Author: Alexander Boot

Kazakh dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev knows how to use the right man for a challenging job, thereby teaching a lesson to us all.

When you need a heart operation, go to an experienced cardiac surgeon. When you need investment advice, seek out a proven financial consultant. When you need a new transmission for your car, use a reputable garage.

And if you want someone to put a positive spin on mass murder, nobody’s CV inspires greater confidence than Tony Blair’s.

One has to be especially impressed with the boldfaced impudence Tony displayed recently when denying any responsibility for the blood-soaked chaos resulting from the criminal invasion of Iraq he and Dubya launched in 2003.

Now it turns out he was merely building on past accomplishments. For Tony’s consultancy has made millions advising Nazarbayev how to be loved by the West.

That task was made daunting on 16 December, 2011, when Nazarbayev’s police opened fire on an unarmed demonstration in the oil town of Zhanaozen, killing 15 and wounding almost 100.

This sort of thing may make anyone look bad, even a man sitting on that great exonerator, a huge wealth pumped out of oil wells.

Keep that stuff coming, and the West can close its eyes to any human rights violations, any bogus elections (Nazarbayev consistently polls over 90%), any secret funding of terrorist groups.

But start shooting peaceful demonstrators like rabbits, and some Westerners may find it hard to suppress a wince. Nazarbayev knew this, which is why he turned to his friend Tony for help.

Tony delivered. In a freshly leaked letter he advised the Kazakh dictator on how to turn a negative into a positive, a classic PR trick:

“I think it best to meet head on the Zhanaozen issue. The fact is you have made changes following it; but in any event these events, tragic though they were, should not obscure the enormous progress that Kazakhstan has made.

“[This] is the best way [to present the bloodbath] for the western media. It will also serve as a quote that can be used in the future setting out the basic case for Kazakhstan.”

In conclusion Tony laid on some well-practised PR warmth: “I look forward to seeing you in London! Yours ever, Tony Blair.”

The style of the missive is questionable, but it’s the heartfelt emotion that counts. This can only be repaid by signing on the dotted line underneath all those zeros.

So what kind of ‘enormous progress’ would offset mass murder? It must really be impressive, for many prominent Westerners have been avidly kissing various parts of Nazarbayev’s anatomy for decades.

Jonathan Aitken, whose commitment to truth was rewarded with a prison term, has upon his release written a hagiographic biography of Nazarbayev. Prince Andrew pays regular visits to Nazarbayev’s capital built to Pyongyang specifications. Western businessmen, politicians and lawyers form a beeline for Nazarbayev’s palace.

They all have a stake in Kazakhstan’s progress, which no doubt hones their objectivity to razor sharpness. Since Nazarbayev hasn’t offered me even a lousy couple of mil, I can admit openly that his accomplishments leave me cold.

Having ruled from 1989, Nazarbayev is one of only two leaders of Soviet republics whose hold on power has survived since the good old times.

He’s also part of the glorious trio, Putin and Lukashenko being the other two, named Man of the Year in 2012. They received this accolade for laying the blueprint for the Soviet Union Mark II.

Called the Eurasian Economic Community, it’s modelled on the Zollverein, a customs union that eventually unified sovereign German principalities into a single country under Prussia’s leadership.

Those principalities that didn’t see the immediate benefits, such as Schleswig-Holstein, had to be educated using such teaching aids as artillery barrages and cavalry charges – a process being exactly paralleled in the Ukraine by Nazarbayev’s co-recipient Putin.   

Aitken called his panegyric Nazarbayev and the Making of Kazakhstan, but a more appropriate title would have been simply The Making of Nazarbayev.

For, in common with most other sultans, Nursultan has parlayed the country’s natural resources into a vast personal wealth, possibly second only to Putin’s.

Much of the lucre is kept in Western offshore banks – and it’s also kept in the family. The family is rather large, especially since Nursultan takes advantage of his recently acquired religion by having three wives, a fact hushed up by the truth lover Aitken but widely known to everyone in Kazakhstan.

His three official daughters have brought ambitious husbands into the family, one of whom runs Kazakhstan’s border guards. In that capacity he collects a $1,000 levy on every Chinese lorry carrying goods to Putin’s Russia. Considering that there are close to 10,000 of those every month, these transactions drip a nice drop into the family’s Swiss bucket.

But a drop it is, for most of the family’s wealth is pumped out of the ground, a shared experience that doubtless brings Nazarbayev even closer to the Russian godfather of all godfathers.

Not much of this wealth drips down to the chaps who dirty their hands getting oil out of the ground. Hence the demonstration whose negative consequences Tony Blair was hired to turn into a positive.

By using Tony, Nursultan showed he knows how to learn from the best, a commendable quality he has put to good use when learning from Putin how to deal with the press.

Yesterday yet another journalist criticising Putin was beaten within an inch of his life in Petersburg, and both Vlad and Narsultan have relied on this method of handling press relations for years.

But not exclusively – also figuring prominently are such techniques as assassinating reporters (“whacking in the shithouse” in Putin’s jargon; I don’t know what it is in Kazakh), shutting down opposition newspapers and smashing their presses, turning all broadcast media into propaganda mouthpieces, blocking dissident websites, criminalising ‘libel’ defined as criticising the leader.

The progress made under Nursultan’s leadership, something Aitken extols and Tony spins, has earned Kazakhstan recognition by international monitors. Transparency International’s league table of corruption puts it at No 105, next to Senegal; while Reporters Without Borders is less generous: Kazakhstan is a lowly No 162 on its Press Freedom Index. 

There is nothing new under the sun, says Ecclesiastes. Back in the days of Lenin and Stalin, Western ‘useful idiots’ also tried to hush up massacres or, when they couldn’t, suggest they be weighed against the ‘enormous progress’ made by the Soviet Union.

The scale of the massacres was greater then, and the progress even less noticeable. This explains the much lower standards of today’s apologists: they don’t have to apologise for quite as much.

Back then their ranks drew people like G.B. Shaw, H.G. Wells and the Webbs, moral and intellectual pygmies but at least not devoid of literary ability.

Today we have Tony Blair who, in addition to the fine qualities he shares with that lot, can’t even put a decent sentence together. Horses for courses, I dare say.

 

This was the title of a 1961 Soviet song thundering ad nauseam from radio and TV sets for years.

Repetition being the mother of learning, most Soviets knew the song by heart. (I haven’t heard it in 45 years but, to my shame, could still hum every hack line by Yevtushenko.)

According to that piece of musical propaganda the Russians had suffered such misery in the Second World War that it was silly even to pose the question in the title.

“Ask the soldiers lying underneath the birches, and their sons will tell you whether the Russians want war,” was how Yevtushenko put it.

True enough, the hypothetical sons might well have answered the question in the negative, had they been asked. But they weren’t, and still aren’t.

The relevant question is “Do the Russian rulers want war?” These chaps, royal, communist or KGB, don’t seek their subjects’ consent.

They either force them, as they did in 1941, when the Red Army wouldn’t fight for the Kremlin butcher, or brainwash them, as they’re doing now, with about 110 per cent of the population screaming “Heil Putin!” (in Russian).

Either process produces the desired effect. When forced, the Russians die reluctantly; when brainwashed, they die eagerly. The common element is that they do die on cue, and that’s all that matters to their masters.

Since 1961 the Russians have brought the world to the brink of nuclear disaster over Cuban missiles, fought a bloody 10-year war in Afghanistan, two equally bloody wars in Chechnya, a war with Georgia.

Millions dead, crippled, orphaned and widowed – pretty good going for a nation that doesn’t want war. One can only wonder what sort of mayhem it would wreak if it did spoil for a fight.

Yevtushenko’s question is now on the lips of everyone watching the events in the Ukraine.

No one knows for sure. All we can do is read the signs and try to interpret them as best we can.

Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine clearly pursues objectives that go beyond ensuring the autonomy of the country’s eastern provinces.

The evident geopolitical objective is rebuilding the Soviet Union to its former glory, which is Putin’s cherished and manifest aim.

This may or may not involve a subsequent invasion of the Baltic republics that are now Nato members. If they do come under attack, Nato will face the Hobson’s choice of either surrendering or fighting.

The first option isn’t worth talking about: its only possible outcome will be KGB domination of Europe. But the second option is worth contemplating.

Looking at the vectors of Europe’s and Russia’s military programmes, one can’t help noticing that they are diverging. To put it crudely, Russia is arming while Europe is disarming.

Between 20,000 and 30,000 crack troops are massed at the border with the Ukraine, and the Russian artillery is already in action, shelling Ukrainian positions from both outside and inside the country’s territory. Is this but a prelude?

The overall strength of the Russian army is about a million, a quarter of them reservists.

Between now and October it’s conducting full-scale exercises, critically involving thousands of reservists. Early reports suggest that the trainees have been issued winter gear, something not needed in August-September.

Many activities involve airborne troops, whose strength is being beefed up to 60,000, roughly five divisions. By contrast, the US army has only one fully trained airborne division, 82^nd. (Some others bearing the same nomenclature don’t do any jump training.)

Airborne troops are by definition offensive: they are too lightly equipped to be much use in defence. Tanks are another clearly offensive weapon, and here the comparison between Russia and Europe is most instructive.

The three biggest European armies, French, German and British, have, respectively, 423, 408 and 407 tanks.

By contrast, Russia officially boasts a 15,500-strong tank force in active service. But that number is misleading.

Unlike Nato, the Russians don’t destroy tanks of the previous generations. They mothball them in warehouses.

Should the need arise, those obsolete but perfectly usable tanks can be taken out and thrown in. That’s what happened in the Second World War, when the Germans wiped out the Soviet tank forces in the first few days.

Much to their astonishments, new Soviet tank divisions appeared out of thin air, and the German intelligence couldn’t figure out their provenance.

How many of those mothballed tanks are there now? In 1970-80s the Russians had 50,000 tanks, a number that would have done any bellicose nation proud, never mind one that doesn’t “want war”.

Nato at the time had just over 6,000 tanks deployed un Europe, clearly not enough to stop a potential Soviet thrust by conventional means. Nato’s strategy was based on a tactical nuclear counter-strike, something deadly to massed tank formations.

However, at that time the Soviets had a nuclear superiority over Nato. Eugene Rostow, Kennedy’s and Reagan’s policy guru acknowledged mournfully that:

“In 1985, the Soviet Union had a lead of more than 3.5 to one in the number of warheads on ICBMs and a lead of more than four to one in the throw weight of these weapons. Its sea-based and airborne nuclear forces have made comparable if slightly less spectacular gains. In addition, it had a near monopoly of advanced intermediate-range ground-based weapons threatening targets in Europe, Japan, China, and the Middle East.”

Assuming that Nato is able to verify Russia’s compliance with various disarmament treaties (an unsafe assumption in view of the country’s gross violations of the SALT accords), that lamentable situation has changed for conditions of approximate parity.

However, even discounting the thousands of mothballed tanks, Russia’s superiority in tank forces has greatly increased.

Hence people living under the aegis of the demob-happy European governments must ask themselves this question: Should a Russian blitzkrieg come, would Nato be prepared to stop it with tactical nukes? Unlikely, would be my guess.

That’s why Nato generals are screaming themselves hoarse about the dire necessity of increasing our military strength. Their pleas fall on deaf ears: Western governments would rather spend money on cultivating our underclass and fattening up foreign tyrants’ bank accounts.

All this no doubt explains the West’s meek response to Putin’s rape of the Ukraine. Rather than presenting a united front bristling with weapons, our sweaty spivs are praying that Putin will be happy with what he’s got already. Nothing further bears thinking about.

But never mind the comparative statistics of tanks, warplanes or armies. By far the most vital weapon in any arsenal is the resolve to fight if necessary – and in this category Europe is even more disarmed than in any other.    

 

 

 

 

 

Germany’s economy contracting. France’s stagnating. Italy’s going into a triple dip, just like that Engländer Dave on his third seaside holiday.

As to the other 15 countries in the eurozone, their economies are a sheer Alptraum, or nightmare, as those sneering Anglo-Saxons call it.

They are so-o-o-o superior in their Schadenfreude, what with even the British economy growing fast, never mind those across the Ozean.

Free trade, liberated labour markets, less red tape, lower taxation, my arsch! We allow those perversions in Europe, thinks Angie, and there goes the dream of a Fourth Reich, right down the Rohren. The Anglo-Saxons can take their much vaunted economic model and shove it where die Sonne doesn’t shine.

What’s a frau to do? Leben is bloody schwer, says Angie, though revolving in her mind is the saying first made popular exactly 100 years ago: Gott strafe England!

Life’s indeed hard. Angela has to look after 18 countries using the Deutschmark, or the euro, as it’s colloquially called.

If they all did exactly as they are told, alles would be in Ordnung. But they all insist on keeping their national parliaments and, what’s worse, occasionally listening to them.

And those bodies constantly sneak in measures that they seem to think are good for their own countries, not infuriatingly Angela’s. You try to manage the Deutschmark, (fine, the euro if you insist) under such circumstances. Ingrates, the whole bunch of them. After all that Deutschland has done to them… no, she means for them.

And guess whom all those Nobel economists are blaming for the mess? Her, Angie.

She shouldn’t have bunged austerity down the throats of all those profligate nations, they say. She should have avoided contraction, preempted the possibility of deflation, injected more stimulus into their economies.

Angie translates to make sure she understands, looks the phrase up in the dictionary. Right, just as she thought. That means Germany should have given those untermenschen even more money, on top of the billions she has already squandered on them.

But money doesn’t grow on Baumen. It rolls off printing presses and, when they go into high gear, hyperinflation ensues.

Angie is a German and, though she wasn’t alive at the time, the Weimar hyperinflation has scarred her brain as well.

She turns on her Siemens DVD player and watches, for the umpteenth time, women who look like her but thinner wheeling Schubkarren heaped with banknotes barely sufficient to buy a loaf of Brot. Bloody Alptraum!

No German führer, or Chancellor as that position is colloquially called, will allow a repeat performance. Those untermenschen can starve, for all Angie cares. She’ll take 25 per cent unemployment over 25 per cent inflation any bloody Tag. Or 50 per cent youth unemployment over 50 per cent inflation. Or 100 per cent… well, you get the picture.

Yes, scream those overpaid Nobel laureates. But have you considered the social aftermath? Whole generations of young people taken out of economic life, with all the knock-on effect that’s going to have for decades to come? Japan’s ‘lost decade’ will look like a walk im die Park by comparison.

Shows how little those Dummkopfen understand. A country where half the young people are unemployed is a defeated country, nicht wahr? And, as recent history shows, a defeated country becomes a German protectorate, a gau ruled by a gauleiter appointed by the Reich, or the EU as it’s colloquially called.

Once they are all brought into the fold and their bloody-minded parliaments disbanded, then Angie will be able to bring Ordnung to their economies. Until then all those self-righteous economists can go suck an Ei.

As to the Anglo-Saxons, she’ll follow their example when pigs will fly. And Schweinen, as she has told Dave so many times, don’t fly.

And guess what? The same windbag economists insist that half those countries using the Deutschmark, or the euro as it’s colloquially called, would be better off reverting to their national currencies.

Ja, ja, ja, so who gives a Scheiße? They may be better off, but Germany wouldn’t be, and that’s all that matters to Angie. Deutschland über alles, as her parents used to say.

 

P.S. My new, serious, book Democracy as a Neocon Trick is coming out this autumn. You can pre-order from the publisher on roperpenberthy.co.uk.

I’m opposed to prenatal abortion, but Richard Dawkins provides a strong argument in favour of the postnatal variety.

Wouldn’t it be nice, I catch myself fantasising, if some 50 years ago, when he first started to spout his malignant drivel, his parents had decided belatedly that their attempt at childbirth had failed miserably.

They could have agreed that obviously their 23-year-old progeny was deeply flawed, but not to worry. With qualified medical help they could nip that little genetic error in the bud. A simple procedure, and both they and the world would be spared further misery.

Then I pinch myself and realise I am daydreaming again. The law is unequivocal on the distinction between prenatal and postnatal abortion.

That the latter is regarded as murder strikes one as just, even taking Dawkins into account.

However, the former is incomprehensibly seen as a legitimate way of correcting God’s (or nature’s, if you’d rather) mistakes or, for that matter, undoing rubber manufacturers’ shoddy work.

A condom bursts, a woman gets pregnant when she has other plans – no problem, at least none that can’t be solved with a scalpel or, push come to shove, coat hanger.

Alternatively, a woman may not mind having a baby, but only one without defects. Thanks to the technological advances of which modernity is so justly proud, she can find out in advance whether or not the baby she’s carrying is up to scratch.

Anything falling short of her exacting expectations can then be cut out faster than you can say “a woman has a right to dispose of her body as she sees fit”.

Of course saying that sort of thing invalidates 2,000 years of our civilisation, branding the enunciator of such views as a savage. But nobody minds that.

Richard Dawkins certainly doesn’t. That’s why he mouthed yet another barbarian idea, one among so many that we should get accustomed to it by now.

Foetuses with Down’s syndrome should be aborted, says my friend Richard. The unhappy parents should shrug their shoulders, abort, then “try again”.

This method of treating the condition is, according to Richard, “very civilised. These are foetuses, diagnosed before they have human feelings.”

Exactly the same thing can be said about Richard, though I hope you realise it was only in jest that I used this observation as a justification for postnatal abortion.

But Richard isn’t joking. He insists that “the question is not ‘is it human?’ but ‘can it suffer?’”

A brighter man than Richard, regardless of his feelings on the matter, would easily spot a flaw in this argument.

‘Can it suffer?’ is a rhetorical question. People always suffer, as I do when, say, reading Richard’s effluvia. Suffering is an essential part of the human condition, certainly more so than ‘happiness’, the pursuit of which is sanctified by American founding documents.

We all know many people, manifestly not afflicted with Down’s syndrome, who lead a life of pure anguish. Some, like the fully developed comedian Robin Williams, kill themselves.

Conversely, I know two men suffering from that condition who don’t strike me as particularly unhappy. I met one of them a few years ago, at a village wedding in Italy. The whole village looked after him, and he gave every impression of a chap enjoying life.

There he was, nattily dressed in blazer and flannel trousers, beaming ear to ear as he kissed the blushing bride. All the guests would shake his hand and talk to him, exchanging laughter and pats on the shoulder. No one seemed to think he ought to have been scraped out of his mother’s womb bit by bit.

The other man is looked after by the friars in our local Burgundian village. He’s their altar boy, ably assisting at Mass every Sunday and telling “La paix du Christ” to the parishioners. I’d say he has made more of his life than Dawkins but, my opinion aside, he certainly doesn’t look as if he’s in the throes of horrible suffering.

I’m not presuming to offer my limited experience as corroborative proof, and I haven’t polled a representative sample of Down’s syndrome sufferers. Neither, I’m sure, has Richard.

Yet his view is even more subjective than mine. Richard himself wouldn’t be happy if he had Down’s syndrome – therefore all those who do must be suffering. But then solipsism is modernity’s chosen religion, and Dawkins is its prophet.

Conversely the question that Richard dismisses out of hand, “Is it human?”, is the only one worth asking, for any argument about abortion, pro or con, has to hinge on the answer.

If we accept that life begins at conception, then abortion is, not to cut too fine a point, homicide. As such, it’s definitely immoral and should be illegal.

If, on the other hand, we see a foetus as only a part of the woman’s body, then abortion is an innocent surgical procedure, like, say, appendectomy.

Anyone, Christian or atheist, who possesses the faculty of sequential thought, should see that the first idea is infinitely more sound than the second on a purely rational level.

For conception is the only moment to which the beginning of human life can be pinpointed with any confidence.

What other point is there? Three months (generally accepted as the cutoff point for abortion)? What about three months minus one day? Or two days? Or ten? Can you be sure that human life began precisely on that last day (two, 10, 29 days) of the first trimester?

Obviously, no logical person can answer this question affirmatively. Then he’ll have to admit it’s possible that a foetus is a human being at 2.5 months, or three weeks. Consequently there’s a risk that aborting any foetus constitutes the arbitrary taking of a human life – something generally frowned upon in our civilisation.

As to deciding which human being deserves to live and which doesn’t, this thought process was widely practised and discredited by regimes I doubt even Richard would like to imitate.

He’s living proof of my oft-expressed belief that atheism leads people into intellectual blind alleys. The intelligent atheists among my friends know this and avoid the impasses by steering clear of touchy subjects.

Richard lacks such wisdom, which is why he ploughs in with nary a thought on how strident and idiotic he sounds.

If I were inclined towards atheism, Richard would turn me off it for life. Those who doubt their faith should thank him for making a powerful, if unwitting, argument in its favour.

Who’d want atheism if it makes one talk such gibberish?

 

I thought I’d never find a good thing to say about Dave, but I was wrong.

Snapshots from his third holiday this year clearly show that Dave doesn’t wear socks with sandals, which betokens an impeccable sense of style.

So there, I’ve said something nice about Dave. And I’m not finished yet.

You see, Dave can make vital policy decisions even while chillaxing, which is how he describes taking a break.

The other day he appointed an openly and proudly homosexual minister, Nick Bole, to spearhead Britain’s family policy.

This shows that, in addition to possessing refined taste, Dave is a man of consistency. After all, his whole family policy up to now has revolved around the axis of homosexual marriage.

So it stands to reason that the chap now in charge of it lives in a civil partnership with another man. Who can better understand the nuances of the only kind of family Dave holds sacred?

When you want a man to shape HMG’s stand on law, you appoint a lawyer. When you want someone to formulate health policy, you appoint a doctor. If you need an expert to work out a military strategy, you appoint a gener…

No, scratch that. As Georges Clemenceau once said, war is too important a matter to be left to the generals. It should be left to politicians instead. Like Dave.

A year ago Dave made a wholehearted effort to commit the British army to the cause of the inchoate Islamic state in Syria. Had Parliament not proved obstreperous, the IS would now be happily beheading people all over the Middle East, not merely in northern Iraq.

Yet the situation is pretty dire as it is, if one listens to General Sir Michael Rose, as one should.

In 2006 Sir Michael called for the impeachment of Tony Blair for having dragged Britain into the criminal invasion of Iraq on false pretences – an invasion that Sir Michael had opposed.

Now he correctly states that the rise of the IS is so catastrophic that we no longer have the option of staying on the sidelines. Just as correctly he fears that yet again we’ll go in without a clearly defined strategic objective or, which is worse, with a stupid one.

The Islamic State must be stopped in its tracks and wiped out – Gen. Rose is right about that. He’s also right in saying that a military victory won’t solve the ultimate problem any more than the destruction of the Iraqi army solved it in 2003.

We must have a clear idea of what comes next, and here I’m afraid the general goes wrong. He thinks the Iraqi people deserve the right to decide their future for themselves.

But the Iraqis had a fair go at it already, as did the Muslims in Egypt and Libya. They all had their democratic elections. That’s the ultimate exercise in political virtue, if you listen to the neocons, which you shouldn’t.

For we know what happened next. All three countries sank into a blood-drenched chaos – which anyone with a modicum of political nous and an IQ close to three digits could have predicted with absolute certainty.

Sir Michael, Dave, Tony, Ed, Barack Hussein and whoever else is willing to listen: democracy doesn’t and never will work in the Islamic world.

Did you get that? Allow me to repeat for the slow of mind or hard of hearing: DEMOCRACY. DOESN’T. AND NEVER WILL. WORK. IN. THE ISLAMIC WORLD. Did you get that?

What works in the Middle East, at least to our satisfaction, is a corrupt and further corruptible dictatorship. The kind that rules with an iron hand and a more or less secular mind.

Shah Reza Pahlavi springs to mind. Also Mubarak. Assad. Gaddafi. And, specifically in Iraq, Saddam. You know, the type of rulers we’ve done our utmost to unseat and replace with the kind of savages who eat human organs and behead Western journalists on camera.

All those men were (Assad still is) variously bloodthirsty tyrants. However, none of them was a direct threat to our interests, which is all that should matter.

Hence our strategy in Iraq shouldn’t be aimed at ‘letting the people decide’. Been there, done that. Five gets you ten they’ll decide wrong.

Instead, having wiped out the IS, as we must, we should find a chap who typologically fits into the mould of the tyrants I’ve mentioned above.

We should put him in power and prop him up for as long as it takes for him to tighten his grip on the country. A right kind of bastard won’t take very long.

Then we should grease his palm with large sums paid into his favourite Swiss or Channel Islands charity – and keep it greased for as long as he remains the right kind of bastard.

In other words, we must admit that our policy in the Middle East over the last decade has been criminally stupid and, which is worse, a failure. Having uttered a suitable number of mea culpas, we should then correct our mistakes by doing what’s right.

Having said so many good things about Dave, one thing I can’t say is that he’s the kind of statesman who can do what’s right. What he can do is more of the same.

Appoint a proud homosexual to run our family policy, already compromised by his fanatical commitment to homomarriage. Waste billions on foreign aid. Play lickspittle to the EU. Let millions of potential or actual criminals into the country. Continue to support an education that doesn’t educate and healthcare that doesn’t care.

And spill the blood of our soldiers in yet another asinine adventure aimed at ‘letting people decide’ in the Middle East.

Still, to end on a positive note, there’s one more good thing one can say for Dave. Incredible as it may sound, the other lot are probably even worse.

 

P.S. My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, is coming out this autumn. You can pre-order from the publisher on roperpenberthy.co.uk.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One wonders about Pope Francis.

His Holiness has just ruled that Salvadoran Bishop Óscar Romero may be beatified – an elevation that the two previous Popes banned outright.

Both John Paul II and Benedict XVI didn’t quite see how saintliness could be reconciled with Bishop Romero’s Marxist rants, albeit packaged as they were with mock-Christian cant.

The Salvadoran was a leading proponent of ‘liberation theology’, the deadliest Christian heresy in modern times.

It was deadly not to Christianity, which people like Romero wilfully perverted but were unable to destroy, but to the thousands of people duped by them into violent action.

The essence of liberation theology is an attempt to latch Christianity on to Marxism, thereby reconciling the West’s founding creed with a materialist philosophy largely based on hatred of religion in general and Christianity in particular.

In his earthly life, Jesus, according to these false prophets, was a Galilean revolutionary killed for trying to liberate a Roman colony from its oppressors.

Since imitation of Christ is the ultimate purpose of a Christian life, it follows that a true Christian must fight oppressors, as defined by liberation theologians.

Those chaps didn’t strive for originality: their definition of oppression was lifted chapter and verse from Marx’s theory of class struggle.

Never mind that every attempt to apply this cannibalistic theory in practice has led to massacres never before seen, or indeed imagined, in human history.

No wonder. Marxists divide the world into two antagonistic classes, the poor and the rich (the exact terminology may vary, but the essence never does). The rich oppress the poor, and the only way for the latter to get a fair shake is to rise up against the rich and dispossess them.

Should the rich resist, they must be killed. Since this category can never be defined tightly, this is tantamount to a carte blanche for ‘the poor’, or rather the pseudo-intellectuals acting in their name, to feel not only free but indeed morally justified in murdering anyone they dislike.

Their homicidal antipathy is directed not just at some individuals known to ‘the poor’ personally, but against whole classes that can be reliably expected to produce enemies of ‘the poor’.

Hence democide, murder by category, is an ever-present feature of every revolution inspired by Marxist animadversions. The number of victims depends only on the size of the population and the length of time the liberators are at work, not on any moral constraints.

Thus the Russian and Chinese liberators of the poor murdered roughly 60 million apiece, most of them actually poor, but then theirs were large countries. China was more populous, but she devoted fewer decades to democide than Russia did, hence the lower proportion.

Cambodian Khmer Rouge, by contrast, managed to murder only 1.7 million, a risibly low number by Marxist standards. But we must remember that it represented over 20 per cent of the population, and the liberators were busy for four years only.

Once again, I’m talking here not about a perversion of Marx’s theory of class struggle but its logical development. Interpreting history as a raging war between two hostile classes presupposes the elimination of the vanquished class by the victor.

One would think that marrying this sort of thing with Christianity would be hard. But liberation theologians found a way.

Christ taught that the rich and the poor are equal before God, didn’t he? Well, that means they ought to be equal in every respect – all equally rich or, that being a manifest impossibility, all equally poor.

Since the rich have created all sorts of hierarchical institutions perpetuating their wealth and privilege, such institutions must be destroyed, starting with the ‘bourgeois’ state.

Biblical justification? No problem. Just look at the Exodus – wasn’t it national liberation from the yoke of slavery? Of course it was.

Unfortunately, there was that nagging add-on of the land God supposedly promised to the Jews, whereas everyone knows it was actually promised to Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda or whatever their predecessors were called in the ‘60s, when liberation theology first spoke out of its burning bush.

But hey, who says God’s truth was all revealed at once? Didn’t Newman talk about the development of Christian doctrine? And doesn’t development suggest gradual revelation?

Hence God first revealed the notion of liberation and then, over time, embellished it by explaining that those originally liberated were actually oppressors in the making. No contradiction there at all.

Compared to this sleight of hand, extrapolating to any national or economic liberation ‘the poor’ may fancy is child’s play, and liberation theologians aren’t children, at least not chronologically.

My problem with this vile nonsense isn’t just that it’s demonstrably heretical but that it’s unspeakably vulgar.

Christ himself, and the religion he founded, never had any quarrel with worldly powers – provided they didn’t encroach on the realm of God.

That’s the meaning of Jesus’s adages “My kingdom is not of this world” and “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.”

It’s also the meaning of St Paul’s statement: “Let everyone put himself under the authority of the higher powers, because there is no power which is not of God, and all powers are ordered by God.”

This was said by a man who knew that the Romans would kill him for his faith. Just like Jesus, however, St Paul was prepared to die resisting worldly usurpation of the kingdom of God. But as long as the powers that be restricted themselves to ruling the kingdom of man, St Paul simply ignored them, just as Jesus had taught.

Christianity’s position on material poverty was unequivocally formulated by Jesus himself: “For ye have the poor with you always”. Since that statement was first made, the Church, and orthodox Christianity in general, has understood its role as relieving spiritual poverty only.

It’s not the Church’s remit to offer economic solutions to material poverty – and it’s emphatically not its business to agitate for armed struggle against every institution seen as an agent of oppression or material inequality.

That Latin American ‘liberation theologians’ ostensibly preached nonviolence is a moot point. History shows there’s no such thing as a nonviolent revolution, even if the original preachers make noises to that effect.

Once a theory legitimising hatred is hatched, especially if it’s couched in religious jargon, violence will always follow.

All those Gutiérrezes and Romeros should have learned their lesson from Ghandi: first the nonviolent prophets spout their sermons, then their violent followers take over. Such is the way of this world.

When Cardinal Ratzinger headed the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he fought liberation theology tooth and nail, correctly accusing it of anti-Christian Marxist messianism.

When he became Benedict XVI he vetoed the beatification of Bishop Romero, whose sermons directly provoked a murderous civil war in San Salvador. That Romero himself was its victim didn’t redeem his wickedness any more than, say, Trotsky’s assassination redeemed all the evil he’d done.

This is the veto that Pope Francis has seen fit to repeal. Out of respect for his office, I’ll only call this decision ill-advised.

How does one protest against violence in a faraway land? Why, by looting shops at home of course.

It’s not only the best way but in fact the only way to express one’s political philosophy or register disagreement. We all know that.

That’s why the other day Londoners and Brummies, feeling that the British government isn’t doing enough to stop the massacre of Christians in Iraq, armed themselves with clubs, bricks and torches.

They then went on a rampage, looting every grocery shop that sells Halal food, which basically means every grocery shop in some areas.

That done, the crowd proceeded to loot supermarkets selling Halal meat, which again means all of them. Most, however, do so surreptitiously, without tagging their meat as religiously pure.

That made it even worse. Indignant crowds felt justified in thinking that supermarket chains used the subterfuge to express their support for anti-Christian massacres in a most perfidious manner.

Attacking a few supermarkets thus made a morally valid political statement. It also sent a clear message: if you sell Halal food, you are directly complicit in the beheading of Christians. You’ll therefore be violently punished.

The supermarkets got the message and removed offensive items from their shelves. Job done.

Their adrenalin flow receding, the looters then went home proud of their accomplishment. Though they hadn’t saved any Iraqi Christians, at least they had mollified their aching collective conscience, thus adding a whole new meaning to retail therapy.

Sounds insane, doesn’t? Not only did nothing of the sort happen, but it takes a particularly morbid imagination to think up such a scenario, wouldn’t you say?

Yet replace Halal with Kosher, and what has actually happened in Birmingham and London isn’t a far cry from the product of my admittedly morbid imagination.

Anti-Semitic mobs – sorry, we’re supposed to call them anti-Israel protesters – wreaked havoc at a Tesco supermarket in Birmingham and laid siege to a Sainsbury’s in London’s Holborn (not, incidentally, a manifestly Muslim area).

Threatened with a Kristallnacht-style pogrom, the management wisely removed Kosher foods from display, handing the mob an easy victory.

That the mob was animated by hatred of Jews in general, rather than by any disagreement with the foreign policy of Israel’s Likud government can’t be gainsaid.

Even assuming for the sake of argument that any attempt by Israel to defend itself is immoral, no one in his right mind would argue that the sins of that Middle Eastern state are visited on Jews all over the world.

By the same token, Middle Eastern Muslims’ atrocities against Christians don’t make every Muslim in Birmingham or London guilty by association.

However, if one were radical enough to make such a claim, it would be more justified than holding all Jews responsible for Israel’s bombing those underprivileged terrorists in Gaza.

Israel doesn’t bomb Gaza for ideological or religious reasons. Those poor Palestinians are killed not because they are Muslims but because they either are terrorists themselves or are used as human shields to protect terrorists.

Hence the bombings aren’t an ideology at work. They are the desperate acts of a nation fighting against extinction.

However, those IS Muslims in Iraq are beheading Christians for no wrongdoing other than being Christian or, to be more exact, not being Muslim. Hence lashing out against all Muslims anywhere would have some conceivable, if no less deplorable, justification.

Yet there are no pickets outside Muslim shops in England, much less any attempt to punish the purveyors of Halal food. No one is painting offensive institutional symbols on the shop fronts in Brick Lane and Northend Road.

While welcoming such civilised behaviour on the part of English Christians, pious or nominal, one can decry the brutality of English Muslims so much more vehemently.

It’s clear that, just as their co-religionists in Iraq are driven solely by hatred of Christians and other non-Muslims, the rioters in Birmingham and London are motivated by hatred of Jews – not by a burning desire to express their disagreement with Israel’s foreign policy.

Anti-Semitic loathing is the reason; Israel in Gaza but a pretext. It’s something that, in the rioters’ eyes, goes a long way towards legitimising the resentment bubbling just under the surface and seeking an outlet.

Unless decisive action is taken, before long every Jewish or Jewish-owned shop in England will be attacked and looted. Shards of glass on the pavements will glisten as brightly as they did in 1938 Germany, and violence will be as brutal as it was then.

At least the authorities in St Louis, Missouri, had the courage to respond to similar, if differently motivated, events by declaring a curfew and calling in the National Guard.

There too the urgent need to seek and destroy splashed out because the police provided a convenient excuse. There too it’s really sociopathic, anomic brutality that’s the reason in search of a pretext.

So what will be our equivalent to the summoning of the National Guard? I can’t even imagine.

My crystal ball would be considerably clearer if events unfolded to the hypothetical scenario I outlined at the beginning. If crowds of outraged Christians attacked Halal shops, it would be easy to picture the government’s response.

Every paper in the land, right, left or centre, would be spewing righteous indignation at such racist beastliness. Armed police units would be put on the streets with instructions to do whatever is necessary to stop the riots and punish the rioters.

The looting of Halal butchers would be taken not just as an attack on a religious minority but as a gross affront against every progressive ideal everyone is supposed to hold sacred. The CPO would be instructed by the government to pass prison sentences without mercy or delay.

Far be it from me to suggest that the absence of such a response to the anti-Jewish riots betokens a latent anti-Semitic animus on HMG’s part. I’m sure there must be another reason. I just can’t think offhand what it might be.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

According to George Galloway, Hamas and Hezbollah aren’t, nor have ever been, terrorist organisations. However, Israel is.

On the strength of this eccentric taxonomy he proposes turning the Yorkshire city he represents in Parliament into an ‘Israel-free zone’.

Speaking ostensibly to Respect activists (an appropriate name for his party, wouldn’t you say?), but in effect urbi et orbi, he clarified his meaning:

“We don’t want any Israeli goods or services. We don’t want any Israeli academics coming to the university or the college.

“We don’t even want any Israeli tourists to come to Bradford, even if any of them had thought of doing so. We reject this illegal, barbarous, savage state that calls itself Israel. And you have to do the same.”

Since Israeli visitors look like Jews from anywhere else, the only way to keep Israelis out is to bar Jews in general.

I don’t know if George has studied German history or language, but there places successfully purged of Jews in compliance with the Nuremberg Laws were in times olden called Judenfrei (‘free of Jews’) or Judenrein (‘clean of Jews’).

George didn’t specify how far he’d be prepared to pursue this obvious parallel, but he’ll be happy to know that the German manufacturer of Zyklon B is still in business, if nowadays restricting itself to a more benign product line.

Considering that 24.7 per cent of Bradford’s population are Muslims (and that’s just those we know about), George’s seeds fall on a fertile ground.

But most Brits aren’t far from his general assessment of Israel’s moral character. For example, 62 per cent believe that the current Israeli government is guilty of war crimes.

Yet my friend George stands out even against this background. While agitating to ban dual British-Israeli nationality, he himself holds two passports. One is British, the other Palestinian, which he gratefully received from Hamas in 2009.

Now, one can understand how commitment to Hamas’s noble cause, which is to do to every Israeli, ideally every Jew, what Isis is doing to Iraqi Christians, can outweigh commitment to truth.

Still, George may regard Israel as an illegal state, but even he has to admit that a state it is. Hamas isn’t, much as all progressive people hope it will be soon. Hence its right to consecrate outlanders to citizenship seems rather questionable.

Yet if such a keen student of legality as George has no problem with it, who am I to argue?

And not just legality: George is also qualified to rule on Judaic doctrine. This privilege has been traditionally reserved for scholars who devote their whole lives to pondering the original texts.

I’m sorry if I’m maligning our Hamas citizen, but I don’t believe he has devoted his whole life to Talmudic scholarship. Yet here he is, explaining that “Israel blasphemes against the Torah by calling itself a Jewish state.”

My grasp of Judaism isn’t all that firm either but, as I recall, Jews acquired the Torah on the way to Palestine which they in short order turned into a Jewish state. Moses on the mountain, voice out of the burning bush, Tabernacle, that sort of thing?

Hence, though Israel ‘calling itself a Jewish state’ may be regarded as offensive to people like George, it’s certainly not blasphemous.

But then George denies Israel’s right to call itself anything, or indeed to exist. The amazing thing is that even some British Jews express views that, if logically developed, would spell Israel’s Armageddon.

For example, Hugo Rifkind, that living argument against nepotism, wrote an article bemoaning the rise of anti-Semitism in Britain. He remarked, correctly, that such sentiments flare up whenever the Israel Defence Force is in action.

But then came a disclaimer, which was pure George ibn-Galloway, or would be if George learned to speak rather than to rant: 

“I mean, look, it’s not as though I think Israel is doing the right thing. Far from it. In my view, if your only military success entails bombing a country where 50 per cent of people are under 18, then it’s not a military strategy that you should be following.”

What if that youthful country fires thousands of rockets at your own towns and digs tunnels through which prepubescent terrorists crawl to murder your own people?

What would be the proper military strategy to defend yourself, according to that Clausewitz of The Times? Roll over and play dead? You will be, before long.

And what if that country sites its rockets in a way (for example, at or in hospitals and schools) that’s guaranteed to maximise collateral damage for propaganda purposes?

Should Israel just sit back, dig in and let Hamas rockets reduce the country to rubble?

Or is this son of Margaret Thatcher’s frontbencher unaware of the constant bombardment of Israel by Hamas, which left Israel with no non-military options?

Unlike Hamas, Israelis don’t bomb ‘the country’. They bomb the military installations the country uses to kill them. Some people under 18 inevitably die in the process, though Israel does more than any country in the history of warfare to reduce their number.

So what would be ‘the right thing’ for Israel to do? What strategy would satisfy Hugo’s exacting requirements?

Bien pensant lightweights like him, who insist on making progressivist noises, in effect converge with evil anti-Semites like Galloway, a meeting of minds that would displease both sides should they be aware of it.

The story goes that, when the Nazis ordered all Jews in occupied Denmark to wear the yellow star, the king himself put one on and called on all his subjects to follow suit.

The story is unfortunately apocryphal, but the idea is good. At a time when the only civilised nation and our sole true ally in the Middle East is desperately fighting for its survival, we, Christians, Jews or atheists, should close ranks and declare: “We are all Israelis now!”

As to George, he should really renounce one of his passports, and I don’t mean the Hamas one. Our parliamentarians do make a strong case for democracy, don’t they?

 

P.S. My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, is coming out this autumn. You can pre-order at roperpenberthy.co.com.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What, you don’t quite follow the logic of it? This only goes to show you aren’t a Cabinet minister, not even a former one.

You’ve got to understand that one can’t ascend to government without being touched by the hand of Sophia, divine wisdom.

Once such a tactile contact has been made, the chosen one becomes privy to the rarefied reaches of intellect, where trivial Aristotelian logic is superseded, nay transcended, by higher reason.

The freshly sacked Attorney General Dominic Grieve is a case in point.

My friend Dominic was kicked out on a matter of principle. The principle is as simple as truth itself: Dave wants to be re-elected.

The path leading to this Shangri-La is thorny, and he won’t reach the destination unless the thorns are removed. Of these, Ukip is the most bothersome.

Even if Ukip’s popular support is halved by the time of the next general election, Ed will move into 10 Downing Street and Dave will go on a speaking tour. For Dave to stay at his present address he needs to convince voters that Britain’s sovereignty will be safe in his hands.

Rumour has it that to this end Dave plans to suspend the Human Rights Act and refuse to obey the diktats of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) unless Parliament approves them.

This doesn’t mean Dave wants to leave the EU, perish the thought. What he wants is to win in 2015, and once that’s done he’ll find a way of coming back into the pan-European legal fold.

But first things first. As a sop to those voters who feel nostalgic about the time when Britain was a sovereign nation, Dave has purged the Cabinet of the more strident federasts, of whom my friend Dominic is one.

Yet Sophia confers her grace in perpetuity, and Dominic, now free of the shackles of ministerial discipline, has given us the benefit of his neo-Gnostic sagacity from the back benches.

Walking out of the ECRH, he explained for the benefit of slow learners, would spell a disaster for Britain. Why is that, Dominic? I hear you ask. In fact, I’m asking the same question myself.

We’re even slower than Dominic thought. Allow him to explain in words even we can understand: “One only has to look at what is going on at the moment in northern Iraq to see that human rights do matter.”

My first reaction is to go down on my knees, put my palms flat on the ground and cry “We are not worthy, oh Wise One!”

My second reaction, once I’ve resumed the upright position, is to reach out for that decommissioned tool of basic logic. Inferior though it clearly is, it’s the only one I’ve got handy.

So let me see if I get this right. Now that US foreign policy has triumphed in Iraq and wholesale slaughter has begun, it ought to become blindingly obvious that we should knock out the cornerstone of British polity, sovereignty within Parliament.

No, surely Dominic can’t possibly mean that.

Oh yes he does: it would be fatal, he says, “to prevent the [ECHR’s] judgements being implemented unless the Parliament approves it.” Parliament in a position to approve laws? What a quaint, outdated idea.

I get it. Parliament’s authority established over 1,500 years should be repealed because otherwise Leeds will turn into another Mosul.

Christians will be converted into Islam at gunpoint or preferably murdered, women will be stoned and children starved. York will secede from the UK and become an Islamic Caliphate, with George Galloway as the Caliph.

Come to think of it, such a situation isn’t wholly unimaginable. What is unclear is how making Britain’s Parliament irrelevant will prevent this evolutionary development. In fact, it’s easier to see how that will accelerate the evolution.

In other words, a slave to Aristotelian logic may feel that Dominic hasn’t made an ironclad case in favour of the ECHR being the sole theoretically possible guarantor of the rights of Englishmen.

Such a slave might further insist that the European Court of Human Rights is no more synonymous with human rights than the European Union is with Europe.

He may aver – mistakenly, according to my new friend – that, just as Europe had existed for a while before the EU, the notion of individual rights hadn’t been totally alien to Europeans before they were blessed with the advent of the ECHR.

Moreover, some members of this august moral authority (Russia springs to mind) don’t seem to be overly constrained by its legal notions.

The ECHR is very good on issuing variously inane laws, but its means of enforcement are somewhat lacking. If a law can’t be enforced, it’s not a law but, at best, an ideological statement. As such, it will be heeded only by those who share the same ideology.

Dominic obviously does and so, truth be told, does Dave. But don’t let me digress: my today’s point has less to do with our leaders’ ideological preferences than with their intellectual abilities.

No good case can be made for a bad cause. But, if appointed devil’s advocates, you and I could easily come up with more plausible arguments in favour of the ECHR than those based on Islamic massacres in Iraq.

Such arguments would still be fundamentally false, but at least they wouldn’t sound as if they were put forth by a 10-year-old attending a remedial reading class.

Dominic couldn’t satisfy even that minimum requirement. This is a man who for four years was the chief legal advisor to the Crown, and he was only relieved of his post for short-term political reasons.

This brings me back to my recurrent theme: modern democracy. The most reliable litmus test of a method of government is what kind of people it elevates to power.

If Dominic, Dave et al are the best we can do, it’s time to think long and hard. Or else head for the hills.

 

P.S. My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, is coming out this autumn. You can pre-order at roperpenberthy.co.uk.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Judit Polgár, the only woman in history capable of competing with men at the highest level, has retired at age 38.

Judit became a grandmaster at 15 years and four months, beating Bobby Fischer’s record by a month.

Since her teens she has been in and out of the world’s top ten, having won games against, among others, world champions both past (Kasparov) and present (Carlsen).

One would think that she’d leave the game with pride, thanking, if not God, then at least the game that has made her a star, though admittedly not one as stellar as Kim Kardashian, whose chief assets are located somewhat lower than Judit’s brain.

Instead Judit fired a parting shot that missed by a mile. She castigated the game as ‘sexist’, with male players doing their best to keep women down.

It’s to men’s beastliness that Judit ascribes the demonstrable fact that, out of thousands of women who have played the game professionally, she’s the only one who has ever been as good as most male grandmasters.

Feminism is a popular game these days but, unlike chess, everybody who plays it is a loser. Its underlying assumption is that, apart from certain fixtures that have made Kim Kardashian such a star, women are no different from men.

Consequently, if they don’t achieve the same results in every field of endeavour, it can only be society’s fault or, in this instance, men’s.

God forbid one should even suggest obliquely that the obvious physiological differences between the sexes extend to their brains. When ideology speaks, common sense keeps silent.

Say that men’s brains are different, and a feminist will only hear that they are better – something that only an idiot would think, amd a tactless idiot would say.

Never mind scientific facts, such, for example, as that aggressiveness (an essential part of a chess player’s equipment) is a function of testosterone, of which women, this side of Martina Navratilova, have considerably less than men.

Never mind that, just as women’s brain wiring makes them better at languages, men’s wiring makes them better at maths, a discipline that bears perhaps the closest resemblance to chess.

Never mind even abundant empirical evidence, such as the sex identity of 56 winners of the Fields Medal, the highest prize in mathematics. Yesterday, the 2014 awards were announced, and for the first time since 1936, when the prize was first endowed, a woman was among the winners.

Yet 40 percent of maths graduates are women, a proportion that diminishes precipitously at PhD level and beyond. Why?

It’s a sign of intellectual laziness and ideology-driven dishonesty to insist that the sole reason is some fiendish male conspiracy.

Women are, on average, not as good at maths as men are, which makes the achievement of the only female Fields Medal winner so much more spectacular.

Neither are they as good at chess, which is why Judit is the only woman ever to climb so high up the game’s Olympus.

If women were as good as men, all those thousands of girls who, in the communist countries, have gone through the same state-sponsored training programmes as the boys, would have produced a more proportionately representative number of top players – or at least more than just one.

Judit is in an ideal position to know what role chess played in her native Hungary, my native Russia and every other communist country.

When Mikhail Botvinnik became the first world-class Soviet player back in the 1930s, the Soviets discovered the propaganda potential of chess.

Millions were poured into unique training facilities to produce living proof of the USSR’s superiority over its ‘capitalist enemies’. Chess players became privileged citizens, enjoying the kind of wealth that was beyond not only most Soviets but, more important, Western players.

For example, when Botvinnik won the 1936 Nottingham tournament, Stalin gave him a car, a prize fully equivalent to a 300-foot yacht today.

Women were just as valuable to the propaganda offensive, and girls were trained side by side with boys. Having gone through the Soviet chess system, I can testify to this – as Judit can no doubt testify to the same situation in Hungary.

Incidentally, to disclaim any parity with her, at the same age she became a grandmaster I quit chess, having discovered joys of a more tactile and liquid nature.

Unlike her I didn’t have the talent and dedication to go all the way, having stopped at a level similar to that of a decent county player in England. Yet shortly before I quit the game, I won a blitz match against Elizaveta Bykova, then women’s world champion, though no longer at her peak.

It’s not just one man’s experience. At that time any male grandmaster would have beaten the top 20 women in a simultaneous exhibition. Today the situation isn’t appreciably different: although there are quite a few decent female players, only Judit was in the first rank.

Part of the reason women don’t go as far is that they’re saner than men. The life of a budding chess mercenary in the West, where players survive on prize money, is similar to that of a travelling tennis pro, but the potential rewards aren’t.

Thus most professional players are dysfunctional individuals who misspent their youth hustling strangers for fivers in cafés, parks and clubs. Most of them look as if they sleep rough, even if they don’t.

Many go mad, which, for example, musicians hardly ever do, belying Daniel Johnson’s assertion in today’s Times that chess has ‘a mysterious affinity’ with music.

True enough, in as much as both fields have a mathematical aspect, they have something in common. But the similarity is superficial because the nature of the inspiration is entirely different.

That’s why it’s silly to say, as Johnson does, that Judit’s brilliant 1987 victory against a Soviet grandmaster “offers raptures not unlike – to take another Hungarian example – one of Liszt’s Transcendental Études.”

A musical piece, even one as mindless as a Liszt study, is inspired by one of the highest manifestations of the human soul. A brilliant chess attack is animated by the urge “to make’em squirm”, as Fischer put it. Chess is closer to poker than to art.

That chess can give aesthetic pleasure doesn’t make it an art – unless we define the concept so broadly as to make it meaningless. Not everything that “offers rapture” is art, for otherwise we’d regard, say, Kim Kardashian’s jutting attractions as artistic masterpieces.

Women are less keen to make people squirm, which is a point in their favour. Nor, and this is another feather in their cap, are they as willing as men to spend their life on an utterly trivial pursuit, and dedicate every waking moment to it.

That’s why, say, Viktor Korchnoi is still playing grandmasters’ tournaments at 83, while Judit has wisely retired at 38. One wishes she were as wise in her pronouncements.