Author: Alexander Boot

We all know the instant knock-on effect propaganda can have.

Repeat ‘ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer’ often enough, and perfectly well-behaved Germans will start gassing Jews.

Devote enough column inches to Islamic terrorism, and no corner shop in the north of England will be safe.

Pass a law banning homosexual agitation in schools, and those Russians will start ambushing anyone with a slight lisp and a neatly trimmed moustache.

Are you with me so far? Do you agree that propaganda inevitably has such an immediate effect? That a sweet little boy who likes violent films is guaranteed to turn into a murderous sadist? That a little girl watching a film about prostitutes will tell her mummy that she wants to be a hooker when she grows up, if not sooner?

Well then, you have to agree with Hannes Swoboda, the Austrian leader of Labour MEPs in the European Parliament and Ed Miliband’s best friend.

Displaying the same unshakeable belief in one-to-one causality that I sketched in the previous paragraphs, my friend Hannes (we haven’t met, but any friend of Ed’s is a friend of mine) came up with a ringing – and well-justified! – accusation of the British Tories and especially those vipers from UKIP.

You see, a few days ago a young Italian waiter, who had only arrived in Britain 10 days earlier but had already found a job at a Maidstone restaurant, was beaten to death by English thugs, each one presumably inclined to euroscepticism.

My friend Hannes, no doubt wishing to score some much-needed political points for our mutual friend Ed, put his finger right on the cause of this heinous crime: “The xenophobic, aggressive climate inflamed by populists and by the rhetoric of the Conservatives in government is now leading to murder in the streets of Britain.”

“Campaigns such as vans with slogans telling immigrants to ‘go home’ and continuous negative rhetoric against foreigners – including EU citizens – are creating an ugly mood in Britain,” he added, displaying the unimpeachable logic for which EU officials are so justly famous.

How right he is! Truer words have never been spoken. The Tory government, only barely restrained by its civilised LibDem partners, has unfurled a hateful campaign based on the malicious misconception that anyone living in England should be here legally.

How dare they! The next thing you know they’ll say that everyone living here must be able to read NHS circulars in English, rather than in any of the 17 languages into which they are translated. Then we’ll really know that concentration camps are just round the corner.

What’s the likely – nay, guaranteed – effect of such fascistic propaganda? You’re right, there can be only one outcome. Militant English nationalists will take to the streets looking for Johnny Foreigners to stamp to death.

And this is exactly what those Tory-corrupted, UKIP-inflamed English yobs did in Maidstone. The ultimate blame must be put squarely on the Tories and those UKIP vipers, though the actual perpetrators can’t be wholly excused.

And now it’s time to name and shame those ghastly Brits charged with the murder of the young Italian.

They are: Aleksandras Zuravliovas, 26, Tomas Gelezinis, 30, Saulius Tamoliunas, 23 and Linas Zidonis, 21. Each one of them a Little-Englander whose latent British jingoism was dragged to the surface by the Tories. Makes one ashamed to be British!

These despicable Little-Englanders… Hey, hold on a moment. I’ve just noticed something… The names don’t sound, well, don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly no English jingoist but, and I mean this with all due deference and respect… well, the names don’t quite have the same ring as Thompson or Jones.

Let me check my sources… Oh well, what do you know. The four murderers are actually not English! They happen to be Lithuanian migrants. Blow me dry, wonders will never cease.

Suddenly, and it deeply saddens me to say so, my friend Hannes’s rhetoric begins to sound a smidgen less persuasive. Why, the Tory xenophobes among us may even suggest – wrongly, inexcusably, I hasten to add! – that the case is an argument not for indiscriminate immigration so dear to the EU’s heart but rather against it.

No, that can’t be right. A high EU official imbued with all the intellectual and moral probity of that august organisation can’t possibly be so earth-shatteringly moronic. Especially when he’s a socialist and Ed’s friend.

So he’s got to be right. Any campaign against illegal immigration is guaranteed to have only one possible result. Lithuanians will start murdering Italians en masse, and then woe betide all those French people in Fulham – the Poles and the Czechs know where they live.

Oh to be in the EU, now that autumn’s here. Makes one want to reach for one’s Browning.

 

 

 

By the sound of it, one would think Prince George was baptised not into the Church of England but into a lifelong subscription to The Guardian.

Actually, scratch that. Had that been the case, the BBC wouldn’t have mentioned the event in a little footnote. It would have been the first item on the 9 O’Clock News.

Following the christening, the Archbishop of Canterbury was asked if he’d have any objections to the prince eventually becoming a Buddhist.

Not at all, replied His Grace. He’s ‘perfectly entitled’. And so he would be – as a private person. However, as third in line to the throne, he isn’t, and it’s shocking that the head prelate of our established church would give such an ignorant, wishy-washy answer.

I would have been tempted to ask the Archbishop how far he’s prepared to go in his subversive ecumenism. How about George eventually becoming Muslim King, by the Grace of Allah, of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the Seas? He could be referred to as the Ayatollah and Supreme Leader George VII, thus ensuring the lasting triumph of multi-culti rectitude.

Or a Satanist perhaps? There are quite a few Satanists in Britain and it’s a shame they aren’t represented in the royal succession. If he converts to this venerable faith when he grows up, Prince George will be able to officiate a Black mass and perhaps sacrifice one of those 40 virgins he could borrow from the Muslims.

On second thoughts, we’ve already had a Druid (i.e. pagan) Archbishop of Canterbury. Why not a Satanist king? No reason at all.

Now it’s useful to remember that such archaic, stick-in-the-mud, not with-it but still valid charters as the 1689 Bill of Rights, the 1701 Act of Settlement and the 1800 Act of the Union are unequivocal on succession. Even someone who is, ever has been, or is married to a Catholic is disbarred.

At the risk of trespassing on His Grace’s theological territory, one may suggest that the distance between Catholicism and Anglicanism is considerably shorter than that between any Christian confession and Buddhism – or any other non-Christian creed.

Is the Most Reverend Justin Welby aware of the constitutional makeup of the realm? Or is he so consumed by the urgent desire to be liked by everyone that he simply doesn’t care about such inconsequential details?

He isn’t the only one. HRH Prince Charles, who – one shudders to think – may become king in our lifetime, keeps insisting that he wants to be known as ‘Defender of Faiths’, not by the traditional (since the sixteenth century) title of ‘Defender of the Faith.’ Jack of all faiths, Supreme Governor of none.

Britain, HRH correctly observes, is multi-culti, and her head of state must reflect in his person the absolute equality of all subjects and therefore of all faiths. Yet equality of everything presupposes belief in nothing. All faiths can be deemed equal only if one regards them as equally irrelevant. And even if HRH feels that way, he’s best-advised to keep such thoughts to himself. His ancestors used to behead people for less.

No wonder Prince Charles dreads becoming our king, a feeling widely shared by many of his future subjects. He describes the throne as a ‘prison’ and claims that he’ll only discharge royal duties ‘joylessly’ as they’ll make him less free to pursue his other interests. In that he’s beginning to sound exceedingly like his ‘I-Want-To-Be-Me’ ex-wife.

Whatever the Prince’s outside interests are, they clearly include neither history nor constitutional law nor theology. He’s so pre-occupied with the environment that he has no time to contemplate how the environment came into being.

Oh, would the next generations of our royals remember that their rights as individuals are superseded by their duty to serve the nation. At times one begins to suspect that they are all republicans at heart.

If that’s the case, then their actions and pronouncements become intelligible – what better way of undermining our constitution than having its living embodiments treat it in such a cavalier fashion.

Her Majesty clearly realises that her power is derived from God – as defined and worshipped by the Christians. Too bad her successors don’t.

Perhaps they should seek guidance from our prelates… No, forget I said that. Let’s just pray that the Queen stays with us for many more years.

 

 

 

Say what you will about the failure of our public education (I know I often do), but in isolated instances it can boast of impressive results.

Occasionally it produces an amalgam of erudition and slight roughness around the edges. Both were evinced by a Royal Marine sergeant who, along with his two comrades, is facing court martial for murdering a Taliban prisoner.

Sweeping up a field in which a Taliban attack had been stopped in its tracks by an Apache attack helicopter, the three soldiers found a badly wounded Taliban fighter.

After a brief discussion of how to deal with the dying man, the sergeant in command of the party put a 9mm round into his chest. In doing so he delivered himself of a Shakespearean quote, offset by a word more commonly used in our schools.

“There you are. Shuffle off this mortal coil you c***,” said the sergeant. “It’s nothing you wouldn’t do to us.” Turning to his men, he added, “Obviously this doesn’t go anywhere, fellas. I’ve just broken the Geneva Convention.”

The incident was captured by the soldiers’ helmet cameras and later downloaded by an investigator who then informed the authorities. Now the three men are on trial for their lives.

There’s no doubt they behaved in a beastly fashion, and it’s not up to me to pass judgment on the minutiae of the legalities involved. The sergeant himself knew he had violated the Geneva Convention, and he should know. He may well have broken, as the prosecution states, the rules of war.

My contention, however, is that in this day and age it’s utter hypocrisy to insist that any war, and especially counterinsurgency, can be waged to a set of immutable rules. Just look at some of the offences proscribed by the very same Geneva Convention the defendants self-admittedly broke.

Some of the gravest breaches of the Convention include:

Wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health

Presumably this refers to inflicting such things on those not directly engaged in battle, especially civilians. Out of interest, how does this tally with carpet bombing of inhabited areas? The answer is, it doesn’t. Such bombing may be dictated by military necessity and, much as we all regret that civilians have to die, we accept it – Geneva Convention or no Geneva Convention.

Taking of hostages

How else can a regular army protect itself when fighting against guerrillas supported by practically the whole population? Let’s say an army occupies a town, where women and children, not to mention the men, routinely carry out terrorist acts, killing soldiers in all sorts of savage ways. How many corpses with their genitals stuffed in their mouths will it take for the army to start taking hostages – and carrying out retaliatory executions if the murders continue? How likely will the occupying force be to stick to the letter of the Geneva Convention, not to mention the ethos of human rights?

Extensive destruction and appropriation of property not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly

Was the destruction of Dresden justified by military necessity? Dropping A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? A sustained bombing attack on Belgrade, when no war had been declared? How much property was destroyed (if not appropriated) when the bombs hit the Chinese Embassy there? Was it militarily necessary? Or was it unlawful and wanton? Western forces fighting against Taliban insurgents routinely bulldoze houses from which shots have been fired – even if the snipers have already been killed. What does the fine letter of the law have to say about that?

This isn’t trying to justify what the defendants did. It’s just that we have to accept that the same behaviour that’s unquestionably criminal in peacetime isn’t always so unequivocal in war – especially when fighting against an enemy that wears no uniforms and perpetrates unspeakable atrocities not only on the occupying force but also on its own people.

The Marines shot the terrorist at a time when Taliban was conducting an indiscriminate bombing campaign of both civilians and Western forces in Helmand.

The sergeant’s own Commando Brigade had lost seven dead and 42 wounded. The insurgents had dismembered some of the dead (possibly before they died) and hung their body parts off trees, for the delectation of their surviving comrades.

Soon thereafter three of the survivors, including the Shakespearean scholar, shot one of the presumptive dismemberers. The sergeant may well be convicted by the court martial, and this may well be just, but I doubt he will be blamed by his comrades who know that any day their own body parts may be found dangling off trees.

Stating the case for the prosecution, David Perry, QC, said that the victim “was entitled to be treated with dignity and respect.” Well, respect is a two-way street. Expecting soldiers to respect those who butcher and carve up their comrades is presuming too much on human goodness.

Personally, I hope the judges will find mercy in their hearts, while the defence will blame it all on Shakespeare so beloved of the defendants:

Oft have I heard that grief softens the mind,
And makes it fearful and degenerate;
Think therefore on revenge and cease to weep.

“But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.”

Edmund Burke wrote this in 1790. One wonders what he’d say if he could come back in 2013. Can’t you just hear him say it? “This is hell. Can I please go back to heaven?”

And that would be even before he saw a beheading video on Facebook. Mind you, in Burke’s own time people weren’t averse to taking in the odd execution. In the absence of electronic communications it was Tyburn Hill that provided the ghoulish entertainment.

Thousands used to gather to watch people dancing the Tyburn jig, which wouldn’t be my first choice of choreographic display. But different times bring different mores – and different experiences.

Burke wouldn’t have batted an eyelid at the sight of faeces, animal or otherwise, adorning most London streets. We on the other hand would probably wince and pinch our nostrils.

On the other hand, the great Whig would have been appalled by the dominant atheism of modernity, something we regard as par for the course.

It’s in this context that Facebook’s decision to allow decapitation videos must be seen. If in 1790 attending public executions went against the diminishing but still dominant ethos of society, watching beheadings today fits right into the ethos.

It was mostly riffraff that flocked to Tyburn. It’ll be mostly the middle classes glued to the screen as a human head gets chopped off in full colour.

If cheap, vulgar, embarrassing voyeurism was a spice then, today it’s the main course. Our desensitised, dehumanised, debauched masses have little else to dine on.

Oh yes, we have art, as defined and touted by Nicholas Serota and other champions of modern aesthetics. What would Burke say if before returning to heaven he had a short stopover at Tate Britain?

He’d stare with blank incomprehension at the sculpture of a man urinating into a bucket. When told that this foul vulgarity is the frontrunner for our top prize this year, he’d demand a clarification. If Serota or some other subversive cretin then explained to him that this is art, Burke would probably express solicitous concern for the chap’s mental health.

If this is liberty, he’d say, give me tyranny any day. Then he’d try to explain that, when liberty is divorced from concomitant responsibility, it becomes a suicide pact. Serota wouldn’t understand.

This is what people want, he’d argue. There’s no higher law than that of supply and demand. People demand, we supply.

If people’s taste for high art can only be satisfied by pickled animals, unmade beds and men pissing, who are we to argue? And if millions want to watch a torrent of blood spurting out of severed veins and arteries, isn’t it our duty to put the show on their computer screens?

It’s true that these days no higher law than supply-demand exists. It’s also true that a society built around the needs, tastes and interests of common man will inevitably be defined by free-market transactions.

Burke would, in fact on numerous occasions did, argue that such a society could never be just, virtuous and long-lived. But today such arguments would fall on ears deafened by spiritual, aesthetic and moral vulgarity reigning supreme.

On second thoughts, having allowed my imagination to run wild enough to fancy a confrontation between Burke, our great thinker, and Serota, our illustrious director of the Tate, perhaps I should go a step further.

What if the next decapitation video featured Nicholas Serota as the star attraction? Suddenly the idea seems to have some merit, wouldn’t you say?

 

 

 

 

Don’t be silly: of course I don’t mean Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS, the intelligence arm of the SS.

That SD is no longer in business. However, the German Social Democratic party still is, and it may yet save Dave from himself and us from Dave.

You see, Angela Merkel’s near-landslide victory in the last elections didn’t get her a parliamentary majority. A coalition is necessary, and Angela’s previous partners, Free Democrats, got wiped out. This leaves the latter-day SD in pole position.

This is bad news for my friend Angela and even worse news for my friend Dave. The plan they hatched together to make Dave look like a statesman may well be lying in ruins.

The plan bears every hallmark of Angela’s capacity for dialectical thinking she developed when holding a nomenklatura position in East Germany’s Kommunistischer Jugendverband Deutschlands. Officially the youth league of the communist party, it was in fact the breeding ground for the secret police.

If a combination of communism and spying can’t teach an impressionable youngster dialectical thinking, I don’t know what can. Being a bright person, Angela got the full benefit of her training.

The key concept there isn’t that the end justifies the means. It’s that the means, whatever they are, don’t need justifying. The end is all that matters.

You may call this cynicism if you wish, but I’ll call it ideal training for modern politics. This Angela demonstrated when Dave came to her with his hand outstretched.

Dave, in common with all our spivocrats, has staked his political future on keeping Britain in the EU. Not because this is good for the country, you understand, but because it’s good for Dave.

The trouble is that not only is Dave facing a stiff and growing opposition within his own party, but UKIP is threatening his continuing political survival from without.

To placate those described by John Major as ‘bastards’ Dave had to promise on a stack of Bibles (New Edition) to hold a national in-or-out referendum after the next election, thus painting himself into a corner.

Even assuming that he wins the next election outright, and this isn’t the way to bet, Dave will then have to ensure the ‘in’ vote in the referendum. The ‘out’ result will mean not only out of the EU but also out with Dave. An immediate leadership challenge will move into Number 10 a young Eurosceptic who’ll claim he was right all along.

Yet launching a no-holds-barred campaign for an ‘in’ vote is a non-starter for Dave. It would only serve to deepen the rift with his own party, while further empowering UKIP.

That’s where Angela’s dialectical thinking came in handy. Dave, who isn’t manifestly endowed with a capacity for dialectical or any other thinking, came to her for help and she didn’t disappoint.

“Dave,” said Angela, “don’t be a dummkopf. You’re not as deep in the dreck as you think. You can still do it, mein schatze.”

“Yeah,” said Dave dolefully. “And pigs will fly.”

“Schweinen don’t fly,” explained Angela sternly. “But politicians, even Englische politicians, must think.”

She then outlined her dialectical stratagem. Dave will declare that he could repatriate every conceivable power from the EU, making departure from the Union redundant. For her part, Angela will use her influence to toss Dave enough repatriation bones to make Britain appear relatively independent.

Once the ‘bastards’ have gnawed on the bones, and Dave has been firmly ensconced at Number 10, the bones will be withdrawn. It’ll be business as usual. Job done.

“Yes, but will it work?” asked Dave, his voice full of hope.

“Don’t be a dummkopf, Dave,” said Angela. “We’ve done it before, we’ll do it again. Don’t you worry your pretty little head, schatze. Alles will be in ordnung.”

The best laid schemes of mice and men, and all that. The problem is that Angela’s likely partners in the next coalition, the SD party, never received training in dialectics courtesy of the communist party and its secret police.

They are quite obtuse in their commitment to a single pan-European, and ideally global, state. Pure Marx, that, unadulterated by KGB dialectics.

This means they won’t allow even token concessions to Britain that might grant her a special status within the EU. So there goes Angela’s plan right out of the fenster (window to Dave).

Much as I find the ideals of social democracy hard to sympathise with, in this isolated instance I feel like screaming, “Hoch SD!” These Germans may yet even out the English playing field.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you need any reminder of the abyss into which we’re falling, look no further than football.

However, if you do want to look further than football, you may. Why, you can even cast your eye across the Atlantic. You’ll find the same nonsense there.

But football first. Greg Dyke, the FA chairman, has put together a commission to pull English football out of its dire straits. Now he has been forced to make an abject apology.

Not for putting a commission together, you understand, but for including only white males in it, eight of them.

Helen Grant, who combines two portfolios (Sports and Equality) no sane country should have at all, piled her two hats one on top of the other. “Sports’ governing bodies,” she decreed, “must reflect the make-up of the diverse society that we live in.”

Presumably this means that four of the members ought to be women and at least one black. To everyone’s regret, the commission is too small to be comprehensively representative, which suggests only two possible solutions.

First, some members of the new-fangled body should combine in their bodies several of the groups demanding a fair shake. One, for example, could be a crippled black Muslim lesbian, while another could be an Indian homosexual Buddhist. This is just a suggestion – the possibilities are endless.

Another solution, and this is probably the one our government would prefer, is to enlarge the august body, let’s say by a factor of 10. That way Helen could have a broader canvas on which to paint her demographic picture. And while at it, she could also insist that Greg Dyke change his surname to a more politically correct Alternative-Lifestyle.

Interestingly, the competence of the prospective candidates to do the job didn’t even come into it. Never mind the suitability, feel the calculator.

This kind of madness isn’t confined to football. In politics too, our governing bodies, executive, judicial or legislative, must have this piebald quality before anything else, or rather to the exclusion of anything else. By anything else I mean the actual ability to govern, which is no longer an essential requirement.

Yet relying on actuarial techniques in composing any governing body is neither grownup nor clever. Like most PC perversions, including the notion of political correctness itself, we got this one second-hand, courtesy of our partners in the ‘special relationship’.     

Americans, being as they are a genuine melting pot of a nation, are obsessed with calculating proportions of various groups, for example those serving in Congress or sitting on the Supreme Court. It’s as if the 27 current amendments to the US Constitution have been augmented by a 28^th: “The demographic composition of every political institution shall faithfully reflect that of the nation at large.”

This type of thinking is seen not only among assorted lefties, who don’t know any better, but also among conservatives, who should. Thus American ‘paleoconservatives’ routinely accuse the neoconservatives of being more loyal to Israel than to the good ole US of A.

This accusation is based on nothing other than the high proportion of Jews, all secular, among the neocons. Amazingly the neocons themselves agree to think along the same lines.

Thus spake the founder of their movement Irving Kristol: “…a disproportionate number of neoconservatives are Jews.” The word ‘disproportionate’ suggests some transgression against the 28^th Amendment, yet unwritten.

By using this word, Kristol, who was himself of Jewish origin, regurgitated the old anti-Semitic arguments used against pernicious cabals, such as Russian revolutionaries, to name one. These arguments are usually unsound even on the crude level at which they are pitched.

For example, the proportion of Jews in the first Soviet governments, while higher than in the whole country, was roughly the same as the proportion of Jews in the urban (in other words literate) population – and actually lower than the proportion of those with secondary education or higher. It was these groups whence most Bolsheviks came.

There are enough valid reasons to criticise the neocons not to have to take issue with their ethnic make-up. Similarly, our craven, incompetent, self-serving political parties – and the bodies they put together – must be not only criticised but, in an ideal world, disbanded for the damage they do.

Anticipating such criticism, and trying to preempt the more decisive steps, they try to do exactly what Helen has accused Greg of not doing: making sure they incorporate a satisfactory number of those from the groups perceived as oppressed minorities (women qualify as such, whatever the calculator says).

Personally, I wouldn’t mind having a cabinet exclusively made up of camp black cripples, provided they could do the job better than the current lot (not a tall order, actually). Conversely, if eight white men is the best the FA can do, fine. I mean I don’t know many women who possess world-class expertise in training generations of footballers.

Alas, such views are in a despised minority. Which is why our government will continue to do what it sees as best for the country. In other words, sweet FA.

 

 

 

 

Never mind the sack. Roy Hodgson, according to the groundswell of opinion, deserves to be drawn and quartered.

He may feel proud of himself for coaching England into the World Cup. But if he thinks that’s any excuse for offending the delicate sensibilities of modern footballers, he’d better think again.

You may suggest that said footballers don’t always present a picture of refinement to the outside world. Most of them can’t string two words together without inserting an obscenity in between. And numerous videos of swinish behaviour, fisticuffs, orgies and drunken all-nighters do suggest that not all of their behavioural patterns have come from Debrett’s Etiquette for Girls.

But make no mistake about it: underneath the rough exterior lurk delicate, sensitive and easily woundable souls. Even though these metaphysical entities may not have been informed by any traditional civilisation, they take their cue unerringly from our infinitely more progressive time.

They hear the call of Zeitgeist in every tonal detail, if only as an inner voice. And it communicates in no uncertain terms the first commandment of modernity: thou shalt take offence. What thou taketh offence at is immaterial.

If any perfectly normal word can also have a pejorative meaning, then it’s offensive even if used in its usual sense. You may not actually feel offended, but that doesn’t matter. You must feign offence to strike a blow for Zeitgeist, to show you too can get in touch with your feminine side.

During his halftime talk at the England-Poland match, Hodgson tried to communicate to one footballer that he should pass to another more often. To illustrate the point, he told a feeble joke involving an astronaut and a monkey launched into space together. The monkey is told to perform all the in-flight procedures, and when the astronaut wonders what on earth he’s supposed to do, he’s told, “Feed the monkey.”

Now no one will ever confuse Roy Hodgson with a stand-up comedian but, as far as illustrations go, this unfunny joke works, while its offensive potential isn’t immediately discernible. At least that’s what you’d think.

Well, you have another think coming. You see, the footballer who was supposed to be fed passes more often is part black, and the word ‘monkey’ can be used as a racial slur. Granted, it can also be used in a stylistically neutral fashion, to denote a small simian, which is how Hodgson clearly used it.

But that doesn’t matter. Our courts have ruled that a racial offence is anything the chap on the receiving end regards as such, and never mind linguistic casuistry. And what’s good for our judges is certainly good for footballers or anyone else.

The only way to avoid having to issue a humiliating public apology, which is what Hodgson had to do, is to ban the use of potentially offensive words, whatever the context. Never mind the denotation, feel the connotation.

The trouble is that there are so many such connotational epithets that it’s no easy task to expurgate them all from every dictionary. But that’s fine for our cause is just. We have time. Whatever it takes.

‘Monkey’ must be the first to go, followed by ‘banana’, which is henceforth to be described as a ‘curved yellow fruit’. 

‘Hook’, the boxing term, is no good because Jews are often called ‘hook-nosed’. Let’s call it a ‘sideways blow’ instead.

‘Bean’, used in some quarters to insult Mexicans, must be called ‘pulse’, as in ‘green pulse’, ‘kidney pulse’, ‘haricot  pulse’ and so forth.

‘Niggardly’ is out (in fact a New York official once had to apologise for using the word in a speech), as is ‘reneging’. Even ‘Niagara Falls’ is suspect for sharing too many letters with you know what. 

‘Towel’, combined with ‘head’, may be used to insult Muslims. It should therefore be renamed ‘large drying cloth’.

‘Frog’ must become ‘jumping amphibian’, while ‘sauerkraut’ will be replaced with ‘pickled cabbage’ to avoid any offensive confusion with Frau Merkel in a bad mood.

The film ‘Bend It Like Beckham’ must change its title to ‘Curve It Like Beckhalalbeef’ or else ‘Spin It Like Beckosherchicken’.

The term ‘Monkey Trials’ doesn’t belong in history books. I’d suggest ‘Trials to uphold the God-given right to teach that there is no God.’

It’s not my intention to come anywhere near to compiling a comprehensive list. This will be the job for our government’s next Royal Charter, which they must draw up while they are at it. My task is more modest: to outline the direction we should all follow to avoid the kind of trouble Roy has found himself in.

And you don’t know the half of it: I for one was deeply offended to hear Roy Hodgson lead his team in a pre-match rendition of God Save the Queen. Surely it ought to be Allah Save the Female Constitutional Monarch?

 

 

 

“Throughout 2013 many renowned institutions will participate in the Netherlands-Russia Year, celebrating the rich bilateral relations between these two countries. A busy events calendar is underway throughout the year.”

Congratulations to the Amsterdam website for this clairvoyant quote of last year. The events calendar of the Netherlands-Russia Year has indeed been busy, if perhaps not quite in the way the author anticipated.

One event involved a senior Russian diplomat (a euphemism for an SVR, previously KGB, spy) Dmitry Borodin.

In the good tradition of Russians certain of their impunity, Dmitry and his wife were making life difficult for their neighbours in The Hague. Reports of their noisy, drunken escapades were piling up, but there was little the police could do: the louts were protected by diplomatic immunity.

Finally, the police had no choice but to act. Mrs Borodin arrived home, driving in an erratic way suggesting that the car wasn’t being operated by someone in full command of the vehicle, or indeed herself.

This supposition the inebriated Mrs Borodin went on to prove empirically by playing pinball with four parked cars before staggering home. The assault on their property proved too much for the frugal Dutch. The police were called and this time they responded.

They arrested the woman and then visited her flat, where they found Mr Borodin drunkenly abusing the couple’s little children, pulling their hair and slapping them around. Now no cops in the world would stand by idly watching this sort of thing, diplomatic immunity or no diplomatic immunity.

The officers got into the act, only to have the drunken brute turn against them. In the ensuing fracas, the diplomat was roughed up and arrested.

Acting on the letter of the 1961 Geneva Convention governing such matters, the Russian Foreign Ministry issued a stern protest, demanding an apology. Diplomats, according to the note, are off limits for criminal prosecution and their bodies mustn’t be confused with punching bags.

Not being an expert on diplomatic law, I can’t judge its letter, but I’m intrigued by its spirit. Suppose Borodin had been actually killing his children, rather than merely brutalising them. Wouldn’t the police have been within their right, at least moral right, to do whatever it took to stop the outrage?

Where do you draw the line beyond which human laws have to be superseded by humane ones? Anyway, as is the diplomatic convention, the Dutch government dutifully apologised. Case closed?

If both countries in the conflict were civilised, it would be. But since Russia was one party involved, it wasn’t.

Onno Elderenbosch, the deputy head of the Dutch embassy in Moscow, is 68 years old. I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Mr Elderenbosch, but on general principle I’d venture a guess that his domestic behaviour differed from Mr Borodin’s.

I may be too hung up on ethnic stereotypes, and if you feel that way I’m sorry. But I just can’t imagine a Dutch diplomat on the cusp of old age getting pissed out of his mind and brutalising little tots, while his wife was drunkenly smashing her car into several parked vehicles.

Anyway, when Mr Elderenbosch got home yesterday, he saw two electricians tinkering with the fuse box in the staircase. When the diplomat opened his door, the ‘electricians’ pushed him inside, tied him up with tape, beat him up savagely and trashed his flat. Then they wrote ‘LGBT’ in lipstick on a mirror and rushed out, leaving the diplomat with what the reports describe as ‘light wounds’.

I’m amazed they didn’t write ‘KGB lives, okay?’ If the thugs were indeed LGBT activists, they’d have little reason to single out a representative of the country where their kind have had a free ride longer than anywhere else.

Holland was the first Western country to legalise, well, just about everything, including homomarriage, drugs (albeit consumed on designated premises), euthanasia – you name it. Gay Day parades, while repulsive everywhere, raise enormity to a whole new level in Amsterdam. Same-sex couples copulate in every imaginable fashion, with the police looking on with indulgent smiles; the city’s picturesque canals swell with discarded condoms.

Moreover, none of this is a secret. Everybody knows that LGBT activists love Holland more than any other country on earth. So I’m going to stick my neck out: there’s no way Mr Elderenbosch was assaulted by chaps identified by that acronym.

The incident bears every hallmark of tit-for-tat retaliation, reviving the memory of the Cold War. In those days, any time a diplomat was roughed up in Russia, his counterpart would be roughed up in the diplomat’s country.

A broken arm in Moscow spelled a broken arm in Washington, as everyone knew would be the case. Secret services often acted outside official channels, and the Geneva convention had no jurisdiction in the clandestine battlefield.

But the battlefield has been converted into luxury condominiums, hasn’t it? The Russians, though regrettably still a bit rough around the edges, are just like us now, aren’t they? Democracy and all?

If these are the questions you ask, you ought to thank Col. Putin and his sponsoring organisation. Their answer is as informative as it is unequivocal.

 

George and Boris are falling over themselves to ingratiate Britain to the Chinese. Actually, they’re also falling over each other, for the Chancellor cunningly scheduled his China trip for the same time as the Mayor.

Can’t let that overambitious chap steal the whole show, can we now? So George stole Boris’s thunder by declaring that visas for rich Chinese will henceforth be fast-tracked.

Boris was furious. His show can have only one star! Crikey! Gosh! Bloody nerve! Who the bloody hell does he think he is, God bloody almighty?

But Boris is no pushover. He wasn’t going to bend over and take it like a man. George’s generosity, he complained, doesn’t go far enough. As far as he’s concerned, anybody with a fat wallet is welcome, regardless of how the wallet got lined.

“We will have to see how this scheme actually works,” Boris hissed, gnashing his teeth. “The detail is a little bit unclear to us at the moment.”

That may be, but the underlying principle is clear enough. In fact, it was first enunciated with soldierly directness by the Roman emperor Vespasian. “Pecunia non olet” (money doesn’t stink), he quipped when questioned about charging tax on the urine sold to tanners by public lavatories.

It’s disconcerting that after two millennia of subsequent civilisation we still haven’t outlived this rather crass philosophy. Utility reigns, okay? The greatest good of the greatest number of spivs. What’s there not to like?

If our olfactory sense were sharper, we’d detect the stench of slavery emanating from Chinese money. But we don’t want our noses to be sensitive. We pinch our nostrils and ask Chinese visitors to sign on the bottom line.

The bottom line is all that matters. Never mind the scruples, feel the wealth.

In fact, China’s population is consigned to what only Protagorian sophistry would prevent one from calling slave labour. But in the good, if relatively recent, tradition of materialistic amorality, we choose not to ponder the ethical implications.

When paying £1 for a pair of cotton underpants made in China, where the average labour cost is one-thirtieth that in America, we refrain from doing simple mental arithmetic. Most of us would be incapable of such mental exertions anyway, after a couple of generations of comprehensively equal education for all.

Yet if we were to add up the cost of the cotton, utility prices, depreciation of the factory plant, manufacturer’s mark-up, cuts taken off the top by various middlemen and retailers, cost of transportation and storage, customs duties and many other things I’ve undoubtedly left out, we’d realise that the poor devils who stitch those underpants together probably still subsist on a small bowl of rice a day.

Without splitting legal hairs, they are slaves – to exactly the same regime that has unapologetically murdered 60 million of its citizens and brutalised the rest. But hey, show us piles of money and we’ll overlook piles of corpses. They don’t smell either.

In the past, before Jesus Christ became a superstar, England took a dim view of slavery. A report of a case as far back as 1569 states that: “… one Cartwright brought a slave from Russia and would scourge him; for which he was questioned; and it was resolved, that England was too pure an air for a slave to breathe, and so everyone who breathes it becomes free. Everyone who comes to this island is entitled to the protection of English law, whatever oppression he may have suffered and whatever may be the colour of his skin.”

Chinese slaves don’t travel to Britain these days – they can’t afford to. It’s their masters, the Chinese answer to the Cartwrights of yesteryear, who are welcomed with open arms by the spivs who govern us.

Rather than barring entry to anyone whose fortune has been made by criminal means, be that slavery or racketeering, our ‘leaders’ want to spare them the inconvenience of waiting for a visa. Moral considerations need not apply when a few bob are on the line.

So fine, pecunia non olet. Money doesn’t stink. It’s only our political class that does.  

 

The temporary closure of the US government has opened the floodgates to all sorts of diatribes in our newspapers, regardless of their political preferences.

Just this once there’s no divergence of opinion: all commentators, Right, Left or Centre, agree that it’s the obstinacy of the Republicans that threatens the wellbeing of America and of the world she’s supposed to lead.

Obamacare, which most commentators generously admit is flawed, nonetheless reflects the will of the people. Democracy has spoken, and now those rightwing nutters are trying to sabotage it.  

Such unity would be touching if the underlying judgment weren’t so flawed. And as is usually the case, a silly underlying judgment produces arguments unworthy of otherwise intelligent men.

In his article America Is Becoming Ungovernable Max Hastings describes Obamacare as “the major achievement” of the current administration. In the process he dismisses out of hand (that is, without bothering to argue the toss) the Republicans’ claim that the plan “will make medical care more costly for middle America, and extend the reach of the hated federal government.”

Rather, the bill will put “health insurance within reach of the poorest Americans… Long-term, it is intended to lower the horrific costs of public healthcare.”

Now this long-term benefit is a matter of pure conjecture, whereas the short-term hike in healthcare costs is a matter of fact: since the bill was passed they’ve already increased by roughly a third. Wait till it goes into effect.

I’d also be tempted to mention that Obama’s project puts medical care on a slippery slope to nationalisation. Republicans may or may not hate the federal government but, the example of our own dear NHS before them, they see no compelling reason to love state control over medicine.

Mr Hastings gets so emotional that he slips into ignorant tirades most unfortunate in a professional historian. For example he accuses the Republicans of defying “the intentions of the Founding Fathers of the constitution as flagrantly as the gun nuts who exploit the 1776 provision for militias to bear arms, to enable modern mass murderers to equip themselves with machine-guns.”

The US Constitution was adopted in 1789 and its Second Amendment in 1791, not 1776, the year America issued her Declaration of Independence. Historians shouldn’t confuse the two documents. Hastings may like or dislike this amendment but it’s part of the constitution, which is to say the law. By citing it, people therefore uphold their constitutional liberties, which ipso facto doesn’t make them ‘gun nuts’.

Mr Hastings then broadens his attack on American constitutional arrangements, which according to him made the Tea Party possible – and God forbid any political mix should feature a conservative component. “Most Republicans,” he writes, “hate 2013.”

“They want to reset the clock to around 1955, when the world lived in terror of nuclear annihilation, but when Dwight Eisenhower occupied the White House, women and blacks knew their place, there was no swearing on TV, and sex was kept in its proper place under the carpet.”

Run for the hills, chaps. If those gun nuts ever take over, there will be so little swearing and sex on the telly that nuclear annihilation will loom large. The only thing to save us will be wholesale nationalisation, starting from healthcare in the States or, ours already being nationalised, taking off from there in Britain.

Both Hastings and the chap in The Times, whose name escapes me, bemoan the subversion of democracy allegedly perpetrated by those dastardly Republicans. Do they realise that the Republican majority in Congress is doing nothing illegal? That the rule of law supersedes abstract principles, including commitment to democracy über alles?

Neither American nor our democracy is direct. People are supposed to govern through institutions, not by plebiscite. Specifically, all modern democracies feature a separation of powers among three branches of government of which two, the legislative and the executive, often find themselves at odds. This is especially true of presidential republics, such as the USA, where the top executive doesn’t automatically have a parliamentary majority.

Such conflicts are normally resolved by what Americans call horse trading. This is exactly what is going on at the moment. The Republicans are prepared to suppress their better instincts and vote for increasing the public-debt ceiling above its current suicidal level of $16.7 trillion. In exchange they demand that the White House either suspend or, ideally, scrap its ill-advised plan.

One also detects that not all Republicans lose much sleep over the possibility of the government defaulting on its debts. That, they predict with much justification, will come sooner or later anyway, so the sooner the better. The consequences will be abhorrent, but not as much as they will be when the debt is twice as big, which it’s confidently expected to be in the near future.

Unlike the Second Amendment, democracy, by which Messrs Hastings et al. swear, isn’t part of the US constitution. If the distinction between a republic and a democracy escapes Hastings, he should really read up on it before committing his thoughts to paper.

In fact, the Founding Fathers, to whom Mr Hastings refers but with whose work he seems to be unfamiliar, knew the distinction very well. Thus In 1806 Adams wrote, “I once thought our Constitution was a quasi or mixed government, but they had made it… a democracy.” Thomas Jefferson then echoed Plato by going even further than Adams: “A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.”

Suppose for the sake of argument that the people voted for reintroducing slavery. Wouldn’t it be a good idea if some parliamentary mechanisms could be activated to countermand the majority?

One wonders how Mr Hastings would answer this question. We already know how US Republicans answer a different but related one.