tory Secretary for Work and Pensions, is like writing a suicide note.

Much to my detractors’ chagrin, it’s only in the sense of that simile that I’m going to kill myself on election day.

This desperate act will be done in the serene knowledge that I won’t be taking anyone with me: in my constituency, the Tories enjoy a majority even Putin would envy – and they don’t have to stuff the ballot boxes or cripple anyone trying to stop them doing so.

Would I still vote Ukip if it mattered? If this could mean letting Labour in? My emphatic, unequivocal and resolute answer is that I don’t know. Perhaps. Probably. Unless my right wrist went on strike at the last moment.

I wouldn’t respect myself Friday morning, gagging at the sight of Ed grinning smugly from TV screens. But then I’d learn to live with it, confident as I am that the difference between the two sets of subversive nonentities, though not nonexistent, isn’t as great as they claim.

Writers more secure in their understanding of the intricacies of strategic, tactical or tactico-strategic voting, will tell you which way you should go. I don’t presume to be qualified to do so.

All I can suggest is that you vote your conscience, leaving the subversive nonentities and their groupies in the press to figure out the strategy and tactics. They have to earn their keep somehow.

Just decide which party you hate the least (I doubt many people love any of them, unless paid to) and vote accordingly.

And, if you know how to pray, do so. Whichever way you vote, Britain will go to the dogs without God’s help. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A new book, Le Corbusier: A French Fascism by Xavier de Jarcy, cites evidence showing that the Franco-Swiss architect not only held fascist and anti-Semitic views, but was in fact a member of a militant fascist group.

“Personally, I was very shocked,” says the author. “I found it hard to accept. You need time to absorb that kind of information.”

Personally, I’m not shocked at all. And I don’t need any time to absorb that information. For Le Corbusier’s totalitarian outlook can be easily inferred not only from his writings but, more tellingly, from his day job.

Le Corbusier’s architectural ideas, realised or otherwise, scream fascism as loudly as anything produced by Albert Speer or other exponents of totalitarianism by artistic means.

Unlike Speer, however, Le Corbusier left a legacy of lasting damage, as so appropriately demonstrated by Centre Pompidou in Paris, the venue of the current exhibition of the architect’s work.

Le Corbusier is one of France’s cultural heroes, which makes him a demigod there. Criticism therefore equates blasphemy, to which the French respond with vigour only outdone by the Muslims.

So far Mr Jarcy hasn’t been eviscerated, beheaded or even shot, but the verbal violence to which he has been exposed is quite virulent.

Jarcy, says Frederic Migayrou, one of the exhibition’s curators, is a headline-grabber out “to create a media event”, tabloid-style.

Most of the evidence the wretch quotes, says the curator, is dated. Actually that’s hardly surprising, considering that Le Corbusier died in 1965 and hence has been unable to provide any fresh evidence in the intervening 50 years.

And “all the quotations on racism or fascism came from… private correspondence.” Presumably that makes the evidence inadmissable.

Then came the clincher, giving the lie to Jarcy’s insinuations: “Le Corbusier was also in contact with many architects close to communism [and] people thought he was a communist in exactly the same way.”

Mr Migayrou obviously thinks that fascism and communism are so incompatible that championing one precludes any association with the other.

This is nonsense, which can be confirmed in a couple of minutes by anyone glancing at reproductions of works by Nazi, Fascist and Soviet painters or sculptors, depicting the same muscular men and sinewy-breasted women holding up the institutional symbols of their ideology.

The swastika, fasces or hammer and sickle are incidental there. What matters is the spirit, or rather absence thereof. We aren’t looking at works of art – we’re looking at totalitarianism executed in pigment, stone or bronze.

The same goes for totalitarian architecture, except that it doesn’t just make an artistic statement. It also tells people how they must live, and even though at times various fascist ideologies differ aesthetically, they’re all united in their shared commitment to dehumanising humans.

Le Corbusier’s work screams totalitarianism in concrete, his preferred material. He didn’t care which totalitarian was in power, as long as Le Corbusier was his architect. Stalin, Laval, Mussolini, Hitler could all look at his designs and smile in that kindly, avuncular way of theirs.

That Le Corbusier was talented is as indisputable as it’s irrelevant. Albert Speer also had talent, and so did Miron Merzhanov, Stalin’s personal architect. This only goes to show that, when driven by evil motives, a talented man can do more harm than a hack.

When you see today’s ugly, impersonal concrete structures giving parts of great European cities that unmistakeably Soviet je ne sais quoi, think of Le Corbusier. Think of him specifically in London, when looking at the Southbank, the Barbican or whole areas of tower blocks. It’s his vision, albeit executed by less talented men.

But never mind areas. Le Corbusier thought on the scale of whole cities, which he wanted to build or rebuild to the stencil he had in his fecund mind.

Of course rebuilding cities that already exist, such as Paris or Moscow, first means wiping the slate clean. That was exactly what Le Corbusier proposed to whomever was willing to listen, from Vichy to Stalin.

He wasn’t the only one, it has to be said. For example, at roughly the same time Kazimir Malevich proposed that the Kremlin, St Basil’s and the Bolshoi all be replaced with structures more in keeping with the technological Zeitgeist.

Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin proposed to perpetrate similar vandalism in Paris, and then on all continents. “Oslo, Moscow, Berlin, Paris, Algiers, Port Said, Rio or Buenos Aires,” Le Corbusier wrote, “the solution is the same since it answers the same needs.”

He was particularly inspired by Gamla Stan, Stockholm’s charming Old Town. Le Corbusier could never see such a place without wishing to replace it with his mass-produced monstrosities, and he proposed to do just that.

No surprises there: totalitarians worship at the altar of uniformity. There was only one right way, and only Le Corbusier knew what it was.

The right way à la Le Corbusier was not only to drive people into soulless, inhuman slabs of concrete, but also to take their streets away. Not for him were places where people could walk, shop, chat with their neighbours.

He strove to replace streets with roads, zipping by his concrete boxes or, better still, underneath them, with the whole city raised on to stilts for that purpose. The stilts idea didn’t really catch on, but one can see cities of roads rather than streets all over America.

Antoni Gaudi, an architect at least equal to Le Corbusier in talent, sought to incorporate his own ideas into the existing townscape, enriching rather than destroying it. For Le Corbusier that sort of thing was too namby-pamby for words.

Masonry walls, according to him, had no right to exist, Gothic architecture was incoherent because it ignored primary forms – concrete and glass were God, and Le Corbusier was his prophet.

There’s no point arguing whether Le Corbusier was a fascist, communist or neither. He resided in that dark area where all totalitarians converge in their desire to override human nature and bend people to their will by every available means, violent, political, social – or architectural.

 

 

For someone who has self-admittedly been writing about British politics for 25 years, Miss Daley doesn’t seem to have a firm grasp of this subject.

“I have never ceased to be in awe of the pre-eminent common sense of British voters,” she writes, and on this superstition she bases her hope, nay, near-certainty that the “unelectable joke” Ed will be kept away from Downing Street.

I’ve used the word ‘superstition’ advisedly, for this is the proper term for a certainty that has no rational or evidential basis. In that, a superstition differs from both scientific fact and true religious faith.

Miss Daley does try to produce evidence for the Brits’ “unimpeachably sagacious electoral judgement”, but in doing so she pathetically emphasises the weakness of her belief.

She cites the 2011 referendum on the change to the single-transferrable-vote system as an example of the electorate’s awesome wisdom displayed by its putting “two fingers up to the great Progressive Alliance”.

Credulous Miss Daley seems to believe that most Brits are capable of weighing the pros and cons of that system against first-past-the-post or proportional representation to arrive at the conclusion that, when all is said and done, the existing system is more in keeping with the country’s constitutional tradition.

I’d like to know the address of the planet she is living on. Assuming that the property prices there are reasonable, that’s clearly the place to be.

Here on earth, where we are stuck for the moment, a fair assessment would be that 90 per cent of the electorate don’t know their electoral systems from a hole in the ground. If they happened to vote right that once, it’s not because of their intimate familiarity with the ins and outs of constitutional conundrums, but because they don’t give a whit one way or the other. Hence it’s easier to keep things as they are.

While praising the unimpeachable sagacity of British voters, it’s useful to remember that we’re talking about the same people who three times in a row (in 1997, 2001 and 2005) voted in the worst and most destructive government in British history.

Only the 2008 economic crisis, largely the work of the Labour government, put an end to that orgy of stupid irresponsibility, and then only partially.

Hence Miss Daley’s consternation: if the Brits self-evidently boast unimpeachable electoral sagacity, then how is it that the Tories, who aren’t “that bad”, are locked neck-in-neck with the same party that produced the economic debacle – and is still led by the same people who were directly responsible for it.

This creates a very real possibility that next week we’ll be governed by a coalition of the “unelectable joke” and the SNP, a party that has all the disgusting qualities of Labour and then some, which addendum includes all-abiding hatred for the dominant population of these Isles.

Miss Daley rebukes the Tories for reducing the argument to the purely actuarial data of pounds and pence. However, it’s the only argument that can possibly keep Dave in truncated power: appeals, say, to tradition, social cohesion or, God forbid, the constitutional integrity of the United Kingdom would just confuse our sagacious voters – not to mention the fact that they’d sound hollow coming from Dave.

The problem with modern democracy, however, isn’t that voters can at times be persuaded to vote the wrong way, but that they can be first corrupted and then bribed into doing so.

Socialists get into power not because they persuade people of the benefits of socialism but because they gradually make people dependent on it.

This election won’t be decided on the Tories’ economic or any other performance as compared to Labour’s. The decisive factor will be the number of voters who depend on government spending wholly or partly.

If that number has reached the critical mass, Labour or some Labour-led coalition will carry the day. If it hasn’t, the Tories may have a chance (not that they deserve it, but this is another matter).

Considering that about 50 per cent of the UK economy is public, which is to say more or less socialist, one suspects that the critical mass either has already been reached, or is about to be.

The very premise of our modern democracy run riot is that first every person will vote on his narrow selfish interest, and then the sum of millions exercising petty selfishness will add up to public virtue.

This is another superstition, based as it is on two false premises: first, that, given modern ‘progressive’ education, voters know where their real interests lie; and second, that they are incorruptible.

It takes an exaggerated faith in human goodness, of the kind Miss Daley evinces, to believe that someone on welfare and in some cushy government sinecure, will realise that his long-term interests will be served better not by a suicidal growth in government spending, but by sound economic policy.

And it takes rank idiocy to assume that such voters will be altruistically prepared to forgo further handouts for the sake of public good and vote for a party that seems to be marginally less destructive in that respect.

This isn’t to make a firm prediction that we’ll be regaled with the sorry spectacle of Ed at 10 Downing Street. However, the matter of which nonentity will occupy the quarters at that address won’t be decided by the awesome sagacity of the electorate.

It hinges solely on whether or not the critical mass of corruption has been reached. If it has, then the purely rational arguments on the comparative merits of the Tories and Labour will have nothing but onanistic value.

One way or the other, one hopes that those voters who still read the papers will eventually be able to rely on more “unimpeachably sagacious” opinion-formers than Miss Daley. Opinions formed by her, kindly speaking, superficial musings will have nothing but destructive value.

In its support of three-way marriages, the Green Party is ahead of its time, though not by much.

The party leader Natalie Bennett says she’s open to the idea, as she’s no doubt open to many other ideas that she hasn’t yet vouchsafed to public knowledge.

In other words, she is open to the idea of breaking the law, which still proscribes bigamy.

But I have to be thankful to Natalie for expanding my vocabulary. Turns out there’s an official term for such marriages: they are called ‘polyamorous’ and not, for example, triamorous, polygenous or polyandral.

The preference of ‘poly-’ over ‘tri-’ suggests many exciting future possibilities which so far have only been explored by Mormons and Muslims. But why should those ‘M’ persons have all the fun?

More important, why should people with such reserves of love be treated without the respect they so richly deserve?

As my new friend Natalie puts it, “The Green Party supports campaigns to advance LGBTIQ rights and aims to build a society where everyone is valued, respected and empowered, regardless of their sexuality or gender identity.”

Thanks are again in order, for my vocabulary has again been enlarged: I had to look up LGBTIQ. I already knew that the first four letters of the acronym stand for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what IQ had to do with it.

Are those cursed with high IQ being abused? I can believe that: intelligent people have to follow the current election campaign willy-nilly and, if that doesn’t constitute abuse, I don’t know what would. But it turns out that in this context the initials stand for ‘Intergender and Queer’, which is rather the opposite of high IQ.

The word ‘intergender’ means ‘between sexes’, which seems to describe any normal relationship, including the kind sanctified by the church. And the colloquial term ‘queer’ is in this case redundant because the underlying notions are already covered by the first four initials of the acronym.

There’s some intellectual muddle there somewhere, and I am open to the idea, as the saying goes, of replacing those two letters with ETC, leaving the door open for unlimited future expansion in the Green Party platform.

Two words in Natalie’s statement that made me slightly worried are ‘everyone’ and ‘empowered’. Of course nowadays ‘valued’ and ‘respected’ have to be accepted without demur on pain of social rebuke, ostracism and possibly legal prosecution.

It has been communicated to us all in no uncertain terms that a person who copulates with a member of the same sex, and/or has some sex organs detached or else sewn on, must be ‘valued’ and ‘respected’ not in spite of such acts but specifically because of them.

But ‘everyone’ and ‘empowered’? To do what exactly? The mind boggles, if we are now communicating in new-fangled colloquialisms, but I’ll spare you the description of numerous possibilities. Let’s just say that, if I were a ewe or a ram, I’d be nervous.

The Greens, so ably led by my new friend Natalie, also propose “mandatory HIV, sex and relationship education – age appropriate and LGBTIQ inclusive – in all schools from primary level onwards.”

Whereas empowering everyone to do anything may strike one as a smidgen too inclusive, the educational statement is almost shamefully restricting. What about tots attending crèches and kindergartens? We don’t want them to feel insufficiently ‘valued, respected and empowered’, now do we?

Under no circumstances must we waste those first, formative years of children’s lives. We don’t want their education to be as incomplete as mine had been until I found out what ‘LGBTIQ’ and ‘polyamorous’ mean.

Ignore the little ones at your peril, I say. They may grow up unwilling to vote for the Green Party, and where will the country be then? In the doldrums, that’s where.

It’s good to see that those wishing to destroy the last vestiges of traditional civility and morality have such a broad choice of parties to vote for. Yet of all the available options, and there are several, I’d recommend the Greens – they seem to be leading the pack, albeit with others in hot pursuit.

 

 

What do the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany have in common with today’s France, Italy, Finland and most other members of the EU?

Quite a few things, actually. But the one springing to mind today is that they all celebrate 1 May as a national holiday.

Red flags are flying everywhere, just as they flew in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, if with different superimposed symbols.

The livery of national socialism has fallen into disrepute, and most political parties in Europe feel rather squeamish about it. Not so with the pictorial and vocal symbols of international socialism.

The conferences of our own dear Labour party, for example, are adorned with red flags and accompanied by rousing renditions of The Internationale, whose original lyrics were produced by Eugène Pottier in 1871, during the heady days of the Paris Commune.

It’s only fitting that on this glorious day you should be regaled with the full English translation. After all, in a week’s time we may well be governed by chaps who belt out these lyrics with gusto:

 

Stand up, damned of the Earth

Stand up, prisoners of starvation

Reason thunders in its volcano

This is the eruption to the end.

Of the past let us make a clean state

Enslaved masses, stand up, stand up.

The world is about to change its foundation

We are nothing, let us be all.

 

(Refrain):

This is the final struggle

Let us group together, and tomorrow

The Internationale

Will be the human race.

 

There are no supreme saviours

Neither God, nor Caesar, nor tribune.

Producers, let us save ourselves,

Decree the common salvation.

So that the thief expires,

So that the spirit be pulled from its prison,

Let us fan our forge ourselves

Strike the iron while it is hot

 

(Refrain)

The state oppresses and the law cheats.

Tax bleeds the unfortunate.

No duty is imposed on the rich;

The rights of the poor is an empty phrase.

Enough languishing in custody!

Equality wants other laws:

No rights without duties, she says,

Equally, no duties without rights.

 

(Refrain)

Hideous in their apotheosis

The kings of the mine and of the rail.

Have they ever done anything other

Than steal work?

Inside the safeboxes of the gang,

What work had created melted.

By ordering that they give it back,

The people want only their due.

 

(Refrain)

The kings made us drunk with fumes,

Peace among us, war to the tyrants!

Let the armies go on strike,

Stocks in the air, and break ranks.

If they insist, these cannibals

On making heroes of us,

They will know soon that our bullets

Are for our own generals.

 

(Refrain)

Workers, peasants, we are

The great party of labourers.

The earth belongs only to men;

The idle will go to reside elsewhere.

How many of our flesh have they consumed?

But if these ravens, these vultures

Disappear one of these days,

The sun will shine for ever.

(Refrain)

 

On general principle, the song adopted by a political party as its own expresses its philosophy. Hence a Labour member, or for that matter voter, must in all conscience endorse every word of The Internationale, or at least its overall sentiment.

Those who do must be commended for having the power of their convictions. The rest of us should get into the holiday spirit and scream:

“Mayday! Mayday!”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was 70 years today that Adolf Hitler killed his beloved dog Blondie, then, as an afterthought, Eva Braun and himself.

Blondie was definitely a victim there, and had the RSPCA had jurisdiction over the bunker, it would have had strong words to say about that act of cruelty towards animals. But what about the other two?

This raises the important issue of victimhood, both in the narrow context of that event and also more broadly.

Eva Hitler, née Braun, was a victim only to a very small extent. She accepted her death as willingly as she had plunged herself into a protracted liaison with a rather objectionable swain. One could justifiably say that she brought her misfortune on to herself.

Similarly, it takes an unlikely feat of verbal gymnastics to regard the Führer himself as his own victim, and so far not even David Irving has displayed the requisite dexterity.

If David Irving has slipped your mind, he is an historian who has earned quite a reputation, and a stint in prison, by insisting that the Holocaust never happened and just managing to desist from expressing the hope that some day it will.

The rest of us know the truth: those millions of Jews were victims of Nazism. Or, to be more ethnographically specific, of Germans, ably assisted by the like-minded populations of most countries the Germans had occupied until they lost the war.

The previous paragraph says something so obvious that I feel ashamed for having written it. My only excuse is that 91 per cent of today’s Germans don’t regard the Allied victory as Germany’s defeat.

Those same Germans who in their millions screamed Sieg Heil!!! and then gleefully did everything they could to make that Sieg a reality, who built and manned concentration camps, operated gas chambers, murdered millions in addition to the Jews, welcomed every cannibalistic policy of the Nazi regime, deified Hitler until things went sour, fought to the last man as the Allies were advancing into Germany – those same Germans weren’t losers.

They were victims of Nazism, and hence the Allies’ victory wasn’t their defeat. It was their liberation, their victory as well. Such is the received wisdom in Germany today.

This has to be the only example in history of victims fighting their deliverers tooth and nail until the very last moment.

Then again, victimhood junkies may claim that all those Volkssturm children and old men were setting Allied tanks alight because they were victims (that dread word again) of brainwashing. They were unaware of the beastly nature of the regime they were defending because they were victims (!) of Nazi propaganda.

THEY DID NOT KNOW!, is the battle cry of today’s revisionism. That is, not to cut too fine a point, a lie. Of course they knew – they couldn’t help knowing.

In his book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen proves, calculator in hand, that hundreds of thousands of Germans were directly involved in the slaughter (as in executing millions by gas, bullet or neglect, running concentration camps, transporting barely living skeletons there, etc.), with millions more involved in an ancillary capacity – and just about everyone else nodding their approval.

There were some German victims too, people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen (whose The Diary of a Man in Despair is a moving and brilliantly written account of the war), men who died in front of firing squads or with piano wire round their necks because they hated Hitler.

But their voices were muffled by the din of Nuremberg rallies and millions of throats roaring Heil!!! all over Germany with the kind of worshipping enthusiasm that couldn’t be faked.

And of course the Germans suffered horrendously as the Russians were moving in from the east and the Allies from the west.

Millions of German women were raped, and while the Russians displayed by far the greatest virility, the Western allies weren’t as blameless as they now like to believe. And yes, 14 million Germans were displaced, many starved to death and tens of thousands committed suicide.

Such facts should be known, and the German historian Florian Huber must be complimented for divulging them in his book Child, Promise Me You Will Shoot Yourself.

But were those Germans typologically closer to Blondie, who was an innocent, unaware victim, or to Eva Braun, who brought her victimhood on to herself? Were they more like the Goebbelses’ six children poisoned by their parents than the parents who did the poisoning, before killing themselves?

Herr Huber laments that “We have to think of ourselves as the bad guys, and it is still a controversial thing to suggest otherwise.”

I’d say this ‘thing’ isn’t so much controversial as historically mendacious and morally corrupt. The Germans were ‘the bad guys’ then, and by denying it they’ll only succeed in reinforcing this retrospective judgement.

In general, the Germans, in addition to their well-documented talents in just about every field of endeavour, seem to have one for succumbing to collective psychosis.

They did so when going rabid under Hitler, then revelling in morbid collective guilt for decades thereafter, and now disclaiming any collective guilt and claiming collective victimhood instead.

A note to Germans: don’t try to massage and pervert history, chaps. Try to come to terms with it and atone for it properly, with none of the Teutonic propensity for Wagnerian drama.

It would also help if you began to think for yourselves, rather than swallowing the party line, along with hook and sinker. Another piece of avuncular advice: the party line is always wrong – whatever the line and whatever the party.

 

 

 

Comrade Stalin once explained, not without a healthy dose of cynicism, that it wasn’t how votes were cast, but how they were counted that mattered.

Comrade Putin begs to differ, as far as the first part of his idol’s maxim is concerned. How votes are cast is also important to him, if only to make the counters’ job more straightforward.

This week’s regional elections in towns around Moscow illustrated Comrade Putin’s priorities – and also his cynicism, which is quite the match of Stalin’s.

A woman walked into a polling station. Eschewing stealth, she brandished a thick sheath of ballot papers and tried to stuff them into the box.

Her right to exercise democratic privileges was, however, defeated by the design of the box, whose slot was wide enough to accommodate several sheets at a time, but not a stack as thick as an unabridged dictionary.

This design flaw slowed the woman down and she attracted the attention of two death-defying observers, who not only dared to belong to opposition parties but also took it upon themselves to make sure the ballots were cast one by one, and not pile by pile.

The observers citizen-arrested the woman and called the police. However, the cops were beaten to the scene by a black BMW with darkened windows and no licence plates.

The sinister car disgorged several muscular lads who proceeded to beat the observers up and smash their cameras. In that undertaking they succeeded so spectacularly that the two men ended up in hospital with broken ribs, busted noses, concussions and cranial injuries.

Having done their bit for democracy, the BMW lads vanished. The police arrived, confiscated the ballot papers and oversaw the removal of the blood puddles on the floor. Subsequent requests of the observers’ colleagues for the release of the evidence, including the CCTV footage, were turned down.

Meanwhile, Irek Valdanov, Chairman of the Electoral Commission for the Moscow area, explained what had really happened.

The observers, according to his truthful account, were Nazis, specially trained in Poland to disrupt Russian elections, which, as everyone knows, are fairer than anywhere in the world, most emphatically including America.

He didn’t opine that therefore the sooner the Russians attack Poland yet again the better, but one could detect the connotational longing.

Do you get the impression that Russian elections are more fun than ours are going to be on 7 May? And the fun doesn’t stop at the ballot box.

Sergei Naryshkin, Speaker of the Duma (Russian parliament), came up with both a realistic prognosis for the future of Europe and a practical proposal aimed at bringing this future about.

The prognosis was that, sooner rather than later, the European Union would be incorporated into the Russian Federation. The statesman didn’t specify whether the incorporation would be voluntary or otherwise, giving the impression that it really didn’t matter one way or the other.

As to the proposal, Mr Naryshkin suggests that, by way of the first step towards joining Russia, the Europeans should kick the United States out of Nato and hence out of Europe. That step, he felt, would hasten making his dream a reality, and he was probably right.

America’s withdrawal from Nato would indeed make Europe ripe for Russia’s plucking. Suddenly the boasts by Putin and his henchmen about the limited number of days it would take Russian tanks to arrive at the Channel begin to acquire a touch of realism.

Mr Naryshkin has a bit of an anti-American and anti-European chip on his shoulder, being one of the Russian officials barred from entry to those places. That no doubt rankles, and one can understand his desire to get his own back.

However, American tourists are still free to travel to Russia and they must be ecstatic to see that many Moscow shops now boast doormats designed in the pattern of the American flag. Since Americans tend to feel rather sentimental about that institutional symbol, one doubts they enjoy the sight of Russian shoppers wiping their feet on the Old Glory.

In my day, Russian manufacturers eschewed such elaborate designs, just as Russian TV programmes didn’t feature open anti-Semitic slurs. Hints, yes, allusions, definitely, but never open invitations to “bugger off to the Promised Land”.

These, however, were exactly the words addressed by one guest on a popular RT1 chat show to another. The ethnically Jewish guest screamed bloody murder but found no sympathy from either the host or other guests. He then did a Robert Downey Jr. and stormed off the set, probably wondering whatever next.

As ever imitating life, Russian art ably assists Putin in communicating the key points of Russian democracy, or actually the only point that matters: Putin.

Masha Rasputina, a pop singer who looks like a brothel employee pushed into management by old age, has just produced a video recording of this song: https://www.facebook.com/almat.malatov/videos/vb.792089599/10153294335199600/?type=2&theater

The Russophones among you will no doubt be hanging on to every word, but even the linguistically challenged will be able to appreciate the overall presentation, complete with a giant backdrop screen portraying Peter Hitchens’s role model. In broad strokes, Putin has gone Stalin one better.

Comrade Stalin was happy to be portrayed as the leader of the world’s proletariat, the teacher of mankind and the condensed embodiment of every human virtue. But he balked at claiming divinity, or letting others claim it for him.

Comrade Putin has no such compunctions. Hence Masha Rasputina’s rousing lyrics include an entreaty to Putin “to pray for Russia, as all Russia is praying for you”. ‘To you’ is what’s clearly meant here.

And there I was, thinking that the Russians have become so devout overnight that they are actually praying to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen. They may be, except that the Russians have historically found the Trinity unnecessarily limiting.

In the past, they sought a fourth hypostasis in Sophia, the Wisdom of God. Now they seek it in Putin, the Wisdom of Man. Religious worship too is fun in Russia, as much as democracy. 

 

   

 

 

Every time I think that now I’ve seen and heard everything, modernity disabuses me of this smug notion.

In this instance, modernity’s power to render me speechless is reasserted by the Dutch designer Mark Sturkenboom, who introduced a startling innovation at the Milan Design Week.

It is a tastefully finished ‘memory box’ that makes sure that the heart isn’t the only organ in which a grieving widow can cherish the memory of her loved one.

Called 21 Grams, the box contains a glass dildo and a small gold-plated urn for storing the eponymous amount of the deceased’s ashes. 21 Grams can be opened by a gold-plated brass key the bereaved woman can wear as a necklace.

And that’s not all. The box is also equipped with a scent diffuser to be loaded with the dear departed’s aftershave (or perfume, if such was his wont), an amplifier for the couple’s nostalgic music to be played during the loving act, a slot for a wedding ring and a little drawer for a keepsake, such as a scarf, handkerchief or death certificate. 

The kit, says the proud inventor, “opens a window to go back to moments of love and intimacy,” and so it undoubtedly does.

Mr Sturkenboom modestly refrained from outlining the ballistic possibilities, but they are endless. The grieving widow will now be able to re-enact all sorts of acrobatic variants the deceased last tried many years ago, when he was still young, supple – and alive.

She may even want to explore some naughtier options by asking a third party of either sex to operate the device. If the dear departed was a bit of a prude, this may enable the sorrowful widow not only to relive the old experiences but also to explore some new ones, such as a threesome.

Isn’t this exactly the kind of solace a modern widow should seek? Isn’t this the way to glue a broken heart together again? Of course it is. And to Mr Sturkenboom’s credit, his inspiration wasn’t just commercial but mainly sentimental:

“I sometimes help an elderly lady with her groceries and she has an urn standing near the widow with the remains of her husband,” he said. “She always speaks with so much love about him, but the jar he is in doesn’t reflect that at all.”

Hence the dildo, as a fitting reflection of love. Can’t you just see it? An old Dutch woman, her hair in a bun, her eyes full of tears, giving the young inventor a nice cup of herbal tea, then sending him on his way and whipping his brainchild out. A picture worthy of the brush of any 17^th-century Dutch master.

I’m sure 21 Grams will be hugely and deservedly successful. It tugs on all the right strings of a heart fine-tuned by modernity.

Ghoulish? Necrophiliac? Perverse? Sick? If any of these words have crossed your mind at any moment, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. You are a close-minded, cold-blooded person out of tune with modern sensibilities.

Even worse, you’re deaf to the very notion of progress. Progress, as the word is these days defined, outpaces even the most fecund imagination.

Aldous Huxley and George Orwell thought they were creating grotesquely nightmarish fantasies of the future. Yet neither of them could even imagine the sensitive young Dutchman who out of the kindness of his heart helps old ladies with their groceries and, while he is at it, redefines morality. 

If it feels good, it’s moral, according to Ernest Hemingway, Huxley’s and Orwell’s contemporary. It’s also healthy, normal and in good taste. Honi soit qui mal y pense, as Edward III once said, albeit in a slightly different context.

Nigel Short is an amiable Lancashire lad, who once came close to winning the world chess championship.

Well, it wasn’t really close, considering that his opponent in the final was Kasparov, arguably the greatest wood-pusher in history. Let’s just say Nigel got closer than any other Brit has ever come to claiming the top prize in the game.

Unlike many top players, who by and large tend to be dysfunctional nerds with bifocal glasses and socks of different colours, Nigel comes across as a well-balanced man with middleclass sensibilities, a good sense of humour and a gift of the gab.

It’s this latter quality that has got him into a spot of trouble. For Nigel committed two deadly sins (Mark II) in one short statement. Women, he said, are innately not as good at chess as men are. And “rather than fretting about inequality, we should just get on with it.”

SIN 1 (general): Belief that any group of people, defined by their sex, race, nationality, religion or any other characteristic, can be biologically different from any other group. Hence some groups may be better than others at certain things.

This belief is verifiably true, which makes it even more subversive. What it subverts is the vulgar Enlightenment fallacy on which modern thinking on such subjects is based: that we all start out as equal and, if we demonstrably don’t end up as equal, it’s society’s fault.

This belief isn’t rational-empirical but fideistic-political, which means it’s impervious to any refuting evidence, no matter how exhaustive or unimpeachable. Whatever evidence to the contrary is presented, the response will be the same in essence, with only minor variations.

Men commit more violent crimes than women? It’s all social conditioning.

Straight men, on average, aren’t as good as women or homosexuals at interior decoration? Ditto.

Blacks generally tend to be better than whites at basketball but apparently not as good at nuclear physics? Ditto.

People with higher IQs tend to be more successful, and IQ is the most reliable predictor of practical success? Ditto.

In Britain, Pakistanis and Jamaican blacks tend to be more violent than Indians and African blacks? Ditto.

Moreover, whoever dares speak out against this neo-orthodoxy is asking for a stiff rebuke, ostracism or even criminal prosecution. This regardless of how many reams of statistical evidence he can dredge up in support of his neo-heterodoxy.

SIN 2 (specific): Belief that there are biological differences between men and women that go beyond the undeniable physical characteristics. Hence men may be better at certain things than women, and vice versa.

Objections to this belief would be less violent if one were to point out activities at which women are demonstrably better than men, such as learning languages. Similarly, it would be just about tolerable to observe that blacks are better runners and jumpers than whites.

But mention the fact that blacks are not quite so good at swimming or philosophy, and be ready to duck the slings and arrows. Similarly it’s off limits to point out the equally obvious fact that women aren’t as good as men at analytical thinking, even if they are better at the intuitive kind.

Hence, though some of the greatest modern poets and performing musicians are women, one can’t name too many great female mathematicians or composers. And, the odd Hildegarde de Bingen notwithstanding, women seem to make better, and more plentiful, saints than theologians. Also, a woman is more likely to be a money-spinning manager of a computer firm than an inventor of new computer technology.

This brings us closer to chess, which is perhaps the most analytical of life’s useless pastimes. And for a few early years of my life I was indeed close to chess.

Like Nigel Short I misspent my youth playing the game competitively. Alas, I wasn’t nearly as talented as he is, which is why I sometimes competed against girls who were as good as me or better.

However, I never competed against a single one who was – or went on to become – as good as Nigel Short.

The social conditioning argument doesn’t quite work here: the girls went through exactly the same training as the boys, from as early an age. They had the same coaches and the same pushy parents, they read the same books, scrutinised the same games, played in the same tournaments.

And yet the entire history of chess has produced, in round numbers, one woman, Judith Polgar, who could compete at the highest level of the men’s game – though there have been quite a few women who could wipe the board with a hacker like me.

Professional neuroscientists can explain this with the benefit of recondite terminology, but it’s reasonably clear even to an observant rank amateur that women’s brains function, and are wired, differently from men’s. That doesn’t make either group more or less intelligent – it’s just that their intelligence is different.

God clearly created us to perform not only different physiological tasks, but also different intellectual ones. Rather than trying to deny this obvious fact, we should rejoice in it, or at least “just get on with it”, as Nigel Short put it.

Hence I’m happy to observe that my wife is more intelligent (not to mention more talented) than I am in some areas, just as she readily accepts, over my perfunctory objections, that I may be more intelligent in some others. This is how it is and how it should be: men and women aren’t identical; they are complementary.

Denying this obvious fact, especially doing so with mouth-frothing vehemence, is worse than silly. It’s vulgar.

Contrary to Oscar Wilde’s quip, not all crimes are vulgar. But he was right in saying that all vulgarity is a crime.

That makes militant feminism criminal but, in our modern world, defined as it is by vulgarity of every conceivable kind, it’s those who dare voice an opposition who are cast in the role of criminals.

One just hopes that Nigel Short doesn’t suffer a fate any worse than finding himself at the receiving end of some idiotic articles, such as the one in The Times the other day. In a few years ‘sexism’ may graduate from being a social faux pas to becoming a felony, and then he’ll really have to watch his step.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two drunk animals, aged 25 and 22, launched an unprovoked attack on two men outside a pub. Having knocked one of them out cold, they then rained blows on the other victim and, when he was down, kicked him in the head 18 times.

(You can admire their handiwork, or rather footwork, on this video: http://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/buckingham-palace-guard-and-soldier-spared-jail-after-cctv-shows-them-stamping-on-victims-head-10202036.html)

They then ran away and tried to hide, but were arrested and eventually put on trial. Now what kind of punishment do you think would fit the crime?

Before you answer, consider that someone who cheats on his taxes is likely to be sent down for at least a year or two, to rub shoulders with the creator of a fraudulent pyramid scheme and a chap who didn’t realise his wife wasn’t in the mood for sex.

Now what sentence do you think would be just for this beastly, violent crime? A custodian sentence surely, but how long? Twenty years? Fifteen? Ten?

My answer to that question would be the maximum the law allows. Viciously kicking a man in the head 18 times is attempted murder, and it’s not for any lack of zeal on the attackers’ part that the victim survived.

Hence my personal verdict would be life with a 25-year tariff, but then I know I tend to be rather harsh. So shall we settle on 25 with a 12-year tariff? Done.

Except that it isn’t. The judge sentenced one animal to 12 months suspended and the other to a 12-month community order. They walked free.

Now is the time to name names. The two criminals are both soldiers: Shaun Smith is a Scots Guard and Jason Collins a Welsh Guard, who has done sentry duty outside Buckingham Palace (before and after the crime).

Both are highly regarded in the service, and the character references their received at the trial were nothing short of glowing. That, according to Judge James Hill, QC, explains the derisory sentence, which he himself admits is otherwise inexplicable.

“I state in open court that what I have done is entirely exceptional,” he said. Oh, it’s quite a bit worse than that, Your Honour. It’s a travesty of justice and mockery of the law – the very law you are entrusted to uphold.

Amazingly the defence was allowed to plea bargain down from attempted murder and then grievous bodily harm (GBH) to the least imaginable charge, that of two counts of actual bodily harm (ABH).

But even that minimum charge allows for a maximum sentence of a fiver per count, 10 years in total. It’s unconscionable that the two thugs were set free just because they are good at their job.

I’d suggest that their crime is worse than fiddling a tax return or running a pyramid scheme – or even, dare I say it, making love to one’s wife without written permission, appropriately notarised.

Oh yes, Smith and Collins had each had six pints of beer and 15 shots, roughly an equivalent of a bottle of spirits.

I don’t know if that was used as a mitigating circumstance in their turning from angels into devils, to use their defender’s words. It should have been used by the prosecution as an aggravating one.

The two criminals are old enough to know their limit, beyond which they turn into murdering beasts. If they go beyond it, this means they don’t mind becoming murdering beasts.

Neither, evidently, does the law, and the explanation for this goes way further than the obvious incompetence of a single judge.

These days crimes against individuals are small beer compared to crimes against the state, whose interests our judges serve with canine loyalty in preference to society’s interests.

Hence, for example, 95 per cent of all burglaries go unpunished and, in most cases, even not investigated properly. It’s as if the law tacitly accepts that a burglar is helping the state to do its principal job, that of income redistribution.

Even violent assaults are excusable, provided, for old times’ sake, they don’t result in disfigurement or death: they don’t threaten the state at all, and if they threaten individuals, it’s just too bad. What was the victim of Smith and Collins doing out in the street late at night anyway? He has only himself to blame.

Not so with crimes committed against the state either directly, by depriving it of a few pounds of tax flesh, or indirectly, by, say, challenging the state’s prerogative to squeeze its body of laws into every marital bed in some awful threesome.

Such deeds are punished severely because they flout the state’s power in a way in which even violent crimes against individuals don’t. The modern state isn’t about protecting individuals or, God forbid, society. It’s about lording it over them.

It is hardly surprising then that even many of those people who fear the law don’t really respect it. And fear alone isn’t a sufficient deterrent – the morality of good and bad has been replaced by the morality of not getting caught, which imposes a far weaker restraint.

Hence every ‘exceptional’ sentence like the one passed by Judge Hill diminishes the law in general and its ability to protect people specifically. The inevitable upshot will be a growing crime rate, with Her Majesty’s subjects feeling unsafe every time they venture out after dark.

Law and order? Ordure, is more like it.