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Today’s article on Garcia Lorca in The Times gives the lie to the old adage “History is written by the victors”. For the victors’ voice is no longer heard in any discussion of the Spanish Civil War and its key figures.

That narrative is dominated by the single-minded champions of the losing, Loyalist, side. Franco is universally reviled, with the excesses of his regime flagged as the only testimony to the brutality of the Civil War. The Republican cause is invariably portrayed as just.

One has to search high and wide for any balanced account, never mind one sympathetic to Franco. No one gives the Caudillo any merit points for stopping a communist takeover of Spain that, had it succeeded, would have turned the country into the Pyrenean version of Bulgaria.

Nor is Franco given credit for what’s colloquially known as “The Spanish Miracle”, the country’s economic revival in the late ‘50s, when Spain reversed centuries of decline to become a player in the global economic games.

History, in other words, is these days written neither by the victors nor by the losers. It’s written by socialists, or liberals if you’d rather, regardless of which side they supported in which war. They use powerful binoculars when looking at the atrocities suffered by the Left, then flip the instrument the other way around (or better still, put the lens covers on) to look at the atrocities committed by the Left.

In that spirit, the article in question waxes tragic about the execution of Lorca by the dastardly Nationalists, adding that he was one of the 140,000-150,000 people executed by Franco between 1936 and 1947.

I’m not going to dispute the numbers given, even though I could mention some history books that cite figures closer to 50,000. Nor am I going to exonerate Franco from even the lower number of executions – shooting defenceless people isn’t nice.

But ‘nice’ isn’t an adjective that can be honestly applied to any civil war in history. These are traditionally fought with bloodthirsty passions by both sides.

Some 200,000, for example, died in the English Civil Wars of the 17^th century (out of a population of about six million). In the American Civil War, the country suffered almost a million casualties, more than in all her other wars combined. The internecine violence that erupted during and after the French Revolution claimed hundreds of thousands of deaths, tens of thousands by execution in the Vendée region alone. The Russian Civil war took uncountable (and uncounted) millions of lives.

No number of wrongs make a right, but Franco’s atrocities should be put in context. The left side of a broader picture must include the murders perpetrated by the Loyalist side, whose number was similar to Franco’s, but whose targets were different. For example, the Left murdered, in variously baroque ways, 6,832 priests (including 13 bishops), monks and nuns.

The article mentions casually but accusingly that: “Spain remains neutral as war breaks out in Europe but Franco’s sympathies lie with the Axis powers”. Fancy that, who could have thought.

Is the implication that Franco should have sympathised with Stalin, who had attempted to turn Spain into his communist colony, rather than with Hitler and Mussolini, who helped him thwart that tragedy? It’s the first part of the quoted sentence that’s significant, not the second, especially if left unqualified.

For Franco indeed managed to withstand the tremendous pressure applied by the Nazis to enter the war on their side. And he even refused the Nazis right of passage for an attack on Gibraltar. In fact, keeping Spain out of that war was one of Franco’s great achievements. (His Blue Division did fight at Stalingrad, but all its soldiers were volunteers who couldn’t forget Stalinist crimes committed on their soil.)

Coming from a country in which hundreds of great cultural figures were either murdered by the Soviets or forced into exile, I deeply regret Lorca’s death. He was a fine poet, although, having read his work in translations only, I can’t really judge how fine.

The Times writer knows no such limitations: “Alongside Picasso, Dalí and Miró, he was a key figure in a cultural renaissance of a stature that Spain had not seen since the 17th century.” This means one has to look at painters to find cultural figures of a stature comparable to Lorca’s. No other writers need apply.

That view is worse than wrong; it’s ignorant. For Lorca’s Spanish contemporaries included such seminal thinkers and essayists as Ortega y Gasset, Miguel Unamuno and George Santayana, along with poets as accomplished as Lorca himself, such as the Machado brothers, especially Antonio.

None of them could match Lorca’s iconic status as a martyr to the left-wing cause, but when one talks about cultural renaissances, such factors ought to be discounted. But they never are, are they?

Perhaps history is indeed written by the victors, even if they lost on the battlefield. For the Left have won their surreptitious revolution, a victory gained not by martial valour but by gradual subversion through the media and educational institutions.

And if you don’t believe me, compare The Times of 100 years ago with the same paper today.  

Girls aren’t what they used to be, and I suppose that’s what all old curmudgeons are saying.

In the times long since passed, some girls were nicer than others. Some were tomboys, others unapologetically feminine. Some were pretty, others described as ‘beautiful eyes’ or ‘great personality’. Some were clever, some just bubbly. Some played chess when others played with fluffy toys. Some were virtuous, others less so.

But one thing uniting them all was that they were all girls, born and bred. While some of them, mainly those from the sunnier climes, had more facial hair than others, very few had bushy beards at any time of their lives.

Those who were so cursed sometimes turned that defect to pecuniary advantage by performing at county fairs, sharing the limelight with men sporting breasts or women who could smoke cigarettes without using their lips.

All that has changed. According to the modern ethos, some girls may have beards and even penises. And some can even compete against other women weightlifters in the Olympics.

This brings us to Laurel, née Gavin, Hubbard, 43, who is to represent New Zealand in the upcoming Olympic Games. Laurel will be a firm favourite in the women’s superheavyweight division, mainly because she had been Gavin until ‘transitioning’ at age 35 (don’t you just love those neologistic coinages?).

I don’t know if Laurel, née Gavin, still boasts the male appendage but, as far as the International Olympic Committee is concerned, that doesn’t matter one way or the other.

Men don’t have to undergo complete surgery to qualify for women’s events. All they have to do is keep their testosterone count below 10 nanomoles per litre for at least 12 months.

Now, given the pharmacological advances of which modernity is justly proud, I’m sure a quick course of testosterone suppressors can do the trick well enough. Yet someone who had a full dose of that hormone for the first 35 years of his life still possesses a body built by male biochemistry.

Since, all else being equal, men are inherently stronger than women, I’m even ashamed to make the point about the unfairness of it all – stating the blindingly obvious isn’t what writers should do.

No such compunctions for Kereyn Smith, New Zealand Olympic Committee chief executive. “We acknowledge,” she allowed, “that gender identity in sport is a highly sensitive and complex issue requiring a balance between human rights and fairness on the field of play.”

No, dear, the issue isn’t, or rather shouldn’t be, at all sensitive and complex. And the balance required isn’t one between human rights and fairness. It’s between madness and sanity. Or, if you’d rather, between seemliness and unseemliness.

Yet, while it’s still marginally permissible to discuss the fairness of the issue, it never occurs to anyone that the topic should never even arise in any sane society. Hence 96 per cent of the 2,418 respondents in an Australian poll thought it was unfair that Hubbard should compete against women.

Did any of them suggest it was cloud cuckoo land for this subject even to come up? I bet many felt that way, but then decided that valour wasn’t the only thing discretion was the better part of.

Discretion is also mandatory for anyone finding himself at odds with a prevailing orthodoxy. That juggernaut can crush anyone, once it gets rolling. Best to keep out of its way.

Thus an intrepid soul daring to use such outdated words as ‘seemly’ and ‘unseemly’ is likely to be mocked and ostracised. The orthodoxy has spoken, and it has stated in no uncertain terms that nothing is unseemly, provided it serves to knock out the last bricks of civilisation still standing.

Defiance of everything seen as normal and decent for millennia is not only welcomed but actively promoted – starting at the elementary school, or even kindergarten, level. No one even considers the long-term devastation such anomie will wreak on society. No one even recognises that such a thing as society exists, and that it’s a garden worth tending.

And no society can survive without a set of norms: moral, legal and aesthetic. In fact, it’s such norms that keep the atoms of individuals from spinning out of the social molecule to create chaos.

That said, a norm isn’t an umbrella under which everyone can fit. Some people can’t, and others won’t, do so. Yet it’s up to society to decide which deviation may or may not be tolerated. A free society will allow any number of them, but an enduring society will also know how to protect itself from disintegration.

Gender dysphoria in itself presents no more danger to society than phocomelia (being born with no limbs) does. Sufferers from either deformity deserve our love, compassion and support.

What they don’t deserve is a claim to normality and exemption from any natural restrictions. When transsexuals insist on being accepted on their own terms, and society concurs through its subversive mouthpieces able to impose a new orthodoxy, norms are no longer seen as normal. Society tries a flipflop and lands smack on its head.

I dare anyone, even a fully paid-up ‘liberal’, to claim he doesn’t wince, at least inwardly, at the sight of a sideshow like Laurel-Gavin. Natural instincts aren’t always laudable, but sometimes they are more honest and noble than pseudointellectual contortions passing for morality. This is one of those cases.

P.S. In a parallel development, now it’s Boris Becker’s turn to fall foul of the new orthodoxy. When he was doing commentary on a Wimbledon match involving a Hungarian player, the camera lingered on the player’s fiancée.

Boris remarked: “They do say they have the most beautiful women in Hungary. I wouldn’t know that, but she’s certainly very pretty.”

The transgressor didn’t realise that any comment on a woman’s appearance is these days prohibited. The ensuing public outcry, with words like ‘sexist’ and ‘chauvinist’ most salient, must have reminded him of the way the strudel crumbles. Boris is fortunate that the lady in question isn’t a converted man, for in that case he would have been accused of mockery.

In addition to his first-hand knowledge of tennis, John McEnroe has the gift of the gab, otherwise known as a big (or motor) mouth. This he has parlayed into a successful career as tennis commentator.

For my money, he is the best there is, although a part of me misses our dear old Dan Maskell. Who can forget his long silences interspersed with the occasional “I say” and “A rather immature shot, that”?

McEnroe’s style is more effusive, reflecting his temperament and American Irishness. He talks a lot, which loquacity sometimes gets him in trouble. As it has this time.

But first, let’s set the backdrop to the story.

Emma Raducanu is an 18-year-old British tennis player ranked somewhere in the 300s. Her ancestry is typical of female British players.

She was born in Canada to a Romanian father and Chinese mother. The family moved to London when Emma was two, and she took up tennis soon thereafter.

Though she grew up in England, Emma pays homage to her eclectic heritage by claiming a fondness for Romanian food and Taiwanese TV series. Yet she never mentions ice hockey, leaving Canadians wondering where they went wrong.

This year Emma got a wild card into Wimbledon and used it brilliantly: she got to the fourth round, which is rare for someone playing only her second professional tournament.

Her achievement instantly served a useful reminder that professional sport seldom brings out the best in human nature. Thus, every time a fly-by-night sports star rises, our papers burst with hysterical enthusiasm liberally tinged with faux patriotism.

Emma, they said this time, is well on her way to making millions in endorsement contracts. The papers may well be right. She has everything going for her: solid game, good looks, effervescence, background that screams diversity. Did we say millions? Make it billions, especially if she gets into the quarters.

Boris Johnson sent little Emma a message saying the whole country was behind her, even though most of the country didn’t have a clue who she was. Quarters? That’s setting our sights way too low. She’s going to win the whole tournament, and then it’s “Arise, Dame Emma”.

She didn’t win the whole tournament, nor even the fourth round. Playing on a show court for the first time in her life, and carrying the weight of the entire United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland on her slender shoulders, Emma dropped a close first set.

The poor girl then hyperventilated in the middle of the second. Experiencing dizziness and difficulty breathing, she had to quit after a medical timeout. Emma was then accompanied to the exit, holding her stomach and barely acknowledging the tumultuous ovation.

And then Mac got in trouble. I’ll quote his statement in full for you to figure out what was so offensive about it:

“I feel bad for Emma, I mean obviously it got – it appears it got a bit too much, as is understandable…

“How much can players handle? It makes you look at the guys that have been around and the girls for so long, how well they can handle it. 

“These guys that can keep their composure and the girls out there are absolutely amazing – so we have to appreciate the players that are able to do it so well and hopefully she will learn from this experience.”

This sounds like a sympathetic comment by a man who knows what it takes to play on Centre Court for the first time. Mac was Emma’s age when he made it to the Wimbledon semis, and he knows that mental strength is as essential to success as a big serve and an armour-piercing forehand.

Not the most insightful or original of comments, I’d say, but how was it offensive? I mean, Mac didn’t say the trouble with Emma was that she was a girl, and a Sino-Romanian one to boot. He didn’t even suggest she must have been having her period or suffering from PMT.

Had he said anything along those lines, public decapitation would have been the only fit punishment, everyone is in agreement on that. But he didn’t, so where’s the problem?

If you have to ask, you must have been living on some faraway planet outside our galaxy. Here on Planet Earth, any comment about a woman is borderline criminal if it falls short of describing her as a giant able to lead a bayonet charge over the top against a machinegun encasement.

The social media screamed with demands that McEnroe be summarily sacked, and the messages highlighted in all caps words like DISGUSTING and REVOLTING.

Harriet Minter, a London hack who specialises in such vital areas as women’s rights and general diversity, wrote: “Is there anything more annoying than a man telling a woman she’s not hurt she’s just emotional? No, no there isn’t. Please ask him to stop.”

Er, let me think. Is there? Actually, there is, and I’d be happy to give Harriet a long list of worse annoyances, with her close to the top. No, not a good idea. If I did that, I’d probably have my collar felt.

Chloe Hubbard, the executive editor of The Independent, a paper only marginally to the right of the Pravda of my youth, added practical advice to scathing criticism: “Feel like the producers could have given McEnroe a bit of a better mental health briefing ahead of him sharing ALL the views there.”

One wonders what such a briefing would contain. I got it: “John, you can talk about men’s mental pressures to your heart’s content, but when it comes to women, keep your big mouth shut.”

The gist is that women aren’t just as sturdy as men – they are much, infinitely, more so. Every woman, even a very young one, is a superwoman impervious to the same pressures that can paralyse all those male wimps. Hyperventilation? You say that H-word again, and…

Emma herself interrupted this imaginary monologue by posting a message in which she implicitly exonerated Mac from his slanderous comment about pressure having got to her. “I was playing the best tennis of my life in front of an amazing crowd this week and I think the whole experience caught up with me.”

The upshot? The message is clear enough, reminiscent of Miranda Rights: “You have the right to remain silent, but anything you say about women can and will be used against you in a court of public opinion – if not one of law.”

Let me tell you, the list of things one can’t say is getting longer than in the Soviet Union, circa 1970. You know, the totalitarian state known in some quarters as the ‘Empire of Evil’?

International laws say that only the sparkling wines produced in the French province of Champagne are to be called ‘champagne’ – with the marque ‘cognac’ reserved exclusively for the brandies produced in Cognac. All other similar beverages must be called, respectively, ‘sparkling wine’ or ‘brandy’.

The Soviets, however, treated those laws with their customary blithe contempt. Hence I grew up drinking ‘Soviet champagne’ and ‘Armenian cognac’ (sometimes in the same glass).

The memory isn’t altogether pleasant: the lighter beverage was a treacly, gassy concoction that got stuck to one’s gullet and refused to go any further. As for the ‘cognac’, it too was sugary with a smell of bedbugs that stayed in one’s nostrils for weeks after consumption – not that such long intervals were ever customary in my practice.

Since leaving Russia in 1973, I’ve made sure neither beverage would cross my lips ever again. Actually, some 30 years ago a friend gave me a bottle of Soviet ‘champagne’, but it has remained unopened. However, it has proved jolly useful in my cooking: I use it as a mallet to pound chicken or veal escalopes. The possibility of this particular mallet exploding in my hand adds some welcome frisson to the procedure.

The collapse of the Soviet Union has done little to heighten the Russians’ respect for international trade laws. Hence they’ve been stubbornly labelling their sparkling wines as champagne, even though these days the real thing is widely available thanks to French imports.

Yet the other day Putin decided to go the Soviets one better. The Duma passed a federal law confirming that the Russian sparkling wines would continue to be called ‘champagne’, and the French could go boil un oeuf. However, a new twist was added: henceforth it’ll be only Russian champagnes to be so designated, while the imported French products must be labelled ‘sparkling wines’.

In other words, champagnes are no longer champagnes, but Russian sparkling wines are. Orwell’s dystopic fantasies come together with Dali’s paintings and Golding’s Lord of the Flies to create a parallel reality.

The French predictably screamed bloody murder, and at first it looked as if they might bring the identity thieves to account. Last Friday, Moët Hennessy announced it was suspending supplies to Russia, meaning that those Russian ‘oligarchs’ would only be able to bathe their whores in water, rather than in Dom Perignon produced by the obstreperous firm.

But then things went back to normal. It turned out the suspension didn’t come from any principled stance. It’s just that Moët Hennessy needs some time to print new labels for the bottles to be exported to Russia, expurgating the C-word that now belongs to Russia by (her own) law. The reports don’t mention whether the cognacs produced by the same company will now be labelled ‘French brandy’, although this sounds logical.

Other ideas spring to mind that Russian legislators may find attractive, especially if Vlad likes them too. Scotch whisky may now be called ‘Scottish barley vodka’, BMW cars could be renamed ‘Bavarian Lada’, and parmesan could go by ‘Italian cheese-like product’.

If the Russians like such ideas, I’ll be happy to provide many others. Meanwhile, I’d rather draw your attention to the general tendency of which this thievery is indicative.

Putin clearly wishes to establish Russia’s status as a rogue state, mostly defined by its hostility to the West. But more important, he wishes to impose his will on the West by a chain of escalating steps.

The escalation is both implicit and inevitable. If the West accepts the theft of its historic trademarks, it may also, in due course, accept the theft of European territories.

Many techniques are used to that end, including, in this case, one described by Orwell in one of his essays on Nazi Germany (written at a time when he still hadn’t identified the Soviet Union as a parallel evil). As I recall, he wrote that the Nazis indulged in ridiculous pageants and rituals as a way of saying to the people: “We know this is ridiculous, you know it too, and we know that you know. But you’ll still be forced to do as we say, and wipe that sneer off your face.”

In other words, surreal displays like the rebaptising of champagne are important not so much for what they are as for what they communicate. The subtext trumps the text.

And the subtext is exactly the same as, for example, in the on-going ransomware attack on Western businesses around the world, launched by Russian hackers with, as a minimum, their government’s acquiescence.

I just wonder if the thousands of American businesses held to electronic ransom fall into the 16 categories specified by Biden as being off-limits for Russian hacker raids. If they don’t, there doesn’t seem to be much the Americans can do about this: the Russians aren’t overstepping the boundaries set by El Swifto in the White House.

Not that there is any appetite discernible anywhere in the West for stopping Russian banditry in its tracks. The cowardly, supine submission of French champagne producers is only one in the long series of surrenders, accompanied by open mouths, closed eye and raised arms.

The Russians have got away with many other electronic attacks, trade thefts, illegal territory grabs and murders committed with variously sophisticated weapons in the middle of Western cities. Each time the West first threw up its collective arms in horror, only then to do so in surrender.

The cumulative consequences could be dire, and don’t say I didn’t warn you.

We are all champions of diversity, aren’t we? We have been taught that the highest moral commandment of all has been left out of the Decalogue only by oversight.

The commandment sounds a bit cumbersome, lacking the pinpoint concision of the old ten. But to make up for its prolixity, it raises morality to a whole new level. To wit: “Any staff of employees shall reflect the ethnic makeup of the population as a whole, but with an extra emphasis on employees representing groups perceived to suffer, or ever to have suffered, discrimination.”

Complying with this commandment supersedes any other considerations, such as competence. Hence, if the number of the formerly or currently oppressed employees falls below the mandated quota, this gap must be filled regardless of the new hirees’ ability to do the job.

This is a difficult concept to get one’s head around, especially when people’s lives are at stake, as they are in medicine. But, as far as the NHS is concerned, some concerns are higher than mere physical survival, and diversity is prime among them.

To that noble end the NHS procured the services of Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba, putting her on a collision course with the superseded commandment of “thou shalt not kill”. Then a six-year-old boy was delivered to her care at a Leicester hospital.

The good doctor diagnosed the child with gastroenteritis, failing to spot the markers of impending sepsis, such as a kidney infection that showed clearly on the blood test. As a result, Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba found herself in trouble, which wasn’t, however, as bad as the boy’s. He died.

That spectacle of negligence and incompetence was so egregious that both the NHS and the courts had to act. In 2015, Dr Bawa-Garba was convicted of manslaughter and given a two-year suspended sentence. She was also struck off.

Such a cluster of punishments is rare in the medical profession, but Dr Bawa-Garba qualified with room to spare, which is more than can be said for her ability to practise medicine.

However, the NHS is known for its generosity, which may at times be biased but never understated. Hence Dr Bawa-Garba was invited back into the fold, and the other day the medical tribunal ruled that she even no longer had to work under supervision.

She, decided the tribunal, was now “performing above the expectations for her trainee level”. That may be, but I for one would be suspicious of a doctor who is still a trainee in her mid-forties – this even regardless of prior convictions for manslaughter.

Understandably, the dead boy’s parents feel less magnanimous than the NHS, but then they can’t see the forest of a higher morality for the trees of their private, and therefore immaterial, grief.  

The victim’s mother proved her narrow-minded focus by saying: “I think it’s absolutely disgusting that she’s been able to go back to work like nothing ever happened. She killed my son. We have to live with this until the day we die.”

To be fair, the NHS’s commitment to diversity may not be the only reason for its reinstating Dr Bawa-Garba, or hiring her in the first place. The NHS is finding it increasingly hard to find doctors, which leads to some laxity in its demand for proper qualifications.

For example, even foreign doctors who don’t know enough English to communicate with patients are welcomed with open arms. For the same reason, existing doctors are overworked, which was cited as the reason for Dr Bawa-Garba’s little mistake. Apparently, she killed that poor boy at the end of a 12-hour shift.

The downside of such long hours is clear, but then so is the medical upside. Continuity of care is an important concept in medicine, and it’s not always a good idea for two doctors, not one, to look after the same patient on the same day.

This insight comes courtesy of the doctors among my friends. They also explain why the NHS is so short-handed.

This gets us back on the track of the diversity commandment and other such perversions, as part of the reason so many doctors are leaving the NHS in the prime of their lives. It all boils down to why young people choose this vocation to begin with.

Some are doubtless attracted mainly by the possible pecuniary rewards, but most simply want to treat, possibly save, patients. What they don’t want is to spend half their time filling up endless forms, attending sensitivity courses, reading illiterate memos issued by diversity directors and assorted optimisers of facilitation and facilitators of optimisation. Nor are they happy to see the number of hospital beds cut for lack of funding, while those parasites come in at six-figure salaries.

Yet this is what the NHS forces them to do, proving yet again that any giant public structure serves mainly the state, not the ostensible end users of its services. After a couple of decades of getting swamped in that fashion, good, conscientious doctors become cynical first, jaded second and prematurely retired third.

The NHS then has to search high and wide, looking for some, any, new doctors to take up the slack. In come the Bawa-Garbas of this world, who tick all the important boxes except one. The box of their ability to keep patients alive remains blank.  

The Frenchman taught that all knowledge came out of comparing two or more things. That may be, generally speaking, said the Russian. But there are two things that shan’t be compared on pain of imprisonment: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

The paper-trained Duma obediently rubberstamped Vlad’s new take on epistemology, turning it into the law of the land. However, to be fair to Vlad, he hasn’t banned any old comparison between the two. What he made illegal is showing that they had something in common.

No one would get in too much trouble by saying that, unlike the despotic Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia was a paragon of freedom and democracy. It’s only when some kind of similarity is suggested that comparisons become outlawed.

This new decree effectively proscribes any study of the period between 1933 and 1945. For any scholarly examination will show that the two regimes had enough in common to be considered dizygotic, though not identical, twins.

Both were dictatorships, with one man making every decision that mattered. Both hated the West, in particular its Anglo-Saxon part. Both had the distinction of being the only countries in Europe that boasted a wide network of concentration camps.

This last commonality wasn’t exactly coincidental. For the Soviets had begun to develop their GULAG system before Stalin took over, and certainly long before anyone outside the Nazi inner circle ever heard of Hitler.

Since the two regimes felt visceral kinship, partly coming from their shared status of post-Versailles pariahs, they pooled their expertise. Thus the NKVD-SS Friendship Society was formed in early 1940, which provided a framework for a fruitful exchange of ideas.

The NKVD taught the SS how to industrialise what Engels called “special guarded places”, linking them into a wide and efficient system. And the SS kindly shared with the NKVD their sophisticated torture instruments, which achieved the same results as the rubber truncheons favoured by the Russians, but without being as labour-intensive.

Both regimes practiced mass murder, but, if anything, the Germans compared favourably with the Russians in that respect. In Germany, it all came down to the accident of birth. Citizens who had the bad luck of being born to an ethnic group that had no right to live were exterminated. Yet anyone outside those groups was left unmolested, provided he kept his head down and didn’t indulge in objectionable politics.

In Russia, state violence was more comprehensive and largely arbitrary. Even after the upper (or just educated) classes and the industrious peasants were wiped out, no one could heave a sigh of relief.

Anybody, regardless of rank, could be picked up and tortured to death for the flimsiest of reasons or none. Crowds of people were often rounded up in the streets and thrown into torture cellars simply because the local NKVD branch had fallen short of its monthly quota.

That way the Soviets ran up a gruesome score higher by an order of magnitude than anything the Nazis managed. Hence the two regimes, while equally evil qualitatively, still had a hierarchy of quantitative evil, with the Soviets coming on top.

The economies of both countries were socialist, though not identical. The German National Socialist Workers’ Party (NSDAP) and the Soviet Communist Party enjoyed both a political and economic monopoly in their countries. Even the flags of the two countries were the same socialist red, although with different superimposed symbols.

But there were differences, again in favour of Germany. There the economy was corporatist, meaning that the state effectively controlled all the major industries, but without nationalising them.

The previous owners remained in place (unless they were Jewish), but they were turned into de facto managers. They were told what to produce and how much to charge, but they remained in their old offices and even generated some profits for themselves. Small businesses, such as shops, cooperatives, restaurants and so on, carried on as before.

The Soviet version of socialism was total, not to say totalitarian. Something like 85 per cent of all enterprises, and all the sizeable ones, belonged to the state, with the rest barely tolerated, or sometimes not. (You’ll notice that most of today’s Western countries are reaching tropistically for the Stalinist size of the public sector.)

Most important, on 23 August, 1939, the two countries became allies. The alliance, known as the Soviet-Nazi Pact, was a sine qua non of the Second World War. Without guaranteed security of their eastern borders, and the millions of tonnes of Soviet supplies of strategic materials (from rare metals to grain), the Nazis wouldn’t have been able to conquer even Poland, let alone Western Europe.

The Secret Protocol to the Pact divided Europe between Nazi Germany and the USSR. Germany started claiming her part of the loot on 1 September, the Soviets entered the war on Germany’s side on the 17^th. Once the two predators devoured Poland, they declared an eternal “friendship annealed by blood.”

Which country was more barbaric in treating their conquered populations is debatable. If anything, if Jews are taken out of the equation, the Soviets were even more cannibalistic.

For example, the Nazis didn’t shoot out of hand tens of thousands of Polish prisoners in their part of occupied Poland, which the Soviets did in theirs. Both countries practised mass deportations, but the Nazis sent their captives to work at factories and farms, whereas the Soviets sent theirs to the death camps.

Obviously no two countries are, or ever have been, identical. The Latin qualification of mutatis, mutandis always applies whenever parallels are drawn. Yet to ban drawing any parallels, especially those as obvious as between the two most evil regimes in history, is tantamount to banning critical thought, free speech and history as a science.

Interestingly, various subversive groups, such as Antifa, BLM or any extreme left factions in Western parliaments, happily compare their countries to Nazi Germany, even though the similarities are small to non-existent. Whereas in Russia anyone who dares to compare the two dizygotic twins as I’ve just done could be prosecuted.

That’s the difference between countries that are still residually free and Putin’s Russia, the darling of the fascisoid European fringes. Then again, since Putin finances most of their parties (and, one suspects, sympathetic pundits), their affection may not be entirely disinterested.    

Such is my considered and suitably moderate response to Angie’s attempt to ban Britons from the continent.

There’s also an element of schadenfreude involved in my reaction: we managed to sneak into France through the window that opened a crack a fortnight ago.

Sitting pretty in the midst of our Burgundian woods, I can now cock a snook at Angie and, more important, comment on this nonsense in a detached and disinterested manner.

Angie Merkel and her adopted son Manny Macron are genuinely concerned about the spread of a deadly contagion Brexititis simplex, of which Britons are prime carriers.

Hence they are trying to designate Britain as a ‘country of concern’. The concern is real: if unchecked, Brexititis can spread so rapidly that it’ll infect many EU members before Angie and Manny can do anything about it.

However, several Mediterranean countries oppose the suggested cordon sanitaire. They see Brexititis as the lesser evil compared to a likely ensuing pandemic of an even deadlier blight, Conditio paupertas, afflicting economies dependent on tourism.

Conditio paupertas may destroy immunity to Brexititis in any body politic. Greece, Malta, Spain, Cyprus and Portugal are particularly susceptible to the virus, and they are fighting tooth and nail to thwart what they see as Angie’s attack on everything they hold sacred, mainly money.

They are increasingly leaning towards relying on the new vaccine, Independentia instans, leaving the population exposed to Brexititis, but offering wide protection against Conditio paupertas.

It has to be said that Angie and Brigitte, who have shared custody of Manny, lately have been neglecting their ward. As a result, Manny was trounced in last week’s regional elections, where he was universally seen as an enfant grossly terrible.

That has evidently strengthened his resolve to keep Brexititis at bay, even at the risk of exposing his own country to Conditio paupertas. To that end, he is pushing all Europeans to submit to the cosmetic surgical procedure colloquially known as ‘cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face’.

You notice that I’m expressing the situation in medical terms, which is proof of my thoroughly modern outlook on life. Every condition must be medicalised to be taken seriously, which is a requirement I accept wholeheartedly.

However, Manny rejects the diktats of modernity and insists on musical metaphors instead. Thus he refers to the self-mutilation that Angie proposes and he supports as ‘harmonised response’, whereas in fact it appears to be widely discordant.

He then mixes his musical and medical metaphors by saying: “We are in concert and perfectly aligned with Angela Merkel. Vigilance with the emergence of this new variant, and of an absolutely indispensable European co-ordination.”

Manny is so much in concert with Angie that he has picked up from her the annoying German custom of treating verbs as dispensable afterthoughts. Yet his eagerness to play second fiddle to Angie in her attempt to keep Britons out is unmistakable.

That’s why I am so happy that we’ve managed to get in before the proposed measures are in place. Unless Manny decides to eject Britons already on the continent, we are in for a most congenial summer.

But hold on for a moment, someone is banging on the door. Let me see who it is…

P.S. Peter ‘Haw Haw’ Hitchens thinks the Royal Navy is stupid to have sailed past the Crimea, but Putin is clever to have annexed it, along with a good chunk of Eastern Ukraine. I fear for Peter should a war break out between Russia and Nato: wartime laws can have a strangulating effect.

Having got bad puns out of my system, I can now concentrate on serious matters. Specifically, on the EU gauleiters who have ganged up on Hungary’s PM Viktor Orbán.

Every time those ‘leaders’ try to put forth a serious argument, the only thing they ever demonstrate is that unfortunate combination of low intelligence and high temper.

The occasion that gave them the chance to prove this point is Hungary’s new law, banning the depiction or promotion of homosexuality to children under 18.

They all insist that this law makes a mockery of democracy and the values the EU holds sacred. The EU, they say, isn’t just about economic prosperity. (Considering the state of most of the member economies, that goes without saying.)

The EU, they explain, is really about a shared commitment to noble values. Among them, one infers, is the mandate to indoctrinate children in the delights of homo- and transsexuality.

I don’t recall statements to that effect in any of the EU founding documents, nor indeed in the writings of the founders. But who said new values can’t be added as we go along, every week if necessary?

The attack was led by the Dutch PM Mark Rutte. “For me,” he said, “Hungary has no place in the EU anymore.”

Rutte should be careful what he wishes for. The awful contrivance commanding his unwavering loyalty may not be able to withstand any more departures.

Hungary, along with Poland and Slovenia, are on the brink already, and, by Macron’s own admission, even France would vote for Frexit, given the choice. In general, one gets the impression that the EU’s love of democracy is selective. It’s mainly used as a cudgel to bust any majority opinion deemed undesirable.

Luxemburg, that European powerhouse, spoke next, through its openly homosexual PM, Xavier Bettel. “To be nationally blamed, to be considered as not normal, to be considered as a danger for young people – it’s not realising that being gay is not a choice,” he said.

It’s amazing how many falsehoods and rhetorical solecisms this lot can squeeze into one sentence. First, I don’t see how a ban on teaching children certain practices is tantamount to laying blame.

For example, not many people this side of the Islamic world blame people who drink moderate amounts of alcohol. That doesn’t mean that schoolchildren should be taught how to mix mojitos, dry martinis and tequila sunrises. They can acquire this knowledge on their own when they grow up, and the same goes for learning about sexual variants.

As to being abnormal, that’s precisely what homosexuality had been considered throughout history until the past couple of decades. Now that modernity has found an extra gear in its drive to expunge history’s greatest civilisation, propaganda of homosexuality provides a useful boost.

But how can it conceivably be regarded as normal? Since we are such staunch democrats, and democracy is after all a triumph of the majority, homosexuality certainly isn’t normal numerically. The biggest study (over 20,000 subjects) I’ve ever seen found that just over one per cent of us are that way inclined. Homosexual activists insist it’s 10 per cent.

Whether we accept either calculation or their average, it’s clear that most people’s concept of normality doesn’t include anal intercourse between two men, to name one practice found in the rich panoply of life.

As to homosexuality not being a choice, it’s a non sequitur. Being a kleptomaniac or a congenitally violent person is often not a choice either. What is a choice is whether or not to act on the congenital predisposition – by stealing, killing or committing unnatural sex acts.

Speaking of the latter, people who are inclined towards necrophilia, bestiality and coprophilia didn’t choose to be that way either. Does it mean they are normal? Should those perversions be taught at school too?

Before any objections are raised, I hasten to reassure you that I don’t fully equate other sexual perversions, kleptomania or propensity for violence with homosexuality. I’m only pointing out that ‘pro-choice’ arguments are full of gaping logical holes.

This cuts no ice with the Belgian PM Alexander De Croo. He repeats Bettel’s animadversions, adding a few embellishments of his own: “Being homosexual is not a choice,” he said to Orbán. “Being homophobic is a choice. We cannot accept a legislation that is legitimising such a behaviour.”

By De Croo’s standards, I’m not only homophobic, but heterophobic as well – I don’t believe children should learn about any kind of sex at school. That responsibility has for centuries rested with parents, and by and large they’ve managed.

Yet the whole thrust of modern education is to disfranchise parents by putting the onus exclusively on the state’s meaty shoulders. This is in line with Marx’s prescription first put forth in the Communist Manifesto – children should be raised as wards of the state, totally obedient to its diktats.

Note how any parents daring to take exception to the stuff pumped down their children’s throats are shouted down and even threatened with imprisonment. It’s Britain I’m talking about here, not Red China.

Many of the parent’s objections have to do with sex education, whose prime if unspoken aim is to destroy the family, the strongest potential dissident against state tyranny. Instruction in normal or abnormal sex pursues not educational but political objectives, and these have nothing to do with democracy, ostensibly so dear to the EU’s rotten heart.

In that regard, I liked the last sentence in De Croo’s comment: “We cannot accept a legislation that is legitimising such a behaviour.”

‘We’ means the EU, which has been lying for decades that member states retain some autonomy. The lie is exposed by every word coming out of the mouths of EU gauleiters, who make it clear member states can pass any law they wish, but only provided the EU likes it.

This sentiment was reiterated by Angela Merkel, who said: “We all made it very clear here what fundamental values we are pursuing.” The European Commission, she explained, “will now continue to deal with the Hungarian law”.

My guess is that the rubber-stamp European Court for Human Rights will now be told to disavow the new law. That will give Orbán a stark choice: either be a good boy or leave the EU.

I hope he’ll choose the latter, but fear it’ll be the former. For now.

The scientific community (and what isn’t a community these days?) is dancing with joy. The fossilised skull on display in Hebei, China, has been identified as belonging to the hitherto unknown progenitor of man, Homo longi, the ‘Dragon man’.

Actually, I strongly believe that the first word appearing in a whole raft of Homo species, such as Homo erectus and Homo sapiens, is offensively homophobic. The former can easily be construed as describing an excited gay man, while the latter sounds like a particularly clever one.

If we reject historical nomenclatures for woke reasons, why not biological ones? It’s a distinct possibility that someone out there may feel offended by the taxonomic term Homo, which can also function as a slur. And we know that such an offence can produce a lifelong trauma, effectively destroying the person’s happiness, not to say life.

But that’s a subject for another day. What has caught my eye today is the story of the Homo longi skull, found decades ago, but only handed over to researchers in 2017.

According to the overexcited reports, Homo longi “had a brain comparable in size to that of modern humans, but sported big, almost square eye sockets [and] thick brow ridges…”

Scientists believe that this Homo is the closest relation of Homo sapiens, quite possibly the missing link that has been such a bugbear for Darwinists. Those scientists don’t even realise how right they are.

For Homo longi has survived almost unchanged to modern times, and photographs of the late Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev prove that beyond any doubt. Just compare the photo above with the description of Homo lungi.

“A brain comparable in size to that of modern humans…” – tick. “Big, almost square eye sockets…” – tick. “Thick brow ridges” – ten ticks. Such a striking similarity couldn’t possibly have been coincidental, could it?

Hence it’s Comrade Brezhnev who fills that lamentable gap in Darwin’s theory. He is both the missing link and proof that the earliest examples of our progenitors are still with us.

You might say this is conjecture, and that would be a fair point. Yet Darwin’s theory, which is universally accepted as an ironclad fact, is just as conjectural. The word ‘theory’ is a dead giveaway there: it’s closer to hypothesis than to fact.

And this particular hypothesis has a dearth of facts supporting it, while there exist an abundance of facts that at best bring it into doubt – and at worst contravene it outright.

The existence of hirsute half-apes living in caves and barely able to stay upright, only then to evolve into Bach and Newton, isn’t supported by reliable evidence, only by conjecture. In fact, the earliest signs of human habitation show that those Homos were easily as intelligent as Richard Dawkins, and quite a bit more artistic.

My problem with Darwinism as the sole explanation of man isn’t that it contradicts Genesis – it really doesn’t. God is equally capable of creating species slowly or quickly. He could easily have breathed a particle of himself into an ape and then watched it becoming human over thousands or millions of years.

What’s deplorable about Darwinism is that it’s allowed to remain merely a theory a century and a half after the publication of On the Origin of Species. Such a leeway is hardly ever granted to any other scientific theory.

The best they get is some 40-50 years. After that they become either a proven fact or a matter of strictly antiquarian interest.

The reason Darwinism still survives and is even accepted as irrefutable orthodoxy lies not in science but in its political appeal. It’s the biological answer to Marxist determinism, with both providing a simplistic explanation of life.

And modernity, the triumph of mediocrity that it is, loves a simplistic explanation – especially one seen as a knife stuck in the back of our moribund civilisation. Hence it eagerly accepts that a bone fragment found in a cave draws a realistic picture of evolution, one found in museums of natural history around the world.

It’s confidently assumed that the possessor of that bone fragment lived in caves because that’s where the fragment was found. One wonders if a thousand years from now scientists will find the skeleton of a miner killed in a coalmine and infer that Homo sapiens circa 2021 lived in collieries.

None of this in any way diminishes my admiration of the scientists who have now forged an unbreakable chain tying together the dragonfly, the ‘Dragon Man’ and Leonid Brezhnev. We all like the odd bit of sci-fi.

No one can change history, although many are trying. And the history of English royalty is truly shameful.

If you look at all our kings and queens, you’ll find they’ve all been offensively white. Judging by the fact that she is portrayed by a black actress in a recent TV series, Anne Boleyn might have been the sole exception – and some die-hard racists deny even that.

Prince Harry is doing his level best to improve this calamitous situation, but his effort may be described as too little, too late. In any case, he is so far down the line of succession that even if his children grow up to marry appropriately coloured spouses, our monarchs will remain white. Perhaps if Meghan could dump Harry and a have a child with Will… but let’s not go there.

If we could start from scratch, we’d doubtless make sure that the royal family reflected the demographic makeup of the population at large. But we can’t backtrack to the beginning, so there.

What we can do, however, is apply our progressive standards to the royal staff, and that’s precisely what the lobbying group Race Equality Matters has done. And what do you know, its findings confirm what we’ve always suspected: the Palace is infested with institutional (or is it unconscious?) racism.

Only a miserly 8.5 per cent of its staff represent various ethnic minorities. This though most of them have been recruited in London, where such groups make up 40 per cent of the population.

When this gross, borderline criminal iniquity was pointed out to the royal retainers, they were suitably contrite. “Could do better,” admitted a senior Palace spokesman. “We recognise we are not where we want to be and we want to improve.”

Where they want to be as a point of departure is at the dizzying height of 10 per cent. No wonder Raj Tulsiani, co-founder of Race Equality Matters, thinks that’s not good enough.

The Palace, he said, doesn’t “deserve a pat on the back” for expressing good intentions. “Amplifying aspirations for future inclusion, it’s nothing. It’s just words,” he added in the inimitable progressive idiom.

What kind of deeds would be deemed satisfactory? I get it. The Queen should summarily sack the Royal Equerry, Maj. Tom White, and appoint a racially appropriate replacement.

He – or better still, she – could then be given the task of dismissing the entire staff and starting a recruitment drive in certain areas of South and East London. For one thing, that would enable Her Majesty to improve her currently strained finances. After all, staffers living in Tower Hamlets are guaranteed to come cheaper than the denizens of, say, Belgravia.

That would keep Mr Tulsani happy, and his happiness is the primary, possibly only, aim of Britain’s domestic policy. However, those of us who have no say in Britain’s domestic policy, and whose happiness is very far down on the country’s list of priorities, may wonder yet again if the world has gone mad.

In a sane world, a campaign for diversity would only make some sense if ethnic minorities could be confidently shown to be underrepresented due to wilful discrimination. However, that’s not the case, quite the opposite.

If any discrimination is at all observable, it’s of the positive kind, with racial minorities receiving preferential treatment. As that great man Thomas Sowell, himself black, has shown, a private firm can’t afford to discriminate against qualified candidates.

Companies compete not just for markets, but also for staff. Good help, as the saying goes, is hard to find, and finding it is a reliable way of gaining a competitive advantage. Hence, when a qualified black or Asian applies for a job, rejecting him on racial grounds would mean cutting the company’s own commercial throat.

Dr Sowell showed that this isn’t the case mainly on American data, and race is a much more sensitive issue there than in Britain. Speaking from personal experience, whenever I was in a position to hire a talented copywriter or art director, I looked at his portfolio, not the colour of his skin. I didn’t care if it was black, brown, yellow or polka dot – and neither I’m sure does any employer these days.

Though the royal family is sometimes colloquially called the Firm, it’s certainly not a private firm. And Dr Sowell shows that discrimination is more likely to occur in the public sector, where the stakes are lower, and competence has little immediate impact on success.

However, only a madman would believe that our royals could indulge racial prejudice even if they were so afflicted. Our ‘liberal’ hacks are predominantly republican, and they constantly roam around the Palace to find a weak spot they can pounce on. If any sign of racism were detected, the clamour would become deafening.

In all such situations, no one asks the only logical question: Why do we think that ‘diversity’ is ipso facto desirable?

Surely our whole society would stand to benefit if every job in the land were filled by the most qualified candidate, irrespective of his race or any other extraneous characteristics? And surely we’d all stand to lose if such characteristics trumped relevant qualifications at hiring time?

I for one wouldn’t like to be operated on by an inept surgeon who got his job only to fill some idiotic quota. Nor would I like to have my plane flown by a bad pilot chosen on similar criteria. Would anybody?

Such questions are never asked because modernity is obsessed with form at the expense of substance. Modern barbarians whip out their calculators and scream bloody murder whenever the numbers don’t add up to some mythical virtue.

Eventually such shrieks bust the eardrums of previously normal people, and they accept madness as sanity. They end up adopting the false premises imposed on them and drawing wrong conclusion on that basis.

All I can do is offer a premise I consider right: Diversity isn’t intrinsically good. If it happens naturally, fine. But shoving it down people’s throats will make the whole society choke on the reflux.

So I wish the Palace could tell the likes of Mr Tulsiani to perform an acrobatic and ballistically improbable act on themselves. Then again, I also wish I could lose a couple of stone without starving myself.