Author: Alexander Boot

Before you reach for your TV remote to check what’s going on, I don’t mean that Obama has somehow leapfrogged the electoral process to claim victory prematurely. Moreover, even if he does win the closest US election in history, it won’t be by a landslide.

Yet though the Americans haven’t voted yet, the Europeans have – and Obama’s victory is staggering. Asked whom they would rather see as US president, over 70 percent of all Europeans went for Obama – and in France he polled an unlikely 90 percent.

The French of course have a predilection for socialist politicians, as they showed in their own latest election. But Hollande only won by a couple of percentage points; he didn’t carry 90 percent of the electorate.

This enthusiastic support for an utterly useless president is worth decorticating. Why such affection for a foreign politician who broke all his good campaign promises and kept all the bad ones, who is presiding over an economy with the highest unemployment rate since ‘Brother, can you spare a dime’ was a big hit, whose administration increased the already catastrophic $10 trillion debt to a suicidal $16 trillion?

For one thing, socialism is beautiful, and all beauty is best appreciated from afar. We don’t screw our noses into the glass case protecting Mona Lisa; we step back to admire the masterpiece. Thus almost half of the same Frenchmen who voted against their own socialists enthusiastically support someone else’s. In the same vein, all those Gitane-smokers in the Left Bank used to love Stalinism in Russia but would have hated it in France.

Then of course there’s the cynical belief that a decline of US economic power, which will inevitably ensue if Obama is re-elected, will put France’s own rickety economy in a stronger competitive position. As it is, she’s slipping behind such overachievers as Spain and Italy, and her own recession is deepening with every subversive measure introduced by François’s government.

The Europeans’ hatred of Romney, or rather everything he represents, shouldn’t be underestimated either. The French in particular talk about ‘ze Anglo-Saxon model’ the way they never talked about ‘ze Nazi model’ during the occupation. What is it a model of? Personal responsibility over communal security; small rather than omnipotent state; an economy free of government meddling; high rewards for hard work, no rewards for indolence; flexible labour markets; low taxation and so forth.

Romney preaches all those disagreeable things, which activates in French minds their historical resentment of ‘ze Anglo-Saxons’, who have had the temerity of beating them on every battlefield, including the economic one. In this respect, the French choose to ignore the obvious lack of homogeneity between les yanquis and les rosbifs. Both are Anglo-Saxons which, when enunciated by a Frenchman, is seldom a term of endearment.

Few stop to realise that Romney’s rhetoric is just that, rhetoric. He says all the right things, yet if elected can be confidently predicted to do all the wrong ones. He’s a modern politician after all, and his record as governor of Massachusetts shows that he put through many Obama-style programmes there, albeit on a smaller scale. But he does make ‘ze Anglo-Saxon’ pronouncements, which trigger off traditional Gallic actuators.

Foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, is another reason, and here I begin to converge with the French, though for a different reason. The French are torn between two animosities. On the one hand, they are easily the most anti-Semitic nation in Western Europe, which unenviable prejudice provides the basis for their hatred of Israel. I heard more anti-Israeli harangues in France last summer alone than, over a lifetime, in all other countries combined.

Both Obama and Romney pledge support for Israel, but the French sense correctly that Obama’s heart isn’t in it, and Romney’s is. That alone would be enough to swing the French vote to Obama.

On the other hand, they resent their own Muslims more than any other European nation does, possibly because France has more of them than anyone else. Here the same pictorial analogy applies: the French mind Muslims much less when they burn settlements around the West Bank than when they burn cars around Paris. It’s not just absence but also distance that makes the heart grow fonder. I’m not sure the French perceive the common thread running through both incendiary excesses, but then the ability to put two and two together is never thick on the ground anywhere, not just in France.

All these are spurious reasons to cheer Obama and jeer Romney. There are better ones, and they too have to do with foreign policy. Romney is steeped in the ethos of the American religion: US supremacy, manifest destiny and a shining city on top of a hill. His own visceral feelings are strengthened by his foreign-policy entourage, neocons to the last man.

The readers of this blog probably know that I regard neoconservatism as a pernicious and ultimately dangerous trend in American politics. It represents the proselytising arm of the American religion, with its belief that every country in the world must be educated in the magnificence of American democracy. If the teaching aids required for this didactic exercise all have to be laser-guided, then so be it.

Romney, if elected, will do the neocon bidding, and since democracy is demonstrably unachievable in the Middle East (Israel apart), the region will be in the throes of a non-stop war. This creates a vast potential for a major conflagration involving Russia, possibly even China.

The neocons aren’t bright enough to realise that, by agitating for the Arab Spring, they’ve brought the world to the brink of the nuclear winter. They are driven by ideology, which can never coexist with reason – as they’ve amply demonstrated over the last decade.

The French have wisely stayed more or less out; we’ve stupidly plunged in headlong. I for one don’t want to see British youngsters dying to promote America’s manifest destiny, which I fear they may have to do in greater numbers should Romney win.

To sum up, if I still lived in America, I’d vote for Romney. In that I’d be driven by economic self-interest, which, according to Adam Smith, lies at the foundation of civic virtue. As I live in Britain, I think Obama would be the lesser evil.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When bicycles first appeared in the 19^th century, they revolutionised Britain’s country life. Suddenly farmers acquired an easy means of courting girls in other villages, thereby reducing inbreeding and improving the nation’s genetic stock.

Cycling quickly became essential transportation for some, entertainment for others, a competitive sport for others still. So far, so good. Now fast-forward to our own time – only to observe that cycling has become downright pernicious.

Rather than simply being good exercise and a cheap way to travel, it has claimed something to which it isn’t entitled: moral ascendancy. Cycling has taken a place next to wind farms, solar panels, public foreplay with trees and hoodies, not smoking, not driving after a pint, not using private medicine and other merit badges of PC modernity.

Overnight a Londoner riding a bike to work stopped being an irresponsible miser willing to risk his life to save a few pennies, or else a health freak prepared to die for stronger leg muscles, or perhaps an impatient chap outracing a bus in rush-hour traffic. He’s now a secular saint doing his bit for environmental and personal health.

Whenever their PC button is pushed, our brainwashed masses respond with a surfeit of enthusiasm and a shortfall of reason. For example, it never occurs to them that cycling has no environmental benefits over public transport – those trains and buses are going to run anyway, so what’s a few passengers more or less? Of course, if most people rode bikes, there would be fewer buses and trains, but even cycling fanatics don’t suggest that such a development is likely.

Now HMG is launching a cross-party enquiry into ways of making cycling safer. No doubt our politicians will bring to the task the same intellectual rigour and scrupulous honesty they display in most of their other endeavours. I don’t know who is spearheading the enquiry, but George Osborne, with his known commitment to cheaper travel, can do nicely.

One can already see which way the enquiry will go in the way statistics are being massaged in our ‘quality’ press. For example, the figure of 3,192 is being waved about like a red rag before a bull. That’s how many cyclists were killed or seriously injured last year.

Do you smell a rat? Here it is: suppose I told you that last year I drank 95 gallons of water, juice and whisky. Does this make me a pathetic drunk or practically a teetotaller? You can’t answer this question unless you know how much of the liquid I consumed was water and juice, and how much of it was whisky.

Let’s try to untangle this statistical knot. In the first 10 months of 2012, 101 cyclists were killed in Britain, about 10 a month. Assuming that roughly the same ratio existed last year, 3,072 of the 3,192 were injured and 120 killed. Suddenly the statistic can be seen in a different light, and that’s even before we defined a serious injury: a broken wrist is more serious than a broken finger, but less so than a broken spine.

Equally false is the figure of 9% more ‘seriously injured or killed’ than last year. Apart from the same lumping the two categories together, this statistic is grossly misleading because it doesn’t take into account the increase in the number of regular cyclists and total distances travelled. This is considerable. For example, between 2009 and now the former number increased by 150,000, making more accidents highly predictable.

The government has earmarked £30 million to make cycling safer – this on top of the uncountable millions spent already on suffocating city traffic with unnecessarily wide cycle lanes. The one on London’s Embankment, for example, is as wide as a car lane, though not even Boris Johnson’s breadth comes close to that of a Mini.

Instead of squandering more of our money, HMG should acknowledge an obvious fact: the streets of our major cities aren’t designed for cycling. London isn’t Amsterdam, where vehicular traffic crawls along the straight canals at a snail’s pace, cycle or no cycles. We have more drivers, more opportunity to drive at the speed limit and more lorries whose drivers are often unsighted. Cyclists will always be in great peril, and the staff of London’s St Thomas Hospital will always refer to them as ‘organ donors’.

The only way to reduce the number of cycling deaths is to reduce the number of cyclists. This can be easily done by practising fair play, something for which the British are so justly famous.

Cyclists using their bikes for anything other than a pleasant ride in the park or in the country must be tested, licensed and made to pay road tax. As it is, they contribute nothing to the upkeep of the roads, leaving drivers, so hated by our liberal establishment, to carry this burden.

Cyclists should also have their bicycles registered and insured. The insurance premiums alone would probably be prohibitive, what with cycling presenting a much higher actuarial risk than driving. Incidentally, it’s not just cyclists themselves who are at risk, but also drivers who often have to swerve to avoid adding another pair of kidneys to the St Thomas’s organ bank.

Also, cyclists must be made either to obey the same traffic rules drivers do or face fines and disqualification. How many times have you had to jump out of a cyclist’s way on a pedestrian crossing? How many of them have you seen running a red light or going hell for leather on a pavement? This must stop.

These measures would be as effective as they’re fair. The number of ‘deaths and serious injuries’ would go down pari passu with the diminishing number of cyclists on city streets. The Exchequer would be millions richer, rather than another £30 million poorer. Drivers would have a much easier life. And, as an important side benefit, fewer bureaucrats would need to be employed.

And the downside? Simple: our PC sensibilities will be so offended that nothing sensible will be done. God forbid people will be encouraged to use their minds rather than emotions – they just might vote for the best candidate on offer: Mr None of the Above

Nick has delivered himself of a rant against those who wish to alter the UK’s relationship with the EU. Displaying the kind of perspicacity we like to see in our great leaders, he noticed that ‘many of the people who advocate repatriation are the same people who want us out of the EU altogether’.

Since ‘no repatriation of powers would ever be enough’ for that sorry lot, he said, ‘there is no hard border between repatriation and exit’. He’s absolutely right about that, and I for one applaud the X-ray acuity of Nick’s eyesight: he saw right through those nasty naysayers.

Now, according to Aristotle, cognition is founded upon a correct empirical observation. That’s why it was natural to expect that Nick would move on to build an intellectual edifice reaching the dizzying heights of wisdom. Regrettably, what followed makes one doubt not just Nick’s mental capacity but indeed his mental health.  

‘Heading for the exit would be the surest way to diminish our great country,’ he said. ‘To go down that route would be a catastrophic loss of sovereignty for the UK.’

Excuse me? One may agree or disagree on the possible consequences of leaving the EU, with neither position bringing one’s sanity into question. But surely, however misguided in every other way, such a departure would mean recovering, rather than losing, sovereignty?

My trusted Chambers defines sovereignty as ‘supreme and independent power’. If Nick accepts this definition, then he seems to believe that, by surrendering both her supremacy and independence to a foreign body, the UK gains sovereignty, while reclaiming them would spell ‘a catastrophic loss’ thereof. This is an interesting point – from the psychiatric point of view, that is.

Take off your jacket, Nick, loosen your tie and lie on this couch. No, I’m not suggesting you ever tell lies – I’m simply inviting you to assume a horizontal position. There, that’s better. Now explain what you mean, and please don’t get excited.

A departure from the EU would diminish our clout – in the EU? No, says Nick. That is, it will do that, but above all it’ll diminish our clout in Washington.

Now we know he’s not just disturbed but insane: fancy believing that we have any clout in Washington to begin with. But assuming that we do have a teensy-weensy bit, how would we lose it? Back in 1941 the US found it in her heart to side with Britain in her conflict with the EU precursor. If our being at loggerheads with a temporarily united Europe didn’t destroy our relationship with the USA then, why would a more benign separation do so now? Call out for the men in white coats.

As Nick is squeezed into a straightjacket and strapped onto a stretcher, he gets another shot in: ‘It is wishful thinking to suggest that we could give ourselves a free pass to undercut the single market, only to negotiate our way back into the laws that suit us.’

But Nick, no one has ever expressed any hostility to the single European market, not within my earshot. It’s the single European state that people have issues with, and surely even you must see that the two aren’t the same? It’s possible, you know, to trade with others without belonging to the same state.

As to the old chestnut of finding ourselves ‘on the sidelines’, unable ‘to negotiate our way back into the laws that suit us’, this provides further clinical proof of dementia. The whole point of leaving the EU is to disengage ourselves from its laws and to return to our own, thus regaining our sovereignty (see Chambers English Dictionary).

The EU would then become a foreign entity, on whose laws we’d have no influence, regardless of whether or not they ‘suit us’. Neither, and this is a simple logical inference, would its laws have any power over us.

Hence our economic ties with the EU would be similar not to those Yorkshire has with Surrey, but to those Britain has with China or the USA. We have no say in what laws they pass – and quite right too, for those laws have no jurisdiction over us. Yet we seem to be doing brisk trade with those nations – why, I bet even Nick’s tennis shoes are made in China. Why on earth can’t we have exactly the same relationship with Germany or France? Even if they restyle themselves as Germance or Francmany?

Nick then had a few unkind words to say about Labour’s about-face on the EU budget, and here one has to agree. For Labour to reposition itself as an opponent of feeding the EU’s spending habit is a bit like Dr Shipman championing responsible care for the elderly. (Parenthetically, according to today’s NHS the good doctor had all the right ideas – shame this pathway blazer is no longer around.)

This is after all the party that only due to internal bickering failed to drag us into the euro. To compensate, they dragged us into everything else, while surrendering much of our rebate and increasing our net contribution to the EU coffers. In fact, their line of attack against the Tories has always been the latter’s presumed euroscepticism. For exactly the same people (Ed Balls, ring your office) to insist on cutting, as opposed to merely freezing, the EU budget represents the acme of cynical opportunism, but then what else is new?

Aren’t you glad we are governed by people of such towering minds and robust moral fibre? So perhaps I was wrong: Nick et al aren’t really mad. They are simply people of limited intellect, unlimited powerlust and nonexistent morals. Call me a maximalist, but there has to be something wrong with a pond where this sort of substance rises to the top.

 

 

Storm Sandy just may have blown Obama back in the White House. His charitable impulses running riot at this stage in the campaign, the president visited an emergency shelter in submerged Atlantic City and said all the right things.

‘You guys are in my thoughts and prayers,’ stated Obama, without specifying the confessional provenance of said supplications. ‘We are going to be here for the long haul.’

What more would the newly homeless, or indeed the electorate at large, need? A little show of sympathy, and suddenly Obama looks presidential. Looking is of course more important than being in the virtual reality of all modern democracies, and in America especially.

Even New Jersey Republican governor Chris Christie, who usually feels about Obama the way a lamppost feels about dogs, was effusive. He and the president had a ‘great working relationship’, presumably meaning they toured New Jersey together without trying to push one another out of the car. ‘I cannot thank the president enough for his personal concern and compassion for the people of our state,’ said Mr Christie, who harbours his own presidential ambitions.

Obama’s lead in the swing states of Ohio and Iowa instantly widened to five percent, which probably means his re-election is in the bag. Never mind the economy, feel the compassion.

It is of course the state of the economy that’s supposed to decide US elections, but in order to do so it must be communicated to the electorate truthfully. Most Americans can’t be bothered to peruse long-term trends, indices and indicators – they expect the media, especially the three major TV networks, to do it for them and tell them what’s what.

Now these organisations lean so far to the left it’s amazing they still haven’t toppled over. Compared to CBS, NBC and ABC, our own ghastly BBC is a paragon of objectivity and even-handedness. For example, at the time Ronald Reagan was winning by a landslide, about 98 percent of the networks’ staff voted Democratic, what with Communist Party USA not being an option on offer. So naturally Obama, the leftmost president in history, is their boy.

This is not to say they’re lying about the dire state of the US economy. They would if they could, but alas there are regulations against that sort of thing. Instead they deceive – by omission, spurious analysis and general tone of benevolence towards their ideological comrade.

It is, for example, instructive to compare how the networks are covering the economy now and how they did so at exactly the same point in 2004, when George ‘Yo Blair’ Bush was fighting his re-election campaign.

In September, 2004, the US economy wasn’t doing well, and the federal debt stood at $7.4 trillion, making one wonder exactly how Americans define fiscal conservatism. In this, old Dubya followed the path charted by his ‘conservative’ predecessor Reagan, under whom the debt had tripled. Still, at the end of Bush’s first term the economy boasted a growth rate of 3.3 percent, an unemployment rate of just 5.4 percent and petrol prices at a manageable $1.82.

Such indicators are a cause for commiseration but, compared to Obama’s dismal performance, they are grounds for jubilation. At exactly the same point in the current campaign, US unemployment stands at 8.1 percent, almost 3 percent higher than under Bush. Economic growth is at 1.3 percent and going down. Petrol costs $3.84 a gallon, almost $2 dollars higher. And the federal debt has more than doubled to $16 trillion.

Yet, while in 2004 the networks depicted the economy in apocalyptic terms, today they either hush up or downplay its plight. Then an NBC commentator was saying ‘I really think Bush has ruined the economy. We’ve lost so many jobs, and I haven’t seen him do anything to really fix it.’ More than 25 million Americans are looking for work now, but this is either ignored or described as a sort of natural disaster, on a par with Sandy.

Meanwhile ABC’s George Stephanopoulos let White House adviser David Plouffe get away with bragging that the administration had ‘cut over $3 trillion in spending’. Such a drastic cut would hardly explain a federal debt ballooning to $16 trillion unless we remember that Obama hasn’t really cut anything by $3 billion. He merely proposed such a cut in his budget, knowing full well that it would never in a million years get through either House, where not just all Republicans but even most Democrats oppose it. The cut, in other words, represents political cynicism, not fiscal prudence.

To be fair, these desperate whitewashing efforts are matched by our own leftwing press, which category now lamentably includes The Times. According to today’s issue, Obama ‘deserves a second term’, and his compassion tour of New Jersey ‘rose above politics’. Any unbiased observer would know that, on his economic and overall performance, all that Obama deserves is to be run out of town. And as to his cheap political stunt, it falls not so much into the ultra range above politics as into the infra range below it.

None of this is to suggest that Romney would make a better president. He could conceivably be the lesser evil, but an evil nevertheless. Yet one almost wishes he could pull off a miracle and get elected – if only to spite the rancid alphabet soup of American TV networks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The premises of the 14^th-century Sretensky Monastery in central Moscow have been found to house a hard-working brothel. To the best of my knowledge, the holy fathers provided only their blessing and administrative support, leaving the workaday activities to several young ladies.

This sort of thing is hard to explain even in a Russian context. Perhaps the monks confuse missionary work with the position of the same name, I really don’t know. Those things are sometimes hard to keep apart. Or else they think it their duty to cater to the physical, not just spiritual, cravings of their flock.

The monastic answers to vestal virgins charge £35 an hour, which suggests that the brothers have faith in a low-cost, high turnaround operation. Then again, as men of God they can’t be seen favouring the rich. 

It’s good to see that the concept of monasticism continues to evolve in Russia, mostly in the direction of getting in touch with lay life, as it were. But then, as the Russian saying goes, ‘like priest, like parish’.

The vicar of Sretensky Monastery, Archimandrite Tikhon (Shevkunov), is Vladimir Putin’s confessor, while Patriarch Kiril is the monastery’s superior. His Holiness, code name ‘Mikhailov’, is a career KGB operative, but then of course the secret police isn’t the mammon that can’t be served in parallel with God.

Nor is he unique in this respect: the entire hierarchy of the Moscow Patriarchate can boast a similar CV. The recently published reports of ‘Mikhailov’s’ (and other hierarchs’) KGB handlers to their superiors are a good read, detailing as they do the zeal with which His Holiness, then merely a metropolitan, carried out his tough assignments. The prose is deadpan, everything stripped to the bare bone of facts.

While I haven’t seen any documents that Tikhon too is a KGB man, this isn’t beyond the realm of the possible. After all, only a trusted comrade can be allowed to hear Col. Putin’s confessions.

You must remember that Russian Orthodox priests are obligated to divulge to the state secrets vouchsafed them at confession. Solzhenitsyn rightly fumes about this in his Gulag, but he forgets to mention that this fine tradition goes back to Peter the Great (d. 1725).

Now imagine a confession that proceeds along these lines: ‘Father, forgive me for I have sinned. I ordered that Col. Litvinenko be poisoned with polonium in London. Then I’ve also used proxies to amass a pilfered $50-billion fortune. And let’s not forget all those uppity journalists I had knocked off…’ This wouldn’t do, would it? Unless, of course, the confessor is bound by an oath that supersedes the one he took at his ordination.

You may argue that Putin is the state, so no danger there. However, the pack of Russian leaders has often been reshuffled in the past, and there is no guarantee that it won’t be again in the future. So better safe than sorry – Col. Putin didn’t get where he is by ignoring this folk wisdom.

Jesus famously drove money-changers and mendicants out of the Temple. I wonder how He would react to one of Moscow’s oldest monasteries housing a knocking shop. There wouldn’t be one stone left upon another, this is an ecclesiastical certainty.

The Russian Orthodox Church claimed that the monks had no knowledge of the den of iniquity, and I’ll leave you to decide how likely that is. I am however curious whether Putin combined his forays to the confessional booth with a quick stopover at the adjacent facility. That would be in keeping with the image of unbridled virility that the national leader likes to project. Also, at this austere time, why waste a trip to another part of town?

How sincere Christians can still accept the authority of the Russian Church is hard to understand. But then we all know Churchill’s pronouncement on the enigmatic nature of Russia.

 

P.S. Just two days after I wrote about HMG winding nuclear power stations down and favouring instead the useless wind farms, came two important announcements. First, no more onshore turbines will be built. Second, a Japanese firm has been contracted to construct a nuclear power station. Far be it from me to claim that my diatribe had anything to do with this. However…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our Tone delivered yet another rousing oration, though I don’t know for a fact that his listeners were indeed roused. Nor do I know if they had paid for the privilege, though it’s a safe assumption that they had. Tony seldom does things for free these days. For all I know he may be trying to charge Cherie for services rendered.

On this occasion Tony correctly, if somewhat unoriginally, identified the situation in the EU as a crisis. Yet it’s one pregnant with opportunity, and Tony is it.

‘Out of this European crisis can come the opportunity finally to achieve a model of European integration that is sustainable,’ explained Tone. ‘A Europe-wide election for the presidency… is the most direct way to involve the public.’

In case you’re Tone-deaf, allow me to translate: Europe’s problems will be solved if, and only if, Tony is elected European president. The speech was perceived by most observers as a job application, and if so we should all offer our unequivocal support.

Just think how much Tony achieved in Britain, where he had to worry about opposition both within and without his own party. In merely 10 years he succeeded in turning a moderately successful country into a destitute, debt-ridden, disarmed suburb of Brussels forced to support Eastern European huddled masses yearning to be on benefits.

Just imagine what he’ll achieve in the EU where even our anaemic checks and balances don’t exist. Why, he’ll run that abomination not just into the ground (that has already been accomplished by others) but six feet under. Where, as I’m sure you’ll agree, it belongs.

In a way one could argue that Tone’s entire tenure as PM was one contiguous application for this post. For example, to earn merit points with the EU, he did his level best to drag Britain into the euro, and only the sight of Gordon rolling on the floor and frothing at the mouth stopped that undertaking in its tracks. Had Tone got his way, Brits would now be fleeing to Romania, not the other way around.

The EU is a quintessentially modern Leviathan and it deserves to have a quintessentially modern politician at its helm. For Tony represents the dominant type of modern life, especially modern public life: the important nonentity.

Bereft of character and intellect, he’s richly endowed with animal cunning and unquenchable thirst for power at any cost – and that’s all he really communicates in his speeches. Who in his right mind would pay to hear him speak defies imagination. Why spend good money? We can get a collection of lies and platitudes from the net, with the added benefit of being spared the sight of Tony’s plastic smile.

He isn’t even clever enough not to let the cat out of the bag, something other federasts do so well. Witness the statement I cited above: ‘Out of this European crisis can come the opportunity finally to achieve a model of European integration that is sustainable.’

In other words, this worthy goal would not have been achieved without the benefit of a debilitating crisis – what’s poison for the people of Europe is meat for the federasts. Unwittingly, Tony has divulged the long-term strategy behind the EU. Even more unwittingly, he put his finger on the key geopolitical feature of modernity.

The strategy was hinted at by Jean Monnet, the St Paul of the federastic religion. In his memoir he called it the ‘strategy of fait accompli’, a sequence of steps creating such tremendous economic problems in each nation that they could only be solved by a supranational Leviathan. The idea was ingenious but hardly new: Lenin had called it ‘the worse, the better’: let the people starve and practise cannibalism as long as the cause triumphs. Europeans don’t quite starve yet, but this is a difference of degree only.

On a broader scale, all modern crises, peaceful or military, have led to a vastly increased centralisation of state power. This holds true for the French Revolution, the American Civil War, both World Wars, the Great Depression and so forth. In each instance the state emerged more powerful and the individual less so. The present crisis in the EU is no different. People like our Tone, unprincipled nonentities desperately needing power for self-assertion, smell a weakness and move in to grab the reins.

Far be it from me to suggest that some kind of conspiracy is afoot. Nor do I think that Tone has studied political science in sufficient depth to work out such far-reaching plans. There is no need. He doesn’t have to use his brain; his nose is all it takes. I told you he has animal cunning, didn’t I?

 

 

 

 

Throughout the ‘Cold War’, the Soviets led a concerted propaganda effort against nuclear power stations in the West. Among other methods, they used the KGB’s good offices to provide surreptitious financing for various anti-nuke groups, such as our own dear CND. Now the Cold War is officially over, though they forgot to tell that to Col. Putin, but that particular offensive has proceeded to a victorious end.

The Soviets, it has to be said, didn’t mind their own nuclear power, even though most of it conformed to the Chernobyl standards of safety and quality control. When that particular one blew up into their faces, the sainted Gorby’s first time-honoured reaction was to declare that any rumours of the accident originated with the CIA and other enemies of progress in the world.

It’s only when westward winds carried the radiation towards the capitalist Sweden, whose Geiger counters went haywire, that Gorby had to own up. Had the winds blown in the other direction, the catastrophe would have been hushed up, just as a much worse one was in the fifties. Then underground nuclear facilities and storage sumps in Siberia blew up, killing 100,000 instantly, and God only knows how many by delayed action.

In those parts of the world where human lives are still held in some esteem, nuclear energy facilities have never had a fatal incident. Nonetheless accidents at Three Mile Island and Fukushima are routinely described as ‘disasters’ even in our Tory press, leaving one wondering what word they’d reserve for incidents in which people actually get killed.

During the same period, tens of thousands of miners died of black lung and in pit accidents, and hundreds were killed by offshore platforms capsizing. This proved beyond any sane doubt that nuclear energy is by far the safest source of energy available, not just the most effective. As I hope you understand, I’m talking here about the kind of sources that can provide most of our energy needs, not the tree-hugging cloud-cuckoo-land varieties.

Even the most fervent champions of wind farms claim that eventually they’ll supply only 17 percent of our energy, and anyone who has studied the issue seriously will tell you that this estimate should be pasted in the dictionary next to the entry on wishful thinking. But even supposing they are right, where will the remaining 83 percent come from?

Our nuclear industry is moribund, with old stations being decommissioned and no new ones planned. Frau Merkel has declared that all German nuclear power stations will be shut down by 2020. France, which gets 80 percent of its energy from nuclear stations, will soon follow suit, Japan has already done so – what else do you expect after the catastrophe of biblical proportions in which no one died?

That leaves coal as the only viable home-produced alternative, which is good news for lung physicians who are thereby guaranteed more black-lung business than they could handle. Incidentally, even radiation levels around a coal mine are much higher than right next to a nuclear power station, but hey, never mind the facts, feel the passion.

Getting back to Soviet antinuclear propaganda in the West, why did they display such touching concern for our health? Why, for example, did the East German communists churn out nuclear stations like hotcakes, while paying their West German stooges to wage massive propaganda against nuclear energy? Why did Soviet cartoonists draw mushroom clouds over nuclear stations, displaying ignorance of secondary-school physics only matched by their expertise in Goebbels-style agitation?

Strategy is the answer. In those days Arab oil producers were in the Soviets’ pockets, which gave the communists a huge strategic advantage. The greater the West’s dependency on Arab hydrocarbons, the better it was for the Soviets, who could instigate oil crises at will. Unlike our own CND idiots (Tony Blair, ring your office) the Soviets knew that nuclear energy was the only reasonable alternative to hydrocarbons, which did wonders to focus the minds of KGB propagandists.

The situation has changed in details, but not in principle. Now it’s not only the Arabs but also the Russians who have their hands on the tap. Germany, for example, gets 36 percent of her gas from Gazprom (in which Col. Putin is reputedly a major shareholder), and central Europe even more (98 percent for Slovakia, 100 percent for the Baltic states). That gives the Russian KGB government a powerful blackmail weapon and perhaps a greater strategic edge than they’ve ever had.

Characteristically the Americans cottoned on faster than the Europeans, but then they haven’t been distracted by such vital issues as how much money the Germans must give to the Greeks to make them refrain from staging Nazi parades for Angela’s viewing pleasure. The Americans have developed hydraulic fracturing techniques that enable them to produce shale gas cheaply and on a large scale.

Quite apart from going a long way towards easing the country’s economic crisis (by, for example, making the raw materials for their chemical industry cost a third of Europe’s prices), this has largely eased America’s strategic conundrum – and complicated ours. The US is now producing 81 percent of its energy, making it less dependent on the Middle East. As America’s idealism is largely driven by fiscal concerns, this will reduce both her strategic stake and her interest in the region.

That will leave the EU in the driving seat – of a car with flat tyres and no engine. Only someone teetering on the edge of a crack overdose can believe that the EU will be in any position to control the situation in the Middle East. And only someone over that edge can really think that, left to itself, the situation won’t explode into the world’s face.

Meanwhile prepare yourself for the immediate consequences of HMG’s touchy-feely PC affection for wind farms, which are as useless as they are ugly. We’ll all freeze in the dark soon, but at least this will leave us enough time for tree hugging.

 

 

 

 

The other  night I caught out of the corner of my eye a couple of minutes of a ‘serious’ TV programme on archaeology. That was enough to prove yet again that ‘serious TV programme’ is an oxymoron, a bit like ‘a young person’.

Two young women were looking at a man’s skull displayed side by side with several others, supposedly belonging to man’s ancestors. What excited their girlish imagination was that the man’s skull was noticeably bigger, which they redundantly demonstrated by filling all the cavities with grit and then putting the grit into transparent glass jars.

This they held as yet another proof of evolution, not that any proof was needed of something the girls held as self-evident. In the admittedly brief excerpt I saw before switching to footie, they didn’t mention the Iceman, but then even Darwinists laden with degrees and honours seldom do.

The Iceman was discovered in a melting glacier high in the Tyrolean Alps on 19 September, 1991. This chap (Homo tyrolensis) is the oldest man found intact. (Some Egyptian mummies are older, but their brain and vital organs were removed.)

Actually, ‘pre-Iceman’ is a more accurate description of him as he lived before the Ice Age. Radiocarbon dating put his age at about 5,300 years old, but many scientists believe such a number is outside the reach of this method. So in fact he could have been much older than that.

Though the Iceman was only about 5’3”, his skull had a volume of 1500-1560 cm³, much bigger than the head of today’s man. This presents a problem for the evolutionists, even those more accomplished than those TV girls. They have to explain an evolutionary process that would account first for a huge increase in head size compared to apes – and then a gradual reduction to today’s average size of 1200 cm³. Yet again what we observe is not so much progressive development as degradation.

The Iceman had the same skull shape, facial features and DNA composition as the present inhabitants of these regions. But in some respects he was more advanced: even though he was 25-30 years old at the time of his death, his body had not yet reached physical and sexual maturity. This tallies not with Darwin but with the biblical accounts of people’s longevity, much higher than ours.

In fact, radiographic studies conducted by research orthodontists concluded that the Neanderthal reached maturity at age 28-32, with the concomitant increase in his average lifespan. In fact, studies of the characteristic features of Neanderthals’ teeth and jaws showed that they lived to about 200-300 – which casts doubt on the notion of progress implicit in Darwinian evolution.

It wasn’t just the Iceman’s physique that was astounding, it was also his artefacts. The Iceman had in his possession tools that we normally associate with the Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Copper Age – or even the Middle Age. And yet he used them all at the same time, presaging, say, our contemporary Australian aborigines who are equally adept at using boomerangs and I-phones. This suggests that dating on the basis of artefacts isn’t quite all it’s cut out to be.

The Iceman was armed with flint weapons and a long yew bow resembling both in size and material the English longbow so fondly remembered by the French. Yew doesn’t grow in those parts, so it must have been a foreign import. He also carried an axe of almost pure copper. This was similar in shape to the axes found in Northern Italy and dated 2,700 BC.

His arrows revealed the Iceman’s knowledge of basic ballistics. Carved from viburnum and dogwood branches, they had flint points and feathers. The feathers had been affixed with a resin-like glue at an angle that would cause spin in flight and help maintain a true course. They were carried in a quiver, together with an untreated sinew that could be made into a bowstring, a ball of fibrous cord, the thorn of a deer’s antler probably used to skin an animal, and four antler tips tied together with grass.

The Iceman was also armed with a tiny flint dagger with a wooden handle, a grass net possibly serving as a carrying bag and a pencil-sized stone-and-linden tool that was probably used to sharpen arrowheads and blades. He toted much of his gear in a rucksack with a U-shaped wooden frame.

Amazingly, the Iceman was adept not only at ballistics but also at pharmacology. More than five millennia before Alexander Fleming he carried a medial kit containing two Piptoporus betilinus mushrooms known to have antibiotic properties.

His clothes belie the image of a primitive savage the Darwinists have conditioned us to expect. The Iceman wore a well-cut fur robe cleverly stitched together in a mosaic-like pattern – a far cry from crude skins. He obviously cared about his appearance: his hair was cut and he had highly ornamental tattoos, a grooming idea that scientists believed to be at least 2,500 years closer to our time.

The overall conclusion is that the Iceman wasn’t much different from us, and where he was different he was superior. Progress works in mysterious ways, wouldn’t you say? Charles Darwin, call your office.

It’s a reasonably safe bet that our comprehensively educated masses have never heard of Batumi. It’s even a safer bet that they soon will.

And I’m sure that even many of those boasting public-school credentials have never heard of chacha. It’s time they did.

For Batumi and chacha have come together to produce a tourist attraction that will revolutionise foreign travel. Especially of the variety preferred by British comprehensively educated masses and even some of those boasting public-school credentials.

But before you move Batumi and chacha to the forefront of your vocabulary, you must learn what they are. Aren’t you glad I’m here to plug such gaping gaps in your education?

Batumi is a port on the Black Sea. It’s the capital of Adjara, which is an autonomous republic of Georgia. The term ‘autonomous republic’ is a Soviet throwback, and typically a geographic area thus designated is neither autonomous nor a republic. Its relation to the metropolis is akin to that between Surrey and the United Kingdom, and no one has ever suggested that Surrey be called an autonomous republic. So let’s more accurately call Adjara a province of Georgia and leave it at that.

Chacha presents another terminological difficulty, especially for Russians. Unlike most Brits, most Russians know what chacha is, or think they know it. In fact, if asked, they’ll say it’s grape vodka (no one will say it’s a dance).

But then the Russians tend to use vodka as their frame of reference for all alcoholic beverages, and often for non-alcoholic ones as well. Hence the Russian proverb ‘tea isn’t vodka, you can’t drink a lot of it.’

Ask a Russian what whisky is and he’ll tell you it’s barley vodka. Slivovitz would be plum vodka, and beer an underachieving vodka that has failed to reach its full potential.

The Russians may be forgiven for thinking chacha is a vodka for it’s usually, though not always, water-like in appearance, and ‘vodka’ derives from the Russian for water. Chacha offers a wider range of strength than vodka, reaching as high as a most satisfying 70 percent.

This occasionally plays nasty tricks on Russian visitors who guzzle chacha like vodka without realising they’re in effect drinking twice as much. This often leads to unpleasant consequences which for decorum’s sake I’ll refrain from describing in every Technicolor detail.

Let’s correct the misapprehension: chacha isn’t vodka. It’s a brandy similar to its Italian cousin grappa or its French relation marc. Like them, it’s made of – are you ready for some technical details? Well, you’ve asked for it.

Chacha is made of must, which is freshly pressed grape juice soon to become wine. To be precise, chacha is made of pomace, which is the solid contents of must: grape skins, seeds, and stems. A simple distillation process produces chacha, a spirit that tends to be less refined than most grappas but tastier than most vodkas.

So now you know what both Batumi and chacha are. What you don’t yet know is how the two combine to offer you an exciting, nay intoxicating, holiday experience. Is that what they say in brochures, a holiday experience? As distinct from a holiday? Nothing like the use of an industry term to give one an aura of verisimilitude.

By way of empirical observation, no holiday experience will ever be complete for many British tourists without them remaining in a state of perpetual drunkenness. This is usually accompanied by the kind of conduct not seen in Europe on such a scale since the dying days of the Weimar republic.

In broad terms this behavioural mode could be described as puke on pavement, to single out one salient characteristic. Furniture-destroying fun in bars and restaurants is another essential feature, one that has made many Prague bars display ‘No British Stag Parties’ in their windows.

Prague, with its beer at 50p a pint now tantalisingly out of reach, has thus created a void in British culture tours, and it’s this void that Batumi is about to fill. Its mayor Jemal Ananidze has just presided over the opening ceremony for Chacha Tower, an 80-foot-high fountain jetting not water but chacha into Adjara’s sultry air redolent of the aroma of cypress trees.

The Russian TV announcer commenting on the big event confirmed the stereotype to which I referred earlier by describing chacha as a ‘grape vodka’. He then presciently predicted that, at a meagre construction cost of $490,000, the chacha fountain will more than pay for itself by attracting brisk tourist trade.

The unsophisticated Batumi city council, which financed the project, probably pictures foreign tourism the way it comes across in James Bond films: elegant men and fragrant women touring the Côte d’Azur in Ferraris and sipping Krug on a seafront terrace. However, given the nature of the beverage serving as the main attraction, one fears that the reality may prove rather different.

If they advertise the project properly, their town will soon be overrun by British stag parties zigzagging through the streets to the tuneless accompaniment of the great classic ‘Ere We Go, ‘Ere We Go, ‘Ere We Go!’ Batumi denizens will soon learn that “wha’ you lookin’ at, mate?” is a rhetorical question best left unanswered, what with ‘mate’ not quite being a term of endearment. They’ll also have to realise that ‘You what, sunshine?’ isn’t a request for meteorological information, and that the colloquial word for pudenda can profitably if metonymically describe a man.

In short, Batumi’s mayor ought to have been careful what he wished for. He might soon get it, with his city turning into an Ibiffa, as it’s properly pronounced.

 

 

In most people’s minds, totalitarianism and democracy are antonyms. Yet the two can happily coexist not only on the same planet but also in the same country. To understand this, we should focus on the essence of totalitarianism, not its incidental manifestations, such as violence.

For elected leaders are also capable of violent oppression. Just look at the democratically elected Hitler, Perón, Mugabe, Putin, Lukashenko, Ahmadinejad and Macîas Nguema (who gratefully murdered a third of the population of Equatorial Guinea that had voted him in).

Conversely, if we define the term rigorously, even a non-violent democracy can be totalitarian. The term should properly apply to any political system that a) concentrates all power within a small elite, b) removes all checks and balances on this power, c) leaves people no viable choice, d) relies on populist brainwashing to change people’s views and personalities, f) reliably elevates to government those unfit to govern.

Each one of these telltale signs is amply observable in today’s Britain and most other so-called democratic states. They all show the dangers resident in a democracy whose power is unchecked by other estates.

The benefits of unchecked democracy are held to be self-evident, which is just as well for they would be impossible to prove either theoretically or empirically. Yet in traditional Western thought even God was regarded as a hypothesis awaiting philosophical and evidential proof. As democracy is not divine, one feels so much more justified in holding it to scrutiny.

First it is important to strip unlimited democracy of its non-partisan mask. Unlike the limited democracies of Hellenic antiquity and Western polity, universal suffrage is a radical idea that came to the fore after man was pronounced to be good to begin with and, what is more, infinitely perfectible.

It followed ineluctably that all good and further improvable people were equally qualified to choose their leaders and govern themselves. Once Americans elevated universal suffrage to secular sainthood, and spread this fideistic notion high and wide, opposition to it became impossible in the West.

But in reality the promise of democracy becomes larcenous when democracy is unchecked by the power of other estates. By atomising the vote into millions of particles, democracy renders each individual vote meaningless. What has any weight at all is an aggregate of votes, a faceless bloc. Consequently, political success in democracies depends not on any talent for statesmanship, but on the ability to put such blocs together.

This has little to do with statesmanship. Coming to the fore instead are a knack for demagoguery, photogenic appearance, absence of principles, ability to lie convincingly, selfishness and an unquenchable thirst for power at any cost.

Tocqueville warned against this with his usual prescience: ‘I do not know if the people of the United States would vote for superior men if they ran for office, but there can be no doubt that such men do not run.’ He formed this ideas of American democracy at the time of Jefferson, Adams and Madison, to name but a few. One wonders what Tocqueville would say today, observing our politicians in action. He would certainly feel that what has been realised is not his prophesies but his nightmares.

The ostensibly democratic, but in fact neo-totalitarian, state acquires more power over the individual than any monarch who ruled by divine right ever had. French subjects, for example, were shielded from Louis XIV by many layers of local government, and the Sun King wielded more power over his loftiest courtiers than over the lowliest peasants. It would not have occurred to him to tax his subjects at 75 percent, something that comes naturally to France’s democratic leaders.

Modern democracy, on the other hand, transfers power from the periphery to the centre, where the small elite reigns supreme. This ever-increasing centralisation reflects a deep trend, that of reversing two thousand years of Christendom and reverting to paganism.

People have been hollowed out, their metaphysical certitudes removed, and the resulting vacuum filled with idols, such as unchecked democracy. Fallen by the wayside is trust in the traditional localism of Christendom. Unceasing and uncontested brainwashing has replaced it with knee-jerk adulation of central government, to which people are taught to ascribe redemptive powers. In this sense all modern states are totalitarian, for they seek control over areas hitherto seen as being off-limits.

Socialism and communism, modernity’s other redemptive creeds, are unchecked democracy’s first cousins. Socialism is democracy with logic; communism is socialism with nerve. All such systems originally spring from a characteristic liberal ignorance of, and contempt for, human nature – a condition disguised by incessant encomiums on the goodness of man.

Behind this smokescreen it is easy to tell lies about democracy, such as that it makes the world more secure. In fact, in the last 100 years, when unchecked democracy achieved the PR status of the only possible alternative to tyranny, hundreds of millions have died violent deaths.

Universal suffrage implies universal military service, a fact that is at least as responsible as technological advances for the amount of blood spilled in modern wars. If medieval kings had to beg their vassals to spare a few men for the army, today’s democracies can conscript the entire population if they so wish, and prosecute anyone who refuses to join up.

Nor does unchecked democracy provide stability. Quite the opposite, one can argue that the democratic body politic carries the gene of instability, even as it is forever plagued by the demons of ad infinitum centralisation. Here too, this most factional of political systems suffers from the heredity of its liberal mother and radical father.

That is why democracy infinitely gravitates towards social democracy (a euphemism for socialism which in itself is a euphemism for the dictatorship of the big state), leaving little room for conservatism, which is a popular but imprecise word for traditional Western politics.

Looking at the three major European democracies of today, Britain, France and Germany, it would be hard to argue that democracy is a factor of political stability. In a mere century, Britain has gone from being a constitutional monarchy to being a crypto-republican province of the EU; France, from being an international power to being first a part of Germany and then her junior partner; and Germany – well, we all know about her.

Britain should not find herself in this company for she was the first country to activate an effective system of checks and balances – something that was often preached but never practised on the continent. The intellectual line of descent here leads from Plato and Aristotle to Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Burke and Tocqueville. They all knew that only checks and balances could prevent a democracy from turning into what Tocqueville called ‘tyranny of the majority’.

Burke said something similar earlier: ‘The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny.’ Another aphorist, Lord Acton, admittedly armed with the benefit of Burke’s and Tocqueville’s earlier insights, put his finger on the problem: the main conflict during the French Revolution, he wrote, was ‘a great struggle between democracy and liberty,’ thus implying that the two terms so often uttered in the same breath just might be mutually exclusive.

If they came back, they would see their worst fears coming to fruition in today’s West. And though the word ‘totalitarian’ was a later coinage, they would probably find it useful to describe our democracy run riot.