Author: Alexander Boot

It’s usually possible to guess a man’s political views without ever bringing up politics.

For instance, a political conservative is unlikely to express enthusiasm for pop music, ‘conceptual’ sculpture, garden cities, vegetarianism, same-sex marriage, facial metal, yoga or body art. And it’s impossible that in writing he’d ever choose BCE and CE over BC and AD.

Nor can one easily imagine a conservative sporting a tattoo, say ‘ACAB’ on his knuckles (for the benefit of those who’ve led a sheltered life, this stands for All Cops Are Bastards). Such telltale signs may of course mislead, but not often.

Of all possible signs, language is by far the most reliable. It’s not hard to understand why.

All ruling elites share the need to exercise crowd control. When the majority stops being silent and becomes vociferous it can easily loosen the elite’s hold on power, something no elite in history has ever welcomed.

There exist only two discernible methods of controlling a potentially restless crowd: coercion and brainwashing. All modern elites without exception use both, but in different combinations.

Crudely, and only for this ad hoc purpose, dividing all modern states into totalitarian and democratic, one can observe that the former mix the two ingredients in roughly equal proportions, perhaps favouring violence slightly, while the latter mostly have to rely on brainwashing.

But this is a matter of proportion only: both types of modern regimes use both methods. They must therefore enforce their monopoly on both violence and language.

Because so-called democratic regimes are somewhat limited in their use of violence, they have to place a heavy emphasis on controlling language. What people say, and how they say it, may threaten the elites more than anything people do.

Our ruling elite, regardless of what parties it represents, inclines to the soft left. The hard variety is generally marginalised in the West, although this may change as the EU edges closer to the precipice.

The vocabulary of the soft left has to be more subtle: slogans like “kill [capitalists, priests, Jews, blacks, whites, aristos and so forth]” can’t yet be part of their lexicon, and neither has the public been sufficiently primed to heed such calls.

Few people realise that the language of political correctness, its vocabulary, grammar and even phonetics, represents the elite’s way of managing dissent. By brainwashing the populace into believing that some words, phrases, grammar and even pronunciation are so immoral that they should be made illegal, the soft-left elite achieves the same end as the Bolsheviks did by making the starving children of murdered parents chant “Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood.”

Since Comrade Stalin was also at liberty to torture people to death, there was precious little dissent during his rule. Here the situation is still different.

Comrade Cameron or even Comrade Miliband can’t rely on violence to the same extent, although our elite is beginning to acquire some taste for criminalising word and even thought. That’s why residual resistance still has some, albeit attenuating, strength.

Language being the battleground on which the elite clashes with the dissidents, it has become a clearly visible watershed. The line runs between the elite backed up by those willing to submit to its logocratic rule and those who still have the temerity to resist it.

One example from today’s BBC sports website: “West Brom will inform their new head coach that they will have to lead the club to Premier League safety.”

Unless this football club decides to appoint Siamese twins, which is statistically unlikely, the team’s new head coach will be singular. Moreover, and I know I’m going out on a limb here, he’ll probably be a man.

This isn’t in any way to imply that a woman would be congenitally incapable of managing a football team, God forbid. It’s just that so far no major football club has ever appointed a female manager, and one doubts a team locked in relegation struggle would wish to blaze that particular trail in mid-season.

So why not follow the singular, implicitly male antecedent with the singular, masculine, utterly appropriate pronoun ‘he’? Moreover, how can people who use the English language professionally be so utterly tone-deaf? Can’t they see that the sentence violates not only grammar in particular but also elementary taste in general?

Anyone asking such questions misses the point. The BBC, along with most of our media, is the mouthpiece of the ruling soft-left elite. That’s why it not only acquiesces in linguistic mangling but actively promotes it.

The implicit message is, “Yes, we know that what our friend Tony called ‘the forces of conservatism’ will cry havoc when hearing such phrases. Well, they can go boil an egg.

“Our mission is to control the populace by controlling their speech, and control their speech we will. To weaken resistance we’ll make sure that schools neither teach proper English nor encourage any affection for it.

“Once the people have accepted our diktat in such seemingly small matters, they’ll think it churlish to object to more serious sabotage. For example, if they accept that ‘gay’ is the only proper word, while ‘homosexual’ is iffy and, say, ‘poofter’ borderline illegal, they won’t have any leg to stand on when we insist that ‘gay persons’ can get married.”

This is how the soft left works, by taking small incremental steps rather than bold leaps. Some of its attacks on decency and tradition, such as ‘gay’ marriage, only seem to have come out of the blue. In fact, all the necessary groundwork had been laid meticulously and deliberately.

We have no means of resisting this escalating onslaught actively. But passive resistance is possible: everyone must mind HIS language, refusing to submit to PC usage – and mocking it when others fail to do so.

Following some criticism of his remarks on economics, Pope Francis has denied that he’s a Marxist. “Marxist ideology is wrong. But in my life I have known many Marxists who are good people, so I don’t feel offended.”

I’m happy that His Holiness has taken criticism in his stride: insulting the Pope would be the last thing on the mind of anyone who respects the throne he occupies.

However, the best way to pre-empt such criticism in the future would be for the pontiff to steer clear of this subject altogether. Otherwise he lays himself wide open to slings and arrows.

I for one have never met a good man who’s a Marxist. I’ve met many good souls who describe themselves as Marxists but, when probed, display total ignorance of that doctrine. But this only means that I’ve met many good-natured ignoramuses who aren’t very bright.

But all Marxists who espouse this doctrine in the knowledge of what it is are wicked. That is, unless you can fault the logic that promulgators of evil are themselves evil.

I don’t know how closely His Holiness has studied the works of Marx or Engels, or if he has ever opened them at all. Here’s a quick quotation from a man who has.

Adolf Hitler readily acknowledged his indebtedness to Marxism in private, even as he attacked it in public. Hermann Rauschning recalls in his memoir Hitler Speaks the führer saying that “the whole of National Socialism” was based on Marx. “I have learned a great deal from Marx,” conceded Hitler, “as I do not hesitate to admit.”

Has the Pope known many Nazis who are good people? Would he ever say that?

True enough, not only Hitler but also his fellow satanists further east owe Marx a debt of gratitude. Every evil they perpetrated sprang from the principles enunciated in the writings of Marx and Engels.

Slave labour (what The Communist Manifesto describes as creating ‘labour armies’), abolition of all private property, keeping those who disagree in concentration camps (‘specially guarded places’, in Engel’s phrase), homicidal atheism, anti-Semitism, genocidal or ideological mass murder are all spelled out in the founding documents of Marxism.

For the sake of brevity I’ll only give you a little flavour, and boy does it stink to high heaven.

“All the other [non-Marxist] large and small nationalities and peoples are destined to perish before long in the revolutionary holocaust. For that reason they are now counter-revolutionary… these residual fragments of peoples always become fanatical standard-bearers of counter-revolution and remain so until their complete extirpation or loss of their national character… [A general war will] wipe out all this racial trash.”

 “…only by the most determined use of terror against these Slav peoples can we, jointly with the Poles and Magyars, safeguard the revolution… there will be a struggle, an ‘inexorable life-and-death struggle’, against those Slavs who betray the revolution; an annihilating fight and ruthless terror – not in the interests of Germany, but in the interests of the revolution!”

“We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.”

Yet perhaps the greatest damage caused by this diabolical doctrine is philosophical. Like his fellow intellectual terrorists Darwin and Freud, Marx stepped outside his ostensible field, economics in his case, to inflict upon subsequent generations a wicked way of looking at human societies.

It’s thanks to Marx that intellectuals and laymen alike predominantly see society as a battleground for two belligerently hostile classes: the haves and the have-nots, or the bourgeois and the proletariat in simon-pure Marxist terminology.

Evil ideologies are deliberately designed by evil men to encourage evil in others. If, for old times’ sake, we equate evil with the seven deadly sins, then Marxism actively encourages most of them.

I can think of few ideologies more evil than the one telling most people that their relative poverty is both unjust and correctable by political, preferably violent, action. The fervour of violence inspired by Marxism intensifies as we move eastwards in Europe. But the underlying assumption holds sway everywhere.

In fact, the phrase “We’re all Marxists now”, first used 50 years after the publication of The Communist Manifesto, keeps popping up in the writings of even those who ought to know better, such as in the essay Can We Be Good Without God? by the American professor Glenn Tinder. Well, include me out, as his countrymen would say.

This view of the world is cannibalistic in theory and manifestly wrong in practice. A civilised society isn’t made up of warring factions. It’s a complex structure organised as a hierarchy of ranks. The more successful an economy (and only a free economy can be successful), the more it encourages productive aspiration rather than, as Marxism does, destructive envy.

Any ideology aiming to impose a uniform world order is wicked – regardless of its ostensible worthiness. Any attempt to practise the kind of universalism such ideologies preach, be it class struggle, racial purity, equality, democracy or what have you, will always fail – but not before causing untold misery and murdering millions.

Marxism is, without close seconds, the most pernicious of such ideologies – both in theory and in practice. If we discount the ignoramuses to whom Lenin referred as ‘useful idiots’, then there’s only one kind of good Marxist. A dead one.

Mea culpa: Trenton Oldfield has kindly pointed out a factual error in my piece about him. Apparently the court decision to overturn his deportation was based not on his wife’s and daughter’s race but solely on his character. I apologise for this oversight, and my only excuse is that it was also committed by every newspaper in the land. I also commend Mr Oldfield for ignoring my harsh but fair comments about his character.

Mea maxima culpa: A Catholic priest has pointed out a theological error in my facetious laments that Nelson Mandela still hasn’t risen. As the Father correctly observed, the rising should occur on the third day after the funeral, not death. Since Mr Mandela was only buried yesterday, watch this space.

On the face of it, the idea unveiled by Iain Duncan Smith, Secretary of State for Works and Pensions, is sound. Any immigrant seeking benefits will have to prove that his English is good enough to find a job in Britain.

But in fact the proposed law is so lacking in intellectual rigour that it’s well-nigh unworkable. It’ll be scuppered by its own holes even before the EU punches new ones.

I’m not going to comment on the near certainty that the European Commission will probably block this law (it has the power to do so, you know). Before the proposal even gets that far it’s likely to be killed by the devil residing in the details.

Question 1: What kind of job are we talking about? A psychiatrist and a bus boy both need to use English to earn a crust, but the linguistic demands they face are different.

An immigrant Bulgarian shrink is as unlikely to seek employment in a gastropub as a Bulgarian bus boy is to open a consultancy in Harley Street. Will the English test they’ll have to take be individually skewed? Somehow one doubts that.

In other words, tests differ, and how they differ must depend on the end they’re designed to achieve. Are they supposed to let as many as possible in or to keep as many as possible out?

For example, the English test for foreign doctors in the USA clearly falls into the second category. I used to help a few Russian physicians prepare for that exam, and I can say with absolute certainty that at least half of native-born Americans would have failed it.

I remember one question (out of hundreds). “Choose the right word: John is one of those people who [a) like, b) likes] order.”

It’s hard to see how providing the correct answer would simplify querying patients for diagnostic purposes. And how many native speakers, including doctors, would answer this question correctly? One percent? Two?

Question 2: Would the Social have enough employees qualified to administer such a test?

Fair enough, most will smell a rat if, when asked what his name is, a swarthy chap replies, “Jop sicker allowvance.” But what if a deeper probe is required?

Most social workers I’ve ever met would have failed the second-year English test at a Moscow secondary school circa 1970. Are they now expected to check the proficiency of those who may have passed such tests?

Methinks they’ll have to make many judgment calls they aren’t qualified to make, leaving the government open to accusations of discrimination. Any half-competent lawyer would salivate at the thought of such easy cases. 

The doctors’ test I mentioned earlier was discriminatory in that it demanded that new arrivals be more familiar with the nuances of English grammar than could have been reasonably expected from the natives.

But any test checking the knowledge of more than 750 words in this country would be equally discriminatory: the benefit seeker would be expected to have a wider active vocabulary than a large and growing proportion of native Englishmen.

It’s hard not to notice, for example, that most foreign footballers who’ve played in this country for more than a couple of years have a better command of English than most of their English colleagues. Nor do they have to swallow hard every other word to stop themselves from using desemanticised obscenities in TV interviews.

Will their benefit-seeking countrymen be expected to be at that level of proficiency on arrival? If not, what level are we talking about? And how soon after arrival?

Too many difficult questions and too few easy answers spell a legal quandary. It’s all much too complicated for words, and the legal complexities will be such that we’ll have to import swarms of foreign lawyers to cope with the overflow.

KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) is a time-honoured principle, and in that spirit I’d like to offer a modest proposal guaranteed to simplify matters.

There’s no need to administer convoluted tests checking the applicants’ linguistic prowess, their job-seeking history in the home country and here, their length of residence and what have you.

Instead we should introduce this simple rule: No foreign national is entitled to any UK benefits, including access to the NHS (other than in emergency cases).

It would be tedious to list all the ensuing gains. These would be considerable for our public (and therefore private) finances, immigration rate, demographics, culture, social life – you name it.

One thing is begging to be mentioned: crime rate. In the last 12 months almost 20 percent of all Romanians currently residing in the UK have been arrested for various crimes. Extrapolating this proportion to the likely absolute number of expected arrivals from Romania and Bulgaria (the two poorest countries in the EU), one gets that hollow feeling somewhere between the oesophagus and the stomach.

Not too much suspension of disbelief is needed to see that acting on my little proposal would limit immigration. This can’t be a bad thing, even though we all know (or are supposed to know on pain of punishment) that immigrants from places like Romania and Somalia enrich British life no end.

I wonder what the EU would have to say about that. Well, actually I don’t. I’d just love to see Barroso roll on the floor frothing at the mouth.

My friend Dave Cameron has been catching a bit of flak over that ‘selfie’ photograph of himself and President Obama flanking Denmark’s blonde PM Helle Thorning-Schmidt. It was she who took the shot.

By itself this would be unobjectionable, but the fact that the trio were thus amusing themselves in the middle of the memorial service for Nelson Mandela has drawn some criticism. According to the critics, the picture-taking episode fell somewhere between lèse–majesté and sacrilege, so Dave felt he had to respond.

Speaking ex cathedra in Parliament, he parried the slings and arrows with a witty remark, alluding to the fact that Helle is Neil Kinnock’s daughter-in-law: “Of course, when a member of the Kinnock family asks for a photograph, I thought it was only polite to say ‘yes’.”

Laughter all around, ‘hear, hear’ on both sides of the aisle, not a dry seat in the room.

But speaking to me in private over the bottle of his favourite Krug Grande Cuvée he always has at breakfast, Dave was more forthcoming. It’s with some trepidation that I’m posting his remarks here, but I know I can count on your discretion.

“So bloody what? It’s not as if I snogged that tart during Tutu’s eulogy or anything like that.

“Well, don’t get me excited, Steve bloody Kinnock is a lucky bastard – Helle is one sexy gel.

“Steve is jolly careless too. She lives in Copenhagen, he in Davos, that’s 800 miles. So fine, he doesn’t pay Danish taxes, good for him.

“But it may cost him in the end anyway, with the wolves circling, if you know what I mean. I wouldn’t have a moment’s peace if Sam was out on her own all the time, and as to Helle…

“That prat Barack, for example, fancies her something rotten, and in fact when we all snuggled together he managed to cop a feel, which is why Helle’s gob is wide-open in the picture.

“Michelle was none too pleased either, you know how unworldly those middleclass gels can get. Sam isn’t like that at all, she doesn’t mind, but then she isn’t middleclass. And anyway, fair’s fair, if you know what I mean.

“Afterwards Michelle told that prat Barack to conduct himself in a seemly, decorous manner befitting his exalted stature as the Leader of the Free World. ‘Stay away from that honky bitch,’ was how she put it, verbatim.

“I too had a bit of fun at Barrack’s expense. ‘Read David Copafeel lately, old boy?’ I asked, in jest of course. He didn’t get it and took exception to the word ‘boy’. Barack can be dreadfully touchy at times, what?

“So what on earth did I do wrong? I wasn’t the one who squeezed Helle’s whatsit, and it was Helle who put her hand on my cheek, not the other way around. I couldn’t have knocked it off without looking like a prat, could I now?

“Auspicious occasion? Commemorating a great man? Give me a break.

“It went on for four bloody hours, so what was I supposed to do, stand to attention the whole bloody time, like a bearskin outside Buck House? At least I didn’t chew gum like that prat Barack.

“And between you, me and the lamppost, how great a statesman was Mandela anyway? So fine, he didn’t murder too many people after he came out of the pokey. Big deal.

“I’ve never murdered anyone at all, so how come no one calls me a great bloody statesman?

“Tell you what, my record is a hell of a lot better than Mandela’s. He was in charge what, between ’94 and ’99? Well, the average income in South bloody Africa fell by 40 percent during those years.

“Had I done the same I’d be flogging crisps on Channel 4 and talking to the blue-rinse brigade on the din-dins circuit, like Tony, not sitting in Number 10. Under my government, actually mine and Clegger’s whose fault it all is, it’s only been down a few percent and everyone’s still screaming bloody murder.

“And look at South bloody Africa now. Unemployment – 40 percent. A third of those in work are on less than $2 a day. And Jo’burg looks like Hitler’s bunker after an Allied raid.

“Rape capital of the world, murder capital of the world. It’s open season on white farmers, and those who haven’t been killed yet are fleeing like rats.

“There’s half as many farmers now than before Mandela, and that’s a great statesman? So what does it make me, Winston bloody Churchill? Peri bloody cles? Abe bloody Lincoln?

“So fine, I did go to the bloody service, would have looked like a right prat if I hadn’t. I’m a P bloody M, so I do what needs doing.

“If what needs doing is to say that a commie terrorist is a great statesman, a bloody saint and Jesus Christ himself, fine, count me in.

“But don’t expect me to impersonate Lot’s bloody wife for four hours. I’d much rather feel up Steve’s wife, which I didn’t.

“Another soupçon of bubbly, old boy?”

I accepted some more of that nectar gratefully, patted my friend Dave on the shoulder – and woke up.

In 2012 the Australian Trenton Oldfield dived into the Thames and disrupted the Boat Race in the name of equality. He felt that elitism, of which the Boat Race was a toxic symbol, led to tyranny. The bizarre stunt was Trenton’s way of expressing his protest.

Since in those days mainstream papers still tolerated my presence, I wrote a piece about the poor man, blaming it all on his alma mater, the LSE. Since then Oldfield served seven weeks in prison, after which the Home Office ordered his deportation.

He appealed and an Asylum and Immigration Tribunal ruled in his favour. The gist of Oldfield’s argument was that if he was forced to leave the UK he wouldn’t be able to take his half-Indian wife and his quarter-Indian daughter back down under because Australians were “passive aggressive racists”.

As this put Oldfield in the news again, broadcast media looked for people to interview, and my name came up. I received a phone call, ostensibly to ask for an interview the next morning and surreptitiously to vet my suitability.

Ever the publicity hound, I agreed to the former even though that meant rearranging my plans – and miserably failed the latter.

“Are you happy that Trenton Oldfield won his case?” asked the researcher, in a tone brooking no disagreement.

“Er…,” I said. “I’m not sure.”

“But he has a right to protest, doesn’t he?” insisted the young lady, stressing all the key words.

“Yes he does,” I agreed. “But he forfeits that right when he breaks the law.”

“Don’t you think he was already adequately punished for that?”

“Perhaps,” I said. “I promise to consider this properly by tomorrow.”

Tomorrow never came, in the sense that the young lady didn’t ring me the next morning, as she had promised. Neither did she offer any explanation or apology, but then one doesn’t expect even elementary courtesy from today’s lot.

But I can’t fault the girl for perspicacity of a bloodhound acuity. Having sensed that my thoughts would be unfashionable, she vigilantly protected her listeners’ sensibilities.

However, had I miraculously slipped through her sieve, this is roughly what I would have said. I trust you won’t be offended.

What does ‘passive aggressive racist’ mean? In any context it’s oxymoronic. In the context of Australia, it’s moronic tout court. My Aussie friends tell me all sorts of horrid things about their country, but never do they suggest that a little quarter-Indian girl would be in mortal danger there.

Yet presiding Judge Kevin Moore accepted this idiocy as a valid reason to defy Theresa May and block Oldfield’s deportation.

“There’s no doubt of your character and the value you are to UK society generally,” said the judge in his concluding remarks. Well, speak for yourself, Your Honour.

Mr Oldfield’s character is at best odd and his value to UK society is at best nonexistent. But that’s only at best.

Protesting against inequality is like protesting against the grass being green or the sky being blue. Contrary to what the US Declaration of Independence says, all men are created unequal in every relevant category, and this will always be reflected in their social and economic status. Such is the way of the world and, like it or hate it, we must live with it.

Even if, as an LSE alumnus, young Trenton doesn’t accept this as a theoretical proposition, he still can’t ignore the supporting empirical evidence. Not a single place exists now, nor has ever existed, where inequality has been expunged. Not to see this, one has to be either blind or stridently cretinous. And Oldfield is fully sighted.

Granted, one can’t help being stupid. However one can and must refrain from expressing stupidity through criminal acts, like disrupting one of the world’s most venerable sporting events. Failure to exercise such self-restraint brings Oldfield’s character into considerably more doubt than Judge Moore allowed.

I’d describe Oldfield’s character as that of a stupid, borderline mad, potentially dangerous firebrand. Anyone familiar with the evidence supporting this assessment has to see Oldfield’s “value to UK society in general” as negative – unless we’re talking of nuisance value.

Does this mean he should have been deported? I’m still not sure – even though I would have welcomed such an outcome on purely aesthetic grounds.

Our 2007 law says that any alien jailed for more than 12 months must be deported when he comes out. Personally, I think that, to borrow Mr Bumble’s phrase, this law is ‘a ass’. Surely any alien convicted of a felony must be thrown out – we have enough of our own undesirables.

But, to borrow a Latin phrase, dura lex, sed lex. Loosely translated, this means the law may be ‘a ass’, but it’s still the law. Until it’s changed, as this one should be, no  provision will exist for the automatic deportation of relatively minor offenders.

Other than that, and I know I’m waxing downright relativist, this case must be considered in the context of others. Justice can’t be seen to be done if punishment for various crimes is out of synch with their comparative gravity.

For example, if a burglar gets a lighter punishment than someone who lies to the police about a speeding violation, justice in general is diminished. Extending this logic to Oldfield’s case, let’s remind ourselves that the Home Office took 11 years to deport Abu-Qatada – and only managed to do so when the Jordanian government graciously agreed to take him back.

Other preachers of hate and terrorism, regardless of their citizenship, continue to ply their business with impunity in mosques throughout the country. Throwing Oldfield out against this background would have been an act of absolute justice but relative injustice.

Hence, on its own puny terms, the Tribunal’s decision was right. What is desperately wrong is that Britain no longer has the moral strength to pass and enforce laws providing for swift and assured expulsion of undesirable aliens. Such as Oldfield – and thousands of worse ones.

 

  

 

 

 

 

Since few of my British readers read that paper, and some overseas readers may not know what it is, The Guardian is the leftmost of our broadsheets, though its supremacy is being contested by The Independent and increasingly The Times.

The Guardian also prides itself on its cultural excellence and sophisticated readership, a claim its poll was supposed to reinforce. Instead, it has blown it to smithereens – yet again.

But I shan’t keep you in suspense any longer. Positions 2-8 are occupied by Marco Weber and Sini Saarela with 314 votes, Pope Francis (153), Jack Monroe (144), Waris Dirie (69), Satoshi Nakamoto (33), Kanye West (28), Andy Murray (22) and Elon Musk (11).

I pride myself on knowing who Pope Francis and Andy Murray are – and even more on not having a clue about who the others might possibly be.

But Wikipedia says that Weber and Saarela are Greenpeace activists; Jack Monroe is a propagandist of cheap food for the poor and, the name notwithstanding, actually a woman, though a lesbian; Waris Dirie is a Somali human-rights activist; Nakamoto has come up with the idea of electronic money; West is an American hip hop artist, whatever that means; and Musk is a software billionaire.

Obviously the poll was taken before Mandela’s death and subsequent canonisation/deification, otherwise he would have topped the list. As it is, the winner and undisputed Guardian champion, weighing in at 1,145 votes (more than the other eight combined) is… go on, make a guess. Give up?

Edward Snowden, Putin’s new friend, Russia’s new resident and America’s chronic pain in the neck. You know, the chap wanted for espionage.

One can see conflicting pieties clashing all over this list. Greenpeace, cheap food, human rights all seem to fit it neatly in the profile of a typical Guardian reader. But then problems start.

For example, Waris Dirie campaigns not for human rights in general, but specifically for those of women who are being circumcised in Somalia. Thereby she brands herself as an opponent of multiculturalism, and surely Guardian readers must be appalled.

They must have some pecking order of pieties, in which multiculturalism is trumped by women’s rights. Come on, fellows, don’t let your Uncle Tony (Blair) down. You can’t slaughter your sacred cow yet, not when it’s still producing its poisoned milk.

You like couscous, cultural diversity and destroying traditional England? Well then, you must accept female circumcision, the stoning of adulterers, the odd blown-up bus, forced marriage, jihad and the murder of apostates. Cultures don’t come piecemeal, you get all for the price of one. So you must rethink Waris Dirie; find someone who sticks up for safer human rights.

And the Pope? How did that come about? Yes, I know he has been making Marxist noises, which is a perfect qualification. But on the available evidence he still remains a Christian, and that’s simply not good enough.

And not just The Guardian kind of Christian either, one preaching that Christ was a sort of Che Guevara of Galilee. No, Pope Frances believes in things like the Incarnation and the Resurrection, something no one associated with The Guardian believes, except perhaps that Polish bloke who drives the delivery van.

So if I were you I’d wait until His Holiness treads the path paved by some of our bishops and declares that all that dated nonsense no longer applies: Jesus must be worshipped for his morality, not his divinity. Then you can vote for Francis. Until then, may I suggest A.C. Grayling?

Kanye West does tick a few boxes, especially the race one. But doesn’t The Guardian aspire to be the flag-bearer of high culture? How does hip hop, whatever that is, advance this aspiration?

I’d replace Kanye with Danny Barenboim: he’s a classical musician, if not a very good one, and he’s about to end the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. He also likes to play Wagner, if not yet Horst Wessel, in Israel, to show how art can triumph over parochial resentments. Vote for Danny, and you tick the race box too – along with others: multi-culti, liberal, high culture. Worth considering, that.

It goes downhill from there. Nakamoto and Musk are both about money. Wealth! Filthy lucre! The source of all evil! From there it’s but a hop, skip and jump to the admiration of capitalism, and this simply won’t do.

Are you out of your mind, chaps? Guardian readers must have money, the more the better, this goes without saying. But this must be accompanied by attacks on capitalism, not accolades for its practitioners. Such attacks a) prove PC credentials, which is de rigueur for Guardian readers, and b) if successful, may stop readers of the less fashionable newspapers from acquiring money.

Reconsider, that’s the upshot. And we haven’t yet talked about your winner yet.

True, Snowden gave America a black eye, which is good. He also tossed morals aside for cheap publicity, which is even better. But then he had to go and become Putin’s friend, which is ambivalent.

On the one hand, Putin is heir to the fine Soviet tradition of equality for all at the price of concentration camps for many. And the camps may not even have existed, as The Manchester Guardian, as it was then, explained to its readers. So far so good.

But Putin has also banned homosexual propaganda in schools. That was a selfless act, of course, considering that he himself is reputed to favour boys. But in spite of such praiseworthy private predilections, in public he has come out as a homophobe. Now tell me who your friends are, and all that. Putin is Snowden’s friend, so what does this make Snowden? Also a homophobe, and that’s worse than being a concentration camp overseer.

Don’t you feel for Guardian readers? Every day they have to meet new challenges, resolve new conflicts. Careful with those dilemmas, chaps, they just might gore you with their horns.

 

P.S. Nelson Mandela is still dead.

 

 

I’ve suggested a few times that the problem with lefties is that they’re not only strident but actually stupid.

Andrew Sullivan, The Times US columnist, has kindly helped my case along with yet another diatribe that doesn’t add up on even the simplest of levels.

Actually, Mr Sullivan’s Wikipedia entry identifies him as a conservative, but then political nomenclatures mean so little these days that they can be safely disregarded.

In the past Mr Sullivan didn’t bolster his conservative credentials by editing The New Republic, a publication to the right of Pravda circa 1970 only marginally and not invariably.

Mr Sullivan is an HIV-positive homosexual, which by itself doesn’t disqualify him as a conservative. However, a few years ago he posted anonymous on-line ads for unprotected anal sex, “preferably with other HIV-positive men”. I’m sure he had his reasons but these must have had little to do with promoting a conservative agenda.

In his articles Mr Sullivan consistently comes out on the left side of the watershed, supporting such unconservative causes as same-sex marriage, progressive taxation, anti-discrimination law, Obamacare and what not.

This time he has uncorked a double whammy. As a political leftie, he attacked Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh, the conservative talk-show host, for taking issue with the Pope’s Marxist remarks; as a Catholic leftie, he supported those remarks. Since we still retain some vestiges of free speech, he’s entitled to his views, of course.

Alas, in the process Mr Sullivan showed his ignorance of politics, economics, Christianity in general, Catholicism in particular, rhetoric and logic. Pretty good going for a 1,000-word piece.

In a general and typically vacuous remark, Sullivan claims that Christianity takes no political sides: “To co-opt Christianity for either side in the pursuit and transference of power is to miss the core point. Jesus had no politics, because he was utterly uninterested in power, as the world understood it and still does.”

True, Jesus’s kingdom was not of this world, but those of us who aren’t divine have to relate Christianity to worldly issues, such as politics. For example, even left-leaning Catholics took the Franco side in the Spanish Civil War because the Loyalists were murdering Catholics, even the left-leaning ones.

Until the Bolsheviks co-opted the Russian Orthodox church to their cause, it had staunchly opposed them. When a sewer underneath the Lenin mausoleum burst, flooding the interior, Patriarch Tikhon quipped, “The incense fits the relics.” Wasn’t he making a political statement?

Truisms need to be either properly qualified or left unsaid, but obviously Mr Sullivan was playing truant when this lesson was taught. Nor was he paying attention when the Catholic social doctrine was being explained.

He extols the two previous Popes, along with the present one, for taking issue equally with “unfettered market capitalism” and communism. He states correctly that Benedict XVI “always opposed those aspects of [capitalism] that treat material gain as the sole criterion of human happiness.”

This is saying nothing at all. Any Christian, indeed any thinking person, would share this position, opposing materialism in general and its excesses in particular. But this doesn’t mean that he would attack the very principles of free enterprise, as Pope Francis lamentably did:

“As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets… by attacking the structural causes of inequality,” said Pope Francis, “no solution will be found for the world’s problems or, for that matter, to any problems. Inequality is the root of social ills.”

This is criticising free enterprise not from a Christian but from a Marxist perspective. Moreover, it’s passing a purely secular judgment flying in the face of all available evidence. The Pope can be forgiven for his ignorance of such basics; a political writer can’t be. 

Speaking of Pope Francis, Mr Sullivan gushes, “He is the first pontiff to describe himself first and foremost as a sinner.” This is arrant nonsense.

Not only every Pope but also every Christian in history would have described himself in that way. If we weren’t all sinners, Christ’s Passion would have been superfluous, and no Christian can regard it as such.

So here we have another sample of the same “profound ignorance of Catholic social thought” that Sullivan ascribes to Palin and Limbaugh.

In a further demonstration, Sullivan regales us with yet another truism: “a Christian cannot be indifferent to the poor or the unemployed or those without access to basic healthcare.” That’s God’s own truth, but only a complete – and thoroughly politicised – ignoramus would infer that therefore Christians must support the welfare state and nationalised medicine.

A true Christian, especially one who doesn’t advocate anal sex with HIV-positive men, would express his love for the downtrodden through personal charity. This would be a step towards not only helping the poor but also towards saving his own soul.

On the other hand, paying hand over fist into the atheist state’s coffers is the principal (though not sole) cause of the very social ills that so vex His Holiness and Mr Sullivan. It not so much helps the poor as increases their number, while robbing them of any incentive to improve their own lot.

I understand Mr Sullivan’s urge to accuse Sarah Palin of not knowing “what she is talking about”: good knockabout stuff is hard to resist. But before engaging others on such subjects perhaps he should remind himself of this quote from the book he so woefully misunderstands:

“Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.”

 

 

 

Yesterday almost a million protesters (by their own calculation) or a few hundred of them (if you believe Russian TV) flooded Kiev in the biggest demonstration yet.

Laudably, they shouted their yearning for freedom from Russia. Lamentably, they screamed their desire to join the EU.

Amid building barricades, clashing with the police and what have you, the protesters pulled down a Lenin statue and decapitated it to the chorus of “Yanukovych, you’re next!”

There’s an obvious moral difference between beheading a stone sculpture and a living person, but one suspects that Yanukovych was more concerned with the practicalities of the matter. Time to do a runner, I’d suggest. I’m sure there’s a nice Moscow flat being furnished to his taste even as we speak.

Moscow, and indeed all of Russia, is a place still adorned with innumerable statues of Lenin. The first leader of all progressive mankind points to the horizon with one outstretched hand, while clutching a workman’s cap in the other.

One hand says ‘You’re on the right track, comrades’, while the other hints at the great man’s belonging to the united proletarians of the world. The claim was slightly tenuous, considering that Lenin came from a gentry family, but we must realise that the Bolsheviks defined as a proletarian anyone who was one of them, either as a card-carrying member or at least as a supporter. The person’s CV didn’t really come into it.

Lenin’s mummy still lies in its Red Square ziggurat, relics supposed to draw pilgrims from all over the world. Lately, there have been few of those, but such things can change. Putin and his gang certainly hope so.

That, however, is par for the course. What I find amazing is that whenever even a conservative Western commentator, especially one who hasn’t devoted much time to studying Soviet history, comes up with a roll call of evil, it’s usually only Stalin who’s selected to represent the Soviet Union alongside Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot.

That’s most unfair to the memory of the great man who, according to Soviet mythology, dearly loved children. That may have been, but Lenin definitely hated grown-ups.

To express such feelings, Lenin comfortably outscored all other twentieth-century monsters in murder rate, though because of his brief tenure he fell short of matching the absolute numbers of Stalin and Mao.

Lenin, it has to be remembered, drew up the blueprint for acquiring and holding on to power. This was followed by practically all modern revolutionaries, from Lenin’s contemporaries to ours.

That’s why the great man must also be credited with murders he committed vicariously, not just those for which he was directly responsible.

This isn’t to deny that the latter category is quite impressive by itself. There were almost 2,000,000 judicial executions in the first five years of the Soviet regime, on Lenin’s watch, plus untold and uncounted millions of extra-judicial ones, most of them murdered without even a travesty of justice for no wrong-doing other than belonging to a wrong class or believing in God.

Coming up with a precise number is difficult for records were either not kept or are still classified. Prof. Rummel made a good fist of it in his seminal studies Lethal Politics and Death by Government, in which he used demographic analysis to arrive at a figure of 61 million murdered by the Bolsheviks, at least a third of them in the five years of Lenin’s rule.

To this must be added 10 million victims of the Civil War Lenin unleashed to convince a reluctant populace that paradise on earth had arrived.

Lenin must also be credited with the technique of didactically starving to death those who are slow to see the light. About 7,300,000 died of starvation in the 1921-1923 famine, half of them by intentional democide, half as a result of Lenin’s catastrophic agricultural policies.

The great humanist was also in tune with modern atheism, except that he tended to express his innermost beliefs more forcefully than even Richard Dawkins.

More than 40 thousand priests (and 10 times as many parishioners) were murdered in all sorts of horrific ways while Lenin was still alive (I’ll spare you the details). Bolshevik gangs avidly destroyed the relics of Orthodox saints and, when Lenin declared the time was right, plundered church valuables.

For the great humanist the time was right when peasants in the Volga region and elsewhere were, in his phrase, “swelling from starvation” and therefore too weak to resist. But it was not all about money: Lenin never ignored the human factor.

In his secret order of 19 March, 1922, he wrote, “…removal of valuables… must be carried out with merciless resolve and in the shortest possible time. The more representatives of the reactionary bourgeoisie and clergy we shall manage to shoot in the process, the better. It is now that we must teach that scum a lesson so that they will not even dare think of any kind of resistance for several decades.”

The aspiring mummy saw the future with the clarity of a prophet. It was indeed several decades before any resistance to his brainchild began in Russia and elsewhere. It’s still going on strong enough in the Ukraine to smash a Lenin statue, though not strong enough in Russia to toss the Lenin mummy into a rubbish dump.

But it’s time Lenin be given pride of place – first place! – in the rota of murderous tyrants. If looked at dispassionately and fairly, he’d be in contention for the undisputed title of the most evil man in history, edging out Stalin, Hitler and Mao.

As a concluding aside, have you ever wondered why such ogres – thousands of them – appeared specifically in the twentieth century? This is one for later.

Wasn’t it Nelson Mandela who once said, “But I say unto you, Love your enemies…”?

No? Well, you can understand my mistake. Amid a dozen pages of gushing hagiography one of our broadsheets actually did say that Mandela taught the people to forgive their enemies. The credulous type that I am, I assumed he and Jesus Christ had somehow morphed into the same person.

However, the third day has come and Nelson Mandela still hasn’t risen. This must come as a shock to anyone subjected to the surfeit of lachrymose emotion pouring off every newspaper page.

Having lost God, modernity seeks idols, and Mandela was cast in this role while still doing time for terrorism. But all idols are false by definition, and Mandela is no exception.

It stands to reason that political idolatry inevitably focuses on figures of the revolutionary Left. I mean, who’s going to put the likeness of Enoch Powell on his lapel?

Thus the mass murderer Che Guevara still adorns the nicely rounded T-shirts of impressionable Western girls. And everywhere one goes one can still see youngsters sporting Lenin or Stalin pins, along with the ubiquitous hammer and sickle.

Nelson Mandela has arguably outdone them all. But unlike Lenin or Castro, he’s praised not for something he allegedly created (paradise on earth) but for something he allegedly prevented (hell on earth). That means the man isn’t given credit for his actual accomplishments, which upsets the justice seeker in me.

The African National Congress, led by Mandela until his 1963 trial and after his 1990 release, was a Marxist terrorist organisation committed to the violent overthrow of the apartheid government.

As such, it was similar to Angola’s MPLA that in 1975 succeeded in turning the former Portuguese colony into a communist state, complete with an ensuing bloodbath. In that undertaking the MPLA was assisted by the Soviets and their satellites, mainly Cuban and East German.

The ANC received exactly the same assistance: it was after all committed to armed struggle, and the arms had to come from somewhere. And it wasn’t just arms.

East German Stasi helped the ANC set up ‘Quatro’, the detention centre across the border in Angola. There dozens of anti-Marxists were tortured and murdered.

In the same spirit of international cooperation the ANC also received assistance from our own dear IRA. In an arrangement allegedly negotiated by Gerry Adams himself, the IRA sent its bomb-making experts to train aspiring ANC murderers, which greatly improved their efficiency.

However, the ANC didn’t just adopt foreign techniques. Some indigenous touches were added, such as the widespread practice of ‘necklacing’, whereby an old tyre was filled with petrol, put around a dissident’s neck and set alight.

All this was going on at the height of the Cold War, when direct association with the Soviets still carried some stigma in the West. That’s why any evidence of the ANC’s communist nature was routinely hushed up in the West’s predominantly liberal press. Similar discretion was afforded to the strong evidence of Mandela’s membership in the SACU and indeed its Central Committee.

At the same time the excesses of the apartheid government were gleefully portrayed and greatly exaggerated. At a time when millions were being butchered in places like Burundi or Angola, it was that, undeniably nasty but comparatively vegetarian, government that was held up as the epitome of evil (the whites ought to know better, was the underlying racist assumption). South Africa became the proxy battlefield of the Cold War.

The ANC and the SACU worked hand in glove, and most ANC leaders never denied being card-carrying communists. Mandela did, but the evidence since then collected by, among others, the British historian Prof. Stephen Ellis shows his veracity wasn’t of sterling quality.

Also, in the early ‘60s the Special Branch uncovered Mandela’s handwritten essay How to Be a Good Communist, in which the ANC leader promised that “South Africa will be a land of milk and honey under a Communist government.” This too was kept under wraps.

In his biography The Long Walk to Freedom Mandela indirectly admitted communist links: “There will always be those who say that the Communists were using us,” he wrote. “But who is to say that we were not using them?” Either way Mandela clearly supped with the devil, and he never brought a long spoon.

So why did the MPLA succeed in turning Angola into a communist killing field, with millions murdered, and the ANC failed to do so in South Africa, as it had clearly intended?

As with many pivotal historical events, the answer is timing. While the MPLA came to power when the Soviet Union seemed invincible, the ANC did so when the Soviets were going through the turmoil of transferring power from the Party to the KGB (the process otherwise known as ‘the collapse of communism’).

The Soviets otherwise engaged, the ANC wisely decided to eschew a civil war whose outcome would be uncertain and rely instead on negotiation and reconciliation. Mandela, supposedly mellowed by his imprisonment, seemed to be ideally suited to the role of peacemaker. However, in his first speech as a free man, Mandela spouted all the old stuff about class struggle.

But Leninists know that class war can be waged not only by violence but also by what Lenin called ‘legalism’ and what today would be called gradualism. An intelligent man, Mandela grasped the situation. Guns not being the realistic option, he had to become the prophet of peace.

Mandela’s credentials for that role were never questioned and he was universally accepted as the father of his country, the greatest man of our time. What followed was hysterical adulation, which is still ongoing.

Well, the father of his country Mandela undoubtedly was, but the child inherited not so much his intelligence, dignity and charisma as some of his less commendable traits.

The ANC rule has turned a safe, prosperous country into a monumentally corrupt, crime-ridden hellhole. The UN ranks South Africa second in the world for murder and assault, while she comfortably leads the world in rape.

Around 50 people are murdered in South Africa each day, which is more by an order of magnitude than 40 years ago. One in 4,000 women have been raped in the past year alone, while over 25 percent of South African men admit to rape, with half of them having raped more than one person.

Decent citizens, both white and black, cower behind walls and razor wire in their gated communities, while the cities outside are being methodically turned into slums. I suggest you visit http://www.slideshare.net/ChrisWhitby/the-death-of-johannesburg-8835174 for pictorial illustration (reference kindly provided by a reader of mine).

Regardless of his hands-on participation or lack thereof, Mandela is responsible for anything perpetrated on his watch by the organisation he led. Richard Nixon didn’t personally pick that Watergate lock either, but he deserved opprobrium.

So does Mandela – for all his supposedly fine qualities. Instead he’s being primed for sainthood but this, however, says more about our times than about him.

It’s demonstrable that, though some lefties are also knaves, all are fools.

This doesn’t mean some of them can’t be superficially clever – many are. It’s just that if they were capable of any deeper thought, they wouldn’t be lefties.

Martin Bashir is a case in point. Mr Bashir, you may recall, was first sprinkled with star dust in 1995, when Princess Diana chose him for her cynical PR stunt… sorry, I mean her heart-rending, sainthood-conferring interview.

As she admitted her adultery, the princess’s eyelashes were flapping histrionically, which was supposed to make her look like a victim. Now a conscientious interviewer would have reminded her of the extant English law, according to which cuckolding the heir to the throne is high treason punishable by death.

But Diana had chosen her sounding board wisely. Every close-up of Bashir showed him nodding compassionate understanding with the frequency of a Parkinson’s sufferer.

That performance led to Bashir’s glittering career in America, first with ABC and then with MSNBC. It was from that job that he resigned two days ago following an outcry caused by his comments about Sarah Palin’s alleged stupidity.

By itself, questioning Mrs Palin’s mental prowess isn’t a sacking offence in the alphabet soup of US TV networks. It’s practically a necessary job qualification.

But MSNBC was in a sacking season. Just a few days earlier it had fired the actor Alec Baldwin from his chat show, following another public outcry. This was caused by the actor calling a particularly obnoxious paparazzo a ‘c***-s***ing faggot’ as Mr Baldwin was trying to swipe a dozen cameras away from his face.

When MSNBC didn’t show the same alacrity in sacking Bashir, the other half of the audience demanded that the gander be served with the same sauce as the goose. Bashir tearfully tendered his resignation.

Now what caused all this drama? Commenting on the calamitous US debt, Mrs Palin said, “It’ll be like slavery when that note is due. We are going to beholden to the foreign master.” The grammar is questionable but the economics is hard to fault.

Most of those promissory notes, £17 trillion worth and climbing, are indeed held by foreign investors and states. It’s natural to expect that at some point this may give them undue leverage over the United States, jeopardising the country’s independence – first economic, then political. Though this isn’t the only possible scenario, it’s a plausible one.

In the good leftie tradition Bashir didn’t question the substance of the argument. What caused his outburst was the use of the word ‘slavery’ as a simile. ‘Slavery’ in Bashir’s circles means only one thing: US black slavery in existence until 1863.

This can only be mentioned in the context of a retrospective apology and a promise to compensate the slaves’ descendants by affirmative action and welfare. Mrs Palin used it differently, which is a crime much worse in America than cuckolding the heir to the throne is in England. 

Hence Bashir’s reaction: “Given her well-established reputation as a world-class idiot, it’s hardly surprising that she should choose to mention slavery in a way that is abominable to anyone who knows anything about its abominable history.”

Bashir then read abominable excerpts from the diary of Thomas Thistlewood, an abominable eighteenth-century plantation overseer. The diary describes abominable brutality towards slaves, which included forcing faeces into their mouths.

“When Mrs Palin invokes slavery, she doesn’t just prove her rank ignorance,” went Bashir’s scripted comment. “She confirms if anyone truly qualified for a dose of discipline from Thomas Thistlewood, she would be the outstanding candidate.”

In other words, he thinks that thus supplementing Mrs Palin’s diet would be a fitting punishment for using the word ‘slavery’ in a seemingly innocuous context. Never mind the denotation – the connotation reigns supreme.

Not having had the pleasure of meeting Mrs Palin, I’ll refrain from commenting on her intelligence or education. Nor shall I rebuke Mr Bashir for being nasty to her: she’s a politician after all. I shall, however, comment on Mr Bashir’s own intelligence and education, which on this evidence are both in short supply.

This may come as a surprise to him and most of his viewers, but slavery has existed for most of the 5,000 years of recorded history and – to the extent that there can be any significant history outside the United States – not just in America.

Yet slavery in, say, Hellenic and Christian times, specifically in America, are two different institutions. Christianity preaches the ultimate equality of all human beings. Therefore even nominally Christian slave owners had to believe that slaves were less than human, as proved by their being racially different.

Denials of the slaves’ humanity can be found in the writings of many Founders, especially those like Jefferson and Madison, who were themselves Southern slave owners. This, however, was a specifically American phenomenon, and revolting it was too.

Yet a slave in Greece or Rome was an institutional inferior of his owner, but a metaphysical equal. Usually the master and the slave were the same race, often the same nationality, and the status didn’t carry any particular stigma. It was common, for example, to sell oneself into slavery by way of declaring bankruptcy, and this form of bondage persevered throughout the Middle Ages.

Mr Bashir was clearly unaware of this when he offered his dietary regimen to Mrs Palin. Yet had he prevented his knee from jerking, he would have realised that she probably wasn’t suggesting that in a couple of generations Americans would be eating faeces in a cotton plantation.

She was clearly talking about slavery in its non-American sense, that of economic bondage. Interpreting it the Bashir way testifies only to his own ‘world-class idiocy’ and ‘rank ignorance’. But let’s not be harsh on the poor lad. He does have to make a living in the ‘liberal’ media.

 

P.S. Nelson Mandela still hasn’t risen, but I’ll keep you posted.