Author: Alexander Boot

Elizabethan poet John Harington made this astute observation: “Treason doth never prosper:// What’s the reason?// Why, if it prosper// None dare call it treason.”

Now some new documents have been declassified, the Cambridge spies are very much in the news, with commentaries ranging from factual to emotional to spurious. One formerly respectable paper actually attributed the chaps’ spying for Russia to their clubbable backgrounds.

However, everyone agrees that Messrs Philby et al were despicable traitors, and no sane person will contest that designation. I certainly won’t, happy in the knowledge that their treason didn’t ‘prosper’.

But the notion of treason interests me, for over history it has evolved like few others.

For example, ‘the Great Condé’, Louis XIV’s cousin, not only was one of the principal military leaders of the princely uprising known as La Fronde, but he also twice led Spanish armies against French royalist troops.

In any modern democracy Condé would have been put up against the wall and shot. Just imagine the fate of Montgomery or Patton had they led Waffen SS panzer divisions against their own countries. Why, William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, was strung up in 1946 merely for having aired Nazi propaganda during the war.

Thus by the standards of liberal democracy Condé was a traitor who didn’t deserve to live. Yet by the standards of a Christian monarchy that France was at the time he was a naughty child who ought to be grounded, or in that instance exiled to his castle in Chantilly.

Clearly, at the time treason to the state wasn’t the greatest sin, nor loyalty to the state the greatest virtue. It was understood that the state was fairly low down the list of objects to be venerated.

That changed with the advent of the Enlightenment, which misnomer is used to describe a massive atheist revolt against Christendom. The nation or, to be more precise, the state began to demand a loyalty than which none could be higher.

People en masse no longer accepted that loyalty to an idea could supersede loyalty to the state – regardless of what kind of state it was, or what kind of idea. Working against one’s own country was now regarded as not just any old betrayal but as apostasy.

Yet some people continued to cling to the obsolete pecking order. They insisted that a country couldn’t expect loyalty automatically. She must earn it – or not, as the case might be.

One such man was the Russian patriarch Tikhon, arrested by the Bolsheviks for preaching against their bloodthirsty revolution. He was personally interrogated by Dzerjinsky and Kamenev, both ranking Bolsheviks.

“We are the state,” they explained to the recalcitrant prelate. “Each state has its laws. Do you feel obligated to obey state laws?”

“I do,” replied Tikhon. “As long as they don’t contradict higher laws.” (Tikhon in general had a nice turn of phrase. When a sewer underneath the Lenin mausoleum burst, flooding the interior, he quipped, “The incense fits the relics.”)

In other words, the patriarch, along with many of his flock, believed that loyalty to an idea could stand higher than loyalty to the state. They wouldn’t have described  working against an evil state as an act of treason.

On an infinitely smaller scale, I too worked against my state when I lived in the Soviet Union. Since I spoke English, leaders of the dissent used me to transmit to the West, mostly the US, information about Soviet brutality.

I wouldn’t have been able to formulate succinctly what it was that I loved, but I knew exactly what I hated: communism in general and the USSR in particular. Hence in my own eyes I wasn’t a traitor but a man doing his moral duty.

Now if I reserve for myself the privilege to act against my own state when I disagree with it, do I have the moral right to deny the same privilege to others?

Such, for example, as Philby et al, who conceivably saw communism as an ideal that superseded British patriotism. Since the UK was the USSR’s political antipode, they felt they had to choose – and did choose.

I think they chose wrong, and I would have happily shot them myself. But now we’ve left the realm of absolute values to enter one of relative ones.

I regard the Soviet Union, along with its Putinesque child, as evil and Britain as, well, not quite as virtuous as she used to be, but certainly not all bad. But mustn’t I allow that others may have different views?

One might say that, if a state rules by law, as it does in Britain, this law must be obeyed and enforced. I agree wholeheartedly. But when Diana, wife to the heir to the throne, was sleeping around, such acts constituted high treason according to the law then in force. Yet no one even bothered to mention that at the time.

I have no conclusion to offer – other than suggesting that treason is a tricky word. But then we live in a tricky world. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This advice is often ignored, which adversely affects life expectancy statistics. For, just like under Stalin, arrest in Russia increasingly means death.

So far this year 169 people have died in police custody, and we still have two months left. The most widespread diagnosis is heart failure, suggesting that crime attracts many Russians suffering from poor cardiac health.

Some diagnoses are more interesting than that. They range from defenestration to insides ruptured by a champagne bottle shoved where the sun doesn’t shine.

This week’s example of the former is a fraud suspect who fell from the ninth floor of a remand prison in Rostov. I’ve only heard of one champagne party, Russian style, but, when all is said and done, the actual technique is immaterial. It’s the thought that counts.

I’d also like to reassure those who bemoan the state of public health in Russia, especially its cardiac aspect. Granted, it’s rather poor even – and this is saying a lot – by comparison with the NHS.

Yet those dying in police stations don’t really suffer coronaries and strokes. In case you haven’t yet guessed, they are tortured to death.

That’s what happens when a country is so humane as to ban capital punishment. Law enforcement has to bypass the law it’s supposed to enforce and exterminate those vermin off the books.

Or perhaps this theory doesn’t really hold up under scrutiny. After all, one doesn’t hear of many such cases in Western Europe, where there is no death penalty either.

But, in case you haven’t noticed, Russia isn’t Western Europe. She has her own legal, or rather illegal, tradition, and didn’t Vlad Putin say that Russia must tread her own path in life?

Let’s not be beastly to the Russians though. They may not have boasted too many Magna Cartas or Bills of Rights in their past, but they too try to do things by law.

To prove that, the Duma has just passed the first reading of what in anti-Putin circles is nicknamed ‘the sadists’ law’. The vote was 240 to 59, which in the West would be a landslide but in Russia constitutes a major parliamentary revolt.

Russian leaders are used to enthusiastic unanimity, and Vlad must be upset about the 59 holdouts. Who do those MPs think they are? What’s wrong with letting prison staff torture inmates who step out of line?

That’s the essence of the new bill. Should it pass into law, warders will be allowed to use electric shock, beatings and other forms of torture to maintain discipline. Champagne bottles aren’t mentioned specifically, but no law can anticipate every eventuality. There has to be some room left for private initiative.

As the Magnitsky case shows, none of this is to say that prisoners aren’t already being tortured, often to death. But warders who either kill prisoners personally or order other inmates to do so on their behalf are at present violating the law.

That is counterproductive, for ideal Russian citizens are thereby criminalised simply for doing their job. For the moral health of the nation, they must be allowed to do legally what they’re already doing illegally.

It has to be said that even in Western countries prison administration isn’t the kind of profession that typically attracts Tolstoyan preachers of non-resistance to violence. Our warders too must have their share of sadists.

That’s why civilised countries ruled by law introduce measures curbing such people’s natural tendencies. The common premise is that prisoners have inviolable rights, just like everybody else. They may have broken the law, but they’re still entitled to its protection.

In Russia even everybody else is somewhat bereft of rights. And as to prisoners, they are fair – soon to become legal – game.

A Russian warder will soon become a law unto himself. It’ll be up to him to charge a prisoner with breaking the rules, sentence him to torture and administer the punishment. Judge, jury and executioner come together in one breast. Bring on the truncheon and cattle prod, tell the morgue to stand by.

In parallel with the sadists’ law, another proposal under parliamentary rubber-stamping discussion is to ban NGOs designated as ‘foreign agents’ from monitoring human rights in prison.

No matter how dirty the linen, it won’t be washed in public or, truth to tell, at all. Lock up, beat up and shut up seems to be the order of the day.

The upshot of it all is as simple as truth itself: if you plan Russia as your next holiday destination, don’t get arrested there – not even for jaywalking. You may live longer.

Such is the pronouncement of our Home Secretary, that darling bud of Theresa May. Not only do some police forces have few black officers, but – are you ready for this? – they may also be short of female officers as well.

And that’s not all. Women, as she announced with horror dripping off every sound, make up 51 per cent of the population but only 28 per cent of the police force!!! Wait a second, let me recover from the shock… fine, I’m a bit better now.

Mrs May also enlarged my vocabulary, which at present is shamefully short of acronyms. One missing acronym was BME (black and minority ethnic), and Mrs May helpfully filled the gap.

“There are only two BME chief officers in England and Wales, and 11 forces have no BME officers above chief inspector rank,” she lamented. “That is simply not good enough.”

This intolerable situation violates the historic principle of ‘policing by consent’, according to our Home Secretary. “We must ensure that the public have trust and confidence in the police, and that the police reflect the communities they serve.”

And there I was, thinking that the police should not so much reflect their communities as protect them. Sorry, ma’am, my mistake. It’s all society’s fault.

Robert Peel, who created the modern police force, never realised what kind of Pandora box he opened. He didn’t anticipate the predicament the occupier of the same office would have 165 years after his death.

Let’s say a neighbourhood is blessed with many alms houses, or whatever such establishments are called these days. There’s no way the locals could possibly have ‘trust and confidence’ in their bobbies unless they too are octogenarians.

Public services must reflect the demographic makeup of the public with actuarial precision, that’s all there is to it. If they don’t, if, to use Mrs May’s example, 51 female per cent of mankind (personkind?) are policed by a force that’s merely 28 per cent women, lawlessness will descend.

How can a woman possibly trust a male officer to save her from a rapist? Or, if the prospective victim is black and the PC isn’t only a man but also white – why, she’d have so little trust in the cop that she might as well relax and enjoy.

Looking at our steeply rising crime statistics, one could be forgiven for thinking that perhaps we have a shortage of police officers, full stop, never mind their race or sex.

Another forgivable thought would be that exactly the same perverse culture that demands demographic rectitude is also responsible for not letting the few policemen we still have do their job properly.

You see, blacks, to name one underrepresented community, make up a mere three per cent of Britain’s population. That means that policemen can be allowed to stop and search exactly that proportion of suspects, no higher – or else risk censure for racism.

They might defend themselves by saying that the proportion of young black men in the prison population is 10 per cent, not three, and this is a more relevant statistic to go by. But Mrs May won’t accept that argument – policing by consent means policing by demographics. That’ll be all, officer.

May I go out on a limb and suggest that, if I lived in a particularly violent area, I wouldn’t want 51 per cent of the cops to be women? The reason for this antediluvian prejudice isn’t ideological but physiological: age and training being equal, women aren’t as strong and fast as men are.

Since cops of either sex aren’t allowed to carry guns, I’d prefer a large man protecting me, rather than a small woman. Call me a reactionary fossil, but I can’t help thinking that a wisp of an unarmed girl wouldn’t stand much of a chance against a young buck with a handful of GBH priors to his name.

Proving that I’m even more retrograde than that, I’d go so far as to say that my ideal of femininity doesn’t necessarily include the ability to bark ‘You’re nicked, sunshine!’ with convincing menace. I thought I’d say this before such an attitude becomes grounds for a mandatory custodial sentence.

In any case, protecting the public isn’t what our police are any longer for, at least not exclusively. They are there to assuage Mrs May’s social conscience. To her, as to our whole deliberately subversive establishment, PC should stand for political correctness, not police constable.

They themselves don’t have to rely on bobbies on the beat to protect them from muggers, and that’s all that really matters to that lot. The rest of us are there to be brainwashed, socially engineered – and defenceless.

Never mind policing by consent, I’d suggest. Bring back government by consent – kick the darling bud out and let her take her ideas on a lucrative lecture tour. She’ll find plenty of suck…, sorry, I mean takers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An Israeli prime minister wouldn’t be one’s first choice of potential Holocaust deniers. Or second. Or third. He wouldn’t figure at all.

Yet, following his speech at the Zionist Congress, some papers are accusing Netanyahu of being just that. That’s unfair.

A Holocaust denier claims it never happened or, if it did, certainly not on the scale universally believed to be true. Netanyahu said nothing of the sort.

He simply remarked that Hitler’s original intent was to expel Jews, not to exterminate them (possibly true), and that the Holocaust only happened because Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, nudged Hitler that way (undocumented).

It does seem that Bibi got carried away there. Since Israel’s present enemies typologically descend from the mufti on a direct line, and since, like their progenitor, they daydream of killing every Jew, there’s political capital to be built on such a claim – and Netanyahu is a politician above all else.

And yes, the absence of evidence isn’t the evidence of absence, as the saying goes. But a politician’s fecund imagination is even less evidential.

Netanyahu cited the following conversation between Hitler and the mufti, for which there isn’t a shred of documentary support. He left a few lines blank, but my imagination can fill voids too:

H: What on earth am I going to do with those vermin? Oh I know, I’ll kick them out of Germany.

M: Mein Führer, I’m afraid that’s not good enough.

H: Why in Gottes Namen not, Haj?

M: Just use your noggin, mein Führer. You expel them, and where d’you suppose they’ll go? They’ll come to Palestine! Can’t have that, can we now?

H: What are you suggesting then? How do I get rid of the Juden?

M: Burn them, mein Führer.

H: Wundebare Idee! Why didn’t I think of that? Consider it done, Haj.

M: Heil Hitler!

H: Allahu akhbar!

I hope my Israeli friends won’t be cross with me, but I find such an exchange to be highly improbable, even though the mufti was a Nazi, a Jew-hater and a murderer.

Thing is, so was Hitler, and I doubt he needed any encouragement to act on his violent intentions towards the Jews, and certainly not from someone he must have considered almost as racially inferior as a Jew.

Hitler’s intentions had been transparent ever since the 1923 publication of Mein Kampf, where ‘fighting’ Jews is the central theme. ‘Fighting’ crystallised to mean ‘exterminating’ later, after the war with the USSR started. 

Since Hitler used the words ‘Jews’ and ‘communists’ interchangeably, his ever-present racial hatred was then augmented by political animosity, hitherto kept in check while Stalin was Hitler’s ally. He also needed a battle cry to rally the troops.

It was that combination that produced the Holocaust, not the mufti’s prodding, even supposing it had happened. If anything, Hitler was probably more encouraged by the way occupied Eastern Europeans responded to the massacre.

The enthusiasm they showed in torturing and murdering their erstwhile Jewish neighbours outdid even the Nazis’ ardour, with, especially, the Balts, Slovaks, Poles and Ukrainians making even the Germans queasy at times.

It’s not just for logistic reasons that the worst death camps were sited in Eastern Europe, not Germany proper: the ambient population welcomed them even more.

In post-war Germany, guilt over the Holocaust has become an essential psychological factor in creating a new ethos – or even, if you believe such a thing possible, the new German, a sensitive liberal in touch with his feminine side.

Take that away, and German self-image would lose a redemptive aspect, leaving only the less attractive parts, such as philistinism, obsession with bodily functions and readiness to take over Europe with banks, rather than tanks.

No wonder that, on hearing Bibi’s pronouncement, my friend Angie was up in arms.

“You can’t take it away from us! It’s ours!” she screamed. “What’s all this Scheiße?!? Himmelherrgott! Whatever next! You can’t change history, particularly not on this issue!”

It sounded as if changing history on other issues would be fine with Frau Merkel, but then she was agitated, and it was all Bibi’s fault. But who can blame him? He’s a politician after all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Goethe’s character sold his soul to the devil for the promise of earthly happiness, forgetting that any bet with Mephistopheles can have only one winner.

Translating this German tale to today’s British reality, our spivocrats Dave and George ought to remember that, while the nation can survive without China’s ill-gotten cash, she can’t survive without her soul – not that they are ever overburdened with such lofty concerns.   

“Verweile doch,” they said to Xi in effect, “du bist so schön.” Stay with us, you’re so beautiful – or rather rich (reich). There went the nation’s soul, what was left of it.

I’m not going to burden you with gruesome stories about abuses of human rights in communist China. These are widely known.

Anyway, the term is imprecise. There are no rights there, and, if you regard freedom as an essential aspect of humanity, certainly no human rights.

It’s a slave economy built on the foundation of the most satanic ideology man has devised so far. China is a semi-starving country oppressed by a few murderous billionaires and their servile cronies.

It’s a country where the criminal gang of Party chiefs can order women to abort their children on pain of punishment. It’s a country that can mow down the unaborted children who grow up and dare to voice their disapproval of the regime.

More important, it’s a country that presents a clear-cut strategic menace to the West, of which we’re still part. In today’s world China is as close to being satanic as any major country comes.

Does this mean we should do no business with China at all? In an ideal world, one run by moral dicta rather than pecuniary gain, the answer would be yes. Decent countries ought to boycott evil ones.

But we don’t live in an ideal world, nor have ever lived in one. In the real world, governments have to balance moral imperatives with economic and social needs.

Britain would never have built the greatest trading empire in history if she had insisted on doing business only with virtuous regimes. Such an intransigent stance would have been as fiscally ruinous as it would have been morally admirable.

So by all means, let’s trade with China. But there’s trade and there’s trade.

Buying cheap clothes, I-phones and fake watches is one thing. Making our energy supply dependent on the good will of a totalitarian regime is another.

No responsible country wishing to survive for a while longer will place its strategic interests in foreign hands – especially if these are the kind of blood-stained hands decent people would refuse to shake.

Yet this is precisely what Britain has done by signing the much-vaunted £40-billion contract commissioning China and France to build our next generation of nuclear power stations.

At least France being part of the deal probably means that the resulting facilities will be reasonably safe. While Chinese workmanship is as shoddy as slave labour always is, the French have a good record with nuclear power.

Hence those plants probably won’t do a Chernobyl on us – but they can do something worse. They can give an evil regime (I mean China, not France for the moment, provided Hollande’s tenure doesn’t last) control of our energy supply, a vital strategic resource.

This is yet another instance when morality and pragmatism converge, as do their opposites. It’s immoral to sell our souls to an evil regime. It’s impractical to let it jeopardise our strategic position.

What I found truly nauseating wasn’t the sight of our governing spivs brown-nosing to the Chinese. One expects nothing else from these spivs.

Even the sight of English Roses waving miniature Chinese flags only caused a minor gagging effect, although at least 60 million died in the shadow of that flag, and hundreds of millions have been turned into slaves.

But the sight of the Queen playing lickspittle to this satanic lot was truly unbearable. Her Majesty’s government hasn’t put her in such a humiliating position since Ceaușescu came to town on his pre-execution tour.

I wonder how many Brits realise that our governing spivs are doing the same thing to the country as Faust did to Gretchen. And, like Gretchen, it’s the nation that’ll pay the ultimate price.

 

 

This morning I was stuck on a bus going up Piccadilly – the street itself and Hyde Park Corner were partly blocked to accommodate the Chinese gangster who’s staying at Buckingham Palace.

That was bad enough, but having to look at the back of the bus in front of me was even worse.

Staring me in the face was a giant ad showing semi-naked Rafael Nadal striking a seductive pose in Tommy Hilfiger underwear.

Now I have for advertising that special feeling I reserve for the profession that still continues to feed me 10 years after I left it. I also have an analytical reflex when looking at an ad.

Questions pop up in my mind the way pictures of fruit pop up in a Las Vegas one-armed bandit. What’s the target audience? What’s the marketing strategy? What’s the advertising brief? You know, that sort of thing.

Most advertising for most products these days relies on glamorising various deadly sins, such as envy, avarice, gluttony or sloth. In product categories like grooming, personal hygiene and clothes, especially underwear, the widely targeted sin is lust.

There’s nothing new about that – advertisers have always known that sex sells. Such ads have appealed to people’s sexuality since God was young.

Except that now they increasingly appeal not just to sexuality but specifically to homosexuality.

I don’t really know who buys Tommy Hilfiger briefs. In fact, until I saw the ad this morning I hadn’t had a clue who Tommy Hilfiger is.

Such ignorance is a definite indication that people like me, old, overweight, married chaps, aren’t the target market. If we were, you can be absolutely sure the advertiser would have found a way of reaching us with his message.

So fine, a roly-poly gentleman of a certain age who writes vituperative prose, drinks single malts and walks out of any establishment where pop music is played isn’t the target for Tommy Hilfiger intimate apparel.

Who is? This question is easy for an old advertising hand to answer.

The model, in this case Nadal, is supposed to cause sexual arousal by exposing his nude torso and shapely behind, creating in the viewer’s mind a subliminal bond between such a pleasurable feeling and the brand advertised.

Fair enough. This sort of thing works, and even I am man enough to admit to not being totally impervious to visual titillation. Except that what I find titillating isn’t a muscular naked chap. Those old Hello Boys! ads for Wonderbra are more my sort of thing. Or else – let me make sure my wife isn’t looking over my shoulder – the current Charlize Theron commercials for Dior.

I imagine some women may be turned on by an image of an undressed beefcake, but I doubt many women sport men’s underwear. They may see the pouch sewn in at the front as superfluous.

Some women must buy underwear for their men, but there probably aren’t enough of them to justify spending many millions on an advertising campaign – and take my word for it, many millions is what this campaign cost.

That leaves only one audience both susceptible to a bare-all tennis player and large enough to pay for the advertising budget: male homosexuals.

When I got home, I looked on Google and instantly found a TV commercial for the same product. It shows Nadal catwalking toward a fitting room, dropping his clothes as he goes.

When he’s down to his Tommy Hilfigers, he pulls them halfway down but stops at the critical moment. He then smiles seductively and shakes his head, as if saying “Thus far, you naughty boy, but no further.” Cut to the logo.

Now every advertising agency keeps a thick volume of information on potential celebrity endorsers. These are rated according to their credibility for various audiences and product categories.

For Nadal to justify his fee – and he doesn’t cross the street for less than seven digits – he had to rate very high on credibility for underwear aimed at a homosexual market.

Whether his own sexuality has anything to do with it, and it does appear ambivalent at times, I don’t know and frankly don’t care. But I do care about the nation’s moral health, and I doubt it’s well served by an open appeal to decadence.

In fact, in his book Le suicide français the French author Eric Zemmour partly attributes the eponymous suicide to the profusion of advertising explicitly aimed at homosexual audiences.

I rather think that Zemmour confuses cause and effect, as he tends to do. What he diagnoses as a disease is merely its symptom, but it’s a telling one.

Explaining his imposition of a urine tax, Emperor Vespasian (d. 79AD) presciently formulated the principle that now guides all commercial activity: Pecunia non olet. Money doesn’t smell.

If there’s money in it, even our government doesn’t mind kissing Chinese gangsters on the part so provocatively exposed by Nadal.

So can one expect a purely commercial enterprise to be concerned about the nation’s moral health? Of course not. Not these days, at any rate.

 

 

In offering to fast-track Turkey into the EU, my friend Angie displayed all sorts of admirable qualities. For one thing, she really understands the essence of the EU better than anyone else.

Never mind all that nonsense about cultural kinship, shared destiny, fused history, European identity, common home. Es ist alles Katzendreck. The EU is a purely political construct, nicht wahr?

Gut. Then any country is European if politics demands it. And European politics demands whatever Angie demands, it’s as simple as that.

Angie could paraphrase her celebrated compatriot Göring, who once said, in response to a Gestapo inquiry about Field Marshal Milch, a suspected Jew, “At my headquarters I decide who’s a Jew and who isn’t.” In Angie’s rendition, this phrase could sound as “In the EU I decide who’s European and who isn’t.”

If political expediency, as Angie sees it, demanded it, she’d invite Saudi Arabia or Nepal to join the EU, never mind Turkey.

The deal she put on Erdogan’s table is as simple as ein Strudelstück. You take in all those Syrians, we’ll take Turkey into the EU. Verstehst du?

Or let me put it to you this way mein lieber Recep Tayyip. You limit the Syrians’ freedom of movement within Europe, we’ll give 76 million Turks unlimited freedom of movement within this accursed continent.

Remember your school physics, mein lieber Recep Tayyip? It’s like two communicating vessels. Ten million Arabs flow into Turkey, 10 million Turks flow into Europe. Or it could be 20 million in, 20 million out, who’s counting among Freunde?

Well, someone should – anyone, actually, who wishes Europe to remain even vaguely European for a while longer.

The arrival of a hundred thousand Syrians here or there would damage Europe severely, but arguably not quite yet beyond recognition. The potential arrival of millions of Muslim Turks, however, would have exactly that effect.

Do you understand, Frau Merkel? What you’re proposing is that Europe should die so that the EU (and, more important, your political career) may live.

Compared to the damage done by your celebrated compatriot Hitler, it’s like a .45 dumdum bullet between the eyes compared to a slap in the face.  

I’ve only had the pleasure of visiting Turkey once, some 20 years ago. Specifically, I went to the five per cent of the country’s territory that’s in Europe geographically – only to see with my own eyes that not even five per cent of it is in Europe culturally.

That was long before Turkey became ‘Islamised’, if you believe our analysts – or accept their premise that there exists a tangible difference between ‘Islamised’ and ‘Islamic’.

I was walking through Istanbul’s business district, jam-packed with young, Armani-suited executives on the rise. Slightly swarthier than the chaps one sees in the City of London, the suits a bit too, shall we say, Italian, but other than that you could have fooled me.

Suddenly a muezzin began to sing off a minaret (I hope it’s not the other way around, I can never get those Muslim terms right), and what do you know. All those patrons of Italian designers dropped on the ground where they stood and began to pray, dirtying their overlong trousers.

Within a minute the Turkish answer to Bishopsgate was turned into a sea of heaving backs, with attached heads rising and falling metronomically. A useful ethnographic experience and all, but, call me a Little Englander and report me to the Equalities Commission, I’d hate to see a repeat performance at Bishopsgate.

At that time, Turkey’s record on human rights wasn’t seen as good enough to warrant her admission into the EU. Now that the country has been ‘Islamised’, her record must have improved sufficiently for Angie to welcome millions of Turks with open arms (I mean this figuratively, as I hope you realise).

This at a time when the Turks are strafing the Kurds who are fighting Isis on our side. That sort of thing is hard to understand without using the dialectics developed by Angie’s celebrated compatriot Hegel and further refined by her equally celebrated compatriot Marx.    

What we should do is as clear as those fake diamonds being sold at Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar. The only possible action can again be illustrated by the metaphor of communicating vessels: Turkey comes in, Britain goes out.

Or, if you prefer a more human analogy, Turkey is a woman standing on a crowded bus, while Britain is a man sitting in front of her. The only gentlemanly thing to do would be for the man to get up and offer the woman his seat – especially if he’s getting off at the next stop anyway.

By expunging the last vestiges of faith, progressive mankind has been trying to aid progress in its juggernaut roll for at least two centuries now.

All sorts of progressive methods have been tried, from mockery to mass murder, from brainwashing pupils to boycotting adults, from massive propaganda to confinement in mental institutions.

Yet nothing has worked decisively enough – faith stubbornly holds on. Even in the most progressive, which is to say Western, countries, some people still keep going to churches, and not just on high holidays. Clearly, antediluvian prejudices are so deeply ingrained that progress is in danger of slowing down.

Of all faiths, Christianity is the greatest offender. Judaism used to rank pretty high too but, after progressive German socialists followed Marx’s recommendations and sorted Jews out back in the 1940s, they have been keeping a low enough profile not to be seen as an immediate danger.

Islam is off limits for criticism because of its Third World, multi-culti implications. Regressively colonial Europeans used to abuse progressive Muslim countries by introducing Eurocentric hospitals, schools and administration.

When they were eventually kicked out, Muslims demonstrably flourished all over the Middle East, but the justified resentment remained. Even now, with all paths of progress converging at the summit, some European dinosaurs still claim that protection from Islam is a more urgent task than protection of Islam.

These human reptiles refuse to acknowledge, for example, the just claims of progressive Palestinians driven to despair by Israel, where Jews haven’t yet learned to keep a low profile.

Why, even though PM Dave has explained that Islam is a religion of peace, Muslims are still being provoked to violate their scriptural prescriptions by regularly stabbing dozens of Israelis, some of them to death.

But fossilised Christian (and Judaist) enemies of progress still persist. They point out that most of the world’s flashpoints over the last 20 years have involved Muslims and had nothing to do with Israel.

Specifically they mention the conflicts between Bosnian Muslims and Christians, Côte d’Ivoire Muslims and Christians, Cyprus Muslims and Christians, East Timor Muslims and Christians, Indonesian Muslims and Christians, Kashmir Muslims and Hindus, Kosovo Muslims and Christians, Macedonian Muslims and Christians, Nigerian Muslims and both Christians and Animists, Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims throughout the Islamic world, Muslims and Christians in the Philippines, Chechen Muslims and Russians, Azeri Muslims and Armenian Christians, Sri Lanka Tamils and Buddhists, Thailand’s Muslims and Buddhists, Muslim Bengalis and Buddhists in Bangladesh, Muslims and Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox Christians in Kurdistan.

Moreover, they insist that such apparent Muslim bellicosity, rather than being purely coincidental, has something to do with the world’s most peaceful faith.

In some parts of Britain, those that increasingly resemble a progressive Middle Eastern souq, people even perpetrate – unprovoked! – violence on progressive Muslims.

It’s only our progressive government that stands up for the right of Muslims to turn Britain into a progressive Middle Eastern souq. Henceforth, declared PM Dave, hate crimes against Muslims will be recorded separately and, presumably, dealt with more severely than crimes against, say, Christianity, which, despite our prelates’ efforts, isn’t yet quite progressive enough.

In fact, clinging on to that retrograde faith must be treated as a symptom of a severe mental disorder, presenting a mortal danger to progress. But not to worry: the disease is now treatable.

The treatment is called ‘transcranial magnetic stimulation’, TMS for short. Brains zapped with TMS lose the neurons responsible for critical thinking and decision making, which faculties are intolerable obstacles on the way to progress and especially atheism.

Jointly developed by progressive US and UK scientists, TMS was designed to cure patients of both Christianity and the irrational reluctance to see Britain turn into a progressive Muslim souq.

A recently completed placebo-controlled study shows that TMS works admirably. “Belief in God was reduced almost by a third, while participants became 28.5 per cent less bothered by immigration numbers,” says the triumphant report.

This experiment is in line with the underlying progressive certainty that all existential problems are at base medical. A bad mood calls for antidepressants, an iffy marriage for psychiatric counselling, boozing ditto, lamentable addiction to recreational opiates for iatrogenic addiction to therapeutic ones, worrying about the future for tranquilisers.

This is the progressive way to look at it, and our government ought to give serious thought to making TMS compulsory. What could be easier?

A Christian objects to homomarriage on religious grounds? Zap! – and there he is, walking the aisle with his rugby team-mate. Another one says that Britain is a historically Christian country, rather than a progressive Muslim souq? Zap! – he grows a beard, learns how to fire an AK and goes off to Syria to fight for progress.

As to capacity for critical thinking, our comprehensive education does a good job suppressing it already – but hey, every little bit helps. Just think how much easier life would be for graduates of our teacher-training colleges if all their pupils were zapped with TMS.

The opportunities are endless, and isn’t that what progress is all about?

 

 

 

 

The Dutch Security Council has completed its investigation without naming the culprits in the downing of the Malaysian MH17 airliner.

Hooray! The Russians are rejoicing. The Council! Did not! Say! Who did it! That means only two things, as far as Vlad is concerned: 1) the Russians didn’t do it, and 2) the Ukie fascists did.

No Russian will wonder who goes by that name. By now the message has been repeated often enough and loudly enough for every TV watcher to know that every Ukrainian is a fascist agent of the CIA, FBI, EU and Mossad.

As an aside, this thundering propaganda of wholesale ethnic hatred hasn’t been seen in Russia since the Second World War, when all Germans were portrayed as subhuman sadists. Subsequent enemies were identified by their presumptive crimes, not nationality.

Hence mandated hatred was to be directed at American imperialists, not Americans; British colonialists, not Englishmen; Zionists or cosmopolitans, not Jews; Hungarian hirelings of Wall Street, not Hungarians; Czech revisionists, not Czechs. In each case the connotation was clear enough, but the denotation remained ideological, not ethnic.

But hey, who says Vlad has to follow blindly the path trodden by his admired predecessors, such as Stalin? Who says he isn’t capable of creative development?

No one. Certainly no one who follows Vlad’s propaganda. So it’s not just the Poroshenko government that’s fascist, but every Ukie. They are all Russia haters red in tooth and claw.

And what coloured the Ukies’ teeth and claws red was the blood of MH17’s 283 passengers and 15 crew. That’s the only inference one can possibly draw from the Dutch report.

Here one has to observe with some sadness that attention to detail, especially procedural detail, isn’t one of the most salient talents the Russians possess. The detail they ignore in this case is that this phase of the investigation was purely technical.

The Council wasn’t out to point accusing fingers – this will be done in February by the international board of inquiry. The Council’s task was merely to establish what brought the plane down.

So it did. MH17 was shot down not by a Ukrainian or American fighter plane (as has been mooted in the Russian press) but by an AA missile fired from a Russian-made Buk system.

Ukrainian loyalists have those in their arsenal too, but here’s the rub: MH17 was hit by the latest Buk modification that’s the exclusive property of the Russian military. Only these latest missiles contain in their warheads the butterfly-shaped shrapnel found in the victims’ bodies.

Moreover, the report outlined the area of 360 square kilometres, within which the guilty Buk was sited. Here’s another rub: that whole area was at the time in the hands of ‘Ukrainian separatists’, which is the Russian PC term for the bands of Putin’s proxy troops.

That makes the naming of culprits redundant. Russia’s guilt is as good as proved, something that the February inquiry will certainly confirm.

The cynic in me suspects that Putin’s bombing raids on Syria were timed to coincide with the release of this report. He knew what the findings would be and, with the instinct of the ‘common Petersburg thug’ (Vlad’s own self-description) realised a diversion was necessary to draw the world’s attention from murdered passengers.

One hopes that not everyone’s attention will be thus diverted. For it’s the tragic fate of MH17 that turned Western opinion against Vlad. None of his previous crimes had had enough resonance to muffle the admiring noises emanating from the latest generation of ‘useful idiots’ in the West.

The KGB junta fronted by Vlad attacked Chechnya and Georgia, annexed the Crimea along with large portions of the Ukraine’s territory – and still he remained a great leader in Nigel Farage’s eyes.

It murdered, roughed up or imprisoned hundreds of Vlad’s political opponents, with some ‘whacked’ with nuclear weapons in the middle of London – and Hitchens, Booker and other useful idiots still kept their panegyrics going.

But the criminal downing of MH17 – and let’s face it, everyone knew from the start who did it – was a step too far, especially since most of its passengers were Western. Had they all been Malaysian, our conscience wouldn’t have flamed so bright, but killing Westerners is where we draw the line.

Not too thick a line, mind you, for the panegyrics didn’t stop, and Vlad is still depicted in some circles as a strong leader, patriot, defender of traditional values and the last bulwark of Christianity, rather than the KGB murderer he is.

But enough of a line was drawn for the modest sanctions to stay in place, and Russia to be increasingly seen as a pariah state, albeit not without redeeming qualities. Therefore, when the inevitable conclusion is published in February, some more diversion will be in order, and the more spectacular the better.

Call me selfish, but I only hope that Vlad won’t choose London for his target practice. Or Paris, where I have many friends. Or Israel, where I have friends too. Or America, where I have both friends and family.

I could almost forgive him Brussels – especially the part where the EU HQ is. It’s Rue de la Loi, Vlad, just south of that wedding-cake square. Can’t miss it.

 

 

 

 

When applied to Christianity, the world ‘relevant’ has the same effect on me as loud cacophony has on music lovers. On the plus side, this pernicious word provides several reliable clues to the personality of the person using it.

He can be guaranteed to be a) an atheist, b) a pseudointellectual who believes that, though clever people like him know better, religion has some social value for stupid people, c) ignorant of Christianity and most other things that matter, including human nature, d) a trendy leftie, for all the lip service he may or may not pay to free enterprise and some such.

Whoever wrote today’s Times editorial Vatican III? is all those things, and also not very bright to boot.

Some identified “observers on Catholic affairs” believe, says the article with obvious glee, “that the Pope [is] beginning the long, painful process of bringing church doctrine on sexual and family matters into line with what ordinary Catholics in many parts of the world actually do or think.”

The observation is as accurate as the relish discernible behind it is subversive. Yes, the Pope is doing just that. And no, unlike our government the Church isn’t run by focus groups. It’s ordinary Catholics who should get in line with the Church and its dogma, not vice versa.

The process the Pope is beginning isn’t so much long and painful as destructive. And if it’s true that he’s indeed planning a Vatican III, then the Church, already deeply shaken by Vatican II, may fall apart.

Take the Pope’s desire to “increase the role of women in the Church”. It isn’t immediately obvious how the role of women can possibly be increased above that already played by Mary Magdalene, St Theresa, St Catherine, St Bernadette – to say nothing of the Virgin.

One can’t get rid of the gnawing fear that His Holiness tries to step on the thorny path leading to the ordination of women, pushing the button on the time bomb that has already shown its explosive potential in the Anglican Church. Add to this his ambivalence on homosexuality and divorce, and the bomb’s yield goes up a few megatons.

Traditional, which is to say truly Catholic, prelates have so far been fighting successful rearguard action against His Holiness’s reformist zeal, but for how long?

This week they’ve written a letter warning that the Catholic Church may suffer the same collapse as that suffered by liberal Protestant churches, which was “accelerated by their abandonment of key elements of Christian belief and practice.”

I’d be tempted to express my concern in even stronger terms. Such abandonment, to various degrees, isn’t just a feature of ‘liberal Protestant churches’ but of Protestantism as such. The Reformation tore the Western Church asunder, paving the way for anticlericalism first, agnosticism second and atheism third.

It also showed that believers reform the Church at their peril. This organisation, after all, exists to guard and transmit what it must see as the eternal, revealed truth, which is by definition absolute.

The moment compromises are made to make the Church more ‘relevant’ to a world increasingly alien to it, it loses much of its credibility and some of its legitimacy. The Church is a viscerally conservative body – or it is nothing.

Its founder being a living God, Christianity is of course a living religion. That leaves room for the possibility that the revelation wasn’t given all at once, and subsequent generations may receive new instalments to what was given to those Galilean fishermen.

Indeed, several Church Councils held centuries after the apostolic mission began clearly received embellishments on the original revelation. It’s on that basis that they modified the doctrine, dogma and rituals of Christianity.

Should the Pope or likeminded prelates claim that God has spoken to them and guided them on the path to liberalisation, such claims would deserve respect. But they say no such thing. Their desire is to get more bums on pews by making the Church ‘more relevant’ to a world utterly corrupted by variously evil secular fads.

There perdition lies, and champions of its arrival can count on thunderous applause from The Times.

Because the Church “is an important part of the social fabric of many societies,” continues the editorial, “…it is in society’s interests for the church to… be relevant… It is seemingly wise to want to see church doctrine more closely and sympathetically reflect the lives of both believers and non-believers.”

This is ignorant gibberish. Church doctrine must “closely and sympathetically reflect” not the lives of “both believers and non-believers” but the revealed truth of Jesus Christ. The moment it starts catering to perverse fads that are destructive even in their secular context, it stops being the body of Christ it’s constitutionally supposed to be (1 Corinthians 12:27).

It becomes instead an extension of social services, and we know what a resounding success they are. Its relevance increases in inverse proportion to its holiness.

Oh well, we know The Times isn’t Catholic. But I for one am trying to suppress the urge to ask seriously the question often posed facetiously: “Is the Pope?”