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As a conservative – some will say reactionary – I’m pleased to report that Her Majesty’s realm is nowhere near as atheist as I feared.

Just because people venerate a different God from mine, it doesn’t mean they don’t venerate any. In fact, judging by the public reaction to the Zouma incident, Britain has revived the ancient Egyptian cult of cat-worship.

Starting from the First Dynasty, felines were treated as deities for at least 3,000 years. They were seen as representations of Ra, the sun god. Hence any affront against cats was treated as blasphemy, though I’m not sure what kind of punishment was meted out to the infidels.

However, I do know how such transgressions are punished in Britain and France, now the ancient cult has made a comeback. And so does Kurt Zouma, the French defender playing at West Ham.

The other day Kurt and his brother, also a defender, came home after a kicking session. Both felt it would be fun to extend that activity to a domestic environment. This time, however, Kurt branched out into rugby technique, dropkicking one of his cats.

Both he and his brother laughed as the latter was filming the cat flying across the room. Either Kurt’s rugby technique needs work or else a cat doesn’t have the ballistic characteristics of a ball, but he failed to reach a decent elevation and distance.

Unaware that they had committed a blasphemous act, the Zoumas happily put the video on social networks. That offended the religious sensibilities of cat-worshippers, and these days no offence is taken in stride.

The plagues of Egypt were visited upon Kurt (yes, I know I’m mixing religious metaphors, but at least the geography is spot on). To begin with, the RSPCA stepped in to confiscate Zouma’s cats, including the victim that apparently had suffered no lasting damage.

The same can’t be said for Zouma’s career. His commercial cash cows instantly did to his endorsements what he had done to that poor cat. Then 280,000 cat-worshippers signed an online petition demanding that the blasphemer be prosecuted and sacked from his club. So far David Moyes, West Ham manager, has ignored this demand.

Instead he merely fined Zouma two-week’s wages, which amounted to £250,000. That created an unforeseen problem. Other players, whose mathematical nous proved just adequate to the task of dividing that sum by two, realised that Zouma is on £125,000 a week, more than anyone else at the club.

Hence they demanded immediate pay rises, thereby committing at least two of the deadly sins, avarice and envy. However, since these sins have a different religious provenance, they don’t count.

One player came to Zouma’s defence without in any way condoning the sacrilege. Pointing out that no one is sacking players guilty of racism, central striker Antonio asked a question he thought was rhetorical: “Is kicking a cat worse than racism?”

Rhetorical? Not on your nelly, replied The Mail’s sports writer Martin Samuel: “The answer? It doesn’t matter. They’re both bad. Racism, cat-kicking. There doesn’t have to be a sliding scale of monstrousness.”

One has to see irrefutable logic there. Some 80 years ago, millions of people with surnames similar to Mr Samuel’s were being gassed in ovens. In the 25 years before and some 15 years after that, 60 million people with all sorts of surnames were murdered in another country.

Yet those crimes, monstrous as they are, are no different from cat-kicking. Morality, of which Mr Samuel is an infallible judge, is absolute. If you have that sliding relativist scale, kick it into touch.

The outburst of religious fervour is thunderous in Britain, but it’s even louder in Zouma’s native France. Brigitte Bardot, who has in the recent decades focused on animals the same passion she used to reserve for her co-stars, demanded that Zouma be dropped from the national team and prosecuted.

If the country’s prosecutors comply with that demand, Kurt is looking at up to four years in the clink, what with French laws being stricter than ours in this area of jurisprudence. Still, he should count himself lucky. In the old days, apostates were immolated.

It’s up for discussion whether any religiosity is better than none, provided that alternative cults don’t involve human sacrifice. Without joining the debate, I’ll merely point out that, in the occidental context, animal worship is a relatively recent faith.

It goes back to the time when reason – finally! – arrived in Europe and people started worshipping nature instead of God. Until then, they had treated nature in a purely functional manner. No sentimentality towards animals was in evidence.

In those backward times it was still assumed that nature, both flora and fauna, was there for the sole purpose of serving man, made in the image and likeness of God. But with the arrival of the Enlightenment and its artistic expression, Romanticism, people replaced God with their own reason.

And it told them that they didn’t need the supernatural to pursue the superpersonal. All they had to do was come up with new cults – or else take the old ones off the mothballs.

Hence the rampant anthropomorphism in treating animals (hence also, by the way, the alacrity with which modern secular zealots jump on the climate bandwagon).

Cruelty to animals isn’t nice. But the on-going mass hysteria about Zouma’s unfortunate choice of football is grotesquely out of proportion. After all, in his professional capacity Zouma must have kicked hundreds of human beings, some of them deliberately.

On the other hand, those creatures are unlikely to purr when tickled behind the ear. And nor do they possess any religious significance. Not any longer.

P.S. Mentioning France reminded me that I must apologise to President Macron. In an earlier article I inadvertently stated that he planned to replace the French national anthem La Marseillaise with the hymn O Come, O Come, Emmanuel (O viens, ô viens, Emmanuel).

Until today the Mail columnist Stephen Glover has mostly written on domestic politics, and reasonably well. His is a safe pair of hands – provided, of course, he stays within his area of expertise.

Today, however, he strayed outside it to regale us with his thoughts on the current situation in the Ukraine. That was a mistake.

To start with, Mr Glover adopts the disclaimer strategy honed by his Mail colleague Peter Hitchens: “I don’t dispute that Putin is a thoroughly nasty piece of work… Nor is there any doubt his regime ruthlessly eliminates its enemies both at home and abroad, and opposes Western interests whenever and wherever it can.”

Having got those supposedly irrelevant incidentals out of the way and divested himself of the stigma of servility to Putin, Mr Glover gets on with the business in hand. His message is that “Russia has a case in Ukraine”.

That’s an opinion, and as such of no interest whatsoever until it has been supported with thought and fact to turn it into a sound judgement. It’s his attempt to do so that shows up Mr Glover’s shortcomings.

He knows the way to prevent war and secure lasting peace. “It involves trying to get inside President Putin’s mind, and attempting to understand Russian attitudes towards Ukraine and Nato with a sharper sense of historical perspective.”

All God’s children like historical perspective. Yet this approach requires, as a minimum, some rudimentary knowledge of history, an asset Mr Glover manifestly lacks. By the sound of him, he even lacks access to Google.

Thus he writes: “Before the 1917 Revolution, part of modern-day Ukraine was in the Russian Empire. After 1945, the entire country was incorporated into the Soviet Union.”

The entire country, as it then was, was incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1922, when the USSR was formed. The Ukraine’s western part at that time belonged to Poland and was detached from her in 1939, when, following their Pact, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned the country.

Sharpening historical perspective even further, prior possession is no per cent of the law. A cursory glance at the history and geography of Europe will show that the borders of most countries have been shuffled and reshuffled for centuries. This is especially true of Eastern Europe, large swathes of which have been changing hands like well-used banknotes.

Glover’s “historical perspective” is tantamount to a call for that process to continue in perpetuity, which is intellectually feeble and morally defunct. If he acquires access to Google, he should key in TRANSYLVANIA, YUGOSLAVIA or ALSACE for verification.

Or, for that matter, CRIMEA. There Mr Glover complements his historical perspective with an ethnic one. “In 2014,” he writes, “Russia seized Crimea – from 1783 until 1917 part of the Russian empire, and now overwhelmingly ethnically Russian – from Ukraine.”

The Crimea was part of the Russo-Soviet Empire during roughly the same period as India was part of the British Empire. So do we have a valid territorial claim to the subcontinent? As to the ethnic composition of any area in Europe, any argument based on it is even more fatuous than one based on prior possession.

Nevertheless Mr Glover persists: “There are some 8 million ethnic Russians in Ukraine, nearly 20 per cent of the population, many of whom regard the government in capital, Kiev, as hostile.”

How many exactly? When the Russians invaded two predominantly Russophone provinces of the Ukraine in 2014, most of the population fled west, not east. I’ve seen numerous polls showing that most Ukrainian citizens, regardless of their ethnicity, are prepared to die for the Ukraine. Has Mr Glover seen any contradicting surveys? He certainly doesn’t quote them.

But even assuming against all evidence that his observation is valid, so what? I could say with equal justification that “there are some 3.5 million Muslims in the UK, many of whom regard the government in capital, London, as hostile”. Should Britain or any other country make far-reaching geopolitical conclusions on that basis?

And how far is Mr Glover prepared to push the ethnic argument? The population of Riga is about 40 per cent ethnically Russian. That of Narva, more than double that. Should Russia invade Latvia and Estonia then, with Mr Glover’s blessing?

His capacity for empathy is as endless as it is misplaced. “Imagine the feelings of policymakers in Moscow,” he writes. “Nato is already breathing down Russia’s neck. If Ukraine joins the alliance, Russia could face the possibility of American troops, and potentially nuclear missiles, on the other side of a 1,200-mile land border.”

Here Mr Glover is accepting Russian paranoia, more put-on than real, as a legitimate concern worthy of serious consideration. First, I am not aware of any immediate plans to admit the Ukraine into Nato, as I am aware of some members, notably Poland, staunchly opposing any such development.

And in what way is Nato “breathing down Russia’s neck”? Is Nato some kind of Chimera, described by Homer as “breathing forth in terrible wise the might of blazing fire”? In the good tradition of Soviet propaganda, Mr Glover ignores the facts and then confuses cause and effect.

Nato was created in 1949 to defend Europe from an aggressively hostile power. Had Stalin and his heirs not threatened Europe, Nato wouldn’t exist.

When, after 1991, the credulous West got to believe that the threat had disappeared, Nato’s presence in Europe was reduced. Eastern Europe, however, wouldn’t be tricked quite so easily – its experience of Russian history was, unlike Mr Glover’s, first-hand.

When power in Russia passed on to the KGB (84 per cent of the Putin administration and much of Yeltsyn’s made their bones in that, history’s most murderous, organisation), they knew what that meant. Hence they begged to be admitted to Nato, to thwart Putin’s declared aim of reversing what he called “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20^th century” (meaning the disintegration of the Soviet empire and not, for example, the two world wars).

Even then, the western Nato members only deployed, at most, a few hundred troops anywhere near the Russian border. That symbolic presence only began to be beefed up after Russia’s 2014 aggression against the Ukraine. The more aggressive did Russia become, the more determined Western resistance (more in word than in deed).

A dose of anti-Americanism is unavoidable in such articles, and Mr Glover doesn’t disappoint: “It seems that, not for the first time, we are too beholden to America, which has driven the expansion of Nato and the encirclement of Russia.”

That’s exactly the line taken by Putin’s propagandists, and Soviet ones before that. Russia is encircled by enemies, which justifies her pouncing on her neighbours like a rabid dog. Actually, only five Nato countries border on Russia, covering just about six per cent of the country’s perimeter. That hardly amounts to encirclement, does it?

Mr Glover also echoes Putin’s lies about the nature of the present conflict, with the Ukraine merely providing a battleground for the clash between Russia and the US. This is a fight in which Britain, according to Mr Glover, has no dog.

After all, Russia poses no “existential threat to the West”, because “the Russian economy, smaller than Italy’s, is desperately vulnerable”. The first part of that statement is incorrect; the second, irrelevant.

A plausible scenario could unfold along these lines: Russia, encouraged by Mr Glover’s ethnic approach to geopolitics, annexes Narva in Estonia, a Nato member. That should activate Article 5 of the Nato Charter, saying that an attack on one member is an attack on all.

If Nato acted accordingly, that would spell an immediate “existential threat” to all of us. If Nato ignored its Charter, the threat would merely be deferred. Nato would effectively disband, with the system of collective security going the same way. If that wouldn’t constitute an existential threat, I don’t know what would.

As to the size of Russia’s economy, that would only come into play in case of a long war of attrition – and perhaps not even then. What’s critical isn’t a country’s riches but her concentration of her economic and moral resources in the military area.

A country with a GDP of £10 trillion that spends £1 trillion on defence will be outgunned by a country that spends £2 trillion even though her GDP is only £5 trillion. And a country prepared to take millions of casualties has a definite edge over one for which any such losses are unthinkable.

Mr Glover has to be commended for dreading the possibility of war. However, he must be rebuked for believing that adopting a supine posture of pacifist surrender is the best way of achieving that laudable purpose.

As a champion of “historical perspective”, he ought to refresh his memory on what a similar strategy achieved in 1938. And as a commentator, he should really take his cue not from Hitchens but from Vegetius: si vis pacem, para bellum. If you want peace, prepare for war.

Fishmonger chain Wright Brothers has commissioned a poll to find out how much its customers know about its product.

The results yet again emphasise the superlative quality of British education. For example, about a third of respondents think that Salman Rushdie is a fish dish, presumably served with chips. (That means, among other things, that they can’t spell ‘salmon’.)

Nearly 20 per cent think prawn cocktail is an alcoholic drink. And 30 per cent think sushi is a fish, though different from Salman Rushdie.

Some 20 per cent refuse to wade through British waters for fear of encountering great white sharks. Those fish are indeed scary but, since they prefer sunnier climes, Britons have more to fear from their own government.

Half of respondents don’t know that mullet is a fish, not just a hairstyle. To my shame, I find myself in the other half, those who know the former but not the latter. About the same proportion are unaware that dogfish actually exists (though fishdog doesn’t) and that fish have noses.

Still, perhaps I was too rash in accusing our huddled masses of ignorance. After all, fish has nothing to do with either first causes or last things. Perhaps, the same people who claim to have tucked into their Salman can’t be bothered about such trivialities.

Perhaps, just perhaps, they skip ichthyology to bury themselves in such seminal subjects as theology, philosophy, counterpoint… No, scratch that thought. I’m sure those same respondents have no clue what theology and philosophy are, and they probably think counterpoint is a knitting technique.

While we are on the subject of pathetic ignorance, I can’t help noticing the abundance of malapropisms in our football commentary, both oral and written.

And please don’t tell me that mocking footballers for their English is hardly sporting. I know that. It’s just that, as a lifelong student (and occasional teacher) of English, I can’t help myself. It’s some kind of Pavlovian reflex.

Thus, Rio Ferdinand, ex-footballer turned commentator, was disappointed in the performance of his former team, Manchester United (who could barely draw with the team currently in last place).

They played well in the first half, but not in the second, which upset their former star. “It wasn’t the performance you want to see; a wholesome performance over 90 minutes,” he sighed.

Oh well, an easy mistake to make, we’ve all done it. It’s that misleading ‘whole’ business, which should really mean ‘from start to finish’. Alas, when you add ‘some’ to it, it doesn’t.

‘Wholesome’ describes a combination of mental, moral and physical health, a sort of state Juvenal described as mens sana in corpore sano. Did Rio study Latin at school? By the sound of him, he didn’t even study English.

Speaking of language, I was amused at the ignorance of our Russian correspondents. One would think that intimate familiarity with the Russian language and ethos should be a job requirement.

Yet they were baffled by a line uttered by Putin at the joint press conference with Macron. When the subject of the Minsk Accords came up, a reporter pointed out that the Russians violate them so regularly that the Accords are for all practical purposes invalid.

“Like it or not, my beauty, you have to put up with it,” replied Putin, which line, rhymed in Russian, confused our pundits. Some guessed he was referring to the Ukraine as ‘a beauty’, but they didn’t know why.

Others, probably prompted by their Russophone colleagues, wrote that this “kind of language… attempts to justify rape”. It doesn’t. The phrase nravitsia, ne nravitsia, spi moia krasavitsa refers to necrophilia, not rape.

On second thoughts, since a corpse can’t by definition give consent, perhaps the difference is slight. The point is that Putin used a catchphrase known to every Russian.

It comes from a chastushka, one of the four-line rhymes that originated in the villages. However, at some time in the sixties the urban intelligentsia got hold of the genre, producing thousands of ditties, mostly obscene, taking the mickey out of, well, everything – including the genre itself and its original practitioners.

The closest English equivalent is the limerick, but with one salient difference. Some limericks are more popular than others, but none of them is universally known. Thus a British politician can’t expect to be widely understood if he adorned his address with the last line of a popular limerick: “And instead of coming he went”.

Some of you may know the whole (wholesome?) thing, but I’m willing to bet some of you don’t. Yet most Russians would have no trouble identifying the provenance of Putin’s gag: chastushkas have a much wider reach than limericks.

The one he quoted is about a chap copulating (the original uses a more robust word) with the corpse of his dead girlfriend, which puts the last two lines into context. This rhyme has most Russians in stitches, something that outlanders are incapable of understanding.

I’ve been trying for the better part of 40 years to convert Penelope to this type of poetry, but in vain. I’ve even translated some chastushkas in rhyme and metre, which labour of love has been rewarded by a polite smile at best. Might as well give up now.

The question remains whether or not the president of a nuclear superpower should make such references in public. What’s permitted at home, over a bottle shared with friends, sounds like extreme vulgarity and crassness when used at a summit press conference.

But who says a KGB officer has to be a nuanced stylist? I wouldn’t even suggest it – any more than I’d insist that Rio Ferdinand learn the meaning of ‘wholesome’.  

Newton found that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Yet even he didn’t grasp the full ramifications of his discovery.

Newton thought his law applied only to the physics of motion. Yet its implications reach further than that, all the way to culture, civilisation, social interactions – life in general.

Thus fascism intensifies anti-fascism, modernism fosters classicism – and woke totalitarianism forces resisters to go to the other extreme.

The more wokers of the world are united in their urge to shove homosexuality or anti-racism down people’s throats, the more likely some people will be to use pejorative terms describing the protected groups.

It’s in this context that one should view the hysterical brouhaha about the comedian Jimmy Carr and one of the jokes he cracked in his concert streamed on Netflix.

Jimmy is arguably one of our best stand-ups and definitely one of the most successful. Part of his appeal derives from the shock value of his humour. He wants his audiences to gasp, look furtively around them and only then laugh.

The shocks he causes slide up the Richter scale in direct proportion to the strength of the original tremors. A joke about cannibalism wouldn’t shock cannibals as much as it would a group of vegans aggressively promoting their diet.

Some of Carr’s jokes are hilarious, some (well, most) are in deliciously bad taste, some aren’t especially funny. But I believe that any artist should be judged on his best work. Thus Mozart is a genius not because he wrote Eine Kleine Nacht Musik, but because he composed, among numerous other masterpieces, the Jupiter Symphony and the Piano Concertos in A Major and D Minor.

Without in any way drawing a parallel between Mozart and Jimmy, when the latter is good, he’s very good. But yes, when he isn’t so good, he makes one wince rather than laugh.

The joke that caused such an outburst of ire went like this: “When people talk about the Holocaust, they talk about the tragedy and horror of six million Jewish lives being lost to the Nazi war machine. But they never mention the thousands of gypsies that were killed by the Nazis. No one ever wants to talk about that, because no one ever wants to talk about the positives.”

I find this joke mildly funny, though Penelope doesn’t. Unlike me, she was properly brought up and hence is reluctant to offend people. I, on the other hand, grew up in Russia, which is to say on the wrong side of the tracks. My jokes are often similar to Jimmy’s, if delivered with considerably less panache and sense of timing.

Yet both she and I had our mothers use gypsies as the bogeymen to scare us with: “If you are a bad boy [girl, in Penelope’s case], the gypsies will come and get you.” It’s on that perception that Jimmy’s joke was built.

Gypsies, to be fair, aren’t the only Holocaust victims Jimmy sees as a fit butt of his jokes (“They say there’s safety in numbers. Tell that to the six million Jews.”). Christianity, especially Catholicism, is another one of his frequent targets. (“If we are all children of God, what’s so special about Jesus?” Or, “When I was a boy, my priest told me ‘When you masturbate, God is watching you.’ I asked, ‘Is he a paedophile too, Father?’”)

Do I find such jokes in bad taste? Yes, definitely. Do I feel offended? Not at all. I make allowances for the context, the intent and the genre. Having done that, I may wince but I won’t be compelled to seek legal or legislative recourse.

After all, even Jesus Christ forgave those who mocked him. All they were commanded to do was stay off the subject of the Holy Ghost: “And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.”

Yet we are supposed to be undergoing a constant progress in everything, including morality. The morality preached by Christ is oh so yesterday. We have a new, much more exacting morality, according to which anyone is entitled to feel offended and then seek retribution.

Hence Mr Carr is accused of endorsing the Holocaust, though his detractors still don’t charge him with killing those Gypsies personally.

A petition, called The Genocide of Roma is Not a Laughing Matter, has so far collected signatures of 16,000 people who feel duty-bound to feel mortally offended. The government, in its turn, feels duty-bound to censure anyone who offends anyone.

Dame Melanie Dawes, Chief Executive of the media regulator Ofcam, insisted that Netflix remove the offensive clip from the broadcast, though she stopped just short of demanding that Jimmy Carr be publicly eviscerated.

And Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries thundered that sites airing such offensive material should be held to account, with their owners possibly facing prison terms. She is pushing through a restrictive media bill, and culprits like Mark Zuckerberg have been put on notice.

As I’m writing this after a rather liquid lunch, I feel mellow and accommodating. Hence I’m willing to accept that Carr’s joke has caused some real – as opposed to put-on – damage.

Yet his joke was to a large extent a reaction to what I call glossocracy, a tyranny that imposes its despotic rule by controlling what people say as a way of controlling what they think and ultimately do. If you don’t like ‘glossocracy’, how about ‘woke fascism’?

That’s what’s destroying the last vestiges of our ethos, its cultural, social and political aspects. Things have got so bad that even fundamentally ‘liberal’ people like Jimmy Carr feel they must fight back. Their reaction is nowhere as strong as the action that caused it, but at least they are trying.

More power to them, I say. The real, irreparable damage is being done not by off-colour jokes, but by singular nouns followed by plural pronouns, by diktats on unisex lavatories, homomarriage and the delights of transsexuality, by sermons of socialist medicine, by kindergarten courses in advanced condom studies, by champions of ‘music’ that is in fact an anti-musical cult ritual with strong Satanic overtones.

Theirs is the action; ours, merely a reaction. But if we don’t react as vigorously as they act, it’s curtains for our civilisation – not just for Jimmy Carr’s performances. Newton’s third law must not be repealed.

Even as I write, Manny Macron is talking to Putin in the Kremlin, trying to avert war. A man of far-reaching intellect, Manny knows that this peace mission can only succeed if an equitable balance is found between the interests of both Russia and the rest of the world.

Russia’s, or more specifically Putin’s grievance is, according to Manny, not getting enough respect. Manny doesn’t specify what it is about Putin that’s truly respectable. As far as he is concerned, that’s self-evident.

Putin’s problem, as diagnosed by Manny, is the trauma of not being loved. Perhaps all he needs is a hug – although I don’t think Manny is in Russia strictly to administer this well-known deterrent to aggression.

As he himself explains, “We must protect our European brothers by offering a new balance that can preserve their sovereignty and peace. At the same time this has to be done while respecting Russia and understanding its modern traumas…

“The security and sovereignty of Ukraine or any other European state cannot be a subject for compromise, while it is also legitimate for Russia to pose the question of its own security.”

So it’s not just psychological trauma. Russia also has legitimate security concerns. What if those beastly Ukies, supported by the 82d Airborne, British paras, the French Foreign Legion and the Wehrmacht sweep across the border? The way Napoleon and Hitler did? Harrowing thought, that.

Anyway, I was about to write a cutting, factual and well-reasoned retort, when I realised there was no need. The job has already been done by Colonel-General Leonid Ivashov, head of the All-Russian Officers’ Assembly.

I don’t think the good general is a household name for many of my readers, but he has been one of Russia’s top commanders for decades. And throughout that time he hasn’t been exactly known as a dove weaned on the milk of human kindness and pacifism.

Gen. Ivashov is the hawkiest hawk ever to fly across the firmament. He is a confirmed Stalinist, whose feelings about all ethnic groups other than simon-pure Russians aren’t always informed by a commitment to internationalism and racial equality.

Nor is he a friend of the United States. In fact, Gen. Ivashov has on numerous occasions stated that his dearest wish is, and Russia’s strategy should be, to ensure that Canada is separated from Mexico by “the Stalin Strait”, which geographical rearrangement wouldn’t bode well for the inhabitants of the land currently occupying that space.

And it’s this worthy individual who issued a petition on behalf of the Officers’ Assembly, demanding Putin’s resignation. This document makes my efforts superfluous in any capacity other than that of a translator.

Though it pains me to say this, Gen. Ivashov’s reading of the situation is rather different from Manny’s. Perhaps he’s too close to the problem to be as objective as Manny, and neither does he have the benefit of education in France’s grandes écoles. One way or the other, here’s what he wrote:

“What exactly threatens the existence of Russia, and do such threats exist? One can confidently state that they do – the country is facing the end of her history. All the vital areas of life, including the demography, are steadily degenerating, and the population is dying out at a record-breaking speed…

“This, we believe, is the main threat to the Russian Federation. But this is an internal threat, springing from the state’s model, the quality of its governance and the social situation. The threat has appeared for internal reasons: invalid model of the state, complete incompetence and unprofessionalism of the system of government and management, the passivity and inertia of society…

“The situation escalating around the Ukraine is artificial, reflecting the venality of certain internal forces, including those in the RF. As a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union, in which Russia (Yeltsyn) played a decisive role, the Ukraine has become an independent state, a UN member that, according to Article 51 of the UN Charter, has the right to individual and collective defence.

“It is natural that, for the Ukraine to remain Russia’s friendly neighbour, Russia should have set an example of an attractive state model and system of government. That has not been done.

“Using military force against the Ukraine will, first, bring into question the very existence of the Russian state and, second, will for ever turn Russians and Ukrainians into mortal enemies.

“We, Russian officers, demand that the president of Russia abandon his criminal policy of provoking a war in which Russia will find herself alone against the united forces of the West – and that he create conditions for complying in practice with Article 3 of the RF Constitution and resign.”

If you aren’t intimately familiar with the Russian constitution, Article 3 specifies that all sovereign power belongs to the people and: “Nobody may usurp power in the Russian Federation. The seizure of power or usurpation of State authority shall be prosecuted under federal law.”

Contextually, one can infer that Gen. Ivashov and the Officers’ Assembly in general believe that Putin is in breach of Article 3. Because he has seized power and usurped state authority he must resign and face prosecution under federal law.

One has to conclude that Gen. Ivashov and his brother officers are virulent Russophobes and paid agents to the CIA, MI6 and Mossad. This conclusion is inescapable for anyone who sees the situation unfolding in Eastern Europe in the terms set by Messrs Macron, Zemmour and Hitchens.

P.S. Every couple of years someone puts my photograph on Facebook. Since it invariably draws more ‘likes’ than my articles, I have to think I missed my true calling. I should have become a male model, rather than a writer. Perhaps it’s still not too late to re-train.

Don’t get me wrong: as the last general election showed, people are happy to vote for Tory politicians. They just won’t vote for Tory politics.

Successful politicians sense this because they all come with a weathercock attached. They know which way the wind is blowing even if they know nothing else.

Hence, from John Major’s tenure as prime minister (1990-1997) onwards, Conservative politicians, keeping their noses to the wind, have clearly felt that they must out-Labour Labour if they want to rise to high office.

And you know the scary thing? They may well be right.

I’ve been struggling with this realisation for years, which led to this passage in How the West Was Lost, written in the early days of Tony Blair:

“Alan Clark, the late Conservative politician cum pundit, attempted to help by offering in a Daily Telegraph article of a few years ago that ‘Thatcherism is in, and of, the past’, and ‘the Friedmanite orthodoxies… were never entirely accepted.

“‘Almost lost to sight,’ he continued, ‘remain the three principal functions of the state: to ensure that its citizens are secure, that they are gainfully employed, and that they are enlightened.’

“Of the Three Functions According to Alan, the first is another word for social conscience, the glossocratic for socialism; the second is another word for wholesale nationalisation (the only way for a state to ‘ensure’ total employment), the glossocratic for socialism; the third is another word for ‘free’ education, wherein the government makes us pay through the nose for the illiterate nonsense pumped into our children’s minds. That, too, is the glossocratic for socialism.

“The three functions of the state can thus be reduced to one: being socialist. Therefore Clark’s Conservative Party must become, if it is not already, as socialist as New Labour but not quite so socialist as Old Labour, and then one day it may win another election in the name of conservatism…”

I’d love to claim prophetic powers, but this was written immediately after John Major left public life. Therefore the passage was more in the nature of reportage than prophecy.

For, immediately after moving his family photographs into 10 Downing Street, Mr Major, as he then was, swore his commitment to turning Britain into a “classless society”. That desideratum isn’t just mildly socialist or quasi-socialist. It’s downright Marxist.

For any large group (and most of even small ones) arranges itself in hierarchical sub-groups. In due course these sub-groups invariably acquire their own aesthetics, philosophies, general ways of looking at the world and themselves in it.

Since such is human nature, any attempt to create a classless society has to involve breaking up the natural order with wholesale violence. The existing social pyramid must be truncated to within millimetres of its base, with both the middle and upper classes obliterated.

Yet countries that tried this little exercise found out that it was still impossible to turn society into a horizontal, rather than vertical, structure. The social pyramid just wouldn’t go away. It would simply regenerate, with different human types moving up to the top and replacing the massacred millions.

Even Marx treated a classless, communist society pretty much the way Christians treat the Second Coming: as the end of earthly development. Man would no longer travel; he would have arrived. Such is God’s law according to Christ and historical law according to Marx.

Neither believed that the blissful end could be achieved by immediate action, especially political. Both insisted that man must first undergo inner changes, modifying his sinful nature to live down the heritage of original sin (Christians) or exposure to Christendom (Marx).

Major, on the other hand, seemed to believe that a classless society was an achievable objective within his seven-year tenure. ‘Seemed’ is the operative word here. For Sir John, as he now is, is a man of… how shall I put it charitably… understated intellect. That shortcoming usually means that the person finds it hard to use words precisely. Thus he probably meant not ‘classless’ but ‘equal-opportunity’, though that isn’t very clever either.

The only places where genuinely equal opportunities exist are prisons. In conditions of even minimal freedom, people will either be propelled forwards or held back by their abilities, families, upbringing, education and so on. What chaps like Major can’t understand or refuse to accept is that none of those can be equalised across the board.

Any attempt to do so would be identical to the truncation trick above. All families would have to be equally impoverished, all schools equally dumbed-down, all inherited wealth equally confiscated. For down is the only direction in which political action can try to equalise people – and even then it’ll fail. Human nature can be hidden under a black (or red) shroud, but it will still shine through.

This brings us to today’s ‘Tory’ government. It too is singing from the same hymn sheet – although upon closer examination those pages contain not hymns but excerpts from Das Kapital.

The main theme is the same classless society so beloved of John Major, but with a variation. Since today’s lot are marginally cleverer and much better educated, they try to avoid manifestly idiotic usages. ‘Classless society’ is one such, so they expressed it differently, as ‘levelling up’.

Yet the only way a government can level up is by not levelling down. It can only improve the economy by not damaging it. And one doesn’t have to boast an Oxbridge degree in economics (in fact, it’s imperative that one shouldn’t be weighed down by that ballast) to know how the government can bring the economy to its knees.

High taxation, rapacious and therefore inflationary public spending, inordinate growth in money supply, tight regulations – such are the anti-economy weapons in the state’s arsenal. And these are the weapons our ‘Tory’ government is firing in a steady barrage.

Last September Michael Gove was appointed Secretary of State for Levelling Up. Undeterred by his recent divorce (I’ve heard some interesting gossip about its reasons, but I’m not in the gossip business), Mr Gove never misses a beat in his Marxist tune.

Speaking to MPs recently, he defined his objective as “to shift wealth and power decisively to working people”. This shows laudable honesty: since Mr Gove knows that his remit is Marxist in essence, he expresses it in Marxist terms.

No subterfuge, no attempt to hide behind the smokescreen of ‘equal opportunities’, ‘levelling up’ or ‘restoring regional balance’. Power to the people, and workers of the world unite, pure and simple.

If our ‘Tories’ aren’t careful, they might find themselves sitting to the left of Labour. People may then vote for Keir Starmer, perceiving him as a sensible alternative to the loony left, aka Tories.

There are signs already that many Tory MPs would prefer Sir Keir to Johnson. That’s why they’ve pounced on Johnson for his remark about Starmer, in his earlier capacity of Director of Public Prosecutions, refusing to prosecute the paedophile Jimmy Savile.

Most resignations from Number 10 and most letters of no confidence from Tory MPs are supposed to have been inspired by that little ad hominem. This, though Starmer’s tenure in that office was by far the most subversive one in history, Savile or no Savile.

No, it’s those weathercocks again. The Tories sense which way the political wind is blowing, and act accordingly. Or perhaps they like their socialism neat, undiluted with quasi-Tory phraseology that they know means nothing.   

Inflation is spinning out of control. So are energy costs. Interest rates are going up. Growth is heading in the opposite direction, with the standard of living manfully keeping up with this plummet.

All in all, the situation is worse than it was in 2008, when everyone was screaming bloody murder and catastrophic crisis. These days everyone would rather talk about prosecco parties at Number 10. (Can’t those spivs afford champagne, for heaven’s sake?)

Our government is profoundly corrupt, in all the wrong ways. That’s not to say that there are right ways to be corrupt – there aren’t. But while some corruption is peripheral, only offending our moral sense, some is fundamental, undermining the core business of governance.

The first kind includes fiddling expenses, pushing through a bill favouring a friend, ignoring restrictions they themselves imposed, bestowing posts and honours for ulterior motives. It’s all sleazy, dishonest and self-serving, but it can’t damage the country in any substantial sense.

By contrast, the second kind, fundamental corruption, can destroy the country, not just damage it. All our post-war governments confirm this observation, more or less. Perhaps Thatcher’s tenure could be exempt, although that’s debatable.

What’s not debatable is that all subsequent administrations have been falling over themselves trying to administer lethal injections to Her Majesty’s realm. The current administration is making a good fist of it too.

It calls itself Conservative, but I can’t think offhand of any Labour government more committed to runaway statism, that hallmark of socialism. To be fair, the Johnson administration was hit by the force majeure of Covid, which necessitated some governmental activism.

Its handling of the pandemic was heavy-handed, perhaps unnecessarily so. But one could argue that under those circumstances overreaction was better than no reaction at all.

Yes, practically shutting the economy down for the better part of two years was ill-advised. But I can’t in good conscience blame the government for its mild case of hysteria – I’m not sure I myself would have been able to keep my sangfroid under those circumstances.

But I definitely blame the Johnson administration for exacerbating the consequences of the pandemic – nay, multiplying them tenfold.

Covid or no Covid, Johnson’s two pet projects, levelling up and net zero emissions, would put the economy under intolerable stress. But pushing on with them at this time is criminally irresponsible, borderline suicidal.

This, even if Johnson genuinely believes that the economic North-South divide can be erased by political action, or that fossil fuels must be phased out within a decade because they destroy ‘our planet’.

The second belief is patently unscientific. All Johnson would have to do is look at the carbon content in the atmosphere (one-eighteenth) and the manmade proportion of it (three per cent). Next he should look at the climatic effects of solar activity, the Earth’s orbit in relation to other planets, tectonic shifts, oceanic and volcanic activity, and thousands of other factors affecting climate.

Then he’d know the whole global-warming theory for the pernicious swindle it is. But he has neither the mind nor, more important, the character to go against the grain of woke orthodoxies, especially those championed by his henpecking wife.

As to the levelling up nonsense, it’s not conservative and therefore not sensible. Markets are like some wild animals; they don’t reproduce, or in this case produce, in captivity. The government should be only the referee, not a player, in the economic game.

This has been known since at least the 18^th century, and not only to professional economists like Smith. Thus, for example, Burke: “The moment that government appears at market, the principles of the market will be subverted.”

The examples of aggressively statist economies, none of which has ever succeeded, turn that observation into empirical fact. Another fact, firmly established by experience, is that a government can’t tax its way out of trouble.

When the economy has been dug into a hole, the government should stop digging. That means lowering the taxes to remove, or at least loosen, the yoke they have placed on the nation’s economic neck.

Yet the Johnson administration is doing exactly the opposite. It’s ratcheting up the taxes to administer a coup de grâce to an economy already writhing in pain on the ground. What would be foolhardy at any time is nothing short of criminal in our current situation.

Johnson takes pride in his green credentials, the really pornographic part of the Carrie On film in which he co-stars. The damage he (and the previous governments) is causing goes way beyond economic suicide. It’s also geopolitical self-harming.

For energy isn’t just an economic resource. It’s also a strategic one. Any self-respecting country must strive to be as self-sufficient as possible in securing an uninterrupted supply of strategic resources, especially energy.

Yet not only does Johnson embark on a patently ridiculous campaign to replace domestic fossil fuels with the notoriously fickle sun and wind, but he wants to do it so fast as to guarantee Britain’s dependence on foreign producers of hydrocarbons.

That makes Britain an easy mark for blackmail on the part of those hydrocarbon producers who are our avowed enemies. No, I don’t mean France, although she isn’t acting as a devoted friend. I mean Putin’s Russia, to whose aggression we can’t respond with sufficient vigour for fear of freezing in the dark.

I realise that Johnson and his jolly friends aren’t committing high treason in the technical definition of the term. But what they are committing is tantamount to the worst kind of treachery: they are denuding the country’s defences against both economic and political cataclysms.

As Richard Weaver argues in his 1948 book, ideas have consequences. These days, Westerners in general and Britons in particular find it hard to realise this.

Due to a combination of economic greed and geopolitical myopia, the West has turned both Russia and especially China into global superpowers able to challenge us on every terrain in every part of the globe. Neither country would have been able to do so without the massive influx of Western technology, knowhow and capital.

Russia’s oil and gas production, for example, would be barely sufficient for domestic needs without Western (not exclusively American) exploration, drilling and production technology, and the transfer of the relevant equipment.

Apart from our thirst for immediate and potential superprofits, we have proceeded from the philistine fallacy that every nation is either already like us at heart or desperately wishes to be.

Yet, had we started from the general (and therefore un-British) understanding that nations governed by the KGB (Russia) or communists (China) are evil regardless of the liberal noises they may make, we would have thought a thousand times before building those evil states up to their position of geopolitical prominence.

And now the two evil states are forming an anti-Western axis, with one of them giving Britain a stark choice: either beggar yourself with soaring energy costs or play ball. Johnson’s (or is it the Johnsons’?) energy, and general economic, policy doesn’t just turn Britain into an easy target. It’s practically inviting our enemies to hit it.

Virtue signalling has its price, which is especially steep when there is no real virtue to signal. And now by all means let’s talk about that prosecco.

A vile drink, if you ask me, but that’s neither here nor there.

When rats begin to flee, it’s usually a good indication that the ship is sinking. This homespun wisdom is a useful introduction to the well-orchestrated resignation of five top aides to Boris Johnson.

One, Munira Mirza, No10’s head of policy, has been Johnson’s close lieutenant for 14 years, since his mayoral tenure in London. Her hubby-wubby, Dougie Smith, is also a key Downing Street aide, and has been under three consecutive PMs, so he is unlikely to stay for much longer either.

Miss Mirza’s flight is especially damaging. As one of her colleagues commented, “Munira isn’t so much a stab in the back as a big fucking beheading.” That may be, but Mr and Mrs Smith helpfully illustrate the title of this piece.

Dougie brought to Tory politics his invaluable experience in business. The business in which he garnered invaluable experience was called Fever Parties. Its line of work was organising orgies for London’s so-called ‘fast set’ in Mayfair townhouses, with over 50 couples as happy customers.

Dougie has reassured doubters that his business and political endeavours didn’t “overlap”. I’m not so sure about that – he may not be giving himself full credit. Of course, had he had a prior career as a male hooker, the overlap would be even more complete.

Far be it from me to throw the first stone at a man who tries to stay afloat in our dog-eat-dog world. I’m merely observing that, unless I’m very much mistaken, Messrs Macmillan, Douglas Home and Powell, to name just a few, got into Conservative politics by slightly different paths. Worth further study, that, along with Lady Thatcher’s young years.

Dougie’s wife Munira presents an even more interesting case. Her boss Boris once described her as “capable of being hip, cool, groovy and generally on trend”, and he didn’t mean it pejoratively.

Now, all my good friends and most of my social acquaintances are lower-case conservatives who vote for the upper-case Conservative Party (the typographic detail points at a fundamental difference). Yet neither they nor I have ever described anyone in that fashion, not without adding expletives at any rate. Nor, to the best of my knowledge, have we ourselves ever merited such modifiers.  

I’m not holding myself and this pre-selected group up as exemplars of conservative virtue. Nor am I casting aspersion on people who are “hip, cool, groovy and generally on trend”. It’s just that those fine qualities aren’t readily associated with conservatism, however you spell it.

Neither is Munira’s CV, if I’m being totally honest. She started her political career as a communist, and I don’t mean this as a general term of abuse describing lefties. Munira was an active full-fledged member of the Revolutionary Communist Party.

In that capacity she regularly contributed to the party’s Living Marxism magazine. When the group dissolved, its core formed the Spiked website, where she too was a bright spark. She also studied for a PhD at Kent University under the professor who had co-founded the RCP.

Thence the mystery began. Munira, along with other RCP staffers, rank communist each, effortlessly floated into the Conservative Party, specifically its Eurosceptic wing. Just four years after that redemptive Damascene experience, Miss Mirza became Mr Johnson’s trusted aid, which trust she betrayed yesterday.

(I remember talking to Gerard Batten, when he was the leader of UKIP. The party should broaden its appeal, I suggested, positioning itself as a real conservative alternative. Gerard smiled ruefully. Far from all eurosceptics are conservatives, he explained. How right he was.)

Being by nature a forgiving sort, I’d have nothing against Conservatives extending a warm welcome to ex-communists. Except that I don’t believe any such thing exists.

When a fully sentient adult, which I assume a PhD candidate must be, remains a communist, that’s a point of no return. An educated woman being a communist activist (not just a passive fellow traveller) in her mid-twenties has to believe in the advisability of murdering millions and enslaving everyone else in pursuit of an evil ideology.

That belief can only spring from an evil emotional predisposition, not ratiocination with its careful weighing of intellectual pros and cons. And unlike ideas, one’s emotional make-up can’t be changed.

(I remember trying to explain this simple idea some 40 years ago to my son, who at that time worshipped Whittaker Chambers, an ex-Soviet spy who had seen the light. The little boy was appalled, a state in which he has remained ever since.)

Yet even if you reject such uncompromising bloody-mindedness, you’ll have to agree with the title above. Conservatism just ain’t what it used to be.

P.S. On a parallel subject, some of our conservative columnists refuse to fall out of love with Putin who, they insist, only murders people all over the world because we’ve treated him without sufficient respect. (I’m so vague on the identities because some readers take exception to my ad hominems against Peter Hitchens.) I wonder what they’ll make of this news.

U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor Jonathan Finer has cited intelligence reports showing the Russians are setting up a mother of all false-flag ops. They are preparing a fabricated video of an explosion perpetrated on a Russian town by dastardly Ukrainians.

The video “would involve actors playing mourners for people who are killed in an event that they [Russia] would have created themselves… [and] deployment of corpses to represent bodies purportedly killed.”

Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said disdainfully that similar allegations had been made before, and nothing like that had ever happened. I detect causality there. Can it be that such plans never came to fruition specifically because they had been exposed beforehand? Just asking.

I’m disappointed in my former countrymen though. Do they have to rip off the Nazis’ 1939 Gleiwitz op in every detail? Can’t they think of something new?

Syria, which has killed half a million of its own citizens? No. Iran, which executes protesters? Guess again.

China, which keeps whole ethnic groups in concentration camps? Not even close. North Korea, which is one giant concentration camp? You’re still cold.

Russia, which poisons dissidents like rats, but with stronger substances than rat poison? And which imprisons thousands on trumped-up charges and then tortures and rapes them in prisons? Getting colder.

Belarus, which is even worse? Freezing cold. Kazakhstan, whose chosen response to demonstrations is the command to fire at will? That’s it, no more guesses. You failed.

According to Amnesty International, the most egregious offender is the “apartheid state” of Israel. And she can get into AI’s good books only by committing national suicide.

Such are the conclusions to be drawn from AI’s report that devoted 211 pages to exposing the beastliness of the Jewish state. In fact, as far as AI is concerned, the very fact that it is indeed constituted as a Jewish state exposes its evil nature.

To satisfy the exacting requirements AI applies to human rights, Israel should fling her doors wide open to admit “millions of Palestinians”, meaning Arabs (Israeli Jews have nothing to do with Palestine, and never mind the Old Testament or history books).

This is the exact wording: “Palestinian refugees and their descendants, who were displaced in the 1947-49 and 1967 conflicts, continue to be denied the right to return to their former places of residence. Israel’s exclusion of refugees is a flagrant violation of international law which has left millions in a perpetual limbo of forced displacement.”

For the sake of balance, it would have been nice to remind grateful readers of the nature of the two conflicts that had such dire consequences. In both cases, Arab states joined forces to “drive Israel into the sea”, which is another way of saying “killing every Jew there”.

To the victor the spoils and all that. If the Arabs had the military skills to match their fanatical hatred of Jews, not a single Israeli would have survived. As it was, the Jewish state lived on and even managed to create a little buffer protecting itself from its murderous neighbours.

It’s true that Israel tries “to minimise the Palestinian presence and access to land” within its borders, and I’m sure the Israelis are mortified at AI’s rebuke of that iniquity. And they are even more heartbroken about their inability to correct the injustice while still remaining a Jewish state where Jews won’t be massacred.

As it is, there are 1,900,000 Arabs in Israel, about 21 per cent of the population. They enjoy greater political liberties than Arabs do in any other country of the Middle East, and in fact the Arab party is a key member of Israel’s ruling coalition.

That’s not good enough, says AI. Israel “must recognise the right of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to homes where they or their families once lived, and provide victims of human rights violations and crimes against humanity with full reparations.”

Well, there’s the rub. You see, Israel is a Western-type democracy, the only one in the region. If she were to comply with AI’s demand, the demographic shift would be such that Israel would no longer be a Jewish state.

An Arab-dominated Knesset would vote for some sort of Arab mandate over Greater Palestine, Islamic states would move in, and every Jew slow to flee would be murdered. Who would pay the reparations then? But at least AI would be happy: the cause of human rights would have been served.

“There is no possible justification for a system built around the institutionalised and prolonged racist oppression of millions of people,” says Agnès Callamard, Secretary-General of Amnesty International. Trying to survive is clearly not a sufficient justification.

Far be it from me to accuse Dr Callamard of anti-Semitism. No doubt she is driven by such noble motives as compassion and a quest for justice. It’s in that spirit that in 2013 she publicly accused Israel of murdering Yasser Arafat. If she genuinely believes that, then the massacre of 8,000,000 Israeli Jews would be fair retribution for the demise of that giant of a man.

Since those objectionable Hebrews refuse to accept the suicide pact, they must be punished accordingly. AI calls for an arms embargo against Israel, and for her leaders to be charged with war crimes.

As for the thousands of rockets ‘Palestinians’ fire at Israeli villages in a steady barrage, the report explains that those poor people are “fighting against occupation”, while “certain excesses on the part of the Palestinian administration and armed groups are not the subject of this report.”

All perfectly objective then, the problem is covered in a reasonable and balanced fashion. The overall style and method of argument fall somewhere between Der Stürmer, c. 1940 and Pravda, c. 1970. Yet the report falls short of those publications in graphic standards.

They both enlivened their coverage of Jewish beastliness with cartoons showing disgusting hook-nosed ghouls devouring their victims. Der Stürmer served its anti-Semitism neat, calling a Jew a Jew, while Pravda preferred the seemingly milder term ‘Zionists’. But the cartoons were the same.

Israel is a human construct and, as such, prone to human folly. We are not in this world blessed with perfect governments or institutions. Hence neither Zionism nor Israel should be off limits for criticism, and I’m sure there is much to criticise there.

Hence it’s wrong to equate such criticism with anti-Semitism. However, a simple empirical observation shows that most people who denounce Israel with sustained vigour are indeed anti-Semites.

As the authors of this Amnesty International diatribe clearly are.   

Those who follow the dialectical development of Russia’s amour propre will be aware of the high regard in which the world is ordered to hold her.

Thus we’ve known since the 16^th century that Russia is the ‘third Rome’, combining the high culture of the first one with the religiosity and spirituality of the second.

That makes her immeasurably superior to the decadent West with its materialism, weak-kneed democracy, atheism, corruption, aggressiveness and overall tendency towards homosexuality.

Such despicable traits are especially blatant among the Anglo-Saxons, who personify every Western vice without offering any compensating virtues. At the moment, the worst Anglo-Saxons are to be found in the US, but Britain is almost as bad, though mercifully not as strong.

We’ve known how vile Britain is since the late 18^th century, when the Russian general Alexander Suvorov summed up the situation with two voluminous Russian words: anglichanka gadit (loosely translated, it means “that English dame always craps on us”). That terse and prescient verdict was passed 60 years before the faecal floodgates were flung wide-open in the Crimea, where a small Anglo-French expeditionary force thrashed the mighty Russian army.

But fine, I get it. Russia is superior to the West, especially its Anglophone part, in every respect. But specifically, what puts Russia on such a high moral and spiritual ground? What exactly makes her unique?

You want specifics, you rotten, decadent, corrupt, materialistic, homosexual Anglo-Saxon viper? Russia’s Ministry of Culture is happy to oblige.

To leave no room for equivocation, that august body has published a new directive, “The foundations of the state policy for the preservation and strengthening of Russia’s spiritual and moral values”.

There you can find exhaustive answers to your mocking questions, chapter and verse. But first the directive issues a word of caution:

“Our traditional values are being threatened by the activities of extremist and terrorist organisations, the USA and her allies, transnational corporations, foreign non-commercial organisations.”

This reminds me of one of those universal advertising headlines that can introduce a plug for any product whatsoever: “What we are not makes us what we are” In theology, this method of identification is called apophatic. In sociology, it’s called inadequate.

Never mind proceeding from the negative. Tell us in unequivocally positive terms what traditional values flourishing within Russia have rotted away in the putrid swamp stinking up the air beyond her western border?

If you thought the Ministry Of Culture would be stymied by such interrogation, you have another think coming. So here goes:

“Such traditional values include: life, dignity, human rights and liberties, patriotism, civic virtues, serving the motherland and feeling responsible for her destiny, high moral ideals, strong family, creative work, priority of the spiritual over the material, humanism, mercy, justice, collectivism, mutual assistance and respect, historical memory and continuity, the unity of all the peoples of Russia.”

I hope this has put you to shame. For the Ministry of Culture specifically talks about preserving such traditional values, rather than developing them. That means those values are already robust and abundant in Russia at present, with only “the USA and her allies” threatening their future out of sheer envy and malice.

While accepting that self-assessment unreservedly, one may still ask for clarification. For example, isn’t there a wee bit of conflict between ‘human rights and liberties’ and ‘collectivism’?

Collectivism, after all, implies pooling personal liberties together, which laudable process has historically led to their diminution. (If you wish to research this subject, the key words to tap into Google are COLLECTIVISATION OF AGRICULTURE, COLLECTIVE FARMS, GOLODOMOR, ARTIFICIAL FAMINE and MASS MURDER).

And since the ‘priority of the spiritual over the material’ is a fact of life, where does it leave ‘creative work’? Does this mean the Russians should work creatively only in such fields as theology, philosophy and high culture, while ignoring creativity and indeed work in vulgar material areas?

These, however, are minor points. Since the Ministry of Culture issued this statement on the official government website, every word there must be true to life. Hence all we can do is thank that body for explaining what Russia is – and what we aren’t.