Author: Alexander Boot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet Christ unequivocally establishes the pecking order of love:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Incest is best, according to an 18-year-old American girl who ‘has always identified as bisexual’, and there I was, thinking that ‘identify’ is a transitive verb.

Though she and her father have been ‘dating’ for two years, they now realise co-habitation without marriage is sinful. Consequently they plan to move to New Jersey (the only state where incest is legal), tie the knot and have children.

According to the young lady, this is the most natural thing to do because she and her parental fiancé have much in common.

Specifically, they are both aroused by neck biting, which these days would be sufficient grounds for marriage even in the absence of genetic affinity.

Several papers on both sides of the Atlantic have carried this story, with none being unfashionably judgemental. Some have commented on the possible genetic implications for the happy couple’s offspring, weighing the odds of innate defects.

Generally speaking, 25 to 50 per cent of children born to this form of parental love develop problems, ranging from idiocy to infertility. Some papers cited the scientific evidence, but, as a man of the humanities, I’d be more interested in the moral aspects of such unions.

Playing devil’s advocate, one could mention that incest produced two tribes mentioned in the Bible, Maobites and Ammonites.

Both were started after Lot and his two daughters escaped from Sodom for moral reasons. Somewhat incongruously Lot then got drunk on two consecutive nights and ‘knew’ his daughters, who each gave birth to a son.

Genesis doesn’t mention any genetic defects suffered by the boys, who each went on to beget children and eventually produce the two aforementioned tribes.

Now, the Biblical threesome had a few valid excuses, which our two neck biters can’t claim.

First, having escaped from Sodom and settled in a cave, they genuinely thought they were the last people on earth. Their opportunities for hanky-panky were considerably more limited than in any American state, with the possible exception of Alaska and the river bottoms of Louisiana.

Second, the daughters had a genuine demographic concern about their father’s seed going to waste, thereby consigning the human race to perdition.

Our neck biters can’t possibly have the same excuse, for they must realise that mankind is unlikely to come to a screeching halt just because they desist from incest. 

Third, Lot’s daughters still didn’t feel that such arguments would cut much ice with Dad. That’s why they got him so pissed that he didn’t have a clue what he was doing or to whom.

Mind you, when the daughters got pregnant, Lot must have cottoned on to what had happened, if only on the balance of statistical probability. After all, the concept of immaculate conception hadn’t yet been introduced, and he was the only male in the cave, which to Lot meant the world.

However, Genesis doesn’t go into that kind of detail, proving yet again that the Bible isn’t journalistic reportage and shouldn’t be read as such.

In any case, the paternal neck biter was completely in command of his faculties when he ‘lay’ with Daddy’s little girl. In fact, according to her account, they had discussed the situation rationally before she sacrificed her virginity at the altar of paternal love.

The word ‘degeneracy’ moves to the forefront of my available lexicon, but using it would be judgemental, which is the last thing one can afford to be these days.

In any case I’m sure that before long the loving couple will be treated as pioneering trailblazers. Since American jurisprudence has borrowed from us the reliance on precedent, the trail the neck biters have blazed will eventually lead to a further expansion of the concept of marriage.

If two men or two women can marry, why not father and daughter or mother and son? Oedipus, schmedipus, they say, as long as he loves his Mum.

In an unrelated episode another young American woman, a devout Christian, has struck a counterblow for sexual propriety.

Veronica Partridge, a pretty, happily married woman, has decided not to wear leggings any longer. Unlike the neck biters, she knows her Scripture, specifically the Sermon on the Mount.

There Jesus explained that “whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her have committed adultery with her already in his heart.” And adultery, as we all know and lament, is a sin specifically mentioned in the Decalogue.

Mrs Partridge noticed that, whenever she wears leggings, every man over age five commits this brand of adultery by looking at her thighs and bottom. Against every modern commandment, she partly blamed herself for inflaming men’s passions and leading them astray.

Excuse me? What kind of troglodyte rubbish is that? A woman can walk stark naked and blind drunk through a deserted street at night, but if a lone passer-by as much as lays a finger on her he’ll end up in the pokey faster than you can say ‘it’s never a woman’s fault’.

And now a woman (!!!) says that what she wears may just affect what a man does! Nonsense, absolute bloody nonsense.

It’s those oglers’ own fault, and they are jolly lucky that we have no law – yet! – punishing rape committed in one’s heart.

While applauding Mrs Partridge’s Christian probity, and complimenting her on her old-fashioned views, one still thinks she needn’t have bothered.

She is indeed a shapely young lady, and most men would find it hard not to look when she wears revealing clothes. But Mrs Partridge also sports a huge nostril ring, which should quickly douse any leggings-inflamed passion with ice-cold water.

Any man of taste would be appalled by this demonstration of unleavened paganism. Even if, unlike Mrs Partridge herself, he isn’t a devout Christian.

If you can stand some avuncular advice, dear, keep the leggings but lose the nose ring. God will forgive you for the former but just may punish you for the latter.     

  

 

As a life-long champion of the ethos of share-care-be-aware, and chairman (and so far the only member) of the Charles Martel Society for Multiculturalism, I welcome every call for religious sensitivity, no matter how seemingly risible.

Every time our Muslim friends have a bit of fun with Kalashnikovs or Semtex such calls become more urgent, and the high moral ground from which they are issued reaches a new plateau.

Well, I’m sorry it has to take violence to make a point that already must be clear to anyone, and not just a life-long champion of multi-culti rectitude like me.

But at least the point is made, and I’m happy to observe that it is heeded. Those French cartoonists, kosher shoppers and zealous protectors for Islamic sensitivity didn’t die in vain.

In a move long overdue, Oxford University Press has banned all references to pigs and pork in its publications, not to offend Jews and Muslims (in that order).

To be honest, I’ve never met a Jew who vociferously objected to seeing pork sold at London or New York supermarkets. Some of my Jewish friends don’t eat pork, but they don’t openly mind others tucking into their bacon sarnies.

But hey, that’s just one man’s experience. I’m sure that even as we speak there are blokes somewhere up in Golders Green loading 30-round mags into their AKs to shoot up every purveyor of Cumberland sausages in London.

And speaking of London, the publisher’s courageous action immediately shamed me into ringing my local estate agent.

I was suddenly made aware of how offensive the name of my area of London must sound to Jews and, as an afterthought, Muslims. Fulham! Get it? Ful-HAM!

Yes, I know the etymology of Fulham has nothing to do with pork products, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is the potential for offence, and our – just! – law says that a racial or religious insult is anything the victim says it is.

Actually, my first call went to the Hammersmith & Fulham Council (a doubly offensive name!), to inquire in a rather imperative tone if they had any immediate plans of changing the name to, say, Lambersmith & Fullamb. It’s only after they answered in the negative that I decided to move, possibly to Hampstead…

Oops, this just goes to show how deeply entrenched religious prejudice is even in a life-long champion of religious equality. No, scratch Hampstead – along with Birmingham, Rotherham, Hamburg or any hamlet in his creation.

Oxford University Press have started a laudable academic trend, and long may it continue. I assume that their next step will be to complement book publishing with book burning.

Books by both Roger and Francis Bacon will be the first into the bonfire, followed by every reproduction of paintings by the other Francis Bacon, every edition of Hamlet (both the play and Faulkner’s novel) and Pygmalion, all zoology texts that as much as mention either pigs or porcupines, along with every collection of nursery rhymes that include the one about little piggies going to market or, for that matter, staying at home.

I am happy to see that this worthy initiative has been indirectly supported by both Pope François and President Francis… sorry, I got their names the wrong way around. An understandable mistake, for on this issue the two men speak as one.

President Francis stated his intention to protect all religions equally because Christianity and Islam are indeed equal, especially Islam.

“French Muslims have the same rights as all other French,” he said. “We have the obligation to protect them.”

He didn’t expand to specify that those rights include the right to protect their brittle religious sensitivities with SMG bursts, but, considering the time the announcement was made, this is a natural inference.

At least this seems to be the inference Pope François made, when he explained that those who get shot for telling jokes about other people’s faiths have only themselves to blame.

“It’s normal,” explained His Holiness. “You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others.” Except, dare one add, Christianity, what with its silly notion of turning the other cheek.

I can’t imagine that Pope François will be looking for an alternative career in any immediate future, but President Francis definitely will be, after France’s next election. Not to worry, he has a bright future with Oxford University Press.   

Do you get the impression that our authorities, both political and spiritual, are making a pig’s ear out of our civilisation with their porkies?

One just wishes they sat down and pondered both the meaning and the potential consequences of their pronouncements. Then perhaps they’ll realise that our countries are rapidly heading for an outburst of civil violence bordering on civil war.

I’m sure by now they’ve had second thoughts… Yeah, yeah. And pigs will fly.   

“Security and prosperity go hand in hand,” explained Dave and Barack Hussein in a jointly written, or rather ghost-written, Times article.

“We reaffirm our belief that our ability to defend our freedoms is rooted in our economic strength,” they added.

This belief, if they indeed hold it, is staggering in its ignorance and feeble-mindedness. Yet again I am scared out of my wits realising what kind of nonentities are leading us – all the way to calamity.

These chaps are trying to peddle the notion that our security will increase pari passu with the growth in the number of i-Pads per capita. They seem to think that the richer we become, the better equipped we’ll be to defend ‘our freedoms’.

Yet history shows that the truth is almost exactly opposite to this wishful thinking. Wealthy civilisations and countries, great or small, have regularly fallen to impoverished barbarians with lean and hungry looks.

The ancestors of today’s Germans were dirt poor compared to the mighty Romans, which didn’t prevent Alaric from sacking Rome in 410 and taking over the western empire.

Closer to our own time, the combined wealth of Western Europe was much greater than that of Nazi Germany, yet we know what happened in 1940.

Even closer to our own time, it took Obama’s partial namesake Saddam two days to devastate Kuwait, even though his own country languished at a much lower GDP per capita.

It wasn’t with billion-dollar ICBMs but with cheap Stanley knives that a handful of Muslims defeated the security of the world’s superpower to bloody its nose on 11 September, 2001.

Before putting their names to this demonstrable nonsense the two spivocrats ought to have glanced at how a more intelligent man than they are, R.G. Collingwood, explained why armed attacks from without or within carry the day:

“Such attacks never succeed unless the thing that is attacked is weakened by doubt as to whether the end which it sets before itself… is worth achieving. On the other hand, this doubt is quite capable of destroying a civilisation without any help whatever.”

In other words, what enables a civilisation to repel attacks is its metaphysical strength, not its physical bulk or the size of its coffers. A destitute 11-stone mugger hell-bent on getting a few quid for his daily fix will easily humble a 15-stone billionaire who has no spunk to defend himself.

The West today is that billionaire, soft of spirit and therefore of muscle, whose hedonistic pursuit of luxury has rendered him incapable of putting up a fight.

Why, our illustrious co-authors, or rather co-signers, have succeeded in neutering their wills and castrating their minds to such an extent that they are even incapable of identifying our enemies, much less resisting them.

Their article was ghost-written in response to the Paris massacre, and they don’t even know who the true culprits were, or rather they know but are too craven to tell.

They hide behind the smokescreen of nebulous neologisms like ‘Islamism’, suggesting time and again that Islam as such, a ‘religion of peace’, has nothing to do with violence.

Why, Dave is even agitating for Turkey’s joining the EU, at exactly the time when Atatürk’s secularising reforms are about to bite the dust. If his tireless efforts to destroy whatever is left of Europe succeed, another 75 million Muslims will gain the right of automatic settlement anywhere here.

Assuming that the widely bandied proportion of potential jihadists among all European Muslims indeed stands at ‘only’ 10 per cent, that’ll add another 7.5 million wild-eyed vampires craving our blood.

But then of course the jihadists-to-be will be seduced and pacified by our Macs and Nokias, if you believe Dave and his co-signer. They ought to remember that such devices can be used not only to pick up one’s e-mails or to log on a porn website but also to detonate a bomb by remote control.

It’s precisely the West’s preoccupation with material prosperity, at the expense of spiritual strength, that is making it impotent to respond properly to internal and external threats.

The co-signers don’t understand that, for otherwise they would have talked not about bolstering ‘global growth’, but about bolstering Christianity, the only proven source of spiritual and moral fortitude in the West.

However, they know that electorates care about their financial, not spiritual, resources. And in our sham democracies whatever electorates want they get, or rather get to hear. These are the rules of the game in which the co-signers are professional players, and ones who believe it’s the only game in town.

This doesn’t speak highly for their intellect or rectitude. But we keep electing such spivs to the highest offices, so what does it say about us? 

 

 

 

 

Islamic terrorism is the talk of the town right now, which is understandable in view of last week’s events.

Yet few realise or, to be more accurate, dare to say that large, and largely radicalised, Muslim populations don’t just produce armed terrorists who kill people. They also excrete cultural toxins that poison the air.

Of these toxins anti-Semitism is one of the deadliest, mainly because antidotes to it are historically weak in Europe.

It’s not the Muslims who pioneered hatred of the Jews. Europeans can legitimately claim priority rights, which claim they re-emphasised in such a convincing manner at the time when my parents were young.

However, the sheer horror of the Holocaust shocked Europeans and strengthened the efficacy of the antidote.

A passing remark that the Jews collude to control the whole world as they already control the banks was no longer seen as innocent banter. It was seen as a first step on the road to Auschwitz.

Hence such remarks got to be regarded as infra dig in polite society, and for the next 70 years Jews had a relatively quiet time in Europe. No one thought anti-Semitism had disappeared. Yet everyone felt relieved it was dormant.

Anti-Semitism was hibernating like a bear in winter. Just like that animal it could be awakened by a prod with a long stick. That came in the shape of the burgeoning Muslim populations.

Once their size reached a certain critical mass, they formed a formidable electoral bloc and began to exert a powerful political influence. In our sham democracies it doesn’t take long for political influence to become a mighty cultural force or even, if the influence is strong enough, a dominant one.

Politicians in search of easy votes began to cater to Muslim attitudes, and Muslim attitudes to Jews are largely informed by a line in the hadith (record of Mohammed’s words and deeds):

“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”

There are other lines in Muslim scriptural sources that take a kinder view of the Jews, but these days Muslims tend to heed this one above all others. No doubt the presence of a Jewish state in the mostly Islamic Middle East has something to do with it, but Muslims themselves could explain this phenomenon much better.

What interests me here is facts, and they are disturbing. Both physical and verbal attacks on European Jews have been growing exponentially for the last decade or so, while a revolting combination of political correctness and political expedience prevents our ‘leaders’ from stamping out the emetic nastiness.

London police report that between April and Christmas last year the number of anti-Semitic hate crimes doubled compared to the same period in 2013.

According to the latest poll, more than half of British Jews (58 per cent, to be exact) doubt they have any future in Britain and are seriously considering moving elsewhere.

One can say with certainty that they are unlikely to use continental Europe as a possible refuge. For, compared to their continental co-religionists, the Brits have it easy.

Within one month last summer eight synagogues were attacked in France, with one firebombed by a 400-strong mob. While last week four Jews were butchered in a Paris kosher supermarket, another such emporium was smashed and looted last year, to the accompaniment of a mob braying “Death to Jews”.

Jewish cemeteries and synagogues are being desecrated throughout Europe with various verbal messages and graphic images, of which swastikas and porcine heads seem to be favoured.

In Germany Molotov cocktails were last year tossed into a synagogue previously destroyed in the 1938 Kristallnacht, while imam Bilal Ismail asked Allah to destroy Jews “to the very last one”.

Anti-Israeli rallies throughout Germany were inductively expanding the object of their hatred from Israelis specifically to Jews as such. Their slogans also testified to finely honed poetic sensibilities, with this one my particular favourite: “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas.”

Catchy slogans tend to have an inspiring effect, and a wave of attacks on Jews, Jewish shops and restaurants, along with a brushfire spread of anti-Semitic graffiti, have been reported throughout Europe. 

In Rome, dozens of Jewish business owners came to work one morning to find their windows decorated with swastikas and graffiti saying “Jews, your end is near”.

In Amsterdam two Jewish women committed the egregious offence of displaying Israeli flags on their balconies. The punishment was swift: one was beaten up, the other was the victim of arson. In Belgium, a Jewish shopper was informed that her custom wasn’t welcome.  

In Spain a popular playwright explained that Jews have only themselves to blame because they are incapable of living peacefully with others: “No wonder they’ve been so frequently expelled.”

Maccabi Haifa footballers were assaulted in Austria, and their match with SC Paderborn had to be cancelled.

In France incidents of anti-Semitism have increased seven-fold in the 2000s compared with the 1990s. The government refuses to let Jews defend themselves with firearms, and it won’t defend them itself, for any such defence would have to start with the acknowledgement of the dominant Muslim component in the anti-Semitic attacks.

Jews, their ability to sense danger honed by the events of 70 years ago, are leaving in droves. By some reports, 100,000 of the 500,000 French Jews have fled the country, with many settling in Israel.

In a way they are fortunate in that they have somewhere to run. The rest of us aren’t so lucky, and many of us don’t even sense the danger, which is a shame.

Europe hasn’t seen anything like this since it was ruled by Nazi gauleiters, and, though ostensibly out to murder only isolated groups, mostly Jews, those chaps were in fact killing our whole civilisation.

The Nazis weren’t diabolical because they murdered Jews; they murdered Jews because they were diabolical. The other satanic regime, that of the Soviet Union, was also virulently anti-Semitic, and only Stalin’s death prevented Soviet Jews from suffering the red answer to the brown Holocaust.

Anti-Semitism is a disease, but it’s also a symptom of a much deeper underlying malaise. None of us is immune to it, and only all of us together can inoculate our societies.

Decadence isn’t just sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll and homomarriage. It’s also anti-Semitism, and it doesn’t just threaten Jews. It threatens the whole society. Us all.