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Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán are birds of a feather, although neither looks particularly avian.

They feel a natural affinity for each other, and also for Putin. Putin is in some ways an aspirational figure for Trump and Orbán. They both envy the Russian dictator’s freedom of action, unrestricted by parliamentary pressure, judicial oversight and other annoyances.

However, because of such irritants, neither Orbán nor especially Trump can be too effusive in their admiration for that indicted war criminal. A few years ago, Trump could still afford the luxury of lauding Putin’s ‘genius’ in public, but now that Putin has reminded the world in Bucha and Mariupol that ‘genius’ and ‘genocide’ are cognates, his Western admirers have to be more restrained.

Moreover, they have to bow to the pressure exerted by their legislatures and impose tougher and tougher sanctions on Russia (Trump), or at least to go along with them (Orbán).

In that spirit, Trump has slapped a virtual embargo, supported with secondary sanctions, on the imports from Russia’s two biggest oil companies, Lookoil and Rosneft. The idea is to limit the flow of money into Putin’s war machine, which that ‘genius’ uses to commit genocide in the Ukraine.

As Cicero explained some 2,300 years ago, “Infinite money is the sinews of war” (nervi belli, pecunia infinita). Other thinkers have expressed the same idea in slightly different terms, referring to money as the lifeblood of warfare. Hence the idea behind the sanctions is to exsanguinate Putin’s aggression.

The idea is sound, but an attack on Russia’s oil exports creates collateral damage. Countries that depend on cheap Russian oil for their energy sustenance now have to get it elsewhere and pay considerably more.

Hungary could suffer more than most. The country gets 86 per cent of her oil from Russia, which explains why Orbán hopped on the plane and flew to the US to scream bloody murder, hoping that Trump’s hearing is acute enough to hear.

The route is Orbán’s well-trodden flight path. Even when Trump was between presidencies, Orbán, with the foresight of an intuitive apparatchik, often flew to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Ferney.

During those pilgrimages, the two men found out they spoke the same language, even if one did so in crude English and the other in Hungarian (which, looking at Orbán, I suspect, though can’t verify, is crude too).

Orbán realised that Trump saw politics as a global extension of his property development business, transactional and based on personal relationships. The kind of personal relationship the president favours is the other chap paying gluteal respects, and Orbán was happy to oblige.

He’d return home with sore lips but high hopes for the future, provided Trump got back into the White House. The latter obliged, and Orbán’s osculatory investment began to pay off.

It again did so the other day, when Trump granted Hungary a one-year exemption from the new batch of oil sanctions. “It’s very difficult for [Hungary] to get the oil and gas from other areas,” Trump said at the joint press conference. “They don’t have the advantage of having sea. … They don’t have the ports. They have a difficult problem.”

The US could easily solve that problem, and in fact has begun to do so by selling Hungary $600 million worth of liquefied natural gas, of which the US has a practically unlimited supply thanks to fracking. Doubling the volume of gas exports and perhaps lowering the price would go a long way towards relieving Hungary’s land-locked ordeal, but sanction-busting seems easier and cheaper.

“Pipelines are not an ideological or political issue. It’s a physical reality …,” said Orbán, proving he has nothing to learn about demagoguery from his idol. Another lesson he has learned well comes easily to all populists, Right or Left. They, nationalists or globalists, believe their audience is generally stupid and, judging by their electoral success, they may have a point.

Pipelines, and economy in general, are always a “political issue” – it’s not for nothing that economy uses ‘political’ as its forename. This is the case even in peacetime, and infinitely more so at wartime.

It’s for political, or rather geopolitical, reasons that sanctions on Russian oil were imposed in the first place, and surely Orbán understands this. So the “physical reality” of the oil pipeline from Russia is as irrelevant as it is indisputable.

Orbán has been a consistent Putinversteher, one of the sincerest and most passionate among European leaders. According to him, Putin is right when blaming NATO for provoking the conflict, and this is something other Western leaders “misunderstand”.

The Ukraine, explains Orbán, can’t win the war in the battlefield, so the West might as well stop propping up the regime both his role models, Putin and Trump, dislike. Like Trump, Orbán wants to put an end to the war immediately, and if that can only be done on Putin’s terms, then so be it.

Orbán is a fierce opponent of the Ukraine joining European alliances. He has said he’d veto her joining the EU, and the very idea of that long-suffering country ever joining NATO makes him shudder with revulsion.

Viktor feels deep empathy for Vlad not only for emotional reasons but also for pragmatic ones. Both he and Putin have to stay in power in order to survive, and not just politically. Should they lose office, both Orbán and Putin are certain to face charges of corruption, and the latter also of war crimes.

Putin is in the enviable position of not being accountable to the electorate – he can only lose power to a coup, in which case he may not live long enough to face those charges. Orbán, on the other hand, has to win elections, and the next one is in April.

Had Hungary not got Trump’s exemption, Hungarians’ living standards would have dipped immediately, and people usually make their leaders pay for that at the polls. Thus Trump has done Orbán a life-saving favour, but then that’s what friends are for.

That exemption is wrong on many different levels, from moral to geopolitical. Ukrainians pay with their blood for every barrel of oil Putin manages to flog, but neither Orbán nor Trump cares about that. Their electorates may, but not as much as they care about the price of petrol and heating oil.

Still, I haven’t seen a single printed word of opprobrium of this latest exercise in the art of the deal, to borrow a phrase. Even if our conservative press no longer thinks in terms of good and evil, or even right and wrong, we are all in even deeper trouble than we know.

The advertising bomb went off in 1970, producing tremors that spread all over the world.

Charlie Saatchi created, and the Family Planning Association ran, an ad showing a pregnant man, with the headline asking: “Would you be more careful if it was you that got pregnant?”

The ad was so daring, so outrageous, so shocking that even advertising veterans couldn’t quite believe their eyes. When they finally caught their breath, they began to give Saatchi every accolade, every award the industry could bestow.

But why was the effect so powerful (despite the dubious grammar in the headline)? Why were people shocked? Why couldn’t they believe their eyes? Simple. Because their eyes had never seen a pregnant man, and their minds couldn’t even fathom one.

Tempora mutantur and all that. If the ad made people gasp in 1970, in 2025 it would only make them shrug. What’s the point? Of course, men can get pregnant, everyone knows that. Especially everyone who reads The Guardian and watches BBC News…

Hold on. Even BBC viewers may be frustrated if they expect its newsreaders always to talk about male pregnancy with deadpan insouciance. One such newsreader, Martine Croxall, let the woke side down.

Earlier this year Miss Croxall was reading an autocue script with her usual fluency. However, when she reached the phrase “pregnant people”, she rolled her eyes ever so slightly and corrected herself, saying “pregnant women” instead.

That was more than both her employer and some viewers could bear, as it were. Not that many viewers, mind you, because only 20 complaints were filed. But that was enough.

The BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit (ECU) upheld the objections yesterday, saying the newsreader had breached its rules on impartiality:

“The ECU considered the facial expression… laid it open to the interpretation that it indicated a particular viewpoint in the controversies currently surrounding trans identity, and the congratulatory messages Croxall later received on social media, together with the critical views expressed in the complaints to the BBC, tended to confirm that the impression of her having expressed a personal view was widely shared across the spectrum of opinion on the issue.”

Please read it again. Miss Croxall received not only 20 complaints but also “congratulatory messages”. The BBC didn’t say how many, but, five gets you hundreds, there had to be enough to reach the conclusion that her “personal view was widely shared across the spectrum of opinion on the issue”.

Miss Croxall thus went along with the overwhelming majority of viewers whose licence fees fund the BBC. That was a borderline criminal transgression, one so egregious that she was lucky to get away with a reprimand. Another such slip and she may hear from the Crown Prosecution Service.

This is a matter of principle that should be impervious to numbers. Still, some 657,000 perfectly binary women gave birth in the UK last year. How many non-binary sideshows did?

Seeking that information, I went to the official website of the Office for National Statistics, only to receive a polite, but otherwise unsatisfactory, reply:

“Thank you for your request. Unfortunately, we do not hold the information requested, as the birth certificate information we receive from the General Register Office (GRO) does not provide information on gender identity.”

So let’s just say only a few and leave it at that, but the issue is about ideology, not arithmetic. Miss Croxall would have been censured even if there had been not a single non-binary birth in the UK, ever. That’s what impartiality means.

Sorry for being so unsporting. Rebuking the BBC for Left-wing bias is like accusing Stalin of communism, Hitler of Nazism and Ed Miliband of eco zealotry. Doing so at any other time would be stating the bleeding obvious, which is a rhetorical sin.

But doing that this week is a whole different story. For the BBC has chosen to strike a blow for impartiality just as it’s embroiled in an embarrassing scandal.

Reporting on the January 2021 Capitol riot in Washington DC, editors at the Panorama news show doctored Donald Trump’s speech to make it sound as if he had called for insurrection. Technically, the task was a doddle. Just take a few words from the beginning of the speech, splice them with a few words from the end, and Don’s your uncle, never mind the context.

That’s like taking the words “the BBC” from one place in this article, the words “may hear from the Crown Prosecution Service” from another and come up with a suggestion that the Beeb is under criminal investigation. Oh well, come to think of it… No, forget it.

Hence, rather than saying what everyone knows anyway, that the BBC is a coven of woke witches and a hotbed of Left radicalism, I must instead compliment it for its blockbusting nuclear-strength cynicism. The BBC reasserting its commitment to impartiality at this time is like Donald Trump advocating elegant elocution or Rachel Reeves preaching fiscal responsibility.

I’m not going to join the chorus of demands that the BBC licence fee be abolished. The choir is already strong enough without my contribution. Let’s just say that a corporation which only ever runs appointment ads in The Guardian is unapologetically Left-wing and doesn’t care who knows it.

We’ve known for decades which side in the culture war the BBC not so much supports as spearheads. The Beeb has been able to get away with that so far, and there’s no reason to believe it won’t continue to do so in perpetuity. Obviously, the BBC can afford wokery without jeopardising its existence.

The monarchy can’t. When royal personages join the destructive cultural crusade, they betray their vital function of maintaining the diachronic continuity of the nation. In essence if not necessarily in form, the institution of our monarchy has been co-extensive with the nation itself, going back so far that not even an eagle eye can pinpoint the moment it began.

Thus the royals can’t play favourites: the past ought to be at least as important to them as the present and the future. When the royal family acts or speaks in ways that betray tradition, it stands in default of its mission, putting its continued existence in peril.

Thus, one has to lament that His Majesty overreacted when throwing his brother under the bus. The last time a royal prince was demoted to commoner, Cromwell was in charge, and the full implications of that precedent ought to make our royals wary.

What’s important isn’t just that the king overreacted, but also why he did so. Some censure of the prince bringing the monarchy in disrepute was called for, but the punishment meted out was so excessively severe largely for woke reasons. I just hope the king will be able (or willing) to block his brother’s extradition to the US.

Cultural warriors led by the BBC have downgraded the importance of some crimes, mainly those against property, and upgraded the significance of others, such as those of a sexual nature.

While in no way condoning amorous misdeeds, the hysteria following Andrew’s alleged hanky-panky with a 17-year-old girl was so out of proportion to the act itself that it was clearly motivated by ideological diktats. By pandering to woke shrieks, the royal family showed weakness, encouraging republicans to pounce.

Then just yesterday, HRH Prince William gave us the benefit of his climatological erudition. Speaking at the COP 30 UN Climate Summit, HRH opined that “We are edging dangerously close to the earth’s critical tipping points…thresholds beyond which the natural systems we depend on may begin to unravel”.

How does he know that? Has he studied the matter extensively? Never mind extensively – has HRH read a single scientific study on climate? I doubt that, and he couldn’t have read Ian Plimer’s seminal book Heaven and Earth.

Prof. Plimer, a renowned climatologist, provides reams of scientific data, with each bit referenced to dozens of sources, showing that the brouhaha about climate owes more to ideology than to science. Hence, in the very least, the issue must be treated as debatable.

And so it is, outside the ideological stormtroopers of the cultural war supported and personified by the BBC. The heir to the oldest and most significant throne in the West shouldn’t act as the dummy to woke ventriloquists if he doesn’t want that throne to totter more than it already does.

Both the monarchy and the BBC are key British institutions, albeit of different provenance, function and importance. We may or may not love them equally or at all, but we must all acknowledge their vital importance. When they go astray, pandering to subversive sensibilities, we are all in trouble – even those of us who may not recognise it.

Yes, I know that every word in that triad is misspelled. But who cares?

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson certainly doesn’t. It’s those hallowed concepts that matter, not how you spell them. Whatever the orthography, the new triad of DEI should replace the old one of 3Rs: reading, writing, arithmetic.

Now, Mrs Phillipson is a good-looking woman, which would normally rank her high on my list of human attainments. But then I look at her plans for Britain’s primary schools, and she not so much goes down to the bottom of the list as drops right off it.

However, I wonder if she too is a chess player like her accomplice Rachel Reeves. Mrs Phillipson’s thought follows the impeccably logical path from the general to the specific. Like the champion junior player Rachel never was, Bridget first lays down the overall strategy and then looks for the best tactics to carry it out.

Can’t fault her on that. I can, however, lament that such a sound intellectual apparatus is put to the service of wicked goals to be achieved by subversive means.

The strategy is easy to discern. Mrs Phillipson and her accomplices don’t care if children learn how to read, write and add up. As far as they are concerned, the purpose of education isn’t to educate. It’s to indoctrinate.

To that end, she has announced that all pupils will get compulsory ‘citizenship’ classes. My first reaction was positive, although we are really subjects, not citizens. Still, no doubt children should study the nature and history of the British constitution, learning the roles played by the crown, the two Houses of Parliament and the judiciary.

But then that’s not what Mrs Phillipson has in mind. Citizenship to her means learning the sacramental significance of DEI (however spelled), media literacy (whatever that means, but don’t tell me — I’m happy in my state of ignorance), gender studies (and she isn’t talking about grammatical categories) and climate change (caused by Brexit, the Tory establishment and Nigel Farage).

I’m appalled. Such subjects will take up precious school time, which is already crammed to the gunwales with sex education, condom studies and birth control techniques. Oh yes, the three Rs will suffer too, but do remember how Mrs Phillipson et al. define the goal of education.

In pursuit of her real objective, Mrs Phillipson will abandon several Tory policies that she is certain amount to nothing short of child abuse. Specifically, she’ll scrap the English Baccalaureate (EBacc), what with its accent on such obsolete subjects as maths, science, humanities and foreign languages.

Such subjects, she believes, do untold harm to children’s education. If they do maths, they’ll be able to figure out that Labour’s spending plans don’t add up, and what kind of citizenship is that? Learning science may make them see the whole net zero brouhaha for the scam it is. If they really get into British history, they may find out it’s not all just racist colonial oppression, which discovery may traumatise them for life.

And yes, Mrs Phillipson would dearly love us to re-enter the EU, but a Briton doesn’t have to know foreign languages to be a true European. All those continentals speak some English patois, so why bother?

She also wants to simplify grammar, and I’d suggest that the best way of doing so is to abandon it altogether. However English is spoke, that be fine, innit?

However, it appears that Mrs Phillipson isn’t quite prepared to go that far yet. All she wants is to get rid of posh-toff grammatical terms, all those subjunctives, predicates, adverbs and some such.

At first I wondered whether she advocated an extensive use of structural grammar techniques, which indeed dispense with much of the traditional terminology. But no, what she means is an emphasis on practical, as opposed to ‘theoretical’, grammar.

As a former teacher of English in the neolithic past, I sympathise with my British colleagues. Their task has just been made well-nigh impossible, but that’s no skin off Mrs Phillipson’s shapely posterior.

While lackadaisical about pupils’ basic education, she is touchingly concerned about their mental health. To that end, she is reducing the amount of time spent on GCSE exams, those tortuous ordeals subjecting tots to intolerable pressure.

Exams will be greatly simplified to make sure everyone passes, if not always with full marks. Children don’t need to learn how to handle pressure because they’ll face none in grown-up life. No, scratch that. The real pressure will come from assorted conspiracy theories, and trust Mrs Phillipson to teach pupils how to recognise and reject those.

What kind of conspiracy theories? Need you ask? Things like global warming denial, that infernal plot to undermine Ed Miliband’s net zero fanaticism.

Speaking of Mrs Phillipson’s accomplices, one such is Labour MP Helen Hayes, chairman of the Education Select Committee. (Sorry, I’m one of those fossils who find ‘chairperson’ jarring and who regard ‘chair’ as strictly a piece of furniture.)

She supports the new curriculum implicitly. Explicitly, she said:

“I welcome the proposed changes to the curriculum, which are designed to ensure access to a greater breadth of subjects including within science and the arts, and that children and young people leave school with the skills they need to succeed in the modern world, particularly the focus on citizenship, digital and media literacy, climate science, oracy and enrichment.”

I’m confident that the new curriculum will teach pupils how to express themselves with Miss Hayes’s coherence, lucidity and, well, oracy. They could then look forward to lucrative careers as welfare recipients, Labour voters, net zero activists and tireless fighters for gender rights.

Messrs Mamdani and Trump cordially loathe each other, correctly sensing that their political views are incompatible.

However, they are dizygotic, if not identical, twins in one key aspect that’s more significant than things like raising or cutting taxes. Both are populists, although they appeal to different segments of the populorum.

Populism has many definitions, but I use it in the sense of going over the head of traditional institutions to derive power directly from popular support.

I see this as a fatal flaw regardless of any short-term gains, and the flaw is systemic because it points not to the abuse of the existing political arrangement, but to its congenital defects. Moreover, these defects were already known 2,500 years ago, but then no one has ever accused people of heeding the lessons taught by either sages or history.

Both Plato and especially Aristotle identified the three core political systems: monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. None, they warned, was going to succeed in its unadulterated form.

If their purity is intransigently maintained, a monarchy will turn into a tyranny, an aristocracy into an oligarchy, and democracy into an ochlocracy, mob rule. For a political arrangement to last, and for justice to thrive, a state must combine the elements of all three known forms of government.

Their faithful and undeservedly maligned disciple, Machiavelli, repeated that thought in his Discourses, published posthumously in 1531. That’s why, he added, the synthetic constitution of Lycurgus lasted longer in Sparta than the purely democratic constitution of Solon in Athens – this, though the latter was more virtuous.

Instead of a monarchy, Machiavelli talked about a principality, but that’s only a semantic nuance. Where he deviated from the Greeks substantively was in his interpretation of mob rule which he saw as anarchy, a total disintegration of governance.

However, hindsight vindicates the Greeks’ view: our modern democracy produces a different, perhaps even more sinister, form of ochlocracy. The empowered mob turns into what Tocqueville called a tyrannical majority. It then holds the government beholden to its tyranny, rendering the state itself tyrannical in the mob’s own image.

Now I’m on a name-dropping binge, allow me to drop another one: Edmund Burke. Writing towards the end of the 18^th century, Burke insisted that MPs should be people’s representatives, not their delegates. Once elected to the Commons, they should act according to the people’s interests even when these don’t coincide with their wishes.

That deep idea hasn’t aged well. It’s contingent on two essential premises, both of which pertained in Burke’s time, but neither does in modernity.

We no longer have politicians able to identify people’s interests and how best to serve them, especially when such interests diverge from their own. And nor do we have a population ready to have its wishes ignored because it trusts elected officials to serve its interests.

Burkean democracy couldn’t survive contact with the Enlightenment ethos of equality. The balance of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy that existed in Burke’s time, and was hailed as ideal by the Greeks, was obliterated in modernity.

British democracy was aristocratic in the 18^th century, in that franchise was limited, and powerful aristocrats could affect the results of elections by influencing their tenants to vote for their preferred candidate. The Reform Acts of the 19^th century expanded the franchise, but in the early 20^th century women and about a third of all men still didn’t qualify to vote.

The idea of one vote for each man, woman and increasingly child was still seen as an indigestible pie in the sky. However, when the Enlightenment injected the egalitarian venom into politics, England held out longer than, say, France and America.

Since both the French and American republics are constituted on Enlightenment principles, they have no in-built restraints to prevent galloping egalitarianism from riding roughshod over mixed government. Add a measure of egalitarian passion to democracy, and neonatal socialism will steadily grow to maturity, weaned on the poisoned milk of the deadly sins.

Aristotle defined a just society as one in which the people accept inequalities as a necessary factor of the common good. But today’s ochlocrats no longer wish to accept any inequalities, which is why they’ll stamp out all vestiges of a just society.

Power mechanisms designed to counterbalance democracy by competing with it either fall by the wayside or else become artifacts, relics of the past nostalgically kept on the collective mantelpiece but no longer used.

Both Britain and the US pay lip service to division of power, but in reality power in both countries is becoming less and less divided, if at different speeds. People’s votes, often only surveyed and not even yet cast, hold sway. Only those politicians come to the fore who can successfully put blocs of voters together by pandering to their wishes or at least promising to do so.

Since public education in both countries ill-prepares the electorate to understand where its true interests lie, people’s knees jerk this way or that, and they insist that their wildest demands be met – or else.

At the same time, political egalitarianism is good at churning out demagogues ready to make any promise likely to garner more votes. It’s not so good at producing statesmen capable of acting on Burke’s prescriptions, or indeed understanding them. Today’s politicians are more likely to sweep the aforementioned mementos off the mantelpiece, watch those institutional relics smash to smithereens, and then start an unmediated dialogue with the rampaging mob.

However, the mob isn’t united in its demands. It’s divided into two large groups, each subdivided into smaller ones. This is caused by the siren song of socialism, sung by the mob, heard by the state and rendering both insane.

The promises of socialism add up to a clinical picture of madness, which precludes uniformity. Some people are mad enough to believe and cherish those promises; some are still sane enough not to.

Since no compromise between madness and sanity is possible, the two groups drift wider and wider apart, with neither, however, ready to relinquish its power. Hence politicians, who are at the beck and call of public whims, also have to split into two groups, each listening intently to the rumblings of opinion within its part of the mob.

Not every member of it can speak though, at least not loudly enough to make himself heard. We all like to talk about public opinion, but there is really no such thing. The only thing that exists is the loudmouthed opinion of the more impassioned and hence extreme faction within each group.

As a result, politics inevitably becomes more radicalised at both levels: the mob and its servile government. This is observable on both sides of the political divide – the irrational and relatively rational people begin to see one another as implacable enemies.

Power passes from one group to the other at more or less regular intervals, but overall it never escapes the mob’s clutches. Whatever little is left of traditional institutions is crushed in its tightening grip.

Whichever group screams its wishes more loudly gets to push its figurehead into government. The sub-mob of crazed Left-wing egalitarians has prevailed in New York City and Britain, the other sub-mob, that of more rational zealots, in the US federal government and Italy.

But the two together add up precisely to what Aristotle et al. saw as a great evil: ochlocracy, mob rule. Those really sane if silent individuals who hope for a return to a civilised political normality should stop their reveries. Once the Rubicon has been crossed, there is no going back.

When you flip a coin, you get either heads or tails – but you don’t get two separate coins. The coin remains one, and it doesn’t matter if one side of it shows Mamdani and the other Trump. The madness of ochlocracy will continue to rend the world asunder, that’s what populism is all about.

Only 44 million Christians live in China, out of a population of 1.4 billion. This, although Christian missionaries tirelessly worked to convert the country for at least four centuries.

In particular, the Venerable Matteo Ricci almost succeeded in converting China in the late 16^th century. Yet he and his successors ultimately failed, which teaches a useful lesson in any number of subjects, including secular ones.

That Jesuit priest and scholar began his mission in 1582 and continued it until his death in 1610. Ricci was the first Westerner to translate Confucian texts into a European language (Latin), and he compiled the first Chinese-Portuguese dictionary.

Ricci’s scientific exploits made him a highly respected figure in China. The Wanli Emperor sought Ricci’s advice on astronomy and chronology, and even invited him to enter the Forbidden City, making Ricci the first European so honoured.

Fully immersed in Chinese philosophy and language, Ricci was a cultural ecumenist, a great believer in what today is called inclusivity. He sported Chinese dress, could speak and write classical Chinese, and in general displayed none of the superciliousness of some other European visitors.

However, his mission wasn’t primarily cultural. Ricci was in China to guide the locals to Christ, and he embarked on that task from an ecumenical premise. Realising that Chinese culture was thoroughly permeated with Confucianism, he sought to emphasise the similarities between that ancient philosophy and Christianity.

Missionaries from the mendicant Franciscan and Dominican orders took exception to Ricci’s approach, accusing him of compromising Christian doctrine. In response, he restated his commitment to orthodoxy, saying: “Simus, ut sumus, aut non simus” (“We shall remain as we are or we shall not remain at all”).

However, it turned out that remaining as he was, an orthodox Catholic, ran into conflict with Confucianism, much as Ricci tried to emphasise the similarities.

These are numerous. Both Confucians and Christians recognise the value of compassion, empathy, filial piety, respect for elders, friendship, community, social hierarchy, ethics. Such overlaps have always attracted Western atheists and Christian apostates to various Eastern creeds.

Chesterton was scathing about that sort of thing, saying wittily that such people always insist “that Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially Buddhism”. Similarities do exist, argued Chesterton, but they are superficial and peripheral. The core Christian beliefs are incompatible with Buddhism or, as Ricci found out, Confucianism (he, by the way, disliked Buddhism).

Confucianism is humanistic, with man occupying its credal centre. In Christianity, that role is played by God, which shines a different light on the world.

Morality is an important part of Christianity, but it’s derivative from its theocentrism. Thus, while Confucians believe in the innate goodness of man, Christians know that man is sinful.

Original sin is a core belief of Judaeo-Christianity, but it runs contrary to Eastern philosophies and religions. Morality to a Christian is achieved through God’s grace first and proper exercise of free will second. It’s salvation that’s the ultimate goal of life for Christians, not morality, as it is for Confucians.

Ricci tried to downplay the differences and cultivate the common ground. You abhor seeing others suffer, he kept saying – so do we. You emphasise honesty – so do we. You insist on acting ethically – so do we. You value wisdom – so do we.

You promote the Golden Rule – so do we. Look, Confucius says, “Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you”, and our “Do unto others…” says exactly the same thing in almost the same words.

His Confucian listeners listened politely and respectfully, nodded, smiled – and remained Confucian. They too were saying Simus, ut sumus, aut non simus, in their own singsong language, and, a few exceptions apart, they never changed their tune.

Fast-forward to the 20^th century, and a curious phenomenon emerges. When assorted socialist creeds, including the most extreme one, communism, began to hold sway, they found a more fertile ground among Confucians than among Christians.

Communism is compatible only with Christian apostasy, not Christianity. By contrast, Confucianism can comfortably coexist with communism, provided Marxist rhetoric is accepted as its reality.

Paradoxically, Confucianism, an ancient philosophy founded in the 6^th century BC, is consonant in some of its presuppositions with Enlightenment fallacies. One such is insistence on the innate goodness of man, which effortlessly floated from Rousseau to Marx.

(When people are found to fall short of that ideal, communists are so disappointed that they try to kill everyone who has let them down.)

Man is born in primordial goodness; he is, according to Rousseau, a noble savage. Hence any society should be organised in such a way as to open all paths to virtue. Already in Rousseau, and certainly in Marx, it was clear that it was the state’s job to define virtue as it saw fit.

And if some individuals’ understanding of virtue differed from the state’s mandate, Rousseau knew exactly what to do:

“The state should be capable of transforming every individual into part of the greater whole from which he, in a manner, gets his life and being; of altering man’s constitution for the purpose of strengthening it. [It should be able] to take from the man his own resources and give him instead new ones alien to him and incapable of being made use of without the help of others. The more completely these inherited resources are annihilated, the greater and more lasting are those which he acquires.”

The entirety of modern totalitarianism is contained in that quotation. This, I believe, is a logical (though perhaps not inevitable) development of humanism, understood in its meaning of anthropocentrism. Transplant this thought into the soil of Confucianism, rich in veneration of authority, community and man-centred ethics, and you can see how this Rousseauan sapling can grow into a luxuriant Maoist tree.

For a Christian to accept communism, he has to abandon Christianity. Otherwise he must act in the spirit of simus, ut sumus, aut non simus, even if he has never heard the phrase. A Confucian doesn’t face such a stark choice, which gets us back to Matteo Ricci, a sage and saintly man who dedicated his life to a noble but lost cause.

His failure ought to remind us that peripheral similarities should never blind us to the existence of core incompatibilities. We should be able to coexist with those of other cultures, but our central beliefs can’t coexist with theirs.

Multiculturalism, in its present meaning of a large menu of equally tasty dishes from all over the world, is thus civilisational suicide, a sort of Dignitas for deracinated societies. The more deracinated a society is, the more likely it is to insist that all cultures are equally valuable – meaning that its own has no special significance.

When this malaise sets in, it usually proves fatal. Thus R.G. Collingwood:

“Civilisations sometimes perish because they are forcibly broken up by the armed attack of enemies without or revolutionaries within; but never from this cause alone. Such attacks never succeed unless the thing that is attacked is weakened by doubt as to whether the end which it sets before itself, the form of life which it tries to realise, is worth achieving.”

Matteo Ricci’s failure is actually his success in that his life teaches us a valuable lesson. We ignore it at our peril.

The British state took (only my innate moderation prevents me from saying ‘extorted’) 44.4 per cent of GDP last year.

That was before our Marxist government embarked on a new offensive in its class war, so you can confidently expect that proportion to grow fast. In fact, 44.4 per cent is merely a point of departure – for the moon.

In France, that proportion was already higher last year, standing as it did at 57 per cent. Theirs is vectored the same way as ours, so France is taking giant steps on her way to the 85 per cent proportion that existed in Stalin’s USSR. One shouldn’t overwork this analogy, but the trend is unmistakable.

When the state accounts for nearly or over half of a nation’s economy, that economy is no longer free. And, if you believe Hayek, neither is the nation – old Friedrich saw freedom as contingent on, and directly proportionate to, economic liberty.

Though Hayek had a point, I think he pushed it too far. I call that type of thinking totalitarian economism, which is less harmful than other forms of totalitarian thought, but still not sufficiently nuanced for my taste. However, an argument can be made that a state that controls much of the people’s livelihood gains concomitant control over the people.

Hence the 60 per cent of GDP in France and 50 per cent in Britain (with both levels probably to be reached this year) empower the state way too much. But that, after all, is the ultimate goal of socialism, and few will deny that both countries are socialist to a most lamentable degree.

However, it’s not just the size that counts, and I can’t believe I’ve just uttered this clichéd innuendo. It’s also how the money taken away from the people is used. And there the French are clearly getting much better value out of their state’s rapaciousness.

Put me blindfolded into a car (ideally a passenger seat), and I’ll instantly tell you whether the road I’m on is in Britain or in France. The surface on French roads is much smoother, and one seldom encounters a pothole. Moreover, roadworks aren’t nearly as ubiquitous there.

French roads also drain much faster and they are often bone dry an hour after a downpour, as heavy as a rain turning British roads into waterways. And their central reservations are designed to block off the blinding lights of oncoming traffic much more efficiently than ours.

It’s true that French motorways are toll roads raking in millions every year, whereas, one or two exceptions aside, British roads are public. But French N, D and C roads are public too, maintained by different tiers of local government. And they too range from good to impeccable.

Moreover, any roadworks that do happen in France are completed much more quickly. A few years ago, for example, a new 15-mile motorway bypass near us was built in just over two months. If you’ve ever observed similar projects in Britain, I can see you smiling sardonically.

Even assuming that roadworks are done by private contractors, this still shows that French civil administrators are better at their job than their British counterparts. We have much fun tittering about the backhanders taken by corrupt French officials, but our own administrators seem to be corrupt in more fundamental ways, those affecting their core duties.

When I wrote my first book back in the late 1990s, I mentioned that, during the 17 years that I’d lived in the King’s Road, its entire 2.5 mile length hadn’t been free of some roadworks for a single day. Seventeen years have now turned into 37, but the numeral is the only thing I have to change in that statement.

Nor is it just the roads. French healthcare is also better than ours, although it’s doing its level best to catch up, or rather down. Again, I’m speaking from personal experience. Not only have I done thousands of miles on French roads, but I’ve also had the misfortune of spending long enough in French hospitals to be able to compare them to our private and NHS ones, which I also know not from hearsay.

While not quite as good as the former, the public insurance-funded hospital in provincial Auxerre is better than NHS hospitals in London. Moreover, it doesn’t take as long to get to hospital there, this though we live in the middle of nowhere, if Burgundian woods can be so described.

When I needed an ambulance, one arrived in 10 minutes, which would be pretty good going even for London with its profusion of medical services. French firemen are also trained as paramedics, which allows the French to roll both services into one, at least in the provinces. This administrative legerdemain saved my life on a couple of occasions, which gets me back to the question in the title, slightly modified.

Why are French public services so much better than ours? Yes, the French have to pay more for them, but at least they seem to get their money’s worth.

I can’t really answer that question, at least not in a few words. What saddens me is that even in the generation preceding mine, the British public administration was the envy of the world. Now it’s rapidly becoming the world’s laughingstock, and the same goes for British education.

The system of state-funded grammar schools, supported by secondary moderns with a greater accent on practical skills, and privately funded public schools, ensured that 25 per cent of the people were well-educated and the rest competent enough to look after themselves in the economic rough-and-tumble.

One could say that most Britons were educated well, if not equally well. But that inequality was a burr under our socialists’ blanket, and they got rid of most grammar schools in the name of equity, that E in today’s pernicious DEI. Parents were thus faced with the choice of either sending their children to moron-spewing comprehensives or paying public-school fees.

Since the law of supply-demand was still in force, public schools, liberated from comparable state-funded competition, began to raise their previously modest fees to a stratospheric level. Fees at Eton and other top public schools, for example, are now around £65,000 a year and growing, but even minor public (meaning private) schools are becoming too expensive for most families.

At the same time, the level of state-funded education remains high in France, although not as high as it used to be – socialist erosion exists there too. Still, French youngsters don’t seem to have reading problems after finishing secondary education, which is often the case in the UK.

Everywhere one looks, it’s not just the roads but public services in general that are better in France, which suggests that socialist corruption is making greater and faster inroads in Britain. And, as our American cousins would put it, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Now our government isn’t just old-style socialist but downright Marxist, the brutally competent and efficient civil service of yesteryear is rapidly receding into a fond nostalgic memory. The fact that the French are going the same way is little consolation – and schadenfreude isn’t a commendable emotion anyway.

Both the British and the French are rapidly cutting off their nose to spite their face, but the British are even better at that metaphorical surgical procedure. Well, at least we are better at something.

It saddens me to report that one of the two principal political parties in the US shows signs of most unfortunate disunity. Not that the Democratic Party has ever spoken in one voice, but these days the sound is especially discordant.

In my day, the Democrats used to split more or less along the Mason-Dixon Line. Those to the south of it overlapped with the bulk of the Republican Party, while those to the north tended to be what Europeans oxymoronically call democratic socialist, and Americans misname ‘liberal’.

The good news for those who, like me, favour political harmony is that such a geographical demarcation no longer exists. The bad news is that it has been replaced with a different split: one between Trotskyists and bog standard socialists.

Neither group bears any relation to what used to be seen as a mainstream political party in the West in general and America in particular. And the Trotskyist wing is most visibly championed by Zohran Mamdani, who in a couple of days is likely to be elected mayor of New York.

President Trump routinely refers to Mamdani as “100 per cent communist lunatic” and “total nut-job”, which, contrary to Trump’s usual tendency to hyperbole, is an understatement, or rather a misstatement.

True enough, Leon Trotsky would have happily signed his name to every political idea Mamdani campaigns on, except perhaps those that reek of anti-Semitism too much. But it’s a mistake to ascribe extreme political views to mental instability.

Neither Lenin nor Stalin nor Hitler was insane. Lenin’s cannibalistic ideas had been fully formed in his mind and put into practice long before syphilis made final inroads on his mind. Stalin developed some paranoid tendencies in the last few years of his life, but he had been perfectly rational in his criminal policies until then. And Hitler, although somewhat hysterical, kept his marbles almost to the end.

People who ascribe evil to madness should brush up on their theology, ideally, or moral philosophy, at a pinch. They’ll find out that evil has full residency in human nature, if only negatively, as the absence of good. The choice between the two is thus perfectly normal either way and it’s always free. Evil people are simply those who have chosen wrong. They aren’t insane – and neither is Mamdani.

Trump, however, is half-right: Mamdani is definitely 100 per cent communist, with a distinct Trotskyist bent. He describes capitalism as ‘theft’ and the police as ‘evil’. Consequently, he plans to crush the former with taxes and replace the latter with social services.

He also wants to freeze the rent for millions of apartments, even those that are already rent-controlled or rent-stabilised (I know a difference exists, although it escaped me even when I lived in Manhattan). New York landlords will respond the same way they always do when the local government plays silly buggers: they’ll keep their properties vacant and put repairs on hold.

To compensate, Mamdani wants to create 200,000 union-built, “100 per cent affordable” apartments, and fair enough, they would be affordable for the prospective tenants. But at a total cost of $100 billion over ten years, they would be zero per cent affordable to the city.

By comparison, his other project, free buses for all, costs a mere pittance of $800 million a year, while his plan to subsidise food to the tune of $60 million a year sounds dirt cheap. Both are likely to end up as a pie in the sky.

But it’s another brilliant idea that especially intrigues me since it illustrates both the economic difference between our two countries and the ideological similarity between Mamdani and our own dear government.

He wants almost to double the minimum wage to $30 an hour. In our money, it adds up to the magical number of £46,000 a year that holds a particular significance for PM Starmer and Chancellor Reeves.

They won their landslide partly on the promise not to raise taxes on “working people”. Since it’s obvious that neither doctors nor lawyers nor stock brokers, many of whom put in 90-hour weeks, do any work, analysts struggled with establishing how HMG defined that category.

Now, as the autumn budget is rapidly approaching, Rachel in Accounts has helpfully elucidated the issue. She won’t raise taxes for the “working people”, meaning those who are on – are you ready for this? – less than £46,000 a year. The fat cats who earn more than that will be “squeezed till the pips squeak”, as one of Rachel’s illustrious predecessors, Denis Healey, put it so robustly.

And there’s the rub: what the American Marxist Mamdani sees as the minimum wage, our homegrown Marxist Reeves regards as untold riches to be expropriated. Just think how much wealthier the US is – and hence how much richer the pickings for their communists.

Another difference is that Mamdani is more honest: he openly talks in rank Marxist terms, such as “public ownership of the means of production”, whereas Rachel still couches her Marxism in pseudo-democratic cant. However, when Marx talked about the means of production, he had in mind the burgeoning factories of the Industrial Revolution which in those days accounted for most of the economy.

By contrast, today’s New York City doesn’t produce much apart from services. The only NYC products I can think of offhand are pastrami, bagels and dill pickles, but I don’t think Marx would have counted these as industrial output. Mamdani ought to bring his Marxism up to date.

Of course, another difference between him and Rachel is that she’ll be able to act on her plans, whereas Mamdani will probably be held back by the harsh reality of New York finances or, barring that, by the state government. But it’s the thought that counts, and Mamdani’s is to the left of common or garden socialism – and way to the left of even such ‘liberal’ mayors of yesteryear as Lindsay, Beam or Koch.

But there is every indication that one law of socialism is still inviolable. The law says that, when Marxists take over or are even about to, people run away, and to this law there are no known exceptions. Apparently, this is already happening in New York, with many wealthy people and corporations fleeing to places like Florida and Texas.

As a former 10-year resident of the Lone Star State, I’m pleased to find out that it already boasts more bankers than New York. I look forward to the time when Wall Street ups sticks and moves lock, stock and barrel to, say, Sugar Land, Lubbock or San Antonio.

What I find amazing is the ethnic aspect of Mamdani’s meteoric rise. This Uganda-born Muslim is seldom reticent when spouting toxic pro-Hamas and anti-Israeli propaganda, with thinly veiled anti-Semitic overtones.

Jews tend to be sensitive to that sort of thing, and open anti-Semitism is seldom a way to electoral success in a city where Jews make up over 12 per cent of the population. Yet a curious phenomenon is unfolding, and not only in New York. Many Jews vote for those who hate them, thus going Jesus Christ one better.

After all, Jesus only said “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”. He didn’t say vote for them, and yet ‘liberal’ Jews do just that, by casting their ballots for candidates loyal to ‘Palestinians’, meaning Jew-hating Hamas.

This, I believe, is to some extent a reflection of a phenomenon widely described in psychological and psychiatric literature: Jewish self-hatred. Englishmen may hate England, and Frenchmen may hate France, but neither people are likely to hate themselves for being, respectively, English or French.

Some Jews seem to be different, and I for one struggle to see any other explanation of why so many of them support that virulent anti-Semite, as simple arithmetic suggests they must. Moreover, it appears that George Soros, himself Jewish, bankrolled Mamdani’s campaign. Some things seem to matter more than ethnic solidarity, and I wonder what they might be.

One way or another, I hope New Yorkers defy the polls and spare themselves what’s likely to become the most destructive administration in the city’s history. My thoughts are with them: one has to renounce the devil on this All Saints’ Day.

The naughty chap formerly known as Prince Andrew of York has been disgraced, divested of all his titles and deported to Norfolk. Henceforth, he’ll be known as the commoner Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, a surname of rather recent vintage by royal standards.

It goes back to the First World War wreaking havoc on German-sounding names. Many of them had to become Anglicised under the pressure of anti-Hun sentiments.

Even the poor German shepherd had to become an Alsatian in Britain, although his canine kin stubbornly kept their original name in the US. But that name change isn’t as momentous as some others.

For it wasn’t just the lowly dog but also our rather Germanic royal family that had to become properly naturalised. King George V took one look at his own royal House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and decided it simply wouldn’t do.

“Henceforth,” he declared, “our House and Family shall be styled and known as the House and Family of Windsor.” That done, there remained the small matter of another branch of the family, specifically the king’s second cousin, Lord Louis Battenberg.

He too had to Anglicise his name and, having undoubtedly considered and rejected such obvious possibilities as ‘Smith’ or ‘Jackson’, Louis settled on an easy option. He transposed the two halves of his surname, translated the German ‘berg’ as ‘mount’ and came up with ‘Mountbatten’.

The name had a nice ring to it, so nice in fact that, according to some unverified reports, it inspired a Jewish cobbler in Brooklyn to change his name to ‘Mountginz’. But I wouldn’t give much credence to that story.

Anyway, it has been known for a while that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, as he now is, is a bad boy who tends to think with the part of his body not known for housing reason. Having started by outlining some historical background, I might as well continue in that vein and point out that such libidinousness has a fine tradition in his family.

One report says that, on a visit to Thailand, Andrew once had forty prostitutes delivered to his hotel in just four days. This outdoes the relatively restrained exploits of his father, which gave rise to much gossip but no reliable reports of Gargantuan amorous voracity.

In fact, heredity junkies have to go back to Andrew’s great-great-grandfather, Edward VII, to dig up the family roots of such rapaciousness.

When he was still Albert the Prince of Wales, the future king already showed a great lust for life. He reportedly had five 10-course meals a day, each course accompanied by a few glasses of appropriate French wines. That gave ‘Dirty Bertie’ a 48-inch waist at the time of his 1902 coronation, which was only a point of departure. Yet that’s not what gave him his nickname.

For wines weren’t the only French product Bertie had a huge appetite for. He loved France and always spent much time there, having numerous affairs with a cross-section of Gallic womanhood, from aristocratic ladies to actresses to Folies Bergère dancers.

But above all, he was a valued patron of Parisian bordellos, including the most exclusive of them, Le Chabanais near the Louvre. Bertie brought to such pursuits not only his vigour in love-making but also his creativity in cabinet-making, a rare talent among aristocrats.

Following his precise specifications, furniture manufacturer Soubier designed a ‘love chair’ (siège d’amour) enabling the corpulent king to have sex with two women simultaneously, without crushing either of them with his bulk. For decorum’s sake, I’ll spare you the technicalities, but I doubt that even such innovations enabled Bertie to match Andrew’s rumoured record of forty in four days.

Andrew’s shenanigans embarrassed his brother on numerous occasions, as they did their parents earlier. Moreover, they brought the monarchy in disrepute, providing grist for the republican mill. That’s why I think justice has been done: Andrew deserves everything he has got.

Yet justice needs to be leavened with mercy, and I don’t believe Andrew deserves more than he has already got. Moreover, comparing his misdeeds to those of his great-great-grandfather, I wonder how much worse they are.

Andrew did keep objectionable company by being friends with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, both undoubtedly sleazebags. But, for all the Gallic glitter of Le Chabanais and other Parisian bordellos, I doubt that everyone Bertie rubbed shoulders with there was an upstanding citoyen or citoyenne.

Andrew is supposed to have had sex with Virginia Giuffre, 17 at the time, who was one of the girls Epstein kept on tap for his guests’ delectation. Even if true, which it probably is, 17 isn’t 12 – these days, with sex education on most curricula, it’s more like the new 30.

Epstein was guilty of trafficking young Virginia to Andrew, but the latter’s guilt is less clear-cut. As that notorious photograph shows, the girl wasn’t unduly distressed, and she was there of her own accord.

Virginia lived through her ordeal, got married, had three children, received a hefty settlement from Andrew when the scandal broke out and eventually killed herself at 41, unable to get away from her abusive husband.

Andrew might have violated the letter of the law, but anyone in his place would have assumed that the girl was of age. Anyway, are we sure all the young ladies Bertie entertained in his love chair were legally old enough for such games?

Edward VII did combine business with pleasure. His diplomatic efforts, boosted by his popularity in France, made the Entente Cordiale possible. The formal agreement was signed in 1904, and a little part of me wonders whether it played a significant role in drawing Britain into the great war ten years later.

Still, Edward didn’t have our benefit of hindsight and he served his country as best he could. But then so did Andrew, who served with distinction as helicopter pilot aboard the HMS Invincible during the Falklands War. Part of his duties was acting as a decoy to draw fire away from other ships during an attack, which took suicidal courage. 

So a cad, yes. An embarrassment to the royal family, no doubt. Entitled, definitely, but then he was a royal prince, and wouldn’t you feel a wee bit entitled in his place? So by all means, take his titles away, banish him to Sandringham – but then leave him alone. He has paid for his transgressions.

Yet all sorts of sanctimonious moralisers who are themselves without sin are baying for Andrew’s blood, with the family of the late Virginia Giuffre demanding that he be extradited to the US, arrested and tried for his ‘crimes’. Many British voices echo such bloodthirsty urges, but then some of those same people would happily have the whole royal family drawn and quartered.

I wonder if I’m the only one who feels pity for Andrew. Like many wartime soldiers, he had difficulty adjusting to civilian life, and he did behave abominably on numerous occasions (his marriage to a totally unsuitable woman was one such). He doesn’t deserve to remain part of the functioning royal family. But he does deserve to be left in peace.

A false flag action is one designed to appear as though carried out by someone other than the real perpetrators. Two notorious examples spring to mind, both going back to the onset of the Second World War.

On 31 August 1939, a gang of SS operatives dressed in Polish uniforms seized the radio station at Gleiwitz on the Polish border and broadcast an anti-German message in Polish. The next day, citing that incident as a casus belli, the Nazis launched the invasion of Poland.

The other evil power, the Soviet Union, wouldn’t be outdone. On 26 November 1939, the Soviets shelled their own outpost at Mainila on the Finnish border. Several soldiers were killed, the Soviets blamed the Finns for committing an act of aggression and invaded the country.

(Fragments of an exploded shell disperse in the direction of its trajectory. Thus it was instantly clear that the barrage came from inside Russia. Moreover, the Finnish artillery was positioned outside the range needed to reach Mainila. But these facts only came to light after the war.)

However, the term ‘false flag’ may also describe an action whose perpetrators deliberately misrepresent their motives for the sake of subterfuge. In that sense, most of our on-going riotous demonstrations, such as Free Palestine, No Genocide in Gaza, Black Lives Matter, Stop Oil, No Nukes, Save the Planet and so forth, are false flag – regardless of the messages inscribed on the flags they do fly.

If you look at the first three examples, the demonstrators pretend to be driven by commendable concerns about the wanton taking of innocent lives. If they were really driven by attaching a high value to a human life, we could argue about the particulars but without taking issue with the underlying biblical principle.

One particular we could argue about, by the way, is the misuse of the word ‘genocide’ to denote any mass killing. Whenever this solecism is committed, I mention the books Murder by Government and Lethal Politics by Prof. Rummel. He distinguishes ‘democide’, the killing of large numbers of people for whatever reason, and ‘genocide’, which he defines as murder by category, ethnic, racial or religious.

Thus, the Hamas murder of 1,195 Israelis on 7 October 2023 was genocide since those people were killed simply because they were Israelis. That started yet another war in which many ‘Palestinians’ were killed. However unfortunate, that action wasn’t genocidal – they weren’t killed because of their race, ethnicity or religion.

But that’s quibbling about semantics. Let’s just agree that killing people for whatever reason is always unpleasant, even though it may sometimes be necessary. Pacifists protesting against any killing whatsoever may be accused of naivety but not of bad faith – unless bad faith is what they demonstrate by wrapping their protests in false flags.

How do I know their flags are false? Simple. Their concern for human lives is highly selective and clearly biased against the West.

For example, Muslim bandits murdered hundreds of Nigerian Christians this summer – for no reason other than their religion. According to Prof. Rummel’s taxonomy, this qualifies as genocide, yet one doesn’t see any marches in European capitals demanding that the genocide of Christians be stopped.

When South African whites infringed on the civil rights of the black population, anti-apartheid marches regularly gridlocked traffic in many Western cities. Yet one doesn’t see many demonstrations against the systematic genocide of millions in Central Africa over the past few decades, in places like Sudan, the Congo, Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda – to name just the deadliest massacres.

Hundreds of thousands are being murdered in Darfur even as we speak, and yet no outburst of moral indignation is anywhere in evidence. Chaps, why have you doused your flaming conscience?

Don’t black lives matter anymore? Or do they only matter when white policemen accidentally kill a drug-addled criminal resisting arrest? What about thousands of black Americans killed every year by their black compatriots? Don’t their lives matter? And if they do, why is no one setting American cities ablaze in protest?

Come to think of it, even the truly bestial violence of 7 October 2023 incongruously had produced vigorous anti-Israeli protests before one or two rather anaemic anti-Hamas marches even took place. All this makes me certain that the slogans emblazoned on assorted placards and screamed by thousands of hoarse throats are there to hide the real animus behind the actions. If that’s not false flag, I don’t know what is.

All this is so obvious that I’m almost embarrassed to say it. The real motivation behind the rallies is harder to pinpoint, if only because it’s multifarious.

Some people, especially young ones, are natural troublemakers who’ll happily join the fun, especially at the expense of ordinary people going about their daily business. Youngsters are natural contrarians – I know; I was once young myself.

That motive, springing as it does mostly from hormonal activity, is innocuous enough. Some others, those that I suspect are dominant, are quite a bit more sinister than that.

One of them is simple old-fashioned racism, exactly the vice those marchers will claim to find especially abhorrent. What’s racist behind their actions is their unspoken premise.

Blacks killing blacks is only the cause for a what-do-you-expect shrug. Our fire-eating marchers want to save their shoe leather when news of yet another such atrocity breaks out. The same goes for murderous ‘Palestinians’. They don’t know better, do they? But Israelis [and any other Western or pro-Western group] should.

The marchers would never admit to having such thoughts, and they may not actually have them. But this is exactly what their intuition says, even if their words don’t.

These are all secondary motives though. The primary one is anomie, a state of growing disconnect from the West, not just as it currently is but as it has always been. For a wide raft of reasons, whole generations of Westerners have been raised in the spirit of hostility to their civilisation. And it’s but a short step from hostility to hatred.

When such animosity boils over, those people, thousands of them, are ready to join any rally regardless of the ostensible message on its false flags. That could be anti-hunting today, anti-fishing tomorrow, anti-birdwatching the day after – it really makes no difference.

And if the demonstration is likely to annoy our friends and excite our enemies, so much the better. Down with Israel, Down with oil, Down with all white cops (not just those directly involved in accidental killing), Down with the West – this last one remains unspoken but not unfelt.

This is their version of what in the politically incorrect past was called Hottentot morality: If enemies of the West kill its friends, that’s good. If friends of the West kill its enemies, that’s bad. Put out more false flags.

I wish psychologists, philosophers and sociologists bumped their heads together to get to the bottom of this mass phenomenon. But I doubt they ever will: most people in those professions today probably sympathise with our false flag marchers – if they aren’t actually within their ranks.

Sarah Pochin’s remarks about the predominance of ethnic minorities among models used in advertising have poked many a hornets’ nest.

Some people were appalled, some mildly irritated, some jubilant, but all agreed that advertising is generally a Left-wing industry. Empirical observation confirms that view: I can count on the fingers of one hand all the conservatives I met during my 30 years in the business on both sides of the Atlantic.

In general, it’s hard to deny that some professions attract certain human types. For example, one doesn’t have to read reams of research to agree that more homosexuals are to be found among interior designers than among bridge designers, or among Chelsea drivers of Priuses than among Cockney drivers of taxis.

In that vein, a search for political conservatives is unlikely to be rewarded among advertising executives. This sounds incongruous. After all, advertising is the cutting edge of capitalist competition, with brands fighting for market share like alley cats killing one another for morsels of food. So what is it about the business that attracts Lefties?

Fundamentally, both Left-wing politicians and admen see their task as replacing actual reality with the virtual kind. Socialists don’t care how the real world works and what motivates real people.

They treat people not as individuals but as a faceless, amorphous crowd moved around by spoken or unspoken commands. The commands may be semantic or semiotic, and they can be perceived and obeyed only in virtual reality.

Real people just want to get on with their lives, work hard, use their earnings to create a decent life for their families. Those who have spiritual and cultural interests want to have the freedom and leisure time to pursue them. Every now and then they want to have a good time on holiday.

This is the actual reality that socialists seek to pervert and replace with the virtual kind. They invite real people to play a virtual game, that of politics. Politicians are after increasing their own power, and they see power as a zero sum game. The more of it the people have, the less is left for the politicians.

Hence they replace governance with politicking, and the reality of people’s lives with a parallel universe in which politicians lie through their teeth, while communicating semiotically that this is how the game ought to be played. They pretend to be telling the truth, people pretend to believe them, and before long the tissue of lies is woven into the fabric of polity.

The rules of the game preclude the people from using their reason. Should they do so, they’d see that there is nothing noble about the state extorting half of what they earn, then squandering most of the money on what politicians call services but what is in fact their own self-service.

Most causes portrayed as virtuous and essential reside in the virtual world and have nothing to do with reality. Allowing half the population not to work, destroying the economy in the name of unscientific nonsense about energy, nationalising this or that with the inevitable loss of performance, degrading the language by issuing idiotically tyrannical diktats – if most people gave themselves the trouble of thinking about any of this, they’d take to the streets, driving politicians out of their niche in virtual reality.

But decades of indoctrination have befuddled people’s minds so much that they are prepared to accept make-believe as real and even assign a high moral value to it. Yes, they are treated like a herd of livestock, but they are proud livestock. Things may be a little hard at the moment, but on balance their virtual reality is beautiful and virtuous.

Virtual has become the new virtuous – all the old certitudes have been inverted, all traditions stamped into the dirt, old vices turned into new virtues and vice versa.

Left-wing politicians keep coming up with desemanticised verbal stimuli best suited to tethering the populace inside virtual reality. Modern politics is neither democratic nor autocratic. It’s glossocratic, with the virtuality of meaningless words replacing the actuality of meaningful life.

This is an exact equivalent of advertising with its brand building, except that politicians play games with people’s lives and admen only with people’s money.

Advertising also creates a virtual world, hiding the striking similarity among various products behind their ‘brand personalities’. A product, such as toothpaste, is real life; a brand, virtual reality. This is a game that advertisers play for financial gain and the people agree to take part in it, provided the advertisers play the virtual game by the virtual rules.

Thus a pub crawler selects a brand of lager not because he truly believes that by doing so he appears more intelligent to his friends, but because he is satisfied that the marketers of the brand have activated the correct mechanisms of glossocratic response.

All such mechanisms can be grouped according to which of the seven deadly sins they glamorise. The appeal of modern virtual reality isn’t so much modern in any true sense as downright atavistic.

Lust, for example, has been shown to be particularly effective for the marketers of personal-hygiene products, underwear, cosmetics and cars. This appeal has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, which is a sine qua non for closing the glossocratic loop.

Thus a belief that some car brands have a strong ‘pulling’ power has been communicated to the men directly, and to the women vicariously. Men expect, and their women accept, that the thrust generated by a powerful engine will reflect or perhaps even enhance the sexual potency of the chap who drives a car thus equipped.

What matters isn’t semantics but semiotics; not substance but form; not reality but make-believe. Similarly, modern politics has practically nothing to do with reality, which is reflected in the nebulousness of the words that convey political concepts.

If even the names of the parties mean nothing in any of the leading democracies, then it’s little wonder that the modern political process almost entirely by-passes reason, in whose name it was devised in the first place.

You can see now why both purveyors of unreality, socialist politicians (which is to say most modern ones) and admen, are kindred spirits, and why both types easily float from one field to the other. They even use the same tools of the trade.

Market research is their shared treasure, invented by politicians, perfected by admen. They put together focus groups to identify the semiotic actuators of the basic, not to say base, response mechanisms.

The electorate is, after all, like a market: short on memory, long on the desire to see the glossocratic game played by the rules. And veracity isn’t one of them. Thus, when a politician promises to look after the least fortunate, only the most backward voters expect him to do so.

Most of the politicians and voters couldn’t care less about the poor. But voters have been trained not to plug themselves into the glossocratic loop until they hear the right words, the eenie-meenie-miny-mo of wokery but without the politically incorrect brutality towards a person of Afro-Caribbean descent.

Similarly, when advertising expertly tweaks the consumers’ naughty bits, the people will agree to be brainwashed in the spirit of this or that brand’s unmatched personality.

Their reason remains anchored in the real world, one in which no brand of deodorant or car will make a user more attractive to the opposite sex. But advertising picks them up by the scruff of the neck and plonks them into the virtual reality they are brainwashed to accept as real.

These are some of the reasons both modern (which is to say predominantly socialist) politics and advertising attract similar human types – and why other types feel increasingly uncomfortable in both fields. They watch real life longingly as it vanishes into the fog of glossocracy.