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It would be both silly and presumptuous to claim that our great, if underrated, philosopher R.G. Collingwood has agreed to appear as guest columnist in this space.

It would be silly because Collingwood died in 1943. It would be presumptuous because I have no reason to believe that, even if he were alive today, he’d agree to act as my co-author.

Yet the two long quotations I’m going to offer apply to our situation today so accurately and exhaustively that they can almost function as a complete article. All I can offer is some ornamental commentary, pointing out the specific relevance of Collingwood’s insights.

The first one was an observation of how civilisations perish. In a single paragraph Collingwood dismissed simplistic explanations, while at the same time almost making long tomes redundant:

“Civilisations sometimes perish because they are forcibly broken up by the armed attack of enemies without or revolutionaries within; but never from this cause alone. Such attacks never succeed unless the thing that is attacked is weakened by doubt as to whether the end which it sets before itself, the form of life which it tries to realise, is worth achieving. On the other hand, this doubt is quite capable of destroying a civilisation without any help whatever. If the people who share a civilisation are no longer on the whole convinced that the form of life which it tries to realise is worth realising, nothing can save it.”

Collingwood’s second insight points out one key cause of our collective enfeeblement:

“The critical moment was reached when Rome created an urban proletariat whose only function was to eat free bread and watch free shows. This meant the segregation of an entire class which had no work to do whatever; no positive function in society, whether economic or military or administrative or intellectual or religious; only the business of being supported and being amused. When that had been done, it was only a question of time until Plato’s nightmare of a consumers’ society came true; the drones set up their own king and the story of the hive came to an end.”

A resounding yes on both counts. Any physical assault on a great civilisation can only ever succeed if the civilisation has lost its metaphysical core, what’s fashionably called values.

It takes a powerful hurricane to break a healthy oak in half but, when the oak is rotten inside, even a slight push will suffice. Collingwood cites Rome, but the same observation applies to us as accurately.

Anywhere we look we can see every traditional strength crumbling away, every certitude of yesteryear inverted. Man has assumed God-like powers of judging good and bad, virtuous and sinful, right and wrong, only to find that, in human hands, such powers can corrupt more than any others.

The West has abandoned the framework of discipline that’s a prerequisite for the existence of real freedom, making every notion, no matter how idiotic and subversive, acceptable and worthy of a place at the intellectual table.

Predictably that has produced a culture of self-imposed despotism that, uniquely in history, needs little help from the state’s good offices. Such help, however, is always on offer whenever the self-despotism alone can’t pull the garrotte tight enough.    

The real morality of Christendom has been replaced with a fake and ever-expanding code of tyrannical restrictions on every traditional Western freedom, each based on the Judaeo-Christian understanding of man as a creature made in the image of God and therefore possessing sovereign value.

Western economies are bending under the load of unbearable debt, which makes them susceptible to evil regimes ever ready to proffer investment that, upon closer examination, turns out to be economic sabotage.

Much is being written about the report showing that the British economy has become so addicted to Putin’s fiscal poison that going cold turkey may well prove fatal. It’s because of this medical condition that foreign gangsters, working on behalf of their evil governments, have found it so easy to buy British (and generally Western) politicians both retail and wholesale.

Western politicians are still residually accountable to their voters, who have systematically shed any metaphysical yearnings, having replaced them with a craving for physical comfort. They can accept any diminution of culture, social life, morality or civil liberties, but not that of physical well-being.

Hence it’s understandably hard for Western politicians to tell Putin’s agents to keep their trillions to themselves, what with the relative impoverishment that’s likely to follow such a principled stance. That’s why it took our (Conservative!) government almost a year to publish a tepid report on the Russian penetration denominated in political influence.

The report doesn’t go far enough, possessing as it does only some limited ad hoc value. To make a really devastating point the report would have had to reveal many shocking facts that have been coyly kept under wraps – and also put such facts in the context of the accelerating disintegration under way in all Western countries, emphatically including Britain.

It’s not just about a few politicians taking campaign contributions in soiled, and often blood-soaked, millions. It’s about a society growing so feeble, so lacking in self-confidence, so malignantly hedonistic that it’s no longer able to defend itself against its enemies – indeed so enfeebled that it even refuses to recognise its enemies for what they are.

The oak has become rotten inside, and the slightest push may well bring it down. When, say, Putin or one of his successors decides that the tottering has reached a wide enough amplitude, it wouldn’t take a massive assault to bring the tree down.

A little push into, say, Estonia would test the West’s resolve, only to find it non-existent. Dying for Narva would be as unthinkable as dying for Danzig was in 1938.

Our politicians and pundits wouldn’t miss a beat echoing Neville Chamberlain who spoke of “a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing”. When we learned, it was too late to prevent oceans of blood from spilling.

Why, that choir has already started to rehearse, with Peter Hitchens singing the solo part: “They are a poor, under-populated country nearly 2,000 miles away… We have no border with Russia, nor any other territorial, naval or economic conflict… We hardly trade with them…”

Now, Hitchens wouldn’t acknowledge a Russian threat even if a Spetsnaz brigade landed in Kent. But here the Chamberlain resonance is unmistakable, as is a complete, if possibly put-on, ignorance of modern geopolitics.

As ever, Hitchens is self-refuting. He never tires of writing – correctly, as it happens – about the woeful decline of Britain in every conceivable sense, while pretending not to realise how light an external push it would therefore take to bring about a collapse.

Those feral bearded chaps clad in bearskins also looked puny compared to the mighty edifice of Rome, with its well-drilled legions, modern technologies, firmly entrenched economic and legal principles. And then…

And then don’t read Hitchens, ladies and gentlemen. Read Collingwood instead. He saw the signs with the eagle eye of a prophet – who’d nevertheless hate to see his prophesies come true.

Today’s Times: “The disclosures came 24 hours after the intelligence and security committee (ISC) published its long-delayed Russia report and questioned whether the government ‘took its eye off the ball. by allowing oligarchs to invest billions of pounds in Britain and make high-level political connections.“

Who could have thought? Well, false modesty aside, somebody could. This is what I wrote on this subject in April, 2012. Some details mentioned in the piece were transient, indeed including Berezovsky, who was to be garrotted by Putin’s hitmen, but the bulk of it applies today just as it did then.

The other day the French authorities impounded some £11 million belonging to that worthy London resident Boris Berezovsky. The money, they declared, had been acquired in criminal ways and therefore its owner can’t claim legitimate property rights. Since the French acted at the behest of the Russian government, which is itself criminal, their reasons are questionable. But their action does raise interesting issues.

I’m not going to explore how Boris has made his billions. If you’re interested in the subject, read an excellent book Godfather in the Kremlin by Paul Klebnikov. The eponymous godfather is no longer in the Kremlin – having fallen out with Putin, he now resides in England. And Klebnikov is no longer alive – in 2004, as he was researching another book on Russia’s organised crime, he died in a hail of bullets fired (one hears by Chechens) from a passing car in central Moscow.

True to its heritage, Putin’s government spread the rumour that Klebnikov had been killed by a jealous husband. Of course he was. The MO proves that: two men firing submachine guns from a fast-moving car. Love does work in mysterious ways, especially in Putin’s Russia.

And now yet another Mafia hit, this time in London, reminds us that Russian ‘businessmen’ are just as capable of settling their disputes at our doorstep. The only sane response to this is NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard). Yet this is a response we are unlikely to give.

Pecunia non olet (‘money doesn’t stink’), said the Roman emperor Vespasian when questioned about his tax on the urine sold by public lavatories to tanners. Vespasian was rather crude even by the standards of Roman emperors, so he can be forgiven for his soldierly directness.

What is upsetting is that after two millennia of subsequent civilisation we still haven’t outlived the principle first enunciated by Vespasian. Except that we couch it in legal cant based on property rights, a subject dear to every conservative heart. However, much as we worship this or any other right, we shouldn’t allow it to turn into a suicide pact. Society has a superseding right to protect itself.

Ever since the ‘collapse’ of the Soviet Union, Russian billionaires have been arriving in England, first in a trickle, lately in a stream. A good chunk of their money arrives with them, and we welcome it. The British can’t afford to buy £40-million houses; good job someone can. Who cares how that £40 million was earned? Pecunia non olet!

Everyone knows, or ought to know, that no one can become a billionaire in today’s Russia without engaging in activities that in any civilised country would land their perpetrator in prison. Since the KGB mafia fronted by Putin controls Russia’s economy, no Russian can become a billionaire without active cooperation with it, if only by paying protection money. And since the mafia is criminal, every Russian billionaire is, as a minimum, its accessory.

They all, possibly with one or two exceptions, have a criminal mentality, and they bring it to London along with their money. We close our eyes on the former because we like the latter. Pecunia non olet!

So we let the likes of Abramovich, Berezovsky and Lord Mandelson’s best friend Deripaska come to London. Their billions are welcomed, as long as we are sure they use our courts, not our dark alleys, to settle their disagreements. Meanwhile, Sloanie dimwits are falling all over themselves to get an invitation to Abramovich’s box at Stamford Bridge.

Girls previously only interested in the hats they were going to wear at this year’s Ascot now profess interest in holding midfielders, wingbacks and second strikers. Thanks to Abramovich’s money footie has become their nostalgie de la boue, today’s answer to the fashionable slumming of yesteryear. And the provenance of the money? Who cares? Pecunia non olet, and those who still remember their Roedean Latin won’t even need a translation.

One would think that the six shots fired into Gherman Gorbuntsov’s body would serve as a wake-up call, even though Gherman himself can hardly be confused with a boy scout. Wanted in Moldova and Russia for the sort of dealings that would tip the Old Bailey scales at the better part of 25 years, he already did some time back in the early 1990s. I don’t know what the charge was in Russia, but I’m willing to bet it wasn’t dissent.

And then Gherman committed the ultimate mafia crime of squealing. Specifically, he agreed to give evidence in the case involving another attempted murder, of the chap whose son at one point owned another English football club. (What is it about football that attracts those people? Why not polo? Go straight to the top, I say.) The death penalty is the only possible punishment, and silly Gherman thought they wouldn’t get to him in London. Little did he realise that, just as the ruling mafia had turned Moscow into the Wild West, so it was turning London into Moscow.

Miraculously, Gherman has survived and now he’s busily naming names, those who ordered the hit. One suspects his loquacity is the price Scotland Yard has demanded for its protection, but be that as it may Gorbuntsov has now pointed a finger at several chaps close to Putin himself. So when he recovers from his wounds, he’ll probably be allowed to stay here, until next time. After all, pecunia non olet, and his money is as good as anyone else’s.

I don’t know if Putin did commission the murder, and frankly I don’t care. It’s enough for me to know that this unrepentant officer in history’s most murderous organisation is perfectly capable of it. What I do care about is the moral damage these Russians are doing to us.

Pecunia non olet? You bet it does. It smells of blood spilled in London streets. It stinks of the Faustian deal we’ve struck. It reeks of a society in decay. Are you holding your nostrils? I am.

Andrew Sullivan, a British writer who has spent most of his adult life in the US, describes himself as a conservative. Even better, a Catholic conservative.

But then political nomenclatures mean so little these days that they can be safely disregarded. To me, Mr Sullivan is neither a conservative nor much of a Catholic.

In the past he edited The New Republic, a publication to the right of Pravda circa 1970 only marginally and not invariably. Then Sullivan is an HIV-positive homosexual, which by itself doesn’t disqualify him as a conservative. However, he has anonymously advocated unprotected anal sex, “preferably with other HIV-positive men”. I’m sure he had valid reasons, but these must have had little to do with promoting a conservative Catholic agenda.

Sullivan also supports other non-conservative causes, such as homomarriage, progressive taxation, nationalised healthcare and whatnot. And he’s planning to vote for Biden in November.

However, he has also advocated some causes that Americans call conservative and I call libertarian. That has proved his undoing, for even such dubious, what he calls ‘moderate’ or ‘anti-Trump’, conservatism turned out to be too much for his colleagues at New York magazine to bear.

They claimed that the toxic presence of even a moderate conservative, however he’s planning to vote, made them physically ill. And I do mean physically, not metaphorically.

That makes conservatism even in its mild forms a deadly contagion, not unlike Covid. The difference is that, while a cure for coronavirus isn’t known, the cure for conservatism is. The honour of its discovery belongs to assorted communist regimes around the world, where the slightest deviation from the party line was punishable by imprisonment or death.

At this point, the only death meted out to dissidents from the woke line is of a professional variety, which is what befell Sullivan. And not only him.

American madness always takes a few years to arrive at our shores, and so far I can think of only one prominent career, that of David Starkey, destroyed by wokish totalitarianism. Prof. Starkey’s crime was making a reasonable point that black slavery, reprehensible as it was, wasn’t genocide for the simple reason that slaves were a valuable commodity supposed to produce material goods.

In America, careers are destroyed en masse. For example, New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss, a rather wokish person herself, had to quit because, as she wrote in her resignation letter, the newspaper fostered an “illiberal environment”. Poor Bari didn’t realise that illiberal is today’s liberal.

Also, the senior curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was made to resign for using “white supremacist language”. The hapless academic refused to stop collecting white artists because doing so, he said, would be “reverse discrimination”.

Another chap lost a senior arts position for publicly expressing “solidarity with the BLM movement”. That language was deemed to be too vapid and wishy-washy – he was supposed to have announced his eagerness to man the barricades, not just mouth those egghead palliatives about some nebulous solidarity.

Sullivan’s transgression was mocking the Critical Theory, which in US academic and media sources functions the way Stalin’s Short Course did in Russia and Mao’s Red Book in China. 

Stripped of its pseudo-philosophical cant, the Critical Theory is a Marxist plan for world domination developed and embellished by the Frankfurt School about which I wrote yesterday. The object of the eponymous criticism is everything that gullible people can be made to believe makes the West evil (discrimination, sexism, misogyny, racism – name your own bugbear).

This functions as received wisdom in American (and increasingly our) academic, artistic and media circles. Even worse, it acts as the party ‘general line’ from which no deviations are allowed and any criticism of which must be punished.

Moreover, people working at such institutions are actively encouraged to denounce their wayward colleagues, either by reporting them to the bosses or posting scathing attacks on social media. You don’t need me to draw parallels here, do you?

But never mind deviations and criticism. Mere silence or tacit acquiescence are indictable offences too. Just like in Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China, the only way for the culprits to avoid punishment is to debase themselves publicly by issuing grovelling apologies and promises to self-correct.

Prof. Starkey has done just that, destroying much of my respect for him. Yet neither Sullivan nor Weiss went without trouble, although Sullivan showed little rancour in his resignation letter.

He stressed the right of the magazine’s editors and staff to choose those they wish to see under their roof, which was something that really went without saying. What needed saying was that bullying someone into resignation for ideological reasons smacks of either red or brown fascism.

It’s tempting to ascribe the Americans’ (and increasingly our) lurch to the left to an onset of some collective madness, mostly afflicting educated people with high IQ. However, that would be a hopeful explanation, because a pandemic can disappear as quickly as it arrives.

But there’s no hope here because no visible counterforce is anywhere in evidence. What we are reaping is the harvest of ideological secularism used for decades as a wrecking ball to smash our civilisation to bits.

That could have been stopped only by another ball of equal mass travelling as fast in the opposite direction. But no such obstacle can possibly exist in a society dedicated to Enlightenment values.

The only thing that surprises me in America is the widespread submission to the proto-communist diktats not only in culture but also in economics. When I lived there (1973-1988), expropriatory taxes and nationalisation appealed only to the lunatic fringe. Now they seem to be mainstream.

Those ‘liberals’ don’t realise that they are signing their own death warrant. When their madness succeeds, and the whole thing collapses, they won’t be the ones to take over. It’ll be the equivalent of China’s Red Guards, and those chaps don’t have much affection for intellectuals – they talk too much and sometimes out of turn, if only unwittingly.

None so hostile as divergent exponents of the same creed, and those woke high-IQ cretins could do worse than remember that.  

The other day Angela Davis came off the mothballs to endorse Joe Biden for US presidency. That fact is unremarkable by itself, but what turns it into a story of worldwide importance is its ‘who’, ‘where’ and ‘why’.

The ‘who’ question is answered by ‘Angela Davis’, her of a most colourful biography. Way back then I couldn’t help knowing every detail of it because Angela was canonised in the Soviet Union.

She had every qualification for communist sainthood. Angela learned her communism from Herbert Marcuse, the shining light of the Frankfurt School of ‘philosophy’ (loosely defined).

Those Frankfurters fell out of Marx’s buns, but their recipes for communist takeover had many more ingredients. These included a gradual undermining of Western institutions from within, specifically exploiting racial, sex and economic inequality and aiming to take control of the press, entertainment and education.

Angela came to appreciate the fine points of that perfidious strategy later in life, but when her hormones were still at a bubble, she plunged headlong into radical politics with the natural impetuosity of youth. She joined the US Communist Party and became one of its leaders, eventually twice standing as the party’s Vice-Presidential candidate in the 1980s.

Not to be pigeonholed into the proletarian cause, Angela also branched out into feminist and anti-war activism, and she belied her anti-racism credentials by joining the Black Panthers, a gang wholeheartedly committed to black supremacy.

In 1971 that got Angela into a spot of trouble because guns registered in her name had been used in a takeover of a courthouse in which several people, including the judge, were killed. Angela spent a year on remand, while the Soviet Union kicked off the kind of worldwide campaign I described the other day. The racism card wasn’t just played – it was shoved down the world’s throat.

That’s when I got to learn so much about Angela that it almost felt as if I knew her personally. ‘Free Angela Davis!’ screamed off every front page, and not just in Russia. In the end the campaign succeeded, and Davis was acquitted.

She was then awarded the Lenin Peace Prize and turned up in Moscow to collect. We were all impressed by her braless good looks, although dispensing with that garment in public was then seen as rather risqué in the faux-puritan Soviet Union.

The answer to the ‘where’ question is considerably shorter, for Davis endorsed Biden in a video played on RT, Putin’s propaganda channel. This choice of venue is telling, for Davis, the heroine of the American Left (and consequently a holder of several professorships), would have had no shortage of indigenous loudspeakers.

That choice, among other critical things, is explained by the answer to the ‘why’ question. For Davis explained her reasons for endorsing Biden succinctly and honestly. And these happen to be the same reasons as those motivating RT, a former Trump supporter of long standing.

Biden, explained Angela, falls far short of the ideal she sees in her mind’s eyes. “He’s opposed to disbanding the police,” she complained, which to her must be tantamount to being a right-wing reactionary.

Now America is certifiably mad (about which tomorrow), but she still isn’t so mad as to give a candidate supporting that insanity more than the proverbial chance of a snowball in hell. Angela understands it and doesn’t make her endorsement contingent on this plank.

She realises that in this life ideals are unattainable: “I don’t see this election as being about choosing a candidate who will be able to lead us in the right direction,” Davis said.

“It will be about choosing a candidate who can be most effectively pressured into allowing more space for the evolving anti-racist movement… Biden is far more likely to take mass demands seriously.”

Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer and other Frankfurters are smiling out of their graves. Their able student has finally heeded their lessons.

As far as the American Left are concerned, being receptive to subversive anti-racist, feminist, ecological and LGBTQ+ pressures isn’t just the most important qualification for presidency, but the only one that matters.

That and not the odd bit of gunplay will bring down their hated capitalism, democracy, rule of law – in fact, their hated everything. This realisation also explains Davis’s choice of venue, signalling that her objectives overlap with the Kremlin’s.

The other day I wrote about the Russian angle in the BLM movement. Hence I have to be grateful to Angela for providing more evidence that I was right.

Donald Trump has many characteristics admired by Putin, mainly that he admires Putin. Though Trump doesn’t have Putin’s leeway in dispensing with such proctologic nuisances as division of power, he clearly respects leaders who do. His horse-trading approach to life can also be an asset, provided Russia can pay the right price for the horse.

But one thing Trump isn’t is woke. His first reaction to the BLM pogroms was a threat to shoot on sight. He didn’t act on that, but there’s no doubt where his sympathies and antipathies lie.

That’s why, continuing the equine metaphor, it looks as if Putin is ready to change horses, saddling Biden with the onus of acting as the conduit into which all pent-up discontents can flow to a destructive effect.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” This, possibly apocryphal, Burkean adage implies the distinct possibility that torpor on the part of American voters can lead to a triumph of the Frankfurters and their evil disciples.

Given the situation, any American voting for Biden in November will be committing treason in all but name. If you think Trump stinks, chaps, hold your nostrils – but don’t vote the country into an abyss.

When Queen Elizabeth II (God bless her) is no longer with us, the throne will pass on to King Charles III (God save us).

That’s how it has always been: the rules of succession are chiselled in stone. Sometimes, however, they can be re-chiselled, as they were by the 2013 Succession to the Crown Act.

Until then, the eldest male heir was first in line, even if he had an elder sister. That arrangement went back to the primogeniture specified in the Salic Law, which is to say to time immemorial.

That, of course, was too discriminatory for our woke (Conservative!) government, led at the time by that self-proclaimed ‘heir to Blair’, Dave Cameron. Having thus established his aspiration to follow in the footsteps of easily the most revolting resident of 10 Downing Street, Dave was true to his word.

Displaying a fanatical determination worthy of better use, he pushed through the homomarriage law, and any number of other affronts to tradition. One of them was changing something in existence for centuries: succession to the crown. Now the eldest sibling, male or female, will inherit the throne.

However, for any foreseeable future that particular affront will have only an academic significance. For Charles isn’t just the eldest male heir, but also the eldest heir, full stop. The same goes for his son William and William’s son George.

Having just scolded Dave Cameron for playing fast and loose with tradition, it ill-behoves me to propose yet another change – and I shan’t. But I wish I could.

For the Princess Royal, HRH Anne, though only fourteenth in the line of succession, stands head and shoulders above the 13 forerunners, and specifically her elder brother. She is consistently the hardest-working royal, a patron of 200 organisations.

However, Prince Charles runs her a close second in that department. Where she towers over him is in such faculties as intellect and character. We desperately need a monarch like Anne, who’d be able to offset to some extent the faddish wokiness of our politicians.

A British monarch has no – or, anticipating casuistic objections, next to no – executive power. The monarch, however, performs vital constitutional and cultural functions, most having to do with spanning the distances of time and geography.

The former has to do with providing unbreakable continuity between generations past, present and future. The latter is unifying all Commonwealth countries into one of the oldest extant alliances in the world (formerly known as the British Empire).

Those functions make our monarchy an inherently conservative institution. A monarch in the thrall of pernicious fads loses the thread of continuity, thereby bringing into question the very existence of the monarchy.

That’s what makes Anne, and doesn’t make Charles, an ideal monarch. For Anne openly despises her brother’s obsession with every wokish perversion coming round.

While her brother hugs trees and talks to vegetables, HRH Anne can barely contain mocking smiles and words. For example, one hobby horse that Charles rides is GM crops, which he fashionably derides (in the kind of fashion set by the same people who’d do away with the monarchy at the drop of a crown).

Anne would have none of that: “It has been an enormous advantage in many parts of the world to use GM wisely for very specific environments. It makes it much more likely to be able to grow what you need… .”

Charles carries on for ever about the perils of ‘climate change’. This is now the accepted wokish term because ‘global warming’ has been discredited by the demonstrable fact that the Earth’s climate has been cooling for the past 30 years.

His sister is openly contemptuous: “Climate changes all the time. It has done so throughout the globe’s history, so there’s nothing new under the sun.” Absolutely. And for about a third of the Earth’s lifespan the climate has been warmer than now.

Charles, though not a vegan himself, respects veganism and vegetarianism. This is de rigueur for any card-carrying wokeman, which is what Charles is.

But not Anne: “You can’t have a world without livestock. They are a necessary and very constructive part of our expectation to feed ourselves… We need livestock as part of the genuine mix that keeps land healthy.”

And then, most tellingly: “Perhaps my biggest irritation is single-issue groups…” She might as well have said ‘my brother’.

As a conservative, I’m opposed to unnecessary changes to ancient institutions that show the honourable patina of time. That’s why I don’t think monarchs should accede on merit – like it or hate it, but upholding traditional succession is more important than any single reign.

However, the English Common Law is based on precedents, and one such was established by the 2013 Succession to the Crown Act, when Parliament overrode an ancient practice. So in theory it could do so again and bypass Charles in favour of his much better qualified sister. Barring that, some sort of regency arrangement could be set up, with Charles talking to courgettes and Anne to heads of state.

That will never happen, will it? Unlike Anne, Charles is in tune with modern times and therefore modern parliaments. Most MPs, including those on the Tory benches, see nothing wrong with Charles – and doubtless plenty wrong with Anne.

HRH Anne, a Leo like me, will turn 70 in August. Wishing her a happy upcoming birthday, one can only sigh wistfully about the great queen we’ll never have. 

I don’t believe in conspiracy theories. I do, however, believe in facts. And these are unequivocal: global revolts like Black Lives Matter don’t sprout haphazardly. They require organisation, funding and coordination.

When a revolt is as global and well-coordinated as BLM, it has to be built on a groundwork painstakingly prepared over years by a large group of professionals. By large, I mean thousands, because history shows that’s what it takes.

That group starts with criminal objectives and pursues them by fomenting criminal action, trying to paralyse Western societies, demonise their histories, vandalise their cities, debunk their heroes, vilify their politics and culture, sow discord, promote hatred and polarisation. The ultimate goal is to undermine the West, making it ripe for a calamitous revolution.

As with any crime, any search for its perpetrators begins by identifying those who have the motive, means and opportunity. Before we decide who that might be, let’s look for clues in the documents issued by BLM and allied groups.

Fortunately, such groups are never reticent about their aims. They can’t afford to be because they need to attract followers, who must know what it is they are supposed to follow.

Thus the writings of Marx and Engels contain a detailed blueprint for a communist state. Nothing was left unsaid, not concentration camps, not confiscation of all private property, not relentless brainwashing from cradle to grave, not genocide, not elimination of the wealthy classes.

Their disciple Lenin didn’t go out of his way to conceal his plans either. On the contrary, he had been outlining them in increasingly evil detail for some 20 years before the Bolshevik takeover.

Hitler, who also acknowledged, if less frequently, his indebtedness to Marx, jammed his 1925 book Mein Kampf with numerous rants about the Jews and his plans for their extermination.

The upshot is that evil documents issued by evil men must be studied, analysed – and believed. And when we don’t know exactly who stands behind a subversive campaign, such documents provide a reliable clue.

With that in mind, let’s look at the US website of one BLM affiliate, the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) formed in December of 2014.

Their declared aim is “to develop shared assessments of what political interventions were necessary in order to achieve key policy, cultural and political wins.” They then proceed to make it clear that their wins will spell our losses:

“We believe that prisons, police and all other institutions that inflict violence on Black people must be abolished and replaced by institutions that value and affirm the flourishing of Black lives.”

In other words, M4BL wishes to abolish the rule of law, which is impossible to maintain without enforcement. As justification, BLM cites mendacious statistics, such as that, compared to whites, twice as many blacks are shot by police.

The proportion holds true per 100,000 population – but not per 100,000 crimes. This indeed constitutes gross injustice, considering that American blacks commit 85 per cent of all violent offences. For justice to be restored, the cited proportion ought to be much higher.

“We believe in centering the experiences and leadership of the most marginalized Black people, including but not limited to those who are trans and queer, women and femmes, currently and formerly incarcerated, immigrants, disabled, working class, and poor.”

In short, give us a malcontent, and we’ll provide a cause. This is another confirmation of the interconnected nature of all ‘protest movements’. The exact grievance doesn’t matter – what matters is that a grievance exists and it can be exploited.

“The current systems we live inside of need to be radically transformed, which includes a realignment of global power. We are creating a proactive, movement-based vision instead of a reactionary one.”

In other words, M4BL is calling for a world revolution. That’s a clue if I’ve ever seen one.

Here’s another: “We believe and understand that Black people will never achieve liberation under the current global racialized capitalist system. We are intentional about amplifying the particular experiences of racial, economic, and gender-based state and interpersonal violence that Black women, queer, trans, gender nonconforming, intersex, and disabled people face. Cisheteropatriarchy and ableism are central and instrumental to anti-Blackness and racial capitalism, and have been internalized within our communities and movements.”

I had to look up ‘cisheteropatriarchy’, and found it means ‘misogynist patriarchy’. ‘Ableism’, I assume, means correlating rewards with ability. Can’t have that.

But the general message shines through the dreadful language: these groups want a communist revolution. So who stands behind BLM, coordinating it with all seemingly unconnected movements to turn the West upside down under communist slogans? Who has the motive, means and proven record?

For someone who, like me, grew up in the midst of anti-Western hysteria channelled into similar conduits, the answer isn’t in dispute. It has to be Russia, capitalising on her 80 years’ experience in anti-Western subversion (or perhaps 70 years, if we subtract the 1990-2000 hiatus in such activities).

The auspicious start was the 1919 founding of Comintern, a GPU-run network dedicated to global propaganda, subversion and espionage. Immediately emerging as its star was the German communist Willi Münzenberg, the underrated genius of large-scale brainwashing.

Münzenberg created numerous front organisations he called ‘Innocents’ Clubs’, and Lenin called ‘useful idiots’. The overall objective was to extol the virtues of Bolshevism and demonise the evils of the West.

Many fronts were ostensibly devoted to benign causes, such as famine relief, but they were never allowed to deviate from the main objective. “These people,” Münzenberg once said, “have the belief they are actually doing this themselves. This belief must be preserved at any price.”

The fronts diverted funds into the Münzenberg Trust, a conglomerate of newspapers, publishing houses, theatres, cinemas and film production companies all over the world. Willi was a busy boy, and so he remained until he fell out with his Soviet masters and was ‘whacked’ in a French forest.

It was the Münzenberg Trust that whipped up a global campaign in defence of Sacco and Vanzetti, anarchist murderers eventually sentenced to death in the US. Much was made of their Italian origin, and America was widely portrayed as an inherently racist country.

That theme was never muted even after Münzenberg’s demise. Throughout my youth we were taught to bring racism up whenever talking to Americans. “But you lynch Negroes” was a mandated stock response to any remark, such as “In America, [we can say whatever we want, people don’t live in communal flats, most have cars, leaders are elected, not appointed etc.]”.

Cartoons depicting black people dangling off trees were a daily treat, forming part of a massive anti-American (and anti-Western) campaign. That experience clearly stands the present regime in good stead too.

Instigating and exploiting racial tensions in America is undeniably part of Russia’s offensive against the West, in which so far propaganda plays the main role. Things like assassinations, meddling in Western politics, attempts to discredit offensive politicians and even military action are still secondary, but the strategy can change overnight.

I can’t prove that the Russians are behind BLM. I know they are, but knowledge and proof are different things. Yet with better resources, those that only governments possess, an unassailable case would be easy to make. I hope one day it will be.

Judging by David Aaronovitch’s review of Anne Applebaum’s upcoming book Twilight of Democracy, both he and Applebaum are unhappy with what they see as the decline of liberalism, especially east of the Rhine.

In 1999 Miss Appelbaum and her husband Radek Sikorski, who later became Poland’s Defence Minister, entertained their friends in his native country. All of them were then “classic liberal conservatives”, whatever that means, which isn’t much.

Since then most of the couple’s guests have become xenophobic, anti-Semitic “active supporters of right-wing populist and authoritarian parties”. The principal reason for that metamorphosis is, according to Applebaum, despair about such things as, in the words of one of her disowned friends, “massive demographic changes… that none of us ever voted for, and most of us don’t like.”

Such apostates to the cause, adds Aaronovitch, aren’t “just to be found in Poland. They bolster Viktor Orban in Hungary, the new far-right Vox party in Spain and Donald Trump in America.”

Tragic, that. Then again, perhaps Miss Applebaum ought to have been more selective in her choice of friends. For example, none of my conservative friends has become a fascisoid populist.

The problem is that neither Applebaum nor Aaronovitch has a clear understanding of what conservatism means. Otherwise they’d know that Appelbaum’s former Polish friends never were conservatives in any clearly definable sense of the word.

They were anti-communists who rallied under liberal slogans they saw as an antithesis to totalitarianism. To their horror, once the Berlin Wall fell, they found out that their countrymen took to liberal democracy like a duck takes to acid.

In Eastern European history, those countries knew liberal democracy for only about 20 interbellum years. The rest of the time they were ruled by empires, be it Austro-Hungarian, Russian, Nazi or Ottoman. And for over 40 post-war years they were lorded over by the Soviet Union and its satraps.

None of that precluded the subsequent shouting of liberal slogans, that was the easy part. The difficult part was building a new body politic by fleshing out a skeleton pieced together from scattered bones.

Liberal slogans had to become liberal policies, but that transition has proved impossible to sustain in countries where liberty was seldom the predominant concern. Moreover, outside observers, including those who, like Applebaum, had an inside track, grossly underestimated the lasting corrupting effect of communism.

Communism was poison dripped in the nations’ bloodstream, and detoxification was always going to take longer than the period of exposure. Writing liberal constitutions on paper takes hours; writing them in people’s hearts takes generations.

The situation is different in the West, and lumping Duda, Oban, their Spanish counterparts and Trump together obfuscates the problem, rather than elucidating it.

“Liberal conservatism” has never failed in the West for the simple reason that it has never existed: it’s an oxymoron. Appelbaum and Aaronovitch attach that term to whiggery, which gradually lost the conservative features it used to have.

Traditional British Whigs differed from the Tories mainly by their focus. If the Tories were mainly the party of aristocracy, the Whigs also represented the emergent middle classes.

Hence they placed a slightly softer accent on traditional hierarchical values and a slightly greater one on such classic liberal desiderata as free trade, pluralism and civil liberties. ‘Slightly’ is the operative word there: the Whigs weren’t out to destroy tradition, and the Tories weren’t opposed to civil liberties.

On the Continent, things were different. For the Enlightenment wasn’t concerned with preserving tradition. It was out to crush it and replace – rather than complement – the old political, social and cultural order with liberté, égalité, fraternité. And the Enlighteners didn’t even realise that the middle element of that triad made the other two impossible.

Unlike Whig liberalism, the Continental kind wasn’t even remotely compatible with conservatism. For it’s a truism oft-repeated (by me, among others) that conservatives are defined by what they wish to conserve. Hence the only definition of conservatism that seems to defy any rational disagreement is the emotional, intellectual and visceral need to preserve the legacy of our civilisation, Christendom.

As the name implies, Christianity was the cornerstone of that civilisation, and it was that cornerstone that European liberals successfully knocked out. In fact, I see the Enlightenment as above all a revolt against Christianity, and in due course British liberals joined in.

If that great Whig Edmund Burke saw the hand of divine providence in the workings of the world, new, secular liberals saw nothing but their own hands at the tiller of history. They mistakenly thought they could get rid of Christianity and still keep the civilisation it had begotten. That didn’t work out, predictably.

The new secular state born out of atheist revolts and built on the foundation of liberté, égalité, fraternité or its equivalents, has proved to be vulnerable to totalitarian upheavals – not only physically but also ideologically.

The two cataclysmic revolutions of the 20^th century, Soviet and Nazi, came in the wake of attempts to create liberal democratic states in Russia and Germany. The ease with which that was reversed is understandable.

Liberal democrats and totalitarians are as close in their slogans as they are different in their methods. Both the Bolsheviks and the Nazis touched the right chords in liberal democratic hearts by their touting of equality, free this and that, elimination of traditional hierarchies, their replacement with meritocracy, the rights of citizens and so forth.

Some of those promises were mere ruses designed to grab power, but some others were genuine. And both groups were united in their hatred of conservatives, defined as anyone who couldn’t bear to see the traditional civilisation of Christendom stamped into the dirt.

Socialism follows unchecked liberal democracy as naturally as liberal democracy follows atheism. In the end, true, as opposed to ‘liberal’, conservatives find themselves politically, culturally and socially homeless.

All mainstream parties in the West are what Appelbaum and Aaronovich call “liberal conservative” and what I call variously socialist, which is to say hostile to conservatism. So what options do conservatives have if, unlike me, they wish to take part in political life? Precious few, which explains their drifting towards assorted populist parties.

In Eastern Europe, where commitment to liberal democracy is of a more recent and less robust vintage than in the West, the ideological possibilities are wider. Their fascisoid demagogues can appeal to Christianity and attack post-Christian liberalism the way Western populists can’t.

Neither Aaronovitch nor Appelbaum is intellectually equipped to rise above the simplistic binary view of ‘liberal democracy good, everything else bad’. They don’t discern the structural flaws in the democratic edifice, and accuse those who do of heresy and apostasy.

Simplistic views have caused much damage throughout Western history. And they have a rich potential for causing much more.

There I was, thinking these words would never cross my lips. Yet on this subject I agree with the chancellor, which is another thing I thought I’d never say.

Clearly, the giant hole created in public finances has to be filled, and promiscuous borrowing creates a bottomless pit by filling with one hand while digging deeper with the other.

Where that nice young man Rishi Sunak and I diverge is on how taxes must be raised. In fact, judging by his announcement yesterday, we may even define higher taxes differently.

Mr Sunak, who for some unfathomable reasons and on no apparent evidence is widely seen as the saviour of Britain, has ordered a review of capital gains tax (CGT). A review doesn’t always mean a rise, but something in the chancellor’s language suggested that in this case it might.

Experts believe he’s considering raising CGT rates to the levels of income tax, which he hopes could bring in £90 billion over five years. Therein lie our disagreements.

Mr Sunak is planning to increase tax rates; I’d like to see an increase in tax revenue. And the two aren’t at all the same thing. In fact, they are usually at odds.

Here I’m going to state some blindingly obvious things that any sensible person knows already. Moreover, I’m going to take Arthur Laffer’s name in vain without the sneering accompaniment that these days is de rigueur in some circles.

But first a historical observation. If high tax rates in general and those on assets in particular improved the health of the economy, then Harold Wilson’s tenure back in the ‘70s would have gone down in history as a period of unprecedented prosperity.

After all, he introduced a top marginal tax rate of 83 per cent on earned income – and 98 per cent on the ‘unearned’ variety. Yet such economic sagacity earned Britain quite a different reputation, that of ‘the sick man of Europe’.

The matter was clarified by Arthur Laffer, an American economist endowed with that rare quality in his profession: common sense. He pointed out that a 100 per cent and zero per cent tax rates have something in common: neither will produce any tax revenue. Hence the optimum tax rate lies between those two extremes, somewhere between 15 and 20 per cent.

Lying underneath Laffer’s simple curve based on that observation is the understanding that taxation is the mightiest instrument the state has for affecting people’s economic behaviour. A man who knows he’ll get to keep 90 per cent of what he earns will work harder than one who’ll have to make do with a measly 40 per cent.

By the same token, a man who knows his investment gains will be taxed lightly will be more willing to invest than to spend. All this is basic.

Delving to an even greater depth, the state’s appetite for taxation also affects the state itself. If rapacious, that appetite is guaranteed to make the state more conceited and less accountable. For, the greater the proportion of the people’s money does the state control, the more control will it exercise over people’s lives tout court.

So yes, the Exchequer definitely needs higher tax revenues. That means it needs lower tax rates.

The best way to deliver higher tax revenues is to widen the tax base by stimulating the economy to grow and produce more people generating high taxable incomes. Similarly, the best way to get more CGT revenues is to encourage people to invest more. And extorting a smaller proportion of their profits is more likely to achieve that end.

All of this is too simple for most economists to understand. They climb on top of a mountain made up of their models, paradigms and graphs, and from that vertiginous height they laugh at Laffer.

Yet the principles he outlined are unassailable, based as they are on that most uncommon commodity, common sense. However, principles aren’t to be confused with a panacea.

The Laffer curve won’t work by itself and it won’t pay for itself. When Ronald Reagan first waved the curve as a magic wand, he used it as an election tool in his campaign for the Republican nomination. His opponent, George Bush, called it “voodoo economics”, and indeed it can be just that.

The Laffer curve, as Reagan eventually found out the hard way, can only work in the context of public thrift and general economic prudence. It will neither stimulate the economy nor increase the tax base without significant parallel reductions in public spending.

That’s where economics clashes with politics, and in that contest there can only be one winner. For, like drastically lower tax rates, sweeping reductions in public spending clash with the mentality of modern Western governments. Since such measures defeat their inner imperative of acquiring ever greater control over the people, economic sanity has to retreat, tail between its legs.

Whenever an economy is in crisis, the treatments prescribed by modern governments tend to make the disease worse. That was the case with the 1929 stock market crash that only became the Great Depression as a result of governmental meddling. And, much as I hate to play Cassandra, it’ll be the case with the measures proposed by Messrs Johnson and Sunak.

Still, I’d rather be a Cassandra than a Pollyanna – that way I’d be less likely to be disappointed than pleasantly surprised.

My contention is that all modern states are tyrannical, aspiring to become totalitarian. The difference between the two types is that of degree: a merely tyrannical state has some residual checks on its power, while a totalitarian one doesn’t.

Both types strive to increase their sway over their flock, but they do vary in the mechanisms they activate to that end. These fall into two groups: physically coercive and what I call glossocratic.

The former group is one most commonly associated in people’s mind with tyranny, either totalitarian or not quite yet. It includes arbitrary arrests, trials on trumped-up charges, draconian sentences including the death penalty, criminalisation of free thought, police control over people’s movements.

The glossocratic methods are subtler but just as essential and no less effective. These have to do with exercising control over language and therefore over thought. For words aren’t just free combinations of sounds and syllables. They designate concepts, attitudes, sensations – constituents of cognition.

Thus, whoever controls language controls the populace. Hence glossocracy: government of the word, for the word, by the word.

All modern states use both groups of power mechanisms, and they differ only in the composition of the mix. States relying principally on physical coercion, with glossocracy playing a subservient if important role, are widely called tyrannical or totalitarian.

Others change the make-up of the mix: glossocracy is their main tool, with physical coercion bringing up the rear and picking up the pieces falling through the glossocratic mesh. Such states are usually called liberal democratic.

The important thing to realise is that both types of states are tyrannical. They just impose their tyranny in different ways.

The BBC is perhaps the most powerful glossocratic tool employed by our powers that be; it’s the loudspeaker through which our ruling elite shouts its diktats. And being a glossocratic tool, the BBC is mainly in charge of reshaping English into a language of slaves overseen by their masters.

The other day the BBC managers cast their eagle eye over their staff and calculated that some 400 of them, two per cent of the total, ‘identify’ as transgender.

That’s twice the national proportion, but then this ratio is typical of the Corporation when it comes to enforcing woke edicts: ethnic minorities account for 23 per cent of BBC screen time, but only for 14 per cent of the population. And the proportion of LGBT employees on the BBC production staff is twice that in the population at large.

Making gender-benders feel at home has moved to the top of the broadcaster’s desiderata. As part of that drive, they should be protected from the egregious insult of being addressed by the wrong personal pronoun.

This grammatical category is the sharpest burr under the glossocrats’ blankets. Masculine personal pronouns have already been outlawed for all practical purposes. BBC sports commentators, for example, may talk about a “ManU striker who left their shooting boots at home” – this, though one can safely assume that every player in the Premier League is male.

That this tyrannical obsession makes the language ugly, jarring to anyone with a modicum of an ear for mellifluousness, doesn’t bother the glossocrats one iota. On the contrary, they welcome ugly distortions because they enforce their power to dictate. Ugly is the new beautiful.

Hence the BBC is ‘encouraging’ (in effect, commanding) all staff to add their preferred pronouns to their e-mail signatures, such as ‘he/him/’, ‘they/their’ and so forth. For some inexplicable reason ‘it/its’ hasn’t yet been recommended, although one would think it has an irresistible gender-neutral appeal.

That, according to the BBC official intranet, constitutes a “small, proactive step that we can all take to help create a more inclusive workplace”, making sure that trans and non-binary people don’t feel marginalised.

“It lets colleagues know your pronouns and shows that you respect other people’s too. It’s really simple,” the document states. This way BBC staff will “help to create a culture where everyone feels comfortable introducing themselves with pronouns”.

Just to think that for a century or so millions of people around the world (including me, in times antediluvian), learned English from the BBC World Service, then considered as the faraway star to reach up for. What will they learn now? How to follow the singular antecedent ‘everyone’ with the plural pronoun ‘themselves’? I used to mark my students down for that sort of thing, in times slightly less antediluvian.

However, we must understand that this has nothing to do with grammar or style and everything to do with glossocratic tyranny, with the glossocrats putting their foot down yet again. Ordering people how to speak is a way of telling them how to think and, eventually, how to act.

Like any other glossocracy, the current one is backed up by punitive coercion. The ruling elite, of which the government proper is but a subset, blows zeitgeist into any direction it wishes and mercilessly punishes those who refuse to be swept along.

A writer suggesting that a woman is born, not made, or a scholar pointing out that black slavery wasn’t genocide aren’t yet shot or thrown into a re-education camp. But they are still punished professionally by losing their livelihood and – even worse – being forced to recant.

At first glance, mentioning the BBC in the same breath as the SS or the KGB sounds far-fetched. But only at first glance. They are all instruments of tyranny. They just work in different ways, although in time the differences may well disappear.

Max Hastings, widely believed to be a reliable historian, belied that reputation by writing two self-refuting passages in one short article.

Reviewing Keith Lowe’s book about controversial war statues, Hastings talks about the Russians’ obsession with war memorials:  

“To put the matter bluntly… Russia’s only indisputable successes since the Bolshevik Revolution have been Sputnik and victory in 1945. This makes it unsurprising that the Kremlin is driven to make much of the latter.”

I shan’t argue against the cited number of Russia’s post-revolution achievements, although some people might. But ascribing the country’s sacralisation of the war just to the dearth of other successes is too facile for words.

The war has been used by the Soviets and their heirs to rally the undernourished masses at home and to scare the overfed masses in the West. That’s why, every Victory Day, there are thousands of cars driving around Moscow with ‘We can do it again’ bumper-stickers. That’s why every Russian chieftain, from Stalin to Putin, has been dropping broad hints to the same effect: we ended up in Berlin once, we can do it again.

That theme is harmonised with detailed accompaniments. Thus Khrushchev was forever reminding Americans that the Soviet nuclear arsenal could annihilate the world many times over. And Putin’s mouthpieces like to talk about turning American cities into radioactive dust.

Hence the story of Russian war memorials and statues is quite a bit more sinister than Hastings fancies. It’s not just about a feeling of inferiority about an underachieving economy.

But that’s a minor glitch, although perhaps not so minor for a historian. What comes next is worse. For, writing about the continuing worship of Stalin in Russia, Hastings effectively refutes his previous statement: “Putin and many of his people still revere Stalin, who presided over a tyranny almost as murderous as that of Hitler.”

The very fact that an eminent journalist and historian felt called upon to slip the modifier ‘almost’ into that sentence, testifies to another success scored by Russia and her acolytes, one that towers above all others: a triumph of global brainwashing propaganda.

‘Almost’ suggests that, though Stalin’s tyranny was murderous, it didn’t quite manage Hitler’s body count. If that’s what Hastings believes, he’s ignorant. If he says that knowing it’s untrue, he’s a liar.

For Hitler is usually ‘credited’ with about 10 million non-combatant deaths. That’s less than half a million for every year he was in power. An awful, gruesome number, but one that doesn’t even approach Stalin’s hit list.

According to the most reliable calculations, between November, 1917, and March, 1953, the year of Stalin’s death, the Soviets murdered over 61 million of their compatriots. About 15 million were slaughtered on Lenin’s watch, before Stalin took over. That leaves the blood of 46 million on Stalin’s hands, a stain accumulated over roughly 30 years in power.

As you can see, ‘almost’ applies neither to the absolute number of victims nor to the murdering rate. So why is Stalin’s tyranny only “almost as murderous as that of Hitler” to someone who’s supposed to know better?

Both regimes, Hitler’s and Stalin’s, were socialist. The difference, at least in the PR sense, lay in the modifiers. Hitler’s socialism was national; Stalin’s, international.

It stands to reason that an ideology preaching the innate superiority of the Germans over everyone else would by definition have a rather narrow appeal. And whatever international appeal it might have had at the beginning (Britain’s Cliveden set springs to mind) didn’t survive the exposure of Nazi crimes.

To be sure, that line of thought, with the concomitant warm feelings about Hitler’s gang, could work elsewhere, with some other race or nationality replacing Aryan Germans. But wherever they come out of the woodwork, most neo-Nazis are perceived as ill-educated cranks, creepy-crawlies at the margins of society.

Admittedly, the margins are getting wider in many European countries, and this is worrying. Yet nowhere do neo-Nazi parties (sometimes called ‘extreme right-wing’ or ‘populist’) belong in the mainstream.

Not so their international counterparts, be it the oxymoronic democratic socialists or even those further to the left. These are definitely in the mainstream, and in fact one can go so far as to say that socialism is the dominant ideology throughout Europe, practised even by parties that describe themselves as conservative or Christian.

Unlike Nazi rants, the language of traditional, international socialism rings all the right bells. Equality, social care from cradle to grave, the state looking after its citizens, free everything (medical care, education, transport, you name it), disappearing divisions between the rich and the poor – you know the glossary as well as I do.

That happened to be the language spoken by the Soviets, mainly because they wished the intellectual and cultured mainstream in the West to get that feeling of kinship. Cultivation of ‘useful idiots’ in the West was Lenin’s declared goal, and it was pursued throughout the existence of the Soviet Union, and beyond.

One of the first acts of the young Soviet republic was to start a global radio service beaming basic socialist messages to an audience already primed to receive them. When Comintern was formed in 1919, it quickly became the biggest and most successful propaganda machine ever.

News of horrendous crimes being committed by the Bolsheviks was reaching the West, but it was dismissed as sour grapes on the part of the dispossessed capitalists and aristocrats.

When Khrushchev delivered that so-called ‘secret’ speech (it was immediately circulated to millions of party members and to Western wire services) in 1956, Soviet crimes could no longer be hushed up – especially since they continued, and not only in the USSR but throughout Europe, from East Germany and Poland to Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

At that point, the communist faction of socialism was, throughout most of the West, pushed into the margins too. But the warm glow emanating from those beautiful words about equality or some such left a residual effect. They continued to tickle the naughty bits of Western intellectuals, even those who sincerely repudiated their erstwhile affection for the Soviet Union.

That’s why so many respectable, anti-communist gentlemen still can’t suppress a slight wince when parallels are drawn between Lenin or Stalin and Hitler. After the wince comes the jerking knee, and the old reflexes kick in. Yes, of course both the Nazis and the Soviets were wicked, but surely the latter never touched the evil depths of the former?

Just like their pro-communist forefathers, Lenin’s useful idiots, the new anti-communist lot won’t be swayed by facts, such as those I mentioned above. Even if they don’t deny the accuracy of such facts (which is rare), they’ll still find some ‘yes, but…’ extenuating circumstances.

And even if they don’t, Hitler will forever retain sole possession of the summit of evil, out of reach for the “almost as murderous” Lenin and Stalin.

‘Almost’. One word. Six letters. Two syllables. And they say, to those able to listen properly, more than many a learned tome.