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Thinking is like music. It too has its own technique, structure and harmony that any average person can pick up if pointed in the right direction. Few people can ever be great thinkers, but most can thereby become competent ones.

Yet they don’t bother. They don’t even realise there is becoming involved, a technique to be learned by lengthy application. No one is born knowing how to play the violin, but everyone is born knowing how to think, goes the popular misconception.

Thus misled, most people waste their whole lives on the cerebral equivalent of trying to play Beethoven sonatas before learning how to finger scales and arpeggios. As a result, their brains produce the cerebral equivalent of cacophony – but they aren’t even aware of it.

One thing they never learn is an essential element of cognitive technique: the art of asking the next question. Thus, even someone like Richard Dawkins, a man burdened with advanced degrees, is capable of writing that Darwin’s theory of evolution “explains everything”.

So it may, if one stops asking questions at some arbitrary point long before a serious explanation is reached. However, asking that next question will show that the real explanation is like a desert mirage: it moves further away the closer one gets.

I was fortunate to stumble on this realisation when I was a little tot growing up with no friends my age. Since my father was banned from living in Moscow, we kept moving from place to place too often for me to develop a social life.

Hence it was my parents who provided the only outlet for my inquisitiveness, my mother willingly, my father reluctantly. He had more important things to worry about, like putting food on the table. But I was relentless, and one dialogue led me to the art of asking the next question.    

“Is there a god, Papa?”

“Do. Not. Be. Stupid. Of course there bloody well isn’t.”

I wouldn’t let him get off scot-free, especially since I was having daily conversations on that subject with my nanny. That illiterate old woman always crossed herself when walking me past the local church converted to a furniture warehouse.

“If there is no God, then who created man?”

“Man originated from the ape. It’s called evolution, and there was this Englishman, Darwin, who proved it conclusively in his book The Origin of Species. You’ll read it when you grow up.”

“And where did the ape come from? The one man originated from?

“From another ape, you know, a lower order of ape.”

“And where did that one come from?”

I’d thus lead Papa all the way down to the amoeba, making him resort to the rhetorical fallacy of telling me I’d find out all those things for myself when I grew up. He was right about that, but the answer to my ultimate next question was provided by neither Dawkins nor Darwin.

The art of asking the next question also comes in handy when dealing with matters transient, not just transcendent. Take politics, for example.

The interrogative chain reaction can be set off by an observable empirical fact, a technique first recommended by Aristotle. The fact in this case is that most of our leaders aren’t qualified to lead.

Yet we dutifully go to the voting booths every few years, hoping that this time things will change. Thereby we walk chin first into the uppercut of Einstein’s terse adage: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

We aren’t insane, Einstein was too harsh there. We simply haven’t been trained in the art of asking the next question. Our minds are so lazy that we accept as axiomatic certain propositions that are so open to questions that the draught of folly blows through unimpeded.

In the case of politics, the questions are as obvious as they are uncomfortable:

• Are all modern governments becoming more centralised? Yes.

• Isn’t it true that, the more centralised the government, the more important are the personalities of those at the centre? Yes.

• If those personalities are consistently inadequate, doesn’t that defeat the purpose? Yes.

• So how do we consistently end up with inadequate personalities in government? We elect them.

• What does ‘we’ mean? Whoever is qualified to vote.

• And who is so qualified? Anyone aged 18 or older, except prisoners serving sentences of over 12 months.

• About 80 per cent of the population then? Yes.

• Including those who don’t know the first thing about government and understand even less? Yes.

• Are such people in the majority? Yes, an overwhelming one.

• So on what basis do they select their leaders? Usually on the basis of promises the aspiring leaders have no way, nor indeed intention, of keeping.

• What happens if they break their promises? They are either re-elected anyway or replaced with others whose promises will be broken in the next cycle. That’s called one-man-one-vote democracy.

• How long has this been going on? With one or two accidental exceptions, at least for a century.

Most people are capable of getting this far, especially if they have no ideological commitment to any particular party. But then comes the art of asking the next question, and few ever dare ask it:

“If the system keeps producing bad results, surely there must be something wrong with the system?”

Serious political thinking and study start with that question. This may lead to an intellectually satisfactory solution or it may not. But if this question is never asked, no such solution will be possible.

Intellectually satisfactory doesn’t of course mean practically achievable – too many unaccountable variables come into play. But no problem can be solved unless it’s properly diagnosed.

The same Socratic art of asking the next question could put paid to any woke fad, such as anthropogenic global warming. The questions could follow this progression:

Is global warming caused by our rapacious consumption of fossil fuels? If so, did it start with the Industrial Revolution, which increased the consumption of such fuels no end? If so, can we assume that there had been no periods of global warming before that time?

That would be it. For, alternating with assorted Ice Ages, there were many such periods, most notably the Roman Warming and the Medieval Warming. Moreover, the Earth has been warmer than it is now for about 80 per cent of its existence, when nobody drove SUVs or used aerosols.

Hence the current interglacial period isn’t caused by SUVs and aerosols. It’s caused by other, natural, factors, and the book Heaven and Earth by Ian Plimer explains them all. Yet no one who hasn’t mastered the art of asking the next question will even think of reading it.

The same trick can work with just about every modern obsession, from sex and racial discrimination to the NHS.

Now, I’m no conspiracy theorist, but could it be that our moron-spewing educational system is specially designed to make sure no one knows how to ask the next question? I wonder.

The other day I inadvertently stated that Her Majesty belonged to an underground al-Qaeda cell.

All right, fine, only joking. I knew you wouldn’t believe I could have said that, even inadvertently. All I actually said was that she merely supported al-Qaeda. What, still no traction? Dear oh dear, you are an incredulous lot, aren’t you?

You are right though: I made no such statement. What puzzles me, however, is that you don’t believe anyone could have said anything so far-fetched.

After all, Sir Kenneth Olisa, Lord-Lieutenant of London and spokesman for the Palace, stated categorically the other day that neither Her Majesty nor anyone in her family is averse to terrorist organisations.

When asked whether the royal family supported BLM, Sir Kenneth came up with an unequivocal reply: “The answer is easily yes.” That answer is easily the most damning thing anyone has ever said about our monarchy (at least since 1649, when Charles I was beheaded).

For BLM is self-admittedly and proudly a Marxist organisation, relying on violence to achieve its aims. The aims are first to remove the police by ‘defunding’ them, and then to proceed unopposed to destroy ‘capitalism’. Anti-racism is merely the umbrella strategy, expressible in snappy slogans.

Patriss Cullors, who co-founded BLM, first cut her teeth in the terrorist Weatherman underground. She describes herself and the other founding members as “trained Marxists… super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories.” That is, Marxism-Leninism.

Nor is she bashful about tracing her lineage back to the US Communist Party, “especially Black communists,” and to “the great work of the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, Young Lords, Brown Berets, and the great revolutionary rainbow experiments of the 1970s.”

We’ve already had a taste of the methods Cullors’s followers propose to employ to achieve their goals. Last year, during the George Floyd riots, BLM gangs burned and looted shops, attacked passers-by, fought the police (who hadn’t yet been defunded).

That’s the red, violent end of its campaign. The violet end is the non-stop propaganda of its slogans in every available medium, regrettably including many mainstream outlets. The spectrum shows that BLM has learned from the best – and in the field of Marxist subversion there’s no doubt that the best is Lenin.

Before he got mummified, the great leader always preached a sensible mix of legal and illegal tactics. The legal ones included participating in the traditional institutions, such as parliaments, the better to subvert them from within. The illegal methods covered a broad range from murders and robberies all the way to a full-blown coup.

Lenin also bequeathed the lesson of broadening Marxist terminology. The word ‘capitalist’ was to him a polyvalent term covering anyone who failed to acknowledge the bright future awaiting the world under communism. In addition to the actual owners of capital, the term described aristocrats, priests, intellectuals who were too clever by half – and of course royalty.

Nor did BLM’s spiritual teacher even attempt to pretend that, to him and his acolytes, annihilating ‘capitalism’ also meant annihilating ‘capitalists’.

One thing I can say for the Marxists is that they are men of action, not just windbags. This they went on to prove everywhere they took over, by murdering, conservatively estimated, some 140 million worldwide – including, and this gets us back to the subject in hand, numerous members of the Queen’s own family.

Since BLM has never repudiated its Marxist-Leninist provenance, one can infer with absolute certainty that, given the chance, it’ll put into practice Marxist theories in which they are “super-versed”.

Contrary to what Lord Russell believed, the fact that the sun has risen every morning in history is ample proof that it’ll rise tomorrow. In the same vein, if victorious Marxists have always murdered whole social classes, starting from the top, they are guaranteed to continue to do so with monotonous regularity.

So let’s not equivocate: by supporting BLM, Her Majesty implicitly supports the cellar in which her whole family, including the children, would be massacred. Hence, since no one has ever suggested that the Queen suffers from maniacal suicidal tendencies, she can’t possibly support BLM.

Therefore Sir Kenneth didn’t really mean it the way it sounded, which he confirmed the next day. All he meant was that all royals abhor racism. Implicitly, however, abhorring racism means adoring BLM. Doesn’t it? No, it doesn’t.

For example, I too abhor racism – or any hatred by category. That doesn’t mean I support black, Muslim or any other terrorism. I’d happily clap into the same prison every BLM member, every Muslim terrorist and every extant Clansman. Let them sort themselves out behind bars.

So what motivated Sir Kenneth to say such a manifestly idiotic thing? Simple. He is living testimony to the efficacy of Marxist, and specifically BLM, propaganda. It has implanted into people’s minds the falsehood that BLM and anti-racism are one and the same.

Exactly the same effect was achieved by Bolshevik propaganda back in the day. Anyone who opposed the murder of millions and enslavement of everyone else was depicted as an enemy of equality, liberty, fraternity, the working classes and social justice. I did say BLM learned from the best.

The subject of race is touchy for the royal family. Ever since one of its members, sure to be identified soon, wondered about the colour of the baby Meghan was about to pop, all in the family have been falling over themselves listing their ant-racist credentials.

For a question like that, if it was indeed asked, didn’t just bespeak idle curiosity and ignorance of genetics (the chances of a half-caste child being darker than his darker parent are one in millions). It was crypto-racism, unvarnished. Simon-pure egalitarians aren’t supposed even to acknowledge any racial differences – just as theatre-goers aren’t expected to find anything strange about a high-heeled woman playing the fearless Roman warrior Agrippa.

Hence our royals had the gun of woke opinion held to their heads. Like the brainwashed mob roaring its demand that Her Majesty show incontinent grief over Diana’s death, today’s mob demands that every royal scream anti-racist disclaimers from every corner of Buck House.

So, if Sir Kenneth did jump the gun, it was only a little bit. Good job Harry didn’t marry a Muslim though. Her Majesty’s spokesmen would be declaring her undying support for al-Qaeda even as we speak.  

Boat people became a popular topic thanks to communist dictatorships, first Cuban, then Vietnamese.

One can understand those desperate individuals. They refused to believe promises of a bright future awaiting their families and countries. Instead, they believed their eyes, popping out at the sight of mass executions, torture and general enslavement.

Unable to see the promised paradise beyond that, they put out to sea, steering their jerry-built boats and rafts through storms and machinegun fire. We don’t know exactly what their chances of survival were (low), nor the death toll (high). Communist regimes are reticent about revealing such statistics.

But we do understand why hitherto normal people would be prepared to risk their lives to escape the crushing blows of the hammer and the slashing swipes of the sickle. Communism has a way of turning normal people into daredevils – just look at all those Germans trying to scale the Wall in ways that weren’t so much death-defying as death-begging.

What I find harder to understand is the new generation of boat people, all those Muslim refugees braving the Channel. Hence the question in the title, which is especially apposite since one doesn’t hear of too many refugees taking their lives in their hands to sail in the opposite direction.

We may joust about the comparative merits of Britain and France till the refugees go back home. Yet the upshot of all those rhetorical thrusts and parries is predictable: there isn’t much in it. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, at least for newcomers to either place.

They are called asylum-seekers, not boat people. But asylum-switchers would be a more appropriate term. After all, if the law says they must seek asylum in the first safe country they reach, then it’s hard to argue that Britain is conspicuously safer than France.

So there must be a good reason for those people to put their lives at risk in illegal attempts to cross the Channel, which wouldn’t be my first choice of a waterway friendly to such adventures. More than 300 have already drowned – and yet thousands of others keep trying.

Over 14,000 of them have succeeded so far this year, much to France’s joy and Britain’s dismay. Such contrasting reactions are guaranteed to cause conflicts.

France’s desire to ship a large consignment of refugees our way is understandable. With 10 per cent of the population, the country already has more than its fair share of Muslims, merci beaucoup. On the other hand, our wish to keep illegal immigrants at bay isn’t unnatural either.

Every sovereign country has the right to decide whom to invite as its guests, and how many. That was one of the arguments in favour of Brexit and, at a guess, the most important one for most of those who voted for it.

One would think that the Royal Navy wouldn’t need France’s help to protect our borders. After all, it managed to discourage both Napoleon and Hitler from attempting an invasion. Surely it ought to be strong enough to stop a few unarmed punts?

Apparently not. Maritime law says we can’t just turn those boats around, and of course sinking them is out of the question. Hence the flesh is strong, but the spirit is unwilling. We may have the physical wherewithal to confront the paddle boats, but not the will to use it.

That means we need France’s help, which the French are reluctant to provide. They’d rather all those ‘women and children’, who on closer examination turn out to be strapping, unshaven lads, were our problem.

Given that reluctance, HMG, as personified by Home Secretary ‘Very’ Priti Patel, appealed to the innermost cockles of French hearts by offering to pay £54 million a year for France’s cooperation. The French kindly agreed to take the money, but so far the cooperation has been begrudging to non-existent.

As a result, the stream of Muslim refugees arriving illegally at our shores has received a boost, assisted by the clement weather in the Channel. Our uninvited guests are now crashing Britain to the tune of 800 a day, and there doesn’t seem to be any end in sight.

Miss Patel has responded to the worsening situation by first threatening to withhold the £54 million, which after all wasn’t meant to be strictly a charitable donation. And then she ordered officials to rewrite maritime laws to allow Border Force to turn boats around.

Predictably, the French screamed bloody murder. Such heavy-handed tactics, they threatened, would have a “negative impact” on their cooperation, which has gravitated towards the negative end anyway.

Now, I’m no expert in the minutiae of either maritime or immigration law. But on general principle, I don’t see how the French can in good faith refuse to keep all those refugees, or indeed to prevent them from committing illegal acts (entering Britain uninvited is one such).

And I especially want to emphasise that the question in the title isn’t rhetorical. I’m genuinely puzzled why those unshaven lads find France wanting and Britain attractive. Is it the food? Employment possibilities? Language? More generous social services?

None of these seems a sufficient reason to brave the raging seas in canoes. Whatever we may think of France, it’s a far cry from Cuba and Vietnam. So I’d like to get to the bottom of this, and I’ll appreciate all the help I can get.

We are still a low-tax party, says Health Secretary Sajid Javid. A laudable sentiment, that. It’s only that I’m not sure Mr Javid has chosen the best moment for expressing it.

For his boss, Boris Johnson, has just announced a 1.25 per cent tax hike supposedly required to plug the more gaping holes in the NHS. That raises our tax burden to a level unseen for half a century.

Now I’m not going to repeat what I’ve been writing about the NHS for decades, along the lines of Britain being the only first-world country cursed with a third-world health service. I am, however, going to refer you to the first article I’ve ever seen saying all the same things in a mainstream publication.

If the definition of a great thinker is someone who agrees with me, then Christopher Snowdon is as great as they come: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-9967433/NHS-delusion-Cure-radical-surgery-not-cash-asks-CHRISTOPHER-SNOWDON-brave-enough.html

What interests me today is the way our successive Tory governments go about changing their reputation. I often call the Tories Labour Lite, but Messrs Cameron, Johnson et al. have been doing their best to lose the Lite modifier.

All their policies, social, cultural, constitutional and fiscal, inevitably raise the question in the headline above. For it’s not immediately obvious how different Labour governments would be.

In fact, I’m not convinced that, however willing their spirit might have been, they would have been able to get away with the level of cultural vandalism and economic irresponsibility routinely practised by the misnamed Conservative Party.

The problem isn’t parochially British. For modernity reaches out tropistically for the bright sun of uniformity. While paying lip service to individualism, it applies the same stencil to everything and takes scissors to anything sticking out.

Thus all modern Western governments pull in roughly the same direction. The odd exception here or there is invariably of the kind that proves the rule.

The direction is vectored towards expanding their own power at the expense of individual sovereignty and self-sufficiency. And extortionate taxation is a tactic they all use.

The modern state sees every loose coin in a citizen’s pocket as either loot or challenge or personal insult. That stands to reason for economic independence is a factor of independence tout court.

Anyone blessed with the knowledge of basic arithmetic can figure out what kind of pension and medical care he could procure for himself had he kept over a lifetime the cash the state extorts from him to provide the same services. And anyone blessed with common sense will realise that a giant socialist bureaucracy like the NHS will always use an ever-increasing proportion of its budget to sustain its burgeoning staff of administrative parasites.

But the state doesn’t want the people to be independent of its power. Of which the NHS is an extension.

It’s not just the modern state that’s congenitally committed to increasing its power. The servants of the state, government members, want to remain in control of the levers for as long as they can conceivably hang on to them.

That’s why they can’t afford to be too blatant about things like adding thousands of pounds to the tax burden on the voting middle classes (and who these days isn’t middle class?). They need to wrap each new outrage into a warm, fluffy blanket of dire necessity.

That’s why major disasters, like wars or epidemics, mean such different things to the state and the people. For the latter, they are tragedies. For the former, they are godsends.

A war, an epidemic or a natural disaster provides a useful pretext for the state to increase its might at the people’s expense. The state can claim emergency powers, promising they are only temporary. And some of them usually are. But the state never relinquishes every power it has grabbed. Some have a way of sticking to its fingers.

You can find this thought developed in my book How the West Was Lost, written more than 20 years ago. Since then, successive Western governments have been falling over themselves trying to prove me right.

Since we all like to win an argument, in some warped way I’m almost grateful to them. And Boris Johnson deserves as much gratitude as any of his colleagues.

His whole demeanour communicates deep regret over the unfortunate duty to extort even more money from us. But a duty, alas, it is.

You see, the NHS is trying to rise, Phoenix-like, from the ashes left behind by the wildfire of Covid. We all love the NHS, don’t we? Of course we do. We are proud of it, the best healthcare system known to man.

The NHS is God, the state is its church, and Mr Johnson is the chap taking a collection plate through the aisles. You wouldn’t mind dropping a fiver in, would you? Well, this extra 1.25 per cent is that same fiver, appropriately multiplied.

Now the NHS can return to its unmatched pre-Covid standards – and I’ll again refer you to Christopher Snowdon’s article (or my own writings on the same subject) to find out just how unmatched those standards had been.

This morning I talked to an Israeli friend of mine, who had caught Covid a few weeks ago. He had to spend four days in hospital, and then went into quarantine at home.

After his discharge, the hospital set up an oxygen machine at his place. And he has been receiving daily visits from a doctor and a nurse, checking on him and running all the essential tests. If you happen to live in Britain, I can just see you turning green with envy.

Israel, like most European countries, has a system of compulsory social insurance, not a giant state Leviathan into whose bottomless gullet the people keep pumping their tax money. I wonder if they are as envious of our dear NHS as its champions claim.

This isn’t to say that those other governments are fundamentally different from ours in their core aspirations. It’s just that they use different mechanisms for increasing their power. Perhaps they haven’t yet discovered the clockwork excellence of fully nationalised healthcare in pursuing that objective.

Say the magic word, NHS, and the Sesame of people’s pockets opens gaping wide with nary a demur to be heard. Just ask Boris.

People who coalesce in groups to pursue a common goal are expected to inscribe that goal on their banners. Except they hardly ever do.

Their banners are really false flags. They flap in the wind not to declare but to conceal.

Just look at all the mass murders in history, be they genocide, democide or simply homicide. Each one hid behind a seemingly rational, perhaps even worthy, cause. This though murdering masses is the only real purpose of mass murder. Yet that desideratum would look uncomfortable if used as a slogan – hence the false flags.

The same goes for most of the ostensible causes championed by mass movements. That’s all such causes are – ostensible. They belong on the false flags, not in the hearts of their wavers.

MeToo and other feminist movements? False flags. Activists put them out to conceal their real animus.

BLM? Ditto. Mouthpieces for diversity, multiculturalism, immigration? Ditto. Extinction rebellion? Ditto. LGBTA+ rights? Ditto.

All these movements are Marxist, openly, covertly or at least typologically. They are driven not by a desire to improve the lot of their favourite group, but by the urge to destroy everything our civilisation has ever stood for.

Like all revolutionary movements, each of them starts with a core of hardnosed militants who gradually accumulate a coterie of duped followers, of the type Lenin ungratefully called useful idiots. All of them follow the strategies of Marxist subversion, even if some may be unaware of the provenance.

Most malcontents have never even read The Communist Manifesto, never mind Das Kapital. But there’s no need: the venomous miasma of Marxism has by now saturated the ambient air.  

Every word written by Marx sputters malice and hatred. The bearded one loathed everything about our civilisation: the religion that inspired it, the culture produced by the religion, the rich (except his acolyte Engels who paid Marx’s expenses), capitalists, priests, aristocrats, landowners, bankers, non-Marxist intelligentsia.

That whole edifice had to be brought down to satisfy Marx’s vicious cravings, and he mapped out a strategy to achieve that demolition. A revolution would provide a thunderous finale, but it had to be carefully prepared to make sure it wouldn’t be drowned in blood, the way all those 1848 revolutions and the 1870 Paris Commune were.

Numerous pinpricks had to set up the final thrust, and each pinprick was supposed to punch a hole in the fabric of Western society. For, according to Marx, the West was being torn apart by its “internal contradictions”, which were ultimately exploitable.

Marx focused his attention mainly on the conflict between the rich and the poor, or, as he put it, between the exploiters and the exploited.

True enough, the Industrial Revolution brought class tensions to the fore by creating ample opportunities for both quick enrichment and equally quick impoverishment. Masses of former peasants were leaving villages to become urban workers, and the initial shift was far from painless.

But Marx and Marxism weren’t driven by love of the downtrodden, much though they professed it. Their aim was to rend Western society asunder by sermons of resentment and hatred. “Class struggle” between the “capitalists and the proletariat” was at the time the most obvious slogan they could inscribe on their banners, but those flags were false.

That was subsequently proved by every country taken over by Marxists. Having seduced the masses by mendacious promises, they instantly went on to break every one. And, when the proletarians tried to protest, machineguns opened up, covering the ground with the corpses of the very people in whose name the takeover had occurred.

But sowing class hatred was a useful battering ram. Swing it often enough and hard enough, and it’s just possible that the edifice will begin to crumble.

Yet the strategy of destruction has developed from Marx’s time. Class resentment still provides productive seeds, but they aren’t the only ones. Actually, they now play a minor role in the crop rotation. After all, every ‘poor’ person driving a car, living in a private flat, sporting £200 trainers, and munching hamburgers while playing computer games is a walking argument against wholesale pauperisation.

That’s why sprouting more luxuriantly are other cultures, or rather sub-cultures. The strategy remains the same: gradual undermining of Western society. But the tactics have been multiplied and refined.

Sowing racial hatred is one such. Here white ‘liberals’ have learned to exploit black militancy with consummate mastery.

To give credit where it’s due, the vanguard of the black movement, which started in the US, has always been laudably honest. Groups from the Black Panthers to BLM have never denied their Marxist inspiration and affiliation. Quite the opposite, they are proud of it.

Yet the flags they wave are false. They haven’t always been, but they are now.

Peaceful protests against discrimination and segregation were justified when they began. People shouldn’t be mistreated because of their skin colour – any decent person would agree with that.

However, that fight was won in the 1960s. Whatever racial discrimination exists now, it’s in favour, not against, black people. (As Thomas Sowell showed so brilliantly, the common mistake is ascribing any shortfall of attainment to discrimination.)

Yet the success of the civil rights movement encouraged Marxist groups to put anti-racism slogans on their false flags. Their aim is to knock some keystones out of the Western edifice, and the race sledgehammer proved its usefulness.

Hence today’s BLM movement, rioting and screaming that black lives matter every time a white policeman takes one. That flag is as false as they come.

Considering that blacks commit about 85 per cent of all violent crimes in the US, some black criminals will inevitably die in clashes with police. In fact, white cops kill an average of about 200 black criminals a year, almost always in self-defence.    

Yet over the past 35 years, an estimated 324,000 blacks have been killed in the US by people of the same epidermal pigmentation. But those lives don’t matter. If they did, BLM thugs would be demanding that police be funded more generously, not defunded.

The real purpose of groups like BLM is to alienate the races, thereby enfeebling society, making it less resilient in the face of cultural and physical vandalism. Alienating the sexes pursues the same objective, whatever slogans are superimposed on the false flags.

Divorce and abortion on demand, generous single-mother allowances, encouragement of homosexuality and other perversions to the point of legalising homomarriage, MeToo – all these are Marxist tactics embodied to achieve Marxist ends.

In a way, these ends are even more pernicious than those of BLM for they strike at the family, the building block of Western society. Yet all such groups invariably put liberation on their false flags.

If you look specifically at abortion and homosexuality, can you think off the top which country was the first to legalise them?

Actually, it was Soviet Russia, in 1920 and 1934 respectively, which was neither the place nor the time otherwise known for a commitment to liberty. The Bolsheviks were out to uproot traditional Russia and spread salt on the ground to make sure nothing worthy would ever grow again.

They too were successful, after a fashion, and they have helpfully shared their experience with their Western followers. The most famous conduits for such knowledge are the Frankfurters who had fallen out of Marx’s buns, all those Marcuses, Adornos, Benjamins et al., who found American universities to be a fertile soil for their poison.

But the Frankfurt School isn’t the only culprit. In fact, both the Soviets and their descendants have always cultivated every seditious movement capable of fracturing the West. And they are still at it: for example, recently the Russians have been found to provide support for the Catalan separatist movement in Spain.

Trust me: few Russians toss and turn at night worrying about the oppressed Catalans. I’m not sure many Catalans do either – it’s hatred of Spain that keeps them awake.

However, it would be wrong to blame the Russians or anyone else exclusively. Once subversive groups have received the initial push, they begin to roll along, gathering momentum as they go. And the faster they go, the louder the flapping sound of their unfurled false flags.

If you, like me, grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, you probably know how to discourage aggressive bullies.

As with many other parts of life, it’s not so much reality as appearance that matters. Your whole demeanour, from gait to facial expressions, should communicate menacing strength. Your body language must be sending a signal: don’t mess with me.

A bully usually gets the message. He is bigger and stronger than you, but attacking you may be more trouble than it’s worth. He may eventually win a fight, but at an unpredictable cost. So why bother if there’s easier prey about?

Extrapolating such street smarts to geopolitics, you’ll find the same survival tactics work there just as well. It’s not so much strength as projection of it that matters.

Switzerland is a good example of that: her resolute government and small but well-trained army kept the Nazis at bay during the war. Hitler weighed the costs of invading Switzerland against the benefits and turned his gaze elsewhere.

Another example is Finland that showed so much courage and martial skill in the Winter War against Stalin’s hordes. Towards the end, the Soviets had a good chance of occupying the whole country, but the cost began to look prohibitive. (Britain’s threat of using the RAF Iraqi base at Mosul to take out the Baku oil fields also added a few zeros to the possible cost.)

Conversely, JFK took the world to the brink of a nuclear catastrophe by betraying the Cuban refugees at the Bay of Pigs. Their force, trained and armed by the CIA, landed at playa Girón to advance towards Havana and unseat Castro’s communist regime.

The Kennedy administration had promised air support, without which the mission was doomed to failure. Yet at the last moment Kennedy got cold feet. No air support arrived, and the invading force was cut to pieces on the beaches. The Soviets got the message: the president was a weakling. The Cuban Missile Crisis followed a few months later.

That is the real problem with weak governments: they emit wrong signals. Rather than implying with their every move that their countries will fight to the death for their interests, their body language communicates weakness and vacillation. They are scared of a fight, which means they are more likely to get it.

That’s why Joe Biden, for all his pacifist instincts, creates a real danger of war, possibly setting the whole world on fire.

Now, I don’t know if he really has Alzheimer’s or other forms of serious senile dementia. He obviously suffers from some form of cognitive decline, but take it from me: most people his age or thereabouts aren’t what they used to be.

But, unless a serious degenerative problem exists, we learn to adapt, compensating with wisdom and foresight for any loss of sharpness. For example, I never used to rely on written notes when speaking in public, but now I do. Jotting down the odd note also helps to keep one’s appointments.

Even though I occasionally poke fun at Biden’s bloopers, I have no bona fide reason to doubt he has found ways to keep himself on the straight and narrow when it comes to policy decisions. And if he does need help, he has a large staff of advisers to provide it.

That’s not the point. The point is that, every time the president confuses his sister with his wife or a congresswoman with his dead son, he sends a message of weakness urbi et orbi.

That emboldens the neighbourhood bullies by giving them ideas of impunity. And it terrifies America’s allies who feel the protective umbrella just might have been folded.

The two major geopolitical bullies are Russia and China, whose Damocles sword is hanging over the heads of the West’s allies: the Ukraine and other former Soviet colonies, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, perhaps even Australia.

The bullies know that even at his best Biden’s instincts pulled him towards pacifism or at least isolationism. Now that he is no longer at his rather puny best, far from it, his chaotic retreat from Afghanistan, relatively unimportant as such, sends an invigorating message to enemies of the West: America appears to be ready to renege on her international security commitments.

“What if…” questions are flashing through the minds of global bullies, and their eyes light up. Of the two I mentioned, Russia is more dangerous by far, even though she may be physically weaker than the other bully, China.

China is becoming the world’s economic powerhouse, and the Chinese may well feel they have more to lose than to gain by challenging the West militarily. They too have learned the value of projecting, rather than using, strength. Everybody knows their regime is both evil and well-armed, and that knowledge suffices as China’s protective mechanism.

Xi and his communist clique have an ideological commitment to annex Taiwan at some point, but they may well be pragmatic enough to wait until their growing economic strength turns into outright dominance. The Chinese have infinite reservoirs of patience, and they may feel that time is on their side.

With Russia things are different. Putin’s kleptofascist regime is running the country into the economic ground. There is no guarantee that the Stalinist mythology of Russia’s greatness will keep the impoverished populace docile indefinitely, especially in the absence of Stalinist violence. In what the Russians call a war between the TV set and the fridge, the TV set may suffer defeat at some point.

Foreign adventures are a well-known stratagem for distracting the populace from empty fridges, and Putin’s sabres are rattling with an ear-piercing jangle. Looking at Biden’s feeble attempts to negotiate the steps or to remember which country is which, Putin may well decide to grab what’s left of the Ukraine – or even to attack the NATO members in the Baltic area.

That by itself would be catastrophic, regardless of whether or not America will honour her security guarantees, or who will emerge the winner if she does. That’s why it’s vitally important that Biden be removed from office, be that by invoking the 25^th Amendment or forcing him to resign of his own accord.

Looking at his possible successors, it’s hard to expect them to be much better. In fact, hard though it may seem to believe, they may well be much worse.

But at least they may be compos mentis, sufficiently so not to communicate exploitable weakness. I’d love to tell you their names – but I forget.

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.