Author: Alexander Boot

At Easter, 2013, six Russian jets carried out a simulated attack on Stockholm. Sweden, proud of her two centuries of peace and getting fat on the ‘peace dividend’, failed to scramble any of her interceptors. Had the attack been for real, Stockholm would now lie in ruins.

This was far from an isolated incident. Russian warplanes routinely violate Sweden’s airspace. At the same time, Russia conducts regular naval exercises in the Baltic Sea, with an accent on landing and supporting units of marine infantry.

The Swedes have finally cottoned on to the possible consequences of pacifism. They’re going through the motions of rebuilding their army, but it’s a long way to go.

For example, they’re increasing their contingent on Gotland, the country’s largest island, to 300 soldiers, equipped with 14 German-made Leopard tanks. Yet at the height of the Cold War the Gotland garrison numbered up to 20,000, which goes to show the size of the gap to fill.

It’s not only Sweden but also the rest of Europe, particularly its eastern half, that has reasons to worry. In 2015 Russia carried out about 4,000 military exercises, compared to NATO’s 270.

A recent US war game showed that Russia would take less than three days to occupy Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. The opposing NATO force wouldn’t be strong enough to resist.

Not only do the Russians use their Kaliningrad (née Königsberg) contingents effectively to surround the Baltics, but they back up this strategic advantage with a prohibitive numerical superiority.

Opposing Russia’s eight airborne fleets and 27 manoeuvre battalions, each equipped with main battle tanks, are merely 12 NATO battalions – with no tanks. Seven of those battalions are native to the Baltics, and their training levels are uncertain.

The overall situation in Europe is even more dire. The three biggest European armies, French, German and British, have, respectively, 423, 408 and 407 tanks, including vehicles that wouldn’t even qualify as tanks in the Russian army.

By contrast, Russia officially boasts a 15,500-strong tank force in active service – augmented with thousands of older but still usable models mothballed in warehouses.

What gives NATO some hope of stopping the Russian army should it finally stop playing games is the approximate parity between NATO and Russian air forces. Modern air-launched anti-tank weapons greatly offset the danger presented by massed tank formations: if during the Second World War bombing was practically useless against tanks, today’s laser-guided missiles can pick off the tanks one by one.

Nonetheless, given the overwhelming numbers of the Russian ground forces, the best possible effect of air resistance would be to slow down the juggernaut, not stop it in its tracks.

It increasingly appears that we’re back to the 1970s. At that time only the US nuclear umbrella (and not the EU, as its champions claim so disingenuously) provided a viable deterrent to Soviet tank swarms sweeping across the Central European plain.

That military doctrine went by the name of MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction), the assumption being that neither NATO nor the USSR would be crazy enough to risk a full-scale nuclear exchange.

One would like to hope that Putin’s fiefdom can be counted upon to show similar sanity. Then again, there are signs diminishing that hope rather drastically.

Putin seems to have decided to resort to the traditional manner in which tyrants try to thwart economic disaster: militarisation first, war second.

The first two wars for which the Russian dictator is personally responsible, against Chechnya in 2000 and Georgia in 2008, failed to alert NATO to the danger of a KGB kleptocracy armed with nuclear weapons. But Russia’s attack on the Ukraine in 2014 began to awaken the West.

Things have escalated since then. Russia is heavily involved in Syria, with only naïve observers believing that Putin is our ally in the region. Tensions with Turkey, a NATO member, are mounting, with Russia’s violations of Turkish airspace becoming more frequent and cynical.

The tone of Russia’s shrill home propaganda is unmistakably warlike, with bugles whining and drums rattling off every newspaper page and TV screen. The West in general and the US in particular are being painted the same black colour as back in the USSR.

Some Russian commentators are talking about the possibility of an eighth Russo-Turkish war, others threaten to ‘turn America to nuclear dust’, still others are issuing open threats to the Baltics and the rest of Eastern Europe, and a first strike with nuclear weapons is mentioned as a distinct possibility.

In fact, the Russian military doctrine has been rewritten under Putin to include the possibility of such a strike, something that even the Soviets discounted, at least openly.

This isn’t supposed to be scaremongering. It’s possible that Russia is flexing her military muscle only to strike poses designed to rally flagging domestic support. Yet it would be criminally irresponsible not to prepare for the other possibility – however much such preparation could cost.

Si vis pacem, para bellum, as the Romans used to say. If you want peace, prepare for war. We want peace, don’t we?

One has to admire our PM’s negotiating skills. Faced with the stonewall of EU intransigence, he managed to wrench out of those boneheaded eurocrats an amazing deal for Britain, making any objection to our continuing membership sound churlish.

The complete list of reluctant concessions Dave managed to pull out of the federasts’ gnashing teeth is too long to publish in this limited space. But here are a few salient points:

·      Britain regains full sovereign control of her borders, except being able to decide who can come here, and in what numbers.

·      However, if the numbers reach an annual level in excess of a million or two (TBD at a later date), Britain will be allowed to apply ‘emergency brakes’, provided the European parliament agrees.

·      HMG will be able to prevent suspected terrorists and criminals from coming to Britain, unless they promise to be good boys.

·      Rather than showering new arrivals with full benefits all at once, we’ll be able to escalate the handouts gradually over four years and beyond, thereby prolonging the immigrants stay and giving them more time to integrate into British life. The wonderful thing about this snivelling EU concession is that it goes into effect in a mere five years – provided the EU hasn’t changed its mind by then.

·      Britain will be exempt from using the phrase ‘ever-closer union’ to describe the ultimate aim of European integration. Instead we’ll be free to say ‘loose but monolithic union’ or, if such is our wont, ‘a physically close but metaphysically loose union’.

·      Germany undertakes to ban at her party rallies, held at Nuremberg or elsewhere, any banners saying Gott strafe England or words to the same effect.

·      France, and specifically the French Academy, has agreed to issue a directive advising the French that the words les Anglo-Saxons and les putes de merde must never be used interchangeably, unless the speaker strongly feels like doing so.

·      Poland has agreed to take back those Polish plumbers and scaffolders who feel like repatriating, provided there aren’t too many of them.

 ·      The Dutch, while continuing to produce and consume mountains of mediocre cheese, undertake to pay lip service to the excellence of Stilton, stopping, effective immediately, comparing its aroma to the smell of dirty socks.

·      The Italians agree to instruct their pickpockets not to target English tourists specifically, unless the latter are asking for it by being negligent. They also promise not to pinch the bottoms of British female tourists, unless said bottoms jut too far out.

·      The Czechs will allow some British stag and hen parties to come to Prague, provided HMG agrees to compensate the city to the tune of £100,000 for every subsequent puddle of vomit.

·      The Spanish agree to rename their island Ibiffa, which is how British tourists prefer to pronounce Ibiza.

·      Britain will be allowed to fish in her own territorial waters, with the EU stipulating the types and quantities of fish to be pulled out of the sea, along with the times during which fishing is to be permitted.

·      Britain will be allowed to slaughter cattle in any way, provided it’s halal.

·      Britain will be encouraged to practise free trade, within the guidelines of the EU’s protectionist quotas. Trade outside the EU, though technically permitted, is discouraged and could be punished by quotas imposed on British goods by the EU.

·      If Britain undertakes to shut up every Eurosceptic in her government, the EU will agree to silence every Eurosceptic within the European Commission.

In fact, the deal secured by Dave is so good for Britain that he was completely justified in saying that, with this agreement on the table, Britain would jump at the chance to join the EU if she weren’t already a member.

This assertion is so indisputable that Dave should have no fear putting it to a test. Britain should withdraw from the EU by summary parliamentary vote and then hold a referendum on rejoining.

The subsequent government campaign could then stress the economic benefits of membership, singling out the negligible rate of youth unemployment in Spain, the healthy condition of Italian banks, the thriving state of French manufacturing and the negligible cost of Germany’s immigration policy. I can even propose the umbrella slogan: “We can have it as good”.

Such a step would reinforce Dave’s credibility as a true statesman in the Disraeli vein, an international negotiator putting Metternich to shame, and a man who’d rather relinquish his membership in every Pall Mall club than utter an empty phrase.    

Every Hitler needs his Goebbels. Performing this function for Putin is Dmitry Kisilyov, head of the government news agency and the host of a popular talk show on Rossiya 1, Russia’s equivalent of BBC One.

Kisilyov is more than just Putin’s chief propagandist. He’s the dummy to Putin’s ventriloquist, lip-synching things that Putin enunciates through Kisilyov, who obligingly opens and closes his mouth.

It was Kisilyov who explained a few months ago that Russia is capable of “turning America into radioactive dust”, which was an expansion on Putin’s reminder to a forgetful West that “Russia is a nuclear power”.

This time around Kisilyov delivered another revelation: Lenin, whose mummy still adorns Red Square, is being increasingly seen in Putin’s Russia in the same light as he was seen in the Soviet Union.

Russian school textbooks are already describing Stalin as a strict but fair manager who “took Russia with the plough and left her with the nuclear bomb”. Now it’s Lenin’s turn to make a comeback.

For anybody endowed with some knowledge of history and elementary moral sense, Lenin takes pride of place on the short list of the most evil, sadistic tyrants of modernity, sharing the roster with Stalin, Hitler and Mao.

Kisilyov doubtless knows enough history, but his deficit of moral sense made him deliver this panegyric on his talk show, for the delectation of millions:

“The scale of his effort and the nobility of purpose that Lenin set for himself to rearrange life on this planet are unheard of! There was nothing like it either before or after him. His romanticism, his courage alone are worth a lot. And if, while reassessing Lenin’s role, our society manages to take out Lenin’s positives and Lenin’s scale, then Lenin’s energy will work for us the way Mao’s energy is working for the Chinese. Putin too is beginning to ‘dissect’ Lenin, carefully, from afar. Even Lenin’s massacres of priests… are but a detail.”

Yes, but the detail is the place where the devil lives. This particular diabolical detail, though paling into insignificance compared to the 15 million murdered on Lenin’s watch, involves the brutal murder of at least 40,000 priests in the roughly six years that Lenin was in power.

The official version is that they were shot, but few were so lucky. Priests were crucified, flayed alive, cut to ribbons, eviscerated, turned to ice by having cold water poured over them in minus 20 weather – and I’ll spare you the more graphic stuff.

What particularly frustrated Lenin’s ‘nobility of purpose’ was the clergy’s reluctance to relinquish its sacramental valuables, lovingly assembled by believers over centuries. Gold chalices and crosses, gospels and other sacred books bound in gem-encrusted covers, precious icons – all those things had to be plundered when the right moment came.

That, in the eyes of the great romantic, happened in 1922, when the countryside was devastated by the worst famine in Russia’s history. Being a man blessed, in addition to the nobility of his spirit, with no mean intellect, Lenin calculated that people dying of hunger would be too weak to resist. This is how he put it, in that especially noble way of his:

“It is precisely now and only now, when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and hundreds of thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables with the most savage and merciless energy, not stopping at crushing any resistance. It is precisely now and only now that the enormous majority of the peasant mass will be… in no condition to support in any decisive way that handful of Black Hundred clergy… who can and want to attempt a policy of violent resistance to the Soviet decree.”

I could comment on this text, but won’t, for no commentary is necessary. Instead I’ll cite another passage from the same letter:

“At this meeting, pass a secret resolution… that the confiscation of valuables, in particular of the richest abbeys, monasteries and churches, should be conducted with merciless determination, unconditionally stopping at nothing… The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and bourgeoisie we succeed in executing for this reason, the better. We must teach this lot a lesson right now, so that they will not dare even to think of any resistance for several decades.”

Again, there’s no need for commentary, especially since we know how efficiently Lenin’s directives were carried out. The ‘scale of the effort’ was indeed impressive – as was the ‘nobility of purpose’.

This, I hope you realise, is a full equivalent of today’s Chancellor of Germany making, through her mouthpiece, a statement about positively reassessing Hitler’s role in the country’s history.

Say what you will about Frau Merkel, and God knows I’ve said enough about her, but she’s unlikely to do so in any immediate future. But then Germany still retains a modicum of sanity.

Now, aren’t you sorry you can’t follow Russia’s propaganda meant for internal consumption? An eye opener, that.

Britain, according to Dave, is racist, which “should shame our nation”. Actually, being led by such a nonentity is a greater reason to be ashamed.

A young black man, according to Dave, is more likely to find himself in prison than at a university. To someone currying favour with the progressivist crowd there can be only one explanation: racism. Our universities are reluctant to admit blacks, while our courts are eager to send them down.

This is a possible explanation, but it’s neither the only nor the likeliest one. In fact, considering the facts Dave cited, it doesn’t add up at all.

The racism explanation would make sense only if certain premises could be factually established:

Premise 1: Universities reject qualified black candidates.

Premise 2: Such candidates are as qualified as rival whites.

Premise 3: Black people are innocent of the crimes for which they are imprisoned.

Premise 4: If found guilty, a black is more likely to receive a custodial sentence than a white defendant with the same criminal record, who’s seen as presenting the same danger to society.

Since Dave failed to establish any of these premises, his diatribe is the same bien pensant drivel that has become his trademark.

He did say that “It’s disgraceful that if you’re black, it seems you’re more likely to be sentenced to custody for a crime than if you’re white.” But without the qualifications mentioned in Premise 4, this is yet another example of hollow chattering, something further emphasised by the word ‘seems’.

When a prime minister makes such a far-reaching claim, there can be no ‘seems’ about it. Either is or isn’t, that’s the choice, to be made on the basis of facts, scrutinised and analysed.  

Dave accused his alma mater Oxford of “not doing enough” to attract black students. That softens the accusation: not doing enough may be treated as laziness or negligence, not racism. That charge would only stick if Premises 1 and 2 were established, which they weren’t.

If they could be established, Dave would have jumped at the chance. Hence one has to assume, without leaving the realm of logic, that neither of those assumptions is true. Therefore, even though universities are lackadaisical about dragging young blacks in, they don’t discriminate against them, meaning they aren’t racist.

Now what would constitute doing enough? Discriminating against more qualified white candidates in favour of black ones?

Apparently not. Since it would be nice to retain at least some conservative support, Dave hastened to add that he didn’t favour reverse discrimination.

However, in the good tradition of Islington salons he failed to state what he does favour, other than that Oxford should “go the extra mile” in search of more blacks. In which direction the extra mile should be travelled wasn’t specified.

Dave then shot himself in the foot, having first withdrawn it from his mouth. “White British men from poor backgrounds,” he said, “are five times less likely to go into higher education than others.”

I’m confused. So we’re talking not about race but family background, for poor white men don’t usually sport blackface at university interviews. Having first caught my breath after the dizzying turn in rhetoric, I must admit that finally we’ve uncovered a kernel of truth – though not the way Dave meant it.

A combination of various government policies have indeed covered Britain with a blanket of rotten council estates. While they don’t greet visitors with the sign “Abandon hope all ye who enter here”, they might as well do so.

The policies responsible for this tragic situation were enacted in social affairs, education and justice.

The massive welfare state created a culture of dependency, depriving youngsters of any incentive to seek a job that in all likelihood wouldn’t match the level of their benefits. At the same time, by effectively acting as provider father and depriving the family of its vital economic function, the state made real fathers redundant. That effectively destroyed the family, with every predictable social consequence.

The annihilation of grammar schools deprived boys from poor families of any educational, and therefore social, hoists, attaching youngsters to the rotten estates in perpetuity and leaving mostly crime as a way of supplementing their benefits and attaining peer respect.

And our justice system encourages crime, rather than punishing it in a ruthless and deterrent fashion. For example, a leading sociologist has calculated that a burglar commits, on average, 50 crimes before seeing the inside of a courthouse, and another 50 before going to prison, usually for a derisory term.

The prevailing belief is that prison represents not punishment commensurate with the crime, but a chance to rehabilitate a youngster who in any case is less guilty than society at large. Justice is thus no longer justice. It’s an extension of social services, and we know how effective those are.

The salient point here is that all those destructive policies come to us courtesy of intellectual and moral cripples like Dave, who spout progressivist drivel and then act on it to stay on the right side of the Zeitgeist.

This would be almost bearable if at some point they spared us their hare-brained, sanctimonious nonsense. Fat chance, as Dave is proving.

Of course much depends on how you define success. By the standards used in the recent OECD report, the British educational system appears to be an abject failure.

A survey of teenagers aged 16 to 19 in 23 developed countries placed our youngsters at 23 in literacy and 22 in numeracy, which – by such retrograde criteria – wouldn’t exactly qualify our education as a rip-roaring success.

However, if you define success as I do, achieving the desired result, then our education qualifies with bells on. For producing two generations of dysfunctional ignoramuses was precisely the aim of our governing nonentities.

Literate youngsters would be tempted to read books without pictures in them, thereby developing their minds. Hence, when they grew up, it wouldn’t have taken them long to realise that those who govern us are indeed nonentities.

Today they’d be able to see through the illogical, mendacious drivel extruded by our politicians, which would keep the likes of Dave, Tony or Jeremy away from any elective office above the proverbial dog catcher.

And if they were numerate, they’d do some basic number crunching to see how phoney our prosperity is. The British economy is like a man commenting on the quality of the tobacco in the cigarette he smokes while sitting on a powder keg – and one wouldn’t need to study integral or differential calculus to realise this. Just knowing how to add up would be enough.

Hence our spivocrats rely on an illiterate population to maintain their hold on power and shove what they consider progress down our throat.

This cynically mendacious notion is based on the idea of equality, understood in the crudest possible sense. However, while heavenly equality before God is the founding tenet of our civilisation, equality of all on earth is but a slogan in the war fought  against our civilisation.

Whenever this idea is bandied about, a whiff of tyranny is in the air. For, since earthly equality isn’t a natural human condition, it has to be mandated and enforced. Whoever does the mandating and enforcing thereby places himself above presumably equal hoi-polloi – some animals have to be more equal than others, in Orwell’s phrase.

In other words, an attempt to equalise people by political action is ipso facto tyrannical and destructive. Our educational system, concocted 60 years ago in the name of equal learning for all, is a case in point.

The OECD survey helps establish the exact time when the educational catastrophe befell. For the same study shows that British pensioners, who escaped the full force of the comprehensive education blow, are among the most literate and numerate in the developed world.

When Anthony Crosland, then Education Secretary, set out in 1965 to destroy what he called ‘every f***ing grammar school’, he must have been aware that by doing so he’d be destroying f***ing education in any meaningful sense.

Yet that was exactly the aim for which his progressivist loins ached. Education, or for that matter anything else, didn’t have to be good. It just had to be equal – equally abysmal for anyone not blessed with parents able to pay for private schooling.

As a side effect, it consigned to eternal misery the very poor in whose name progressive socialists are destroying our civilisation.

The boot straps of free grammar schools by which the poor could pick themselves up out of state dependency were cut – with the spivocrats rubbing their hands with glee. The more people were dependent on them, the greater their power. QED.

The knock-on effect of this policy has nearly destroyed higher education as well. Universities stopped being institutions of higher learning and instead became battlegrounds of egalitarian social reform.

When he was Prime Minister, Tony Blair, the worst spiv of all, set the goal of half the population being university-educated. He was being either stupid enough not to understand that this would trivialise the university into de facto extinction, or else subversive enough not to care.

Predictably, the level of university education in Britain has dropped way below the level of a pre-1965 grammar school. Twenty per cent of young university graduates are only marginally better than our teenagers in literacy and numeracy.

Just think about it: one in five university graduates can’t read and add up properly. We’ve come a long way since the time mortar boards could only be seen on the heads of scholars, philosophers and scientists.

Things have degenerated to a point where most people don’t even understand what education means. They equate it with acquiring practical skills to survive in the rough-and-tumble of the economy.

The role of education as a developer of minds, morals and souls has been forgotten. I fear for our country and, more generally, our civilisation.

While coherent arguments in favour of staying in the EU are nonexistent, we aren’t short of strong arguments to get out, courtesy of the EU itself.

Every statement uttered by this wicked organisation is one such. Yesterday, for example, Britain was criticised by the European Committee of Social Rights for requiring immigrants to show some command of English.

This, according to this august body, violates some provisions of the European Social Charter, first adopted in 1961 and boasting among its signatories a dozen countries compared to which Nazi Germany was a laissez-faire paragon of justice.

What I find amusing is the composition of the Committee, featuring representatives from such historical bastions of social rights as Estonia, Russia, Bulgaria and France. Words like ‘glass houses’ and ‘stones’ spring to mind.

Estonia’s presence is particularly telling, considering her own position on linguistic uniformity. The knowledge of Estonian is an ironclad requirement for citizenship there, even for those, mostly Russian, residents who were born and bred in the country.

Hence in 1992, shortly after the country went independent, 32 per cent of Estonian residents found themselves stateless. By now that proportion has come down to about eight per cent, still quite high.

I’m not blaming the Estonians – quite the opposite. Russian was imposed on them by a brutal supranational power trying to merge the country with others into a mythical Soviet nationality, riding roughshod over the local ethnic identity, including the language.

As part of that programme, swarms of Russians settled in Estonia, attracted by the readily available accommodation kindly vacated by KGB execution squads and arresting parties. (About a quarter of Estonia’s population were executed, imprisoned or deported.)

Naturally, since most business there was transacted in Russian, the new arrivals’ incentive for learning the devilishly difficult Ugro-Finnish language was somewhat understated.

Predictably, when independence came, those linguistically challenged Russians found themselves at a loose end, feeling they belonged neither in the country of their birth nor really in Russia. One can sympathise with them, but one can also understand Estonians: language is perhaps the most important adhesive holding a nation together.

Now, if we recall Terence’s saying Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi, we realise that, while Estonia sees herself as Jupiter, her representatives try to thrust us into the bull’s slot. This is an unfortunate double standard.

For the same principles apply to us. We too are being dragged into a supranational, wicked (though not yet violent) body aiming to toss all European nationalities into a cauldron, bring it to a boil and cook it long enough to produce an unpalatable stew destroying the flavour of each ingredient.

We too are trying to protect our nationhood, and we too realise that our language is indispensable to the task. English is the language of England – everything else is but a side line.

Not every resident of a 60-million nation at the world’s crossroads can be expected to be a native speaker or to use nothing but English at home. But it’s a vital requirement that every permanent resident should have enough English to integrate into our cultural, economic, social and political life.

This is especially critical now, when every other adhesive seems to have fallen by the wayside. Christianity is no longer seen as a factor of national unity, English culture is a terra incognita even for most Englishmen, English history might as well have begun earlier this year.

So what’s left? Some ill-defined ‘British values’ Dave Cameron bandies about, which presumably include the time-honoured practice of two men marrying each other? Among such existential ruins, the English language looms larger than ever before.

If Estonia’s presence among countries teaching us ‘social rights’ is amusing, Russia’s is downright obscene.

This is a country that denies every political liberty Englishmen took for granted centuries ago, one where pensioners starve, 28 million people live under the poverty level of £175 a month, qualified medical care is available only for the rich, every election is falsified, political murder is rife, daily racial attacks are common, a country that routinely jumps at the throat of her neighbours like a rabid dog, committing beastly atrocities in the process.

Now Putin’s poodles are howling at us about ‘social rights’. (The term confuses me. Is it the same as ‘human rights’? Is the right not to speak your country’s language human, social or both?)

Speaking of poodles, until a few years ago Bulgaria had acted in that capacity to Russia. Roughly at the time the Social Charter came into effect, Bulgarian assassins did the Russians’ ‘wet work’ all over Europe, when their pay masters were otherwise engaged. That’s another country amply qualified to act censorious towards us.

Then there’s France, with her maniacal insistence that anyone who speaks native French is French. The logical inference is that those who don’t aren’t – can we please be allowed the same latitude?

This diktat is tiny compared to the overall EU tyranny. It’s but a molecule of the aforementioned stew being concocted in Brussels. Yet I’m astounded that some Englishmen don’t find it sufficient by itself to want to shake the EU dust off their feet.

Putin, reputably the world’s richest man, with some estimates of his wealth reaching $200 billion, doesn’t really need this present. It’s just a small addition to his existing fleet.

Nor does £25 million constitute a significant outlay for the billionaire donor, Roman Abramovich. The yacht he gave to Putin is no more than a trinket, like a teddy bear one gives to a girlfriend who has a jewellery box full of diamonds.

Actually, my interest in Russian gangsters is tepid at best. My main concern is our response to Russian gangsters, especially those in the Kremlin. Specifically, I’m fascinated by the kid gloves the West invariably dons when dealing with political evil.

That our foreign policy is guided not by morality but by expediency is obvious and, at times, understandable. However, our notion of what’s expedient is catastrophically wrong.

Political evil responds not to leniency but to a show of force. The force doesn’t necessarily have to be military, although that should be at least implicit. More important is a show of moral strength – an explicit statement that good won’t tolerate evil as of right.

Alas, just when such a firm stand vis-à-vis Russia would be vital, the West’s sphincter loosens and the kid gloves come onto its trembling hands. What results is appeasement, something one would have thought was irrevocably compromised in 1939.

Policy may be held hostage to expediency, but morality shouldn’t be. Yet only now does the West begin to make vague noises about Putin’s evil. Until political cards fell just so, morality had remained shoved deep into our sleeve.

That Putin is an evil gangster has been known since 1992, when Marina Sal’ye completed her investigation of Putin’s shenanigans in his official capacity as Petersburg’s Deputy Mayor. (Unofficially he was assigned by the KGB to control Mayor Sobchak, just as Gen. Korzhakov was performing the same function for President Yeltsyn.)

At that time Putin was flogging illegally everything he could lay his hands on, including submarines. The nicest touch was exporting $100 million worth of raw materials in exchange for food a starving Petersburg badly needed. The raw materials promptly left Russia, yet no food arrived.

Already in those early days Putin’s purloined wealth stood at tens of millions. When he ascended to power, the KGB colonel began to move up the ranks, using an elaborate network of third-party launderers to amass what could be the world’s greatest capital.

All this has been known in the West for at least 20 years. In fact, back in 2007 a CIA report already put Putin’s ill-gotten wealth at $45 million – yet the report was never made public.

Even the first two aggressive wars Putin started, against Chechnya and Georgia, didn’t loosen our governments’ tongues. It’s only when the emboldened thug grabbed the Crimea, attacked the Ukraine and had a Malaysian airliner shot down that our appeasers began to stir to life, if in a gingerly fashion.

Suddenly the US Treasury begins to talk about Putin’s corruption, nepotism and embezzlement of state funds. So what else is new?

Speaking to BBC Panorama, Adam Szubin, who oversees sanctions in the US Treasury, said all this has been known for “many, many years”. Why such craven silence until now then?

One can almost see that it may be imprudent for Western governments to acknowledge publicly that the leader of a major nuclear power is a common bandit. But surely our press, with its much-touted commitment to free speech, shouldn’t have such compunctions?

Yet I have it on good authority that both The Wall Street Journal and our own FT are sitting on a wealth of information about the underground network of laundering conduits channelling Putin’s (and other gangsters’) money into the West.

Every detail has been laid bare – so where are the sensational reports? Are we waiting for Russia to launch a nuclear strike before we become more forthcoming with the truth?

Likewise it has taken Britain nine years to complete an inquiry into the murder of Alexander Litvinenko. Correction: what took nine years wasn’t completing the inquiry, it was publishing its results. The actual investigation didn’t even take nine weeks – the case was open and shut almost instantly.

This means we’ve known for nine years who murdered Litvinenko and who, in Sir Robert Owen’s phrase, ‘probably’ ordered the Mafia-style hit, albeit with a more sophisticated weapon.

In other words, we know that Putin is definitely a gangster and ‘probably’ a murderer, However, our response is emetically timid.

On the mendacious pretext that we need Putin’s support in Syria, Cameron’s government has reacted to the new/old facts with insouciance. It’s as if we are so weak that we desperately need Putin to bomb Syrian schools and hospitals first, wait for the rescue workers to arrive and then, with typical KGB perfidy, hit them with a secondary strike.

In an uncharacteristic show of candour, John Major, then Britain’s PM, identified Neville Chamberlain as his role model among his predecessors. Cameron probably feels the same way, and the spirit of Munich still befouls the air in our corridors of power.

Have we forgotten that 1938 was followed by 1939, and not just chronologically?