If the upper-case Word that was in the beginning created everything, then would it be too much to suppose that lower-case words lie at the beginning of nations?

Perhaps it would be. It’s too daring a jump to suggest that languages create nations, not the other way around. But what’s indisputable is that a nation’s language gives a clue to its character – and vice versa.

I’ve often compared my two best languages, English and Russian, to point out how much the differences between them tell us about the respective national characters.

The language of the dynamic, pragmatic, can-do English revolves around the verb, the action word. The best English sentences tend to have no more than a few non-verbal parts of speech to each verb, and the verbs are ideally as active as possible.

Moreover, since the verb forms the fulcrum of an English sentence, it must be used precisely. Hence the multitude of verbal tenses, each appearing in their infinitive, continuous and perfective variations.

The Russian verb, by contrast, is a poor relation entitled to three tenses only. The more static, contemplative, emotional Russian character needs a different language to express itself, one that can at times dispense with verbs altogether. Nouns and modifiers come to the fore instead, many with numerous affixes conveying nuances of meaning and emotional colouring.

If a nation’s character finds its exhaustive expression in its language, a nation’s language finds its artistic expression in its literature. And here a friend of mine has provided a helpful insight that’s worth developing.

Russian children grow up reading adventure stories. Americans Jack London and Mayne Reid, Frenchmen Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas, Louis Boussenard and Gustave Aimard, Britons Robert Louis Stevenson, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Walter Scott and Daniel Defoe are among their favourites, and there are quite a few others.

But did you notice something? There isn’t a Russian name among them. Russians love reading adventure stories, but they refuse to write them. And yet most of the writers I mentioned lived in the 19^th century, the time when Russians created one of the great literatures of the world.

Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov (to name the most famous ones) delved the depths of human nature and condition, uncovering many a stratum few Western writers ever explored. However, the genre of picaresque or adventure novel seemed to have passed them by.

Yet even great English writers, such as Fielding, Swift, Thackeray, Trollope, Dickens in some of his novels, felt no compunction about turning to that genre. They didn’t think its constraints prevented them from hitting their artistic targets.

I’m convinced that this too reflects the difference between the Russian and English languages, which in turn elucidates the difference between the two national characters.

While the Russian keeps asking multiple variations of the same question, ‘Why-oh-why?’, the Englishman instantly segues to ‘What are we going to do about it?’. His very viscera craves action, not so much rumination.

When replying to questions posed by English audiences, I sometimes try to slow them down, suggesting we first understand the problem before rushing to solve it. No such issues with Russian audiences. They are happy to contemplate, sometimes bewail, the problem for so long that there’s no time left for a solution.

You understand of course that this is an oversimplification, a mere attempt to outline a tendency, rather than trying to jump to an all-encompassing conclusion. Still, there’s a hint there somewhere at the workings of the Word that was in the beginning – and of many words that followed in its wake.

“Of freedom and of life he only is deserving who every day must conquer them anew,” goes the line in Faust.

On that criterion New Zealand deserves neither freedom nor life. Alas, she isn’t the only one.

Modernity encourages, nay demands, uniformity. Hence one can confidently expect that, mutatis mutandis, the same perversions that pervade politics in one Western country will also be prevalent in any other.

Thus, even though I haven’t been following New Zealand politics closely, I know what it’s like just by reading the accounts of yesterday’s mayhem in an Auckland supermarket.

I’ll leave you to decide which was worse, the action or the reaction. Both were appalling, yet neither was new.

A Sri Lankan immigrant grabbed a knife off a supermarket shelf and started lunging at everyone he could reach. Six people were wounded, three of them critically, before police shot the terrorist dead 60 seconds later.

How come armed police reacted so swiftly? I’ve heard of rapid response, but this was extraordinary. Less than a minute to arrive at the scene? Incredible.

Well, you see, they didn’t exactly arrive at the scene. They already were at the scene because they were tracking the murderer’s every move.

The man, who for some inconceivable legal reasons is identified only by the initial S, was a known ISIS sympathiser who was especially partial to hunting knives. He had bought two of them, leaving the readers of his tweets in no doubt about the kind of game he was after.

S stated his intention to kill “Kiwi scum” so credibly that he was put on terror watchlists, arrested and sentenced to a year’s supervision. “There are very few people that fall into this category,” explained Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern after the fact.

Yet even those chosen few couldn’t be stopped before they actually killed someone. According to the NZ judges, the intention to commit murder isn’t “equitable” to actually committing it. Do they mean ‘equal’? One never knows with lawyers.

Perhaps I spoke too soon when singling out uniformity as a distinguishing feature of modernity. In every country I’m familiar with, conspiracy to murder is a statutory offence by itself, punishable by long prison terms (in England, up to life). New Zealand is evidently different.

Yet Miss Ardern’s reaction to the heinous act shows her country isn’t different in every respect. First, she said she was “gutted”, which, considering the nature of the crime, was an unfortunate choice of phrase.   

But then she did acknowledge that: “What happened today was despicable, hateful and wrong.” But, and it’s an all-caps BUT, “It was carried out by an individual, not a faith or religion. He was gripped by violent and ISIS-inspired ideology that is not supported here.”

It’s comforting to know that Islamic terrorism doesn’t yet enjoy broad popular support in New Zealand. And it’s hard to argue that S wasn’t stabbing all and sundry by himself – after all, it would have been awkward for many people to wield the same knife at the same time.

But, if S was indeed primed by “violent and ISIS-inspired ideology”, then surely that ideology is complicit in the act, if only tangentially? Also, some clarification wouldn’t have gone amiss.

For ISIS doesn’t have exclusive rights to that ideology. Similarly inspired are any number of other Muslim groups, all those Talibans, PLOs, Muslim Brotherhoods, Al-Qaedas and so on, whose name is legion.

Judging by the battle cry they all scream, Allahu Akbar!, they believe they are doing God’s work, as prescribed in the Koran. And they take nothing out of that book that isn’t there.

Granted, the verses that explicitly call for violence towards Christians, Jews and any other infidels aren’t the only ones. But if there ever was any doubt that these verses directly inspire mass violence, it ought to have been dispelled over the past 1,400 years.

Yet each time a shooter, stabber or suicide bomber screams “Allahu Akbar” before killing, Western politicians fall over themselves to shout just as loudly that Islam has nothing to do with it.

Typically, they add that the murderer has “mental health problems”, making one wonder how deranged loners managed to conquer most of southern Europe just a few decades after their creed graced the world.

In this sense I feel let down by Miss Ardern. She did follow the pattern by exculpating “faith or religion” with that delicious taste for redundancy. But she inexplicably left out insanity as an explanation. I trust she’ll soon correct that oversight.

In addition to stating murderous intent, S got on those watchlists because he had downloaded numerous ISIS propaganda leaflets. That was sufficient for the police to keep a watchful eye on him, but not to send him to prison.

Just perusing calls to mass murder doesn’t seem to become an imprisonable offence in New Zealand unless those instructions are actually followed. However, downloading child porn does constitute an imprisonable offence even if the perversion remains nothing but a cherished fantasy.

I don’t get the logic of it. The justification for sending down child-porn downloaders is that they thereby encourage the crime to be committed by the uploaders. Such a proclivity is indeed despicable, but how is it any worse than downloading murderous instructions?

It isn’t, quite the reverse. But there exists a seminal difference between child pornography and Muslim terrorism. The former isn’t protected by wokery, but the latter is, to some extent.

Even the wokiest of individuals won’t admit solidarity with suicide bombers or serial stabbers. But neither will they have the courage to acknowledge what motivates such crimes, what causes them.

The causes are all coloured in the rosy hues of Third World virtue, which means they can’t be castigated unreservedly. And they are definitely off-limits for any preventive action, other than slipshod surveillance.

Goethe was right: those who deserve freedom and life must fight for them every day. The likes of Miss Ardern refuse to do so, leaving both freedom and life at peril.

Jumping from one classic to another, she should do a Macbeth and look at her hands. They’ll be bright red with the blood of those Auckland shoppers.

Ever since 1973, when the US Supreme Court issued its pro-abortion ruling in a Roe v Wade case, that topic has been in the forefront of public debate.

The debate ought to be moral and logical, but instead it always veers into politics, which nowadays has nothing to do with either morality or logic. By and large, conservatives argue against Roe v Wade, while liberals support it wholeheartedly.

Since most US conservatives tend to be Republican, it’s Republican-led states that take the fight to Roe v Wade. This year alone they’ve passed 94 restrictions on abortions. However, none has gone as far as my former home state, Texas.

It has passed the so-called Heartbeat Act, banning abortions past the point when a foetal heartbeat is detected, typically as early as six weeks into pregnancy.

Any individual, including those not directly involved, can now sue any doctor, nurse or anyone else performing or assisting an abortion. Damages to be awarded start from $10,000. Exceptions can be made only in medical emergencies, but not in cases of rape or incest.

Pro-abortionists screamed bloody murder, as it were, all the way to the Supreme Court, demanding that it block the new law. However, the Supreme Court refused, by a 5-4 vote.

Now the screams have reached a hysterical pitch, with the good Catholic Joe Biden leading the way as a sort of choir master. The new law, fumed the good Catholic, is “extreme”. It “significantly impairs” women’s access to healthcare. Right. So abortion is healthcare, a bit like appendectomy.

I stress Biden’s religious credentials only to show his hypocrisy. For one can be either a pro-abortionist or a good Christian, never both. Catholic doctrine in particular is adamant on the subject: since life begins at conception, abortion violates one of the Commandments, and not a misdemeanour one either.

The point I usually make when this subject comes up is that one doesn’t have to fall back on Christian doctrine to make a case against abortion. A simple logical process should suffice.

Sanctity of life is a concept that might have originated within the Church, but then so did all of our most fundamental laws. Since then, however, they have shed any visible tethers tying them to religion and entered the secular jurisprudence of all civilised countries.

Hence the issue of abortion boils down to a simple question. Is a foetus a human being, autonomous in potentiality, or merely a part of a woman’s body, like the appendix?

If it’s the latter, then it can be treated like the appendix: allowed to exist if it gives no trouble, cut out if it causes discomfort. If, however, it’s human, then the distinction between abortion and infanticide becomes blurred, not to say non-existent.

Given the normal gestation period of about nine months, the issue is further reduced to another question. At what point along this timeline does a human life start?

What about at nine months minus one day? No, that’s not it. No difference between pre-natal and post-natal abortions would be noticeable, and the latter is unequivocal murder.

How about, say, 24 weeks into pregnancy, which most abortion laws specify as the cut-off point, as it were? This limit is based on the antediluvian proposition that at that time a foetus becomes viable, that is able to survive outside the womb.

Yet recent scientific advances, of which modernity is so proud, can enable a foetus to survive at a much earlier stage. Fair enough, it can’t survive on its own, but then neither can a post-natal baby. Using the same logic, we ought to condone infanticide up until at least school age.

I’d suggest that the 24-week limit is arbitrary to a point of being unsustainable. Are we to believe that a human life starts at exactly 24 weeks and not, say, at a mere 23 weeks and six days?

Clearly there is no scientific basis for this belief. In fact, any ironclad limit on the presumptive life-giving point would be arbitrary, refutable by the same process of reductio ad absurdum. Any, that is, except one: the moment of conception.

Only this moment is irreducible and unarguable. Any other point is open to question, and surely decent concern for elementary (secular!) morality should treat any reasonable doubt in favour of preserving life? Even a petty criminal can only be convicted when no reasonable doubt exists. Surely life deserves a similar consideration?

Thus the new Texas law is in no way extreme. It too sets an arbitrary point, that when a foetus begins to show a heartbeat.

Yet equating life with cardiac activity doesn’t stand up to scrutiny either. After all, people have been known to survive for up to 45 minutes after their heart stopped beating. Should they have been buried directly that line on the oscillograph went straight?

The Heartbeat Act is yet another palliative. Yet it’s a better one than any other so far. After all, “Half a loaf is better than none,” as Thomas Jefferson once said in a different context.  

As you might have gathered, I’m opposed to abortion both on religious and rational grounds. Yet I’m man enough to admit that I sometimes make knee-jerk decisions for purely emotional or, if you will, intuitive reasons. Not often, but sometimes.

In this case too I’d support the new Texas law simply because of those who oppose it. Joe Biden is one. This good Catholic defends abortion with considerably more passion than he displayed when leaving many Americans at the mercy of Taliban savages.

He has sworn an oath to “protect and defend” Roe v Wade as a constitutional right “upheld as a precedent for nearly half a century”. In fact, as his press secretary Jen Psaki explained, Biden has always laboured manfully to turn that precedent into federal law – a noble cause those Texan hillbillies are thwarting.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose politics put her somewhere between Leonid Brezhnev and Che Guevara, described the Act as “catastrophe to women in Texas”. And New York Mayor de Blasio took time from his day job of running the city into the ground to call for a “national mobilisation” to fight for abortion.

Also, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), whose politics puts it to the left of either Brezhnev or Che Guevara, promised to stick to its guns, or rather abortion tools. The Act, say its spokesmen, opens the door to “vigilante lawsuits”. Surprisingly they didn’t use the term ‘McCarthyism’ they typically reserve for any conservative measure.

Anyway, well-done, Texas. Though the Act isn’t quite the destination, at least it’s a step in the right direction. These days, one can’t ask for more.

P.S. According to newspaper reports, Geronimo the alpaca has finally been “executed”. Chaps, people are executed; animals are put down. Those who don’t know the difference probably can’t distinguish betweeen a foetus and an appendix either.

The other day I quoted Plato and Aristotle to the effect that an educated electorate is essential if democracy is to have a sporting chance of success.

The same thought can be expressed differently: democracy, in its present, unchecked form, is bound to fail. For an educated electorate is a pie in the sky.

What exactly is education anyway? In the sense in which it’s relevant to the subject in hand?

The word didn’t really allow for much interpretation in the past. Everyone knew what education meant: an accumulation of knowledge whose desired outcome was a more intelligent and moral person. One best equipped to seek truth, and recognise it once found.

However, when modernity barged in, it brought along a full bag of semantic tricks, ranging from larceny to ambiguity. Hence nowadays education means something – or rather some things – entirely different.

For example, Thomas Sowell, one of today’s best thinkers on such subjects, talks about education in mostly utilitarian terms, as obtaining the useful skills required for survival in the rough-and-tumble of commercial life. He acknowledges that this isn’t all that education is about, just the most important thing.

Developing his thought logically, we’d have to see no difference between a university and, say, a plumbing school. If anything, the latter may even be more conducive to making a stable living.

However, if we accept my definition of education as a process by which a person becomes better at pursuing truth, it’s not immediately obvious how a degree in structural engineering or computer science can achieve that purpose. More employable, yes. Better, not necessarily.

Others equate education with a certificate of academic attainment, usually a university degree of some kind, any kind. This notion has never been sustainable, and now less than ever, even though such certificates make useful wall art.

To begin with, it’s now possible to obtain a university degree without ever tackling disciplines traditionally recognised as academic. Practically every university these days offers credit courses in subjects that, rather than making a person better, are guaranteed to make him worse.

The usual complement of black studies, women’s studies and gender studies is in the forefront, backed up by a wide selection of courses that must have been thought up by inmates of lunatic asylums.  

The US leads the way with such programmes as ‘The Lesbian Phallus’ (The Occidental College, LA), ‘Philosophy and Star Trek’ (Georgetown University) and ‘Maple Syrup Making’ (Alfred University, NYC).

But British universities manfully hold their own, with such courses as ‘How to Train in the Jedi Way’ (Queen’s, Belfast), ‘Harry Potter Studies’ (Durham), ‘The History of Lace Knitting in Shetland’ (Glasgow) or ‘The Life and Times of Robin Hood’ (predictably, Nottingham University).

A youngster emerging with a degree awarded for stellar performance in such studies is no better equipped to face up to his civic responsibilities than an average Dachshund. At an unkind moment, I’d even suggest that the dog, if trained to bark at the sound of some key words, stands a better chance of voting intelligently.

However, even discounting such, shall we say, esoteric courses, and agreeing that the mere acquisition of marketable skills, commendable though it is, is irrelevant to acting as a responsible voter, a degree in the humanities is these days more of a hindrance than an asset.

To be prepared for participating in governance, which is what every voter does, a person must have at least some rudimentary grounding in such disciplines as theology, philosophy, history, law, logic, rhetoric, political science and so forth.

However, the teaching of such disciplines, if they are taught at all, is more or less monopolised by people hostile to our civilisation. They see it as nothing but a shameful hodgepodge of superstition, oppression, racism, colonialism, misogyny, homophobia and other irredeemable sins.

Rather than helping youngsters to overcome their youthful prejudices, such professors reinforce them – and then inculcate new ones, worse than the early lot. The results are catastrophic. In fact, I’d venture a guess that, should the franchise be limited to holders of university degrees in the humanities, every Western country would have a communist government, or as near as damn.

Having myself gone to a Soviet university, I shudder to see how similar Western universities have become. But there is an important difference, and not in favour of the latter.

We had to take a whole raft of compulsory subjects designed to brainwash us in the delights of communism. As I remember, the curriculum included year-long courses in the History of the Communist Party, Dialectical Materialism, Historical Materialism, Scientific Communism, Marxist Political Economy, Marxist Aesthetics, Scientific Atheism – and I’m sure I must have left some out.

However, we, most of us, recognised those courses for the mind-numbing propaganda they were and never took them seriously. Our real education came from forbidden texts, usually typewritten, mimeographed and disseminated by intrepid individuals risking their freedom.

Western students, on the other hand, hungrily gobble up the fetid refuse they are fed. And what do you know, the same texts that were forbidden in the Soviet Union are now ‘cancelled’ in Western universities, and for the same reason. A concerted effort is under way to protect young brains from contamination with truth. Courses in the humanities have become exercises in subversive propaganda.

Such is the situation. And I can see no realistic possibility for changing it (for the better, that is).

Before youngsters become students, they spend a decade or longer as pupils. The majority, a dwindling one, will never advance to higher education.

Schoolmasters get to work on young brains still in the embryonic state and, by the time they are finished, their charges are deemed ready to decide who will govern the country, and how. On what basis are they qualified to make such decisions?

They are taught at most schools by graduates of teachers’ training colleges, who are themselves functionally illiterate Marxists almost to a man. That doesn’t prevent them from having firm convictions based on wholesale rejection (and ignorance) of Western civilisation.

Many of their pupils complete their secondary education without learning to read and write properly. But so much stronger is their belief that only political candidates swimming on the wave of putrid biases are fit to govern. And they vote accordingly.

Those who go on to university then fall into the hands of graduates of better establishments, often Oxbridge in Britain or the Ivy League in the US. Most of them are acutely resentful of their lowly lot in life, as compared with that of financial wizards or successful businessmen.

American academics envy Wall Street mavens, and British academics envy American ones because they get higher salaries. Both groups feel, correctly, that they are at the margins of society, extraneous to the philistine dreams that their medieval colleagues would have seen as nightmares.

They see themselves as pariahs, a self-perception that feeds on itself.  ‘Progressive’ ideas are their way to explain what they bemoan as their life away from the mainstream.

Notable exceptions exist, they always do. But exceptional academics don’t set the tone at humanities departments. They are sometimes tolerated for the sake of scoring diversity points, but such tolerance runs out sooner or later.

You can see that no reform of education can solve the problem, none can reverse the trend of releasing into political life swarms of people manifestly unfit for the purpose. For education doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

As the popular ditty goes, “The foot bone’s connected to the leg bone, the leg bone’s connected to the knee bone, the knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone…” – and education is welded unbreakably to the whole ethos of society.

For education to produce responsible voters in sufficient numbers, a tectonic shift must occur, creating a fissure between the West and the past several centuries of its development. By way of a palliative, perhaps one could agree on just a single century – but even that is impossible even to imagine.

History ticks on, and there is no going back. Darwin was right when saying that everything changes. Where he was calamitously wrong is in believing that every evolutionary change is for the better.

That wrong idea has left its original biological domain and drifted into social and political life as the doctrine of unstoppable progress. The same two words I offered the other day as a refutation of democracy disprove this doctrine as well: Joe Biden.

After the collapse of most Western monarchies, democracy got to be seen as the best political system imaginable, perhaps the only decent one possible. But this adulation didn’t start yesterday.

Franchise has been steadily expanding in all Western countries, with democratically elected institutions acquiring more and more power. It has got to a point when no argument about, and especially against, democracy seems to be imaginable.

Well, not as far as I am concerned. I can start and finish a credible argument against democracy with two short words: Joe Biden.

A political system can be judged on many criteria, but surely the most important one is its record in elevating to government those fit to govern. And, comparing unchecked democracy with even absolute monarchy, I’m not convinced the former emerges the clear winner.

Actually, the extreme, absolute form of monarchy hasn’t existed anywhere in the West for the best part of three centuries, longer in England. Democracy, on the other hand, has been absolute everywhere in the West for at least a century.

Still, even allowing for an impure comparison between a system long since extinct and one well-nigh dominant, monarchy more than holds its own. The usual argument against it is that there’s no guarantee that hereditary succession won’t throw up an incompetent monarch.

True. In this world we aren’t blessed with perfect systems. T.S. Eliot pointed this out in poetic form when he decried “dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good”.

However, while thanking people for pointing out the woeful imperfection of monarchy, one can still take exception to the implication that democracy is conspicuously better in that respect. That’s when it helps to utter the two words I mentioned: Joe Biden.

Moreover, I’d suggest that a man who is from early childhood trained to govern by the best minds of his time stands a better chance of getting good at it than someone who has to learn on the job. Especially if he happens to be a chap who became a professional politician soon after graduating from a provincial law school.

Joe Biden is such a man. He graduated 76^th in his class of 85 at Syracuse University. Part of the reason for such a low ranking was a paper he wrote, or rather plagiarised, from a law review article.

That wasn’t a one-off lapse: when Biden first stood in a presidential election in 1988, he similarly ripped off a speech by Neil Kinnock, who himself couldn’t be easily confused with Demosthenes or Cicero.

Biden’s career in the Senate was marked mainly by soporific speeches that even Obama, himself not the sharpest chisel in the box, found crushingly boring. He also liked to wear his Catholicism on his sleeve, while voting with remarkable consistency for every anti-Catholic measure (such as public financing for abortions).

That such a man could eventually be elected president in his dotage is a poor advertisement for democracy. Even in his prime, Biden didn’t come within a million miles of the level expected from the Leader of The Free World.

But he is well beyond his prime now. Two brain aneurisms and malignant tachycardia Biden has suffered have severely hampered his cognitive ability, which wasn’t of sterling quality to begin with.

Take it from me – all old men suffer some decline. Yet much depends on their starting point. An intelligent man with an IQ of 160 may lose a quarter of his top level and still end up with an IQ of 120, way above average. The same decline in a man with an IQ of 100 will produce an idiot.

I don’t know what Biden’s IQ was before he went gaga, but hardly a day goes by without him coming across as a confused man who doesn’t quite realise where and what he is, nor recognise the people around him.

He can’t even read the teleprompter fluently and, whenever he has to say a few words off the cuff, he sounds incoherent and pathetic. At his press conference the other day, instead of answering a question, he assumed a praying position by bowing his head down on his hands.

Joe Biden is incompetent at even running the routine business of quotidian governance. When a crisis arrives, he becomes what Americans call a clear and present danger.

All this was already evident during his campaign. And yet the electorate put him into the White House where he manifestly doesn’t belong.

Why? All sorts of spurious reasons, the principal one being that he wasn’t Trump.

Now, for all my reservations about the previous president, I doubt he would have handled the current situation in Afghanistan in Biden’s craven and inept way. That too was predictable, but the electorate wasn’t sufficiently smart to predict anything.

Nor is it just an American problem. In fact, I can’t think offhand of many great Western statesmen in my lifetime. Adenauer, perhaps. Thatcher, with a few reservations. Reagan, maybe, with even more reservations. De Gaulle? Fine, I’ll give you that. Anyone else? Well, you get my point.

Speaking specifically of American presidents in my lifetime, I can’t think of anyone who could be described as a statesman without fulsome generosity. Yet in the 17^th century, during the period as long as my lifetime, France had Richelieu, Mazarin and Colbert – outstanding statesmen every one of them.

And that was during the reign of two absolute monarchs, Louis XIII and Louis XIV. Moreover, if you insisted, I could perhaps name a few others during the same period, who each stood head and shoulders above any modern politician, as far as human material is concerned. Manny Macron, anyone?

The idea that democracy doesn’t depend as much on individual brilliance doesn’t quite wash. It may not need statesmen of Colbert’s standard, but it’s certainly vulnerable to chronic and, what’s worse, ideologised idiots like Biden. If you don’t believe me, ask those Afghanis at Kabul airport. Or, better still, the families of the 13 US soldiers brought home in coffins.

The greatest political thinkers from Plato and Aristotle onwards, all the way to Burke, De Maistre and Tocqueville, were well aware of the congenital drawback of democracy. They knew that, to be successful, democracy heavily depends on a highly educated and limited electorate.

In Athens, the required quorum was only about 5,000 men. And both great Athenians suggested that this was not only the minimum acceptable but also the maximum desirable number of active participants in a democracy. Burke believed that only 5,000 Britons were qualified to vote in his day. Anything more, and democracy turns into mob rule (“deviant constitution”, as Aristotle described it).

And a mob made up mainly of functionally illiterate philistines can’t vote intelligently and responsibly. Bono publico? They don’t even know how their own bono could be served best.

It’s worse than just having nincompoops at the helm. For, after several generations of democracy run riot, a certain type of politician evolves, one who knows how to get elected but neither has a clue how to run a government nor gives this matter much thought until he has to. By then it’s too late.

Then the vicious circle closes: an unqualified electorate cultivates unqualified leaders, who in turn condition the electorate to remain unqualified. Rather than merely producing the Bidens of this world, this vicious circle practically guarantees that first mostly and then only Bidens will spin out. It’s only by an increasingly rare accident that this circle is ever broken.

So do our politicians and political scientists spend sleepless nights trying to think of wise and just ways to limit democracy and counterbalance it with other mechanisms of power? Quite the contrary.

Instead they talk about expanding the franchise even further, to include 16-year-old children, though not yet their pets (canine Americans?). And their public pronouncements are full of sycophantic praises of “the people”, who are invariably commended for their goodness and sagacity.

Are you surprised that a Joe Biden comes out at the other end? I am not.

 

An article in The Times has 950 words, all about Sweden having become “Europe’s gun crime hotspot.”

That factual point could have been made in a short paragraph citing a few comparative figures. Juxtapose the number of shot victims in Sweden (114 killed since 2019, 290 wounded) with that in other countries, and Bjorn is your uncle. Job done.

A longish article, however, has to offer a semblance of analysis. Instead The Times offers dissemblance.

Among the 950 words the piece contains you won’t find one that explains the problem. That key word is Muslim.

For most (or at least a disproportionate number) of shootings and other crimes perpetrated in Sweden have been imported from the Middle East and North Africa.

Thus Malmö, a city of 350,000 souls of whom 40 per cent are Muslims, boasts more murders than the rest of Scandinavia combined. Muslims also commit 85 per cent of all rapes in Sweden.

The same happens in other countries too. In Germany, Muslim refugees commit 250,000 crimes a year. Muslims perpetrate two out of three rapes in Oslo and three out of four in Copenhagen. And in London, the areas that have the highest Muslim population also happen to boast the highest crime rates.

So how is it possible to omit the word ‘Muslim’ out of an article that length? Simple. What we are witnessing is a phenomenon I’d describe as the Woke Choke.

The Woke Choke is applied to (or, increasingly, by) writers to squeeze the truth out of the narrative, forcing it to conform to woke diktats. Hence there can be no suggestion of anything wrong with any group of people, whether defined by race, culture, religion or country of origin.

If some group stubbornly refuses to be forced into the egalitarian Procrustean bed, then it’s not to blame. We can blame anything else: capitalism, social injustice, insufficient social spending, income gap, Margaret Thatcher – anyone or anything, but not the group itself.

The article in question spends most of the space on soppy human-interest titbits, describing the anguish of parents whose children have been hit by stray bullets and some such. Yet only 60 words are devoted to an oblique attempt at some explanation. Here they are:     

“Now a range of factors, from an increase in availability of firearms to the failed integration of immigrant communities, have combined to put guns in the hands of angry young men. The majority are from non-Swedish backgrounds – often born and raised in Sweden to foreign parents.”

Leaving aside the dubious link between availability of guns and crime, Sweden has some of the tightest firearm laws in the world. So how come this “increase in availability of firearms” has coincided in time with the influx of Muslim immigrants over the past decade?

One can’t help sensing that the old law of supply-demand hasn’t yet been repealed. Availability of illegal guns has increased because gangs of mostly Muslim “angry young men” drive the demand up. And economics tells us that a voracious demand will always find a supply, legal or otherwise.

I especially love this business with “failed integration of immigrant communities… from non-Swedish backgrounds – often born and raised in Sweden to foreign parents.”

Which immigrant communities? Which non-Swedish backgrounds? American? French? English? German? And whose failure is it?

For example, I know a French family living in Sweden. I speak either English or halting French to them, so I have no way of judging the success of their integration. However, taking a stab in the dark, I’d still venture a guess that, even if they are less than wholly Swedish, they are unlikely to go on the night-time prowl, gun in hand.

And what kind of people born and raised in a country – even if their parents are from elsewhere – won’t adopt the local mores? Some of my Russian friends have children born and raised in America, England or France, and take my word for it: they are indistinguishable from the locals.

If you’ll pardon a personal reference, my own son was seven when he emigrated to America. He had no trouble integrating – to a point where he became a successful journalist, who, alas, doesn’t even speak Russian.

There’s only one condition that would prevent native-born people from feeling at home in the country of their birth: refusal to do so. True enough, Muslim children often grow up not so much in a cultural ghetto as in a cultural prison cell.

Some children, for example, don’t even realise that Britain isn’t a Muslim country (yet). They read only Muslim papers, watch only Muslim TV channels, go to Muslim schools, have no non-Muslim friends – in fact, may not even know any non-Muslims.

To create such a bubble in a predominantly English-speaking environment takes concerted effort and alert vigilance. That way children born and bred in Britain – or for that matter in Sweden – can grow up so alienated from their country that they’ll happily see their compatriots as enemy combatants, to be blow up, stabbed or shot.

This is how I would have written a Times article on this subject. Yet something tells me I won’t be asked.

Looks like Naomi Osaka got the mental health ball rolling. One of the world’s top female players, she flipped out of both the French Open and Wimbledon, citing mental health problems.

Had the authorities paid attention to Miss Osaka’s declining mental health, they would have noticed the early onset of her condition. During last year’s US Open, she had the names of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and other black Americans killed by police embroidered on her face masks. 

This was a clear demonstration of a split personality. You see, Miss Osaka is half-black American and half-Japanese. Predictably, she is torn between her two identities, with the two races battling each other within her brittle psyche.

Thanks largely to her endorsements of Japanese products, she is the world’s best-paid female athlete. Hence the Japanese in her lands a crushing blow on the black. But the black comes back with a flurry of social conscience, attacking the Japanese with unrestrained ferocity. Early symptoms of schizophrenia appear as a result – and Miss Osaka isn’t the only player showing such signs. 

That’s why I am happy to see that at last tennis authorities are beginning to pay attention to the outbreak of emotional instability among tennis players. As ever, it’s the US Open that first put its finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist.

The tournament has responded to this deeply worrying pandemic by providing rubber rooms, presumably equipped with straitjackets, for players who can no longer cope with the pressure of hitting fuzzy yellow balls over the net. Qualified psychiatrists will be on hand to offer emergency care, stabilising the players before their transfer to hospitals and other institutions.  

“Our goal is to make mental health services as readily available to athletes as services for a sprained ankle – and with no stigma attached,” says Dr Brian Hainline, a USTA first vice president. “We will provide an environment that fosters wellness while providing the necessary resources to readily allow mental health care seeking.”

While different from the Covid pandemic in some respects, a collapse of mental health also has much in common with it. For an afflicted person doesn’t just suffer on his own – he also presents a danger to others.

Many are the cases of tennis players smashing their racquets or, worse still, using them to attack their opponents, umpires and spectators. In their nimble, muscular hands, that implement becomes a deadly weapon – this even if they refrain from punching, kicking, biting and scratching.

A combination of a rubber room and straitjacket will provide a welcome restraint, preventing the players from causing grievous harm to themselves and others… Hold on a second, Penelope is trying to say something…

Oops, mea culpa. Looks like I’ve misread a newspaper account yet again. It’s not rubber but quiet rooms that the US Open is providing. The objective isn’t to restrain players with failing mental health, but to help them meditate, presumably about their endorsements.

But at least I got the other part right: psychiatrists will indeed be on tap to offer qualified medical help. Players will be encouraged to talk frankly about their relationships, sexual or otherwise, with their parents and also about the pressures of seeking more lucrative endorsements. So who says the papers bring nothing but bad news?   

P.S. In another welcome development, Princess Anne is to open her house to the paying public. That’s another step in the right direction: monetising the monarchy.

However, as a former adman I wish the family were more creative in merchandising royal memorabilia. Off the top, here’s one idea to consider: the Queen Cuckoo Clock.

The face would feature the Union Jack colours and those of the royal standard. Every hour on the hour, a window would open at the top of the dial. A tiny Queen figurine wearing a crown would pop out and hoot: “Cuckoo-ooo”. American and Japanese tourists would happily pay 50 quid or more for this premium item, thereby contributing to the upkeep of our head of state.

P.P.S. Our supermarket shelves are emptying out because of a severe shortage of fruit and veg pickers, meat, fish and poultry processors, and lorry drivers.

In a flash of lateral thinking, typical of former admen, I juxtaposed that datum with the number of British families below pensionable age who live off benefits: more than 4,000,000. This places a tremendous pressure on the Exchequer (even greater than that driving tennis players to insanity).

Both problems could be solved in one fell swoop, but I won’t tell you how. It’s time for you to activate your own creative resources, and I’ve given you enough clues to guide you to the threshold of the solution.

I should have seen this plaque before – after all, I’ve been visiting Bourges Cathedral at least once a year for decades.

Yet it was only the other day that I peeked into one of the chapels – and there it was, the plaque commemorating three senior clergymen martyred in 1794, during the Terror. They were beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1995, together with 97 other victims of revolutionary afflatus, all but one priests.

The plaque got me thinking about the four most pivotal revolutions in Europe: in England (began in 1642), America (1776), France (1789) and Russia (1917).

Different years, different countries, different revolutions really – but they all had something in common. Each one was at least partly inspired by hatred of apostolic religion, or, in the case of the latter two, of religious faith in general.

The English revolutionaries led by Cromwell were Calvinist sectarians. Their American and French counterparts were mostly deists, if not atheists. The Russians were atheists to a man.

That Cromwell’s men foamed at the mouth at the very mention of Roman Catholicism is par for the course. But one would think they’d have reasonable respect for Anglo-Catholicism, the dominant confession in England at the time. One would think wrong though – their Puritan hearts hated both apostolic confessions with almost equal fervour.

Most of the American Founding Fathers were deists at best, but they were concerned about America’s history, begun as it was by English Protestant dissenters. Hence they couldn’t express animus towards faith.

However, apostolic confessions, not just Catholicism but also Anglicanism, were fair game. The Founders detested them, which feelings were expressed in the First Amendment to the US Constitution adopted in 1791.

It coyly eschewed the phrase ‘separation of church and state’. Instead the First Amendment stated only that: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

But in his comments both before and after the ratification Jefferson was unequivocal: this amendment, he gloated, built “a wall of separation between Church and State”.

Implicitly, this was a dig at England, which Jefferson and most of his colleagues cordially loathed. They wanted to transplant onto the American soil the trees of the English Common Law, while severing their roots nourished by England’s Trinitarian faith.

Jefferson’s views on religion were greatly informed by Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration, preaching equanimity towards all creeds, except naturally Trinitarian Christianity.

Yet American revolutionaries didn’t cull priests en masse – they merely removed them from any influence on public affairs. Their French and Russian counterparts went the Americans one better.

The French exiled 30,000 priests and murdered hundreds more, including the three martyrs commemorated at Bourges. The Russians upped the ante: over 40,000 priests were murdered in all sorts of Satanic ways on Lenin’s watch (d. 1924), in the first few years of the Bolshevik regime, and before Stalin took over.

Any attempt to understand the reasons for such hatred, shared by revolutions that are otherwise so different, will lead us to a more general understanding of revolutions as such.

A revolution is distinct from a coup d’état in that it doesn’t just want to change a government. It seeks to change man. And man is an amalgam of the physical and metaphysical, of body and soul.

Any revolution worthy of the name is out to claim dominion over both, the physical landscape of governance, economics, social pecking order and what have you, but also the innermost essence of man, his whole outlook on life.

This too must undergo changes, some, as in England and America; considerable, as in France; total, as in Russia. And this is where any revolution finds itself in direct competition with the Church – this even if clergymen have no appreciable involvement in government.

And revolutionaries are less benevolent towards their competitors than, say, businessmen. The latter may be cutting a few economic throats during work hours, but afterward they’ll happily meet the possessors of those throats for a friendly drink. Revolutionaries are different. They are in the throes of an all-consuming passion, and they hate those who stand in the way.

To be fair, the four revolutions I mentioned didn’t reserve all their hatred for apostolic confessions. They had quite a bit left over for monarchs and aristocrats.

All four were dedicated to the elevation of the common man, who supposedly suffered great oppression at the hands of titled reprobates. That aspiration was but a fragment in their general commitment to changing human nature.

For, left to its own vices and devices, human nature will always arrange society along hierarchical lines. Those occupying the lower tiers of a social structure may have better or worse lives, but, in either case, their condition will never destroy the vertical structure, though it may replace one with another.

Christianity, with its founder stating that his kingdom is not of this world, encourages humility and discourages envy. For revolutionaries, on the other hand, humility doesn’t even come into consideration, while envy is their meat and drink.

That deadly sin is encouraged by revolutionaries because it paves their way to power. Since they act in the name of the common man, they have to whip up resentment against those seen as social superiors – that’s basic.

But there is a deeper reason for that stratagem. All four revolutions had to resort to violent tactics and fraudulent slogans to rally the masses. Yet the firebrands were also envious – of those whose claim to legitimacy was transcendent, and therefore organic, in origin.

All monarchies have such a claim. It may or may not be worded as divine right, but in any case it’s a reflection of the Christian understanding of power: it always comes from God.

That may be debatable, but Joseph de Maistre (d. 1821) settled the debate. He argued that traditional institutions, such as monarchy and aristocracy, go so far back that they disappear in the haze of time – we can’t trace them back to their historical origin. Therefore we might as well assume they come from God.

That’s what revolutions lack, this timeless quality. Hence they have to kill, or at least cheat, their way to power. Even the American Revolution is no different.

The colonists were invited to the Boston Tea Party, a violent protest against the duties on tea imposed by the English. Yet even with those duties, tea in America cost half of what it cost in the metropolis.

And the American slogan of no taxation without representation, borrowed, along with much other revolutionary effluvia, from Locke, was mendacious on several levels.

Philosophically, it wrongly claimed representation as the essential legitimising factor of taxation – yet most Englishmen weren’t represented either. That didn’t prevent them from paying taxes, which were higher than in America.

Moreover, implicit in that slogan was a promise of lower taxes, which didn’t quite work out. Immediately after the revolution the taxes skyrocketed – for the colonists to find out they hated them even with representation.

This explains why revolutionaries always look at the traditional, organic regimes they oust with outward hatred but secret envy. Those regimes didn’t have to base their legitimacy on phrasemaking.

It’s just a small stone plaque attached to the wall of a 13^th century cathedral. Yet one look at it triggers all sorts of thoughts about, well, everything. One such thought is about revolutions, which hardly ever bring out the best in human nature.

“Yo, Blair” was the way George W. Bush liked to address Her Majesty’s first minister. Dubya must be thanked for not referring to him as Fido or Rex.

For it was with canine obedience that Blair sent British soldiers to die next to Americans in Iraq. The only conceivable rationale for that incursion would have been to get rid of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, and in fact that explanation was bandied about at the beginning.

However, since it soon turned out that Iraq had no such weapons, another explanation was urgently needed. That was helpfully provided by the neoconservatives, who inscribed on their flags words like ‘nation-building’, ‘democracy’ and ‘free elections’.

Apparently, the US and Britain went into Iraq because it was a despotic dictatorship. As a gesture of good will, the allies would eliminate Saddam, a figure they themselves had manufactured as a counterweight to Iran.

Rid of this clearly undemocratic person, Iraq would become like Norway. Or, barring that, at least like Portugal. And while at it, Bush and Yo Blair would perform a similar service for other Middle Eastern nations bending under the yoke of undemocratic rulers: Syria, Egypt and Libya — but not Saudi Arabia that has a lot of oil.

It was time they too were introduced to the delights of Western democracy, bicameral parliaments and independent judiciary. Once they were graced with such gifts, they’d instantly see the light that had somehow failed to shine on them for the previous 1,400 years.

That was arrant, wicked nonsense, and acting on it could only have had the disastrous effects it did indeed produce. A bloodbath ensued, the more impassioned Muslims groups began operating from a base of wide popular support, all of the Middle East was set aflame, jihadist groups like Isis and Muslim Brotherhood sprang out, a window was open for Russia to climb in.

True, neither Saddam, nor Gaddafi nor Mubarak was indeed a democrat. They were all variously unpleasant tyrants. However, they managed to instil a semblance of order in their rather savage lands. When they were ousted, order disintegrated.

Emerging out of the chaos weren’t Muslim answers to Lincoln, Churchill and Mother Teresa. Jihadists moved in, and the Middle East exploded into internecine wars waged under the green banner of Islam. As a side benefit, Europe has been inundated with an influx of refugees, most of them not only alien to Western culture but downright hostile to it.

Any leaders blessed with even average intelligence and a modicum of education would have known that such an outcome was entirely predictable – while no other was imaginable. Yet neither Dubya nor Yo Blair possessed such requisite assets.

Blair, whose photo should be in the dictionary next to the entry for spiv (n), was different from Bush, however. He complemented his mediocre intellect with such qualities as perfidy, sleaziness and maniacal conceit.

It’s from this base that he has now launched an attack on Biden and Johnson, whose withdrawal from Afghanistan Yo Blair described as “imbecilic”. Takes one to know one, I suppose.

Upon closer examination, however, one discovers that it’s not withdrawal as such that meets with Yo Blair’s disapproval, but the hasty manner in which it was executed.  

Yes, our involvement in that country wasn’t a “hopeless endeavour”. On the contrary, it was a qualified success. And the death of 457 British and 2,433 American soldiers “was not in vain”. Still, nothing wrong with leaving if that’s what we felt like doing. However, withdrawing hastily betrayed “all those who need to be evacuated”.

Yo Blair has to choose. Should we have stayed for a long time because our mission was a rip-roaring success? Or just a few more days because we owed it to friendly Afghanis?

His love affair with himself, made so much more fervent by certain failings of mind and morals, won’t let him say what should be obvious to everyone. The truly imbecilic thing to do wasn’t coming out. It was going in.

There’s no doubt that a country lending its territory to gangs of terrorists having the West in their sights must be discouraged. But, as both common sense and empirical proof show, putting boots on the ground isn’t the right way to go about it.

Such countries could be cut off from the world’s economy with boycotts, not just a few sanctions. They could be blockaded and thus denied basic supplies. Their communications, from the Internet to the telephones could be jammed. Their utilities could be sabotaged. They could be hit with punitive bombing raids, of a severity commensurate with the crimes committed by the gangs they harbour.

Before long the governments of those countries would decide that perhaps they’d like to be our friends after all. And that means getting rid of the jihadist gangs, using the weapons I’m sure we’d be happy to provide.

That doesn’t mean that the West should never send its troops abroad. But this should be done for strategic reasons, not because some foreign leaders don’t conform to our idea of governance.

Even as we speak, the US alone is keeping the better part of 200,000 of its soldiers in various countries around the world, such as South Korea, Cuba, the Philippines and quite a few others. British involvement is smaller, only about 2,300 soldiers, mostly deployed in Eastern Europe to act as tripwire in case of Russian aggression.

An extra 2,000 Americans and a few hundred Britons that supposedly would suffice to keep Afghanistan out of Taliban’s clutches wouldn’t have made much difference. And after all, no allied soldier has been killed there for 18 months.

In that sense, Yo Blair had a point, even though he ignored the much bigger one, that we shouldn’t have sent our troops to Afghanistan or anywhere else in the Middle East.

Looking at the state of that region, not to mention Europe, that has transpired as a direct result of the two decades spent by Anglo-American soldiers there makes it hard to argue that invasion is the way to go.

It takes a remarkable absence of any self-critical faculty for someone like Yo Blair to throw stones out of his glass house. He should stick to making his millions out of assorted tinhorn dictators, some of them not conspicuously better than Saddam or, for that matter, the Taliban.

I for one would love to see him answering some pointed questions at the Hague. But then few of my dearest wishes ever come true.    

Afghanistan is very much in the news, specifically America’s hasty withdrawal that left the country at the mercy of Muslim fanatics.

This action followed from first Trump and then Biden decrying ‘forever wars’ America has to fight on behalf of those who won’t fight for themselves.

This elevates the argument from the specific Afghan context to the level of general principle: making America great again means her taking care of the internal business first. Let others fend for themselves.

Leaving the specific Afghan arguments to others, I’d like to comment on the general principle, which I think springs from insufficiently deep thinking on such matters. For messianic proselytism lies at the very foundation of America.

This was demonstrated by the first batch of English settlers who colonised Massachusetts Bay. As early as 1630 their leader, John Winthrop, delivered an oration in which he alluded to Matthew 5:14 by describing the new community as a “city upon a hill”.

Let’s consider the contextual implications of these words from the Sermon on the Mount: “Ye are the light of this world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.” This proselytising verse issues both a promise to the world and an entreaty to the listeners: by following Christ they would light a lantern illuminating the righteous path for the rest of mankind.

Not only would they acquire an ability to do so, but they would also acquire the duty. “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works…,” continued Jesus.

Thus, when Winthrop likened the new colony to a city upon a hill, he implicitly equated it to the beacon that shone the word of God onto the rest of the world. And since he did so in a secular context, the religion based on this premise could only be secular.

The new nation was to become a secular simulacrum of God as an object of worship. This was a curious example of amour propre: America was to worship herself.

The Biblical phrase immediately entered the American lore and there it remains to this day. The underlying spirit cuts across party lines: the phrase “a city upon a hill” was used by both the arch-Democrat John Kennedy and the arch-Republican Ronald Reagan.

America isn’t just different from all other countries; she is saintlier and therefore better. While other lands amble aimlessly through life, it’s America’s right and duty to carry out a messianic mission, to give “light unto all that are in the house” by spreading the ideals of democracy, republicanism or any other voguish political term denoting the underlying virtue.

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

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

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

Like Christianity, in due course its secular simulacrum, the American creed, also split into two streams, both based on the underlying premise of American exceptionalism: hermetic and crusading.

The hermetic stream (these days called isolationism) prefers to practise its unmatched virtue internally. Others, if they know what’s good for them, are welcome to follow, but the hermeticists are more concerned with protecting their own cloister from strangers than forcing them to join.

Conversely, the crusaders (usually called interventionists) are ever ready to strike out, converting others not just by setting glittering examples of virtue, but also by setting stubborn infidels on fire.

Both streams have issued countless statements of intent, but I’ll quote only two, made by two US presidents a century and a half apart.

Encapsulating the ethos of hermetic American exceptionalism, John Quincy Adams declared: “Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

Yet John Fitzgerald Kennedy communicated the opposite view in his inaugural address: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

This specimen of demagogic logorrhoea was making a promise of eternally escalating imperialism, going back to Winthrop with his ‘city upon a hill’. And it’s this crusading streak of the bifurcated American religion that has made the US the success she is today. Though from time to time the American pendulum swings towards the hermetic end, the overall tendency towards crusading invariably takes two steps forward to every backward one.

This innate crusading spirit has established America as ‘the leader of the free world’, a status that confers benefits, while also imposing responsibilities. The benefits are mainly economic: America has supplanted the British Empire as the most economically virile Western nation.

That wasn’t an entirely haphazard development: much of America’s elevation at the expense of Britain’s demise was a matter of deliberate and consistent policy. Hence, while fighting the Axis powers during the Second World War, America always had in her sights Britain as a secondary target.

Thus America’s wartime arrangements with the moribund British Empire were different from those with Stalin’s Russia. If billions’ worth of US aid given to Stalin was free, Britain had to pay for everything in cash, IOUs being accepted only grudgingly and with the understanding that no defaults would be allowed. (Britain only finished repaying her US wartime loans at the end of 2006.)

The entire gold reserves and foreign investments of the British Empire had to be used up to pay for American supplies, especially food and medicines. The victory was ultimately won at the expense of Britain’s post-war economic prospects.

Churchill knew this was coming. On 7 December, 1940, he wrote to Roosevelt, pleading that the terms on which American aid was being proffered would consign Britain to post-war penury: “Such a course would not be in the moral or economic interests of either of our countries.” Roosevelt acknowledged receipt and promptly collected Britain’s last £50 million in gold.

Churchill pretended not to understand that “such a course” was precisely in America’s “moral and economic interests”. Morally, the demise of the traditional British Empire, the last major stronghold of Christendom’s political order, played into the hands of the American crusading ambitions of leading the post-Christian world. And economically, British cash helped America double her GDP during the war.

Moreover, as a result of the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement, the US dollar became the world’s reserve currency. That’s how America has been able to run up a $27 trillion national debt without, so far, catastrophic economic consequences.

Generally speaking, this vindicates the crusading communicants in the secular American creed. Yet after each geopolitical setback the hermetic confession comes back into its own, and this is exactly what we are witnessing now.

Both Trump and Biden have made pronouncements along hermeticist lines, which proves that this strain, like the crusading one, is impervious to the presidents’ personalities or stated principles. However, we can be certain that before long the crusading spirit will come roaring back to “make America great again”, in the primitive way in which greatness is understood nowadays.

Where will the crusaders strike next? I don’t know. But I’m sure they will.