Blog

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.

“I told you so” isn’t my favourite genre of journalism, and I only ever practise it when sorely tempted.

This is one such occasion. As Putin’s kleptofascist regime is raising its nastiness to a new height, our papers have had a Damascene moment. They’ve discovered that London, along with many of our political and financial institutions, is so inundated with dirty Russian money that a draining operation may no longer be possible.

This, of course, is one of my recurrent themes, and I’ve just discovered when it began to recur, if you’ll forgive the tautology. Turns out I first started writing about it very early in the life of this space, almost 10 years ago. So here is that article again, for the benefit of the antique collectors among you. The title was ‘Russian Businessmen Aren’t Just Buying London’s Houses — They Are Buying Its Soul‘. Some of the people mentioned are no longer with us. But the shame of it all still is.

The other day the French authorities impounded some £11 million belonging to that worthy London resident Boris Berezovsky. The money, they declared, had been acquired in criminal ways and therefore its owner can’t claim legitimate property rights. As the French acted at the behest of the Russian government, which is itself criminal, their reasons are questionable. But their action does raise interesting issues.

I’m not going to explore how Boris has made his billions. If you’re interested in the subject, read an excellent book Godfather in the Kremlin by Paul Klebnikov. The eponymous godfather is no longer in the Kremlin – having fallen out with Putin, he now resides in England. And Klebnikov is no longer alive – in 2004, as he was researching another book on Russia’s organised crime, he died in a hail of bullets fired (one hears by Chechens) from a passing car in central Moscow.

True to its heritage, Putin’s government spread the rumour that Klebnikov had been killed by a jealous husband. Of course he was. The MO proves that: two men firing submachine guns from a fast-moving car. Love does work in mysterious ways, especially in Putin’s Russia.

And now yet another Mafia hit, this time in London, reminds us that Russian ‘businessmen’ are just as capable of settling their disputes at our doorstep. The only sane response to this is NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard). Yet this is a response we are unlikely to give.

Pecunia non olet (‘money doesn’t stink’), said the Roman emperor Vespasian when questioned about his tax on the urine sold by public lavatories to tanners. Vespasian was rather crude even by the standards of Roman emperors, so he can be forgiven for his soldierly directness.

What is upsetting is that after two millennia of subsequent civilisation we still haven’t outlived the principle first enunciated by Vespasian. Except that we couch it in legal cant based on property rights, a subject dear to every conservative heart. However, much as we worship this or any other right, we shouldn’t allow it to turn into a suicide pact. Society has a superseding right to protect itself.

Ever since the ‘collapse’ of the Soviet Union, Russian billionaires have been arriving in England, first in a trickle, lately in a stream. A good chunk of their money arrives with them, and we welcome it. The British can’t afford to buy £40-million houses; good job someone can. Who cares how that £40 million was earned? Pecunia non olet!

Everyone knows, or ought to know, that no one can become a billionaire in today’s Russia without engaging in activities that in any civilised country would land their perpetrator in prison. Since the KGB Mafia fronted by Putin controls Russia’s economy, no Russian can become a billionaire without active cooperation with it, if only by paying protection money. And since the Mafia is criminal, every Russian billionaire is, as a minimum, its accessory.

They all, possibly with one or two exceptions, have a criminal mentality, and they bring it to London along with their money. We close our eyes on the former because we like the latter. Pecunia non olet!

So we let the likes of Abramovich, Berezovsky and Lord Mandelson’s best friend Deripaska come to London. Their billions are welcomed, as long as we are sure they use our courts, not our dark alleys, to settle their disagreements. Meanwhile, Sloanie dimwits are falling all over themselves to get an invitation to Abramovich’s box at Stamford Bridge.

Girls previously only interested in the hats they were going to wear at this year’s Ascot now profess interest in holding midfielders, wingbacks and second strikers. Thanks to Abramovich’s money footie has become their nostalgie de la boue, today’s answer to the fashionable slumming of yesteryear. And the provenance of the money? Who cares? Pecunia non olet, and those who still remember their Roedean Latin won’t even need a translation.

One would think that the six shots fired into Gherman Gorbuntsov’s body would serve as a wake-up call, even though Gherman himself can hardly be confused with a boy scout. Wanted in Moldova and Russia for the sort of dealings that would tip the Old Bailey scales at the better part of 25 years, he already did some time back in the early 1990s. I don’t know what the charge was in Russia, but I’m willing to bet it wasn’t dissent.

And then Gherman committed the ultimate Mafia crime of squealing. Specifically, he agreed to give evidence in a case involving another attempted murder, of the chap whose son at one point owned another English football club. (What is it about football that attracts those people? Why not polo? Go straight to the top, I say.) The death penalty is the only possible punishment, and silly Gherman thought they wouldn’t get to him in London. Little did he realise that, just as the ruling Mafia had turned Moscow into the Wild West, so it was turning London into Moscow.

Miraculously, Gherman has survived and now he’s busily naming names, those who ordered the hit. One suspects his loquacity is the price Scotland Yard has demanded for its protection, but be that as it may Gorbuntsov has now pointed a finger at several chaps close to Putin himself. So when he recovers from his wounds, he’ll probably be allowed to stay here, until next time. After all, pecunia non olet, and his money is as good as anyone else’s.

I don’t know if Putin did commission the murder, and frankly I don’t care. It’s enough for me to know that this unrepentant officer in history’s most murderous organisation is perfectly capable of it. What I do care about is the moral damage these Russians are doing to us. Pecunia non olet? You bet it does. It smells of blood spilled in London streets. It stinks of the Faustian deal we’ve struck. It reeks of a society in decay. Are you holding your nostrils? I am.

Yes, I know. As a lifelong tennis player, I should have been trying to learn Nadal’s forehand, Medvedev’s serve or either man’s backhand.

However, as a lifelong realist, I know that any hope of my emulating those men’s strokes is forlorn. They and I inhabit different tennis planets, and I can no more learn to hit the tennis ball from them than they from me.

Yet I’m not only a lifelong hacker, but also a lifelong student of the English language. That’s why, when watching a sporting event on TV, or reading about it in the papers, I pay attention not only to how the players play, but also to how the commentators speak or write.

To keep it fair, I never mock the numerous errors peppering the speech of former tennis players for whom English isn’t their mother tongue. It’s only native speakers who find themselves in my crosshairs.

One such bemoaned a sitter blown by a seeded player. “Missing easy shots isn’t his forte [pronounced for-tay],” he said. The reporter hit a double fault there, an impressive feat, considering that both came from a single attempt, in this case one word.

‘Forte’ has two pronunciations in English. In music, whose glossary is dominated by Italian, the word is indeed pronounced for-tay. But in the non-musical sense of a ‘strong point’, the word floated into English from France, which is why it’s pronounced fort (as in Sumter or Benning, for the benefit of my American readers).

Yet, however pronounced, the word didn’t belong in that context. Missing easy shots is no one’s forte. It can be somebody’s (well, my) weakness or, as one can deduce from the context in question, habit. I know that ‘habit’ doesn’t sound as sophisticated as ‘forte’, but if that’s what the chap meant, then he should have bitten the bullet, or else his tongue, and bloody well said it.

This brought back to mind my pet idea of issuing licences for using words. The whole lexicon of the English language should be broken into groups according to the frequency of usage. For example, the word ‘bed’ will appear in the 10,000 most frequently used words, the first licensed bracket.

Since words like ‘eirenic’, ‘exegesis’ or for that matter ‘forte’ won’t be covered by that starter licence, only an advanced course would entitle a speaker to use them. I’m not sure how this system could be set up or enforced, but it’s the thought that counts.

At the end of the match, the biggest sponsor of the tournament said a few customary words. He congratulated the players and remarked that his company has been sponsoring the event for 21 years. And since Nadal has now won 21 majors, “there’s a lot of synergy there”.

There isn’t. If I were a language policeman, the chap would have had his collar felt.

‘Synergy’ is interaction producing a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Since neither Nadal nor the chap has become better at his job as a result of that corporate sponsorship, the word is simply wrong.

He meant ‘symbolism’, but, as you’ll notice, neither word is among the most frequently used ones. Since in my scheme the speaker wouldn’t have qualified for an advanced licence, he should have said something like ‘a good sign’ or ‘a happy coincidence’, hoping that ‘coincidence’ would just about squeeze into the top 10,000.

Let’s not be too harsh on the good Aussie gentleman – using English isn’t his profession. It is, however, how a sports journalist earns his crust at one of our top newspapers.

Professional integrity demands that people have full command of their tools of trade. The hack under scrutiny here has treated this requirement with cold disdain. Worse than that, he must really hate his principal tool, English.

If that weren’t the case, his ear, hand, mind – his whole system – would go on strike if he attempted to write the sentence he did write: “A protester for refugee rights has dramatically thrown themselves three metres onto the Australian Open court during the men’s trial.”

One has to infer that the protester suffers not only from asocial tendencies, but also from dual personality disorder. As one of my favourite comedians once quipped, “My Dad is a schizophrenic, but he’s good people.”

‘A protester’ is a singular noun; ‘themselves’ is a plural personal pronoun. The two don’t belong together this side of a loony bin.

I realise that singular personal pronouns, especially the masculine ones, have been outlawed by the woke controller. But submitting to the diktats of such riffraff is even worse than speaking without a licence – or with too much licence, as the case may be.

Anybody who loves English, or at least doesn’t hate it, would be unable to write such a sentence on pain of death. It would have jarred his ear worse than any tinnitus.

Nor was it a case of an unfortunate lapsus manus. For in the very next paragraph, the same offender committed a few more transgressions: “Gobsmacked tennis fans could be seen staring in shock as [a] person earlier leaped over the front row railing, waving the sign overhead. They only managed to make a short dash towards the corner of the court before being tackled by authorities.” [My emphases]

Enough said about the awful, ideologised grammar of that ‘they’ business. But the chap has a Van Gogh ear not only for grammar, but also for style.

The infra dig colloquialism ‘gobsmacked’ does exist, although the word doesn’t strike me as especially mellifluous or charming. Yet I wouldn’t take exception to it if uttered over a pint in a pub.

But in the context of a newspaper article it’s a glaring stylistic solecism that ought to have made the hack’s tinnitus even more acute. But it didn’t. His ear for English didn’t hurt because he doesn’t have one.

I don’t know if this says more about him or the paper that employs him. Doesn’t it have editors and subs? No, probably not.

The underlying assumption has to be that there’s no such thing as right or wrong – and not just in language. 

A reader asked this popular question a couple of days ago, and it deserves a longer answer than I could provide in the Comments (“Is anything?”).

First, ‘Armageddon’ has to mean a shootout with strategic nuclear weapons. That isn’t on the cards because neither side wants it.

Putin probably has the technical capacity to annihilate Britain and France, the two nuclear powers in the civilised part of Europe. However, some major Russian cities would also go up in smoke, including the ones where Putin and his jolly friends live.

Also, if Britain no longer exists, where will those gangsters find schools for their children, hospitals for themselves and laundromats for their purloined trillions? And what will happen to their mansions in the best parts of London? No, I’m sure they’ll keep their fingers off that button come what may.

As yet no post-Hiroshima war has involved nuclear weapons. The Israelis were ready to use them as a last resort in 1973, but that proved unnecessary. Neither the US nor Russia has gone nuclear in any conflicts. India and Pakistan keep their nukes in the silos – this though both would dearly love to see those mushrooms sprouting on the other side.

The question would be more apposite if we replaced ‘Armageddon’ with ‘conventional war’. Is the Ukraine worth risking such a war between NATO and Russia?

Let’s say “no, it isn’t” and see what happens, staying within the boundaries of the “What if…” genre of history. Suppose a bloody war between Russia and the Ukraine breaks out, which is a possibility but, as President Zelensky stated, not necessarily a certainty.

Hundreds of thousands of Russians may not survive the war, and Putin’s regime may not survive all those KIA notices. That possibility will remain even if Russia emerges victorious, which it probably will.

But let’s assume the Ukraine is conquered, and Putin hangs on. What then?

The Anschluss of Belarus will definitely follow (it’s likely to happen even if Putin decides against further aggression against the Ukraine). Kazakhstan and some other ex-Soviet Asian republics will re-join the fold, a truncated USSR will be reconstituted.

Is this possibility worth risking a war? Let’s assume it isn’t and keep our conjecture going.

Will Putin’s appetite be sated? Probably not. Russia may have been hit by crippling sanctions. Will the Russians be happy to have their standard of living drop from low down to puny? Will they be happy to swap empty fridges for TV sets full of bugle toots and drumbeats?

They may, up to a point. But certainly not indefinitely. When the rumble of discontent turns into a growl, Putin will have two options.

One will be to unleash the kind of terror for which his idol Stalin is known and, in some quarters, still loved. This isn’t feasible, even though Putin and his gang wouldn’t be held back by any moral compunctions.

Tightening the screws more than they are already tightened, yes. Murdering millions and enslaving the rest – unlikely. Different times, different mores, different Russians. Herzen did write that the strongest chains shackling people are forged out of victorious swords, but I simply can’t imagine today’s Russians sitting still for Stalinesque terror.

The other, likelier, option will be to empty those fridges out completely, but at the same time ratcheting up the volume of the TV bugles and drums. More conquests, in other words.

The next logical target in our hypothetical “What if…” scenario would be the three Baltic republics, NATO members all. Article 5 of the NATO Charter specifies that an attack on one member is an attack on all. Should NATO go to war then?

If not, NATO is dead as an effective deterrent to Russia, which is the sole purpose for which it was formed in the first place. That means the US, which is growing more and more isolationist, will fold its nuclear umbrella and go home, leaving Europe to her own vices and devices.

The continent may not be occupied by Russia, but it’ll definitely be dominated by her. That’s another way of saying that Europe will no longer be free.  

The combined resources of a now de-NATOed Europe will still be sufficient to contain Russia, provided those resources are mobilised and activated, not to mention underpinned by steely resolve. However, such an effort is extremely unlikely, if recent history is anything to go by.

Realising this, and Putin’s KGB training means he’s unlikely to overlook it, Russia will be encouraged to move into Poland and beyond. So is that worth risking a war?

The number of hands voting aye is increasing now. By then even slow learners will have realised that the foot is off the brakes of the rolling juggernaut, and it won’t stop by itself.

But let’s say the nays still have it. And next thing you know a Russian airborne division lands in Kent, with a puppet government in tow. What then? Should we fight?

Here the support for a belligerent response becomes overwhelming. The spirit of the Blitz, the roar of the lion, we’ll fight them on the beaches and all that… Well, you know the drill.

Hence, going back to my counter question (“Is anything?”), the answer is an unequivocal yes. By the old method of reductio ad absurdum, we’ve agreed that some things are definitely worth risking war.

The original question could then be further rephrased to say, “What are those things?” Or else, “At what point in our hypothetical progression must we fight?”

Here we leave the domain of “What if…” to enter one of dispassionate analysis, based on the thorough knowledge of the relevant facts and intimate understanding of the key players in this game. It’s on these bases that I form my judgement:

The earlier we snip the chain of events I’ve outlined, the better. This chain may be hypothetical, but the hypothesis is solid, supported as it is by the nature of Putin’s regime – and an understanding of evil.

This last constituent is especially hard for middle-class Westerners to grasp, and who these days isn’t middle class? Bourgeois mentality is such that good people boasting two chickens in every garage, two cars in every pot, 2.5 children and a nice house in the suburbs can’t easily grasp that some other people may be drastically different.

A little different, yes, we can all get our heads around that. But yahoos knowing no civilised restraints on their behaviour? No, leave that stuff for horror films. Real life isn’t like that, even if it might have been in the past – or may still be in the low-rent parts of the world.

Alas, real life is exactly like that. Some people are evil; under certain historical and cultural conditions evil people create evil regimes. And evil regimes do evil things that seem irrational, and therefore impossible, to good people.

I’m certain that my macabre progression must not be allowed to unfold. How, is a different matter.

It’s clear that NATO won’t fight to save the Ukraine, so that point is moot. However, Putin must be made to pay an exorbitant price for perpetrating evil in the heart of Europe.

I doubt any sanctions can be severe enough to deter that particular evil, but I’m no expert. It’s possible that, at some cost to their own comfort, NATO countries could destroy Russia’s economy, entirely based as it is on export-import.

Moreover, a promise to do so may prevent Putin’s march into Eastern Europe. Provided – and this is a sine qua non proviso – both sides are sure that the West is ready to impose such sanctions. In the absence of that certainty, the threat of sanctions is no more effective than threatening a thug with a gun he knows isn’t loaded.