Author: Alexander Boot

On Saturday morning, Putin’s bandits used Putin’s Grad missile launchers to hit a residential quarter in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol on the Azov Sea.

Altogether 120 rockets were fired, killing 30 and wounding 102. Most of the victims were civilians.

The spotting services for the barrage were kindly provided by a Mariupol resident, who turned out to be a traffic cop, not a universally admired profession at the best of times.

His communications with the Russian officers operating the Grads were intercepted, and I listened to them with some interest and more sadness.

There I was, hoping that in the 42 years that I’ve been away the Russians had shifted the ratio of obscenities to normal words in the direction of the latter. Alas, if anything, the reverse is true.

For that reason I can’t quote the exchange verbatim, but the gist of it is that the battery commander was concerned about the 9-storey blocks of flats in the immediate vicinity of the targeted road block.

The spotter told him not to be a wimp and do as he was told. The buildings were far enough away, he said.

After the battery commander had butchered civilians, the traffic cop rebuked him for not doing exactly as he was told and not killing enough. He then suggested that the officer should redeem himself by targeting another residential suburb of Mariupol.

Ukrainian security services managed to arrest the spotter before he destroyed the evidence, making it impossible for Vlad to reassign the blame for the massacre to Nato, the EU, Israel, the USA or else the RSPCA.

Still, Russian military doctrine says that attack is the best defence. There was no defending yet another crime committed by his bandits, so Vlad went on the offensive.

Speaking at a Petersburg university, he explained that it’s wrong to say that his lads are fighting Ukrainians. The perplexed expressions on the students’ faces demanded an elucidation, and it duly came:

“We often say: Ukrainian army… But in essence it’s no longer an army, it’s a foreign legion, in this case a Nato foreign legion, which certainly doesn’t pursue the Ukraine’s national interests… There are different aims there, and they are linked with achieving the geopolitical objectives of containing Russia…”

I get it. Dastardly Nato dressed some unidentified units in the uniforms of Putin’s bandits and launched an aggression against the Ukraine. They then recruited foreign mercenaries to contain the aggression. Makes sense – in fact, it’s the only thing that can possibly make sense.

Logically speaking, no containment is necessary when there is nothing to contain. In fact, George Kennan came up with the doctrine of containment back in the 1950s, when the Soviet Union was indulging in aggression all over the globe.

By claiming that Nato again seeks to contain Russia, Vlad contradicted his previous claims that the ‘separatists’ had nothing to do with Russia. That is, he openly admitted that Russia yet again presents a mortal danger to the world.

Vlad didn’t specify the ethnic composition of the foreign legion, delegating that responsibility to his house-trained TV chat show. One of the guests there helpfully explained that the so-called Ukrainian army is mostly Albanian mercenaries in Nato’s employ. Glad he made it clear – this explains it all.

Frankly, yet another atrocity scandal is the last thing Vlad needs this week. He has enough headaches as it is.

Another Nato hireling, Standard & Poor, has just cut Russia’s credit rating to the non-investment ‘junk’ status of BB+. Hence Russia finds herself in the choice company of Indonesia and Barbados, the difference being that neither of those seeks global domination.

The rating means no Western company in its right mind will invest in Russia, and the country will have to pay over the odds to borrow from the money markets.

Vlad put on a brave face, and for once he was right. Neither of those consequences matters much.

No one is investing in Russia anyway, quite the opposite. Capital is fleeing the country, to the tune of $152 billion last year – three times the rate of the previous several years. And Western sanctions make it practically impossible for Russia to borrow money anyway.

So S&P can choke on their rating and crawl back into their CIA hole, as far as Vlad is concerned. It’s not the money that rankles, but the humiliation.

And Vlad has been sensitive to humiliation ever since school, when bullies picked on him because he was short. It was humiliation that drove him into a judo dojo and made him seek KGB employment when still a pimply schoolboy.

Both were his way of getting back at those bullies – and the rest of the world while he was at it. And now it’s Nato that’s the bully, along with its S&P hireling.

They think they can hit him in the wallet, but they have another think coming. His personal wallet, bulging with about $40 billion, is perfectly safe, and so are the wallets of the billionaire gangsters who make up Vlad’s coterie.

Speaking of which, to crown it all, those British lackeys to Nato, Mossad and the CIA opened an official inquest into the 2006 murder of Alexander Litvinenko.

That ex-colleague of Vlad’s in the KGB escaped to London and started publishing malicious rumours about Putin’s personal links to organised crime, specifically though not exclusively to the Russian Mafia operating in Spain.

Now Vlad is being accused of having sent two of his trusted KGB henchmen to London, to slip tens of millions’ worth of polonium into Litvinenko’s tea. Well, what if he did?

Wouldn’t you do the same if you were accused of Mafia links, and paying eight figures for polonium was no problem? Of course you would, especially if the accusation were true.

What is interesting about the inquest isn’t its likely outcome. After all, anyone with a bit of common sense knows that Vlad is as guilty as Cain. “Everyone knows” is of course short of proof beyond reasonable doubt, but we aren’t in a court of law now.

The radioactive trail of the polonium leads all the way to Russia, and only her government could get its hands on a substance of which merely 100g is annually produced in the world.

And no government official would have decided to ‘whack’ Litvinenko without a direct authorisation from the Kremlin. This is all even before we start asking the lapidary cui bono question, establishing that, in addition to the means, Vlad had a motive.

What I find fascinating about the inquest is its timing. After all, Litivinenko’s widow and her lawyers were seeking justice in vain for eight years, in the face of HMG’s reluctance to pursue the matter.

Yes, everyone knew that Putin was involved, but rocking the boat wasn’t ‘helpful’ at a time when HMG chose to overlook the openly criminal nature of Vlad’s kleptofascist regime. Hence a bit of nuclear terrorism in the middle of London was overlooked as an unfortunate hiccup on the way to Russia’s shining democratic future.

Justice was held hostage to politics. Now the political situation has changed, and justice has been set free. If Vlad decides to take it easy on the Ukraine before the end of the inquest, justice will again be manacled. 

Verily I say unto you, the rule of law does work in mysterious ways in today’s Britain. Perhaps the Hague Tribunal will do better when it finally gets its hands on Vlad.

 

One ought to compliment the actor on his capacity for frank self-assessment. Not many idiots acknowledge their mental deficiency with such openness and equanimity.

Actually, as someone who grew up in an actor’s family, I know that Mr Cumberbatch’s honesty was pretty much redundant. All he had to say was “I’m an actor.”

I’m not trying to suggest that it’s impossible to find an intelligent actor. All I’m saying is that I’ve never met one, and I’ve met many thespians in my life.

There must be something about the ease with which actors slip into other people’s personalities to suggest they haven’t got much in the way of their own. And if one looks for empirical proof to support this a priori proposition, all one has to do is to read a random show business column.

For example, the other day the half-Kiwi, half-Aussie actor Russell Crowe was in South Korea, plugging yet another film about Australians in the First World War.

By the sound of it, the film’s main message is that Britain’s principal war aim was to have as many Australians killed as was possible without wholly divesting the country of its male population.

Having donned the personality of one of the victims in the film, Mr Crowe clearly hadn’t had time to doff it by the time the promotion tour rolled along.

Speaking to a South Korean audience he expressed an unscripted belief that Korea’s plight under the Japanese occupation was exactly the same as Australia’s was – and still is! – under British tyranny.

My wife was up in arms, but then I reminded her of Mr Crowe’s profession and asked her to consider the source. She instantly quieted down.

As to Mr Cumberbatch, it’s not his honest admission, laudable though it is, that’s remarkable, but the circumstances that prompted it.

Speaking on an American TV chat show, Mr Cumberbatch felt called upon to highlight his impeccable liberal credentials.

To that end he dropped a tear or two for the plight of British black actors, who work on their craft just as hard as Mr Cumberbatch, but find good roles harder to come by. “I think as far as coloured actors go it gets really difficult in the UK,” he concluded.

COLOURED!!! He might as well have said that all black actors should be sent out to work in a cotton field – the ensuing brouhaha wouldn’t, couldn’t, have been any more thunderous.

Never mind the impeccably liberal sentiment – feel the word ‘coloured’. No one cares what Mr Cumberbatch, or anyone else for that matter, thinks, means or even says. Content is nothing; form, everything.

If Mr Cumberbatch hadn’t realised this before, the public outrage in all media drove the point home with sledgehammer power.

“Racist!” “Outrageous!!” “Offensive!!!” “Insulting!” Each red-hot denotation spelled an earth-shattering connotation: Mr Cumberbatch could kiss the Oscar for which he was nominated good-bye.

Such awards sometimes go to giftless hams, but they never, ever go to racists, homophobes, misogynists or any other transgressors against the ‘progressive’ code Hollywood upholds more passionately than the Decalogue and the Sermon of the Mount put together.

The definition of a racist is broad. It may include not only someone who professes hatred for other races, but also someone who is UNAWARE or INSENSITIVE.

And failing to keep track of the kaleidoscopically fluid terminology deemed appropriate to describe members of off-white races is a sure sign of a well-nigh criminal deficit in awareness and sensitivity.

Clearly, if Cumberbatch wanted to retain a Chinaman’s… sorry, an American Person of Chinese Extraction’s chance of catching the coattails of the disappearing Oscar, he had to defend himself and do it fast.

Now, the easiest way to present a case for the defence would have been to point out that the most powerful American organisation devoted to the fight against racial discrimination is called the NAACP.

And that, ladies and gentlemen of the self-appointed jury, stands for the National Association for the Advancement of – are you ready for this? – Coloured People!

So the term still has currency in the best possible circles. Black people who feel slighted or offended seek solace at the NAACP’s good offices without ever feeling the least bit offended.

That’s what I would have said. But I’m not running for an Oscar, and my own liberal credentials are anyway shot to hell every time I put my fingers on the Mac keyboard.

Mr Cumberbatch felt he really had to ham it up this time. And so he did, issuing a 147-word statement in which he owned up to idiocy.

“I’m devastated,” he beat himself on the chest, “to have caused offence by using this outmoded terminology… I make no excuse for my being an idiot and know the damage is done…”

The damage is indeed done – to Mr Cumberbatch’s Oscar chances. Those were already rather slim, for his very name has strong racist overtones.

One doesn’t bump into too many Benedict Cumberbatches at a Peckam or Brixton council estate or, for that matter, a South Bronx or Watts project. The name screams ‘white middle class’ or, even worse, ‘white upper-middle class’.

And “white upper-middle class” in its turn screams ‘racist’ so loudly that one has to strain one’s vocal chords to outshout it with redeeming messages. The subtlest of hints at the remotest of possibilities that the chap acts in the character implied by his moniker, and he’s dead.

Not physically, you understand, not yet anyway. He’s dead socially in the very circles that nominate chaps for Oscars, invite them to Notting Hill or Park Avenue parties, admit them to Pall Mall clubs and their American equivalents.

So he might as well be dead physically – unless he does a DIY Lazarus and comes back to social life by issuing nauseating, grovelling, stupid apologies.

But perhaps Mr Cumberbatch doesn’t realise that’s what they are. He is, after all, a self-admitted idiot.

 

 

 

 

According to Tarik Kafala, head of BBC Arabic, the word ‘terrorist’ is too ‘loaded’ and ‘value-laden’. Why not just say “two men killed 12 people” and leave it at that?

I agree wholeheartedly.

The English language has grown way too big for its own good. All this innate English pedantry has led to uncountable concepts fractured into numerous sub-concepts, each demanding its own word.

This creates all sorts of problems. For one thing, our educational systems simply can’t cope with such lexical cornucopia. As a result, pupils jettisoned into the world of work know only about 1,000 words, and even those they can neither read fluently nor spell.

How do you suppose it makes them feel when all around them they hear English words that to them might as well be Nepali? It makes them feel dejected and rejected, that’s how.

The inferiority complex descends faster than you can say socio-economically disadvantaged.

For those who don’t understand polysyllabic words, inferiority complex means a richly justified realisation that one is indeed inferior. Yet such feelings have no place in our progressive world. The word ‘inferior’ isn’t just laden with values; it positively bursts with it.

No one is inferior or superior to anyone. We are all equal in every respect, and if it appears that some standards are too high for some people, then the standards must be lowered.

Applied to the task at hand, this approach means that the word ‘man’ must be made to work overtime, to convey all sorts of meanings hitherto assigned to more precise words. Simple, isn’t it?

Everyone knows the word, so no problem there, especially if ‘man’ is followed by ‘their’, as in “every man must do their duty”.

Thus it isn’t an engineer who designs bridges, but a man. Not a footballer who scores a goal, but a man. No scientists, bus drivers, geologists, social workers, state officials, musicians, vicars – there are only men and/or women and/or other.

That way no one has to rack his – their!!! – brain trying to remember the difference between, say, a paediatrician and a paedophile.

One man/woman/other treats children, another man/woman/other has sex with them. Sancta simplicitas. No linguistic difficulties, no pedantic nit-picking with definitions, no one feels inferior and therefore offended.

Now just imagine the offence that a word like ‘terrorist’ can cause. The kind people who have put together BBC guidelines clearly can’t imagine it, or rather don’t see why they have to.

One side’s terrorists are the other side’s freedom fighters, we all know that. Using the word ‘terrorist’ automatically puts the speaker on one side and against the other. This presupposes an implicit rejection of moral parity, which is just not on.

In any case, says Mr Kafala, the word is indefinable. “The UN has been struggling to define the word for more than a decade and they can’t.” You mean, even if they haven’t gone through our comprehensive education?

My trusted dictionary defines terrorism as “the unofficial or unauthorised use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.” What fault do the UN and Mr Kafala find with this definition? Sounds pretty accurate to me.

The purpose of terrorism is to terrorise, in the words of Vladimir Lenin, a renowned authority on the subject.

The stratagem has been known since at least the Sicarii of biblical times, but the word ‘terrorism’ only appeared in English courtesy of the French Jacobins, Lenin’s acknowledged role models.

So let’s see how tightly the dictionary definition fits the Paris AK wielders. They didn’t act in any officially authorised capacity – tick. They used violence and intimidation – tick. They pursued political objectives – tick.

Sounds like the word fits them to a T, as in terrorism. That, however, isn’t the point at all, according to BBC lexicographers.

They are sensitive not just to the cold-blooded semantics but also to the emotional colouring. Even if the former is spot-on, the latter can still offend.

In this instance the offended parties would be all those millions of BBC viewers and listeners who are on the side of, well, the Paris men. And they have a sacred right not to be offended, bestowed upon them by the God of Diversity.

He is a wrathful and vengeful God – sin against him at your peril. So just say ‘man’ and shut up.

What, ‘man’ is too general for you? Well, if you insist, the BBC will kindly provide other options.

How about ‘attacker’? No values anywhere in sight: you can defend any cause and hence you can attack its foes.

Still too harsh a term? Then how about ‘militant’, asks the BBC. Christians talk about ‘Church Militant’, so what can possibly be wrong with Mosque Militants? Nothing at all. Fair is fair.

If you’re still unhappy, try ‘bomber’, says the BBC. A Lancaster dropping blockbusters on Germany is a bomber, so is a ‘man’ blowing up a school bus. No values, no judgement, the God of Diversity has a grin on his face.  

“Our responsibility,” states the BBC guidance, “is to remain objective and report in ways that enable our audiences to make their own assessments about who is doing what to whom.”

All assessments, it hardly needs saying, are equally valid. To you, the Kouachi brothers may be terrorists. To Mr Kafala they are just ‘men’. To the BBC at large they may, at a stretch, be called ‘attackers’ or, at a tighter stretch, ‘militants’.

And in my assessment we should refuse to pay the BBC licence fee. After all, it too is loaded with value. £145.50 of it.

 

 

 

 

King Abdullah’s death deeply saddened the heads of both our state and government.

Dave and the Queen manufactured sadness for public consumption with enviable skill, finding some balance between diplomatic protocol and hamming it up.

They then agreed that flags should be flown at half mast over Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey.

This last one is particularly baffling, considering that the Abbey is still a residually Christian place of worship. That’s what we get for having an established church, I suppose.

If our church answered only to Our Lord Jesus Christ, I doubt it would be overly distressed over the demise of a monarch in whose kingdom there is not a single church, conversion to Christianity is punishable by death and even possession of a bible is a crime.

But being a state church, the C of E has to do as the government does. And the government does whatever it takes to keep the Saudis sweet. After all, 6,000 British companies are doing billions’ worth of trade with Saudi Arabia, and that sort of thing outweighs any possible moral considerations.

The Queen can’t speak in her own voice either, only in that of her ventriloquist, who at present is named Dave. Otherwise one doubts that Her Majesty would be even as upset as her condolences suggest, which isn’t very.

But Tony Blair, now Tony is different. He really spoke from what passes for his heart: “He was loved by his people and will be deeply missed.”

Now I don’t think I’ve ever in my life had the pleasure of speaking to a single Saudi, much less covering a representative sample. But on general principle, one has to think that the love Tony mentioned wasn’t evenly spread among Abdullah’s subjects.

For example one doubts that many Saudi women loved the monarch who didn’t let them drive, vote or leave the house without a male chaperone.

(You realise, I hope, that I’m talking about their emotions, not my own. Personally, much as I deplore the last measure, I can see the merit in the other two, considering that most British women tend to vote Labour, and one of them tries to drive into me every time I take my car out.)

Nor do I think there is much weeping in the families of those women who have been stoned to death for a little hanky-panky out of wedlock.

The families of victims executed for blasphemy probably aren’t shedding tears either, especially since blasphemy is interpreted rather broadly by Saudi kangaroo… sorry, I meant Sharia courts.

Nor are the 1.2 million banned Saudi Christians lighting too many candles. One reason is that they can only do so in their home churches, but even that is all their lives are worth.

Such churches and private prayer meetings are regularly raided by police, with every participant flogged, imprisoned or simply ‘disappeared’, not practices that could have endeared the late king to the victims too much.

One hates to mention petty criminals in the same breath, but the kind of thief who in the UK would get a suspended sentence in Saudi Arabia gets his right hand cut off. I doubt such reluctant southpaws are rolling on the floor in an agony of grief even as we speak.

So who outside the King’s (very) extended family and their oil traders does Tony think loved the late chap?

Such questions are often tactless and always pointless. For Tony doesn’t think the way we do.

Tony himself was a tyrant, because that’s what every ‘leader’ of our putative democracies is. Admittedly he didn’t have as much power as Abdullah, but his power far exceeded that of the ‘absolute’ monarchs of Christendom, whom our populace is brainwashed to regard as tyrannical.

And tyrants tend – nay, need – to believe that they and their ilk are the objects of wide adulation.

Sometimes such beliefs aren’t unfounded. In some less civilised (if not necessarily less cultured) countries, the more a tyrant oppresses the people, the more they love him. This sort of collective masochism is amply covered in both sociological and psychiatric literature.

In our sham democracies, on the other hand, people usually vote a tyrant in not because they love him, but because they dislike him less than the other chap.

That is certainly the case in Britain, and subconsciously – at least I hope this feeling isn’t conscious – our spivocrats must envy those seas of people, all screaming their love for the leader in the places where such love is mandatory.

Hence Tony’s choice of words.

For his panegyric for Abdullah sounds suspiciously like the one a past tyrant delivered for his counterpart in another country.

On 23 August, 1939, representatives of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union met in the Kremlin to sign the pact that pushed the button for the Second World War.

But that was still a week away. Meanwhile, that momentous event was lavishly celebrated at a banquet given by Stalin in honour of the Nazi signatory, Foreign Minister Ribbentrop.

There the international socialist butcher proposed a toast to the national socialist one: “I know how much the German nation loves its Führer,” said Stalin. “I should therefore like to drink to his health.”

I wonder if echoes of those words were ringing in the back of what passes for Tony’s mind when he wrote his lament on Abdullah’s death.

Possibly. Then again, possibly not. But the similarity of words surely reflects the similarity of sentiment. Tyrants do tend to identify with other tyrants more than with their own people. 

 

 

 

 

 

The other day a mortar shell hit a trolleybus stop in the beleaguered Ukrainian city of Donetsk, sending shards of glass, pieces of metal and body parts flying.

Both sides in the conflict blamed each other for the killing of 13 victims, with the bandits calling themselves the Donetsk People’s Republic screaming ‘Stop thief!’ more loudly.

However, the OSCE ballistic analysis showed that the mortar involved was the type widely used by Putin’s bandits. Moreover, the nearest Ukrainian position was at twice the mortar range, while the ‘separatists’ were well within it.

Not being an expert in ballistics, I can’t have an independent view on the technicalities involved. But I do know something about TV production, and the Russians’ mastery of this art deserves every accolade, including the coveted Golden Globe award.

A TV crew appeared on the scene within minutes, as did a crowd of shocked and indignant bystanders, weeping and wailing to the highest thespian standards.

Unlike me, they were all experts in ballistics. None of them had the slightest doubt that the mortar had been fired by the Judaeo-Nazi Banderites, otherwise known as the Ukraine’s armed forces.

Leading the crowd was a saleswoman from the supermarket next door, who wore an outraged expression and her store’s uniform. Yes, she had seen the explosion, she sobbed, and yes, the shot came from there (a dramatic gesture in the general direction of Kiev).

No RT viewer could have remained indifferent. Millions had to realise how truly beastly the Ukrainian republic was.

No, scratch that. There is no Ukrainian republic in any other than the formal, window-dressing sense. There are only puppets whose wires are being pulled by the US-CIA-EU-Mossad-MI6 Nazis driven by zoological hatred of Russia, as personified by the KGB colonel Putin.

Stills of the scene immediately went viral on the net, and there wasn’t a single newspaper or TV station in Russia that failed to flash them bigger than life.

That turned out to be a mistake. Some readers, presumably those belonging to the 14 per cent of Russians who don’t feel Putin is Christ’s messenger on earth, had a close look at the photos and couldn’t shake the feeling that the irate saleswoman’s face looked familiar.

They then looked at some previous photographs and, lo and behold, the same woman featured as the star model in two of them.

The earlier one was a still from an RT news show last summer. The very same woman was allegedly an eyewitness to another heinous crime perpetrated by the Judaeo-Nazi fascists: the crucifixion of a three-year-old boy, nailed by the Ukies to a notice board in the city of Slavyansk.

Alas, she was the sole witness and no corroborating evidence was ever presented, which angered the marginal, independent part of the Russian press. Comparisons of Putin and Goebbels became common currency, and somehow accounts of the crucified tot faded off TV screens.

So did the eyewitness, but not for long. On 13 January, the bandits fired rockets at a Ukrainian checkpoint in Volnovakha, a suburb of Donetsk. That created a bit of a splash because a full city bus had been blown up in the process, killing 12 passengers.

The bandits’ first reaction was to claim the major military coup of destroying an enemy roadblock.

However, when the news of the blown-up bus spread, they blamed the other side for the crime, as one does. They, the bandits… sorry, the volunteers in the service of the Donetsk People’s republic, had no “technical means to shell the area.”

What about the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission that studied the five craters and concluded that they were caused by “rockets fired from a north-north-eastern direction” (the bandits’ position)?

Well, what do you expect from those hirelings of Wall Street, the CIA and Mossad? Here, talk to the surviving victims. They’ll tell you what’s what.

And there she was, our hard-working woman in a hospital bed, her face emaciated, her head bandaged, her arm in a sling. She explained who the true criminals were, sob, and demanded, sob, that they be brought to account.

Excellent performance, shame about the casting. For laying the photographs of the three incidents side by side, one of the 14-per-centers identified the woman as the Russian TV actress Galina Pyshniak.

Speculations immediately ensued, no doubt fuelled by secret funds provided by the US-CIA-EU-Mossad-MI6 and other hotbeds of global Russophobic fascism.

An RT film crew appeared at the bombed trolleybus stop within minutes of the mortar explosion, armed with cameras, rent-a-crowd and Miss Pyshniak in full flow, already sporting the uniform of the relevant supermarket.

It was as if the Russians had known in advance when and where the mortar shell would go off, which would only have been possible if they… No, we must nip such libellous musings in the bud.

Meanwhile, Donetsk’s Prokofiev Airport, which cultured denizens named after the great composer born nearby, is no more. After holding out for 234 days, longer than the siege of Stalingrad almost 70 years earlier, the Ukrainian army withdrew, leaving behind, well, nothing much.

The airport, now commonly called ‘Ukrainian Stalingrad’, was razed by an artillery barrage ordered by Alexander Zakharchenko, the chieftain of the band… sorry, President of the Donetsk People’s Republic. Or, to be specific, by his employer Col. Putin.

The only way to fly in and out of Donetsk is now by Russian military helicopter… I have to apologise yet again.

Everyone not in the pay of the US-CIA-EU-Mossad-MI6 fascists knows that Russia has nothing to do with the spontaneous uprising of Russophone Ukrainians against the Kiev Nazis elected by a landslide.

Said Russophones went to the local supermarket, possibly the same one that later employed the job-sharing Miss Pyshniak, and bought everything they needed for driving the Ukrainian army out of Donetsk Airport.

Rifles, grenades, machineguns, personnel carriers, tanks, missile launchers, AA systems, mortars, artillery batteries – none of it came from Russia. Nor did any of the wielders of this kit, even though some of them served in the airborne brigade almost totally wiped out by the Ukrainians.

That is, yes, it’s hard to deny that some of the bodies belonged to Russian soldiers. But they were not under Russian command at the time. They were… well, on furlough. The lads could have gone to some resort or else to see their parents. Instead they chose to die in the Ukraine, and who can blame them? Their cause was just.

Meanwhile, Russian state media, so trusted by Peter Hitchens et al, are screaming themselves hoarse, shouting ‘On to Kiev!’, ‘On to Kharkov!’, ‘On to Lvov!’, ‘On to Vilnus!’, ‘On to Warsaw!’

Drums rattle, bugles blow, Putin’s approval ratings hold fast. Let’s just hope that the little man with the Napoleon complex doesn’t decide that the only way to keep his ratings is to act on his henchmen’s slogans.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Have you noticed how the word ‘trillion’, in whatever currency, has become part of everyday vocabulary?

No one writing about Western economies bothers mentioning puny little millions any longer, and thousands might as well be dirt under our feet. Even the billion, until recently thought to be a fairly respectable monetary unit, has fallen by the wayside.

We, meaning Westerners, are so rich that we think in trillions now. Isn’t it absolutely wonderful?

Well, to realise exactly how wonderfully rich we are, stage this simple experiment.

Take a £10 note to an off-licence and buy a bottle of wine (drink responsibly, I must add). Then take another £10 note and add a few zeroes to the numeral 10 with a black felt-tip pen.

Now, to get an instant grasp of modern economics, go to the same shop, triumphantly waving your banknote – in the face of hard reality.

You’ll find that your new wealth will only buy exactly the same bottle you previously bought for £10. Turns out you have more zeroes, but no more money.

This admittedly crude example illustrates the fallacy of quantitative easing (QE). It also makes a mockery of the decision by the European Central Bank (ECB) to inject €1.1 trillion worth of life into the eurozone’s moribund economies.

The measure is, to expand on the wine analogy, akin to using alcohol as a treatment for alcoholism.

It’s irresponsible spending funded by borrowing and the printing press that’s largely responsible for the current near-catastrophic plight of the eurozone.

The rest of the responsibility rests on the shoulders of the subversive schemers who used the explosive prop of a single currency to play political games with the economy in the first place, but this is by the bye.

QE is an excellent tool for stimulating growth – not of the economy, that is, but in the politicians’ approval ratings. It’s a short-term solution, some wallpaper masking the growing cracks in the masonry. It’s also a crowbar making the cracks wider.

While the term QE is of relatively recent origin, the underlying concept has been in wide use for a century, and the Brits shouldn’t feel smug about the eurozone’s death throes.

We ourselves provide a nice illustrative example of what QE does to the economy. Among its many disastrous consequences one instantly springs to mind: QE devalues money and overvalues assets.

In most people’s cases, it keeps their real income down and their house prices up – provided they already own a house.

After all, most people are paid in money, not assets. And money is worth less and less. For example, before the advent of QE as a standard peacetime measure, £100 pounds in 1850 equalled £110 in 1900, a negligible inflation of 10 percent over half a century.

That meant British subjects could confidently plan for their future, anticipating that hard work accompanied by a lifetime of thrift could make them independent not only of want but also of the state.

And a baby born in 1850 with a silver spoon in his mouth, the worth of that utensil being, say, a solid middle-class income of £500 a year, could live his whole life in reasonable comfort even if he never made a penny of his own.

Conversely, if we look at the next century, £100 in 1950 equalled £2,000 in 2000 – a wealth-busting, soul-destroying inflation of 2,000 percent.

This meant that the silver spoon would quickly drop out of the mouth of a similarly hypothetical baby born in 1950: unless he grew up to be successful at his job or shrewd with his investments, he would be poor.

To take another Anglo-Saxon currency as an example, in the last 100 years the US dollar has lost 95 percent of its value, a marginally better, though still abysmal, performance.

This has been accompanied by an inordinate growth in property prices. In the last 50 years, asset inflation in Britain has outpaced money inflation by a factor of 10, which explains why workmen’s cottages of yesteryear have become ‘luxury homes’ in the jargon of today’s estate agents.

Empirical knowledge is a rather lowly cognitive tool, but it’s perfectly adequate in economics. In other words, the economic past is a reliable predictor of the future.

And the past predicts that the fantastic, or rather phantasmagorical, sum of €1.1 trillion coming the eurozone way courtesy of the ECB will have a disastrous long-term effect.

The rich, who own most assets, will become richer, and the ‘poor’, those who depend on income for their livelihood, will become poorer – and more resentful.

This recent fit of QE epilepsy is thus tantamount not only to an economic bomb but also a social one. When it goes off, it’ll scatter the fragments of the eurozone all over the world, and we’d be naïve to think that we won’t be hit.

“Bonanza for Britain” screams a headline in The Times, which only goes to show how low the paper has sunk in its intellectual content.

“The stimulus will herald a new era of cheaper holidays and cut-price imports for Britain, experts said,” explains the paper.

One wonders exactly how expert those experts are. Real experts would have added that any long-term economic calamities in the EU will only bypass us if we are no longer in it.

As long as Britain stays in this awful contrivance, its problems will be ours, if only vicariously. The eurozone is, after all, our major trading partner, accounting for 44 per cent of our exports.

As their money is devalued by the short-sighted infusion of €1.1 trillion, and as the pound strengthens against the euro, Europeans won’t be able to afford our goods any longer, which is bad news for our economy.

The lower holiday costs notwithstanding, it can become good, or at least indifferent, news only if we redirect our exports to the other continents, all of which thrive as Europe stagnates. But to do so, we must leave the EU – effective immediately, and never mind the referendum.

The QE thus becomes a QED, or would do so for any responsible government. Don’t you wish we had one?

 

P.S. Most of the numbers used in this article come from my book The Crisis Behind Our Crisis, which, in an attempt at sound economics, I commend to your attention.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

I’ve been trying for years to find a good word to say about the professional Tory Tim Montgomerie of The Times, but he makes it extremely difficult.

So much happier I was to see the title of his today’s article The Church Is Blighted by Its Left-Wing Bias. At last, I thought, preparing to enjoy every word. Tim has finally seen the light and he’s going to shine it upon us.

Alas, my hopes were raised sky high, but that only made the subsequent fall to earth so much more shattering.

Right diagnosis, shame about the proposed treatment. Mongomerie is absolutely right when saying that Anglican prelates should talk more about “the miraculous nature of Jesus Christ” and less about public policy, especially when their take on it reeks of Marxism with a Druid dimension.

But then Montgomerie has to go and spoil all the good prep work by citing “the Church of England’s great success story – London… [under] the inspired leadership of the Bishop of London, the Right Rev Richard Chartres.”

The leadership has been so inspired that it’s now practically impossible to find a 1662 parish in the London diocese, one that still uses the Authorised Version and the Prayer Book. This is the liturgical equivalent of the same ‘left-wing bias’ that so vexes Mr Montgomerie, something he clearly fails to realise.

The great success story of London and the hope for “the renewal of the whole Church of England” are for him exemplified by Holy Trinity, Brompton, with “its famous Alpha course”.

This, according to Mr Montgomerie, is one of the few places of worship that “find ways to answer the questions about faith posed by a university-educated population.”

I don’t know which university Montogomerie has in mind, not that it matters much any longer. The difference between Oxbridge and a newly converted polytechnic is these days mostly limited to the resulting CV, not the education.

But a truly educated Christian has to see the Alpha course for what it is: a happy-clappy, quasi-Pentecostal, share-care-be-aware heresy for the intellectually challenged and theologically ignorant.

Whatever turns people on, I suppose, but to attach to the Alpha course hopes for ecclesiastical renewal is cloud-cuckoo land – especially in the context of a general lament about the dire state of Christianity in England and the leftward slant of its established church.

The state of Christianity in England is indeed dire, which has not only spiritual but also political consequences, especially in the face of the Islamic threat.

Islam is a feeble religion, but there is nothing feeble about the ardour of its adherents. Say what you will about Islam, but many Muslims are prepared to kill and be killed for it.

When push come to shove, somehow one fears that not many Westerners will be ready to die for what’s on offer as a spiritual alternative to Islam: the human rights of women, homosexuals, animals and rubber trees.

It takes a strong metaphysical statement to muffle a weak one, and such a statement in the West can only ever come from Christianity. Its failure in this respect is fatally dangerous at a time when Muslims increasingly tend to manifest their piety with Soviet-made assault rifles.

These days even Buddhists express themselves on this subject more robustly than Christians, shattering the image of pacific saffron-robed chaps wholly devoted to navel-gazing and meditation.

Witness the brouhaha about the uncompromising declaration made by Ashin Wirathu, one of the leaders of the Buddhist nationalist movement in Burma, or whatever it’s supposed to be called nowadays.

Mr Wirathu’s movement fights for Burma to remain Buddhist, rather than being overrun by Muslims. To that end it proposes curbs on religious conversions and interfaith marriages, along with other measures, some with strong racial overtones.

Without in any way condoning any of these, one can still envy the self-sacrificial passion with which Mr Wirathu speaks out for his beliefs (for which he has already served a long prison sentence).

Naturally, whenever the new multi-culti gospel is sinned against, international organisations must have their say. In this instance, the righteous, or rather self-righteous, criticism came from the UN envoy Yanghee Lee.

This South Korean woman favours the full gamut of internationalist idiom: severe dark suits, Jermyn Street shirts and uncompromising attitudes to any principled attacks on any religion, except Christianity.

However, unlike our namby-pamby London Christians so close to Mongomerie’s heart, the Burmese Buddhist monk wouldn’t bend over and take his punishment stoically. Instead he came back fighting:

“The bitch criticised the laws without studying them properly,” he shouted to a huge crowd of eager listeners. “Don’t assume that you are a respectable person because of your position. For us, you are a whore.”

I assume Mr Wirathu was using the term figuratively, in reference to Miss Lee’s moral failings, rather than literally, as a comment on her sexual behaviour.

In either case one can’t possibly countenance the use of such language when talking about a woman, even if she works for the UN and shares its attitudes.

But one can still envy the clarity of both sentiment and message – something beyond the latter-day Church of England with all its ‘inspired leadership.’

 

 

 

 

 

Our time is supposed to be the natural development of the Age of Reason. Yet upon even a cursory examination this Reason strikes one as rather, well, unreasonable.

The US president talking about the virtue of robbing the rich… the French president actually robbing the rich… men becoming women… women turning into men or alternatively bishops… the human rights of the rain forest and seals… women who outnumber men treated as a minority… neither individuals nor families nor states paying their way… millions of babies aborted not to cramp the parents’ style… non-stop wars… mass murder as an expression of diversity… multiculturalist mayhem killing off any real culture… men marrying men, women marrying women… Western countries ruled by transparent and not very bright spivs… pickled animals as art… a Nuremberg rally combined with an orgy as ‘popular’ music… reversion to windmills preached by the same people who equate technology with progress… six-year-olds taught about condoms…

If this is Reason, one wonders what Madness would look like. But then one stops wondering and takes the old quotation marks off the mothballs. This ‘reason’ is indeed madness, and God only knows where it will end.

On second thoughts, it’s not just the deity to whom the future is as clear as the past. Granted, no man can equal God’s omniscient foresight. Some, however, can almost do so.

Such men are called prophets, and one of them saw right through the euphoria universally felt just as the Age of Reason was unfolding – and long before thousands of heads rolled.

His name was Jacques Cazotte (1719-1792), and he had enjoyed some modest renown since the 1772 publication of his fantastic tale Le Diable amoureux.

The French still respect writers (thank goodness), and at that time writers were knocking God off his perch. A century before Nietzsche everyone who was anyone already knew that God had died, to be replaced by Messrs Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet, d’Alembert… well, anyone who put pen to paper in defence of Reason.

Cazotte wasn’t quite divine, but he was at least angelic. Hence he was welcome at the Olympus where the new Gods consumed their ambrosia chased with Burgundian nectars.

At one such gathering, in 1788, Cazotte was blessed by proximity to true divinity. CONDORCET HIMSELF! Chamfort! La Harpe! The Duchess de Gramont! De Malesherbes! Bailly! Out with God! Come the revolution! Up with Reason and Philosophy! Down with fanaticism and superstition (the diners’ term for Christianity)!

Toasts to that overdue development were drunk, scabrous stories were told, wit sparkled, then back to the revolution against God, soon may it come.

“Don’t worry, Messieurs,” said Cazotte, who until then had kept silent. “The revolution you so desire will come, soon. Very soon. Trust me, I’m a prophet.”

Another outburst of exhilaration, another toast to the revolution, all including Cazotte drained their glasses. Then he spoke again: “But do you know what will happen to each of you when it does come?”

The diners braced themselves for more toast-inspiring fun, but they were in for a letdown.

“You, Monsieur de Condorcet, will always carry poison on your person, which you’ll take in prison just before your execution… you, Monsieur, will die on the scaffold… so will you… so will you… you, Madame, will be taken to the scaffold with your hands tied behind your back and then beheaded… you, Monsieur, will cut your own veins only for the executioner to finish the job that very day…

“And all that will be done in the name of Reason, Philosophy, Liberty and Equality. These will be the new gods at whose altar you’ll be sacrificed.”

“And what about me?” asked the playwright Jean-François de La Harpe, struggling not to laugh.

“Yes, I forgot,” said Cazotte. “All this will happen within the next six years, when you, Monsieur, will become a Christian and miraculously survive.”

“Oh well,” laughed the others. “If we die when La Harpe becomes a Christian, then we’ll all live forever.”

“No you won’t,” insisted Cazotte. “And neither will Their Majesties. They’ll die on the scaffold too.”

Thereby everybody present instantly became an accessory to a capital crime. Laughing about the death of God was one thing, nice clean fun. But predicting the execution of the monarch was sheer sedition, which was no joke. Some people simply didn’t know where to stop.

Cazotte was asked to leave and he headed for the door. By way of a parting shot, one of the guests asked what he predicted would happen to Cazotte himself. Out of curiosity.

“Why, I’ll die on the scaffold too,” said Cazotte and walked out.

So he did die, four years later. And so did everyone else present, more or less exactly the way Cazotte had prophesied. La Harpe did undergo a spiritual crisis in prison, surviving and emerging as a Catholic and conservative. It’s thanks to him that the story became known.

Now I believe in prophets and prophesies, but this belief isn’t wholly mystical. It stands to reason, no quotation marks, that even this side of the Bible some people may be blessed with extraordinary foresight, just as others are blessed with genius for music.

If Bach could elucidate eternity with his Passions, then why couldn’t someone else, Jacques Cazotte in this case, see just a few years ahead? No reason at all.

Or perhaps his wasn’t a prophecy in any mystical sort of way. It’s just possible that Cazotte was an intelligent man whose thought wouldn’t be clouded by Voltairian effluvia and the general enthusiasm for it.

Some people are like that, you know. They, in Kipling’s words, can keep their heads when all around them are losing theirs, an act of anatomic self-preservation, if you will.

This wouldn’t enable them to second-guess God, but second-guessing people is much easier, if seldom altogether easy. Such seers may come across as prophets, whereas in fact they are only endowed with the power of thinking clearly and dispassionately.

That’s where real reason starts. And that’s where ‘Reason’ gets its quotation marks.

Suddenly we realise that it’s nothing but semantic larceny – like ‘liberalism’ which is anything but, like ‘democracy’ under which demos is more powerless than under the most absolute of monarchies, like ‘equality’ of all being equally ruled by a spivocratic elite.

Jacques Cazotte, where are you when we need you so badly? Please come back – and feel free to bring some likeminded friends along.

“Mr Blair is still in public life, but he is not bound by its principles,” said Andrew Bridgen, MP. “That needs to be changed.”

Mr Bridgen is mistaken. Tony is bound by the principles of public life hand and foot. What he understands, and Mr Bridgen doesn’t, is that principles mustn’t be confused with ideals.

The ideal of public service is just that – to serve the public. The principle of public service, as it has evolved over the last few decades, is to serve the chaps lording it over the public.

Every giant modern enterprise, be it a major charity, a global corporation or indeed the state, is operated mainly – and increasingly solely – for the benefit of the operators.

Politics no longer has anything to do with service. It’s about self-service, a goal towards which a modern spivocrat unswervingly strives in office or thereafter.

When in office, the spivocrat enjoys immense power, both for its own sake and as the launch pad it provides for skyrocketing into private life.

Out of office, the spivocrat parlays his political clout and connections into personal wealth.

Such is the principle, and shame on Mr Bridgen for confusing it with the risibly obsolete ideal of public service.

What raised his ire was not so much the nine-digit fortune Blair has amassed since leaving office as his client list. More and more it begins to resemble a Who’s Who of World’s Tyranny.

Having been rewarded with millions of pounds by the Kazakh dictator Nazarbayev, Blair now stands to earn considerably more millions from the despotic regime of Azerbaijan. Seems like the ruling Mafiosi can’t even conceive of building a £45-billion oil pipeline to Europe without Blair’s advisory services.

One wonders exactly what he advises them on. I doubt Blair knows the difference between a pump and a compressor, or between either of them and a word processor. I also suspect that what he means by ‘flange’ has nothing to do with pipes.

What Blair no doubt offers is mediation between the Azeri bribers and the bribees in the European governments involved. The bribes may be a straight cash transfer, a barter of services or simply an IOU. That doesn’t matter either in moral or in practical terms.

It helps an essentially criminal enterprise (all state-sponsored, and most other, enterprises in Azerbaijan are essentially criminal) to have a spiv on the go who can pick up the phone, call, say, the Turkish PM and be put through straight away.

This kind of access is worth millions, and millions is what Blair is going to get – at a time when his past activities in office are increasingly coming under scrutiny. The details needn’t detain us here, but they do provide a lesson in geography.

From dubious dealings with IRA chieftains to dragging Britain into foolhardy military adventures, to his mysterious dealings with Putin’s thugs and their Italian cronies, Blair’s record in office is questionable at best.

But even if he never faces trial, which many of his critics are demanding, even his legit activities as PM re-emphasise the real principle of public life.

While succeeding in beggaring (I hope this is the correct spelling) the country over 11 years in office, Blair laid the foundations for personal enrichment beyond the imaginings of any previous prime minister. He is also the first former prime minister openly shilling for other states, all of them unsavoury.

Like priest, like parish, as the Russians say. It turns out that Blair’s capable disciples Ed Miliband and Ed Balls knew about the impending 2008 crisis a year before it happened, but kept that knowledge to themselves.

The Eds, who both held key economic posts in the last Labour cabinet, were begging Gordon Brown to call a snap election in 2007 because “the economy was about to fall off the cliff”, with Labour losing power as a result.

That by itself is perhaps a lesser crime than having driven the economy to the cliff in the first place, an undertaking in which the glorious trio so ably assisted the Prime Spiv Tony.

Still, at least they could have warned the public they were supposed to serve that a disaster was imminent. There would have been much both individuals and corporations could have done to soften the coming blow.

Alas, the principle of public service came into play, and the two Eds chose to protect their careers rather than their country.

When queried about this disgrace, Miliband’s spokesman didn’t even bother to deny it. “It’s ancient history,” he said. “We are concentrating on the 2015 Election.”

The cynicism is truly refreshing, and exactly what we’ve come to expect from our ‘leaders’. Rather than turning red with shame and immediately resigning from all public offices, this lot want to reach for the brass ring again.

And the scary thought is that they just may get it. In that case the two Eds will be neighbours at 10 and 11 Downing Street, and there has to be a role for the balsa man Peter Mandelson.

Nothing can drag him to the bottom; that chap just doesn’t sink. Sacked twice from Blair’s cabinet for failing to live up to its stratospheric moral standards (see above), he then embarked on a career similar to Tony’s, if on a smaller scale.

That involves extremely shady contacts with Russian gangsters, such as Oleg Deripaska, who has entertained Mandelson on his yacht. To prove that the principle of public service doesn’t vary from party to party, our present Chancellor also partook of Deripaska’s hospitality.

I’d pay serious money for a recording of the festivities, but even in its absence one could venture a reliable guess. After all, I doubt that Deripaska’s interest in Mandy was romantic. Mandy is already happily married to another man and, as far as I know, Deripaska isn’t that way inclined.

No, it was just more of our spivs putting into practice the current principle of public life: feathering their own nests while befouling ours. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dominic Lawson, usually a lucid social and political commentator, has just broken an immutable rule to which there are no known exceptions:

Atheists must never, under any circumstances and whatever the provocation, talk about religion, and especially argue against it.

Whenever they do, they are absolutely guaranteed to sound stupid and vulgar, no matter how clever they are otherwise. Even if their names are Dave (as in Hume) or Manny (as in Kant), whenever they broach this particular subject they sound as dumb as any old Tom, Dick or Harry.

One reason for this is that people not driven to God by their faith seldom take the time to ponder and study religion deeply enough, and this is invariably communicated in the first couple of sentences they utter.

Granted, it’s impossible for a reasonably educated Westerner not to have a sketchy knowledge of Christianity. But if a little knowledge was a dangerous thing to Alexander Pope, a sketchy knowledge of Christianity is a downright deadly thing, especially when it isn’t lifted by intuitive faith.

The more complex and subtle the subject, the more brutally is the ignorance of it punished, and no subject even begins to approach the subtle complexity of Christianity. Hence an atheist who knows little about it, and understands even less, is bound to sound silly when offering his views on religion, and ten times so when arguing against it.

Dominic Lawson is a case in point. Not a stupid man by any means, he blithely, and possibly in a fit of journalistic hubris, violated the aforementioned rule, suffering the predictable consequences.

Actually, he admitted to being ignorant, perhaps deeming himself to be above ridicule, but more probably because he doesn’t even realise that what he admits to is indeed ignorance. To wit:

“But when someone says that he ‘loves the Prophet’ – or indeed, as American preachers are especially fond of intoning, that he ‘loves the Lord Jesus’ – those devoid of religious faith don’t just find this strange: we struggle to understand what that ‘love’ could feel like.”

Fair enough: such love, strangulated by quotation marks, is less instantly comprehensible than the feelings one has for one’s spouse or children. But people who ‘struggle to understand’ a subject should refrain from offering strong views on it, or especially from implying that this lack of grasp elevates them to a higher intellectual plateau.

Mr Lawson has a rather tasteless tendency to use newspaper articles to proclaim his love for his wife and children. In this instance he strongly implies that this emotion is superior to the one he ‘struggles to understand’.

Yet Christ unequivocally establishes the pecking order of love:

“If any man come to me, and not hate his father, and mother, and wife and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.”

This was a rhetorically emphatic expression of a postulate that later found sublime development in much theology and philosophy.

Any love is a particle of God’s love for man and, derivatively, man’s love for God. Since a part is by definition smaller than the whole, love for one’s mother or daughter exists on a lower plane and, in case of a conflict, must be sacrificed.

As Aquinas put it, “Love is the mother and root of the virtues… Love comes to permeate lower virtues.” And further: “When a human act does not conform to the standard of [divine] love, then it is not right, nor good, nor perfect.”

I’m not suggesting that Mr Lawson should read Summa Theologiae or, God forbid, believe a single word of it.

All I am saying is that it’s vulgar to dismiss a vast philosophical subject with a public-school sneer of “I struggle to understand…”, implying that one’s own understanding resides in the ultra range above this nonsense, whereas in fact it languishes way beneath even the infra range.

Mr Lawson proceeds to vouchsafe to us the information that he is married – happily! – to an ‘observant Catholic’, with whom he often disagrees on religion without, however, diminishing their nuptial bliss one iota. I must say I was pleasantly surprised at the news of Mrs Lawson’s piety.

Not having had the pleasure of meeting her personally, I’ve formed my judgement of her innermost convictions solely on the basis of her own writings. These suggest that she mainly worships in the temple of the Goddess Diana, as in the late Princess of Wales, of whom Mrs Lawson was a friend.

Be that as it may, the loving couple seem to disagree on the effect of, and inspiration behind, the symphonies of Anton Bruckner, which produce in Mr Lawson “admitted feelings of ecstasy”, rather than the somnolence these interminable works so often induce in lesser men.

Apparently Mrs Lawson ascribes her hubby-wubby’s ecstasy to some unwitting religious catharsis, while he objects that “those feelings are completely abstracted from notions of humanity and morality (let alone the composer’s faith).”

Judging by her friendship with Diana, I doubt that Mrs Lawson pitches her arguments at a particularly deep level. That is regrettable, for discussing such matters in a cursory way is a bit like pondering modern computers on the basis of the abacus.

Suffice it to say that to any serious philosopher of aesthetics such ‘complete abstraction’ would sound downright daft.

“Music is the moral law,” wrote Plato, and Aristotle added that this law was to be strictly enforced: “Any musical innovation is full of danger to the whole state… when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the state always change with them.”

Agree or disagree, there isn’t a whiff of ‘abstraction’ there, and neither is one to be found in the works of Hegel, Kant, Schiller, Shaftsbury, Kames – well, of any aesthetic thinker of note.

Considering that the foundations of Western music were laid at a time when music was little more than liturgical accompaniment, this belief in ‘complete abstraction’ is at best naïve.

That is clear even before we’ve touched upon the nature of artistic inspiration in general and musical inspiration especially – or before we’ve talked about the intricate interplay between the inspiration of the composer, performer and listener.

Such matters ought to be discussed, never mind argued pro or con, seriously or not at all. Otherwise one runs the risk of coming across as, in Chesterton’s phrase, “the village atheist talking to the village idiot”. Even worse, the former can easily begin to sound like the latter.