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My heart goes out to all those irate Muslim protesters harassing French embassies all over the world, including in London.

How would you feel if hundreds of thousands of your brethren (and sistern, natch) were thrown into concentration camps, used as slave labour, forcibly sterilised, tortured, killed to harvest their organs or simply for the hell of it?

Wouldn’t you protest if your places of worship were desecrated and wrecked, if your sacred scrolls were destroyed, if your cemeteries were bulldozed, if the government forbade you to give your children names prescribed by your religion, if your children were taken away from you and brainwashed in re-education camps?

I know I would. I’d be outside that French Embassy in Knightsbridge, burning the tri-colore, screaming abuse at embassy officials, threatening their lives… Hold on a minute.

Penelope has looked over my shoulder and said that at my age I can no longer get away with just scanning the news. I need to concentrate on reading every word, or else I’ll make a bloody fool of myself – as I just did.

Turns out it’s not France that’s responsible for all those atrocities, which some experts call genocide, others ethnocide, still others democide. It’s China, and the group on the receiving end is her 12-million Uyghur minority, an enclave of Islam surrounded by communism.

That news utterly confused me. After all, all France did was issue a timid statement that she isn’t prepared to sacrifice her core civil liberties to mollify Muslim sensibilities.

So why, I asked Penelope, isn’t there a single protest going on outside Chinese embassies, while the French ones are under permanent siege? She told me to figure it out for myself, if I’m such a hot shot (she actually used a slightly different word). Fine, let me try.

Anyone who still believes that Islam is primarily a religion should be disabused of that misapprehension on the strength of the cited facts alone. The events unfolding all over the world prove yet again that Islam is mainly a militant political movement, doctrinally committed to global conquest.

Thus, whoever decides where and how to organise those protests (and believe me, mass protests are always organised) has to use strategies developed by political and military analysts. One such strategy, unchanged since the Punic Wars, involves striking at the enemy’s weakest point where the chances of a decisive breakthrough are at their most realistic.

Hence there’s no point in Muslims harassing Chinese embassies. The only tangible effect of such actions would be a further increase in brutality towards the Uyghurs. Now, France is a different matter altogether.

The Muslims are justified to regard France, or any other Western European country, as a soft spot. The liberal ethos prevalent in the West precludes any serious resistance, other than the hot air blown by politicians.

Large swathes of Europe (including Britain) have already had Sharia imposed on them; millions of European Muslims are refusing to honour any laws other than those dictated by their cult (they’ll compromise on accepting Western welfare cheques). And the West does nothing.

Sorry, that’s another thing I got wrong. The West actually does quite a bit: it imports millions more cultural aliens who don’t even bother to learn the local language. What they do learn is the jihad rhetoric spewed out at practically every mosque and Islamic Centre.

The West is ripe for the picking, they are told. Redouble your efforts, and in a decade or two Europe will become a caliphate. And oh yes, Allahu akbar, let’s not forget that.

And the Uyghurs? Very regrettable, that, but not to worry: 72 virgins are awaiting them in heaven. The men among them, that is – the women will have to go without. 

Imagine a Martian landing on Earth and trying to make any sense of it. That was me, 47 years ago almost to the day.

When I arrived in America from the Soviet Union, my baggage included some conservative instincts and a total ignorance of how to relate them to life in the West.

A week later, when visiting a Washington friend, I first saw an episode of Firing Line, a weekly talk show hosted by William F Buckley. “He’s conservative but very good,” said my host, for whom the conjunction ‘but’ was a necessary partition between ‘conservative’ and ‘good’.

I was instantly captivated. The first thing that enchanted me was Buckley’s language. Even though I had devoted my life to studying and eventually teaching English, I had never heard it spoken that way.

My English vocabulary was good, or so I had thought. That smugness turned out to be unfounded: practically every sentence Buckley uttered in his lazy mid-Atlantic drawl contained some words I didn’t know. More important, the ideas discussed on the show, and the sources cited, showed me a clear path for my instincts to follow in search of a rational base.

During my subsequent 15 years in America I never missed a single episode of Firing Line, nor a single issue of Buckley’s magazine, The National Review, which boasted among its contributors some of the most brilliant conservative minds of my lifetime.

Soon I began to devour all the primary sources Buckley and his colleagues mentioned, and consequently they lost some of their ability to enlighten me – a TV interview or a magazine article can’t compete with books. However, their ability to delight me was intact, and both the show and the magazine continued to do just that.

Then I moved to Britain and lost touch with Buckley and his work. Those were the pre-Internet days, when reruns of old shows weren’t readily available. And I began writing magazine articles myself, steadily veering way off the American path Buckley followed.

Then, a month or so ago I started binge-watching old episodes of Firing Line, now available at the touch of a computer key. The nostalgic element was strong, as was the forensic desire to retrace my steps.

I’ve found, with some lamentable self-satisfaction, that my vocabulary has grown exponentially since I first saw Firing Line: I now know every recondite word in Buckley’s lexicon. Also, at the risk of sounding immodest, I’ve moved even further beyond the intellectual level of a TV talk show, even one as luminous as Firing Line was.

But luminous it was – I’ve never seen a talk show in America, Britain or France that comes anywhere near the depth, wit and erudition of Firing Line. Its old shows also remain useful.

Even though I no longer learn from these reruns anything I don’t already know, they have lost none of their capacity to stimulate my own thoughts, especially on the leitmotif of Buckley’s life’s work: exegesis and propagation of conservatism.

Buckley was both a conservative (although he sometimes also referred to himself as a libertarian) and a true American patriot. However, he constantly struggled with the difficulty – I’d say impossibility – of reconciling the two.

Just yesterday I saw a 1984 instalment of Buckley talking to a Republican congressman. The battle lines were drawn between Buckley’s orthodox conservatism (these days called ‘paleoconservatism’ courtesy of my friend Paul Gottfried) and his guest’s moderate version.

Neither party bothered to define conservatism: the definition was self-evident to both. Yet perhaps had they agreed on that essential premise to begin with, the whole discussion would have gone in a different direction.

As it was, all they talked about was economic policy, things like farm subsidies, caps on public spending, the comparative value and compatibility of balanced budgets and tax cuts, inflation, etc.

Such things are doubtless important, but they have little to do with conservatism. They may indirectly derive from it, but they aren’t it. Such subjects would only be essential to a very different debate, one between libertarianism and statism.

Conservatism starts with an answer to the question of exactly what it seeks to conserve. The only sound reply has to be: as much of the legacy of Christendom as is possible to preserve without sinking into obscurantism and Luddism.

Economic libertarianism, desirable though it may be, has a barely discernible link to that tradition. It touches only tangentially on the real legacy of Christendom, which is religious and cultural.  

That tradition was destroyed, deliberately and cruelly, by that great misnomer, the Enlightenment. It ripped the religious heart out of Christendom and secularised, which is to say vulgarised and perverted, the rest.

Thus love (and therefore the sovereign value) of all human beings simply because they are indeed human derived in Christendom from God who is love. The Enlightenment sidelined God and produced a secular theology of human rights as its core. That was tantamount to sawing off the base of a pyramid, then putting it on its tip and watching it fall.

The West tumbled on a slippery slope and began to slide downhill at an ever-increasing speed. The cultural and social debacle we are witnessing today is close to the bottom of the abyss.

Hence the problem Buckley couldn’t solve or perhaps even acknowledge. For the US is the first and most consistent Enlightenment state, constituted as such from birth.

If Western European conservatives, especially in countries where monarchy is extant, can still fight some rearguard action under the banner of God, King and Country, American conservatives are obliged to worship the Constitution, which abolished the middle element of that triad and marginalised the first.

Buckley was blessed with a formidable intellect, and he was a cultured, multilingual conservative who knew every note of Bach and could play many of them. Moreover, he was a devout orthodox Catholic who detested Vatican II and could eloquently enunciate his opposition to it.

However, he refused to see that the US and all the cultural and social perversions he despised had the same progenitor. As an American patriot, Buckley simply couldn’t afford the freedom of questioning the core assumptions of modernity, and therefore of his native land.

Had he done so, he would have realised that real conservatism is impossible in any Enlightenment construct, be that America or, perhaps to a lesser extent, France. What’s possible are either easy surrogates, such as economic libertarianism, or else apophatic proclamations of what conservatism is not, i.e. socialist, statist, extremist and so forth.

Apophatic theology can exist, but apophatic political science can’t: sooner or later its practitioners will find themselves at an intellectual dead end. At that point they’ll either have to admit defeat or state unequivocally what their conservatism is and how it can relate to practical life.

That was a problem Buckley faced, through no fault of his own. However, he fought his way out of the systemic cul-de-sac with an élan, wit and sheer brilliance never seen on television before or since, and seldom ever seen at all.

I’ll continue watching and re-watching Firing Line with pleasure, gratitude – and some nostalgia for the innocence of youth I’ve lost since first illuminated by the dazzling light that was William F. Buckley, Jr. (1925-2008).

“We lack Macron’s courage to call the savagery what it is: Islamist terrorism,” writes Rod Liddle, and he’s supposed to be the good sort.

For those unfamiliar with Liddle’s oeuvre, his stock in trade is trespassing on the territory signposted by Richard Littlejohn: gor-blimey, don’t-give-a-monkey’s style of journalism, a sort of vox populi on wheels.

This isn’t my favourite genre, but at least Littlejohn almost always says sensible things. He doesn’t seem to claim implicitly that his folksy style gives him a licence to say anything that pops into his mind.

Liddle’s prose, on the other hand, often makes me wonder if he or anyone else edits what he writes. He’s one of those ex-lefties who reinforce my conviction that no leftie is ever really ex. Liddle tends to sound generally right-wing (no one who routinely uses words like ‘fuck’ in writing can sound conservative), but one senses neither real conviction nor serious thought behind the façade.

Thus he is one of those ‘useful idiots’ on the right who adore Putin and wish we had a strong leader like him.

That’s tantamount to desiring to have in Her Majesty’s realm a leader who siphons purloined billions into his own offshore accounts and those of his flunkeys, suppresses free speech, despises the rule of law, conducts active global subversion, routinely threatens nuclear annihilation, pounces on his neighbours like a rabid dog, imprisons or murders his opponents at home and abroad, claims his undying loyalty to the most diabolical organisation in history and acts in its spirit, mixed with the ethos of organised crime.

Does Liddle dispute any of this? If he does, he’s ignorant. If he doesn’t and still worships the KGB colonel, his moral compass has gone haywire. In either case, he isn’t fit to enlarge on important issues.

Just look at the headline I cited in the first paragraph above. What Liddle is saying there is false: every PM in recent memory has had enough courage to decry Islamist terrorism. None, however, has had “the courage to call the savagery what it really is”: Islamic terrorism. Neither does Liddle.

Or perhaps he just doesn’t realise that the two terms aren’t exactly synonymous. If so, I’m happy to help – we none of us want a hack to refute himself so blatantly.

‘Islamist’ evokes the popular, and false, image of a crazed loner inflamed by his woeful misreading of the ‘religion of peace’ (so termed by numerous politicians who don’t mind railing against each individual atrocity). ‘Islamic’, on the other hand, describes in this context faithfulness to the tenets and history of Islam, whose scripture does, after all, contain more than 300 verses explicitly prescribing violence towards infidels.

Or perhaps I’m being unfair, and the problem isn’t so much individual as collective or, if you will, civilisational. As such, it goes deeper than a simple deficit of either courage or intelligence.

I believe that within the framework of liberal, which is to say modern,  Weltanschauung it’s simply impossible to call a Muslim terrorist a Muslim terrorist. Anyone daring to suggest that Muslims commit their atrocities because of Islam, not despite it, will face accusations – and possibly even charges – of racism, white supremacism, fascism and other such indictable offences.

At least, people like Liddle only exert influence on their readers, or not, as the case may be. People like Macron, on the other hand, have the power to formulate policy, or not, as the case may be.

For they labour under the yoke of the same civilisational folly that forces Liddle to confuse Islamist with Islamic. Hence Macron has added another duty to his already onerous load, that of reformer of Islam, a composite of Martin Luther and Denis Diderot with a shaggy beard attached.

Manny has the commendable self-confidence to believe he can facilitate the creation of what he called an “Enlightenment Islam”. Even uttering such words, never mind trying to act on them, betrays either total ignorance or, more likely, a tacit acknowledgment of the constraints I mentioned earlier.

Unlike Christianity, Islam aggressively discourages freedom of thought. That’s why, in the 1,400 years of its existence, it has precluded even the remotest possibility of real reform or, on the plus side, anything that in the West goes by the name of the Enlightenment (‘Crepuscularism’ is the term I’d prefer).

The essential Christian doctrine of free will presupposes the freedom of apostasy, with the erosion of the church it may entail. However, if the Christian church were to abandon that doctrine, it would stop being a Christian church.

The church has historically believed that erosion at the periphery, lamentable as it is, wouldn’t weaken its doctrinal and ecclesiastical centre. That self-confidence has been vindicated: for all the attrition the church has suffered, it has still survived for 2,000 years.

On the other hand, if Islam allowed the same freedom of thought, it wouldn’t last a decade. In acknowledgement, it enforces on pain of death unquestioning obedience and unwavering practice. That’s understandable: Islam doesn’t have the theological strength to withstand sustained critical analysis.

The cult of Mohammed is vital to it, and Islam is the only Abrahamic religion in which a non-divine personage is worshipped with such fervour. Any parallels between Christ and Mohammed in this regard are spurious.

According to Christian doctrine, Jesus Christ wasn’t only fully man but also fully God, the creative hypostasis of the Holy Trinity. Muslims, on the other hand, believe that Mohammed was only a prophet of God, not God himself.

Thus their hysterical worship of Mohammed strikes me as more of a cult than a religion. And it’s with cultish zeal that Muslims jealously protect Mohammed’s image and follow his every word – including the words that incite terrorism.

I’m sure Macron knows as well as I do that the role of the Imam of All Imams he has claimed for himself is unplayable. He just said those words because the entire logic of the modern liberal mindset would allow no other, and he had to say something.

And it’s for the same reason, I suspect, that Rod Liddle pretends to be ignorant of the semantic difference between Islamist and Islamic. Of course it’s also possible that, as an alumnus of the Fabian LSE, he’s indeed ignorant of it.

According to the governments of Turkey, Iran and Pakistan, along with the mullahs and multitudes of pious Muslims in most Islamic lands, Manny Macron has declared a crusade on their religion.

And following the fine tradition of the previous eight Crusades, the Muslims aren’t going to take it lying down. Rallying the faithful, Malaysia’s ex-PM said that Muslims have a right “to kill millions of French people” if they insult the Prophet.

He didn’t specify how many millions, but at least his co-religionists have made a good, if by their standards still modest, start. Now, having beheaded several days ago a Paris teacher for daring to defend freedom of speech, they’ve added three parishioners of a Nice church to their score.

Just as he did the other day, Manny Macron vented his crusading spirit thunderously: “The entire nation will stand so that religion can continue to be exercised freely in our country,” he said. And then, sounding positively Churchillian: “We shall never give in!”

Realising how unfashionably radical those statements sounded, he immediately mitigated them by calling for “unity” and asking “not to give in to the spirit of division”. If I understand Manny correctly, France’s commitment to multiculturalism won’t be weakened even if Muslims butcher the recommended millions of Frenchmen.

That’s as far as the Ninth Crusade has gone, as far as it will ever go. Manny (or any other Western leader) will express his indignation at the murders and sympathy for their victims (“Our thoughts and prayers go to…”), call for unity, reiterate his commitment to civil liberties, explain that Muslim terrorists are sick individuals in no way inspired by their cult, and promise to stand firm.

The neo-Crusaders will thus arm themselves with hot air only, while the Muslims will defend everything they hold sacred with knives, guns, bombs and heavy vehicles driven through crowds. Such is the balance of power.

I’m touched by Manny’s outspoken commitment to the free practice of religion in France. It’s good to keep things nice and general, refraining, in the spirit of multiculturalism, from singling out any one religion in particular.

Since France used to be a Catholic country, and since Muslims are already perfectly free to practise their religion without fear of beheading, Manny could have uttered the dread words ‘Catholic’ or at least ‘Christian’. But he didn’t. The God of Multi-Culti is athirst and he can smite any infidel.

You’ll have noticed the baffling fact that France suffers more terrorist attacks than any other European country. That is, the fact is baffling only to those who fail to make the forensic observation that came to me in a revelatory flash: the number of terrorist incidents in a country is directly proportionate to the number of Muslims resident there.

France has the largest Muslim population in Western Europe, which is why the edge of multiculturalism is there at its most cutting. Apparently, cultural differences manifest themselves not only on hot kebabs, but also in cold steel.

Forget about crusades; they aren’t going to happen. But is there anything at all Western governments in general, and the French one in particular, can do to protect their people against Islamic savagery?

The answer is no, not without a complete cultural and political volte-face that’s about as likely as an air thick with flying pigs. Still, one is allowed to daydream in one’s weak moments.

In that blissful state one could think of any number of measures – all springing from the basic premise that the only good Muslim is a bad, which is to say impious, Muslim. Good, which is to say devout, Muslims are incompatible with Western societies because their religion is.

Regarded in that light, any mosque or Islamic centre where a single jihadist word has ever been uttered, and especially where a single terrorist has received instruction, should be summarily closed. In parallel, and this is an important point, all its members must lose their state benefits.

This point is important because, as the Figaro columnist Eric Zemmour showed the other day, most of the French Muslim terrorists are beneficiaries of state largesse, be it income support, lodgings or whatever. Putting a lid on that trough may also have the effect of limiting any further influx of migrants from Islamic lands.

In any case, such immigration should be severely curtailed, ideally stopped. The underlying assumption that in due course Muslim immigrants possibly, and their children definitely, will adopt their new culture has been proven false, some exceptions notwithstanding.

When the number of cultural aliens exceeds a certain critical mass, the culture itself is diluted into disappearance. And France, whose population is already 10 per cent Muslim, has evidently reached that point.

Any countries registering their approval of terrorism, never mind supporting it in more tangible terms, should have punitive sanctions imposed on them. If they instigate terrorist attacks, this must be treated as a casus belli and punished with military force, of apocalyptic proportions if need be. Such decisive response, however, must be based on more solid evidence than whatever inspired Messrs Bush and Blair to attack Iraq in 2003.

Western societies provide sufficient legal mechanisms to seek redress for grievances and insults. If Muslims find, say, a caricature offensive, they are free to sue their offenders – but, much as we all appreciate cultural diversity, not to cut their heads off.

I suggest that any Muslim wishing to become a permanent resident or citizen of a Western country be tested for his comprehension of, and compliance with, the laws and culture of his adopted land. When these aren’t evident, he must be instantly deported.

I’d even go further and recommend that the same test ought to be applied to those who are already citizens, even if born and bred. When the presence of a certain individual in the country endangers the lives of others, the country shouldn’t be held back by the formality of birth certificates or naturalisation papers.

Also… well, I’d better stop now before my collar is felt by the thought police. I don’t think they’d find my affection for Avicenna, Averroes, Saadi and Omar Khayyam to be a mitigating circumstance.

Not in his entirety, I hasten to add. It’s only Cartesian epistemology or, to be precise, its central postulate that’s deemed delinquent,.

All knowledge, wrote the philosopher, is based on comparing two or more things. Now, I have both philosophical and theological problems with that notion (it denies, for example, intuitive or revelatory knowledge, along with the knowledge of God, who is by definition incomparable).

But Putin’s objections are more practical than that. The other day the Duma proposed, and Putin endorsed, a law making it illegal to “equate the objectives, decisions and actions of the Soviet leaders, generals and soldiers with the objectives, decisions and actions of the Nazi leaders, generals and soldiers.”

One can deduce two things from this, one false, the other true. The false inference is that no parallels between the Soviets and the Nazis exist and therefore drawing them can yield no knowledge. The true inference is that the parallels do exist, but the knowledge they yield is unacceptable to Putin and his coterie.

If Euclid is to be believed, parallel lines can’t converge – which is why they are called parallels and not overlaps. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be drawn. In this context, though Bolshevism and Nazism weren’t identical in every respect, their similarities outweighed their differences.

The Duma member who proposed the law singled out Poland as the principal culprit in drawing those objectionable parallels. Yet one wonders how anyone can deny that the Poles have every right to wax Cartesian in this respect.

After all, on 23 August, 1939, the two evil regimes, Hitler’s and Stalin’s, signed a pact (followed by a lesser-known friendship treaty) dividing Europe in general and Poland in particular between them. To claim her piece, Germany attacked Poland on 1 September; Stalin followed suit on the 17^th.

Thus at the beginning of the war Hitler and Stalin were allies. They fired the first shots, and Poland was the first target.

Before the year was out, the Soviets deported more than a million Poles. Most ended up in Siberian concentration camps, others in unmarked graves – and the 22,000 officers murdered at Katyn and elsewhere are far from being a complete list of victims. At least 300,000 Soviet Poles also fell victim to Stalin’s genocidal purges, with about 100,000 dying of bullet or neglect.

Under those circumstances one can understand the Poles’ inability to distinguish between Brown and Red concentration camps, or between Brown and Red hit squads – especially since most Poles who perished in the Nazi camps were actually Jews (who accounted for three million out of the five million Poles killed during the war).

Actually, since the affection for Jews in Poland has always been rather understated, most Poles who lived through the war regard the Soviet occupation as worse than the Nazi one. And when the Soviet troops re-entered Poland in 1944, they began to rape, loot and murder on a scale that exceeded the Nazi crimes, which took some doing.

Moreover, having occupied the country, the Soviets installed a version of their own evil regime that continued to enslave the Poles for the next 50-odd years, while the Nazis only managed to do so for less than five years.

Moving on to a more fundamental level, both communist and Nazi ideologies – which is to say both nationalism and internationalism – are offshoots of the Enlightenment. A major difference between the two is that the Nazis declared war on the whole world except their own people, while the Bolsheviks’ war was waged on the world, including their own people.

While national and international socialism each developed in its own way, both were doctrinally committed to extreme statism, with state worship replacing religion, to which both regimes were violently opposed. That model came courtesy of Marx, and both Hitler and Stalin acknowledged their debt to him, the first obliquely, the second directly.

As part of the alliance established on the state level, the NKVD and the SS forged their own links. In 1940 the NKVD-SS Friendship Society was inaugurated with the approval of both Stalin and Hitler. The two diabolical organisations were comparing notes and exchanging pointers.

Even before the natural affinity between the two was institutionalised, a profitable exchange of ideas and equipment had been under way. The SS learned from their Soviet colleagues how to set up and run a network of concentration camps – and how to use gas for mass murder.

The Soviets were the first regime in history to use poison gases on their own people. That happened during the peasant uprisings in the 1920s, when gas shells were dropped from planes on the forests where the rebels were hiding. At the same time, the Soviets pioneered the use of gas vans, mobile gas chambers of low throughput but high efficacy.

The Nazis saw the potential of that innovation, used it in the early stages of the Holocaust and later developed it into the stationary facilities since then amply documented. In gratitude, the Gestapo shared with their NKVD colleagues the torture equipment essential to the needs of the Soviet growth industry.

In short, the parallels between the Soviets and the Nazis are perfectly valid and clearly visible, mutatis mutandis. But one can understand why Putin’s gang regards them as obnoxious.

Its ideological basis is a return to the imperial glory of Stalin’s Russia, if without the attendant communist slogans. Hence Putin’s propaganda machine is busily fostering the image of Russia as a noble fighter for goodness surrounded by enemies colluding to destroy it.

Russia emerges as a sort of prostitute with a heart of gold whom everyone screws and no one loves. Explained in those terms is everything awful that happens to Russia, such as her appalling poverty (outside Putin’s trusted lieutenants), the former constituent republics claiming their independence, and the West responding with sanctions to Putin’s holy mission of reversing “the worst geopolitical catastrophe of the 20^th century” (i.e. the disintegration of Stalin’s empire).

Putin’s Goebbelses are spinning the same yarns as did Soviet propaganda from Lenin onwards. NATO, using that ghastly Poland as its spearhead, is planning an invasion of Holy Russia, starting with her historically lawful, if illegally detached, property in the west.

This week Putin’s answers to Der Sturmer are screaming about the impending NATO thrust into Belarus to be launched from Poland and Lithuania. The only possible response is of course to preempt that aggression by dispatching Russian troops into the country, whether she wants it or not.

Reviving the ethos of a virtuous Soviet Union heroically fighting off its enemies is part of the propaganda offensive. Obviously, anyone daring to compare Stalin with Hitler jeopardises this signalling of nonexistent virtue. Clapping such a spoilsport into prison becomes the only logical response.

If old René were alive today, he’d have to think twice before indulging in his epistemology. Comparing those two things might or might not yield knowledge. But it could definitely earn him a tenner in one of the extant camps.     

But not to worry: America’s would-be next president does get help, from his wife Jill.

The other day, Joe went off the rails a bit, but Mrs Biden put him back on track. Addressing his supporters on line, Joe got things ever so slightly wrong.

“Four more years of George, er, George, er,” he said, “he – we’re going to find ourselves in a position where, if Trump gets elected, we’re going to be in a different world.”

Whose denizen Joe already appears to be, but Jill dragged him back to reality. “Trump,” she whispered, poking her hubby-wubby in the ribs.

This incident left Washington insiders guessing which George Biden had in mind. The only two possibilities mooted were George W. Bush and his father George H.W. Such narrow-mindedness shows a singular lack of imagination.

For it’s conceivable that Joe was actually thinking of George Washington, whose return to the White House should indeed be avoided at all costs. After all, his congenital urge to kill the Red Coats might jeopardise musicians in the United States Marine Band, whose uniforms are blatantly red.

Just imagine the band going into a rousing rendition of Hail to the Chief, only for George Washington to order his Secret Service detail to take the musicians out one by one. You know what they say about old habits: unlike old men they die hard.

Then again, Joe might have been making a valid point, whose subtlety went beyond his listeners. Think about it in terms of parties, not personalities. The two Bushes are Republicans, as is Trump. Hence Joe was simply pointing out the dangers resident in one party practically monopolising the White House.

‘George’ thus becomes a collective noun designating a political genus – a bit like SAS soldiers referring to all officers as ‘Ruperts’ even if their actual names are different. People really ought to try to understand what this great man means before jumping on his case.

I for one look forward to Biden’s presidency, for it’s time honesty returned to the White House. To wit: just two days before Joe left his viewers guessing which George shouldn’t be president for another four years, he made an admission startling in its candour.

Starring in a campaign video, Joe boasted: “We have put together, I think, the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organisation in the history of American politics.”

I can’t say I approve of voter fraud, but I have to admire Joe’s honesty. No other politician would ever make such a frank admission, and surely the tradition of truthfulness in American presidency has been attenuating since the tenure of, well, George Washington.

Alas, Joe’s detractors hold his supposed blunders against him. They point out that he sometimes doesn’t even know where he is. The other day, for example, he was campaigning in the beautiful town of Keene.

Since I once drove through it, I know it’s beautiful and so does Joe. “I love this place,” he said. “Look, what’s not to like about Vermont in terms of the beauty of it?”

There’s nothing not to like about Vermont in terms of the beauty of it (I have to use the same turn of phrase, I love it so much) – this aesthetic assessment is unassailable, even though Keene is actually in New Hampshire.

Perhaps Joe was trying to make a point about parochial rivalries, so typical of adjacent states. By praising the beauty of Vermont, he wanted to remind his New Hampshire audience that they are all New Englanders and, more broadly, Americans. Getting jingoistic about their own patch might therefore be construed as unpatriotic.

But even assuming for the sake of argument that Joe confused the two states, you must admit that’s an easy mistake to make. They are indeed similar in many respects, including the breath-taking beauty of their foliage season. I mean, he didn’t confuse, as he might have done, New Hampshire with New Mexico or for that matter New South Wales, did he?

Then last year, as his campaign was gathering momentum, Joe said he was in Ohio when he was in Iowa. So fine, those two states aren’t adjacent, but they aren’t a million miles apart. Let him whose knowledge of geography is impeccable cast the first stone.

Not only is Joe honest, but he’s also humble. Earlier this year he introduced himself to potential voters thus: “My name’s Joe Biden. I’m a Democratic candidate for the United States Senate.”

Of course, everyone, emphatically including Joe, knew exactly which office he was seeking. But Joe’s innate modesty accounted for that slip of the tongue: something within him craved a less conspicuous, more familiar post – what a welcome contrast to that egomaniac Trump.

Sometimes Joe gets his arithmetic wrong, or so it seems. For example, he claimed that since 2007 150 million Americans had been killed by guns and, this year, another 200 million by Covid.

Having thus depopulated the United States, Joe was accused of getting his numbers wrong. In fact, he was sounding a grave warning, which his audience either misunderstood or misheard. Joe meant that, if we aren’t careful, guns could kill 150 million Americans, and Covid everyone left.

Hyperbole is a time-honoured rhetorical device, and Joe wielded it adroitly. Accusing him of senility on this basis is as silly as accusing him of incest simply because back in March he confused his wife and his sister when speaking at a rally in California.

“By the way, this is my little sister Valerie!” Biden said, taking his wife by the hand. “And I’m Jill’s husband,” he added, pointing at his sister. 

I’m not going to speculate about the intimatemost details of life in the Biden household, and neither should anyone else. Yet even assuming that Joe’s brotherly love goes a bit too far, remember that Nietzsche had a similar relationship with his sister, which didn’t prevent him from writing Also sprach Zarathustra.

I’m hereby asking everybody to refrain from pointing out Joe’s little slips, if that’s what they are. Otherwise we may indeed end up with another four years of George and Martha in the White House.

His Holiness generously likes to share with the world his ideas on subjects not immediately related to his institutional domain.

There’s nothing wrong with that in itself. In fact, one could argue that everything in life either lies within the pontiff’s domain or at least touches on it tangentially. However, finding an accommodation between Caesar’s things and God’s is an intellectually demanding task, and I’m not sure Pope Francis is quite up to it.

The task is so demanding because no evangelist graced us with a gospel of Christ the Economist, Christ the Lawyer, Christ the Educator or Christ the Marriage Counsellor. All the evangelists vouchsafed us are the Gospels of Christ our Lord.

That, however, doesn’t mean that the divine message concerns matters of the spirit only. For it’s Christ’s person, not just his teaching, that’s the essence of Christianity.

By uniting within himself the human and the divine, Jesus sanctified not only the metaphysical spirit but also the physical body. (Denying this fact produced the deadliest heresies in the history of Christianity.)

Reconciling the two in daily life is hard, but it’s not impossible. Though I seem to be the only one to use the term ‘applied theology’, many great thinkers have practised that discipline under different rubrics. They all knew there’s life not only after death but also before it, and that life must be lived within the material framework, but without compromising eternity.

One of the areas of quotidian life to which theology can be applied is economics, and this is the task Pope Francis often puts on his already overladen shoulders. What he has written this time does contain a kernel of truth, but it’s buried under such a huge pile of rubbish that discerning it becomes well nigh impossible.

“The fragility of world systems in the face of the pandemic has demonstrated that not everything can be resolved by market freedom,” wrote Francis, and that’s the kernel of truth I mentioned.

It’s not even necessary to drag the pandemic in – the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of what I call economic totalitarianism has been evident for a long time. Neither market freedom nor market unfreedom is the answer to our prayers.

The Marxist belief in the primacy of economics has begotten most of the objectionable modern movements, both of the left and of the right. It’s distressing to see that such libertarian thinkers as the odious Ayn Rand and the nice Milton Friedman accept Marx’s premises and only attach a different sign to them.

They all believe that economic virtue can cure man of his sins – they just define virtue differently. Nationalise the economy, says Marx, and everything else will fall into place. Free up the economy, say the libertarians, and everything else will take care of itself.

Like Orwell’s animals, both sides reduce everything to a single issue. They just can’t agree on the number of legs.

Yes, the Pope could have said, Jesus did teach that his kingdom is not of this world. But he made it abundantly clear that his kingdom is higher than this world. Therefore, a Christian must measure all his earthly activities, including economic ones, against the Kingdom of God.

But that doesn’t mean that any successful economic activity somehow contradicts God’s commandments by definition. Yet this is precisely what the Pope says, while revealing most lamentable economic illiteracy.

“In today’s world, many forms of injustice persist,” he writes, “fed by… a profit-based economic model that does not hesitate to exploit, discard and even kill human beings.”

It’s true that free markets don’t eliminate sin and consequently all the woes that so upset the pontiff. But do they actually ‘feed’ injustices? One detects a spot of post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy here, and an implicitly loose definition of justice. An income disparity, for example, as often as not reflects not injustice but justice, people getting what they deserve.

The Pope seems to imply that economic models not based on the profit motive promote universal harmony and security. There His Holiness ventures onto the swampy ground of empirical evidence, and it swallows him up.

For no profit-grabbing economic system has ever produced as much human misery as do models ostensibly rejecting profit as the driver of an economy. Hundreds of millions died horrific deaths in the twentieth century alone in the name of profit-free economic justice.

In this world we aren’t blessed with perfect systems, but there’s a difference between imperfection and evil. That, I’m afraid, is the choice we face when it comes to economies: imperfect freedom reflecting human nature, or perfect slavery stamping human nature, along with human lives, into the blood-soaked dirt.

The Pope went on to attack “the magic theories of ‘spillover’ or ‘trickle’”, using magic in the meaning of false. That again is ignoring overwhelming empirical evidence.

For wealth accumulated by the smart operators of free markets does trickle down all the way to the bottom. That’s why most of today’s poor in the West would have been regarded as sinfully prosperous at any other time in history. 

His Holiness then went on to endorse the discredited and defunct theory of zero-sum economics: “if one person lacks what is necessary to live with dignity, it is because another person is detaining it.”

At the heart of this neo-Marxist theory is the picture of an economy as a pie whose size never changes. Therefore if one greedy individual helps himself to a large slice, some poor person will only get crumbs off the table.

This fallacy, like many others, is based on a false premise. Accept it, and everything else seems to make sense. But this premise simply doesn’t tally with plainly visible facts.

For free economies (and which Western economy is truly free these days?) are always dynamic. They may go up or down, but, viewed over a long time, they grow.

Thus, when I first graced the West with my presence, in 1973, the FTSE 100 stood at 478. Today, even after having lost 150 points to the pandemic, it’s 5841. This means that the top UK companies are now worth 12 times more than in 1973 – that’s a much bigger pie to slice up.

The Pope is held to be infallible when pronouncing on faith and dogma ex cathedra. Alas, when enlarging on other subjects from a less lofty pulpit, he is very fallible indeed. That would seem to be a good reason to desist, but who am I to offer advice to the Holy Father?  

I’ve just come across the most startling statistic I’ve seen for a long time – and I’m not easily startled by statistics.

According to a private poll conducted by David Shor, a top US analyst, about 30 per cent of American women under 25 identify as LGBT. For the previous generation, women over 60, this proportion is under five per cent.

Reviving the old nature vs. nurture argument, let’s assume that human nature is more or less immutable. Hence, if we went by biological factors alone, the proportion of women who have no time for men should hold more or less stable from one generation to the next. Since that’s not the case, it leaves one explanation only: culture has undergone a cataclysmic change.

This pertains even if we take Mr Shor’s data with a whole shaker of salt. In fact, I’m sure the real proportion is quite a bit lower than he cites. For it’s not only possible but extremely likely that many of Mr Shor’s respondents lied to him. This is a common phenomenon in all polls: people tend to say things they think the pollster wants to hear or, even more often, things they feel will make them look good.

However, in this case their veracity doesn’t matter. It’s immaterial whether 30 per cent of young women actually are lesbians or merely claim to be because they are trying to come across as interesting, progressive and ‘cool’. The cultural catastrophe is just as calamitous either way.

That a steep rise in homosexuality is an omnipresent symptom of decadent societies is true to the point of being a truism. Nor would anyone be surprised if told that, historically, decadent societies tend to be moribund.

Yet the problem that concerns me here isn’t general but specific. After all, even homosexual activists never put the incidence of male homosexuality at higher than 10 per cent, and all the reliable research I’ve seen yields much lower figures. So why are young women different?

One can think of any number of valid reasons. But the overarching factor is an ever-accelerating shift from a Christian civilisation to a post-Christian one, complete with new moral presuppositions.

In Christendom, all such presuppositions derived from the church either predominantly or at least largely. And the church countenanced sex only between men and women, only in marriage and only for reproductive purposes.

That was a moral law, and, like all laws, it was frequently and widely broken. However, the existence of, say, murderers doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have laws against murder. Laws are important because they signpost the boundaries of the permissible, enabling society to guard itself against trespassers.

As Western civilisation travelled towards new havens, sex began to shift from frequently immoral to universally amoral. Long before 1963, when, according to Philip Larkin, sexual intercourse began, Hemingway enunciated this amorality frankly: “About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.”

That adage could be paraphrased to say that morality, specifically in sex, has become strictly eudemonic, separated from demonic by just two letters. In other words, the moral law can no longer be broken simply because it no longer exists.

Sex gradually lost its erstwhile link to procreation, family, love and eventually any human emotion other than lust. Whenever that link still persists, it’s strictly a matter of individual, and increasingly eccentric, choice.

Shedding the tethers of moral restraints, sex has joined drugs and rock ‘n roll as a prong in the trident piercing the entire cultural history of the West. And even when sex doesn’t function in that lofty capacity, it merely satisfies the biological need to climax.

As ever, language provides a reliable clue. Notice how the mechanical word ‘partner’, which a few decades ago appeared only in annual reports and sex manuals, is replacing emotionally and socially charged words, such as ‘lover’, ‘husband’ and ‘wife’. (Only yesterday I was asked in a doctor’s surgery whether I lived with my partner. “No,” I replied, “I live with my wife.” The nice nurse didn’t understand what I was on about.)

This process can only be fully understood in the context of the overall frontal assault on the religious, moral, social and political heritage of Christendom, which, come to think of that, is a workable definition of modernity.

And those in the vanguard of any attack receive most medals. Hence both male and female homosexuals are now screaming that they are proud to practise what only recently was regarded as nothing to be proud of. Yet, though both sexes are coming out of the closet, only the women have more or less ditched that piece of furniture altogether.

Witness the fact that so far not a single male tennis pro (and just one footballer) has come out as a homosexual, while many of their female colleagues have. Male homosexuality must still carry some residual stigma, possibly because of the more invasive nature of the acts involved.

Women, on the other hand, feel they have nothing to hide: they can just as easily achieve an orgasm with another woman, perhaps even more easily. Since it’s all that sex is about, who needs men?

This dovetails neatly with feminism, whose underlying claim is that men and women aren’t just equal but the same, and therefore interchangeable. Men are redundant as providers – either the women themselves or the state can assume that function. Men are redundant as fathers – again, the state can step in and do the job. Men are no longer needed for sex – either other women or sex toys can take care of that.

In fact, men are the historical enemies of women whom they used to subjugate, enslave, exploit and rape. Being ‘into’ men is therefore ‘uncool’, while being ‘into’ traditional family is tantamount to selling out.

Peer pressure crushes women to a point that many find it easier to identify as lesbians than as would-be wives and mothers – even if they happen to be straight. Homosexuality has become aspirational among young women, and young men can’t be far behind.

That’s what Mr Shor’s statistics tell us, whether or not his respondents were perfectly honest. I just hope I’ll be dead by the time homosexuality becomes mandatory. 

Just to think that a mere seven years ago we had a real Catholic Pope, one who devoted his whole life to upholding Christian doctrine.

This is what Benedict XVI said about the issue that’s so close to his successor’s woke heart: “A century ago, anyone would have thought it absurd to talk about homosexual marriage.”

He then added that homomarriage, abortion and reproductive technologies were of the Antichrist. “Modern society is in the middle of formulating an anti-Christian creed,” said His Holiness, “and if one opposes it, one is being punished by society with excommunication.”

No one has to be a Catholic or, more generally, a Christian. However, no Catholic or, more generally, no Christian would have a leg to stand on if he tried to object. For the view expressed by the Pope has scriptural antecedents in both Testaments.

In the two millennia that passed since St Paul wrote on this issue in his epistles to Romans, Corinthians and Timothy, the Church accepted his view as sacred truth. Then, seven years ago, when Pope Benedict was forced off his throne, things began to change.

Pope Francis clearly dreads excommunication from secular society with its increasingly subversive and anti-Christian diktats. Going against Christian doctrine, the teaching of the Church and its entire history, on the other hand, is no problem at all.

Hence, halfway through a documentary film about him, Pope Francis endorsed homosexual civil unions: “Homosexual people have the right to be in a family. They are children of God. Nobody should be thrown out or be made miserable over it. What we have to have is a civil union law; that way they are legally covered.”

The pontiff’s concern for the minutiae of secular law is touching. It’s comforting to know that the Pope is ready to veer outside his remit and engage in legal debates. Or rather it would be comforting if such forays didn’t come at the expense of his core business.

It’s interesting to follow his logic though. If all God’s children have the right to form a family, why not marry homosexuals in church? What’s food for the goose of the registrar ought to be food for the gander of the priest. Denying that is like saying that burglars have a right to rob my neighbour, but not me.

The rationale given by his Holiness is sheer demagoguery. Of course, homosexuals are children of God. That’s why they must be loved and treated with dignity, like all God’s creatures made in His image and likeness.

Not that I am drawing any direct parallels, but the same goes for thieves, murderers and even Jeremy Corbyn. We as Christians are duty-bound to love them, treat them kindly and pray for their salvation. But that doesn’t mean we should endorse their actions, or desist from stopping them by every available means.

The Church expresses this concept tersely: love the sinner, hate the sin. On the other hand, Pope Francis is saying that not only must the sinner be loved, but also that his sin must be actively endorsed. In Christianity, this is called heresy. In logic, this is called a category error.

This Pope is unlikely to renounce the former, but he’ll probably correct the latter before long – by declaring that homosexuality is no longer a sin and homomarriage should be given a sacramental status in the Church. On balance, I’d rather he stayed illogical.

Wearing my two hats, one of a champion of progress, the other of an ex-adman, I am appalled. For the current trend in British advertising violates my most cherished principles.

One of them is that any public communication featuring images of people must faithfully reflect the demographic makeup of the whole population. The same principle must also apply to any professional group, be that the board of a bank or the government of the country.

You’ll agree that any violation of this postulate betokens racism, favouring one racial group over others. This, as we know, is the eighth deadly sin, much worse than the other seven.

Admittedly, it took me a while to accept this principle that now seems self-evident. Progress took its time to work its way into my viscera, but now it dominates every humour in my body and soul (this last word shouldn’t be taken literally: every progressive person of any of the 74 known sexes knows that the soul is but a figment of reactionary imagination).

That’s why it’s with great anguish that I have to report being greatly offended by current TV and print advertisements. For they flagrantly violate the sacred principle of proportional demographic representation I hold so dear.

Take black Britons, for example (I hope you realise that I’m using the questionable term ‘black’ for brevity only – ‘British persons of Afro-Caribbean descent’ is morally correct but rhetorically long). They make up 3.4 per cent of the British population.

Thus, 3.4 per cent of any group shown on public media, specifically in advertising, must be black. I not only accept this principle but salute it with both hands.

However, while I don’t have any statistics at my disposal, anyone watching TV will confirm that the actual proportion is higher by an order of magnitude. At least one of every three people shown in commercials seems to be black.

Now, any adman will tell you that a photograph of potential customers should reflect the target audience for the brand. Some brands are specifically aimed at black audiences, and in my time I did quite a few such ads.

Moreover, when I worked in New York, whole agencies existed that specialised in black markets exclusively. I did some freelance work for them because I had a knack for talking to black audiences – why, I don’t have a clue.

However, the other day I caught a commercial for Peter Jones, the department store in Sloane Square that separates Chelsea from Belgravia. Living as we do just down the road, Penelope often shops there, and I sometimes tag along to make sure she doesn’t take too many liberties with the charge card.

I’m not sure that in the 30-odd years I’ve ever seen a black family shopping there, appalling as this fact is. But now I have – in a TV commercial for the store. Why such demographic chicanery?

No advertising agency would aim a campaign for Peter Jones at a black target group. Very few black live in the vicinity, and one doesn’t run into too many black Sloanies.

Hence ads featuring them miss the target audience, which no agency worth its salt ever used to do. Much as it pains me to say this about my former colleagues, they seem to be sacrificing professional integrity for… what exactly? Political correctness? Propaganda? Virtue signalling?

It’s not just this particular campaign. A new arrival in England who knows nothing about the country and wishes to fill that vacuum by watching TV commercials will get a wrong idea about his new country’s demographics.

Blacks and Asians together make up about 10 per cent of the population. Hence, if we stuck to the principle of proportional racial representation, one out of 10 actors and models appearing in ads should come from those groups. The actual percentage is much higher, although it would take serious research to establish the exact numbers.

The same goes for homosexuals. The most reliable study I’ve seen showed that only about 1.4 per cent of Britons favour their own sex. Yet advertising certainly features a much higher percentage. It’s as if the ads were meant to be aspirational, showing life not as it is, but as it’s supposed to be.

The champion of progress in me rejoices; the former adman weeps. Since advertising budgets are tightening up to suffocation, precise targeting becomes even more vital than ever. One has to admit with much chagrin that many of our advertisers pursue – or are forced to pursue – other than merely commercial objectives.

Just to think that in the past advertising was just a way of flogging brands. Now it has to multi-task, to use a fashionable phrase. Long live progress, I say. And if it necessarily includes racism, then so be it — provided it’s the right kind of racism.