Author: Alexander Boot

Few things are as polarising as debates over the taking of human life.

By now the Augustinian concept of just war has caught on, and soldiers killing for their country aren’t widely regarded as murderers.

When the state says that the war it is fighting is just, youngsters aren’t supposed to struggle with moral choice. They are expected to go and kill or be killed.

When they exercise their own moral choice, the state punishes those whose moral choice it finds wrong. The issue is more or less clear-cut.

Not so with other forms of homicide, such as the death penalty and abortion. One observes that those in favour of the former are almost always opposed to the latter and vice versa, with both sides invoking the argument that human life is sacred.

Since even intelligent atheists acknowledge that Western morality derives from Judaeo-Christianity, it’s worth mentioning that religious views on such matters are unequivocal. The death penalty doesn’t contradict our religion; abortion does.

The religious argument must be made. Yet the same case can be argued rationally, without taking God’s name in vain.

Executing a murderer doesn’t so much deny as assert the value of human life. By having the courage to kill the killer, the state expresses society’s abhorrence of murder.

Human life, the state says thereby, is sacred. Whoever takes it wantonly thus strikes out against not just his victim but against every moral foundation of society.

A murder sends out destructive waves into society, and their amplitude can never be attenuated if the crime is left unpunished, or punished inadequately.

No punishment other than death is in this case adequate specifically because human life is sacred.

Its value can’t be measured against any length of imprisonment. Society can no longer protect the victim, but imposing the death penalty is the only way for it itself not to be victimised.

Therefore the death penalty was never regarded as cruel and unusual punishment anywhere in the West until the last few decades.

At that point the Judaeo-Christian underpinnings of our society were destroyed  and society was cast adrift – into oblivion.

Since, as Margaret Thatcher once explained, society no longer exists, it can no longer be threatened, and suddenly the death penalty becomes unacceptable. We are atomised individuals now, each with his own view of right and wrong.

This inevitably creates morally troubled waters in which any tyrannical, which is to say modern, state can then fish by turning itself into the unifying moral authority.

Rather than referring to an appropriate scriptural verse, as the erstwhile moral authorities used to do, the state can impose its own laws that seem moral but are in fact self-serving.

The state’s principal objective is not to enforce immutable moral laws but to self-perpetuate by putting forth regulations aimed at destroying the laws that have for ages been considered immutable. Any surrogate will do, provided the state can throw the might of its formidable propaganda machine behind it.

Hence Western states one by one abolished the death penalty, and hence also they’ve allowed abortion on demand. This somehow is no longer seen as the arbitrary taking of a human life.

Forgetting for a second any moral or, God forbid, religious considerations, the logic of it has always defeated me, as if to serve a reminder that modernity, allegedly devoted to the triumph of reason, ends up stamping reason into the muck.

The only way not to regard abortion as killing is not to regard a foetus as human. But, having written this sentence, the state refuses to put a full stop at the end of it.

It acknowledges that a foetus is indeed human, which is why it’s wrong to kill it when it’s close to climbing out of the womb. Until that moment, however, it’s just a part of the mother’s body, like an appendix.

The logical chaos begins when the state attempts to pin down the beginning of life to a specific point during pregnancy. Generally speaking, most states agree that a foetus is already human during the second and third trimester.

One has to infer that, when the clock strikes midnight on the ninety-third day of pregnancy, a miracle occurs. A magic wand is waved and an appendix becomes a person.

Since those who operate our states tend not to believe in miracles, they must have a more rational explanation for this transformation, though so far they have modestly refrained from offering it for public consumption.

One can understand their reticence, for no logical explanation exists. If a foetus is human at 93 days, it has to be just as human at 92, 62 or 22.

Logically speaking, only one indisputable moment can be accepted as the beginning of a human life, that of conception. Therefore abortion constitutes a killing at any time during pregnancy, be it at 150 days or 15.

Being a reasonable sort, I’m willing to accept – strictly for the sake of argument – that the issue is in doubt.

But surely any doubt must be treated as a certainty: it’s the sacred human life we are talking about here. If it’s even remotely possible that life already exists, then it must be assumed to exist for sure.

Yet we can no longer be rational about such things. The state has trained us to be sanctimonious instead, because it can use our sanctimony against us.

All similar considerations apply to euthanasia. Since sentiment has been replaced by sentimentality, we are supposed to jump up and salute at the state’s supposedly humane permission to kill those whose lives are so full of suffering that they are no longer worth living.

Again logic interferes. Exactly who decides that a life is no longer worth living? Who establishes the point at which suffering becomes intolerable?

It could be the sufferer himself, which is usually the case. But people in pain will often do or say anything to get relief, which incidentally is used as an argument against torture.

The poor chap may feel that death is his only salvation, but we’ve all heard of many miraculous recoveries. If he indeed recovers, don’t you think the patient will be glad he didn’t opt for euthanasia, or that the option didn’t exist in the first place?

Sometimes the death-defining moment is established by doctors, who thanks to their training are more likely to decide correctly that the suffering is irreversible.

Yet more likely doesn’t mean guaranteed, and we have all heard of doctors making horrendous mistakes in writing patients off prematurely.

The only rational solution to the problem is the same as in abortion. Because we can’t know for sure one way or the other, we must err on the side of the sanctity of human life. Only he who gives life can take it, and neither doctors nor patients themselves fall into that category.

Yet, just as with abortion, sanctimony rules. And, just as with abortion, the goalposts are pushed all the way towards the corner flags.

At first abortion was seen as allowable only when the mother’s life was in danger. Then, as diagnostic techniques became more sophisticated, when the foetus couldn’t be expected to grow up at least as modestly intelligent as Ed Miliband. And then – whenever the woman felt like it.

Euthanasia, and its close relation assisted suicide, was first deemed appropriate only when a clearly terminal patient suffered intolerable and unrelievable pain. Eventually it got to be considered not just allowable but desirable for anyone who no longer felt like living.

When modern sanctimony comes in, reason walks out. Witness the latest bout of madness, in Belgium.

Some 30 years ago a 22-year-old man went on a rampage of rape and murder, for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Last week the villain complained he could no longer stand prison life and demanded that doctors kill him.

And – are you ready for this? – Belgium’s Federal Euthanasia Commission agreed. The man was to be put to death next Sunday.

Only yesterday’s last-minute intercession by psychiatrists put this egregious act on hold for the time being. Yet again I feel baffled.

Belgium, along with most formerly civilised countries, has banned capital punishment. In spite of that a criminal was to be judicially killed in a grotesque fusion of euthanasia, assisted suicide and the death penalty.

Modernity has abandoned God in the name of reason, and God’s morality in the name of the secular kind. But an odd thing happened: it turns out that without God there is no reason and no morality.

We ignore the evidence showing that God’s laws aren’t just more righteous but also infinitely more rational than man’s laws. One only hopes it won’t take an apocalyptic calamity to drive this point home.

At the beginning of the film In Bruges, a gangster speaks with his tongue slightly in cheek: “What have the Belgians ever given us? Nothing but child abuse and chocolates. And they only use the chocolates to get at the kids.”

This wasn’t supposed to be serious analysis, yet the analytical methodology behind it can boast divine endorsement: “Ye shall know them by their fruits.”

Applying this proven way of thought to Belgium, one has to admit that she isn’t among the most accomplished of European nations. Still, from van Eyck, Memling and Rubens to Franck, Magritte and Maeterlinck, Belgium has more to offer than just chocolates and their possible illicit uses.

Flemish urban architecture doesn’t have much to apologise for either, with Ghent, Bruges and Antwerp generally believed to be among Europe’s most beautiful cities.

Admittedly Brussels is justly believed to be among Europe’s ugliest cities, but that makes it an ideal capital of the European Union. I mean, would you rather have Paris or Rome befouled by thousands of denationalised bureaucrats on fat expense accounts?

All in all, Belgium wouldn’t be my first choice of a place to live, but then it wouldn’t be the last one either. Not with so many Muslim countries around.

Applying the same methodology to assessing Islamic civilisation, one has to acknowledge that the fruits it has borne have mostly been either poisonous or nonexistent.

In its earlier days of violent expansion, some scholars bearing quills travelled the world in the wake of riders brandishing swords. Just as the riders bridged Asia and Europe with their conquests, so did the scholars act as conduits of knowledge flowing back and forth.

Thus the Arabs brought to Europe algebra and Aristotle, the former from India the latter from Greece. But, unlike the Indians and the Greeks, they made few indigenous contributions to the world.

These days the Muslims criticise the West for its decadence, and much of their criticism is justified. What isn’t justified is their right to offer such criticism.

One should suggest they use the critical methodology that came from the same source as the analytical methodology I mentioned earlier: “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.”

Much is being made these days of the violent advances made by Muslim fanatics in the Middle East, along with the seemingly peaceful demographic advances made by so-called moderate Muslims in Europe.

The target of these two prongs is clearly and with laudable honesty enunciated by Muslim leaders: the creation of an Islamic caliphate destined to rule or at least to dominate the whole world.

My imagination isn’t vivid enough to see the resulting world order in my mind’s eye. But, judging by the Muslims’ record in the countries they already possess, this prospect isn’t much to look forward to with eager anticipation.

The world’s scientists number only one per cent of Muslims in their ranks, with Israel alone having more scientists than all Islamic countries combined.

This is hardly surprising for Arab countries’ collective investment in scientific research is but one-seventh of the world’s average.

Only 300 foreign books are translated in Arab lands every year – one fifth of the number translated in Greece.

Twenty per cent of the world’s population live in Muslim countries, yet their combined GDP is smaller than that of France, although this may change if François Hollande sticks around for a while.

Add to this the rich contribution that Muslims make to Europe’s crime rate, and one would think our governments would do all they can to limit, or better still reverse, the spread of Islamism.

One would hope they’d see the existential menace provided by the implantation of an alien and historically hostile civilisation into an admittedly decadent but still residually western Europe.

Such hopes would be forlorn. Waving the false flag of liberalism in the air, while keeping the dagger of destruction for political gain up their sleeves, European governments seem to be competing with one another as to which one can cede the most ground to Islam the fastest.

As is increasingly becoming the norm, governments and societies no longer see eye to eye on most issues, and this one especially.

People care less and less about which party is going to be in office after the next election – witness the growing apathy of the electorate across Europe and the unprecedented uncertainty of outcome in most precincts.

But they care more and more about their national identity, which they increasingly see as under threat from alien implants. In response European governments, emphatically including ours, foster the tyrannical spread of liberal cant increasingly backed up by the force of the law.

When people express even the mildest of resentments against their own countries being yanked out from underneath their feet, they are declared to be neolithic racists and troglodyte xenophobes. When their resentment goes one notch above mildest, they are routinely charged with ‘hate crimes’.

This newfangled legal category may include not only physical attacks on Muslims but even some publicly expressed dismay over, say, the number of mosques in Britain having grown from 60 to 1,600 in the last 50 years.

European governments and people are clearly at cross-purposes, and so far the governments have had the upper hand. Yet there are indications that this situation is being reversed.

Even our sham democracies can’t afford to ignore the swell of public opinion for ever, and the opinion is indeed swelling. It’s slowly becoming possible to voice a concern about uncontrolled immigration in general and Muslim immigration in particular without being equated to Hitler.

But slowly is the operative word, while the burgeoning of Islam in Europe is anything but slow. Feeling impotent to do anything about it by appealing to their representatives, people are beginning to act in the only way still open to them: taking to the streets.

If in the past such actions were the preserve of various extremist groups, today’s political mainstream is beginning to swing that way too.

Witness the tens of thousands who took part in yesterday’s protests against the creeping Islamisation of Germany. Most of the participants in the rallies indeed came from rather radical groups, but only because the action had been poorly organised.

A poll conducted by Germany’s impeccably liberal Stern magazine shows that one in eight Germans would join an anti-Islam march if it were organised close to home. How long before one in eight becomes one in three?

The British tend to trail behind the continentals in the ardour of political activism. But this side of The Guardian pages and HMG press releases, one hardly hears anything other than anger about the continuing Islamisation of our country.

The people of Europe clearly don’t want their countries to become branches of an Islamic caliphate, and they are prepared to confront their governments over this issue.

I can’t say I blame them. Who’d want to live in an Islamic or even quasi-Islamic country? To paraphrase W.C. Fields, all in all I’d rather be in Belgium.

 

 

 

Paul Valéry must have had Russians in mind when he wrote that “The only thing one can learn from history is a propensity for chauvinism.”

Well, fine, not all Russians – one shouldn’t generalise. But chauvinism is certainly the only lesson learned by many Russian descendants of White émigrés, most of them living in France.

One has to reach this melancholy conclusion on the basis of their open letter Solidarity with Russia in the Hour of the Ukrainian Tragedy.

Written by Count and Countess Shakhovskoy, the missive includes among its 100-odd signatories members of some of Russia’s oldest families.

A Bobrinsky, a Tolstoy, a Bariatinsky, a Sheremetiev, a Pushkin et al all signed this proof that they must have played truant when history was taught. Especially that part of history that went beyond chauvinism.

Their ancestors were the lucky ones. They managed to get away when Putin’s ancestors raped Russia.

The unlucky ones were culled en masse, for no crime other than belonging to an undesirable class. Actually, culled is perhaps a wrong word, suggesting as it does a quick death visited without much imagination.

Yet many murders were quite imaginative, as documented in Sergei Melgunov’s book The Red Terror, published in the west while Lenin was still alive.

Melgunov cites thousands of instances of such niceties as skinning people alive, rolling them around in nail-studded barrels, driving nails into people’s skulls, quartering, burning alive, flailing, crucifying, stuffing people alive into locomotive furnaces, pouring molten pitch or liquefied lead down their throats.

White Russians who ended up in Paris kept their lives, but they all lost something else. Those who had large families, lost some of their members. Those who had estates, lost them. Those who had money, lost it. Those who had libraries and musical instruments, lost them. Those who had jobs at universities, lost them.

Above all, they all lost their country, and many swore to regain it by ousting the blood-soaked degenerates who took over in 1917. Yet there was always a growing group, infiltrated or otherwise corrupted by the Bolsheviks, which began to claim that the Soviet Union was the same old Russia, albeit painted red.

For all their professed internationalism, they’d say, the Bolsheviks expressed the national Russian idea. Hence they must be supported.

They didn’t know much about what was going on in Russia, and what they did know they blanked out. Many went so far as to beg forgiveness and implore the Soviets to take them back.

The Soviets would oblige, typically welcoming the repatriates with executions and concentration camps.

But even many of those who knew better than to go back still took out Soviet passports as a symbolic gesture. They’d go to the Soviet embassy, drink to Stalin’s health and gorge themselves on free caviar few of them could afford at home.

Step by step, in their minds Soviet Russia ceased to exist as a real and quite awful country, now painted such a dark hue of red that it looked almost brown.

She was replaced by a legend, a sort of secular verbal icon depicting a pristine mother cradling baby émigrés in her arms. With each passing decade, chauvinism indeed became the only lesson they learned from history – and the only one they passed on to their descendants.

Not long ago, a young Frenchman whose Russian father was born in Paris explained to me that the very earth of Russia is sacred. “What makes it any more sacred than the earth of, say, England or France?” I asked – in French, for the youngster doesn’t know a single Russian word except ‘vodka’, wrongly stressed on the last syllable.

He looked at me as if I had questioned the heliocentric nature of our universe. For both him and even his father (who does speak some Russian, reasonably well for a Frenchman) the saintliness of Russia is axiomatic.

To them every Russian regime, be it Grand Prince Vladimir’s, Stalin’s, Gorbachev’s or Putin’s is part of the same blessed continuum, which they idealise in defiance of any widely documented facts.

Russia to them can do no wrong – even if it’s ruled, as it is now, by the spiritual and institutional heirs to the same chaps who flailed and quartered their ancestors, those who didn’t manage to get away to Paris.

This explains why, rather than being appalled by Putin’s frankly kleptofascist regime, they lash out against those who dare criticise it – and especially those who try, however meekly, to resist its aggression against the Ukraine. 

Hence the letter, written by Their Highnesses from the height of their fire-eating jingoism. One paragraph will suffice to get across the essence of this message ad urbi et orbi:

“In the face of increasing tensions, both in Donbass and in international relations, one conclusion is inescapable: the aggressive hostility currently unfolding against Russia is devoid of any rationality. The politics of double standards goes beyond the scale. Russia is being accused of all crimes and found a priori guilty without any evidence, while other countries are offered amazing latitude, specifically in the area of observing human rights.”

One would be tempted to say that every word in the paragraph, as in the whole letter, betokens either ignorance or stupidity. But that’s not the case, at least not the primary case: the letter is animated by unadulterated chauvinism. Those cursed with it are indeed bound to sound ignorant and stupid, but this is a side effect only.

Facts can never make inroads on Russian chauvinism, especially its strongest, vicarious variety afflicting those Russians who have wisely refrained from living in the mythical land of their morbid imagination. The rest of us, however, should be reminded of the facts.

Such as, I am not aware of any country serially violating civil rights that is given ‘amazing latitude’ in the West. Neither apparently are the authors who fail to cite any such place.

One can guess that they refer to Israel’s attempts to protect her citizens against terrorist attacks, but this is only conjecture based on this group’s long history of, putting it mildly, ambivalent feelings towards the Jews.

In that case all I can suggest to the authors is that they read The Guardian or, closer to home, Le Monde. They’ll find plenty of evidence that Israel is never short of Western detractors. No ‘double standard beyond the scale’ is there to be seen.

What they mean by ‘irrational hostility towards Russia’ is neither irrational nor hostile. It’s simply the West’s attempt to use sanctions to mitigate Russia’s rabid aggressiveness towards her neighbours, this time towards the Ukraine.

Russia happens to be the only European country currently attempting a conquest of another European country. This is indeed a crime of which Russia is accused, but she is ‘found guilty’ neither ‘a priori’ nor ‘without evidence’.

Do the authors think that it’s Martians who have occupied parts of the Ukraine? If so, they should by all means continue to hold that view, at least until they have received some competent psychiatric treatment.

The rest of us know that the culprit is Russia or, to be more specific, her ruling regime or, to be even more specific, Putin. This knowledge is strictly a posteriori, with enough evidence to convince the jury and convict the culprit.

But the authors don’t sit in judgement of Russia. For these vicarious chauvinists Russia is God, and God is only to be worshipped, not judged.

Perhaps they ought to read Paul Valéry’s essays – in the original language, which they know a whole lot better than Russian.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Actually I put Hamas in the title mainly for alliterative purposes. For it’s not just Hamas in particular but Islamic states in general that dearly wish to wipe Israel off the map.

Numerous wars and innumerable acts of terrorism have so far failed to achieve that worthy goal, with the Jewish state holding fast in the face of desperate odds.

But one of the world’s biggest publishing firms has obligingly given the Muslims a taste of things to come or rather, one hopes, only to keep daydreaming about.

HarperCollins has published an English-language atlas for the Middle East, where geography plays second fiddle to politics.

According to the atlas Jordan smoothly segues into Gaza, with nothing in between. It’s as if the numerous wars and innumerable acts of terrorism have succeeded and Israel no longer exists.

Yet I have it on good authority that she is still there: the Jewish state of eight million souls is recognised by the UN, along with every civilised country on earth and quite a few uncivilised ones as well.

A spokesman for HarperCollins explained that including Israel would have been ‘unacceptable’ to the intended readers in the Gulf. The omission, he added, reflected ‘local preferences’.

Now my impression has always been that the purpose of cartography is to reflect not local preferences but geographical facts.

For example, I’m fairly certain that the local preference of Königsberg denizens would be for their city, under its original name, to belong to Prussia, which is to say Germany, as it did when Kant lived there.

Yet every atlas in His creation correctly identifies the place as the Russian city of Kaliningrad, which it became in 1946 following the arrival of Soviet tanks, with NKVD execution squads bringing up the rear.

Similarly the inhabitants of Tibet would, if queried, doubtless state their local preference for regional autonomy, which they possessed until China’s invasion in 1951. Yet their quaint ideas haven’t affected any reputable maps.

The customer is always right and all that, so it would be churlish to expect a commercial concern to flout commercial considerations.

The only truth that matters to modern businesses is the kind that emerges during an AGM, and one can understand that. What other truth can there possibly be?

Still, what if an Egyptian or Yemeni reader gets the impression that he could travel from Jordan to Gaza without encountering any offensive Jewish presence in between?

He’d run into an Israeli checkpoint and become an unhappy customer. Commercially speaking, if many more Arabs were similarly misled, those HarperCollins AGMs would become less upbeat than expected.

Had the publishers been more subtle in their thinking, they could have had their baklava and eaten it too. Rather than making Jordan and Gaza contiguous, they could have shown another administrative entity lying in between, but without identifying it by the ‘unacceptable’ name of Israel.

Instead they could have labelled it – and this is off the top of my head – ‘Territory temporarily and unlawfully occupied by the fascist-Zionist vanguard of the Judaeo-Masonic conspiracy aiming to dominate the world’.

Yes, I know this hardly rolls off the tongue, but what the label would lose in brevity it would gain in political rectitude. And the Muslims’ delicate sensibilities would be assuaged.

In any case, given Israel’s diminutive size, the name would have to be printed so small that no one would be able to read it without a magnifying glass. But at least those Egyptians and Yemenis would know that there is something between Jordan and Gaza.

That way HarperCollins could have the best of both worlds, political and geographical. Instead they chose to sacrifice geography, which has caused public outcry all over the world.

As a result, it dawned upon the venerable publishers that, instead of choosing the lesser of two evils, they chose both.

An immediate salvage operation followed, and all talk of ‘local preferences’ ceased. Instead a company spokesman put the omission down to a printing error and said that “HarperCollins sincerely apologises for this omission and for the offence caused.”

Now I’ve heard of incompetent copy editors and subs, but this is too ridiculous for words. A bit of house cleaning is definitely in order, or would be if the spokesman had been telling the truth.

As it is, sacking a few lowly employees would be grossly unfair. Moreover, they could go to the industrial tribunal and win their case against the dismissal by citing the previous statements on ‘local preferences’ issued by HarperCollins.

Money may not smell, but some ways of making it certainly do. The only way of communicating this point to HarperCollins is for all decent people to start boycotting its products.

This is precisely what I am going to do, and I hope you’ll follow suit. This is the only way to make them realise the error of their ways. Surely you don’t think that an appeal to professional ethics would have the same effect?

 

P.S. I’ve been travelling for the last few days and have failed to wish you all a Happy New Year, an oversight that I’m hereby correcting.

 

 

 

 

 

Amsterdam is lovely this time of the year, partly because it’s half empty.

The Dutch, flying yet again, have all gone away on holiday, to be replaced by tourists from all over the world. Some of them are from Britain, and it’s mainly for their benefit that the few Dutch who have remained at home have put up most helpful signs.

Appearing all over the city centre in either the new-fangled electronic or traditional poster format, they warn visitors from misty Albion of the local pitfalls:

“Caution,” scream the signs. “White heroin is sold in the streets as cocaine. Tourists in hospital. Three visitors dead. Beware of street dealers. If you see someone breathing with difficulty or not at all, call the ambulance on 112.”

Since the signs appear in no other language, specifically not in the mother tongue of Holland, one is left in little doubt about the intended target audience.

Actually, for once there’s as much French as English to be heard in the city centre, but the French don’t get the benefit of prior warning in their own language. Evidently they can be relied upon to know that heroin is taken intravenously (mainlined, in colloquial parlance), whereas cocaine is either snorted or, if freebased with ether, smoked.

The English are clearly assumed to be less sophisticated, or else more receptive to the hidden charms of this glorious city.

And there I was, thinking that the English go to Amsterdam exclusively to admire the paintings at the Rijksmuseum and ponder how interestingly Flemish architecture was transposed into a more northern idiom back in the 17th century.

Apparently not. They evidently also visit Amsterdam to buy white powder to snort up their noses and, when fraudulently given heroin instead, to start breathing with difficulty or, in extreme cases, to stop breathing altogether.

It’s also possible that unclad young ladies displaying themselves in dimly lit windows may exert an additional gravitational pull on our seekers of foreign culture. But this is only a guess.

What is a certainty is that drugs are everywhere in Amsterdam, and this creates such a welcome atmosphere of laisser-faire that the English absolutely have to breathe it in. Or snort it in, as the case may be.

Both cocaine and heroine are illegal in Holland, but the key point is that marijuana and hashish in various forms can be legally scored at most coffee shops that incongruously don’t purvey coffee as their principal line of business.

This ought to give some food for thought to our champions of drug legalisation. The example of Holland shows yet again that every perverse legislation eventually always goes a click or two above the legally acceptable behaviour.

Thus legalising euthanasia inevitably leads to the cull of patients who still have much life in them. I have it on good authority that old Dutch people are often scared of going to hospitals because they think the doctors will kill them.

Likewise, legalising abortion in extreme circumstances leads to hundreds of thousands of abortion on demand, actually millions in America every year.

As we have found out the hard way, extending licensing hours will lead to a huge increase in public drunkenness and generally swinish behaviour.

And legalising ‘soft’ drugs is guaranteed to make the ‘hard’ variety both more widely available and more fervently desired.

If in public perception cocaine and heroin are still a couple of stages away from universal social acceptability, legalising marijuana will remove one stage and shorten the distance between sanity and degeneracy.

The argument that legalisation will destroy the criminal infrastructure built upon illegal substances doesn’t quite wash either.

Fair enough, if coke and ‘horse’ are available at your friendly local chemist’s, criminals won’t be involved in the drug trade. So what do you suppose they’ll do instead? Become fund managers or stock analysts?

They’ll find other fields of endeavour in which to apply their talents, such as weapons, poisoned gases or slave trade. What the net social effect of such a career change would be is hard to predict, but even harder it is to believe that it’s guaranteed to be positive.

Sorry, have to finish now. We’re off to the Rijksmuseum, our first visit since it reopened. I’m fairly certain that nothing and no one will get up our noses on the way.

 

  

 

It is a matter of long-standing convention that someone making peremptory statements on language should himself use it well.

This, along with other long-standing conventions, no longer applies to the columnists regaling readers of The Times with their prose, and Oliver Kamm is a case in point.

He sets his store early, with the very title of his article Just Because a Phrase Is American Does Not Devalue It. Perhaps not, but any comment on the use of English by someone capable of writing such a sentence certainly is ipso facto devalued.

The phrase to whose defence Mr Kamm springs is ‘I’m good’ in response to ‘How are you?’.

“There’s nothing wrong with the grammar or semantics of I’m good, and to object to the phrase on the ground that it’s an Americanism is odd,” he writes.

What is even odder is for someone who takes it upon himself to comment on such matters not to know that this usage isn’t just American, but illiterate American. A cultured American would say I’m well or I’m fine, just as we would.

Such a hypothetical individual may say I’m good only to establish his populist credentials, which many cultured Americans so annoyingly feel they have to do.

This is their way of perpetuating the myth that their society is classless, whereas it is in fact more rigidly stratified than any other I know, and certainly more so than supposedly class-ridden England.

Using demotic language, sporting baseball caps (ideally worn backwards), wearing ghetto clothes, serving proletarian food at dinner parties are all aspects of cultural slumming in which many Americans indulge unthinkingly.

Thereby they send to the general masses Mowgli-like semiotic signals saying “We be of one blood, ye and I”. It’s the password they use to gain admittance to true Americanism.

The subcutaneous purpose of this elaborate and multifaceted charade is not only to assert but also to negate, to define America apophatically as something she is not, namely European.

“Repudiation of Europe,” the novelist John Dos Passos once wrote perceptively, “is, after all, America’s main excuse for being.” He was absolutely right, and this repudiation takes a variety of forms, most of them imperceptible to outsiders. 

Mr Kamm is clearly deaf to such transatlantic codes, which is understandable, forgivable and even commendable. What is neither understandable nor forgivable nor commendable is that he is similarly deaf to the nuances of the language spoken in his own country.

Otherwise he would stop to think why an Englishman, specifically the supposedly literate journalist he mentions, would wish to choose the contentious phrase in preference to the customary I’m well.

One can think of only two possibilities: either he draws most of his knowledge of English usage from American films (and those Englishmen who, like him, are weaned on such films) or he wants to ingratiate himself to those for whom ‘cool’ isn’t just a comment on temperature.

In the first case he is a cultural savage; in the second, a tasteless hypocrite. Surely Mr Kamm, who I assume must have received some sort of formal education, has to be aware that there is more to language than just grammar and semantics. There is even more to it than simply communication, for language proclaims a man just as clothes do, and in more varied ways.

For example, the sentence “I believe John Lennon is as good as Beethoven, if in a slightly different way” is lexically and grammatically irreproachable. But it communicates cultural savagery as surely as would the use of disinterested in the meaning of uninterested, masterful instead of masterly or willy-nilly instead of at will.

Not only is the phrase I’m good jarring culturally, but it is also ambiguous semantically. Mr Kamm is aware of this because he has read the book Simply English by Simon Heffer, which he quotes as saying “To many Anglo-Saxon ears this [I’m good] still sounds like a profession of one’s moral condition…”

“I doubt that anyone in practice misunderstands the phrase I’m good in the way that Heffer fears,” comments Mr Kamm.

But Mr Heffer fears nothing of the sort. Similarly I’m convinced he doesn’t think that saying I be good, bro would cause much misunderstanding either. Nor does he fear that a break in communication would necessarily occur if a semiliterate Englishman were to say he is disinterested in classical music.

It’s just that, as a cultured man without a populist chip on his shoulder, Mr Heffer knows that ambiguous phrases ought to be avoided even if one’s interlocutor can be confidently expected to be able to decipher their intended meaning.

He also knows that language conveys so much more than just the bare bones of communication, which knowledge is manifestly denied Mr Kamm – whose own shoulders are weighed down not just by chips but by boles in their entirety.

“If you want a ‘pure’ English, you’ll need to go back at least a millennium, before the Normans invaded,” concludes Mr Kamm with his by now well-established ignorance.

Such a long retrospective journey is unnecessary. It would suffice to go back but a few decades, to the time when The Times was a respectable paper that kept the likes of Mr Kamm a swearing distance away from its pages.

 

 

You like reconciliation. I like reconciliation. All God’s children like reconciliation.

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II definitely likes reconciliation, for she made it the theme of her traditional Christmas speech.

The speech was full of glad tidings, but also some tidings that weren’t all that glad.

The good news was that Her Majesty didn’t announce her abdication, as had been mooted in the press.

God only knows how long our monarchy will last when the next royal generation takes over, as one day it regrettably must.

If upon his accession the heir to the throne acts on his intention to defend faith in general, rather than the Christian faith specifically, the monarchy will lose its underpinnings, as established historically, philosophically, theologically, culturally and every which way.

This is another way of saying it’ll become redundant and effectively moribund. The Queen, who is probably the last devout Christian in her family, must realise this.

Hence those of us who also realise it must wish Her Majesty a lasting good health, which by the looks of her she seems to have, God bless her.

The bad news is that the Queen ought to get herself better speech writers, better film directors and, ideally, a better government.

This brings us to reconciliation which, along with so many other words in the language of Shakespeare, can mean all sorts of different things.

Let’s use Germany, by way of illustration. Throughout much of the first half of the 20^th century, the British and the Germans were killing one another in rather apocalyptic numbers.

Just a few months into that orgy of violence, at Christmas, 1914, some spontaneous truces broke out all along the Western front, with a few German and British soldiers even indulging in a football kickabout.

The Queen used this episode as an example of reconciliation, which it really wasn’t. A day’s lull in hostilities in which millions were to die in the next few years was more like the last gasp of Christendom, the last rites at the coffin of our civilisation.

Now after the next war, in which many more millions were killed and the coffin of Christendom was nailed shut, a reconciliation did ensue.

Britain and Germany, the western part only for the time being, became partners and friends in 1945, and so they are likely to remain till the EU do them part.

That’s what I’d call genuine reconciliation. For the purposes of this narrative let’s refer to it as Reconciliation Type 1.

Now France also took on Germany in the Second World War, and the two nations also stopped fighting each other – in 1940, after France capitulated.

Since the French and the Germans were no longer trying to kill one another en masse, I suppose one could say, stretching semantics to breaking point, that the conflict ended in reconciliation. But if so, it’s a different kind of reconciliation, Type 2, which could be more accurately described as one side’s abject surrender to the other.

Her Majesty specifically used Northern Ireland after the Good Friday Agreement and Scotland after the referendum as examples of reconciliation. However, she didn’t specify which type of reconciliation she was talking about.

Fair enough, the word could accommodate those two examples – as long as we acknowledge that the reconciliation that took place in both parts of the United Kingdom was clearly Type 2.

As a result of the Good Friday Agreement, Northern Ireland is effectively governed by professional murderers, whose stock in trade for much of their lives was blowing up public buildings and transport, torture, beatings, assassination and kneecapping.

As a result of the post-referendum reconciliation in Scotland, the de facto communist and Union hater Alex Salmond will probably become our next Deputy PM – and will definitely become a major influence in government, regardless of which party comes out on top next May.

Now which type of reconciliation would you say this is? I’d say that in this instance the semantic flexibility of the English language has done Her Majesty a disservice.

Her film crew didn’t do her any favours either. When the Queen waxed inordinately effusive about the inconsequential football episode 100 years ago, the newsreel sequences of it were intercut with the footage of blade runners competing in the Para-Commonwealth Games.

If that was a subtle hint of what happened to millions after the last football was kicked at Christmas, 1914, then one has to applaud the symbolism. But somehow I doubt that Her Majesty was suggesting that amputations were the only alternative to reconciliation.

So what was she suggesting? That we should reconcile ourselves to the tasteless side show of cripples putting themselves on display to pander to the public’s perverse tastes? But no one has declared war on the poor wretches as far as I know, so no reconciliation is in order.

This is by the by. The main point is that the two types of reconciliation should never be lumped together.

There can be no reconciliation between good and evil, right and wrong, truth and falsehood. In each case there can only be either the victory of the former over the latter or vice versa, and this point deserved to be made in a speech devoted to reconciliation.

Moreover, if the Queen were allowed to write her own speeches, to express her true feelings, to say what she really thinks, I suspect that point would indeed have been made.

As it was, she allowed – had to allow, according to the modern perversion of our constitution – Dave and his jolly friends to act as her ventriloquists.

It’s they who are the real dummies here, the living argument in favour of a monarch who rules and not just reigns. But this argument will never be won, or indeed made.

Instead we’ll helplessly watch Britain creeping into republicanism, without even a semblance of resistance. That will add a new twist to the notion of reconciliation, add yet another meaning to this already voluminous word.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today is a special day in our post-Christian calendar.

Christmas sales are at a peak, and millions of people come together to worship and rejoice at the altar of the God of Acquisitiveness.

Shops are his churches, department stores are his cathedrals, Christmas sales are his sacraments and all the grex venalium besieging Oxford Street are his parishioners.

But for the steadily declining numbers there still are different churches, different cathedrals and different sacraments, and those retrograde, stubborn, backward-looking groups aren’t doing well even in Britain – never mind in Islamic lands.

Against that background Dave’s professed commitment to ‘Christian values’ sounds particularly nauseating. Actually, even Jimmy Saville would have less of an emetic effect if he came back from the dead to declare his unwavering devotion to Christian morality.

I don’t know whether Dave’s brand of Christianity includes faith in God among the values he holds dear. If it does, his behaviour is schizophrenically inconsistent.

With energy and dedication worthy of a better use he pushed through the anti-Christian homomarriage law. With uninterested apathy he has done nothing to reduce the number of abortions – in fact he has never once mentioned that this method of birth control just may be at odds with his supposed religion. Nor has he ever stated any unequivocal opposition to euthanasia, in whatever form it may take.

This sham Christian has done nothing to reverse the Middle Eastern policy of his idol Blair. As a direct result of the criminal and, which is worse, idiotic invasion of Iraq, the number of Christians there has declined from 1.5 million to less than 500,000 in the last 10 years.

It’s not just Iraq. Christians are being persecuted, robbed and murdered all over the Muslim world, churches are being razed, hundreds of thousands flee for their lives if they are lucky. The unlucky ones face stay to face the stark choice: convert to Islam or die.

In response, Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali regularly risks death in his heroic efforts to save Middle Eastern Christians – and what does Dave do, the bogus communicant in the same confession that Bishop Michael serves so honourably?

Why, only a last-minute parliamentary vote prevented him from committing British troops to the cause of ISIS, the worst murderers, robbers and rapists of Christians anywhere in the world today.

All this proceeds to the accompaniment of mendacious bleating coming from Cameron’s and Blair’s fans in our papers, even the supposedly conservative ones. Thus today’s editorial in The Times claims that “it is not because of Islam that religious liberties are under threat”.

No, of course not, perish the thought. I blame Zen Buddhism myself.

That transparently lying claim is followed by a foray into religious history: “The three great monotheistic faiths in the region … have an inextricable history of cousinship, and trace their origins through Abraham.”

Considering that for 1,400 years the followers of one of those Abrahamic religions, Islam, have been murdering, off and mostly on, the followers of the others two, Judaism and Christianity, the cousinship must be very remote indeed.

Back in 1096 the kind of people we’d call Western leaders today embarked on a crusade to liberate the Holy Lands captured by the Muslims, and to save the people we’d call Middle Eastern Christians today from murderous abuse.

Almost a millennium later, our Western leaders are ready to embark on any foolhardy adventure in the name of democracy, that Enlightenment construct concocted by atheists, but they won’t lift a finger to save Christians grievously endangered by that adventure.

In this so-called democracy, we the demos are helpless to affect our government’s policy in any way, channelling it into a conduit consistent with the founding tenets of our civilisation.

But as we are getting ready to celebrate the incarnation of Our Lord, we can still pray for those who desperately need our prayers, those who crave God’s help even more than the rest of us do. We hope our prayers will help; we know our leaders won’t.

Merry, joyous Christmas to those of you who in their bone marrow feel the divine significance of this day. And happy, profitable shopping to those who don’t.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Don’t vote for David Cameron,” says the title of Tim Montgomerie’s article in The Times.

Thanks, Tim, I wasn’t going to anyway. But that piece of advice is odd, coming as it does from a man who’d vote for a Labrador, provided it sported a blue rosette on its collar.

So whom should I vote for? Nigel Farage? Nick Clegg? Ed ‘God forbid’ Miliband?

Turns out that’s not what Tim meant. What he meant was that we should vote not for Dave but for the Tory party, whoever happens to lead it. It’s not about personalities. It’s about “the core brand”.

“Mr Cameron may choose to quit himself in 2017,” explains Tim, which is an unfortunate turn of phrase. Quitting oneself is hard to imagine, unless we are talking about the transmigration of souls. Quitting of one’s own accord would be a concept less Buddhist and easier to understand.

But let’s not quibble about incidentals. However phrased, Tim’s insight goes right to the core of Britain’s statehood.

So we are a parliamentary, rather than presidential, democracy? Crikey. Who could have thought. Thanks, Tim, for making this clear, and in the language of marketing that speaks right to our hearts.

“I am not encouraging you to vote for any other party,” continues Tim, but then – to quote the recently deceased Mandy Rice-Davies – he would say that, wouldn’t he?

What Tim is encouraging us to do is to “forget presidential-style politics and vote for a party’s underlying beliefs.”

It would be hard to argue against this if Tim were to explain exactly what the Tories’ underlying beliefs are, and especially how they relate to the declared and probable policies of the current Tory party.

The core brand values, to use Tim’s jargon, of the party can be summed up by the triad ‘God, king and country’, whose three elements are in descending order of importance.

As, according to St Paul, all power is from God, God confers power on the king, who then rules in God’s name.

His power is, however, balanced by the country as represented by the elected Commons, while the unelected and hereditary House of Lords makes sure that the balance of power doesn’t swing too much towards either end.

God, as represented by the Church, sits in judgement of the whole process, making sure it doesn’t contradict his commandments.

Does this sound like a fair representation of the ‘underlying beliefs’ evidently held by the current Tory party, whoever leads it now or will do so in the future? If it does, you haven’t been following politics lately.

The past being the best, if not ideal, predictor of the future, it’s reasonably easy to surmise how the Tory elite will interpret its ‘underlying beliefs’ if by some miracle it forms our next government.

The only such belief it has evinced so far is whole-hearted commitment to personal power at all cost. It’s an assumption borne out by recent history that no real principle comes into it at all.

God naturally falls by the wayside, observing, no doubt in despair, how routinely the Tories violate his commandments, especially the one about bearing false witness.

Not to cut too fine a point, the Tories are lying through their teeth about everything of paramount importance, and it takes an utterly unrealistic optimism to expect them to change after next May.

Take the economy for example. The government is indulging in window dressing that would do any interior decorator proud, and only the credulous among us accept their triumphant shrieks.

The economy isn’t doing well – it’s being made to look as if it’s doing well. This misleading appearance is created by exactly the same expedients as those practised by the disastrous Labour government.

We are in the middle of a housing bubble being inflated to bursting, while the public debt continues to climb up towards the two trillion mark. This combination produced the disaster of 2008, and the next one will be much worse: the economy has climbed to a greater height to fall from.

We are still not paying our way, and the nauseating talk about sham ‘austerity’ isn’t going to improve the situation. Yes, the tempo of irresponsible spending and borrowing will have to slow down somewhat, whichever party wins the next election. But the fact of it will remain no matter what.

The underlying, which is to say founding, belief of the Tory party used to encompass responsible finance, not the current frenetic effort to buy our votes with our own money. It was the moral duty of the rich, as Christians and Englishmen, to look after the poor by way of private charity, and one struggles to think of a more seminal ‘underlying belief’.

This has been replaced by the state extorting half of our income to bolster its own standing with the voting blocs such policies created in the first place. The Tories are doing this on a huge scale, only marginally lower than Labour’s madness.

Is Tim suggesting this is going to change, and a return to the ‘underlying beliefs’ is on the cards? Not even he, a lifelong Tory activist, dares say it.

What about defence of the realm, which surely is essential to every ‘underlying belief’ of Toryism?

The present government is rapidly disarming in the face of the most volatile international situation we’ve faced in decades. Will Britannia rearm and again rule the waves under the next Tory government?

Perish the thought. Start spending money on defence, and there won’t be enough left to buy the votes of our own underclass, especially as it’s being rapidly augmented by the underclass we gratefully receive courtesy of the EU.

And speaking of which, do the Tories still number the sovereignty of the realm among their ‘underlying beliefs’? If so, they shouldn’t just make vague promises about some nebulous referendum.

No real Tory would want a referendum, which could go either way. He would be desperate to leave the EU effective immediately, thereby restoring the nation’s sovereignty to where it belongs: king and country.

Is this an ‘underlying belief’ to which the Tories are committed? I’d be prepared to take Tim’s word for it, except that even he won’t say something so manifestly untrue.

The sanctity of the family as the core unit of society surely has to be among the ‘underlying beliefs’ that define Toryism. This has been dealt a deadly blow by the subversive homomarriage law fanatically pushed through by the Tory-led coalition.

Will the next Tory government repeal? Will it, Tim? While at it, will it try to do anything about the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed every year? Or will it simply continue to lie about ‘underlying beliefs’?

“Vote Ukip,” continues Tim with his usual subtlety of political insight, “if you don’t like any politician and prefer the 1950s to now.”

You mean the time when men married women and both sexes lived under laws passed by our own parliament and endorsed by royal assent?

Now that’s sound advice, at last. I think I shall, Tim.

A friend of mine wrote to me yesterday: “A sentence in this morning’s newspaper tells us all we need to know on this subject: ‘The RAF’s first transgendered fighter pilot is to have her own sperm frozen.’ (italics mine)”

Actually, this sentence is so multi-faceted that it works on many different levels, telling us all we need to know about more than one subject.

The obvious one is the future battle-worthiness of our armed forces in general and the RAF in particular.

As someone who has never been called upon to go into battle I’m fascinated by the men who are. What motivates them to go over the top into machinegun fire? Fight to the last bullet? Fly into one dogfight after another, knowing that the odds in favour of survival are dwindling away with each take-off?

Take Douglas Bader, for example. That RAF fighter pilot was a great ace during the Second World War. The Group Captain is credited with 20 solo victories, four shared ones, six probables, one shared probable and 11 enemy aircraft damaged.

He was a hero by anyone’s standards, but few other men have ever had such standards. For Bader was a double amputee, having lost both his legs in 1931. He was discharged then, but insisted on returning to the frontline squadrons when the war started.

Now there was a man who didn’t need an excuse to sit out that war. No one in his right mind would have accused him of cowardice had he stayed on the ground.

Yet he didn’t. Why?

Love of his country must have been the most obvious motive, but I’m sure there were others as well. Pride had to be one of them – not in the sense of hubris, which is one of the cardinal sins, but in the sense of esprit de corps, which is one of the martial virtues.

By all accounts, soldiers, and especially those in the elite branches of service such as the RAF, go into battle not just for God, king and country, but also for the proud fraternity of their comrades.

Some of them may not be believers, monarchists or even patriots, but esprit de corps alone is enough motivation. Even if unsure that heroic death will earn them immortality, they have no doubt it will earn them the admiration of their comrades, their unit, the RAF at large – and of the whole nation.

Now how do you suppose they would feel if they knew that the RAF has become the laughingstock of the nation, rather than its pride? How do you think Douglas Bader would have felt?

Yet the sentence that caught my friend’s eye goes a long way towards making the RAF a butt of silly jokes, not least my own. Soldiers can handle danger; what they can’t handle is mockery.

How willing will our future heroes be to join the RAF knowing they might fly to a likely death in the company of a freaky side show freezing ‘her own sperm’? And should some of the esprit de corps evaporate, what effect will it have on the defence of the realm?

Never in the field of human conflict was so much damage done to so many by so few words, to paraphrase ever so slightly.

As a lifelong student of language, I am in general fascinated by the capacity of words to destroy with a laudable economy of means. Float something like liberté, egalité, fraternité up in the air and a whole civilisation can go up in smoke.

As to a few words telling us all we need to know, they can do so even if we don’t understand the words.

For example, you probably don’t have a clue what on earth these nine words mean: “Ofiteri de politie in civil opereaza in aceasts zona”.

Yet, when they appear on a Metropolitan Police sign put up in Covent Garden during the Christmas shopping rush, they indeed tell us, as a minimum, all we need to know about one complex problem, that of immigration.

These words are the Romanian for ‘plainclothes policemen operating in this area’. Since the message isn’t repeated in any other language, it has to be aimed at one group only: monolingual Romanian pickpockets.

The Met clearly knows that picking pockets in London is a profession almost exclusively reserved for arrivals from Romania, our fellow member of the European Union.

Equally obvious is the fact that the same message wouldn’t have a similarly deterrent effect if it were inscribed in English, which is after all the official language of this member of the European Union.

For the Romanian Artful Dodgers have no English. What they do have is the unrestricted right to come to Britain in unlimited numbers – all to the accompaniment of even our supposedly conservative broadsheets bleating about immigrants enriching our nation.

Well, they certainly don’t enrich those members of our nation whose pockets they pick. Nor do they enrich bank ATMs and their customers: almost 100 per cent of all crime against cash machines is committed by Romanian monoglots.

Far be it from me to commit the linguistic fallacy of claiming that the sentence ‘most pickpockets and ATM criminals are Romanians’ means the same as ‘most Romanians are pickpockets and ATM criminals.’

I’m sure they aren’t, although this certainty is based on a general sense of statistical probability rather than any hard data.

But still, those nine words in Covent Garden open up all sorts of paths into all sorts of areas: our immigration policy, EU membership, modernity, a civilisation in crisis.

Mercifully, I don’t even have to tread those paths. Those few words I’ve mentioned indeed tell you all you need to know.

One question does need an answer though: how likely are those Romanian pickpockets to be transgender women freezing their own sperm?