Author: Alexander Boot

 

At the risk of dating myself, I remember the case as if it was yesterday.

Alas, it wasn’t. This granddaughter of the publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst was kidnapped by the so-called Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974.

Those Marxist thugs abducted Patty, 19, who was living with a boyfriend at the time, and kept her in a wardrobe for a few weeks, indoctrinating her in their ‘philosophy’, a hodgepodge of Marx, Mao and Malcolm X.

The indoctrination was literary, oral and sexual, with Patty regularly raped by two of the Liberators. Rape eventually turned into consensual sex, and Patty went on to keep for many years a cherished memento given to her by one of the rapists.

In due course she became a willing participant not only in the sex but also in some of the Liberators’ less amorous activities, such as bank robberies.

During one of them Patty, who had adopted the nom de revolution Tania, was filmed pointing an M1 rifle at terrified bank employees sprawling on the floor.

“Keep your mother****ing heads down or I’ll blow your mother****ing heads off!” bellowed the newly converted heiress.

In another incident she gave covering fire to her comrades, and only her poor marksmanship saved the lives of several police officers.

Eventually the police caught up with the SLA. Patty got away at first but was caught soon thereafter.

As she was led to custody, Patty asked the throng of reporters to “send my greetings and love to all the sisters and brothers out there”, and she wasn’t talking about her siblings. Filling in a prison questionnaire, she listed her profession as ‘urban guerrilla’.

At her trial Patty was defended by the fashionable lawyer F. Lee Bailey. The phrase making the rounds in the legal profession at the time was: “God asks himself every morning ‘What can I do for F. Lee Bailey today?’”

In Patty’s case God didn’t do much for either of them. Bailey’s defence was based on brainwashing, which supposedly turned Patty into an unthinking automaton. It was during her trial that the term ‘Stockholm syndrome’ gained common currency.

Under Bailey’s expert guidance, Patty eventually repudiated her SLA allegiance, but it took her weeks to do so. Perhaps because of that delay, the brainwashing defence failed, and Patty was sentenced to seven years in prison.

In passing his verdict, the judge commented that “rebellious young people who, for whatever reason, become revolutionaries and voluntarily commit criminal acts will be punished.”

Patty ended up serving two years and then dropped from the public eye – until this week, when her pet shih tzu Rocket won the top prize in the ‘toy’ category at America’s leading dog show.

This is undoubtedly a better way of getting into the limelight than firing an assault rifle at policemen, knocking off banks and scaring bystanders out of their wits.

But Patty’s re-emergence makes one wonder again whether brainwashing really can override people’s free will so thoroughly. After all, following her indoctrination programme Patty roamed free – and armed.

She must have had endless opportunities to get away from her captors, yet chose not to do so. Patty clearly no longer regarded them as her abductors and rapists. They now were her friends, lovers and comrades-at-arms.

My natural impulse would be to dismiss the whole notion of brainwashing as another psychobabble con.

Free will is an ontological property of man, and it’s one of the key differences between us and animals.

To think that violence, sensory deprivation and a litany of cretinous slogans can turn a decent person into a murderous robot would be demeaning not only to the person but to mankind at large.

In fact, one could cite many examples of people exposed to much more cruel indoctrination who nevertheless managed to resist. Some American POWs in Vietcong ‘re-education’ camps spring to mind, many Germans who hated everything the Nazis preached, and many Soviets who retained their humanity in the face of non-stop inculcation backed up by death threats.

Yet one can also site many other examples, including those American POWs who did succumb to communist indoctrination, Soviet citizens who did swallow the part line sincerely, and Germans who greeted Hitler’s deranged speeches with millions of heartfelt ‘Heils!!!’.

One could also cite the psychotically charismatic cult leader Jim Jones, who in 1978 brainwashed 913 of his followers to commit ‘revolutionary suicide’ by cyanide.

Much as one detests the dehumanisation of humans, evidence does show that brainwashing works famously on some people. But what kind of people?

Having grown up in a society where brainwashing propaganda was screamed at the populace every minute of every day, I firmly believe that indoctrination works only on those who are emotionally and intellectually predisposed to accept it.

Not everyone can be a hero, and some people who detest the ‘re-education’ may pretend to go along to save themselves. But pretend they would, and once the threat disappeared such people would instantly recover their former selves.

Patty Hearst didn’t, which means her captors found her to be a receptive audience. Patty’s life at Berkeley University, which was then the hotbed of left-wing radicalism, must have made her receptive to left-wing propaganda.

As an heiress, she must have had strong feelings of guilt, and if she hadn’t to begin with, a year at Berkeley would have enlightened her to the Berkeley version of reality. Thus her SLA indoctrinators enunciated her own thoughts, if with an added radical twist. Their job was easy: a bit of coercion, a bit of propaganda, and Patty was all theirs.

“People move on,” she said the other day, accepting congratulations on her canine triumph. They certainly do, and I hope Patty, now 60, has moved in the right direction.

That, however, doesn’t make me doubt the justice of her prison sentence all those years ago. She should have served the full whack.

 

 

 

 

Air Chief Marshal Sir Michael Graydon put it in a nutshell: “I very much doubt whether the UK could sustain a shooting war against Russia.”

Air Commodore Andrew Lambert concurs: “If the Russians turned up the heat, we would struggle badly.”

No wonder. Since 2010 HMG has cut £4.7 billion out of the defence budget, along with 33,000 servicemen and hundreds of warplanes, warships and tanks. The numerical strength of our army is now down to the levels of the early 19^th century.

Our solitary carrier has no planes on it, and we are down to 17 surface ships. The two carriers under construction will be useless pieces of metal if, and it’s a big if, they ever sail. We’ll have neither the planes to put on them nor the escort ships to turn them into carrier battle groups.

Britannia not only doesn’t rule the waves any longer – she can’t even make them.

Moreover, according to some expert reports, the Russians’ new tracking systems can more or less nullify our Trident deterrent, which is our sole hope of giving the Russians second thoughts.

The number of our fighter squadrons has been cut from 26 to seven, and the other day, when Russian nuclear planes buzzed just off the coast of Cornwall, our two Typhoons had to be scrambled from a Lincolnshire (!) base to intercept them.

If the Russian mission was launched to test the rapidity of our response, whoever runs the Russian air force must a have a broad grin on his face.

Those who know what they are talking about reacted to this Russian provocation in a way that’s in worrying contrast to the response of those who haven’t a clue, namely Dave.

We shouldn’t, he said, “dignify it with too much of a response… this episode demonstrates that we do have the fast jets, the pilots, the systems…”

We know we have those things, Dave, but thanks for telling us. We also know we don’t have enough of them to defend the realm against the Russian threat, which our Defence Secretary considers “real and present”.

If HMG abandoned its maniacal commitment to foreign aid, our defence budget could be increased by 40 per cent without any additional appropriations. But, especially in this election year, Dave has to be seen to perform within the culture of care, share, be aware. This takes priority over defence of the realm, which is after all the main function of government.

It has to be said though that, compared to Germany, the UK is a thoroughly militarised, sabre-rattling, testosterone-driven power. Germany’s armed forces are down to 63,000 personnel in active service, while her arsenal is hopelessly outdated and short of even spare parts.

As always, such gross negligence on the part of Western powers is rooted in ignorance, stupidity and chronic inability to think strategically.

This was pointed out yesterday, in slightly more diplomatic terms, by the House of Lords EU committee.

Its report says that Europe has “sleepwalked” into the Ukraine crisis. There is a chronic shortage of Russian experts at the Foreign Office, claims the report. Thus we suffer from a vastly curtailed analytical capacity and a compromised ability to formulate an “authoritative response” to the crisis.

I’m not sure that Britain’s analytical capacity would be tangibly heightened by adding more bureaucrats to our already bloated public sector.

However, the report correctly attributes the looming catastrophe to the fact that Europe has proceeded for too long from the “optimistic premise” that Russia is on the road to democracy, moral goodness and Christian probity.

I seldom blow my own trumpet but in this case I find indulging in this kind of musicianship impossible to resist. For, as those who’ve kept the back copies of The Salisbury Review can find out, I’ve been writing for 25 years that the Russian leopard still has all its spots in place.

Being rather bloody-minded by nature, I persisted in screaming that all those glasnosts and perestroikas were fundamentally bogus, a stratagem to achieve the same ends by different, more flexible means. Sooner or later, the flexibility was bound to disappear, while the evil ends would take over openly, rather than surreptitiously.

Some readers agreed, but most felt that I had an axe to grind, a chip on my shoulder and no objectivity, a faculty that’s an exclusive property of those blessed with ‘an open mind’ (another word for ignorance).

I don’t claim any unique insights or an uncanny analytical ability. Every educated ex-Russian of my acquaintance knew what was going on as well as I did, and some of them wrote exactly the same things.

The trouble was that we wrote for small journals whose readership numbered in thousands, whereas the perestroika groupies wrote for mainstream publications with millions of readers.

Why, even now, when Russia’s evil designs have been laid bare for all to see, Peter Hitchens still knocks off his pro-Putin drivel for The Mail, our most conservative paper.

Most pundits, however, have now seen the light with the unrivalled acuity of hindsight. So, as the Lords report suggests, have some of the politicians.

Let’s just pray that it isn’t too late for this newly acquired vision to be translated into appropriate action. Personally, I am not holding my breath. 

 

 

 

 

Putin poses a ‘real and present danger’ to the Baltic states and therefore to Nato, says the Defence Secretary. Nato, according to him, is getting ready to repel any aggression.

The first part of the statement is easy to welcome. The second is hard to believe.

The welcome part is that Mr Fallon realises Putin is a great threat to the West, as great as that presented by ISIS.

What makes Putin dangerous isn’t necessarily the scale of his current aggression. It’s the steady escalation from one stage to the next, with each probing the West to test how far he can push.

“SO WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?” is the perennial implicit question.

This didn’t start a year ago. The opening shots in the war on the West were fired in 2008, when Georgia was the immediate target.

As his booty, Putin got two provinces of Georgia, veto rights over the country’s policies and, most important, a reply to his question. The answer, in deed not in word, was – eh, not much. Nothing, if truth be told.

That’s exactly what he wanted to hear. The time had come to up the stakes and move on to the table where the game is bigger. Hence the brutal attack on the Ukraine.

Even that unfolded gradually, though the time lines were now compressed. First Putin used Russian troops modestly withholding Russian insignia to occupy the Crimea and pose his lapidary question to the West.

Again he got the answer he wanted: next to nothing. Some derisory sanctions, a few stern words and no single-minded response across the board. Some misguided Western opinion-makers even went so far as to argue that perhaps Putin had a point.

Didn’t Crimea belong to Russia before Khrushchev transferred it to the Ukraine?

It certainly did – for almost exactly the same number of years as India belonged to the British Empire.

Granted, the British Empire no longer exists. But then neither does the Russian Empire, for which Prince Potemkin annexed the Crimea, or the Soviet Union, within which Khrushchev moved it sideways.

The colonel was listening and drawing conclusions. Time had come to attend to serious business.

The serious business was to use his proxy bandits, armed to the teeth by the Russians and reinforced with regular Russian troops (again without insignia) to grab two eastern provinces of the Ukraine.

This time the reply to Putin’s question came in rather higher tones. Russia was hit with mild sanctions, which nevertheless had a deleterious effect on the country’s economy, especially when accompanied by oil losing half its wholesale price.

Moreover, there were some consequences for Putin personally, which was the worst bit. Rather than being fêted as a world statesman, friend to US presidents and German chancellors, he began to be treated as a leper belonging in a quarantine.

This started in Brisbane, where Putin found himself in shunned solitude. Merkel tried to talk to him, and her subsequent accounts clearly discouraged all other leaders from conversational conviviality towards Putin.

He now felt like a pariah, with precious little he could do to regain his seat at the table. One possible way out of the conundrum was to stop the carnage, withdraw the troops and start playing honestly, without swiping some chips off the table when no one was looking.

That, however, was out of the question. Putin’s early life was guided by the unwritten code of street gangs: if you start a fight, you can’t stop it until either you or your opponent writhes on the tarmac sputtering blood.

Either way you’ve earned respect (rispetto, in the Italian equivalent). If you lose that particular fight, there will be others. But if you sue for peace, there won’t be – because there won’t be any respect. Your former mates will turn on you, join forces with your enemies, and you’ll be history.

That’s the only code Putin knows, the only one that has left a deep imprint. He acted accordingly.

His sinister propaganda machine, otherwise known as Russian media, was cranked up, and the messages it spewed out got more and more menacing.

If the West arms the Ukraine, Russia will use low-yield nuclear weapons. To start with. Make no mistake about it, screamed one Putin Goebbels after another, we can turn any foe, including the USA, to radioactive dust.

We’ll burn Paris and London to cinders with napalm, screamed another acolyte. Russian military doctrine, explained Putin’s high command, no longer excludes a nuclear first strike.

Putin himself used the trick beloved of all fascist dictators: he sacralised his aggression.

Before Grand Duke Vladimir baptised Rus, he himself had been baptised in the Crimea, explained the colonel. That, and not Khrushchev’s administrative shenanigans, is what gives Russia the right to claim the peninsula.

And isn’t Kiev known, since time immemorial, as the Mother of Russian Cities? Well, then it’s time for Russia to return to her mother, or rather it’s time for the wayward mother to return to Russia.

Putin then declared that Russia is the hub not of the world proletariat and all oppressed masses, but of a mysterious entity called Russian World, a sort of Pax Russica.

His, Col. Putin’s, task was henceforth to protect not just Russian citizens but all ethnic Russians, regardless of where they live. If they see themselves oppressed, then oppressed they are, and it’s Putin’s sacred duty to spring to their defence.

Long-term this may sound worrying to any country that includes a Russian minority. For example, I know quite a few aggrieved Russians in Paris, London and New York.

But those aren’t the immediate targets. What Putin sees in his evil mind’s eye is Russia’s reoccupation of the former Soviet republics, all of which have considerably bigger Russian minorities than Paris, London and New York.

Putin is on record describing the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20^th century”, a rating not countenanced by a single former Soviet republic other than Russia herself.

But Putin is president of Russia, so he owes it to his namesake who baptised Kievan Rus a millennium ago to bring the republics back into the fold.

The Ukraine’s turn is now – who’s next on the list? Belarus? Possibly. Kazakhstan? Even more likely.

Still, the West could live with the rape of those former provinces of the Soviet Union, as it’s currently living with the rape of the Ukraine.

The real problem could come from Putin’s attack on Latvia, with her 556,422 Russians, Lithuania, with 174,000 and Estonia with 321,198 (a whopping third of the population). The three Baltic republics are Nato members, and Article 5 of the Nato Charter says that an attack on one member is an attack on all.

This realisation dawned on Merkel, Hollande and other European leaders, especially since Putin was using nuclear blackmail as a prompter.

If, encouraged by Europe’s inactivity, Putin acts on his threat, Nato will have only two choices: fight or surrender. The second option is really a non-option: surrendering would be such a show of testicular weakness that Putin would almost certainly press on to the Channel at least.

Fighting, on the other hand, isn’t a valid option either. Europe has nothing to fight with – no arms, no armies, no will above all.

It was 26 years ago that Western leaders pretended they believed that Russia had gone vegetarian. Now we will all get fat on the peace dividend, was the universal hope.

That promoted a demob-happy mentality, which led to demob-happy policies. The Nato target of military spend equal to two per cent of GDP was never met by Europe. Britain’s defence budget stands at 1.7 per cent, and going down. Germany and France are even more parsimonious.

Hence Merkel and Hollande rushing off to Moscow to offer surrender, while begging Putin to let them keep face. They don’t want to fight, they can’t fight, they hope Putin won’t make them fight.

Amazingly Western papers are describing this cowardly act as a peace initiative. The Russians read the situation better: their papers are full of headlines like “Europe got scared”, “Europe crawled to us on her knees” and “Europe has to welcome Putin”.

The blackmailer’s ploy has worked.

So what exactly does Mr Fallon mean when claiming that “Europe is getting ready”. How is Europe getting ready?

Is it embarking on a rapid rearmament programme? Is it firming up relationships within Nato to make sure all members present a united front? Is it setting up lines of defence at depth? Is it communicating to Putin that we aren’t necessarily averse to a nuclear first strike either?

Don’t be silly. It’s election year, and the blessed electorate knows nothing about Putin and cares even less.

Spending large amounts on armaments would mean not spending them on buying the votes of the underclass, and we can’t have that, can we now?

Britain had started to rearm in the nick of time before Hitler marched. The 21^st-century nick of time is now, and all we get from our leaders is talk. Which, as we know, is cheap.

 

 

“Jews didn’t desert New York after 9/11 so why on earth does Netanyahu want them to run away now?” asks one of our more objectionable columnists.

In other words, he fails to see the difference between flying planes into buildings full of multi-national, multi-cultural and multi-confessional victims, and attacks that target specifically Jews.

Since such a deficit of both logic and sensitivity is surprising even in a modern hack, one would expect Morgan to expose the intellectual structure supporting his comment.

He duly obliges:

“At least 270 Jews are known to have died in the attacks on the World Trade Centre on 9/11. Possibly as many as 400. That’s between 10 and 15 per cent of all the victims. I don’t remember hearing anyone, least of all Benjamin Netanyahu, declare then that every Jew in New York should immediately quit the city and go and live in Israel.”

Why do you think that was, Piers? I get it. Netanyahu was so reticent then because New York Jews make up a great part of the US Jewish lobby, itself a part of the worldwide Judaeo-Masonic conspiracy.

Netanyahu wanted them to stay in New York so that they could continue to help Israel both politically and financially. Is that about the size of it?

I’m sure Morgan would throw up his arms in horror if such crude thinking were ascribed to him. Well, crude it may be, but at least it has some inner logic, mad and perverse though it is.

That is more than can be said for his own crepuscular thinking.

The 9/11 atrocity brought Jews and gentiles, and more broadly all Americans, together because it was an attack on America.

The attackers neither knew nor cared about the ethnic and religious composition of their victims – and neither did the survivors. Their natural instinct was to close ranks and fight back, together.

An attack on a kosher grocery or a synagogue is different. Rather than reinforcing the feeling that French Jews are Frenchmen, American Jews are Americans and Danish Jews are Danes, it reminds them that some of their countrymen see them as a discrete, pernicious group slated for destruction.

Jews in general and European Jews specifically can be forgiven for being ever so slightly sensitive about that sort of thing. After all, almost half of the world’s Jewish population was wiped out in a few short years when my parents were already adults.

Then too German Jews felt they were German first and Jews a distant second. Jews in the rest of Western Europe felt roughly the same way, though the Dreyfus affair did give French Jews a chance to stop and think.

And then all those Germans, Dutchmen and Frenchmen, most of whom weren’t even religious Jews, met in the gas chambers operated by their erstwhile countrymen and neighbours.

In our time dominated by psychobabble we don’t bat an eyelid when a woman claims she was severely traumatised when a male colleague made a remark about her figure. We nod our sympathetic understanding when a ginger-haired man seeks psychiatric help because of all the crude jokes he had to endure at school.

Yet we deny the same sympathy to those whose whole families were gassed like rats in concentration camps.

Just close your eyes and imagine those barely living skeletons, naked, starving, robbed of any human dignity, herded into a tight space. Then the hissing sound comes and they all know what it means…

Now imagine they were all English: your grandpa Nigel, your aunt Jane, your granny Florence. How would you feel if today’s English people were targeted for attacks specifically because they are English?

The difference between Germany at the time of Kristallnacht and Europe today is that now European Jews have a place to flee to. That option was well-nigh nonexistent then, and many countries –including Britain – were indirectly complicit in Nazi crimes by denying refuge to the Jews.

The prime minister of Israel, a country constituted along Zionist lines, is duty-bound to remind European Jews that, if they feel unsafe in their home countries, there is another home waiting for them.

Morgan mocks this impulse in his usual hare-brained fashion. Netanyahu himself, he says, claims that his country could be nuked by Iran. So it makes no sense for Jews to move to Israel.

True, Israeli Jews may die, as they have died in four wars launched by the virulent anti-Semites who surround them. But there is a difference between dying with honour defending your country and being slaughtered as part of a helpless and impersonal herd.

Morgan then mobilises his severely challenged intelligence to come up with another argument. Jews, he says, weren’t the only victims of the recent terrorist attacks.

True. Similarly Jews weren’t the only victims of the Second World War and they weren’t the only group exterminated in Nazi concentration camps. Gypsies suffered a similar fate. So did homosexuals. So, incidentally, did 2.5 million Russia POWs.

But Jews were a major group specifically targeted en masse then, as they are now. If a Gypsyland or a Homoland had existed back in the 30s, one would have expected the prime ministers of those countries to extend a welcoming hand in the same manner as Netanyahu has done.

Morgan describes Netanyahu’s invitation as “cowardly, self-serving, crassly insensitive and overtly political.”

I especially like the word ‘cowardly’, as applied to a man who fought with suicidal commando units in three different wars, who led innumerable raids behind enemy lines and was wounded several times.

Obviously, Morgan’s own background in commissioning scurrilous pieces based on phone hacking makes him an unimpeachable judge of courage.

Many European Jews are fleeing to Israel, doubtless feeling that too early is better than too late. It’s a decision only they can make, and it’s not up to any gentile, and certainly not the transparently anti-Semitic Morgan, to pass judgement on that decision.

Make no mistake about it: European Jews are in real danger, if only because of the chronic inability on the part of our own ‘cowardly, self-serving, crassly insensitive and overtly political’ leaders to recognise and combat the growing Muslim threat.

How Jews choose to deal with this danger is up to them, both collectively and individually. Some will leave, most will stay, and we should all pray that their fears prove to be groundless.

As to Morgan, I’ll punch him next time I espy him in our local supermarket. Since he’s both bigger and younger than me, unfortunately this promise isn’t likely to make him do a runner.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Bank of America estimated last week that, if a Labour-led coalition takes over in May, our economic growth will screech to a halt and foreign investors will lose confidence.

“In a nutshell,” the report concluded, “the UK would look increasingly like France.”

Now, considering that France’s growth rate is one-fifth of ours and her unemployment is twice as high, the report paints a bleak picture indeed. One would think that becoming like France is the last thing Britain would want to do.

Not so, according to Labour’s leadership material Chuka Umunna, shadow business secretary.

Rather than assuring the electorate that the Bank of America is in the employ of the Tory party, the CIA or possibly MI6 and therefore wide of the mark, the chap with the unlikely name endorses the report enthusiastically.

We’d be happy for Britain’s economy to be just like France’s, he says. In fact, that’s our goal.

One’s first reaction is to express heartfelt concern for the mental health of Chuka and his superiors, notably Ed Miliband. True, after Hollande’s victory in 2012 Ed did say that he was in agreement with François’s economic ideas.

But that was before those ideas were acted on – before France suffered what only hopeless Francophiles or else witless socialists would fail to describe as an economic disaster. Surely by now Ed and Chuka must have realised that Hollande’s ideas pave the way to economic hell?

Not at all, says Chuka. We want Britain to be just like France because French workers are 20 per cent more productive.

“It takes on average a British worker to Friday to do what equivalent workers in France will complete by the end of Thursday afternoon,” he said.

The phrase is muddled: what he means isn’t to Friday, but by the end of Friday. Alas, the thought behind the phrase is even more jumbled.

The thought, not the fact, for Chuka’s statement is factually correct. French workers are indeed more productive.

But from this it would follow that we must import Hollande’s policies only if Chuka could prove three things:

First, that France’s higher productivity is thanks to Hollande’s measures and the economic philosophy on which they are based. Second, that by adopting such policies we would bring our productivity up to France’s level. Third, that in the process we wouldn’t also import high unemployment and zero growth.

Chuka can’t prove any of these three things because none of them is true. Nor will he be able, or rather willing, to answer this simple question:

If France’s population is roughly the same as ours, and her productivity is 20 per cent higher than ours, how come her GDP is slightly smaller?

To make arithmetic sense of this disparity we have to assume that the French are putting in 20 per cent fewer man/hours. That’s exactly the case. In fact, France’s labour force spends almost 25 per cent less time at work.

And why is that? Now that question will tear so many holes in Chuka’s intellectual trousers that his modesty will no longer be protected.

For it can be answered in one word: socialism.

To break it down a bit, that voluminous concept in this case includes restrictive labour laws, the state owning 60 per cent of the economy, a punitive taxation system that’s especially extortionist towards wealth producers, unsupportable social costs, the 35-hour week, high unemployment (only 40 per cent of France’s population are in work), unrestrained union blackmail, the social stigma attached to entrepreneurship.

All these perversions have the same ideological base, and Hollande has honed their cutting edge to razor sharpness. By importing that sort of thing here we wouldn’t become like France. We’d be like Greece.

So why is labour productivity so much higher in France? There are a raft of reasons for this, but the main one is that their workforce, from top to bottom, is better educated than ours.

And why is that? Simple. Because their education system began to be destroyed by socialist egalitarianism later than ours.

This destructive animus came from exactly the same ideology that is so ably represented by Messrs Hollande, Miliband and Umunna. It doesn’t matter that schools turn out functional illiterates unable to hold a decent job. As long as they are equally illiterate across the board, every socialist heart is a-flutter with joy.

School education in France is still better than in Britain, but the gap is narrowing fast. Should Miliband’s friend stay in power for a while longer, French school leavers too will be unable to read, write and add up, doubtless losing their productivity edge as a result.

In other words, France’s productivity is still higher than ours not because of socialism, but in spite of it.

So what measures are Chuka and his jolly friends proposing to improve the literacy of our labour force and consequently its productivity?

Reintroducing grammar schools? Tightening academic standards at comprehensives? Sacking incompetent teachers? Shutting down colleges training incompetent teachers? Disbanding teachers’ unions? Reintroducing streaming?

Nothing of the sort. What they are proposing is more of the same educational calamity triggered off by their fellow socialists back in the 60s.

That, I’m afraid, will mean that France’s higher productivity will remain a pipe dream. What is absolutely guaranteed to become a reality is France’s economic disaster – many times over.

One envies our politicians’ ability to lie even when saying things that are factually correct. The Labour party doesn’t hold exclusive rights to this skill, but they set the standard for all other spivs to follow.

 

 

 

According to some research gushingly extolled by two articles in today’s Times, Dostoyevsky, Gogol and the rest of Russian literature “are surpassed in sadness by a surprising genre. It’s the lyrics of English-language pop songs.”

That conclusion “ought to prompt a reassessment by cultural critics of an art form that is often misguidedly thought of as lowbrow…,” adds the paper.

One doesn’t know where to begin. Perhaps as good a starting point as any would be to comment on an obvious logical inconsistency.

Sad and lowbrow are by no means antonyms. It’s possible to be both, as anyone who remembers the old song Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road will tell you. It’s also possible to be neither, as any listener of Mozart’s Turkish Rondo will agree.

The implication that sadness is ipso facto a sign of refinement is quite simply false (my wife has made me promise not to use stronger adjectives), but then one doesn’t expect proper sequential thought from hacks.

What one does expect from them these days is vulgarity at its most soaring, and in this respect the two articles in today’s Times reach new heights.

Comparing great works of art with pop, whatever they are compared on and whatever conclusion is reached, is vulgar by definition.

At least apples and oranges are both round fruit, meaning they belong in the same category. Real art and pop excretions don’t. They don’t even belong in the same order of humanity.

Pop lyrics can’t be analysed by the criteria of art, poetry or literature. As an object of research they can only function in the domain of anthropology, sociology, the study of shamanistic cults, psychiatry, commerce or even pharmacology (its amateur practice).

They aren’t so much lowbrow as infrabrow. Pop is designed to be perceived not by the organ behind the brow but by the one between the legs.

Admittedly, I’m not a keen student of various pop genres. That’s why I’m ready to work with the exhibits helpfully provided by The Times.

These are pop lyrics “at their finest” that have the advantage of being “more personal” (if possibly “less dramatic”) over “such great works of 20^th-century music as Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring or Mahler’s Fifth Symphony”.

Exhibit One: Bob Dylan’s “Twenty years of schoolin’ / And they put you on the day shift.”

One can see how the poignancy of this heart-rending existential lament easily matches – nay, outdoes! – the musings of those Karamazov whingers. Now had the protagonist been put on the night shift after all those years of schoolin’, the personal drama would completely trivialise even Bach’s Passions.

Do you need me to comment? Didn’t think so.

Exhibit Two: Joni Mitchell’s lament on the destruction of the environment: “They took all the trees and put them in a tree museum / And they charged all the people a dollar and a half to see ‘em.”

What can possibly rival the sublime melancholy of this dirge? Mozart’s Requiem? Forgedaboudid.

Of course, a brief walk through London parks, to say nothing of the New Forest, would suggest that not ‘all the trees’ are now museum exhibits. Moreover, one could observe trees there free of charge, keeping the $1.50 in one’s pocket. But hey, true art is allowed poetic licence.

Exhibit 3: The Who’s “People try to put us down / Just because we get around.”

If words don’t rhyme, we can make them rhyme, can’t we? But one has to agree that one would be justified to feel rather sad about being put down without sufficient cause.

Then again, Mary was justified in lamenting Jesus being crucified without sufficient cause in St Matthew’s Passion. The latter lament may be more dramatic, but the former one is more personal.

Who’s to say which one is more melancholy? Certainly not The Times. In any case, they are supposedly comparable.

Exhibit 4: The Doors’ “It’s all over for the unknown soldier.”

It was also all over for Andrei Bolkonsky, his wife, Count Myshkin, Lensky, Anna Karenina, Stavrogin and other protagonists of Russian literature, so the parallel is unimpeachable.

As to The Doors’ indisputable observation, exactly what’s unknown here? The soldier’s name or that he indeed was a soldier? Clearly, the subtext of pop effluvia is as enigmatic as that of great literature.

Exhibit 5: Morrissey’s “Why do I smile at people I’d rather kick in the eye?”

Why indeed? It would be so much more angst-provoking, profound and interesting if Mr Morrissey did kick everyone he meets in the eye.

Of course, unless he holds a karate black belt, he’d have to knock those objectionable individuals down first, where their eyes would be within striking range of his feet – but we are none of us naturalists, are we?

Actually, one immediate answer to the question so provocatively posed would be that the law might take exception to such acts, but we aren’t after obvious answers here. We’re after plumbing emotional depths.

Raskolnikov and Bezuhov struggled with similar, albeit less personal, conundrums, but the sheer acuteness of Morrisey’s stark question reduces those characters to banality.

“These,” explains The Times, “are commentaries and explorations, not merely entertainments. They encapsulate the concerns of postwar generations.”

Here I have to pull my tongue out of my cheek and nod an unreserved agreement. These unmitigated vulgarities do encapsulate post-war generations – with their ignorance, anomie, tastelessness, materialism and absence of critical judgement.

One would hope that our formerly respectable newspapers would be scathing about this cultural and spiritual calamity, rather than dignifying it with sympathetic discussion.

Such a hope would be forlorn: the papers have to be sold and, even if the hacks knew what’s what, which they probably don’t, they wouldn’t be able to say it for fear of offending most of their readers.

The circle is complete, and boy is it ever vicious.

 

 

The other day the leaders of three apostolic confessions, Catholic, Russian Orthodox and Anglican, met at an undisclosed location to discuss the pressing issues of the day.

In true ecumenical spirit they invited a lapsed Lutheran, Frau Angela Merkel (hereinafter AM) to chair the conference.

I can’t in all conscience name the participant who has kindly let me have the transcript of the meeting, for such disclosure would be most unethical. But thank you, Angie, all the same.

So here it is.

In attendance: His Holiness, Pope Frances (PF), His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and all Russia (PK) and His Grace the Right Reverend Justin Welby (JW)

AM: Meine Damen und Herren… actually you are all Herren, aren’t you? So why on earth should we still use this old form of address if it no longer applies? Das ist verrückt. Also, Meine Herren…

PK: Herr is obscene in Russian. We didn’t win the war for me to be called a bloody herr by a Kraut.

JW: She meant no offence, Kirill. Let’s all be friends, shall we? Compromise is what Christianity is all about, don’t you think, Frank?

PF: Who am I to judge?

AM: Quite. Now as we all know, an unfortunate situation has arisen in the Ukraine…

PK: There is no unfortunate situation. There’s only an unprovoked aggression on the part of the USA, the EU, Nato and the rest of the world. They are using those Judaeo-fascist, homo-loving Banderites to attack Mother Russia…

PF: What did you call my Mama, you hijo de puta? How would you like me to knock your teeth down your…

AM: Please Your Holiness, bitte. Kirill wasn’t talking about your mother. He said Mother Russia. It’s a figure of speech. Germany is a father figure, hence Vaterland. Russland is a mother to her people, hence Mother Russia. Verstehen Sie mich?

PF: Si.

AM: And Kirill, you can’t call the Ukrainians ‘fascists’ all the time. We must use polite language, wouldn’t you say, Frank?

PF: Who am I to judge?

PK: Fine. As we say in Russian, you can call me a pot as long as you don’t put me into an oven.

JW: And in my mother tongue, we say ‘sticks and stones…’

PF: What did you call my Mama, you idiota? I’ll knock your cabeza off…

AM: Please, Frank, calm down. He wasn’t talking about your mother, Himmelherrgott!

JW: I most certainly wasn’t! And speaking on behalf of… well, whoever it is I speak on behalf of… I’d like to take this opportunity to apologise to Russia for the Crimean War…

PK: Which we won.

JW: Er… well, if you insist… And while at it, I’d also like to apologise to His Holiness for the Falklands…

PF: Malvinas, por favor. 

JW: But of course. Malvinas it is. And, since I’ve already apologised to our German friends for the beastly bombing of Dresden, now I’d like to apologise for, well, the German defeat in the Battle of the Bulge…

AM: Duly noted and accepted.

PK: Then accept this, you hubristic Hunnish whore: the Crimea is ours! For ever and ever, amen! Right, Frank?

PF: Who am I to judge?

JW: Of course it is, Kirill, of course it is. But where I come from, we are obsessed with legality, you know. So by what legal right…

PK: Let me explain something to you, Anglichanin. There’s only one law, that of God , as represented on earth by Comrade Putin. And God is on our side because Russia is holy.

AM: Full of holes?

PK: Full of God’s grace! St Vladimir the Baptist was himself baptised in the Crimea. So it’s the same to us as Mecca is to the bloody Chechens and Georgians!

PF: Who am I to judge, but I thought the Georgians were Christians.

PK: Let me explain something to you, Frank. Russia is the third Rome, and there will be no fourth. That means Christians are whoever I say are Christians. Get it?

AM: Justin, what’s the Anglican position here?

PK: Missionary, that’s all the Anglichane know…

JW: Well, the Russians seem to feel very strongly about this, which isn’t the Anglican way…

PF: Not my way either. Who am I to judge?

PK: Too bloody right we feel strongly about this. And, by the mercy of God, we can turn you lot into radioactive dust!

JW: Yes, well, look… I’m opposed to nuclear weapons with their indiscriminate destructive potential… The Anglican settlement is all about compromise, you know. The geopolitical shifts are such…

PK: Don’t you shift me any geopoliticals or geopolitical me any shifts! Anyway, St Vladimir was baptised in the Crimea, so the Crimea is ours. Russia was baptised in Kiev, so Kiev is ours. Moscow is the third Rome, so the two other Romes are ours too!

FM: Sorry, Kirill, who am I to judge and all that, but you can’t occupy Rome. That’s where I live! Take over Rome! And pigs will fly!

AM: Schweinen don’t fly.

JW: Indeed they don’t. Hence the English figure of speech. I do think, to avoid such misunderstandings, time has come for all European languages to be united into one, in the spirit of trust and cooperation…

PF: May I just say, and it may be off the subject, that I am feliz… happy that Angie has taken over Europe. I do believe that women’s role in government and in the church must be broad…

PK: They don’t call them broads for nothing.

JW: That’s American, which isn’t helpful. In my mother tongue, we say…

PF: What did you call my Mama?!?

Here ended the conference. According to the draft communiqué that my nameless source Angie has kindly forwarded to me, the meeting was “constructive, productive and positive”.

Our established Church used to be called the Tory party at prayer. No more.

The prayer part of it has been debauched by female priesthood and, to crown it all, episcopate.

And as to the Tory bit, the Church is firmly positioning itself on the left of the political spectrum. (So is much of today’s Tory party, but this is beside the point.)

As far as I know, the bishops haven’t endorsed any party yet. They have, however, proposed the full gamut of loony left policies.

Their Graces have just released a document advising ‘Christian men and women’ how they should vote in the upcoming election. The advice outlines policies that are supposedly consonant with the Christian outlook on life.

One such policy is further European integration. To wit: there is “an enduring argument for continuing to build structures of trust and cooperation between the nations of Europe”.

Take out the words ‘structures of’, and the statement is unobjectionable, if ever so slightly banal. But the word ‘structures’ makes it crystal clear that it’s not just the Christian desiderata of trust and cooperation that are being preached here, but a single European state.

However, it just so happens that most Christians I know hate the EU and most atheists love it. There is a good reason for both extremes.

The traditional state of Christendom mirrored the subsidiarity of the Church, with power devolved to the lowest sensible level.

On the other hand, the atheist post-Enlightenment state is all about endless centralisation, with power radiating from the periphery to the capital.

The logical result of this process is the denationalisation of political power, which eventually begins to gravitate towards a greater nexus than any one country can provide.

Even Christians who aren’t well-versed in political theory sense intuitively that a single European state, which we already have de facto if not quite de jure, represents a subversive denial of the political tradition of Christendom.

The political watershed runs in parallel with the ecclesiastical one. The only airtight definition of a political conservative is a person who wishes to preserve the founding tenets of our civilisation and build on its multifarious heritage. Conversely, a leftie is someone craving the destruction of our civilisation, with all it entails.

That’s why, even without running a private poll, one can be absolutely certain that a greater number of conservatives will be found among Christians than among atheists. After all, one of the principal ecclesiastical functions is preserving both the revelation and its manifestations in quotidian life.

To sum up, by advocating a single European state, Their Graces adopt a political position that’s not only un-Christian but aggressively anti-Christian.

It is of course possible that they haven’t had time to think such matters through. Their waking hours can be more profitably spent on deciding whether female bishops’ skirts should be slit, and if so how high. Looking for a scriptural justification of homosexuality is also a time-consuming pastime.

Fair enough, not everyone can be a deep political thinker. But humility, that Christian virtue the opposite of which is a cardinal sin, ought to have suggested to the bishops that, when one doesn’t really understand the subject, the best thing to do is shut up.

Their other guidance concerns our nuclear deterrent, which Their Geopolitical Graces don’t think we should have.

“Shifts in the global strategic realities,” they write, “mean that the traditional arguments for nuclear deterrence need re-examining.”

Which shifts exactly would they be, Your Graces? A neo-fascist Russia building up and modernising her strategic arsenal, while publicly threatening to turn her adversaries ‘to nuclear dust’? Russian proxy troops raping the Ukraine? Russian nuclear bombers flying a couple of miles off Bournemouth? A virulently anti-Western Iran about to acquire nuclear weapons? The Muslim threat growing in spread and intensity by the minute?

Evil, and I feel embarrassed having to point this out to prelates, is hierarchical. War in general and weapons of mass destruction in particular are evil, but they have to be tolerated if they prevent a greater evil.

That’s why St Augustine of Hippo and St Thomas Aquinas, among others, put forth and developed the doctrine of just war (jus bellum iustum).

If one side’s cause is just, the other side’s cause isn’t. Surely the Christian position must be that justice should prevail over injustice or, more broadly, virtue over evil?

If so, then any weapon, be it bow and arrow or a hydrogen bomb, is morally neutral because its morality is subsumed in the overriding morality of justice. If it helps a moral cause, it’s moral – and vice versa.

Their Graces rile about the Mutual Assured Destruction doctrine, which they call ‘deeply problematic’. They ought to remember that it’s only thanks to this doctrine that Soviet aggression around the world was checked.

Remember the Soviet Union, Your Graces? That political embodiment of the Antichrist, to use your terms? The state that murdered 40,000 priests in the first few years of its existence? Killed or imprisoned millions of believers? Razed tens of thousands of churches?

But for MAD, it would have triumphed. And should we abandon nuclear weapons today, we’d instantly succumb to Russia’s nuclear blackmail, if not direct aggression. Is that the kind of outcome that would pacify the raging consciences of our prelates?

The notion of just war seems to be lost not only on our episcopate collectively but also on the Arch Oil Trader individually. Thus the Right Reverend Justin Welby saw fit to apologise to the Germans for the bombing of Dresden.

No reciprocal apology for the murderous Luftwaffe raids on London, Coventry, Exeter and so on was proffered. Not even in the spirit of ‘trust and cooperation’.

His Grace clearly begrudges Sir Arthur Harris, head of the RAF Bomber Command, his evident inclination towards euroscepticism. And true enough, the devastation of Dresden was most unfortunate.

Yet it can only be properly assessed in the context of just war, which Britain was waging against the second-greatest evil in history. Hence the killing of a Londoner by a V-2 was evil, whereas the killing of a Dresdener by a Lancaster was justifiable, if lamentable.

Apologising for it retrospectively, which seems to be in vogue these days, isn’t only unintelligent but also immoral.

Anyway, why just Dresden? Why not also apologise to the French for the burning of Joan of Arc? Or perhaps to the Arabs for the Third Crusade, which was after all led by an English king?

Welby, Santamu, Chartres and their 40 episcopal accomplices ought to be ashamed of themselves.

Repeat after me, Your Graces: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa… oops, sorry. Forgot you’re opposed not only to Latin but even to proper liturgical English.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two days ago I wrote a piece whose message was summed up in its title: “There will be no Grexit.”

At that time international economists were demonstrating, calculators in hand, that it was economically impossible for Greece to stay in the Eurozone definitely, and in the EU probably.

And Angie was saying Nein to any new deal with the unshakeable resolve of a virgin who really means Ja but doesn’t want to appear easy.

My counterargument was that the EU was a political project, not an economic one. Since Grexit would endanger it, the Europaführer Angie would be willing to let politics ride roughshod over economics yet again.

Now the words ‘I told you so’ are among the most irritating in the English language, which is why I generally refrain from using them. But this time the temptation is too strong.

Having played hard to get for a while, Angie finally put out yesterday. A compromise on Greece’s debt, she said, is possible after all.

Thank you, Angie, for confirming my bona fides. I knew I could count on you.

Yet even this triumph of statesmanship pales by comparison with Angie’s improbable architectural and geographical feat of turning Minsk into Munich.

What do you call a treaty in which Side A gets everything and Side B nothing? I call it the capitulation of Side B. The Europaführer’s and Putin’s sycophants call it a diplomatic triumph or at least a step towards one.

In reality the accord confers every benefit only on Putin and every obligation only on the Ukraine.

It could not have been otherwise, for Angie has de facto agreed to accept Putin’s cynical lie that Russia has nothing to do with the rape of the Crimea and eastern Ukraine.

Putin knows this is a lie, Angie knows it’s a lie, Putin knows that Angie knows, and Angie knows that Putin knows she knows.

Yet she pretends to believe Putin because not doing so would mean she, along with her European acolytes (including us, in case you’ve forgotten), would have to oppose Russia’s aggression with staunch resolve.

However, Europe, demoralised, demob-happy and gutless, has neither the appetite for such a show of courage nor increasingly even the military capabilities.

Replace ‘separatists’, ‘rebels’, ‘People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk’ and whatever other euphemisms are being bandied about with what they really mean, and Minsk Mk II will instantly look like what it is: Munich Mk II.

For example what does the removal of foreign troops and ‘illegal armed formations’ mean? As far as Putin is concerned, and as far as Angie pretends to accept, no such things exist. His proxy troops are supposed to be legitimate Ukrainians fighting for regional autonomy.

Their weapons were provided by God, with no human agency involved. Their leaders, such as the KGB officer Strelkov, may be Russian by birth and lifelong residence, but patriotic Ukrainians in their hearts.

Similarly, the ‘illegal armed formations’, which according to the agreement are to be disarmed, are meaningless. If the so-called People’s Republics are legal, then their bandits are legal.

And even if we accept that there is a teensy-weensy whiff of illegality about them, who is going to disarm them? Angie? She can’t. Putin? He won’t.

Anyway, by what authority would he do it even if he wanted to? They have nothing to do with him. In fact, Russia wasn’t even mentioned as a participant in the war.

All claims to the contrary notwithstanding, no meaningful demilitarised zone separating the two sides has been agreed upon. Yes, Putin agreed to withdraw heavy armaments to the demarcation line established by the previous Minsk accord, while the Ukraine will withdraw her equivalents to the line established yesterday.

The gap of 50-70 km between the two lines, however, isn’t a true DMZ because in reality only Putin’s proxy troops would be in a position to enforce it.

Hence the DMZ will only serve the purpose of allowing Putin’s bandits to catch their breath, regroup and start all over again.

In effect, the status of eastern Ukraine (forget about the Crimea; it didn’t even get a cursory mention) as Putin’s fiefdom has been confirmed.

The Ukraine will be granted control over her own borders, but only after constitutional changes codifying the results of elections in the areas controlled by Putin’s stormtroopers.

Since the elections will be supervised by the latter, the vote for autonomy is guaranteed. That means that Putin will get exactly what he wanted in the first place: direct influence on the Ukraine’s policies, both domestic and foreign.

In effect, that means the country will be prevented from making any westward moves, be it in the direction of Nato or the EU. QED, smirks Putin.

In fact, Peter Hitchens’s idol bemoaned President Poroshenko’s refusal to negotiate with the People’s Republics directly. You don’t have to recognise them, he explained, to recognise reality. And reality must be recognised.

Meanwhile the Ukraine was obligated to resume funding the People’s Republics. Thanks to the spineless ‘leaders’ of Europe, with Angie in the van, Putin doesn’t even have to loosen his purse strings to get what he wants.

This invalidates all comparisons between the People’s Republics and Transnistria, the Russian client state carved out of Moldavia. Russia pays for Transnistria; she has made the Ukraine pay for the People’s Republics.

There is one good thing about the agreement: from midnight tomorrow the shooting is supposed to stop, and no more buses full of civilians will be diverted to heaven en route to a shopping centre. But for how long?

For as long as it suits Putin, is the answer to that. The agreement includes no provisions for guaranteeing or enforcing it.

The border will remain permeable enough for unlimited amounts of Russian weaponry to reach the bandits’ hands. Those Russian soldiers who choose to spend their holidays and furloughs in sunny Donetsk will be able to do so unimpeded, provided they remove Russian insignia from their uniforms.

Angie is chomping at the bit to lift the sanctions, and it’s conceivable that Putin will kerb his dogs of war until she does. After that, it’ll be back to the old scenario, with cohesion among Western allies further undermined.

“We have no illusions. No illusions,” said Angie hastily as she accepted congratulations on her triumph. That’s good. Nothing we like more than a leader with a firm grasp of reality.

And reality is simple: not only has the Ukraine been sold down the river, but a major European war has moved a step closer.

 

 

The Greek defence minister has thrown his toys out of the pram. “Daddy!” he screamed, “if you don’t give me another chocolate, I’ll ask Mummy!”

For Daddy, read Angie, the sex-defying father figure of the EU.

For another chocolate, read the billions Greece owes but neither wants nor is able to repay. Daddy Angie, in his/her turn, puts on a stern face and refuses to proffer another sweet, meaning more lenient terms of non-repayment.

For Mummy, read the USA, Russia or China on which Greece is counting as an alternative source of chocolates, which in this case means money. Lots of it.

This strategy of playing both ends against the middle is familiar to all of us who still remember being children. “Daddy, but Mummy always lets me watch TV after midnight…”, “Mummy, Daddy said he would take me to the zoo if you don’t.”

And, if the parents are getting a divorce, “Mummy, if you don’t buy me an I-Phone, I’ll go live with Daddy.”

We all tried that sort of thing in our tender years, but it’s something we usually outgrow when we grow up. However, the whole thing about the EU is that all countries in it – or at least in the eurozone – are perpetually infantilised.

Daddy Angie is the only adult in the EU family. Being a clever parent, she sometimes lets the children have illusions about their status, but underneath it all both parties know the pecking order in the family.

Children sometimes threaten to leave home – I know I did when I was about five. They won’t even try though and, if they do, they’ll be pulled back in by the scruff of the neck.

Well, this simile has now been milked for all it’s worth. What the Greek defence minister actually said was that his country wants a deal. “But if there is no deal, and if we see that Germany remains rigid and wants to blow apart Europe, then we have the obligation to go to plan B.”

Well, you see, Germany doesn’t want to blow Europe apart. She wants to keep it glued together as her own fiefdom, a Fourth Reich, different from the Third in its reliance on the euro rather than panzers as the adhesive.

As the good minister knows this, his turn of phrase is merely another not-so-veiled threat: if you don’t forgive us our debts, we’ll leave the eurozone and possibly the EU.

Rather than being your adjuncts, we’ll become a vassal of the USA, Russia or China, whichever country opens her chequebook the fastest.

The threat is empty at every level.

It would be extremely powerful if the EU were an economic project. But it isn’t. It’s overwhelmingly, nay purely, political.

A sound economy is no more the aim of the Fourth Reich than a faster Tiger tank was the aim of the Third. Both are but a means to a political end.

Of course it makes no economic sense to keep Greece and a few other countries one could mention in the single currency or indeed the single European state. An army marches as fast as its slowest soldier, which is why some less civilised armies used to shoot stragglers out of hand.

The EU isn’t civilised either, but then neither is it an army. It’s a political organisation that can accept any deprivation, any social unrest, even any war, provided it isn’t too cataclysmic. What it can’t accept is disintegration.

That’s why, much as I hate to play Cassandra, I predict that Greece won’t go anywhere. Angie will talk tough for a while but in the end she’ll do what it takes to keep the aborted foetus of the EU on its life support.

Of the three saviours mentioned by the minister, none will be too eager to jump up and whip the trusted chequebook out.

America has pursued a staunch pro-EU policy since before that contrivance got its name. Why would it change now and abet the possible demise of ‘Europe’, especially since this will cost an awful lot of money?

China, for which the EU is a major trade partner, wouldn’t want to upset the applecart either. Her strategic interests wouldn’t come into play either, for China has none around the Mediterranean.

Russia would of course love to thumb its nose at the EU by harnessing a Trojan horse at its outskirts. Putin may just present this to the public as a counteroffensive in the war waged on his country by America and the EU. (That is how Putin’s propaganda treats his own aggression against the Ukraine.)

But the price of such a symbolic gesture would be too high. At the moment Russia can’t even afford to keep her minuscule client states, such as Transnistria, afloat.

The Russian economy is in dire straits, and the straits will become even direr if Putin doesn’t pull out of the Ukraine, which he won’t.

He could of course squeeze his housetrained ‘oligarchs’, such as London’s own Abramovich or Mandelson’s best friend Deripaska, for a few billion as a one-off subsidy. Those chaps won’t have an option but to cough up – if they forget that they only have a leasehold on their fortunes, Putin has enough polonium left to remind them.

But they know, and Putin certainly knows, that this would be a gift that’ll keep on giving. A quasi-communist Greece will become Russia’s long-term sponger state, much as Cuba was for more than 50 years.

Unless I miss my guess, that isn’t the kind of commitment Russia is prepared to accept at a time when the shelves of her supermarkets are developing huge gaps.

All in all, Greece isn’t going anywhere. Angie will find a way – she always does. The toys will go back into the pram, the baby will shut up, and Daddy will have to tighten his belt.

European politics is so much fun, don’t you agree? We must all be proud to belong to the EU.

Meanwhile, many observers, me included, are drawing obvious parallels between the current Angie-Vlad negotiations and Munich 1938. At times I wonder if Moscow 1939 would be a better analogy.

You know, when Russia and Germany signed a pact dividing Europe between them and starting the bloodiest war in world history. This just may be on the cards, but I’ve made enough predictions for one day.