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Predictably, American vocabulary has changed since I left the country in 1988. Hundreds of new words have appeared, old words have acquired new meanings and – more to my point today – old denotations now convey new connotations.

One such is ‘American exceptionalism’. The expression existed in my day, but it was hardly ever used in a positive sense. Liberals associated it with conservatism, conservatives with the loony fringe, and the apolitical masses didn’t use it at all.

That connotation reflected the atmosphere of relative restraint prevalent in public discourse. The political landscape resembled a gently undulating valley with fluffy sheep grazing on the slopes, with only the odd wolf distorting the pastoral serenity. This has since changed into sharply contrasting peaks and troughs regularly shaken up by violent tremors.

Hence ‘American exceptionalism’ has evidently moved from the loony fringe into the Right part of the mainstream where it has been elevated to an ideal. I realised this by listening to the late Charlie Kirk’s orations, all delivered with the sermonising aura typical of American propagandists of both Right and Left.

To me, or any other National Review reader or writer of my day, terms like ‘American exceptionalism’ or ‘American nationalism’ are extremist statements of patriotism, the love of one’s country. And extremism doesn’t belong in conservative – or any other serious – thought.

Such terms turn a laudable feeling into an objectionable cult. Talking to some MAGA people and listening to Kirk’s speeches, one gets the impression that any demarcation line between the two has been smudged.

If we put ourselves in the moccasins of the first Americans, we’ll see that they could hardly avoid a certain amount of pantheistic mysticism when finding themselves face to face with a vast, promising and yet hostile expanse.

Much as they prayed for riches in the future, they knew that the present was more likely to greet them with the fangs of wild beasts or the tomahawks of aboriginal scalpers. The only way to keep going was to lay some groundwork for optimistic fatalism: they had to deify their exploits.

God had to be on their side because no one else was. To find enough resolve to build a new country they had to strive to build a new Jerusalem.

But there is only one real Jerusalem – everything else, including England’s green and pleasant land, can only be its simulacrum. However, this particular American simulacrum has survived to this day, almost 400 years after John Winthrop first described America with a quotation from St Matthew about “a city on a hill”.

The overall sentiment is that America isn’t just different from all other countries. It’s saintlier and therefore morally superior. Hence it’s America’s holy mission to solve every little problem of life internally – and then shine the torch of truth and goodness on other countries, even those that try to shield their eyes from the blinding light.

In 1809 Jefferson, at best a deist, expressed the principle of America as a beacon without relying on biblical references: “Trusted with the destinies of this solitary republic of the world, the only monument of human rights, and the sole depository of the sacred fire of freedom and self-government, from hence it is to be lighted up in other regions of the earth, if other regions of the earth shall ever become susceptible of its benign influence.”

Tastes differ but facts shouldn’t: America was not “the only monument… and the sole depository… of freedom and self-government”. Britain, to name one other country, had form in those areas too. But then the puffery of political pietism knows no bounds.

Never in the history of the world, at least not between the collapse of Rome and the emergence of Bolshevik Russia, had there existed another nation so bursting with such refreshingly sanctimonious arrogance. Many have commented on the perverse references to religion in Bolshevik iconography, with atheistic people expected to worship the mummified relics of a secular saint, but few have noticed that the same mimicry is just as robust in America.

Hardly any speech by American leaders from the 18^th century onwards has omitted quasi-religious references to canonised historical figures, whose deeds are routinely described in Biblical terms. “Fellow citizens, the ark of your covenant is the Declaration of Independence,” pronounced John Quincy Adams, and he meant it exactly as it sounded.

Sacral visual imagery also abounds, as do the mock-religious shrines to past leaders. George Washington in particular is worshipped in a religious manner as the ‘Great Father of the Country’.

The interior of the Capitol dome in Washington displays a fresco entitled The Apotheosis of Washington where the sainted Father is surrounded by Baroque angels and also representations of other Founders in contact with various pagan gods, such as Neptune, Vulcan and Minerva.

The Jefferson Memorial, not far away, is also a replica of a pagan shrine, with various quasi-religious references inscribed. Cited, for example, is a quotation from Jefferson’s letter to Washington preaching “God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? … Commerce between master and slave is despotism.”

It is useful to remember that these ringing words were uttered by a deist, more likely an agnostic, who had his chattel slaves flogged to mincemeat for trying to escape. The statement would therefore be hypocritical if we were to forget that by then ‘God’ had become the shorthand for ‘America’.

In due course, another term was added to the lexicon of American exceptionalism. In the 1840s the journalist John L. O’Sullivan coined the term ‘manifest destiny’ to describe America’s messianic mission in the world. Said manifest destiny was according to him ‘divine’: it was incumbent upon America “to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man”.

In other words, it was now up to America, not Jesus Christ, to save the world. Americans thus corrected the conservative triad of God, king and country by eliminating the middle element and merging the other two into one.

Such sentiments have always existed at the grassroots of American conservatism. But in my day they were seldom enunciated in the mainstream. American conservatives, such as aforementioned NR readers and writers, tended to be civilised gentlemen, not loudmouthed zealots.

They were the ones who created a minor revolution in the American political mind, making conservatism intellectually, culturally and socially respectable. However, judging by the shift in the connotation of ‘American exceptionalism’, the relay baton has been passed from the gentlemen to the uncouth touts and ideologues.

Connotation has triumphed over denotation, and most activists may be unaware of the historical undercurrents into which I’ve barely dipped. They proudly list ‘exceptionalism’ in their rota of American virtues, and no one questions their conservative credentials.

No one with any influence or public presence, that is. Civilised, erudite, well-spoken conservatives still exist in America, and in fact I know a few who are quite appalled. But they no longer have an audible voice. The Right has fallen into the hands of shrill demagogues who confuse jingoism with patriotism, chest-thumping ardour with arguments and semi-literate musings with rhetoric.

That’s why European conservatives don’t see the MAGA types as their kin. Conservatism, as I never tire of arguing, is above all a matter of style and temperamental predisposition, not ideology. A real conservative wouldn’t be caught dead sporting a legible baseball cap and spouting slogans in elementary-school English.

And of course, loud protestations of American exclusivity have a rather limited international appeal. This is unfortunate because, issue by issue, the MAGA types and British conservatives agree more than they disagree.

However, much as they may be consonant in their ideas, they are stylistically incompatible. That makes them incompatible, full stop.

When MAGA activist Charlie Kirk was murdered yesterday, he was doing what he did best: debating politics with students on their campus. A sniper bullet hit him in the neck, and life gushed out of his severed artery.

One would expect that brutal crime to bring people of different political views together: Right, Left of Centre, they are all members of civilised society. And civilised people react to the murder of even political opponents in, well, a civilised way.

By way of illustration, I’d like to offer my own response to the murder of the Left-wing Labour MP Jo Cox on 16 June 2016.

To set the scene, Mrs Cox espoused ideas and policies I found as deplorable as American ‘liberals’ doubtless found the ideas and policies of Charlie Kirk (some of his pronouncements don’t sit well with me either, but that’s a different matter). With that in mind, I invite you to compare my reaction with theirs.

Lest you accuse me of bragging, I’m using my own words not out of egotism but out of laziness. I know many other conservatives wrote similar things, but it would take time and effort to look up their comments. My own, however, are at my fingertips:

“I don’t care what objectionable or noble causes Mrs Cox supported, what kind of politician she was or wasn’t, what her career might or might not have held in store for her.

“When a young woman in the prime of her life is butchered by a lunatic degenerate, when she dies with the last words ‘My pain is too much’, when she leaves a bereaved husband and two motherless children behind, I can feel the tragedy of it all as much as anyone. I pray for her soul and for her family; I hope God will judge her with kindness and she’ll rest in peace.”

So much for the point. Now comes the counterpoint of ‘liberal’ social media comments on the murder of a 31-year-old man leaving behind a young wife and two little children:

“Hitler giving Charlie Kirk a tour in hell.”

“He was “a f***ing Nazi. And you know what kind of Nazi is the best Nazi? A dead one. Thank God that s***stain of a person is no longer in this world”.

“Why didn’t Charlie Kirk just debate the bullet? He would have easily deflected.”

“I don’t know I think getting killed by your favorite thing in the world is sweet. It’s a nice gesture.” [A reference to Kirk’s championship of the Second Amendment.]

“If he doesn’t make it at least he died with the love of his life, school shootings.” [Ditto]

“This wouldn’t have happened if Charlie Kirk had been armed.” [Ditto]

Such feral gloating is a verbal equivalent of a savage devouring the liver of his dead enemy. Alas, this is the tonal quality of current political debate, and not only in the US.

People no longer have opponents they want to prove wrong. They have enemies they want to see dead.

It hasn’t always been like this. For example, in the early ‘50s William F Buckley published two books that attacked the liberal mindset dominant in America, God and Man at Yale and McCarthy and His Enemies. Tempers were running hot at the time, with McCarthy accusing every liberal of being a communist and every communist of being a Soviet spy.

Not all of his accusations were justified, although many were. But his language was intemperate, emotive, often rude and slanderous. McCarthy’s targets responded in kind, and the air was think with invective.

Then Buckley’s books came out, with one showing the totalitarian nature of ‘liberalism’ at Yale, the other defending McCarthy’s message if not necessarily his style. Most reviewers, some of whom were mentioned in the books by name, took issue with Buckley’s assertions, indeed with his politics as such.

Yet most of them complimented his style and verve, saying how pleased they were to have such a talented and erudite opponent. Today he’d be getting death threats.

The level of public discourse has dropped below the lower limit possible within a viable civilisation. Political zealotry now rides roughshod over manners, style, integrity, even common decency. People no longer hold their speech to such tests, or even the tests of logic and common sense.

As they move farther and farther away from the source of our civilisation, they gradually lose all links with it. Their own passions, however expressed, take precedence over civility, that irreplaceable cognate of civilisation.

That turns them into barbarians, which word originally designated those outside civilisation, in that case Greek. And barbarians don’t recognise any checks on their words and increasingly their deeds. Not all of them vent their feelings with a high-powered rifle, but many of them can do so and, given the chance, will.

People who fear the possibility of apocalyptic nuclear war should look no further than social media comments on Charlie Kirk’s death. Those who cheer a homicidal act are capable of pushing the suicidal button. Having slipped the shackles of civilisation, they haven’t replaced them with any other restraints.

The political arena is resonant with jarring shrieks, and the most piercing ones come from savages incongruously called ‘liberals’ or those more appropriately called ‘populists’. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, I dare say.

Charlie Kirk, RIP

Let’s see, and the way to see is to compare the president’s response to two aerial events yesterday.

In one, the Israeli Air Force struck a Qatar hotel in which a group of Hamas chieftains were holed up. Five terrorists were killed, although apparently the gang leaders escaped with their lives.

In the other, Polish, Dutch and Italian fighter planes were scrambled to shoot down Russian drones invading Poland’s airspace. This was followed by another monstrous Russian attack on Ukrainian cities, including Kiev.

Which of these incidents caused Trump’s fury? To make it easier for you to answer this question, let’s set the contextual scene.

Poland is a NATO country, bound with the US by a mutual defence treaty. She is a staunch ally of the West and has been a fierce opponent of Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine.

In addition to any altruistic urges, this stance is motivated by self-interest. Polish leaders realise that Putin’s plans go beyond the Ukraine. That understanding sets them apart from Putin’s mouthpiece Peter Hitchens, who wrote a few days ago: “I am still not sure what Putin wanted to achieve [by attacking the Ukraine]…”

This uncertainty is staggering, considering that Putin and his minions never made their aims a secret. At the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Putin stated that his objective was to “de-Nazify and demilitarise” the Ukraine.

Of course, according to Kremlin propaganda, the Ukraine’s whole government and most of her people are Nazis. Moreover, the country undeniably has an army. Hence, what Putin said was tantamount to a commitment to destroy the Ukraine as a sovereign state and turn her into a Russian colony.

And not just the Ukraine. In his incendiary Munich speech of 2007, Putin spelled out his long-term plan to rebuild the Soviet empire, thereby undoing “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20^th century.”

This ratcheted up spittle-sputtering hysteria, when hardly a day goes by without Putin or his henchmen threatening to annihilate NATO countries with nuclear arms. Putting it in simple terms, Poland is our friend, whereas Russia is a fascist country, our enemy and a source of constant danger.

That’s why the provocative violation of Poland’s, which is to say NATO’s, airspace can be justifiably treated as an act of war, or at least a rehearsal for it. Poland’s Prime Minister was absolutely right when warning that “we are closer to war than any time since World War Two”.

The other incident also involved a clash between our friend, Israel, and our enemies, Hamas and Qatar. Hamas is a diabolical terrorist organisation whose aim in life is to annihilate Israel and murder every Jew living there.

Since in that region Israel is the only reliable ally of the West in general and the US in particular, and Hamas is Israel’s enemy, it’s our enemy as well. And Qatar is the major Sunni supporter of Hamas.

Doha has hospitably housed Hamas’s political office since 2012, and over the years Qatar has financed Hamas to the tune of $1.8 billion. That’s even more than the cost of the airliner the Qataris presciently gave Trump as a gift, which he gratefully accepted.

All this makes the question in the title above almost rhetorical. Did the Poles offer Trump expensive airliners, as the Qataris did? They didn’t. Did their leaders ever describe Trump as a genius, which Putin did many times? Did they hell. Have they been critical about Trump’s kowtowing to Putin, as the Russian juggernaut moves closer to Poland’s border? You bet they have.

There you have, the answer to that question. Trump ignored the provocation against NATO (us) and was furious about Israel’s strike on Hamas (them).

The White House said that Trump felt “very bad” about Israel’s strike on her enemies, and ours. Moreover, by his own admission, Trump tried to sabotage the attack.

He wrote that, on finding out about the raid, “I immediately directed special envoy Steve Witkoff to inform the Qataris of the impending attack, which he did, however, unfortunately, too late to stop the attack.”

Had it not been too late, the Qataris might have been able to thwart the attack and ideally kill some Israeli pilots. Nice. But that’s not all:

“I view Qatar as a strong ally and friend and feel very badly about the location of the attack. I want ALL of the hostages, and bodies of the dead, released, and this War to END, NOW!”

Next time Trump is in Qatar, he ought to peek into the BOOKSHOP WINDOWS there. He’ll find prominently DISPLAYED copies of Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, plus any number of other Nazi and anti-Semitic TITLES.

Nor is it just the Qataris’ reading habits. They also act in the spirit of such literature, supporting by word and deed not just Hamas but also every other anti-Israeli and anti-Western terrorist gang.

If Qatari emirs – and Russian dictators – are Trump’s friends, then who are his enemies? I don’t know, ask him. I can only observe that he and his underlings are more critical of America’s Western allies than they are of the kind of scum one finds in Qatari or Russian government offices.

For example, both Trump and Vance are scathing about Britain’s deficit of free speech. Without in any way disputing such charges, let’s just say that those chaps aren’t similarly critical about the situation with free speech in Russia or for that matter Qatar.

It’s true that Britain’s clamps on free expression ill-behove a civilised Western country. But our sins are minor compared with the fascist oppression in Russia, where critics of the regime are routinely imprisoned or even murdered, or with the Sharia dictatorship in Qatar, where independent political bodies and trade unions are banned (and whose courts treat a woman’s testimony as worth half that of a man).

Beware of Qataris bearing airliners and of Russians promising huge property development concessions, one is tempted to say. But since we know the answer to the question in the title, such advice would fall on deaf, or else deliberately plugged, ears.

P.S. Now I’m in the business of dispensing unsolicited advice, I’d suggest to Hitchens that he try not to be so blatant about his role as Putin’s shill.

If he must regurgitate Russian lies, one trick he may try is at least not using exactly the same language, word for word. Thus the Kremlin line on the on-going war is that it was started by the West using the Ukraine as its proxy.

Here’s Hitchens, impersonating a parrot: “I think the West doesn’t especially want peace. Western policy in this region has the aim of preventing a Russian recovery… It means that the West uses Ukraine as a battering ram against Russia.”

Oh, is that why the West transferred untold amounts of capital and technology to a post-perestroika Russia? I get it, that was a ploy to conceal its dastardly ulterior designs.

For the same reason, Europe kept Putin’s economy afloat by getting most of its gas from Russian fields and pipelines, those that wouldn’t have even existed but for American and European exploration and production technology, pipeline equipment and computer knowhow. Really, there’s no limit to the West’s perfidy.

There is one to Hitchens’s own perfidy though: he isn’t smart enough to conceal it.  

A friend has sent me a video of Bertrand Russell’s 1952 interview, and I enjoyed every one of its 30 minutes.

The enjoyment, I hasten to allay your fears for my sanity, had nothing to do with what he said and everything to do with how he said it. One just doesn’t hear such patrician cadences any longer.

The last person to strangulate every vowel in such an irresistible manner was our late Queen, roughly at the time of Bertie Russell’s interview. Later in life, Her Majesty somewhat flattened out her accent, much to my chagrin.

King Charles took royal pronunciation down another tiny notch, and his children a couple of notches more. If this tendency persists, our future monarchs will sound like Michael Caine or Bob Hoskins, which will be most unfortunate (much as I admire both actors).

The phonetic appeal of Russell’s diction prevented me from doing what I would have done with any other recording of unalloyed rubbish: turn it off after five minutes.

Russell started out his academic career as a mathematician, later switching to philosophy. He had made the transition, he explained, to see if philosophy could lead to religious faith. Instead, it led him to lifelong atheism.

I don’t necessarily believe that a man without faith thereby exhibits a lapse of intelligence. What I found harder to dismiss was Russell’s misunderstanding of the link between faith and philosophy, which sounds like a misunderstanding of both.

By taking up philosophy as a possible path to faith, Russell didn’t just put the cart before the horse. He put the horse down, only to be amazed that the cart didn’t become self-propelled.

Jacques Maritain defined philosophy as the science of first principles, in the same sense in which physics and chemistry are the sciences of matter. Anyone wishing to take up natural science has to start from the assumption that nature exists, irrespective of his own sensory perception of it.

By the same token, anyone taking up the science of first principles has to proceed from the assumption that first principles exist. His study may later disabuse him of that notion, but any search for truth, be it philosophical or physical, has to start from a working hypothesis.

Therefore, philosophical quest can’t, nor can be expected to, lead to faith in God. Faith, on the other hand, may serve as a powerful springboard for a dive into the troubled waters of philosophy. The thinker may eventually decide that his philosophy doesn’t justify faith, which would be a lamentable conclusion but at least one reached from the right premise.

I can’t judge the quality of Russell’s work in mathematical logic, Principia Mathematica, that he wrote with AN Whitehead. Anything mathematical takes me out of my depth, but general logic doesn’t. By the sound of it, Lord Russell had the opposite problem.

When asked who was the most influential philosopher in the contemporaneous world (1952), he said Marx, although Russell wouldn’t dignify him with the name ‘philosopher’. I agree with him there, and in general one has to say that, unlike his Bloomsbury friends, Russell wasn’t taken in by Marxism or Bolshevism.

When he visited Russia in the 1920s, he found its government hideous, which was a welcome diversion from the panegyrics mouthed by the likes of Shaw and the Webbs. But then he showed how impossible it is even for a confirmed atheist to break out of the Christian mindset of our civilisation.

The problem with Marx, explained Russell to his American interviewer, is that he not so much loved the poor as hated the rich. And true philosophy has to be animated by love, not hatred.

He would have found it difficult to insist on this crypto-Christian belief when talking, say, to Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, who both had a fair claim to the title of philosopher, the latter perhaps the less fair one.

Then the subject veered towards war and peace. Russell was a pacifist, and the interviewer drew his attention to that aspect of his philosophy. The tactful American didn’t mention the fact that Russell’s campaign against the First World War earned him a six-month stint in prison.

He did bring up that global conflict, and Russell explained that he had never opposed war in general, only that war. He was in favour of Britain’s involvement in the Second World War, however.

He realised that, “War was always a great evil, but in some particularly extreme circumstances, it may be the lesser of two evils.”

I don’t know if Lord Russell was aware of this, but he repeated, almost verbatim, St Augustine’s teaching on the subject of just war. I doubt Russell ever read The City of God, but yet again he was unable to shake the tethers of Western civilisation, aka Christendom.

A less tactful interviewer might have mentioned that Russell’s understanding of war against Nazism as the “lesser of two evils” came to him rather late in the conflict, in 1943 to be exact.

Throughout the 1930s he was a rank appeaser. For example, in a personal letter written in 1937, when Nazism was already in full swing, Russell offered this idea:

“If the Germans succeed in sending an invading army to England we should do best to treat them as visitors, give them quarters and invite the commander in chief to dine with the prime minister.” Across the Channel, Pierre Laval got executed for less.

But yes, confirmed Lord Russell, he was a committed pacifist opposed to any war other than the one that had ended five years earlier. For example, the West should find an accommodation with the Soviet Union, much as Lord Russell deplored Bolshevism.

In general, he had high hopes for the world, even though it was demonstrably in dire straits at the moment. The interviewer perked up and asked Lord Russell to outline the basis for such hopes. Or, putting it differently, could Lord Russell please identify the most pressing problems and suggest solutions for them?

Russell was happy to oblige. One potentially deadly problem with the world is that there exist too many countries, each bristling with weapons and some even with nuclear arms. The solution offered itself to the anti-Marxist genius of mathematical logic: there should be just one world government, in possession of all armaments, from catapults to atom bombs.

Just as he seemed to be unaware of the Christian provenance of some of his ideas, Lord Russell obviously didn’t realise that the idea of a single world government came right out of Marx’s playbook. It’s an old socialist dream, which happens to be everyone else’s nightmare.

The interviewer was so taken aback that he didn’t delve any deeper. I would have been curious to ask about the practicalities involved. Who, besides Lord Russell, would be a member of the world cabinet? All governments being to some extent instruments of coercion, how would that pan-global body come up with policies and laws, ensuring that the former be carried out and the latter obeyed?

And so forth, up to the final question: Doesn’t Lord Russell realise that, even if such a dystopic monstrosity were possible, it would be so despotic that by comparison Hitler and Stalin would look like humanitarians trying to get in touch with their feminine side?

But fine, one government for all, wars are impossible, that’s one problem out of the way. Any others?

Yes there are, said Lord Russell. Two, to be precise. One is that all the countries of America, Europe, Asia and Africa, indeed all the continents, ought to be equally wealthy. Otherwise sooner or later the poor countries would attack the rich ones, and war would ensue.

That was going Marx one better. Lord Russell pushed socialist egalitarianism beyond parochial social classes and all the way to a global scale. The question of how that laudable equality was to be achieved wasn’t asked, which is a shame. I’m sure the great philosopher would have emphasised his credentials by offering a mathematically logical solution.

And the other problem? There Lord Russell changed horses in mid-stream, dismounting Marx and mounting Malthus. It’s overpopulation, he explained.

The population of the world must remain “stationary” lest it run out of food. Unlike Malthus, Lord Russell eschewed number crunching. He didn’t repeat the fallacy that, while the world’s population increased in a geometric progression, food supply only grew in an arithmetic one. Hence we’d all starve to death before long.

Actually, the world overproduces food, and many governments keep the supply down artificially. But the ‘how’ question would again have been more interesting.

By what diabolical measures would Lord Russell prevent people from multiplying like rabbits? How far would he go in his commitment to eugenics? His contemporary, GB Shaw, for example, advocated a mass cull of all wrinklies reaching the ripe age of 70. They should all be asked to justify their continued existence and, if they couldn’t, they’d get the chop.

GBS assumed he himself could offer convincing reasons for living past 70. But he’d have had no problem with turning the world into an abattoir of old-age pensioners. Mr Marx, meet Mr Hitler, you have so much to talk about.

Russell lived for another 18 years after that interview, which he put to good use by going on CND marches sponsored by the KGB, protesting against American crimes in Vietnam and Israeli ones in Palestine, and joining forces with communists like Jean-Paul Sartre to call for forming a tribunal to bring those criminal regimes to justice.

But that interview was bad enough. It made me glad I don’t try to overachieve by studying mathematical logic and its relation to philosophy. Such disciplines clearly play funny tricks with a man’s mind.

My friend, the Rev. Dr Peter Mullen, writes brilliantly about Christianity pervading every pore of the West’s body, this unbeknown to most people.

Even those who’ve never seen the inside of a church, except perhaps as sightseers, and who have no faith in God but much hatred of ‘religion’ (lumping all religions together) still have their instincts, customs, culture and language shaped by the formative creed of our civilisation.

This is a subject for at least a book, better still a whole library. The best one can do in a short article is snip off a fragment of the whole and take a closer look at it, ideally without stepping on Peter’s toes.

One such fragment is politics and the institutions thereof, and this subject may be more elusive than some of the others. After all, Britain apart, all Western states are constitutionally separated from the church.

Britain is different in letter but not in spirit: we do have an established church, but these days it worships at the altar of wokery, not that of Christ the Saviour. It’s there mainly for appearances’ sake, but the appearances aren’t totally meaningless.

Our head of state is divinely anointed, which maintains historical and spiritual continuity, while conferring some residual dignity on governance. This hardly amounts to anything more than lip service to God, but it’s better than no service at all.

Our laws have scriptural antecedents, and even a mere hundred years ago British judges routinely quoted the Bible to justify their rulings. But what about our political institutions?

The point I like to make is that Christianity isn’t only the teaching by Christ but also, even more so, the teaching about Christ. Revelation is a slow-release process, and in his earthly life Jesus only vouchsafed faith to his disciples, leaving them to build it into a religion and ultimately a civilisation.

All the pronouncements made by Jesus and recorded by the evangelists would have taken just over two hours to utter. Yet his ministry probably lasted over three years. Surely Jesus must have said many other things that his disciples either misunderstood or forgot?

My contention is that, when it comes to Western politics, it’s not so much Christ’s commandments as his person that exerted a formative influence. The nature of that person was put down on paper in 451 AD, at the maritime town of Chalcedon.

Jesus, stated the Council of Chalcedon, is fully man and fully God, the second hypostasis of the Trinity. He has two distinct natures united in one person without confusion, change, division, or separation. This union remains an unfathomable mystery, but the influence of Christ’s duality on Western politics is easier to grasp.

The Creeds, both Apostles’ and Nicene, derive their name from the Latin word Credo, “I believe…”, the first word in both. This is a statement of private, individual faith, and it appropriately starts with the singular first-person pronoun.

However, the Lord’s Prayer, the most significant Christian supplication because Jesus himself provided the exact wording, starts with a plural pronoun ‘Our Father’, not ‘My Father’.

Unlike the Creeds, the Lord’s Prayer isn’t individual but collective, emphasising the corporate nature of the faith that turns it into a religion. Thus the two most significant statements of Christianity reflect another aspect of Christ’s duality: all in one, and one in all.

When it came to creating the structural organisation of a Catholic world church, this duality begat the complementary, intertwined concepts of subsidiarity and solidarity.

Subsidiarity means devolving decentralised responsibility to the lowest sensible level. Thus whatever problems arise can be solved by the most local group capable of solving them, which ensures efficiency and preserves local autonomy.

Solidarity, on the other hand, emphasises the shared dignity of all people, encouraging empathy, cooperation and collective responsibility. Higher levels of the Church lay down doctrine, but they only ever intervene when local authorities need help implementing the general principles established by central authority. However, central authority must proceed in the knowledge that its function is to assist local institutions, not to supplant them.

By and large, the Church has been able to preserve this organic blend of the general and particular, corporate and individual, central and local.

Now, during the four centuries between the sack of Rome in 410 AD and the coronation of Charlemagne in 800 AD, the Church had to assume a great deal of secular authority. It had to fill the political and administrative vacuum that existed between the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the birth of the Carolingian Holy Roman Empire.

Those centuries are commonly called Dark, although many serious thinkers have always disputed that designation. After all, the embryos of many inchoate Western institutions, including political ones, were created during that period.

And, since the Church wielded a great deal of secular power then and managed to keep it for several centuries thereafter, many political institutions of the West incorporated at birth the structural principles of Church organisation – specifically those of subsidiarity and solidarity.

In politics, they were translated into localism and centralism. I’d suggest that the unity of the two, and the potential conflict between them, define our politics today, much as they did in the Middle Ages and every epoch ever since.

The most successful political formations of modernity are those that feature a workable balance between centralism and localism, the secular offshoots of solidarity and subsidiarity. Conversely, the least successful, most corrupt and often evil modern regimes are those in which central governments ride roughshod over local autonomy and authority, ultimately over the individual.

The more local authority the central Western state usurps, the more it distorts the balance of subsidiarity and solidarity – the more decisively it severs its Christian roots and the more readily it embraces evil.

The clash between political conservatism and various forms of socialism, be it oxymoronic ‘democratic’, unvarnished ‘communist’ or fascistic ‘national’, can be ultimately reduced to the struggle between centralism and localism ensuing when they are no longer in organic balance.

This balance lies at the foundation of all modern political systems, including British republican monarchy, French monarchic republicanism and American conflation of the two.

Yet few British, French or American politicians – and even fewer voters – are aware of the debt their politics owes Christianity. Believers among them have forgotten about that link, while the atheists desperately want to do so.

But the link is there, writ large not just in theology or political philosophy, but in history – as it continues to be made every day.  

A coalition of two or more countries doesn’t just appear out of thin air.

Make a pile of all the world’s 195 countries, take a random handful out, and you’ll find that all the countries in your hand have both common interests and serious differences.

If you then wish to bring them together in a coalition, you have to convince them to shunt their serious differences aside for the sake of capitalising on their common interests.

You could do that by gentle persuasion, hoping they’ll listen to reason. But if those particular countries are unlikely to listen to you, no matter how reasonable you sound, then there’s only one other thing you could do. You should pose such a dire threat to those countries that they join forces of their own accord.

This clarity of understanding came to me thanks to Donald Trump’s foreign policy, and I have to thank the president for that. I’m also grateful to Messrs Xi, Modi and Putin for providing a visual aid for any future course in the art of making a coalition.

When Trump started his trade war on the world, laying about him like Macduff, smiting friend and foe alike, I mentioned to my American MAGA interviewer that America may eventually run out of friends and allies. “We don’t care,” he replied with typical aplomb.

The recently concluded summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in Tianjin should have disabused him of such blithe self-confidence, but probably didn’t. MAGA chaps are zealots, and zealotry is impervious to such incidentals as evidence and reason.

The three principal SCO countries, China, India and Russia, have clearly been pushed into a close-knit alliance against the West in general and the US in particular. This means they’ve agreed to downplay their differences and coalesce on their common interest: confrontation with a US-dominated West.

If this coalition perseveres, my MAGA interviewer will soon realise that America can no longer go it alone. She needs all the allies she can get because neither the US nor indeed the West as a whole any longer boasts an overwhelming strategic, economic and military superiority over those three countries combined. (It’s debatable whether this exists even vis-à-vis China by herself, but this is a debate for another time.)

The two evil regimes, Chinese and Russian, are anti-West viscerally and, shall we say, ontologically. Even so, there exist serious, perhaps irreconcilable, differences between them that a wise policy on the part of the West could have exploited.

Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, China has been steadily colonising the Russian Far East and large parts of Siberia. Those regions are visibly moving away from Moscow and closer to Peking, something Russia is helpless to prevent but doubtless sees as a matter of grave concern.

India, meanwhile, has been moving closer to the West for years. The country inherited most of her political institutions from Britain, English is her unifying language (I mean India’s, not so much Britain’s), and no a priori enmity towards the West exists there.

There is, or rather has been, a fair amount of hostility to China though. India and China have teetered on the brink of war, possibly nuclear, for decades. Though the relations between the two countries have somewhat normalised in recent years, they are still far from normal.

Both keep huge army contingents on the border, and there are still no direct flights between India and China. The movement of people between the two countries is limited, and, even if they are no longer mortal enemies, they are certainly not friends.

Russia and India have been traditionally friendlier, and India, along with China, remains Russia’s significant trading partner. This isn’t to say that there are no frictions there. For example, both Russia and China have castigated India’s membership in Quad, the security bloc of the US, India, Japan and Australia.

India’s stand on Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine has been ambivalent. Let’s call it a position of benevolent neutrality, a tacit support of the Ukraine and no support of Russia (other than buying Russian oil). At the same time, the growing proximity between Russia and China, with the former increasingly looking like a vassal of the latter, threatens India’s strategic interests in Asia.

India is also concerned about Russia’s courtship of Pakistan. For example, Russia announced last year that she would welcome Pakistan into the BRICS group, much to India’s displeasure.

In short, there are numerous fault lines among the three major SCO members, and subtle diplomacy could have easily turned them into fissures. But Trump doesn’t do subtle diplomacy.

His first instinct is that of a bully, the new sheriff explaining to the folks who is now running their town. Except that the folks may form a united front and run the sheriff out of town before sundown.

I doubt my metaphor of a Western film is accurate, but this is essentially the situation Trump’s ill-informed aggressiveness has created. Three major countries have put their differences aside to concentrate on their main interest: standing up to America.

Some commentators hasten to allay such fears. The new coalition, they say correctly, lacks any positive programme of action, other than economic cooperation. What has brought it together is largely the negative desideratum of confronting the West.

True. But then what was the positive programme of NATO, an organisation that secured relative peace in Europe from 1949 to 2022? The sole purpose of NATO was strictly negative: containment of Soviet aggression.

Going back a bit further, what was the positive impulse behind the wartime alliance of the US, Britain and the USSR? The impulse was strictly negative: stopping Hitler in his tracks.

The coalition of China, India and Russia may be negative in its aims, but such negativity makes it stronger, not weaker. It gives the alliance a sharp focus, something that the US (and the West in general) sorely and demonstrably lacks.

Though his failure to stop the war in the Ukraine has sobered him up a bit, Trump is still striking out in all directions, picking fights against all and sundry, pushing former allies towards China and away from America.

For example, take the totally unnecessary brawl he picked with Brazil, the biggest economy in Latin America, and a country generally well-disposed towards the US. Out of the blue, he announced that Brazil would face 50 per cent tariffs, the highest in the world so far.

Brazil, Trump falsely claimed, runs a trade surplus with the US. In fact, Brazil runs a multi-million deficit in its trade with the US, but the punitive tariffs had nothing to do with trade. They were punishment meted out as retaliation for the prosecution of former Brazilian president Bolsonaro, who was a Trump ally.

This was a mafioso payback more than an exercise of sound politics, diplomacy or economics. So how long before Brazil joins China, India and Russia in their anti-American, anti-Western coalition? At this pace, America First may soon become America Alone, which will be a tragedy for the West at large.

The title above serves a dual purpose. In addition to introducing this article, it can do extra duty as the title of Trump’s next book, the sequel to The Art of Making a Deal. May I also suggest a subtitle, How to Turn the World Against You?

Five, if that reprobate dared tweet that only men have penises. That’s what happened to the award-winning TV writer Graham Linehan.

For the benefit of my foreign readers, British policemen don’t carry guns on normal duty. When a suspect to be arrested is likely to offer armed resistance, special units, similar to American SWAT, are called into action.

Not having had the pleasure of meeting Mr Linehan, I don’t know how pugnacious he is. I do know he is Irish, which, at the risk of ethnic stereotyping, suggests that he might have been in a scrap or two.

However, five SMG-toting cops arrested him at Heathrow, as he got off his flight from America. Hence there was no way Mr Linehan could have brandished a weapon – airlines are strict about that sort of thing nowadays.

Still, better safe than sorry. Officers arresting a known terrorist would certainly carry arms, and Mr Linehan’s crime was worse than any terrorist offence. A terrorist has life and property in his sights, but he doesn’t endanger the very essence of the state. Graham Linehan does.

He has been a relentless campaigner against transgender lunacy for years. Specifically, he has been arguing that biological males must be kept out of women-only spaces. And if they aren’t, the women who happen to be inside are suffering abuse.

As a result, Mr Linehan found himself on the receiving end of a witch-hunting hysteria in all media. I can appreciate his ordeal, having myself suffered something like that, if on a comparatively minuscule scale.

A dozen years ago I wrote in The Mail that, if homosexual groups are allowed to advertise on buses, then Christian groups ought to be given equal time for their rebuttal. Within hours, the LGBT rag PinkNews published my photograph and contact details, telling its readers to express their indignation.

This they did, in hundreds of obscene e-mails, many threatening my life and limb. One chap wrote he’d happily kill me but, looking at my photograph, he diagnosed that I’d soon croak of my own accord, so he didn’t need to bother.

But I wasn’t a ‘celebrity’. Mr Linehan is, which means he and his family had to suffer constant abuse a thousand times worse, and for years.

Soon the award-winning writer couldn’t find any work in the UK. His wife, unable to take the pressure, walked out. And his show-business friends either stopped taking his calls or regretted not being able to ‘do lunch’.

Finally, the writer was hounded out of Britain and emigrated to the US, hoping to rebuild his life there. But he continued his campaign, tweeting a week ago this incendiary message: “If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”

I’m disappointed in Mr Linehan. The joke would have been funnier had he written “punch her in the balls”. He missed a trick there, a mistake he then exacerbated by flying to Blighty for a short visit. Waiting for him at Heathrow was a welcoming committee with automatic weapons.

His arrest has caused an outcry in conservative papers, but I don’t feel any anger. Would you be enraged reading that torrential rains caused a flood? Of course not. It’s what torrential rains do.

So why be incensed reading about a man being arrested for writing something that even twenty years ago would have been considered bleeding obvious? It’s what Marxist governments do.

Marxist (or any other) ideology isn’t about changing the nature of government. It’s about changing human nature, moulding it to conform to the ideology. Since that’s impossible to do by any regular means, the government has to rely on irregular means.

To begin with, it has to achieve, or at least approach, total control over individuals. Looming large at the end of that process are things like concentration camps and mass executions. However, it’s impossible to arrive at that glittering goal at once. Some incremental steps have to be taken along the way.

In a country like Britain, where traditions of civil liberties go back many centuries, such steps must be taken cautiously, with the speed of progress picking up gradually and slowly. First, the Marxist government has to accelerate class war, making sure that gaining economic independence from the state would become hard, eventually impossible.

As I’ve argued quite a few times, this – and only this – explains the economic catastrophe our Marxist government is visiting on the country. A catastrophe, that is, only for you and me.

For the Starmer gang, it’s a huge success. Rich people are fleeing the country in droves, and the middle classes are losing their usual trappings: reasonable disposable income, private (meaning the only decent) education for their children, financial security – why, that’s the next best thing to shooting them en masse.

But it’s not just about the economy. Depriving people of economic freedom is only part of the Marxist job. A more important part is depriving people of freedom, full stop.

And there Marxists, fascists and other totalitarians have discovered a trick that’s as diabolical as it’s effective. They boil their ideology down to patently ludicrous statements going against common sense, history, logic, morality – everything that goes into the make-up of human nature. And then they force the people to accept those statements as real and regurgitate them when told to do so.

The government knows the statements are ludicrous, so do the people, and the government knows the people know. Yet it’s the ultimate exercise of power to force the people into mouthing idiotic drivel or at least pretending they go along with it.

Naturally, those few who refuse to do so or, worse still, have the gall to sneer at that twaddle become criminals in the eyes of the state – worse than thieves, worse than burglars, worse even than terrorists.

Someone who posts tweets like Mr Linehan’s strikes at the very essence of the Marxist state. He is an apostate, heretic, even a traitor. He tries to slip the tethers of state control, and that’s a graver crime than slitting someone’s throat.

So it stands to reason that cops threw him into a cell, took away his trouser belt and only released him hours later, when bail was posted. In North Korea, he could have been shot, but Britain isn’t North Korea yet. Not really, at any rate. Only aspirationally.

The same aspiration informs the proposed policy of introducing mandatory ID cards to be carried by His Majesty’s subjects at all times. Been there, done that, didn’t buy a T-shirt (there was a shortage of clothes in the Soviet Union).

Whatever our Marxist rulers say to justify this totalitarian measure is a lie – take it from someone who had to carry an ID card from age 16 to 25, when I shook the Soviet dust off my feet.

The only purpose of forcing people to carry ID cards on pain of punishment is to enable any state official to put his foot down. Any cop will be able to stop anyone in the street and demand proof of identity.

And if the mark is absentminded enough to have left his card at home, the cop will arrest him or not – whatever it takes to make a point, to remind all and sundry that they are all servants at the state’s pleasure.

Meanwhile, poor Mr Linehan was charged with an offence against ‘trans people’. When he asked the cops to define the concept, he was told: “People who feel their gender is different than what was assigned at birth.”

Don’t you just love the language? To any normal person unsullied with totalitarian dung, sex, not ‘gender’, isn’t assigned. It’s determined, and not at birth but at conception, when two DNAs come together in a fertilised ovum. It’s good to know that even the police have been house-trained to speak the cant of Marxist tyranny.

Having said all that, I wish Nigel Farage expressed his legitimate indignation in Parliament, not in Congress. It’s perfectly fine to wash dirty laundry, but, for a British MP, the proper laundromat ought to be located in Westminster, not on Capitol Hill.

Trump and Vance don’t need any encouragement to poke their noses into internal British affairs, and they certainly don’t need any more ammunition to fire at European countries. Whatever abuses against free speech they espy in Europe – and God knows those abuses are numerous and egregious enough – they are Europe’s business, not America’s.

I don’t often – almost never, truth to tell – agree with Democratic congressmen, but I do agree with Congressman Jamie Raskin, who called Mr Farage a “Putin-loving Trump sycophant” who “should go and advance the positions he’s taking here in Congress today, in Parliament, which is meeting today, if he’s serious about it.”

Hear, hear, although the language needs work. If Britain wishes to go to Marxist hell, she ought to do so in her own fashion. There is nothing Trump can do about it, other than running off at the mouth in his usual bossy, offensive and illiterate manner.

Nigel Farage, on the other hand, can do something about pushing Britain away from the brink, but he should do it by standing up in the Commons, not by bending down to pay gluteal tribute to Trump. Even if what Farage says is true, which it is.

Since human life on Earth had a beginning, it’s illogical to believe it can’t have an end. It can and probably will, some day.

Christians believe there is life in death, but most people deny that nowadays. However, no one denies that there is death in life. Living organisms live, then die. We see it with our own eyes.

We are all – even conceivably I am – going to die, individually. And, if we regard the human race as a living organism, we can also die collectively.

Life on Earth can be erased by the sun getting out of kilter and either frying or freezing us to death. A giant meteor may hit the Earth and break it in half. Some meteorological quirk may create a great flood, even bigger than the one spelled with the capital F.

Someone better-versed in science than I am can doubtless come up with many other doomsday scenarios, but there’s no point worrying about them. Such disasters either happen or they don’t, and there’s nothing we can do about the possibility of democide caused by defects in physical nature.

What should concern us is the possibility of suicide caused by defects in human nature. This is worth pondering, if only because we may have a chance to prevent it. This is an outside chance, I’ll grant you that, but a chance nonetheless.

If collective suicide is a possible end, we certainly have the means to achieve it. The most obvious and quickest way to perdition is a no-holds-barred nuclear war, and we are teetering on the brink of it. This is so obvious that I’ll spare you a long list of likely flashpoints that can conflagrate the world.

Death by demographics would be slower but no less possible. After all, throughout the West and much of the East people don’t produce enough children even to maintain the replacement level. If more people die than are born, then sooner or later there won’t be anyone left, what’s there not to understand?

Another suicide, falling somewhere between the two in its potential speed of execution, could be caused by a release of toxins, either accidental, as a result of negligence, or deliberate, as biological warfare. Think of Covid and the havoc it caused, then think of bubonic plague or some other Black Death, multiply the Covid effect by a million and there you have it: suicide by germs.

Then there is this new-fangled Artificial Intelligence, which, according to some dystopic projections, may create a victorious robotic revolt putting paid to mankind. Personally, I can’t understand how creatures can outdo their creators, but since some knowledgeable and respectable people worry about the cataclysmic potential of AI, who am I to argue?

You may think we aren’t so stupid as to let such things happen. I disagree with the second part: we are eminently capable of committing collective suicide. But the first part is correct: we aren’t stupid at all. What we suffer from isn’t a deficit of reason but its surfeit. We are too intelligent for our own good, or rather too reliant on our reason.

If you look at the four possible catastrophes I mentioned, they were made possible by tremendous tours de force of intelligence.

Marshalling and releasing the energy bubbling in the atom took ingenuity beyond my understanding. Think of Democritus (d. circa 370 BC) who came up with the atomic theory of the universe, then jump on to Ernest Rutherford who first split the atom in 1918, to Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and other great minds who devoted their lives to nuclear physics and quantum mechanics.

We should all be in awe of such depths of the intellect so thoroughly plumbed, but awe suggests not only reverential admiration but also fear. The same goes for the biochemists and toxicologists who have developed perfect means of collective suicide.

Gone are the primitive times of yesteryear, when attackers caused outbreaks of deadly diseases in besieged fortresses by lobbing dead rats over the wall. Today the same effect can be achieved globally by breaking a few test tubes in public.

Would you know how to synthesise such toxins? Neither would I. But we can’t accuse those who can do so of lacking intelligence. On the contrary, they must be smarter than you and me, certainly in one specialised area but perhaps also in general.

And I’m almost paralysed by the awe I feel contemplating the intricate minds dedicated to computer technology and its ultimate achievement, AI. If you think for a second they are stupid, then peek into the innards of your Mac and see if you can figure out how it works.

You can’t, can you? Then show some respect for those geeky boffins who spend their lives glued to screens or hunched over plates, microchips and connectors. They may be many things, but stupid isn’t one of them.

Women who decide not to have children aren’t necessarily dumb either. On the contrary, they may be too clever by half. They seek outlets for their minds rather than spending the best years of their lives on pregnancies, nappies, breastfeeding and washing their babies, then looking after them, teaching them to walk, talk, read and tell right from wrong, driving them to school and cooking their meals.

They find such outlets in studying things like physics, biochemistry or computer science and parlaying their education into remunerative careers improving their lifestyle and boosting their self-esteem. You are free to think what you will of such women, or even poopoo words like ‘lifestyle’ and ‘self-esteem’. But you can’t deny those ladies have to be rather smart to have careers, to seek fulfilment in their brains, not their wombs.

Scale such exploits down from physics, biochemistry or computer science, and the same observation applies: careers in public relations, HR, management, sales, even show business take intelligence too. Such ambitious women want their jam today, and let others worry about impending demographic catastrophes. Those childless wonders may be selfish, even cynical, but they are nobody’s fools.

“This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper,” wrote Eliot in his poem The Hollow Man. Hollow spiritually, is what he meant, and this bottomless pit can’t be filled with intellect. And if it can’t, then the world may indeed end, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s with a bang or a whimper.

Human reason will end up denying and eventually devouring itself if its excesses aren’t controlled by a higher reason whence the spiritual and moral constraints come. Such constraints have been systematically removed over the past few centuries, allowing unfettered reason to run free.

Emerging out of the resulting upheavals was Modern man, a creature bristling with noetic smugness. Now he had shaken off the fetters of religion, he no longer had any use for anyone’s reason but his own. Where before he had been enslaved, he was now free.

Yet nothing turns freedom into bondage and then death as ineluctably as a lack of discipline.

No matter how talented a composer is, he’ll produce nothing but cacophony if he ignores the structural and harmonic rules of composition. His unchecked freedom will kill his music.

If anarchists striving for absolute freedom ever produce their own state, the state will soon fall apart, but not before creating the worst tyranny in history.

An anticlerical believer who denies the authority of the Church and relies on his own resources will lose his resources first and his faith second.

The builders of Notre Dame expressed themselves within a discipline. The builders of Centre Pompidou were free to express themselves as they saw fit.

Noetic smugness, unwavering trust in human reason as the be all and end all, may indeed end all. A nuclear scientist’s reason may produce a way to heat our houses or to incinerate them. A biochemist’s reason may create life-sustaining medicines or life-ending poisons. A computer scientist’s reason may produce useful machines or man-eating ogres.

Moreover, a philosopher pondering the link between reason and language may end up denying the validity of reason, language and indeed philosophy (except perhaps his own). Human reason, in other words, may be either a creative tool or a suicide tool, and it takes a higher reason to decide which it’ll be.

Mankind won’t kill itself by being too daft. It may kill itself by being too clever by half.  It’s not stupidity but noetic smugness that’s more likely to lock and load the weapon of mass destruction. That’s what put mankind on suicide watch, and we’d be foolhardy to put self-confidence before vigilance.  

When asked to comment on Trump’s soft treatment of Putin’s war on the Ukraine, Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa said: “The supreme leader of the world’s greatest superpower is, objectively, a Soviet, or Russian, asset. He functions as an asset.”

‘Objectively’ is the key word there. Trump probably never signed any contract in blood, and he probably doesn’t think of himself as a Russian asset. But, as I always say when the subject comes up, it’s hard to imagine how different his actions and pronouncements would be if he were indeed a witting agent of Putin.

Obviously, an American president can’t afford the luxury of openly cheering an aggression threatening the world order formed after 1945. Doing so would cost the US the support of all her allies, and no country can go it alone in today’s volatile world.

Nor can Trump say in so many words that everything Putin says about the war is true, and that the Ukraine is at least as much to blame for the carnage as Russia is, possibly even more. If he did so, according to the US law he’d have to register as a foreign agent.

However, as the Portuguese president pointed out, what Trump does say amounts to a similar message. For example, after the red-carpet travesty in Alaska, where Trump failed to secure a ceasefire, he said that Zelensky “can end the war with Russia almost immediately, if he wants to, or he can continue to fight.”

The implication is that only Zelensky’s obstinacy keeps the blood gushing. That’s not wrong: the Ukraine could indeed have stopped the war at any moment since 2014 and especially since 2022. All she would have had to do was capitulate – and this is exactly what the Kremlin has been saying and Trump has been implying.

Trump issues dire warnings to Putin with metronomic regularity, threatening higher sanctions and “severe consequences”, not only for Russia but also for her trading partners. None of this materialises: Trump delivers ultimatums, typically giving Putin two weeks to come to his senses. When that doesn’t happen, “severe consequences” arrive in the shape of another two-week ultimatum.

Meanwhile, Trump keeps lashing out at Zelensky, stopping just short of branding him a warmonger, but leaving his audience in no doubt that this is exactly what he means. Hence, Trump’s administration, says de Sousa, has “gone from being allies on one side to acting as referees in the conflict.” And not an unbiased referee, may I add.

Trump has consistently refrained from criticising Putin openly, other than regretting that at times he can’t recognise his good friend Vlad. Trump doesn’t show the same restraint when extolling the KGB dictator. For example, shortly after the full-scale Russian invasion started, he praised the move as “genius” and “savvy”.

Since then, Trump has consistently supported Putin’s ideas on how the war should end: the Ukraine must cede the Donbas region, recognise the annexation of the Crimea, repudiate any possibility of joining NATO.

In return, Trump offers some mythical “security guarantees” to the Ukraine. He knows in advance that Putin will never accept the deployment of NATO troops in the buffer zone, which would be the only viable security guarantee.

While this talk shop stays open, US military supplies to the Ukraine oscillate between being risibly insufficient and non-existent. Instead, the Ukrainians are getting general noises about the awfulness of so many women and children being killed by Russian missiles.

Still, I agree with de Sousa’s qualifier: Trump is probably a Russian asset only de facto, not de jure. However, anyone who understands the KGB mentality will know that this nuance is lost upon Putin.

Before Trump began his political career, he had often accepted Russian, which is to say KGB, money to help him out of tight spots. And for the KGB this is tantamount to a signature on a service contract. Anyone who takes KGB money, in whatever form, is treated as an asset.

Russian help was especially invaluable in the 1990s, during the later stages of Trump’s career as property developer. One after another of his businesses was going into receivership, his Atlantic City casinos were going bust, costing investors and banks billions in bad debts.

As a result, investors stopped investing and banks stopped lending, and no big-time developer can function without credit. That’s when the Russians moved in.

Trump, said Alan Lapidus, his long-time architect, “could not get anybody in the United States to lend him anything. It was all coming out of Russia. His involvement with Russia was deeper than he’s acknowledged.”

Trump’s sons confirmed this statement. In 2008 Donald Jr. said: “In terms of high-end product influx into the US, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.”

Another son, Eric, echoed that confession in 2014. Asked how the Trump Organisation remained afloat when no banks were willing to give it loans, he shrugged: “Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”

Now, the Russian government is a seamless blend of the KGB and organised crime. Any Russian investor willing to pump billions into foreign businesses can only do so with that blend’s approval and encouragement.

One case in point is Trump’s dealings with the Bayrock Group, which led his financial revival that began in the early 2000s.

Bayrock was renting whole floors in Trump Towers at a time when Russian mafiosi made up a large proportion of Trump’s tenants (up to 20 per cent). The Group was run by Tevfik Arif, a former Soviet official in Kazakhstan who had seemingly inexhaustible sources of funds with rather a dubious provenance.

Another Bayrock boss was Felix Slater, a Russian-born mafioso who in the 1990s had pleaded guilty to a vast stock fraud involving the Russian mafia (and its partner, the KGB/FSB, without whose participation no criminal gang could ever function in Russia).

Trump explained he had done business with Bayrock because Arif had impressive connections. “Bayrock knew the people, knew the investors,” Trump said. I bet. But I’d have been tempted to inquire what kind of people and what kind of investors.

There have been books written about Trump’s extensive links with Russian ‘businessmen’, too numerous to list here. I was especially impressed with one such deal, inscribed on a tissue of lies.

In 2008, acting through a trust, the Russian ‘oligarch’ Dmitry Rybolovlev (or rather his wife – a distinction without a difference) paid $95 million for Maison de l’Amitié, Trump’s house in Palm Beach, Florida. (This may be a coincidence, but the name is a direct translation of Dom Druzhby, the Soviet government’s club in central Moscow, where foreigners mixed with KGB recruiters.)

The house, which Trump had bought for $40 million four years earlier, was on the market for a long time without attracting any takers. Then Rybolovlev moved in, paying way over the odds and making some people suspect that the purchase sum represented a veiled subsidy.

Moreover, Trump claimed that the sale was the only deal he had ever done with any Russian, which demonstrably wasn’t true. Still, none of this is prima facie evidence of Trump’s being a Russian asset.

Trump’s leaning towards Putin in the on-going war may be motivated by his sincere admiration of the latter’s “genius” and “savvy”. That, however, is another distinction without a difference.

Assets may work for a foreign government wittingly or unwittingly. In the former case, they might be coerced by kompromat (one of the few Russian contributions to the English language), bought by cash or scared by threats. But they may also act for ideological reasons or out of sympathy for what the foreign government represents – the US ‘atomic spies’ were a prime example of that category.

In the end, it doesn’t matter. What’s important is that, ever since the Russian invasion, Trump has been toing and froing in his actions and pronouncements. But the general vector of his leaning is unmistakable, and Putin certainly doesn’t mistake it for anything other than tacit support.

Three cheers for President de Sousa who said in plain Portuguese what most European leaders think. It’s only words, but they are welcome words.

Because I say so. And why do I say so? Because everyone knows it’s true.

Such is the gist of yet another racist story, this one unfolding at the US Open Tennis Championship. The two parties involved are the American player Taylor Townsend and the Latvian Jelena Ostapenko.

Jelena lost their match, which is hardly surprising, considering that she is a prime candidate for a Mounjaro jab. I don’t know the Latvian for “Who ate all the pies?”, but whatever it is, she must have heard it a few times.

Anyway, Jelena doesn’t like losing, especially to a lower-ranked opponent like Taylor. This brings to mind the famous American football coach, Vince Lombardi, who once said: “Show me a good loser, and I’ll show you a loser.”

People playing professional tennis to Jelena’s standard (she has a Grand Slam title to her name) are invariably bad losers. Nothing unusual about that.

But post-match spats, like the one Jelena had with Taylor, don’t happen all that often. Jelena had two problems with Taylor’s etiquette, which gave rise to the incident later described as racist.

First, it’s customary to start the pre-match warm-up at the baseline, where modern matches are mostly played. Once the two players have established their rhythm, they usually take turns at the net. Townsend, however, defied that unwritten rule by starting the warm-up at the net, thus denying Ostapenko her baseline sighters.

Then, at a critical moment in the match, Townsend won a point on a fortunate net cord. When that happens, it’s customary for the lucky player to apologise, which Taylor neglected to do.

That caused Jelena’s ire, and after the match she told Taylor that she had “no class” and “no education”. Taylor replied, “You can learn how to take a loss better,” and you’d think that was the end of a rather trivial incident.

So it would have been if Taylor Townsend weren’t black. But she is, and no incident involving black people on the receiving end of a tirade is ever trivial these days.

Ostapenko was roundly accused of being a racist, even though her remarks didn’t mention race even tangentially. The tennis world, backed up by the press, sprang to the defence of ‘persons of colour’.

Another player, Naomi Osaka, herself a person of colour (or rather two colours: she is half Japanese, half American black) stated categorically that Ostapenko’s post-match comment was “one of the worst things you can say to a black tennis player in a majority white sport”.

If Naomi genuinely thinks so, she must have led a sheltered life. As a former resident of Texas, I can assure her that some things people can say about blacks are considerably worse than ‘no class and no education’.

The charge of ‘no education’ can be safely levelled at any professional player of any race, unless we narrow the concept of education down to basic literacy. These people spend 10 hours every day training on the court, in the gym or on the running track, and have done so since they were five years old.

Add to that rubdowns, physiotherapy, ice baths, sleeping at least eight hours a night, eating out, and there isn’t much time left to acquire anything I’d call education. Witness Roger Federer, one of the nicest and ‘classiest’ tennis players ever. When once asked what his favourite pastime was away from tennis, he replied, “Shopping”.

What, not brushing up on Thomistic philosophy? Parsing a Bach fugue? Reading Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War? Well, I never.

Nor would anyone watching players’ antics on court consider the ‘no class’ accusation misplaced, again regardless of race. I wouldn’t say that the gentlemanly Federer is an exception, but he is certainly not in the majority.

Players kick water bottles into the front rows of the audience. They smash their racquets over chair backs. They knock the chairs over by throwing water bottles at them (Ostapenko herself has been known to do that). They swear at the umpire, their opponent and any member of the paying public who dared to move a muscle while a point was in progress. They fake injuries either to default out of matches they were losing anyway or to catch their breath during the ensuing timeout.

Meanwhile, Osaka continued: “I’m sorry to say but I feel like in society, especially people of colour, we are expected to be silenced. Or there are times where we have to be very strategic as to when we speak up. And in these type of moments, it’s important for me to speak up, not only for myself, but for my culture.”

One could be forgiven for thinking Naomi was talking about the Jim Crow South, c. 1955, not today’s America. If any group is “expected to be silenced” there, especially on the subject of race, it’s white people. It’s as if they’ve all been issued their Miranda warning: “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law” or at least that of public opinion.

Townsend herself graciously conceded that Ostapenko spoke in the heat of the moment and probably didn’t mean to issue a racist insult. However, she’d better keep in mind that, every time Taylor Townsend walks onto a tennis court, she represents not only herself or her country, but also her race:

“I’m very proud as a black woman being out here representing myself and representing us and our culture.

“I make sure that I do everything that I can to be the best representation possible every time that I step on the court and even off the court… I didn’t take it that way [Ostapenko’s remark as a racial slur], but also, that has been a stigma in our community of being not educated and all of the things when it’s the furthest thing from the truth.”

“Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas,” and the demographic veritas doesn’t quite tally with Taylor’s claim. For example, only 10 per cent of American black men have bachelor’s degrees, compared to 61 per cent of their white counterparts.

But that’s neither here nor there: this statistic has nothing whatsoever to do with the problem in hand. For Ostapenko’s remark, whatever we may think of it, clearly lacked a corporate sweep. It was aimed at Taylor Townsend specifically, not her race, nor any other group she may represent.

In any case, stating, as Townsend did, that every time she hits a fuzzy yellow ball she strikes a blow for her race, is a vulgar trivialisation of a genuine problem, interracial relations. Just think what would happen if Townsend’s white, male counterpart and namesake, Taylor Fritz, said that he is proud of being white and represents his race every time he swings his racquet.

He’d be… well, I almost wrote lynched, but then thought better of it. But you get the idea.

This isn’t to say that US blacks have no reason to be hypersensitive. When I lived in Texas, I had a black friend my age who had had to ride in the back of the bus when he was a child. That experience is bound to leave scars, though Clarence did a good job hiding his.

Taylor Townsend was born in 1996, and she grew up in Chicago, where blacks didn’t have to ride in the back of the bus even in her great-grandparents’ generation. Still, the memory of being considered less than human (as American blacks were regarded a hundred years before her great-grandparents’ generation) can’t be erased quickly.

And it will never be erased if racial tensions continue to be whipped up in the media and on campuses. Too many groups in America stand to benefit from fomenting racial strife: they seek to divide so that they can conquer.

If the country suddenly went colour-blind, how would all those professors of black studies make a living? Or censors taking their blue pencils to American classics like Huckleberry Finn? Or racial equality activists, many of them white?

They’d all have to do real work, rather than just indoctrinating impressionable youngsters to hate their country (and the West in general) for its history of racism. This isn’t to say there was no such history. There was, and it was appalling at times and in places.

Treating any race as inferior is a sin, but sins can be atoned, says the formative religion of our civilisation. Which this particular one will never be if any criticism of a black person is treated as racism, against all evidence.

We do live at a crazy time, which I’m tempted to write at the end of just about every article. And unabashed propaganda of racism makes it crazier that it would otherwise be.