Author: Alexander Boot

New, they say, is long-forgotten old. In the past this old adage used not to apply to scientific discoveries, but times change.

Our time in particular is becoming exceedingly more politicised, and science isn’t off limits for this observation. This is especially true of any findings that bring into doubt the key assumptions of our soulless, materialistic modernity.

One assumption modernity can’t do without is that man originates from the ape. Never mind that Darwin’s slapdash theory, and certainly the part of it that deals with the descent of man, has been debunked by just about every modern science you care to mention.

No other theory, and not even its staunchest supporters claim Darwinism is anything more than that, would have survived beyond one generation, two at most. But since without the crutch of Darwinism modernity has no philosophical leg to stand on, dissenting scientific data are brushed aside towards oblivion.

This amnesia, either deliberate or enforced, explains the noise accompanying the recent ‘discovery’ that elephants boast an intelligence far superior to that of primates, such as chimpanzees.

Apparently, when a researcher points at one out of ten buckets, an elephant picks the right one 67.5 percent of the time, falling just short of year-old babies (72.7 percent) and putting primates to shame. This discovery is being hailed as just that, and the impression given is that we’ve learned something new.

We haven’t. The data pointing in the same direction have been in the public domain for decades. But they have been hushed up for obvious reasons: if man is the most intelligent mammal and the chimp is his immediate ancestor, the chimp has to be seen as the intellectual giant among animals.

Many experiments have been staged on the basis of the a priori knowledge that the chimp has to be clever, and that was all there was to it. Many a Darwinist has set out to prove the intelligence of apes, allegedly so much superior to other animals’, if ever so slightly inferior to man’s.

It’s only when primatologists untainted by evolutionary afflatus became involved that any such claims were disproved. A conclusion has been reached that primates don’t differ from other mammals as much as was believed in the past. In fact, many scientists place chimpanzees lower on the intelligence scale than some other animals such as dolphins – and elephants.

For example, elephants and wild dogs bury their dead, whereas apes don’t. In fact the primatologist Jane Goodall showed that chimpanzees have no concept of death. Female chimps carry their dead young with them, and other siblings in the same litter continue to play with the corpse when it’s already in the late stages of decomposition.

Also, unlike whales who look after their aged and sick, apes often attack their defenceless old, setting a useful example for our ‘socioeconomically disadvantaged’ underclasses to follow. 

Much has been made of the fact that apes can use a few primitive tools. After all, Engels, another demiurge of modernity, more or less equated this ability with humanity.

“Man was created by labour,” he wrote. Labour was therefore used as the simulacrum of God, though a straight swap has never quite caught on. One doesn’t hear many people praying to Labour, our Lord. Nor do many people insist that there’s no God other than Labour, and Richard Dawkins is its messenger.

However, thanks be to Labour, apes aren’t the only nonhumans who can use tools. For example, the Galapagos woodpecker (Cactospiza pallida) grips a cactus thorn in its beak to pluck insects out of the tree bark.

Some birds of prey attack ostrich nests by dropping stones from a great height. Eagles drop turtles onto stones to break the shells and eat the contents. Actually, Aeschylus is said to have been killed when one such turtle-lover mistook his bald pate for a stone. And there are many other examples of some animals being equal, and often superior, to primates.

When yet another bit of news emerges that suggests that this is the case, such as today’s reports about the elephant’s superior intelligence, it’s dutifully published and quickly forgotten.

Even before this onset of amnesia, no one dares suggest that perhaps the new experiments cast doubt on Darwinism. This isn’t to say that such reports lie by distorting facts. They don’t. They merely deceive by omitting to mention some obvious inferences and conclusions.

Meanwhile, children, in as much as they’re taught anything, are being taught Darwinism as unchallenged fact. You can set up your own experiment to prove this.

If you have a child of school age, ask him who the most intelligent animal is. If he doesn’t say ‘the chimp’, I’d be very much surprised – and you’d be well-advised to disabuse the youngster of such notions.

Bucking modernity doesn’t get one far in our modern world. At some point, the skies will open and Labour will smite the precocious tot with its mighty hand.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The other day MEP Godfrey Bloom lost his UKIP whip for referring to a group of female party activists as ‘sluts’.

Since I wasn’t there I didn’t have a chance to verify the validity of that description. However, my previous observations didn’t give me the impression that UKIP conferences are ideal hunting grounds for good-time girls.

However, if Mr Bloom has information to the contrary, he’s duty-bound to post the names and phone numbers of the ladies in question on his website, to enable the lads with conservative, anti-EU leanings to authenticate or disprove his claim.

It turns out Mr Bloom didn’t mean it the way it sounded. “It was a joke,” he said, “and most people in Britain have a sense of humour.”

I must belong to the humourless few, for I can’t for the life of me see how calling someone a slut is funny, justified or not. What’s the joke, Godfrey?

Now we get to the crux of the matter. It transpires that Mr Bloom is an etymologist of no mean attainment. He used the word not in its current meaning, but in the original one, dating back to the early 15^th century, when it was spelled ‘slutte’. “It means you’re untidy, you leave your kit lying around,” he told BBC’s Newsnight.

This makes his invective less offensive, though it still falls short of being a knee-slapper.

Anyway, the whole thing got me interested, and not just because both meanings of the word presuppose a lady ‘leaving her kit lying around’. You see, in my student days I was made to take an exam in the history of the English language, which was the only exam in six years that I failed and had to re-sit.

The examining professor gave me an English word, can’t remember what, and asked me to identify its origin. I was then supposed to show how the word evolved from Old English to Middle English to our time, specifying the exact time and cause of each change.

My answer demonstrated a great deal of creativity but precious little knowledge. The professor commended me, somewhat facetiously, on the former and failed me for the latter. Having then spent a few sleepless nights swotting up, I managed a B in the replay.

In spite of that traumatic experience, I share Mr Bloom’s keen interest in comparative etymology. His predicament got me thinking.

What is it about the combination of the letters s and l? Many languages use them in words conveying something or someone dirty, both in the hygienic and amorous senses of the word. Some of those words are clearly cognates, but most aren’t.

Just look at English. We begin with ‘slovenly’, ‘slime’, ‘sleaze’, ‘slush’, ‘slob’, ‘slop’ and proceed to ‘slattern’, ‘slapper’, ‘slag’ – and of course ‘slut’.

Now the German for ‘slime’ is Schleim, which is an obvious cognate. However, I can’t discern an immediate link between ‘slattern’ and the German Schlampe, which means the same thing and features the same two letters.

Or look at French. The word for ‘dirty’ is sale, and the one for ‘slapper’ is salope – the same two offensive letters keep cropping up, and in the same sequence. Add to this the Russian word for ‘slag’ (shlyukha), and one becomes really puzzled.

Someone who, unlike me, passed the requisite exam in one go and then developed his interest professionally may have all the answers. I don’t. I just wonder if there exists some hidden onomatopoeia to which we aren’t privy.

Perhaps, just perhaps, the phonetic shape of a word has an intrinsic link to its meaning. This may or may not go back to the Indo-European protolanguage, whose existence has never advanced beyond being an interesting hypothesis.

Or if one is so inclined, one could trace the whole thing back to God who must have created language roughly at the same time he created man.

Of course men then used language for sinful purposes, such as chatting up women in the hope of turning them into, well, sluts. God got angry and scattered them all over the world, with the subsequent disintegration of their single language: “Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”

This may be a loose interpretation of Genesis, and even a looser one of historical linguistics. But this is as far as I can go. Any further attempt to slake my thirst for arcane knowledge, and I begin to slouch in my chair, my jaw goes slack and I fall asleep. Slowly.

And then I see a Sloanie slut in my slumber.

 

 

 

An international study of literacy and numeracy among 24 industrial nations has made me feel guilty.

The guilt isn’t so much direct as vicarious: I didn’t actually make anyone illiterate or innumerate, but I might have put the jinx in.

Judge for yourself: I have lived in the USA for 15 years and in England for 25, the last 13 of which featured a timesharing arrangement with France. Before going to America I had spent six months in Italy.

Well, it just so happens that the four countries cursed with my malevolent presence all found themselves close to the bottom of the table.

In the chronological order of my life, Italy ended up at No. 24 in literacy and 23 in numeracy; the USA at 18 and 24; England at 22 and 21; France at 17 and 19. At the same time Holland, where I often go to see friends but where I’ve never stayed longer than a few days, finished in the medals: bronze for literacy, gold for numeracy.

Now, I hope my friends elsewhere don’t take umbrage, but England is the only country with which I’m involved emotionally. Putting it in the language of real life rather than tabloid reports, I like quite a few countries, but England I love. That’s why I hate to see what’s happening to her.

Grave as my guilt is, there are those who are even more responsible. Conservative politicians and papers immediately set out to score points by blaming Labour for this unfortunate situation. Specifically, they singled out Messrs Blair and Brown, along with their entire cabinets, everything they stand for, the horses they rode in on and the air they breathe.

Sure enough, those chaps made the problem far worse than it had been. But they didn’t create it.

What created the problem was the wanton, criminal demolition of grammar schools and the creation of comprehensives in the mid-60s. That evil deed was also perpetrated by a Labour government, but at the time Tony was still at school (a prestigious independent one of course). It’s also useful to remember that the saintly Margaret Thatcher, in her tenure as Education Secretary, shut down more grammar schools than any dastardly Labourite ever did.

Overnight England’s education was converted from being the envy of the world to being its laughingstock. By turning schools into a laboratory for social engineering, the Bollinger Bolsheviks, most of them privately educated, concocted several generations of functional illiterates.

Consequently, England is the only country in the developed world where those aged 55 to 65 showed better literacy and numeracy than those aged 16 to 24. This wouldn’t have anything to do with the introduction of comprehensives in the 1960s, would it?

This giant social experiment removed from the lower classes their traditional social and economic hoist: good education. A clever child, regardless of his background, used to be able to go to a grammar school and emerge ready to take on all comers in the workplace rough-and-tumble. Even more important, he’d acquire the intellectual, aesthetic and spiritual refinement that separates us from animals and Millwall supporters.

The whole thing flew in the face of the universal law to which there are no known exceptions: any state embarking on a vast programme inspired by ideology will produce results diametrically opposite to those intended (or rather declared).

A war on poverty will make more people poor. A war on drugs will increase their use. A ban on handguns will lead to more handgun crime. An attempt to redistribute wealth will destroy it. Policies aimed at reducing the income gap between bosses and employees will widen it. An all-out effort to end all wars will lead to more, and bloodier, wars.

And an attempt to introduce equal, comprehensive education will always result in equal, comprehensive ignorance. Hence it will reduce social mobility and cast in iron every privilege conferred by wealth.

If you’re seeking empirical proof, just look at the other report published in today’s papers. Social mobility in England is among the worst of all developed nations, and surely our idiot-spewing education is the principal culprit.

When will the bastards learn that people aren’t guinea pigs or other test animals? We aren’t to be used for experiments and trials. Any state is evil that treats people as material, rather than an end in itself. Please, will somebody tell Dave.

 

 

 

There’s this Episcopalian priest who celebrates mass every Sunday, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

And then there’s this Muslim who five times a day lies on the floor facing Mecca and prays to Allah, other than whom there’s no God and Mohammed is his messenger.

The priest is a collar-wearing woman, but that’s perfectly fine. The Church thinks so, and if you don’t, well, you don’t belong in civilised society. Whether you belong in prison is a different matter, to be decided soon.

The Muslim is a woman too, which means she covers her face and takes abuse from her male co-religionists. We don’t know whether, when walking past a building site, she hears whistles and shouts of ‘get your face out for the lads’, but it’s likely.

Both the priest and the Muslim are black or rather, since they live in the USA, Afro-Americans, but this is neither here nor there.

The erudite priest teaches the New Testament as a visiting assistant professor at Seattle University, and why not? Biblical studies is a valid academic discipline and, for an ordained person, also a form of proselytism.

The Muslim only converted to Islam 15 months ago, so she’s still in the learning, not teaching, mode.

So far so good. But I can sense you getting impatient. Get on with it, I hear you say. What’s the punch line?

Well, here it is. The priest and the Muslim are one and the same. Ann Holmes Redding, of Seattle, Washington, 51, recovering alcoholic, single as she ever was.

This is the joke, and it’s on all of us.

“At the most basic level, I understand the two religions to be compatible,” explains… Father Ann? Mother Ann? Well, Ann in any case. “I am both Muslim and Christian, just like I’m both an American of African descent and a woman. I’m 100 percent both.”

Unimpeachable logic, that. If Jesus is fully divine and fully human, why can’t Ann be fully Christian and fully Muslim? The ability to reason in such a rigorous way is amply covered in psychiatric literature, though the more scriptural sources have so far been less forthcoming.

“It wasn’t about intellect,” added Ann. Really? Could have fooled me.

Ann’s bishop, the Rt. Rev. Vincent Warner, has no problem with this timesharing arrangement. It’s replete with interfaith possibilities, which the good prelate finds exciting. Nor does he see anything wrong with Ann’s daring take on Christianity.

The Gospel according to Ann may not be the one you know, but who’s to say it’s any less valid? In our egalitarian times? You have your theology, I have mine, they have theirs, and because we originate from the ape we can all love one another, amen.

To Ann, Christianity is the “world religion of privilege.” Of course it is. Didn’t Jesus tell us to get rich quickly, buy some political clout and marry into aristocracy? Well, perhaps he didn’t. But that’s what he obviously meant.

Ann has never believed in original sin. The Trinity is an idea about God and cannot be taken literally. Jesus is the son of God insofar as all humans are the children of God, and Jesus is divine just as all humans are divine.

Ergo – and I’m beginning to get the hang of Ann’s relentless logic – we are each of us God. So I want to know which of you Gods created the Seattle diocese? Own up, you bastards.

So there we have it, the perfect Anglican priest for our times. There may be a deanery vacancy at Durham Cathedral, if Ann would consider relocating.

However, she might first have to change her stand on race if she’s to qualify. You see, Ann has a problem with having too many white people in the Episcopal Church. Walking into her Islam prayer group, on the other hand, is “to be reminded that there are more people of colour in the world than white people, that in itself is a relief.”

This may be construed as racialism in some quarters, but as long as it’s just black racialism those quarters had better shut up. The same goes for St Paul with his ‘neither a Jew nor a Greek’.

“Islam doesn’t say if you’re a Christian, you’re not a Muslim,” says Ayesha Something or Other in Ann’s support. True. Neither does it specifically disavow gymnasts, scientists and lathe operators. They can all combine Islam with whatever else they are.

The Koran does say, “Fight against such as those to whom the Scriptures were given [that is, Jews and Christians]… until they pay tribute out of hand and are utterly subdued.” But whoever feels this presents an irreconcilable problem, let him cast the first stone – preferably at adulterers.

It’s just that Ann could step aside and let her Muslim half fight it out with her Christian half. The way the cookie crumbles these days, her Muslim half will probably blow up her Christian side and – in the recent tradition of suicide bombing – itself as well.

It will then go to heaven, leaving us relieved and ever so slightly bemused on earth.

Simon Walker, the director general of the Institute of Directors, got into my good books. Alas, he chose not to stay there for long.

First, Mr Walker took issue with the Chancellor, who in his last budget scrapped child benefit for households where one member earns over £60,000.

Mr Walker spotted with his eagle eye that as a result such a family would be effectively hit with a 73-percent marginal tax rate.

That is, HMG would take 73p out of the next pound such an overachiever earned, which, Mr Walker correctly surmised, would rather dampen his ardour to earn that next pound.

My new friend Simon then doubled the size of type in which his name appears in my good books by claiming affection for a flat tax rate. There was a man after my own heart.

But then he had to go and nip our burgeoning friendship in the bud. “You should never pay more than 50p on the pound you bring in,” said Mr Walker. “If you are doing that you are doing something that is wrong and that degrades the motivation to work.”

The state extorting half of what we earn is all right then. No degraded motivation anywhere in sight. We work for the government until the end of June, then start working for ourselves. What can be fairer?

No one stops to think that even the most absolute of Western monarchs would not have dreamed of taxing people at that confiscatory rate. Why, this is a good starting point for contemplating the delights of democracy.

Strip it of the usual cocoon of slogans and shibboleths, and democracy emerges in its nudity. Promising self-government, implicit in its name, it delivers something entirely different.

By transferring all their sovereignty to the political elite in the capital, the people make its power truly absolute. All those Edwards and Henrys are turning green with envy in heaven, or wherever they are.

A government voted in by a third of the electorate (at best) presumes to have a mandate to do as it wishes: taking as much of the people’s money as the spirit moves it, debauching the rest by increasing the money supply ad infinitum, creating or importing a huge underclass for the sake of which such outrages are necessary.

All this is accompanied by incessant brainwashing, subtler than Goebbels’s but more effective in the long term. As a result people assume that this travesty of democracy is richly covered with the patina of time.

It isn’t. The shift to this total, not to say totalitarian, democracy is relatively recent. For example, Freedom House, a Washington think tank, claims that not a single democracy existed in 1900. By 2007, according to the same source, we had been blessed with 123. If true, this is a revolution to rival the French and Russian versions.

The parallel extends naturally. Those two revolutions first exterminated whomever they had revolted against. Then, however, came the turn of the revolutionaries themselves. The French and Russian firebrands were massacred by the guillotine and the TT pistol respectively.

In the same vein the democratic revolution was perpetrated by the middle classes. To begin with they watched gleefully as the upper classes were being put to the metaphorical sword. By the time they realised they would be next it was too late.

The government confiscating half of their earnings (in effect much more, if we consider the inheritance tax, VAT and other less visible duties) by itself would be sufficient to shorten the lifespan of the erstwhile bedrock of our society.

But it’s not by itself. The last 50 years of the twentieth century saw an inflation of 2,000 percent – as opposed to a mere 10 percent in the last 50 years of the nineteenth.

All of it was perfectly democratic, but the people still were aghast. Their money falling victim to institutionalised promiscuity, they rushed to put whatever was left into property.

As a result, asset inflation outstrips money inflation by a factor of 10. Putting this into everyday language, before long a family house, that presumed entitlement of the middle class, will cease to exist – no one will be able to afford it.

Another essential asset of the middle classes was the decent education they could give their children. That too was taken away by the double whammy of creating idiot-spewing comprehensives and destroying grammar schools.

The middle classes rushed to public schools, only to find that it would take a gross income of £100,000 a year just to educate two children there – that’s before any other expenses, including the confiscatory taxes. Read medicine for education, the NHS for the comprehensives and BUPA for public schools, and the situation in healthcare is exactly the same.

As a result, a growing proportion of public school pupils come from foreign families with rather shady sources of income. The same families are increasingly becoming the only ones able to afford living in safe neighbourhoods or being treated in safe hospitals.

More and more, the middle classes are squeezed out of existence. Britain is clearly moving towards a third-world social structure, with a small elite ruling the roost and the rest amalgamated into an impoverished déclassé mass of humanity.

If you can afford to remain middle class, congratulations. If you can’t, you can console yourself by living in a democracy.

The other day I wrote a knockabout spoof of an interview given by Pope Francis to a Jesuit magazine, as it was reported in the press.

However, a highly respectable Catholic thinker took exception to my having based the spoof on newspaper reports and not on the full text. Since I do respect him highly, I was suitably contrite: it is indeed lazy and slipshod to ignore primary sources.

My friend kindly provided the full text of the interview. In the good Christian tradition he clearly expected me to atone for my sins by acknowledging how wrong I was. “You may still not like what you read,” he said, “but you will at least do him justice.”

Well, as far as the first part is concerned, my friend got it in one: I don’t like what I’ve now read. As to the second part, the only thing I can do is comment on the text. If my justice happens to be of the rough variety, then so be it. Dura lex, sed lex, as His Holiness would say.

At the very beginning, Pope Francis issues a disclaimer, “I have never been a right-winger.” Then he goes on to prove that he’s indeed exactly the opposite of that.

However, he reassures the readers that he’s no populist. Sorry, Your Holiness. It’s just that we were misled by such statements as, “The people itself constitutes a subject. And the church is the people of God on the journey through history, with joys and sorrows. Thinking with the church, therefore, is my way of being a part of this people.” 

I’m not sure I understand the denotation, but the connotation is clear enough, and if this isn’t populist, I don’t know what is. In general one has to go more by the overall tenor of the Pope’s pronouncements, rather than by what he actually says. For he doesn’t say very much.

Left-wing theologians, like left-wing politicians, seldom say anything of substance, right, wrong or indifferent. Their stock in trade is platitudes, truisms and bien-pensant generalities.

Some of the Pope’s truisms are indeed true, as when he says that, “The most important thing is the first proclamation: Jesus Christ has saved you.”

Verily, a Christian is someone who believes he was saved by Jesus Christ. Similarly, a footballer is someone who kicks the ball and a musician is someone who plays an instrument. All of those things are true. So true in fact that none needs saying.

When asked a question demanding a meaty answer, the Pope sticks to marshmallows instead. For example, when ecumenism comes up, the Pope mentions the importance of ‘dialogue’.

“The joint effort of reflection, looking at how the church was governed in the early centuries, before the break-up between East and West, will bear fruit in due time. In ecumenical relations it is important not only to know each other better, but also to recognise what the Spirit has sown in the other as a gift for us.”

And specifically, Your Holiness? ‘The joint effort of reflection’ has been going on for over a millennium, and the two Churches still cordially loathe each other. If continuing dialogue ‘will bear fruit in due time’, when is the time due? Another millennium? Two?

Such shilly-shallying looks particularly lamentable by contrast to the way the Pope’s predecessor tackled such thorny issues.

Pope Benedict didn’t limit himself to ‘dialogue’. He extended a generous offer of the ordinariate to those Anglicans who’ve had enough of female lesbian priests and similarly progressive innovations. But then conservatives do tend to prefer talking in concrete terms.

Unsurprisingly the Pope is an enthusiastic supporter of Vatican II: “Vatican II was a re-reading of the Gospel in light of contemporary culture,” he says. “Its fruits are enormous. Just recall the liturgy. The work of liturgical reform has been a service to the people as a re-reading of the Gospel from a concrete historical situation.”

The Gospel, Your Holiness, doesn’t need to be re-read ‘in light of contemporary culture.’ Let’s identify the dog and the tail, and then we’ll know what should be wagging what.

The Gospel is there to shape contemporary or any other culture, not to be shaped by it. And yes, the fruits of Vatican II are ‘enormous’, in the sense in which the word is a cognate of ‘enormity’, especially if we ‘recall the liturgy’.

One such fruit is effectively driving out the ancient Tridentine and Latin mass. If in the past a Catholic could travel the world and always go to mass knowing it’ll be exactly as at home, now, unless he’s a polyglot, he’s lost when abroad. Rather than being all-inclusive, the new mass is all-divisive.

Also lost is the grandeur of the liturgy, its sublime beauty. Every vernacular into which liturgical Catholic texts have been translated since 1965 has only succeeded in rendering these texts mundane. Comparing the English of the Anglican 1662 mass to the French of modern Catholic liturgy tells us all we need to know.

And what was found to replace what was lost? Approval by proponents of ‘contemporary culture’? Most of them are atheists anyway.

Then on to homosexuality: “A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality. I replied with another question: ‘Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?’ We must always consider the person. 

“During the return flight from Rio de Janeiro I said that if a homosexual person is of good will and is in search of God, I am no one to judge… it is not possible to interfere spiritually in the life of a person.”

If the living embodiment of the apostolic tradition is ‘no one to judge’, then who is? The rest is populist demagoguery at its most soaring. Of course, ‘a gay person’ must be loved – because he’s a person, not because he’s ‘gay’. God indeed loves repentant sinners, but He hates sin.

So the Pope yet again says nothing. He could, for example, have stressed repentance as a sine qua non of forgiveness. Does he think that a homosexual repents when insisting on the right to marry, march in public demonstration of perverse lewdness or flaunt his little predilection to offend traditional decency?

If not, what is the Church’s position on unrepentant sinners? Those seeking an answer to such questions, shouldn’t ask the Pope. He won’t say anything of value.

The same goes for the subject of women in church. Does the Pope’s receptiveness to ‘contemporary culture’ extend to potential acceptance of female clergy?

“It is necessary to broaden the opportunities for a stronger presence of women in the church…We must therefore investigate further the role of women in the church. We have to work harder to develop a profound theology of the woman.”

But such a theology already exists, certainly in the Catholic Church, where Mary’s status almost equals that of her son. What does ‘a stronger presence’ mean? Female priesthood? Female episcopate? If not, what then?

Oh well, what can one expect from a man who admits to admiring Caravaggio, Chagall and Wagner. I suppose we must be thankful that His Holiness didn’t go for Amy Winehouse and Damien Hirst instead.

For that’s what ‘contemporary culture’ is all about. Do let’s hope that under this Pope’s guidance the Church won’t gravitate towards the clerical equivalent.

If one listens to the commentators, American politics is going through so many splits it’s amazing her crotch muscles are still intact.

The temporary shutdown of most state business may well be followed by the country defaulting on her debts, with unforeseeable consequences for global economy. Gloom is here, with doom soon to follow.

Depending on who’s talking, this unfortunate situation is blamed either on Obama’s health policies, rightly perceived as going against the grain of the American ethos, or else on the bloody-mindedness of the American Republican Right.

The American Republican Right is thereby split away from the American Republican Left, both are split away from the Democrats of any description, who too are split up among themselves.

All commentators without exception are ascribing such fractiousness to minor transient differences or else to jockeying for electoral position. All these are no doubt a factor, but the problem may well be more fundamental than that. If so, America is yet again teaching us all a lesson, this time in how not to do things.

The fact is that the USA has rightwing politicians galore, but it has precious few conservatives. The difference between the two points at the crucial problem of today’s politics everywhere in the West.

Conservatism starts from an intuitive predisposition, which a man then relates to various aspects of life. In each case he must answer for himself the lapidary $64,000 question: “What is it that I wish to conserve?”

A conservatively inclined American can find cultural outlets for his inner inclinations without much problem. Even social life wouldn’t be unduly unreceptive. But what about political outlets?

Here America and France have the same problem: both are constituted from birth as revolutionary republics inspired by Enlightenment principles. An American who answers the crucial question with “the Constitution of the United States” thereby reaffirms his commitment to the destruction of every aspect of Christendom, including its political legacy.

A revolutionary republic suffers from a congenital, incurable defect: it doesn’t reach all the way up to heaven. It thus lacks, if you will, the eschatological legitimacy of a monarchy, which may claim it’ll end in heaven because it started there.

Burke, the guiding light of what passes for American conservatism, was unequivocal on this point: God willed the state. De Maistre put it more cautiously and possibly precisely: the origin of a monarchy goes so far back that we can’t trace it all the way to its inception. Therefore we may as well believe it’s willed by God.

The philosophical ambivalence of American or French conservatism explains its practical weakness. At least in France it’s possible to look back nostalgically at the glorious history of the pre-revolutionary state. Americans doing the same thing would in effect be denting the country’s sovereignty, which is no longer possible.

This explains why for all intents and purposes conservatism doesn’t exist in America, certainly not as a discernible political force. Filling the hole thus formed, various simulacra of conservatism step in. Alas, the hole turns out to be bottomless.

Falling into it are economic libertarians, the closest an American can come to conservatism. To justify his intellectual existence, a libertarian has to attach undue importance to commercial activity, relying on it as a be-all and end-all.

Yet we see time and again that what I call ‘totalitarian economism’, when it’s not underpinned by universally accepted metaphysical dicta, sooner or later begins to resemble a snake biting its own tail.

This is the true origin of both the 2008 crisis, the current one, and of the suicidal debt most Western countries have had to run up to keep up with their post-Enlightenment egalitarianism. Conservatively inclined Americans look to sound bookkeeping as a solution to their economic ills. Instead they should be looking to sound metaphysics – everything else will follow.

Other faux conservatives, the neocons, are simply frauds. Their politics is much closer to Trotskyism. Specifically, they are committed to the aggressive proselytising of the American secular religion of democracy – and only to that. Any such effort presupposes an increasingly powerful central state, which is about as unconservative as it’s nowadays possible to get.

In the process the neocons mouth utter gibberish along the lines of ‘conservative revolution, ‘conservative welfare state’ and so forth. They have neither the mind nor the taste to detect the oxymorons there. More worryingly, the public doesn’t possess such admirable qualities either.

The American, or any other, Left, on the other hand, has a coherent promise to make. It may be utterly stupid and subversive, but it is indeed coherent. Whatever wording leftwing politicians prefer, in effect they are saying, “Don’t worry. If your own efforts don’t enable you to keep up with the wealthy Joneses, we’ll look after you.”

Such promises are backed up with cash – hence the US national debt of $16.7 trillion. All those libertarians who call themselves conservatives react to this outrage churlishly by tossing their toys out of the pram. Deep down they know that promiscuous spending will always be popular with a large, and growing, part of the population.

Reducing the whole argument to dollars and cents means losing it. It also means that complete nonentities like Obama can not only win elections but justifiably claim high intellectual ground.

They are trying to help those who won’t help themselves, and what are the ‘conservatives’ doing? Courting economic collapse with their brinkmanship.

Hence all the acrobatic splits that so excite the imagination of commentators, who then propose all sorts of ad hoc solutions. None will work, not in the long term, in the absence of a proper conservative platform from which effective opposition can be launched.

Such a platform is impossible to build in a revolutionary republic, and it’s becoming increasingly unlikely even in what’s left of British monarchy. On this pessimistic note, I’ve got to split.

Just about every Tory activist begged Dave not to push through his flagship law on homomarriage. This abomination, they pleaded, would hurt the party.

Now they’ve been proved right, Dave says he’s sorry. Oh well, that’s all right then.

What exactly is he apologising for? According to the Tory activists at the receiving end of the apology, Dave “still believes that gay marriage is right.”

A man with the power of his convictions then? If so, why apologise? You see, Dave isn’t sorry about his commitment to this subversive law. He’s only sorry about the effect it has had on the party.

The effect is well-nigh seismic. Under Dave’s sage guidance the party has lost more than half of its membership, with thousands of lifetime Tories citing this law as the reason for leaving.

Many of them have defected to UKIP, enabling it to act as a wrecking ball in the next elections. Unless a highly unlikely agreement is struck, this practically guarantees that the Tories won’t win the election outright. Another coalition beckons, emasculating the party and hurting us all.

There’s no doubt that the new law has done much damage not only to Dave’s party but also to the country at large. But having a PM like Dave is even more damaging – while the realisation that the other lot are even worse makes one weep.

Dave’s apology confirms that things like intellect, integrity, conscience and morality play no part in his decision making. Political expediency reigns supreme, and he only regrets he didn’t realise that his fanatical support of homomarriage went against the grain of that sole desideratum.

How was I to know? Dave asks. That makes him sound both disingenuous and daft. It’s the former because every association chairman told him so, imploring him to desist. It’s the latter because a modicum of common sense would have sufficed to anticipate the highly predictable result of his faddish stupidity.

Dave, Dave, Dave, what are we to do with you? Well, here’s what I’ll do: I’m going to give you a sure-fire procedure for avoiding such mishaps in the future. Next time you decide to tout an asinine idea, say post-natal abortion, compulsory euthanasia of wrinklies or humans marrying other species, guide what passes for your thought through these steps.

Step 1. Remind yourself that many grass-root Conservatives are different from you and your cabinet. They don’t regard the name of their party as strictly a figure of speech.

Step 2. That being the case, ask yourself what it is that they are trying to conserve.

Step 3. You’ll find that, generally speaking, they wish to protect what’s left of Christendom – its moral, religious, social and political tradition. Irrespective of their personal faith, they are desperate to conserve what they regard as immutable values at the foundations of their party.

Step 4. Accepting this as an overriding principle, you may be able to figure out how it applies to each particular idea that may cross your mind.

For example, homomarriage defies not only the 2,000 years of Christianity but also the 5,000 years of known human history. That’s 250 generations in about as many countries – you must tell yourself that not all of them were inferior to the one you so ably represent. Maybe they were on to something.

If you can’t go through the requisite mental process yourself, ask someone who can. Specifically, when an issue of public morality is at stake, you may wish to ask the Church. Flawed as it has become, the Anglican Church is an essential part of the realm, and it’s constitutionally empowered to offer such advice.

Just to be on the safe side, also ask some Tory thinkers, preferably those who aren’t seeking a political office. The late Prof. Ken Minogue would have been a good choice, but even after his death there are quite a few others.

Had you sought the advice of such people before shoving this abomination through Parliament, they would have told you that you’d run the risk of leading a party that no longer exists.

Step 5. Listen to what they have to say. They are cleverer than you are and just as committed to the party’s political success. What would make their advice particularly valuable is that they are committed to a few other things as well.

Alas, something tells me Dave is incapable of going through such elementary steps. That’s why one has to compliment him and his staff on the fallback election strategy they seem to have adopted.

Rather than re-emphasising their conservative credentials, they expect to win the next election by simply not being Labour. All that’s missing is a snappy slogan encapsulating the party’s promise to the electorate.

May I suggest “The Tories. We are the lesser evil”? Such truth in advertising just may carry the day.

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

We always hurt the one we love, goes a popular song. Perhaps. But there’s hurt and there’s hurt.

One man may hurt his wife by forgetting their wedding anniversary, or by drinking too much and earning too little, or by neglecting to do the dishes. Another man may hurt his wife by regularly putting her in A&E with broken bones.

Both may claim love and beg forgiveness, and the first man may well be justified in his declaration and his entreaty. But the second man must be locked up for as long as the law allows. And if he still insists he loves his wife, he’s either a hypocrite or a madman.

A man doesn’t express love for a woman with his fists. Nor does a political activist express love for a country with lifelong efforts to bring about a Marxist revolution. Never mind their – or their relations’ – protestations. In both instances, it’s hate speaking.

Ralph Miliband was such a Marxist activist. He devoted his life to glorifying Marxism in theory and trying to help it vanquish in practice. So whatever his son Ed  says in response to the Daily Mail article, Ralph hated Britain – objectively, to use a term from the Marxist jargon.

“Britain had to start working towards building a viable alternative that would be genuinely revolutionary socialist in its positions,” he wrote – and then worked towards this goal with enthusiasm worthy of a better application.

To those who haven’t experienced it first hand, Marxism may look like an innocent intellectual pose. It isn’t. Neither is it a beautiful theory perverted by the Soviets.

In fact even at their most murderous the Soviets fell far short of the cannibalistic prescriptions swelling the tomes by Marx and Engels.

For example, their Manifesto prescribes the nationalisation of all private property without exception. Even Stalin’s Russia in the thirties fell short of that ideal. In fact, a good chunk, as much as 15 percent, of the Soviet economy was then in private hands.

Marx also insisted that family should be done away with, with women becoming communal property. Again, for all their efforts, Lenin and Stalin never quite managed to achieve this ideal either, much to the regret of those who could see an amorous pay-off in such an arrangement.

Then, according to the Manifesto, all children were to be taken away from their parents and raised by the state as its wards. That too remained a dream for the Bolsheviks. Their kindergartens and young pioneers’ camps weren’t compulsory, and those fortunate women who could get by without full-time employment were still free to read Pushkin to their children.

Modern slave labour, such an arresting feature of both Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, also derives from Marx – and again Lenin, Stalin and Hitler displayed a great deal of weak-kneed liberalism in bringing his ideas to fruition.

Marx, after all, wrote about total militarisation of labour achieved by organising it into ‘labour armies,’ presumably led by Marx as Generalissimo and Engels as Chief of the General Staff. Stalin came closer to this than Hitler, but again fell short: no more than 10 percent of the Soviets were ever in forced labour at the same time.

One aspect of Bolshevism and Nazism that came close to fulfilling the Marxist dream was what Engels described as “specially guarded places” to contain aristocrats, intelligentsia, clergy and other “noxious insects”, in Lenin’s heartfelt phrase.

Such places have since acquired a different name, but in essence they are exactly what Marx and Engels envisaged. Here Lenin and Stalin did come close to fulfilling the Marxist prescription, but they were again found wanting in spreading concentration camps to a mere half of the world. So where the Bolsheviks and Nazis perverted Marxism, they generally did so in the direction of softening it.

Genocidal or ideological mass murder widely practised by both the Nazis and the Soviets also derives from Marxism. Here are a few quotations from their works to give you a taste of exactly what Ralph Miliband tried to introduce to the country he supposedly loved: 

“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.”

“In history nothing is achieved without violence and implacable ruthlessness… In short, it turns out these ‘crimes’ of the Germans and Magyars against the said Slavs are among the best and most praiseworthy deeds which our and the Magyar people can boast in their history.”

“…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.”

Truer words have never been spoken. The Russians have never made excuses for the Marxist carnage they perpetrated. And now the Marxist Ed Miliband is trying to make excuses for his Marxist father.

Here we have another apple falling not far from the tree. Don’t pick it up – it’s poisonous.

Barack Hussein, Chairman and President of Oh bummer!, the world’s biggest chain of department stores, has written to shareholders, explaining why all outlets have suspended trading:

My fellow shareholders,

First let me thank you all for your continuing loyalty to the Oh bummer! project. Allow me also to assure you that this loyalty is reciprocated in my heart. However – and it pains me to have to say this – any more tangible reciprocity unfortunately has to be put on hold until further notice.

Starting today, Oh bummer! can afford to keep on only a skeleton staff of essential personnel, specifically our security guards and also the guys who turn the lights off and on.

This, I have to say, also means that no dividends will be paid to any of you for any foreseeable future, and Allah knows that this hurts me more than it hurts you.

Many of you will blame me for this unfortunate situation, and I am man enough to admit that, as President of Oh bummer!, I have to shoulder some – a teensy-weensy portion – of the blame.

The rest – most! – of it, belongs to the real vipers on the Oh bummer! board, who shall go as nameless as they are mindless, gutless and spineless. Oh well, if you insist, I am specifically referring to that boehner-headed viper John, who happily combines the mind of a cockroach with the moral sense of a skunk.

Still, in the good tradition of the Oh bummer! project, the buck stops with me, meaning that no bucks will flow in your direction. As this represents a most unfortunate situation, you are within your right to demand an answer from the board and specifically from me as its Chairman.

Why? I hear you ask. Why could you not carry out the inventory without having to shut down all the stores? This question, my friends, is best addressed to that boehner-headed viper John. For it was he who led the revolt against the product line I had proposed and spent all my adult life (along with some of my infancy) to refine.

This line of health products is guaranteed to ensure not only the physical wellbeing of our customers and shareholders but also their peace of mind. Allow me to reiterate for those of you with special needs what the Oh bummer! project is all about.

In a move never before attempted, if often dreamed about, in the history of retailing, all Oh bummer! customers will be obligated to buy our health products. Should they fail to comply, our security personnel and those guys who turn the lights off and on will force them to do so.

The derelicts’ charge accounts will be debited considerable amounts, and if even this measure fails they will be locked up in our warehouse. There they will stay until they accept that Oh bummer! only has their best interests in mind.

What can be fairer than this? Nothing at all. And yet that boehner-headed viper John persists in his maniacal insistence that this breakthrough retailing innovation somehow restricts the freedom of our customers and shareholders.

Nothing can be further from the truth. That boehner-headed viper John has forgotten the words of V.I. Lennon, the true inspiration behind the Oh bummer! project. Freedom, taught Comrade Lennon, is acknowledged necessity.

Therefore, all that our customers and shareholders will have to do is acknowledge the necessity of buying our line of health products. This will chisel their freedom in stone for generations to come – and let that boehner-headed viper John weep and wail and gnash his dentures.

In the spirit of openness and transparency for which Oh bummer! is so justly famous, I also have to share with you another problem – or rather another dastardly plot being concocted by that boehner-headed viper John and his co-conspirators.

As I am sure you realise, no business can operate without a bank overdraft. The bigger the business, the bigger the overdraft – to this universal law there are no exceptions.

Well, although Oh bummer! is the world’s biggest chain of its kind, our present overdraft stands at a paltry $16.7 trillion, barely $52,863.15 for every customer and shareholder.

This most reasonable overdraft is up for renewal in 16 days, which is a routine annual procedure. Yet that boehner-headed viper John, in cahoots with the bank manager, has colluded to deny our request to raise the overdraft ceiling to whatever amount I will deem necessary.

This means that a spectre is haunting Oh bummer!, the spectre of default. This creates the real and present danger of us having to shut shop altogether, not just for a temporary inventory, which is not an outcome any of you want.

So I appeal to you, my fellow shareholders: stop that boehner-headed viper John in his tracks, so the business can proceed as usual. Long live freedom, as I define it! Long live Oh bummer! Death to [fill in the blank]!