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Have you been to Firenze lately? Followed the news from Kyiv? Enjoyed Beijing duck?

Well, I haven’t and never will. For me these cities are, have always been and will forever remain Florence, Kiev and Peking.

I do respect, as one has to, the right of any people to call their cities any names that strike their fancy, no matter how ridiculous. I may grumble about it if I don’t like the name, but eventually I’ll have to go along.

Thus, if Italians decide to rebaptise Florence as, for example, Città di Gramsci, I’d toss off an indignant article about the obscenity of naming an ancient city after a communist subversive, but eventually I’ll have to accept the new name. There’s really no other option.

I may bitterly resent seeing Saigon called Ho Chi Minh City, but this fait is very much accompli. The bastards won the war and now they can play fast and loose with urban nomenclature – that’s not the greatest catastrophe that has befallen the Vietnamese.

By the same token, if Kiev and Peking undergo a name change and become, say, Zelensky and Mao respectively, I’ll huff and I’d puff, but I’ll soon relent. Or not so soon, I’ll grant you that.

For example, when Leningrad again became Petersburg, I stubbornly referred to it as Leningrad for another couple of years or so. I genuinely believed, as I still do, that the city still has more to do with Lenin than with the patron saint of Peter the Great. But, having put up a valiant rearguard action, I eventually conceded the point.

Yes, countries are free to give whatever new names, no matter how offensive, to their cities. However, if the names remain the same, they have no right to tell us how to spell and pronounce them in English.

The way the Chinese pronounce the name of their North Capital, it has always come out closer to Beijing than to Peking, inasmuch as Chinese phonetics can be perceived by any European ear, that is. But so what? To us, it has always been Peking. (As, parenthetically, it still is to the French – bien joué to them. They cherish their language more than we do ours.)

We don’t tell the French and Italians that our capital is neither Londres nor Londra, do we? So they mustn’t shove Paree and Roma down our throats. To their credit, they don’t, and even the Russians are happy with our Moscow, although to them it’s the same as the river, Moskva.

This sounds like a small point to make a fuss about, but it really isn’t. For such name changes are symptoms of a ghastly disease, the politicisation of language.

A nation’s language is the most valuable part of its identity, more important than any politics. Over the past 250 years, France, to cite one country I know well, has been governed by several monarchies, a revolutionary committee, a Directory, a military dictatorship, an emperor, five different republics and, from 1940 to 1944, by the Nazis.

But she always remained France, her language has always been French and, as Maurice Chevalier used to sing to SS officers, Paris reste Paris.

To the English, politics matters more and the language somewhat less. Yet even here, English is a powerful national adhesive, uniting into an integral whole such seemingly irreconcilable people as Londoners, Scousers, Geordies and even Scots (apart from Glaswegians; they are sui generis). As such, it shouldn’t be used as an arena for scoring political points. But, alas, it is, very much so.

Variously pernicious groups are aware of the political power of language. He who controls English, controls the English – they sense that in their viscera. I refer to this process as glossocracy, government of the word, by the word but, unfortunately, not just for the word.

It behoves all intelligent patriots (which is a longer way of saying ‘conservatives’) to keep politics out of English, fighting lexical subversion every step of the way. However, when the enemy advances on a broad front, it must be fought for each inch of territory.

If we try to expurgate politicised, un-English woke usages, or at least refuse to use them in our own speech, we can’t cede ground elsewhere. And make no mistake about it, it’s for political reasons that some countries insist that their old city names should be spelled and pronounced the new way in English.

In this case, it doesn’t matter how we feel about the underlying political inspiration. We may sympathise with it, as I sympathise with Ukrainian independence, or deplore it, as I deplore China’s global bossiness. But English is the mainstay of our culture, not theirs. And, unless they change the names of those cities, they’ll bloody well remain Kiev and Peking.

Well, to me, at any rate.

P.S. Speaking of English, I continue to learn new usages by listening to football commentators. The other day, one praised England for “the emergency of many talented young players”. I’m still waiting for the NHS to start providing emergence services.

Another chap commended a winger for his “Olympian speed”, making me wonder if the player could qualify for the Olympian Games.

And of course they all talk about “the amount of goals”, proving yet again that one doesn’t have to be literate to earn a large number of money.   

The Bumper Book of Vitali’s Travels, by Vitali Vitaliev, Thrust Books, 612 pages (and you’ll want to read every bloody one of them)

Vitali is my friend and I hate him, as I’d hate anyone making me commit a deadly sin, in this case envy. No one from Russia – or, worse still, the Ukraine! – should be able to write such dazzling English and get away with it, certainly not in a review by another native Russian speaker.

It’s not only for this shameful reason that I’m a wrong man to review this book. For Vitali describes himself as a dromomaniac, meaning he is every inch consumed with wanderlust, which I every inch am not. Not only has he hopped around the globe several times over, but he has also been writing travel notes, which are collected in this volume.

Now, generally speaking, travel writing is far down the list of my favourite literary genres. In fact, it doesn’t even make the list at all. However, speaking specifically rather than generally, Vitali proves there is no such thing as boring genres – there are only boring writers, a category to which he manifestly doesn’t belong.

I’ve read The Bumper Book from cover to cover, but starting with the essays on the places I know well. Or so I thought.

Reading Vitali’s prose, I was humbled to discover that, like the hapless Dr Watson, I saw without observing, meaning I didn’t really see much. Conversely, like the eagle-eyed Sherlock Holmes, Vitali sees because he observes. And like the inspired virtuoso he is, he takes but a few words to make us see things we ourselves missed so blithely.

His quiver of metaphors and similes would be too bulky for anyone else’s back, but Vitali’s is broad and sturdy enough. And every arrow-like weapon is honed sharp enough to pierce any armour of tired old stereotypes.

As a rule, I avoid quoting a reviewed book too profusely, but I don’t know how else to convey Vitali’s mastery. Any attempt merely to describe it would be like trying to describe the taste of, say, avocado. A reader would never get an accurate idea until he has tried the fruit for himself. So here are a few delicious morsels:

“Didn’t I myself once compare London to a curvaceous bikini-clad blonde who has wandered by mistake into a drab, male-only Pall Mall club?”

“I have come to regard it [Venice] as an aging, yet still graceful, woman, suffering from insomnia and dragging restlessly around the house in her worn-out, loose-fitting slippers in the night. Soft splashes of water against the ancient Venetian stones are like shuffling of slippers across the floor…”

On Riga: “It was late afternoon in March. Stray cats were copulating frantically on time-beaten cobbles. A plush Volvo of the latest make was crawling up a narrow lane squeezing into the gap between houses like a gleaming dagger into a tight sheath.”

On Prague: “Baroque architecture… strikes me as somewhat beer-inspired: this excessive ornamentation, this profusion of curved and interrupted lines, these heavy and solid – almost stout – facades, this beer-foam-like multitude of cupolas and turrets… And isn’t it true that the best examples of baroque architecture can be found in beer-loving countries? Please correct me if I am wrong (which I probably am).” A wine-imbibing Roman would probably oblige with gusto, but Vitaliev writes so well, I don’t feel like correcting him on anything.

“Walking in Manhattan, where the traffic is so slow that it gives the impression of travelling backwards, I spotted an elderly woman asleep inside a capacious shopping trolley, her bare feet sticking out like two freshly bought overbaked baguettes.”

On New York’s Brighton Beach, mostly populated by Russians: “A couple of elderly immigrants, carrying an indelible ‘I-am-waiting-to-be-hurt’ expression on their faces, could be seen strolling along the wet wood-paved boardwalk. From time to time, they would stop and stare at the ocean, as if trying to discern the outlines of their native Odessa on the horizon.”

“While in New Orleans, I was tempted to compare it to:

“A joyful scream, a gentle shock; a sophisticated mess, like a Cajun dish; a cup of strong black coffee that cheers you up and keeps you awake throughout the night; a friendly blow in the solar plexus that leaves you bent over and gasping for breath, and yet with a blissful smile on your face…”

And on and on, the world comes alive one sentence after another beautifully shaped sentence, one page after another perfectly structured page, one chapter after another chapter short on words but long on startling imagery and X-ray vision. If the purpose of literature is indeed to enlighten and delight, then The Bumper Book does so with the verve and precision seldom found in this genre.

This gets me to the starting point: the authentic and yet idiosyncratic English this reprobate has the audacity of writing.

Whenever I am described as a Russian author, or a Russian anything, I invariably quote Joseph Conrad: “My nationality is the language I write in.” Vitali cites this retort too, in his essay on Andrei Makine, the French writer who, like us, was raised in the Soviet Union.

By that criterion, Vitali is a British writer par excellence. But he wouldn’t be the British writer he is without the experience of having been (and lived) just about everywhere. An experience I for one am grateful he has put to such a thoroughly enjoyable use.  

This melancholy conclusion is inescapable in light of Biden’s comments before, during and on the climate summit graced by the presence of 42 world leaders, including Vlad Putin.

It was that champion of ecological probity whom Biden chose to single out for special praise, in preference to the other 40: “I am very heartened by President Putin’s call for the world to collaborate on advanced carbon dioxide removal.”

It pleases me as a British subject that my country has also been singled out for praise. Britain, Bill Gates told the conference, is to play a leading role in helping subsistence farmers avoid the shocks of global warming. God help me, but the chap has gone microsoft in the head.

Had Gates plotted climate changes next to farming activity over the past few millennia, he’d know that warm periods marked the times of the greatest productivity and prosperity. And conversely, when the climate got colder, famines usually ensued, accompanied by large-scale migrations, shrinking populations, disappearing farms, disease and general misery.

Now Biden and Gates, along with the world’s entire progressive community (it is a community, isn’t it? – everything else is), cling to the daft notion that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is mostly produced by irresponsible people who fuel their lives with hydrocarbons.

This belief is so scientifically illiterate that one shouldn’t grace it with too much commentary. I exhausted my quota of articles over the past couple of months by siting on several occasions reams of scientific data that show that human input makes up an infinitesimally tiny portion of atmospheric carbon dioxide and an even smaller one of atmospheric gases in general.

Moreover, changes in CO₂ concentration have little to do with climate, and next to nothing compared to solar activity, tectonic shifts, volcanoes, meteorites and hundreds of other factors beyond human control.

But let’s assume that great scientist Greta Thunberg is right. Even so, since carbon dioxide is a major resource of biomass generation, its removal will reduce the number of forests and trees in general. Since trees absorb CO₂, its amount in the atmosphere will hence rise pari passu. This is one way in which nature maintains its balance, and trying to distort it artificially is fraught with incalculable risks.

But I shouldn’t compete with Greta on this subject – her educational credentials are too awe-inspiring. Tipping my hat, I’m prepared to agree with her and Joe Biden: CO₂ is poison, and hydrocarbons are the work of the devil.

Now let’s juxtapose this premise with the fact that Russia’s economy is almost totally dependent on the consumption of hydrocarbons and especially their export. It’s oil and gas that keep Vlad and his jolly friends in the style to which they’ve lately become accustomed. Without hydrocarbons, Russia’s economy will collapse within weeks and, more important in this context, so will Putin’s regime.

So how sincerely do you suppose Vlad supports the wokish theories so dear to Joe’s heart? Not very, would be my guess. He merely wants to trick his way to a measure of international respectability, something to which he has never been entitled, and now less than ever.  

“President Putin and I have our disagreements,” acknowledged Biden, but these are insignificant compared to their shared commitment to… well, you get it.

I’m not sure ‘disagreements’ is quite the right word, unless he’d also use this word to describe US-Japan relations circa 1942. Just a couple of weeks ago – and I realise a fortnight is aeons in politics – Biden described Putin as a killer (or rather agreed with that description when asked).

Since the president gets intelligence briefings, and assuming he can read them with full comprehension, he must be aware of the reckless brinkmanship with which Putin teeters on the verge of full-blown war against America’s allies and even other Nato members. Biden must also have heard of the three aggressive wars Russia has waged in the past 20-odd years. Moreover, I’m sure the CIA informs him of the relish with which Vlad and his acolytes regularly threaten nuclear annihilation, specifically turning America into “radioactive dust”.

And speaking of other Nato members, a few days ago the news broke that the same two GRU officers who in 2018 poisoned the Skripals, British subjects on British soil, had four years earlier blown up an ammunition warehouse in the Czech Republic, which, unless I’m very much mistaken, belongs to Nato.

Two local residents died in the blast. I’m sure the area’s ecology must have suffered too, and we know how deeply Vlad cares about that. Let me tell you, wars have been started for much milder ‘disagreements’ than that, and Article 5 of the Nato Charter calls for a robust response to such hostile acts.

I’m not the first to question Biden’s mental health, nor shall I be the last. But I just can’t imagine anyone who is compos mentis choosing this time to pat Vlad on the back and compliment him on some empty promises he has no intention of keeping. I wish the security of the West were in safer hands.

Today is St George’s Day, and I almost forgot that. I have a ready excuse though: the day of England’s patron saint has been ignored, not to say hushed up, in London.

I walked a few miles through Fulham and Putney earlier today and saw not a single St George’s Cross flapping in the wind. It wouldn’t be a stretch to observe that, say, St Patrick’s Day or even the Fourth of July receive greater publicity.

One would have expected front pages of our broadsheets dedicated to this Roman officer martyred in the Diocletianic Persecution of 303 AD, and first mentioned in England by the Venerable Bede. That expectation would have been frustrated: one would have needed a magnifying glass to find the feast even mentioned in most of the papers.

Yet for half a millennium at least, St George’s Day was a national holiday celebrated with almost the same pomp as Christmas. St George was honoured because so was England.

No longer. Honouring England, and therefore St George, is these days on a par with xenophobia and racism. In some quarters, the Cross of St George is regarded as not quite so bad as the swastika but almost – and certainly more disreputable than the red flags seen everywhere on May Day.  

Oh well, one hears (often from the same people who think Englishmen ought to be ashamed of themselves), what do you expect? St George wasn’t even English. True. But then neither was Jesus Christ, whose birth we do celebrate nevertheless, if in a rather perfunctory fashion.

The thing is that nowadays we celebrate not so much Christmas as Christmas Sales, that orgiastic festival of acquisitiveness. This gives me an idea of how to restore St George’s Day to its past grandeur.

Shops across the country must be given tax incentives to discount their merchandise every 23 April dramatically enough to have crowds queuing up through the night. At least that way every shop will be draped in St George’s flags to remind us that England is still worth celebrating.

Happy St George’s Day to all of you who love England, wherever you are from!

It pains me to say this, but I have to agree with the conclusions reached by an internal inquiry conducted by the Church of England. The Church is institutionally racist, which is to say mired in what will soon be added to the list of deadly sins.

According to the Archbishops’ Anti-Racism Taskforce: “A failure to act now will be seen as another indication, potentially a last straw for many, that the Church is not serious about racial sin.”

True to its word, the taskforce proposed 47 concrete steps towards ending a “rut of inaction” and ushering in a rut of action instead. The taskforce’s findings are consonant with Archbishop Welby’s 2020 pronouncement that the Church is still “deeply institutionally racist”.

Some of the 47 steps mirror the initiatives that have proved staggeringly successful in the lay world: appointment of full-time racial justice officers, compiling annual reports on recruitment and mandatory training to embed anti-racism instincts.

Hear, hear! Every Anglican church in the land must have on its staff a diversity deacon, empowered to overrule the vicar on, well, anything he feels the vicar must be overruled on. That goes without saying.

However, I’d still propose to extend this welcome initiative into matters doctrinal and liturgical. To begin with, the list of seven cardinal sins should be expanded to include an eighth: racism. In general, the list ought to be seen as open-ended: new deadly sins, such as misogyny, homophobia and xenophobia, should also be added as required, but perhaps not all at once.

The Penitential Rite must also be slightly amended to begin as: “Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against thee in racist thought, word, and deed…”

In the good tradition of Anglican liberalism, Lambeth Palace should eschew dictatorial practices and empower the ministers to express their innermost personal convictions. Thus, if a vicar demands that his/her/its congregation worship Jesus Christ as a black woman, he/she/it should be free to do so.

But perhaps I’m barking up the wrong tree. More than 160 recommendations along these lines have been made to the taskforce, and I’m sure my amateurish efforts must have been superseded already.

So perhaps I’d better focus on the core of the problem and preempt all those naysayers who will doubtless insist that the C of E isn’t institutionally racist. To shut them up once and for all, I’d like to submit some incontrovertible evidence.

If we define institutional racism as discrimination against or in favour of an employee solely on account of his/her/its race, irrespective of any other qualifications, then I submit the Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell as my Exhibit A.

In 2020 His Grace (irredeemably white) replaced in his current post, second most senior in the Church, John Tucker Mugabi Sentamu (impeccably black). Since anyone would be hard-pressed to identify Archbishop Stephen’s qualifications to be a priest, never mind a prelate, it had to be his pigmentation that acted as an institutional hoist.

If His Grace is as committed to eradicating racism as he professes, he must tender his resignation and apply for a job as diversity officer. Mugabi Sentamu should then reclaim his diocese or, if reluctant to do so, put forth a candidate of proper racial credentials.

Here we dig our teeth into the meat of the argument. As progressive people, we accept that racism is anything anyone says it is. Yet pedantic sticklers may feel that this criterion is insufficiently precise. They insist on some objective measure of institutional racism.

Thank God one such exists: Proportional Ethnographic Representation, PER for short. By applying PER to an institution’s staff, we can determine if a particular race is over- or underrepresented in relation to its share in the ethnographic makeup of the nation at large.

Any sizeable deviation from the statistical requirement spells institutional racism. It’s as simple – and as fool-proof! – as that.

Hence we programme the total number of C of E bishops (42) into the PER tool and then add the number of black bishops (5). Hence 12 per cent of the bishops are black, meaning that the total proportion of blacks in the population must be similar.

But – and I can’t even begin to describe my shock – it turns out blacks make up only three per cent of the UK’s population. There you go then, the Taskforce’s findings stand vindicated. The Church of England is institutionally racist because whites are grossly underrepresented in its episcopate. QED.

BLM has scored its triumph: Derek Chauvin will spend years, possibly decades, in prison.

Was the verdict just? Since I haven’t seen any trial transcripts, and newspaper reports tend to be biased one way or the other (usually the other), I can’t answer that question purely on legal grounds.

Instead I can ask another one: What would have happened had the jury found Chauvin not guilty? You don’t need me to tell you.

The riots that came in the slipstream of George Floyd’s death would have looked like a quiet picnic in the park by comparison. Every state in the Union, along with all other Western countries, would have seen mayhem as bad as anything that happened in the ‘60s or perhaps even worse.

Cities would have been paralysed; bars, restaurants and shops would have been torched and looted; white people would have been randomly assaulted, possibly killed en masse; civil order would have disintegrated and, at best, would have taken weeks to restore.

You know this, I know this, and everyone taking part in the trial knew it. Prosecutors, defence attorneys, judge, jury – they all knew that any other than a guilty verdict would have turned the country into a bloody, fiery mess. Even closer to home, their own safety would have been severely compromised in eternity.

They wouldn’t be human if such considerations hadn’t entered their minds during the trial. It’s on this basis that I regard the guilty verdict in the Chauvin trial as unsafe.

That doesn’t mean it’s undeserved – only that the impartiality of judge and jury was under such undue pressure that it couldn’t be taken for granted. This failed to satisfy a conditio sine qua non of jury trial, rendering the proceedings suspect.

Conservative, which is these days to say marginal, papers point out that George Floyd’s death is no great loss to mankind. A life-long criminal, he once held a gun to the stomach of a pregnant woman hostage, which my conservative brethren don’t think is a nice thing to do. Floyd was also a drug pusher and taker, and in fact was under the influence during the fatal incident. Police were called to the scene because he tried to pass a counterfeit banknote at a shop, and Floyd fought the arrest with all the gusto of a muscular drugged-up man accustomed to violence.

All that is true. It’s also irrelevant. The law doesn’t just protect Sunday school teachers. It must protect all people, good or bad. If no one is above the law, then no one is beneath it. A human life must not be taken arbitrarily even if, by all secular criteria, it’s a worthless life. If Chauvin had indeed treated Floyd with excessive, murderous cruelty, he deserves all he gets.

Yet the use of the conditional mood in the previous sentence is justified, for reasons I’ve outlined earlier. This raises another question: Why would a failure to convict Chauvin have resulted in a Walpurgisnacht, or Kristallnacht if you’d rather?

This brings us to BLM, an openly Marxist, which is to say subversive, organisation. All these modifiers leave no doubt that Floyd’s death and Chauvin’s hypothetical acquittal would only have served as a pretext, not the reason, for riots.

BLM was founded in 2013 by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, who describe themselves as “trained Marxists”. The adjective makes one wonder who trained them, but it’s the noun that’s even more telling.

Trained, professional Marxists have only one cause in their lives: replacing traditional Western governments with communist dictatorships. The slogans they hoist on their flagpoles are as varied as they are irrelevant. Whatever they are, they are but a means to the end.

The desired end is always the same whatever the current slogan. It could be redistribution of wealth, global warming, feminism, LGBT rights, racial equality, nuclear disarmament or any combination thereof – any such slogan is a tissue of lies trying to conceal the underlying subversive intent.

The source of BLM financing is as opaque as the identity of the Marxist instructors who trained its founders. Its money is known to be handled by a shadowy organisation called Thousand Currents, fronted by Susan Rosenberg.

Miss Rosenberg boasts a colourful CV. As a member of the terrorist ‘May 19 Communist Organisation’, she was in the mid-80s sentenced to 58 years in prison on a weapons and explosives charge. Thanks to Bill Clinton’s pardon, she only served 16 years of that term, which brings into question the very notion of presidential pardons.

She now handles BLM financing, thereby continuing a fine Bolshevik tradition. In the olden days, whoever was in charge of the Bolsheviks’ money was also involved in hands-on terrorism. (You can Google names like Krasin, Litvinov, Semashko and, for that matter, Stalin for details.) However, before money is handled, it has to be there.

So where do BLM’s millions, almost 100 of them last year, come from? I don’t know, but I could venture a guess.

The size of BLM funding suggests a state, rather than a consortium of private individuals. As a rule, rich people don’t like bankrolling organisations that are committed to dispossessing rich people, or worse. Though that rule has been broken at times (some Russian millionaires, such as Savva Morozov, gave money to Lenin), this isn’t the way to bet.

Much more likely is that BLM is supported by a state with a vested interest in unsettling and destabilising Western countries, especially the US. Off the top I can think of only two countries with an established record of funding, training and arming extremist groups, mostly though not exclusively communist: Russia and China.

Russia is the more probable suspect, considering her recent, and not so recent, behavioural patterns. But either way, while I’m not sure I regret Chauvin’s conviction, I definitely regret the use to which enemies of the West will put it.

BLM will become stronger and the West weaker. This is a zero sum game – whatever one side loses, the other side gains. And make no mistake about it: we and BLM are on opposite sides.  

Footie is now front-page news because 12 clubs, six from England, the others from Italy and Spain, have announced the founding of a breakaway Super League. If allowed to go ahead, this would trivialise, possibly destroy, traditional competitions, both domestic and European.

The entire football community – players, managers, pundits, fans – are understandably up in arms. And, since the big 12 will each receive signing-on fees in hundreds of millions, with billions more to come, the owners are rightly accused of greed.

Interestingly, the accusers, most of them rank atheists, are liberally quoting biblical injunctions against avarice, which is good to see. What’s less good to see is that they make no allowances for the dialectical subtlety of both Testaments, especially the New one.

The impression the critics try to convey is that Christ was opposed to wealth as such, not just particularly rapacious ways of acquiring it. That contravenes Christian dialectics, derived not only from Christ’s teaching but, above all, his person.

This tripartite dialectic can be represented by the formula of yes – no – yes or, in Hegel’s terminology, thesis – antithesis – synthesis. As applied to the person of Christ, it can work in this manner: Yes, Christ is fully God (thesis). No, Christ is fully a man (antithesis). Yes, Christ is God-man (synthesis).

Christians have always applied this dialectic to economic behaviour – come to think of it, they’ve applied it to everything, though not always consciously. There are many comments on wealth in the Scripture, but I’ll focus on just two.

In a well-known incident, Jesus stunned his apostles by a bold thesis: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of the needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” The disciples “were astonished out of measure”, and understandably so. After all, at the onset of their religion Abraham’s righteousness was rewarded with riches, as was Solomon’s wisdom.

But then came the antithesis: “…With men it is impossible, but not with God: for with God all things are possible.” The synthesis couldn’t be clearer: as long as we put God first, we are justified in pursuing riches. Granted, the Christian attitude to wealth never rose above toleration. But tolerated it was. It was never proscribed. 

In another incident, Jesus spoke of “mammon”, which is the Aramaic for wealth: “No servant can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one and love the other; or else he will hold to the one and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.”

The yes – no – yes dialectic is implicit there, and in several ways. For Jesus, serving God meant putting God before all else  (metaphysical thesis). It didn’t, however, mean elimination of everything else, for life had to be lived (physical antithesis). Therefore, though we cannot serve mammon, which is to say put it first, we may still wish to live comfortably as long as we serve God (“…seek ye first the kingdom of God; and all these things shall be added unto you”), put him first (synthesis).

The message is clear: God is everything, but this doesn’t mean that man has to be nothing.

This dialectic was understood by all theologians who talked about riches. Thus St Thomas Aquinas: “The perfection of the Christian life does not consist essentially in voluntary poverty, though that is a tool of perfection in life. There is not necessarily greater perfection where there is greater poverty; and indeed the highest perfection is sometimes wedded to great wealth…”

Note the qualifiers: “essentially”, “not necessarily”, “sometimes”. Rather than issuing a licence to acquisitiveness, St Thomas was expressing the fundamental Christian view on pursuing wealth: Go on then, if you must. But do remember what comes first. Jesus, after all, only said man shall not live by bread alone, not that man shall live by no bread at all.

Addressing seven centuries after Aquinas a world that no longer could be automatically presumed to put God first, Pope John Paul II said essentially the same thing: “It is necessary to create lifestyles in which the quest for truth, beauty, goodness and communion with others for the sake of common growth are the factors which determine consumer choices, savings and investments.”

The language is modern; the message is two thousand years old. It’s based on the Christian balance between the two planes, physical and metaphysical, reflecting the two natures of Christ: God and man.

When our civilisation was being formed, seeking wealth for those who didn’t inherit large tracts of land was tantamount to selling the fruits of their labour. The butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker bartered their products for other people’s. Since money was sometimes involved as a means of exchange, it was natural to expect that more of it would eventually end up in some hands than in others.

Thus labour indirectly presupposed the possibility of enrichment. Yet in spite of that the New Testament contains direct endorsements of work. These come across in the Lord’s Prayer (“give us this day our daily bread”), in Jesus the carpenter talking about “the labourer worthy of his hire” and in St Paul the tent maker stating categorically that “if any would not work, neither shall he eat.”

The upshot of this is that our football pundits should stop their Bible-thumping even if they can’t help screaming “Damn them to hell!” (Martin Samuels, our best football writer). Dismount your high moral horse, chaps, take a deep breath and try to discuss the issue of the Super League on its merits, such as they are.

When all is said and done, it’s only footie, not some heretical religious schism threatening our whole civilisation. A bit of dialectical perspective would come in handy, don’t you think?

“It appears as if all schools have been turned into training grounds for depravity, and everyone leaving them instantly shows that he has been led astray, with his head holding nothing but emptiness and his heart nothing but self-esteem, that first enemy of reason.”

Take a stab at it, you can’t miss. Any conservative could have thus commented, accurately, on our system of education.

Yet no British conservative has said that, not verbatim at any rate. This ringing denunciation was uttered by a Russian conservative, Admiral Alexander Shishkov (1754-1841), Minister of Public Education.

He was talking about Russia, but I wonder what Shishkov would say if he were miraculously transported to Britain, circa 2021. How would he view our schools, with their shift of emphasis from basic literacy to condom studies, homosexual practices, transgender delights, and racism as the principal dynamic of world history?

Such subjects weren’t taught in the Russian schools Shishkov knew. However, his pronouncement was as locally valid as it was universally prophetic. He was a conservative after all.

Even under the tsars, the good admiral got bad press in Russia for being reactionary, archaist, obscurantist – choose your own term of abuse. He got off lightly. Any minister holding his views in today’s Britain would get more than just bad press. He’d get the sack.

However, a conservative mind isn’t just the best tool for understanding life, but I dare say the only useful one. Alexander Shishkov proves this yet again by using the term self-esteem pejoratively.

That’s not how most people understand self-esteem today. It’s treated as a synonym of self-respect, although in reality they are closer to being antonyms.

Self-respect is a moral concept; self-esteem, a psychological one. Or, if you’d rather, self-respect is ontological while self-esteem is existential.

The former has to do with honour and dignity, something to which every human being is entitled simply because he is indeed human. The latter is a feeling, usually inflated, of possessing a high self-worth.

Self-respect doesn’t have to be earned, it only has to be asserted and upheld. Self-esteem, on the other hand, should presuppose no automatic entitlement: it has to reflect actual achievement, and even then it’s too close to smugness for comfort.

Thus it’s indeed the “first enemy of reason”, in Shishkov’s phrase. Reason needs a sense of under-achievement to stay active. It has to seek new discoveries, which ipso facto means reason must be dissatisfied with the discoveries it has made so far.

Looking at most people in the public eye, politicians, stars, celebrities and so forth, one detects an abundance of self-esteem and a distinct lack of self-respect. Moreover, one sees very few people who are alert to that nuance.

Perhaps we too should entrust our public education to retired naval commanders. May the search for a British Admiral Shishkov commence.  

No? You don’t believe me? Then read Peter Hitchens’s latest piece of pro-Putin propaganda. You’ll find out that “a frantic lobby in this country and in the USA wants to get us into… war against Russia.”

And what do you know, “A war on European territory could be a truly terrible thing.” You could see me wipe my brow in relief even as we speak.

For ‘could be’ means there has been no war yet. Those 14,000 people killed since Russia’s 2014 aggression against the Ukraine must have committed suicide. And those two million displaced Ukrainians must have fled their homes just for the hell of it. Thank God for peace.

I sometimes wonder why Hitchens regularly repeats word for word the effluvia of Putin’s Goebbelses, acting in effect as an agent of influence. In the past, I explored various possibilities, but by now they’ve crystallised into two: a) he is paid to do Putin’s bidding or b) he is unhinged. I hope it’s the latter: a medical problem rates sympathy; treason, only contempt.

In either case, one has to regret that The Mail on Sunday continues to provide a forum for enemy propaganda. Surely its editors can’t possibly think that Hitchens’s outpourings on this subject are sound?

Today he follows his usual pattern. First he establishes his bona fides as a Russian expert: “As I know a bit about Russia, and once lived there…”

Take my word for it: Hitchens never lived in Russia. He was posted there as a foreign correspondent, which means that for a couple of years he shared the same bubble with the upper echelons of the Soviet chieftains. Truly living in the Soviet Union meant feeling every second that one’s life was in the hands of Yahoos who had already murdered 60 million of one’s countrymen.

Then Hitchens issues his customary disclaimer clumsily designed to defang any accusation of bias: “Yes, Russia is ruled by nasty, sinister despots. But…” The disclaimer out of the way, that little conjunction at the end is the key opening the door to the most blatant pro-Kremlin propaganda this side of RT.

We have nothing to fear from Russia because “it is a defeated, poor country with an economy about the same size as Italy’s”. This doesn’t pass muster as a valid argument even at Hitchens’s primitive level. Surely he must know enough history to realise that poor nations with lean and hungry looks can not only threaten their wealthier enemies but actually defeat them?

Two great empires of the past, Rome and Byzantium, were brought to their knees by relative paupers. Too far back?

Fine, then look at Nazi Germany whose GDP was but a fraction of the combined wealth of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Benelux and France. Hitler still managed to overrun all those countries in about 10 months, driving the British Expeditionary Corps into the sea while he was at it.

Or consider the Soviet Union in the 1930s, when its people were actually starving. That didn’t prevent the Soviets from creating the biggest and best-equipped army in the world, which managed to regroup after being practically wiped out in June-December, 1941, and win a war against a formidable adversary.

Still too far in the past? Then cast your eye back to the 1970s, when the USSR’s economy was much smaller than it is today. That still didn’t prevent the Soviets from amassing a force of 50,000 tanks aiming their cannon at the West, and threatening the world with nuclear annihilation (a legacy lovingly maintained by Putin’s Russia).

Comparing the economies of civilised countries and Russia is a fruitless task. What matters there is not what’s in the shops, but what’s in the silos.

Authoritarian regimes have the luxury democracies can never enjoy at peacetime: they can concentrate all their resources in the military area. Both Stalin’s economy in the 1930s and Brezhnev’s in the 1970s did just that. Hence they managed to put together formidable armies – to the accompaniment of fellow travellers’ bleating about the country being poor and therefore unthreatening.

According to Hitchens, another factor of our safety is that Britain has no common border with Russia. Citing that as a serious consideration betokens an antediluvian concept of warfare that certainly predates even Napoleon.

Britain didn’t have a common border with France either, and yet she suffered a suffocating continental blockade and a sanguinary war. Neither did Britain have a common border with Nazi Germany, which didn’t stop those Luftwaffe bombs (many of them Soviet-made, by the way) falling on London.

Talking about war strategies from the standpoint of territorial proximity is especially inane now, in an age of Russia’s ICBMs and Mach-2 Tu-160 bombers. Yet this is Hitchens’s pet argument he lets loose in practically every article.

In that spirit, he echoes not just Putin’s propaganda, but also Stalin’s, circa 1939. Then Stalin cited Finland’s proximity to Leningrad as a justification for pouncing on that tiny country. Now Hitchens implicitly justifies any future aggression by Russia by saying almost exactly the same thing.

“Nato troops,” he writes, are now often to be seen in Narva, Estonia, and “Russia’s second city St Petersburg [is but] 99 miles from the Estonian frontier.” So what?

Estonia is a Nato member, in case Hitchens hasn’t noticed. Nato is a defensive alliance put together to thwart any Russian aggression against Europe. Hence some exchanges of military personnel among member countries is a normal practice.

At present, a formidable force of 1,112 Nato soldiers are deployed in Estonia, serving as potential sacrificial pawns in a tripwire mode should Russian hordes strike. Kremlin propagandists – echoed by Hitchens – scream their heads off about Nato’s eastward expansion, moaning about the threat this presents to Russia’s security.

The underlying assumption is that those 1,112 Estonia-based soldiers may one day drive across the border the way Napoleon’s 500,000 soldiers did in 1812 and Hitler’s 3,000,000 in 1941.

If he and Putin are genuinely worried about that, they should ponder the likelihood of any Western country launching an unprovoked attack on Russia. If they think, or pretend to think, that this probability is greater than zero, one has to doubt either their honesty or their sanity.

The rest of the piece is an exercise in the old Soviet stratagem of moral equivalence. Yes, we have the KGB, but you have the CIA. We murder people abroad, you poison Castro’s cigars. You put rockets into Turkey, we put them into Cuba.

Hitchens’s version of that trick is comparing the 2014 Soviet thrust into the Ukraine with America’s 1845-1847 conquest of Texas and California. Using that as his canvas, he paints a dystopic picture of sick fantasy:

“Imagine that the USA had lost the Cold War and the USSR had won it.” Then “instead of Ukraine being detached from Moscow rule, and slowly reeled into Nato and the EU, imagine that an equally huge, fertile, productive and strategic chunk of the USA, including Texas and California, was encouraged to declare independence and form a new Spanish-speaking nation hostile to the USA?”

This is a variation on the old Soviet theme: don’t accuse us of murdering millions of our own people when you have Jim Crow. Moral equivalence all around.

America’s theft of Mexico’s territory was indeed illegal and immoral. So were Sweden’s attacks on Russia in the 17^th century, Napoleon’s continental blockade, Hannibal’s forays into Rome and Alexander’s conquest of Persia. If we look back far enough, we can uncover any number of beastly acts committed by most of today’s countries and their precursors.

However, using such findings as an excuse for today’s aggression is cloud cuckoo land. Yes, America sinned against Mexico and international law. But she has partly redeemed her sins by helping to defeat Hitler and then, as the lynchpin of Nato, protecting Europe against the Soviets, now Russians, ever since.

Contrary to Hitchens’s animadversions, Putin’s Russia presents an existential threat to Europe’s security. She has already started two aggressive wars in Europe, against Georgia in 2008 and the Ukraine in 2014. Any further aggression eliciting nothing but a token response from the West will put paid to the post-war system of collective security, leaving Europe at the mercy of Russia’s blackmail.

Both Putin and Hitchens detest the Ukraine’s popular uprising, which Hitchens invariably describes as a “putsch”, against the Kremlin’s puppet regime. How dare those marginal people rise against what to Hitchens is “the most conservative and Christian country in Europe [albeit run by “nasty and sinister despots”]?

Hitchens is another illustration to my yesterday’s piece on ex-communists. His loins ache for the kind of strong Russian leader he worshipped in his youth. We never forget our first love, although sometimes we pretend to. As Hitchens does each time he spins his faux-conservative yarns.  

Vlad Putin once denied being ex-KGB. “There’s no such thing,” he said. “This is for life.” Truer words have never been spoken, at least not by Vlad.

He and I are the same generation, and I remember my university classmates who chose a KGB career. They were, not to cut too fine a point, scum to a man – amoral careerists who would have happily denounced their parents to get ahead in life and who were already snitching on their classmates, such as me.

Let’s get the causality right: they didn’t get to be that way because they worked for the KGB; they worked for the KGB because they were that way. Later many such precocious youngsters (Putin and most of his government, to name a few) changed their jobs, but they didn’t – couldn’t – change their personalities. Barring a religious epiphany, one’s character is immutable.

In the same vein, many prominent Westerners describe themselves as ex-communists. They then get upset when I quote Vlad and say there’s no such thing.

I’m specifically talking about Westerners because people who grew up in Eastern Europe and Russia can be forgiven for having succumbed to an unceasing onslaught of propaganda not counterbalanced with opposing views. After all, not everyone is capable of critical thought, especially when possessing this faculty may be life-threatening.

Even there perhaps ‘forgiven’ is a wrong word. ‘Understood’ would be closer to the mark.

However, as far as I’m concerned, Western ‘ex-communists’ merit neither understanding nor forgiveness (in any other than the Christian sense of the word). And I refuse to accept their explanations, such as “I was young and stupid until my 20s [sometimes 30’s or even older], but then I grew up and changed my views”.

Views are indeed changeable – why, even I have changed quite a few of mine, and I’m not known for excessive flexibility. What’s not changeable is a person’s nature, and my contention is that communist beliefs are a function of emotional, intuitive predisposition, not intellect.

They reflect not what a man thinks, but what he is.

I’m not talking here about idiots and ignoramuses who simply have no way of knowing better. The human type I have in my crosshairs is the Western intellectual who went from being a communist in his younger days to becoming a chap who pontificates on conservative values in his dotage. (Names available on request.)

Since these days people seldom take the trouble of delving beneath the surface of a statement, such turncoats are taken at their word. Few listeners stop to ponder what those exes are actually saying. Well, allow me to translate.

This is what they really mean: “Until I was 20 [30, 40 or older] I believed in creating the kind of state that murders millions of its own citizens, tortures and imprisons many more, creates artificial famines killing millions, eliminates every known liberty, reduces the population to a brain-dead herd, surrounds itself with an impregnable fence, uses lies and shrieks in lieu of normal speech, militarises the whole society, pursues an incessant aggressive policy designed to spread its own evil to the whole world, ignores all legal and moral norms of civilised behaviour.”

Books on the true nature of communism have been available in their thousands since the early 1920s. Hence a sentient, which is to say adult and educated, human being who believes such things isn’t misguided or mistaken. He’s evil. And that aspect of one’s character can only ever be concealed, not suppressed.

When my son was a teenager, he read Whittaker Chambers’s book Witness and was extremely impressed. The author was an American communist who spied for the Soviet Union and later acted as a witness in the trial of Alger Hiss, another communist spy.

Chambers later saw the light and became a senior editor of National Review, a conservative journal. (When still a communist spy, he had the same job at Time magazine, a more remunerative position, and one more consonant with his nature.)

My son was upset when I doused his enthusiasm by saying something along the lines of once a communist, always a communist. I tried to explain to him what I meant, but failed miserably. I wonder if I’ve done any better now. Perhaps not.