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Jacob Rees-Mogg sees an ideal world in his mind’s eye, and I don’t just mean the ultimate ideal he must see as a devout Catholic.

As an intelligent man, he probably realises that in this world the ideal is unattainable. As a civilised man, he still thinks we ought to try.

It’s with the resulting charming naivety that he deplores the pandemic replacement of arguments with harangues, as evinced by some thug screaming “Nazi!” at the Remainer MP Anna Soubry.

(Alas, Mr Rees-Mogg undermines his otherwise impeccable conservative credentials by referring to her as “Ms Soubry”. A principled conservative would eschew that ugly newfangled locution in favour of the traditional “Miss Soubry”, but then he wouldn’t remain an MP for long.)

“Shouting ‘Nazi’ at someone with whom you disagree is not only rude but stupid,” writes Mr Rees-Mogg. “Free speech is about making rational arguments and trying to persuade the other person that your opinion makes more sense and is more logical.”

He’s absolutely right. However, had he replaced “is” with “should be”, he would have been not only absolutely right but also realistic.

For the standards of public debate have dropped precipitously. Most people are not only incapable of putting forth a logical and well-structured argument, but are even unaware that such a thing exists.

Both in Britain and the US, thought has been replaced with sentiment, sentiment with sentimentality, and sentimentality with hysteria. This is particularly noticeable in the debates putting each nation asunder: Brexit in Britain, Trump in the US.

The overall intellectual level is such that calling someone a ‘Nazi’ or a ‘Commie’ is accepted as a valid argument.

Some isolated exceptions aside, venom and spittle have replaced logic and wit, with nary a real argument anywhere in sight. As to elementary civility, that went a long time ago.

The snappiest diagnosis would be the failure of public education. Instead of being taught how to think, pupils are indoctrinated in what to think. Typically, they’re brainwashed to mouth progressivist twaddle, without ever attempting to support it logically or indeed think it through.

Not so long ago a university-educated young lady was genuinely surprised when I said “That’s not an argument” in response to her saying “I disagree”. “But of course it is,” she objected. “I disagree means I argue”.

No, it doesn’t, dear. It only means you’d like to argue.

As in most things, there exists an ascending hierarchy in debate. It starts with a feeling, then moves up incrementally to a thought, opinion, judgement – and only then to an argument.

That’s why I rudely yawn when my interlocutor starts an argument by saying “I feel”. “I don’t care what you feel” is my stock response. “Tell me what you think. And then prove why it makes sense”.

The young lady above committed the rhetorical fallacy of argumentum ad lapidem – dismissing a claim without proving why it’s wrong.

The lout screaming “Nazi!” committed another fallacy, petitio principia, closely related to circulus in demonstrando – using what should be the conclusion of an argument as its premise.

However, I suspect that the educated girl and the ignorant lout know neither the exact names for their rhetorical fallacies nor indeed that such fallacies exist.

I’m sure Miss Soubry isn’t a Nazi, but it’s not theoretically impossible that she is. However, before she’s thus branded, it’s incumbent on her accuser to define Nazism and show how Miss Soubry fits the definition.

Alas, it’s not only loutish plankton who’ve reduced arguments to hysteria, but even quite a few commentators writing for respectable publications.

One such commentator recently told me in a private conversation that I shouldn’t support Brexit because Putin supports it.

That chap was unaware that he was committing the fallacy of ergo decedo, wherein someone’s real or implied association is claimed to disqualify his argument.

Using the same line of thought, I could insist that all vegetarians and dog lovers are Nazis because Hitler was both things. Or that anyone who likes the Appassionata is a mass-murdering Communist because Lenin thought, wrongly, it was the best piece ever written.

Alas, at that point I said things I shouldn’t have said. Had I been less angry and more sober, I could have explained that a serious man’s judgements aren’t contingent on what anyone else thinks, pro or con.

A judgement is the destination of a journey whose purpose is a search for truth or, ideally, the truth. This search may be aided by those who’ve successfully made it before, but it’s ultimately individual.

In this case, my support for Brexit results from a lifelong search for political truth, which is inseparable from what I accept as the absolute truth. Therefore it can’t be affected either positively, if everyone agreed, or negatively, because Putin does.

The truth destination can’t be reached by reason only. A perfectly logical structure may still yield a wrong result, or illogical intuition a correct one.

But, if such statistics were available, I’m sure they’d point at reason as being the most successful tool, although it can be helped along by others.

Earlier I said that claiming public education for the failures that so upset Mr Rees-Mogg is a snappy diagnosis. Yet snappy often means superficial.

A reader would be justified to ask why British education, which used to be the envy of the world, has become its laughingstock.

Yet foreigners who laugh at the mote in our education should look at the beam in their own. They’ll discover that the problem isn’t British but universal, which is to say civilisational.

People can’t search for what they don’t believe exists, the absolute truth. Such ignorance inevitably leads them astray in their seeking smaller, contingent truths.

For, if no absolutes exist, everything is relative. Hence things that don’t even qualify as thoughts, never mind arguments, are accepted as such; and any opinion is as good as any other.

Without delving deeper into such matters than this format allows, let’s just say that our civilisation was built on the premise that the absolute truth exists and it takes a sound, structured thought inspired by faith to find it.

I don’t know exactly when this situation changed, but the rot began to set in  some time close to the end of the three centuries separating these two aphorisms:

“To impugn human reason is to impugn God” and “Reason is a whore, the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.”

The first one, by Thomas Aquinas, identifies reason as God’s gift, essential to any attempt to grasp the absolute truth – and, by inference, smaller truths. The second one, by Martin Luther, identifies reason as the enemy of faith and all things spiritual.

However, history has shown that faith dies when unsupported by reason – and then reason dies when unsupported by faith.

Thus the collapse of sound argument correctly pointed out by Mr Rees-Mogg may serve as Exhibit 1 in the prosecution’s case against modernity.

Even some of my friends, to say nothing of less educated people, tend to associate the horrors of Bolshevism mainly with Stalin.

He’s considered unequivocally evil, while Lenin is seen more or less as H.G. Wells saw him, “the dreamer in the Kremlin”. Alas, his dream was misconceived, which is why he was forced to resort to tyranny in its pursuit.

Should a trial by public opinion be held today, Stalin would be sent down for life, while Lenin would get away with a noncustodial sentence, or perhaps merely a year or two in prison.

Since any serious student of modern Russian history knows that Lenin was every bit as evil as Stalin or – as I believe – even more so, offering him this free ride is puzzling. Or rather it would be if one didn’t realise that the Western narrative on Russia has always been influenced, and often determined, by, well, Russia.

From 1917 to 1991 the official Soviet line was that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with Bolshevism and therefore its founder, Lenin. However, in 1956 Khrushchev declared urbi et orbi that there had been plenty wrong with Stalin.

Mass executions, tortures and Gulag under Stalin were then officially acknowledged. Yet when I was at school and university (1954-1970), it was impossible to mention publicly, and dangerous to do so even privately, that all those nice things had been not just pioneered but actually mandated by Lenin.

Since Soviet studies in the West were more or less dominated by people in general sympathy with Bolshevism, if at times upset by its worst excesses, this line was proliferated. It survives to this day, although a whole library of books have been written about Lenin’s regime, designed to most exacting Satanic specifications.

One reason for this is that there exists another, larger library that continues to preach the old line of the noble-minded yet unfortunately misguided Lenin whose legacy was perverted by the beastly Stalin.

Such apologetics are still produced by Lenin-worshipers, but these days they know how to envelop their message in a fog of seeming even-handedness. Unvarnished encomiums for Lenin and other communists more or less died with Erik Hobsbaum’s demise.

Yet the genre of subtler crypto-apologetics is still alive, and Catherine Merridale is its truly virtuosic practitioner. Reading her book Lenin on the Train, one begins to understand how good and intelligent people, but those without a special interest in Russia, can be duped into swallowing the old Soviet canard.

The book describes Lenin’s infamous 1917 journey from Switzerland to Russia in a train provided by the German General Staff (not the Foreign Ministry, as Merridale says).

The Bolsheviks were the only major party in Russia that unequivocally preached pulling out of the war. Yet Lenin didn’t want peace – his aim was “to turn the imperialist war into a civil one.”

The Germans didn’t mind that: they wanted Russia out of the war anyhow. To that end they lavishly financed Lenin’s revolutionary activities and then, as Churchill put it,“transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus frim Switzerland to Russia.”

Though Merridale quotes this aphorism, her view on both Lenin and his journey is rather different, and as to German financing, she performs around it a song and dance routine that puts Fred and Ginger to shame.

The trick she favours could be called ‘striking a note’. While describing in minute detail the lavatorial arrangements on the eponymous train or some such, Merridale would drop in a message of love for the Bolshevik butcher, thereby establishing a theme but then not developing it.

For example, one note Merridale strikes and then leaves has to do with Lenin’s preference for Swiss doctors to whom he went for some “stomach complaint”.

The medical theme is thus left hanging in the air, which is a pity. Because, though Lenin might have had some gastric problems too, his principal ailment was the syphilis he caught from a French prostitute in 1902.

It was for that, then deadly, disease that he sought help from not only the Swiss, but also French, German and Russian doctors. However, in those pre-antibiotic days they couldn’t really help, and eventually the disease killed him.

The Russian doctor Lenin used was the world’s leading authority on neurosyphilis, Prof. Margulis. When I was still in Russia, his old widow showed me with trepidation a yellowed letter sent to her husband by Nadezhda Krupskaya, in which Lenin’s wife thanked the doctor “for everything you’ve done for Volodia and me.”

Lenin’s contemporaries knew about his little problem. For example, Ivan Pavlov of the dog fame once wrote that the “revolution was made by a madman with syphilis of the brain”.

Merridale didn’t have to mention Lenin’s medical problems. But once she did, it was sheer dishonesty to say nothing of the one that eventually killed him. But then lying by omission is much subtler than doing so by commission.

In that spirit: “Lenin liked Switzerland… and though the war was forcing the prices up, he could afford the food and rent.”

How? one wonders. How could Lenin and his gang, none of whom had ever had a paying job, afford living in a pricey Switzerland? How could “the great Russian” afford Europe’s most expensive doctors?

This theme neatly overlaps with another one: the mutual hostility between Lenin and the Western socialists of the Second International. Merridale goes into long ideological explanations, and no doubt ideology was part of it.

But it wasn’t for ideological reasons that Lenin’s Bolsheviks were the only major socialist party ever expelled from the Second International. The reasons had to do with the methods the Bolsheviks used to earn a crust.

Those effeminate Europeans were aghast. For the Bolsheviks used sex and blackmail to extort huge amounts from rich men like Savva Morozov. They sent out handsome gigolos to woo rich heiresses, and then made sure the inheritance wasn’t long in coming. They then laundered the proceeds.

And they widely practised robbery, which Lenin euphemistically called expropriations, exes for short. The most illustrious ex was masterminded by “that wonderful Georgian” (Lenin could never remember Stalin’s real name), when a gang of Bolshevik bandits launched a paramilitary raid on the Tiflis Treasury.

Not only Stalin but also some of the other future People’s Commissars were involved in such capers. Evidence suggests it was Krasin (Trade and Industry) who shot Morozov when he finally refused to pay, while Semashko (Health) and Litvinov (Foreign Affairs) were imprisoned in France for trying to launder the Tiflis loot.

The Bolsheviks started as they meant to go on. What followed their putsch was a wholesale robbery of a major country by its own government, the first such heist in history.

The details can be found in Sean Meekin’s important book History’s Greatest Heist. But one detail not mentioned there was provided by an explosive scoop in The New York Times of April, 1921.

Apparently, while looting Russia to help their regime survive, the Bolsheviks also prepared for an orderly retreat in case it didn’t survive.

In 1920 alone, 75 million Swiss francs were sent to Lenin’s account in just one Swiss bank. Trotsky had $11 million in just one US bank, plus 90 million francs in his Swiss accounts. Zinoviev kept 80 million Swiss francs in Switzerland, Dzerzhinsky had 80 million francs, while Hanecki had 60 million francs and $10 million – the list went on and on.

Any one of those accounts could have provided a loaf of bread for each Russian starving to death. Yet that task fell on Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration, which saved millions of human skeletons from death by spending just $20 million in 1921-1922.

Such facts would perhaps dampen any honest person’s affection for Lenin. But Merridale’s love is impervious to facts or reason.

Because: “The universe of Marx and Lenin used to be my own… I made my pilgrimage to Lenin’s tomb… I was not one of those who thought all aspects of the Soviet Union evil, false or misguided, but the effects were catastrophic just the same.”

In preparation, she claims to have read all 45-50 volumes of the gems Lenin left for posterity. If so, she must have been reading selectively, for otherwise she wouldn’t have failed to notice the virulent hatred and hardly anything else dripping off every page.

In any case, she would have done better familiarising herself with the basic facts of Russian history. Then she’d avoid such ignorant statements as: “Nicholas II… ignored or actively spurned the Duma while staffing the upper house, the Council of Ministers, with [talentless people].”

That’s like confusing our cabinet with the House of Lords. The Council of Ministers, dear, was an executive body. The advisory upper house of the Duma was called the State Council, which a professional historian of Russia ought to know.

What I really love is the word “pilgrimage”. Evidently Merridale sees the pagan mummy displayed inside a neo-Babylonian ziggurat as a holy shrine. But what’s that coy “used to” bit? She still inhabits the same universe; she only claims a different address.

Still, an inquisitive reader may want to know which aspects of the Soviet Union Merridale doesn’t find evil, false or misguided. Alas, that information isn’t proffered, making the statement meaningless. But she isn’t after meaning – she’s after casually striking notes that may resonate through the reader’s mind.

Some of the notes are lyrical: “Lenin’s countrymen have cooled to him in recent times… no one really loves him now; the corpse has been preserved without a heart.”

But that doesn’t mean Lenin goes unloved. Merridale still loves him, and so does the curator of a Lenin museum who instantly became her soulmate:

“It helps that I once lived, as she did, in the Soviet world. We have a language in common, a language that young Russians do not even know.”

This is rank effrontery. On display here are symptoms of a disease afflicting many journalists, academics and diplomats who once lived in the Soviet Union for a few months or perhaps a year or two.

They led the lives of cossetted, well-supplied, venerated Western visitors who, if the spirit moved them, could hop on the plane and leave at a minute’s notice. Living in the USSR, dear, meant something else: being enslaved by blood-sucking yahoos who could do to you as they pleased.

Using a year’s worth of academic tourism, with KGB providing the tour guides, as grounds for claiming some gnostic insight unattainable not only by Westerners but also by some Russians is revoltingly dishonest.

These are the first intimations of the stratagem used to make Stalin carry the can for Bolshevik crimes, while letting Lenin off scot-free or at least with only a slap on the wrist. I’m writing about this at such length because it’s used widely and effectively by many of Merridale’s colleagues.

Actually, comparing Lenin to Stalin isn’t always helpful. In some ways Lenin resembles Hitler more.

Stalin neither courted nor needed popular support. Because he inherited unlimited power first won and consolidated by Lenin, Stalin’s tyranny relied on a bureaucratic apparat and unlimited violence.

Hence, though Stalin wrote his fair share of Marxist gibberish, he shunned speeches and hardly ever appeared in public. On the other hand, both Lenin and Hitler had to claw their way to power largely by first winning over their own parties and then selling their message to the public.

Both, therefore, were loudmouth demagogues dependent on charismatic appeal. And in fact many things Merridale says about Lenin could be said verbatim about Hitler.

However, if any writer spoke about Hitler with the same gushing, almost erotic adulation, he’d be ostracised for life.

This, for example, is how Merridale ends the book: “This man belongs to the springtime of hope, and it was revolution that defined his life.”

She then argues that the giant statue of Lenin still standing outside Petersburg’s Finland Station captures Lenin’s essence best: “He stands high on an armoured car… and while his left hand has been tucked into the armpit of his bronze waistcoat, the right is thrusting forward: emphatic, strong, forever in command.”

Now try to picture a statue of Hitler still adorning Berlin (an impossible situation, but do let’s allow our imagination to run wild), and a British writer putting on paper exactly the same message, mutatis mutandis.

The armoured car would have to be replaced with a podium and the waistcoat with a tunic, but otherwise every word could remain the same. Now imagine this writer’s subsequent career – and rest assured that Merridale’s won’t suffer in the same way.

“His slogans felt like a sudden electric shock…: a call to life, a blinding glimpse of future…” Is that Hitler or Lenin? Don’t be silly: had she written that about Hitler, she’d be queuing up at the social even as we speak.

“His performance was a tour de force by any standards, but for a man of middle age who had just spent eight days and nights on perilous slow-moving trains, it was miraculous.”

So were Hitler’s performances at Nuremberg rallies; and he too was a middle-aged man who worked himself to exhaustion.

“Hitler has a charisma that still holds many Germans in its grip.” Sorry, my mistake. Merridale actually wrote “Lenin” and “Russians”, but you can understand why I went wrong.

Such passages pervade the narrative:

“Lenin’s ultimate achievement was to turn ideas that Marx had outlined on paper forty years before into an ideology of government… With brief, almost manic strokes of his pen, Lenin sketched out a soviet system… abolition of the police, the army and the bureaucracy.”

Any honest historian would feel duty-bound to add that this was all window-dressing: one of Lenin’s first decrees was to establish the CheKa, history’s most evil secret police.

He also created a huge bureaucracy and, by incremental steps, the world’s largest post-war army. That had to be mentioned just to keep the record straight, but Merridale prefers to keep it crooked.

“Above all else, he had struck upon a kind of truth that people would soon want to hear. The finer details of constitutional change were irrelevant…”

Quite. Only the febrile demagoguery was relevant, and never mind constitutional niceties.

By now Merridale must have realised that even the least critical reader would smell the rat of bias. So let’s keep things in balance, shall we? Hence: “Lenin’s government became as dictatorial and merciless as any industrial baron of the past.”

Another note casually struck; the cause of verisimilitude served. But not very well.

This statement could have been strengthened by providing a list of those industrial barons of the past who created history’s most repressive state claiming millions of victims.

Surely a professional historian must know that no such villains had existed before Lenin not only among industrialists but even among fellow tyrants?

But then of course: “Lenin’s programme offered hope and dignity to many of the country’s poor, not least by granting an unprecedented measure of equality to women.” Fair enough, women were executed and “turned to camp dust” at almost the same rate as men.

We must be grateful to Lenin for having proved yet again that true, pure equality is achievable only in prison. It’s a shame though that this discovery came at such an awful cost.

Anticipating such regrets, Merridale goes into her dance routine, and the technician in me has to admire her nimbleness of step. Only once, on Page 5 of a 300-page book, does she attach a numerical value to the cost, again for the sake of verisimilitude:

“Among the costs were countless human lives, beginning with tens of thousands of murders in Lenin’s lifetime… Over the seven decades of the Soviet Union’s existence the number of its guiltless victims would rise to the low millions.”

This passage is another note struck nonchalantly and left at that. Had she persevered with her actuarial calculations, she would be accused of flagrant lies. For her numbers are low by orders of magnitude.

Directly they grabbed power, Lenin and his fellow ghouls plunged the country into a putrid swamp of blood, epidemics and famines – followed immediately by the internecine civil war so dear to his heart.

When peasants realised that Lenin’s promises of land, bread and peace were lies, they stopped sowing and reaping. No food was reaching the cities, and the people were starving.

Lenin’s CheKa immediately sent out ‘food units’, who routinely machine-gunned hostages and confiscated all grain – along with all other food, including lard and even pickled vegetables.

Faced with deadly starvation, peasants would try to defend themselves by rushing machineguns with axes and pitchforks. Eventually a brush fire of peasant uprisings broke out, which were mercilessly suppressed.

That was the first time in history that a government used battle gases against its own people. How many died is impossible to calculate, but the lowest estimate I’ve seen is 500,000.

This was only one of Lenin’s contributions to the body count. For the starving workers in whose name Lenin’s putsch had been perpetrated did what their colleagues did in the West: they went on strikes. Unlike in the West, however, the strikes were dispersed with live rounds claiming thousands of lives.

Cannibalism was rife in the countryside. Parents were eating their children, scavenging was widespread: corpses were routinely used for nourishment. You can find on the net many harrowing photographs to that effect.

The ghouls didn’t shun direct action either: almost two million were executed judicially on Lenin’s watch. Untold and uncounted millions were simply shot out of hand or tortured to death without even a travesty of justice; millions more perished of starvation and disease; 10 million died during Lenin’s coveted civil war.

Slated for annihilation were whole classes: aristocracy, intelligentsia, professionals, officers, clergy. Of the latter, 40,000 priests were murdered during the same period, and only the lucky ones were simply shot.

The putsch of 7 November, 1917, introduced not just a new regime, but a new concept of a regime: one declaring war on its own people and the rest of the world, and waging that war with inhuman savagery on a scale never even approached before.

As Lenin explained to his acolyte Bonch-Bruevich when the former aristocrat expressed mild misgivings about the destruction of Russia: “Remember, old boy, I spit on Russia. I’m a Bolshevik!”

Altogether, during the 70-odd years they were in business, the ghouls murdered some 60 million of their own subjects, turning the whole country into a blend of concentration and military camps.

Such widely accepted numbers don’t tally with Merridale’s, and by all means she should be free to dispute them. But she doesn’t: she just strikes a note and moves on.

Yet the number of 60-odd million was produced by a painstaking demographic analysis described in Prof. Rummel’s books Death by Government and Lethal Politics. And even Khrushchev owned up to 20 million – a mendaciously low estimate but still a far cry from Merridale’s “low millions”.

The art of striking notes becomes truly virtuosic when Merridale writes about something she simply couldn’t ignore in this context: the German funding of Lenin’s putsch.

The real story is amply documented. The shadowy figure Alexander Helphand, the eminent socialist cum gun-running millionaire better known as Parvus, approached the Germans with the idea of using the Bolsheviks to knock Russia out of the war.

On January 7, 1915, Parvus set up a meeting with Freiherr von Wangenheim, the German ambassador to Turkey, where Parvus was acting as financial advisor to the Young Turks. The message Parvus asked him to convey to the German government, and especially to its military arm, was as simple as the truth itself:

“You want Russia out of the war – so does Lenin. You regard the Russian Empire as an enemy – so does Lenin. Therefore your interests coincide with Lenin’s. But here’s the hitch: you have money, and Lenin has none. And here’s the upshot: you must finance Lenin’s activities for he will be acting not only in his own interests but also in yours. Nicht wahr?”

Generals Ludendorff, Hoffmann and Seeckt cast the deciding vote, and a sum of 50 to 60 million gold marks (in the estimate of Eduard Bernstein, one of the leaders of the Second International and Germany’s deputy minister of finance at the time) was made available to the Bolsheviks in several increments.

Thus began the fruitful cooperation between the more aggressive elements in the German government and the Bolsheviks. It was to last until 22 June, 1941, when Hitler’s Germany attacked Stalin’s Russia.

Parvus set up Hanecki, an agent he shared with Lenin, in an import-export firm in Denmark. From there and Sweden Hanecki shipped German goods, mostly medicines, condoms, surgical instruments and chemicals to Russia.

There the goods were sold and thus laundered through a legitimate company run by the Pole Mechislav Kozlowski, another one of Parvus’s men. Now scrubbed clean, the funds went into various bank accounts to be withdrawn by the ultimate recipient, Lenin.

Thus the Soviet regime had money laundering built into its genetic code at conception, and the resulting expertise is still standing the regime’s descendants in good stead.

As von Kühlmann, the German foreign minister, reported to the Kaiser, the money was well spent:

“…Russia appeared to be the weakest link in the enemy chain. The task therefore was to loosen it, and, when possible, to remove it. This was the purpose of the subversive activity we caused to be carried out in Russia… It was not until the Bolsheviks had received from us a steady flow of funds through various channels and under various labels that they were in a position… to conduct energetic propaganda…”

Lenin kept his end of the bargain too. Three months after his putsch, he took Russia out of the war with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

However, the civil war he started was going badly. The Bolsheviks were getting ready to disappear in the general direction of their Western millions, but the Germans came to their aid yet again.

The German and Austrian General Staffs authorised some 300,000 POWs in Russian captivity to fight on the Bolshevik side. To that end, their familiar German and Austrian weapons were shipped to Russia, and the ex-POWs used them well.

When Gen. Krasnov was about to capture Petrograd and decorate its lampposts with Lenin and his jolly friends, his troops were stopped at Pulkovo by a well-orchestrated artillery barrage, which Krasnov’s officers, all war veterans, instantly identified as German.

Moreover, when desperate Russians fled to the post-Brest German-occupied area, the Germans instantly delivered them to the Soviets, keeping punctilious Teutonic records of all the 40,000 poor souls, some of whom were summarily shot right in front of the impassive German officers.

Thus it wasn’t only German gold, but also German bayonets that propped up Lenin’s regime, and this is a true and amply documented story. The Soviets naturally denied it, but that became difficult after the Allies captured the German archives in 1945.

One would think it would be hard for Merridale to spin the story out of her narrative, and she doesn’t. But the old technique of striking a note comes in handy.

She claims that most of the German archives had been destroyed. That’s true, but enough survived to nail Lenin to the wall, including the above quote by von Kühlmann, which Merridale cites without comment.

The first relevant note is struck on Page 11, when she mentions “Parvus, the enigmatic go between who handled some of Lenin’s German funds”. She then proceeds to describe the Hanecki operation, explaining how the German millions were laundered and converted into the revolutionary fighting fund.

Then, using the familiar trick, she leaves the story until Page 241, hoping that by now most readers will have forgotten. The new twist comes from the Provisional Government’s order to arrest Lenin for being a German spy in receipt of vast sums from Russia’s war enemy.

However, Merridale disavows such heinous accusations out of hand: “The only awkward detail was that no one had a shred of proof.” Never mind what she herself wrote 230 pages earlier. And never mind the 20 volumes of proof she herself mentions in the next breath. All fabricated, was it, dear?

Merridale then shortens the distance between statement and self-refutation. On Page 254 she writes: “…the import-export company for which [Hanecki] worked was owned by Parvus and Sklarz, both known to be German agents.”

However, “Exactly how that cash flowed east remains a matter for speculation. It’s entirely reasonable to suppose that some of Parvus’s German millions reached Lenin’s fighting funds.”

Thanks for the “entirely reasonable to suppose”. But she herself showed earlier exactly “how that cash flowed east”, obviating any need for speculation. And the sentence above leaves the German interest in no doubt.

By now any unsophisticated reader is thoroughly confused. Did Lenin or did he not take German money? Merridale comes down on both sides of the fence, and I hope that didn’t cause any lasting gynaecological damage.

Speaking from the side of the fence where she’s most comfortable, she writes: “Instead of trusting the masses with the truth about his German funds, Lenin opted to lecture them. Instead of confiding in them, he lied.”

Yet there I was, thinking there wasn’t “a shred of proof” for any such transactions. So what did Lenin lie about? (She doesn’t cite the exact lie: “Everybody knows that Parvus had business dealings with Hanecki, but we had none.”)

And so it goes. I hope you realise that I haven’t written this atypically long piece because I’m preoccupied with Merridale and her mendacious but rather entertaining book.

I’ve just used it as an illustration to the subtle exoneration of Lenin that gradually leads even intelligent people to give him a free ride, in addition to the one he got on the train provided by the German General Staff.

By striking her discordant notes, Merridale plays the old tune of an idealist forced by circumstances to do some unsavoury things. Eventually the din becomes so deafening, that the true nature of one of history’s most evil men can no longer be discerned.

The advantage of writing a blog, rather than a newspaper column, is that no newspaper would run the title above. Nothing is perverse these days, and one can claim otherwise only at one’s peril.

Blogs too will doubtless be censored soon, but, before they are, I feel free to comment on the counterattack that Orthodox Jews have launched against subversion by perversion.

The activist Shraga Stern has instructed solicitors to write to the education secretary that “to teach about homosexuality, same-sex relationships and gender reassignment [is] morally unacceptable and unlawful”. (Mr Stern is laudably opposed to sex education tout court, but he must realise that’s a fight long since lost.)

He’s certainly right about morally unacceptable, but I’m not sure about unlawful. The 2010 Equality Act does demand that children be taught about homosexual and gender-bender delights, with no exemption for faith schools specified.

This provides yet another proof that in modernity law and morality have gone their separate ways, with both diverging ever farther from the founding tenets of our civilisation, not to mention basic decency and common sense.

This separation is so insane that its advocates inevitably go soft in the head. Amanda Spielman, the Chief Inspector of Schools, illustrates this point most helpfully:

“We know a gay child might be born into any town, any family, any time,” she said in reply to Mr Stern’s complaint. “You can’t say in these communities there won’t be any gay children. This is about making sure every child has the chance to grow up with the right level of information [and] . . . access to the kinds of conversation or support they might want.”

It’s refreshing to see that someone entrusted to inspect schools cheerfully follows the singular ‘every child’ with the plural ‘their’, which alone should be grounds for summary dismissal. Yet this little indiscretion can be overlooked when popping up in the midst of so much illiterate drivel.

In the schools Miss Spielman inspects, children have little “chance to grow up with the right level” of literacy and numeracy. Yet they have their young heads stuffed to the gunwales with instruction on how to pinch the reservoir tip of a condom before pulling it on.

This invaluable tuition starts in kindergarten, and in elementary school it’s augmented by propaganda of homosexuality and gender-bending. Tots learn it’s all about free choice, that cornerstone of liberty.

If a boy chooses to stick his wee-wee into another boy, his choice is commendable and in no way inferior to normal sex – not that children should be encouraged to have any kind of sex before they grow up.

Equally, all children are free to choose the sex that best suits them from a large menu on the table. The last time I looked, the menu contained 22 options. Since I had never heard of 19 of them, I realise that real life must have passed me by and it’s too late now to catch up.

Contrary to Miss Spielman’s twaddle, children aren’t just informed about perversions – they’re implicitly encouraged to try them and see if that way they’ll grow up better prepared for adult life. It’s indoctrination, not education.

This educational trend is responsible for trans-sex operations becoming not just allowable but fashionable. We’re treated to the news of yet another man who used to be a woman being impregnated by a woman who used to be a man – and no one calls for the men in white coats.

I haven’t conducted a private poll, but it stands to reason that most youngsters changing their sex probably wouldn’t do so had they not been told that this is a perfectly valid choice.

Mr Stern says that, if draft guidance from the Department of Education goes into effect, thousands of Orthodox Jews would leave the UK for the sake of their children’s sanity (if they haven’t already been driven out by Muslim attacks).

But why should it be just Orthodox Jews who are aghast?

Admittedly neither Testament lists 22 sexes, or issues an injunction against changing from one to another. This just goes to show how infinitely more sophisticated we’ve become on the wave crest of progress.

Yet it’s not just Leviticus but also Romans that refers to homosexuality as ‘abomination’ punishable by infernal fires. God forbid secular schools should take any notice of such antiquarian matters, but surely Jewish and Christian schools must be allowed to be guided by their faith?

Apparently not. And I’m not even getting into esoteric arguments about the Judaeo-Christian nature of Western morality, even if ostensibly secular.

Nor am I appealing to aesthetics, banish the thought. However, show me someone who claims not wincing at the sight of, say, a putative woman sporting a five-o’clock shadow and speaking in a rich baritone, and I’ll show you a liar.

I’m simply saying that, for faith schools to fulfil their remit, they have to be free to teach their faith, including the morality the faith commands. Sounds sensible, doesn’t it?

However, when modernity speaks, morality, faith, decency, common sense and aesthetics stay silent. Or, if they do try to speak, they’re easily outshouted by a modernity that not only promotes perversion, but is itself one.

Paris, certainly. Marseille, but of course. Bordeaux, probably. Lyon, definitely.

But Toucy, our sleepy village in the sleepiest part of northern Burgundy? Surely not. One just can’t see it as a hub of revolutionary activity.

In fact, the other day I made a smug, self-satisfied remark to that effect, displaying Schadenfreude at its most supercilious. However, Penelope, who lived in France for 10 years as a girl, suggested I shouldn’t hold my breath.

This morning we drove to Toucy market, to find I was wrong in having overestimated the bucolic placidity of the locals.

The centre of Toucy is adorned with a statue of the great lexicographer Pierre Larousse who was born there. And adorning the statue were a dozen or so gilets jaunes, banging on plastic buckets and making la mère of all ruckuses.

I couldn’t make out what they were shouting, but the sentiments must have been in line with the messages on their placards. Most of them evoked the memory of the slogans aimed against Marie-Antoinette in 1789.

All said rather uncomplimentary things about Manu, which is the French contemptuous diminutive of Macron’s Christian name (I anglicise it to ‘Manny’). This, although ‘Le Roi Macron’ had taken exception to being so addressed because that insulted not only him but also the very institution of presidency.

I didn’t notice any dismay expressed about that venerable office; just the heartfelt desire that it should be occupied by someone other than Manny.

One poster explained the nature of the problem: “We want to live, not to survive”. (The translation inevitably loses the charm of the original: On veut vivre, non pas survivre.)

Another one emphasised that the demonstrators were sick and tired of being taken for a ride (Marre de se faire plumer, literally “We’ve had it with being plucked”). Yet another specified the ride: rubbish collection tax rose 25 per cent last year, preceded by similar hikes in fuel taxes.

That message struck a chord deep in my heart, for I’m directly affected.

For example, during the 18 years that we’ve been in the area, diesel prices went up and down, but they were consistently 25 per cent lower than in London. Now they’re 15 per cent higher, and I’d happily add my voice to the chorus of “Manny out!”

The general sentiment among the gilets was that Manny’s policies left much to be desired, and his personality even more. It’s possible that the wicker basket for his head has already been woven, waiting for its cue to slide under the guillotine.

Now much as I sympathised with the demonstrators, I was a little wary of their tendency to burn cars. Having parked around the corner, I didn’t fancy the prospect of walking 12 miles home.

That fear evidently wasn’t shared by the two policemen observing the proceedings. Since they were national rather than local, they must have been forewarned that disturbances were coming.

As I was queuing up for my beef cheeks, which everyone knows is the best cut for boeuf bourguignon, les flics cut menacing figures. But then they relaxed, realising that no auto–da–fé was on the cards, meaning, and I’m translating loosely in jest, that no cars were likely to be burned.

They turned their backs on the bucket-bangers and began to scrutinise the estate agents’ boards with a manifest lack of interest. Eventually they walked away in the direction of the fruit stands.

Clearly they knew their rural protesters well. As those strapping officers haggled about the price of clementines, the revolutionaries took the weight off their feet. They sat down at the outside tables in a local café and inundated the staff with orders for coffee, croissants and pains au chocolat.

Croissants are, after all, the stuff of life and fuel of any self-respecting revolution, especially in rural France. But how long will our local protests remain a scene from a French vaudeville? How long before burning cars illuminate Toucy and other local villages?

One can understand Manny’s desire to transform himself from a presumptive king of France to the emperor of Europe, sort of a present-day Charlemagne. Displaying the nose of a bloodhound, Manny must have sensed the inner imperative of today’s democratic politicians.

Woefully unfit to do their jobs, they live in constant fear that they’ll be found out. Hence the desire to put some serious mileage between themselves and their voters, who just might hold them accountable.

That’s why Manny, along with most of his European colleagues everywhere, sees the EU as a godsend and a most welcome employment opportunity for life. Manny is more bolshie than most because he has indeed been found out.

If the demonstrations have reached Toucy, you can imagine what’s happening in urban centres. The French do have form in expressing their discontent with their rulers, and who says they’ve lost it?

It must be time for Manny to go into hiding and change his name. May I suggest Manu Egalité?

As often happens with great breakthroughs, the recent one in jurisprudence has gone barely noticed.

Yet Judge David Hale’s ruling in a drug-dealing case not only blazed new legal trails, but also opened up dizzying new horizons.

Two drug dealers guilty of possessing cannabis with intent to supply were spared jail because His Honour found their “grammar and pronunciation” to be at a much higher level than normally expected from drug dealers.

Admittedly I haven’t had the privilege of meeting many, indeed any, drug dealers. Yet on general principle I doubt they set the locution and elocution bars at a vertiginous height. Therefore the two criminals in question didn’t really have to evoke the memory of GK Chesterton and Evelyn Waugh to get off.

In fact, the only sample of their linguistic attainment provided in the newspaper report is rather inconclusive: “Mad flavours from 10 tonight – let me know for more details.”

Now, should I ever feel inclined to trade in illicit substances, I should fear no punishment whatsoever, for I could express the same, admittedly rather basic, thought even better.

I would have found a better adjective than the slangy ‘mad’ to describe the enticing flavours, and I would definitely have said ‘contact’ instead of ‘let me know’. After all, it’s up to the seller to let the prospective buyer know about the wares available, just as it’s up to the prospective buyer to contact the seller with any inquiries.

Yet it’s of course commendable that two youngsters are better-spoken than the chaps one hears conversing behind King’s Cross Station after dark. Moreover, as a writer I welcome the value our legal system attaches to the tools of my trade.

However, I do wonder if Judge Hale considered the full legal implications of his momentous ruling. For, if decent locution can be seen as an extenuating circumstance, it follows logically that speaking badly should be regarded as an aggravating one.

One can just hear a colleague of Judge Hale delivering a sentencing statement along these lines: “Young man, normally what you did doesn’t call for a custodial sentence. But because you use double negatives and glottal stops, and because you drop your aitches, I have no option but to send you down for life with no possibility of parole.”

That, however, would be regarded as class, and quite possibly racial, discrimination. After all, a poor chap who says ‘I’m, like’ instead of ‘I said’ is a victim of society, which, and not he, should hence be held responsible for whatever crime he committed.

The upshot of this is that, since all criminals speak either well or badly, none should go to prison. There has to be a logical hole somewhere in this conclusion, but I can’t spot it offhand.

Judge Hale’s ruling also casts a new light on another case. Some 20 years ago, a drugged-up aristo I knew, a man educated at a good public school and Cambridge, used a replica pistol to knock off a convenience shop.

I can vouch from personal experience that he spoke with perfect diction and impeccable syntax, and yet the poor man had to serve a year in prison and for ever carry a blot on his CV.

His year of captivity can’t be returned to him, but the least we can do is demand that his criminal conviction be excised from his record: I’m sure the two dealers spared jail couldn’t match his Sloanie vowels.

Sentencing them to community orders, Judge Hale explained that he didn’t want to “fetter the prospects” of either man by sending them to prison. One prospect that may soar unfettered is that they’ll graduate to flogging opiates rather than cannabis, but obviously their superior locution precludes this, otherwise likely, possibility.

The Judge then proved his knowledge of such matters by explaining to the relieved youngsters that, although “cannabis may be an experiment that you find pleasurable”, they could be “desperately affected” by it.

That, though undeniably true, misses some of the point. For the chaps were guilty not of finding cannabis pleasurable, but of finding it profitable. Chances are they sample what they purvey, but that strikes me as being beside the point in the context.

The Times article reports on the case in the spirit of journalistic objectivity that in some circles may be seen as moral anomie. The only quality judgement is reserved for the alma mater of both criminals, the Bishopston Comprehensive School in Swansea, “which is rated excellent”.

Even though I know nothing about that school, on this evidence I disagree with its rating. The school may have been moderately successful in teaching two lads how to speak proper, like. However, it didn’t teach them not to peddle drugs, which I’d describe as a gross failure.

In conclusion, I have a piece of avuncular advice to anyone contemplating a career in crime. Learn your grammar and keep your aitches where they belong – you just may be able to get away with murder.

Since over the past several days my glass hasn’t been allowed to remain either half-full or half-empty for more than a few seconds, I defy the stock definitions of optimist and pessimist.

Nor can I claim the possession of a crystal ball, much as I’d like to own such an appliance. However, using the modest logical faculties I do possess, I find it hard to think of 2019 with anything other than a sense of foreboding.

Everywhere one looks, the options we seem to face span the range from barely acceptable to downright catastrophic. However, since a short piece doesn’t afford the luxury of looking everywhere, let’s just cast a quick glance at a few things off the top.

Such as Brexit, to start with.

All options to the positive side of barely acceptable are off the table, having been removed by a staggeringly weak and inept government. That’s why even discussing them is a sign of infantile idealism divorced from any conceivable reality.

However, just to keep the record straight, a decisive, resolute, intelligent government, of the kind no Western country is currently blessed with, could have shifted the realistic range of options far towards the plus end.

That could have been done by leaving the EU directly Article 50 was invoked and without paying any exit fees, at least not straight away.

The EU could have been told that any divorce settlement involves not only a restitution of liabilities but also a division of assets. Once Britain left the EU, the two parties could have begun a dispassionate, fact-based analysis of both the assets and the liabilities, aiming at achieving an equitable arrangement.

Meanwhile, Britain could have invited the EU to enter into a free-trade agreement, of the kind two civilised sovereign nations can both profit from. Yet civilised sovereign nations can also compete with one another.

In that spirit, Britain could have created the most favourable conditions possible to attract foreign trade, businesses and capital – and stimulate the domestic variety. Red tape could have been rolled up and tossed away, tariffs relegated to the past, taxes on income, business and capital drastically reduced – well, any economic primer will teach how that’s done.

(It gives me a petty, hubristic pleasure to see the word ‘Singapore’, which I’ve been using in this context for years, beginning to crop into the economic narrative of our respected columnists.)

That way Britain would have gained a competitive advantage over the EU, nullifying whatever punitive measures that pernicious contrivance could devise.

Such measures would definitely have been imposed – as an organisation pursuing political aims only, the EU would happily cut off not only its economic nose but indeed its every economic limb to spite any dissident state undermining its desiderata.

However, a bold move along the lines of the one I’ve mentioned would have taken the sting out of any spiteful actions, making the EU think twice before destroying, say, 10 per cent of German car exports.

Alas, that will remain an unfulfilled fantasy firmly lodged in the subjunctive mood.

The barely acceptable end of the Future Very Indefinite range includes limping out of the EU somehow, either without a ‘deal’ (but with many unilateral concessions, as I hope everyone realises) or with Mrs May’s ‘deal’, which is one contiguous unilateral concession tantamount to leaving one foot stuck in the EU morass.

After that the vector plunges towards the catastrophic end. This could take the shape of holding a second referendum or simply crawling back to the EU tail between our legs and submitting to eternal vassalage on terms inferior to those we had before.

The range of political options available internally follows the same path. The very realistic thought that a year from now we may well be missing Mrs May is enough to give me sleepless nights, or would be if that glass remained half-empty or half-full.

Any way you cut it, a well-meaning and generally benign nonentity at the helm is preferable to an evil nonentity bent on revenge and destruction. Yet Corbyn’s premiership, which started as a remote possibility, first graduated to a probability and is now almost a certainty.

People everywhere, and perhaps especially in Britain, vote not so much for as against. They look at Mrs May’s craven, incompetent, divided government and don’t weigh it against the available alternative. They want it out.

The root of the problem was identified by the American comedian George Carlin, who once quipped: “You know how dumb the average person is? Well, I’ve got news for you: half the people are even dumber than that.”

Applied to politics and couched in more scholarly vocabulary, this observation points at the systemic drawback of universal franchise. Yet things are what they are, and universal franchise is getting more and more universal.

The voting age is bound to be reduced to 16 and, if we follow the (serious!) recommendation of Cambridge’s head of political science, possibly to six. One way or another, for as long as the ability to vote responsibly and intelligently isn’t seen as a necessary qualification, our dumbed-down electorate will make evil ghouls like Corbyn inevitable.

The very possibility of a Corbyn government has already made many wise investors seek greener pastures elsewhere. When he does take over, an economic catastrophe will follow within weeks – as the same economic primer will tell you.

But even in the unlikely event Mrs May hangs on, our economic prospects are bleak, and not because of Brexit qua Brexit.

Leaving the EU properly could have spelled an economic boom, along the lines I drew in the subjunctive mood. But leaving it chaotically and without a clear picture of the future, or, even worse, staying in is bound to have dire economic consequences – with dire becoming catastrophic if followed, as seems likely, by the arrival of a Trotskyist government.

Skipping over the continuing degradation of our education, medical care, defence and law enforcement, let’s look at something lighter, or not, as the case may be.

The Times chess columnist Raymond Keene enthuses about the self-teaching artificial intelligence programme AlphaZero. It’s currently thrashing every other chess software that in its turn can thrash any human player, which Mr Keene sees as having far-reaching implications.

Favourably comparing the programme’s creator Demis Hassabis with Sir Isaac Newton, Mr Keene enthuses: “If the lucubrations [sic] of AlphaZero can be adapted to medicine, or even politics, and the same level of excellence attained, then it may be seen to have exerted a transformative influence over modern life in many varying areas.”

I’m afraid Mr Keene’s enthusiasm is as ill-advised as his misuse of the archaic word ‘lucubrations’. He clearly sees nothing but positives in an area alive with the sounds of dystopia.

Artificial intelligence can indeed exert a transformative influence over modern life, but it takes an inveterate optimist not to see a concomitant potential for disaster. Call me a luddite, but I have nightmares thinking of machines deciding what’s good for us in politics.

Grandmaster Keene’s experience has taught him to see life’s little challenges strictly in intellectual terms. That works admirably in chess, which is free of moral connotations. (Yet many of his colleagues bemoan the dominance of computers, which they believe is killing the game.)

Politics, however, is largely a moral exercise, and in this life morality can never be off-limits to human fallibilities. Perfection in politics is not only unachievable but indeed undesirable simply because it’s not objectively definable. Checkmating the opponent is the perfect end to a chess game, but what passes for it in the game of politics?

One side’s meat is the other side’s Novichok, and no one will ever accept a computer’s mediation, nor especially diktat. Sooner or later people will throw their clogs into the works, bringing the machine to a sputtering halt and sinking our world into a blood-soaked chaos.

A statesman of only average intelligence can still achieve greatness if he’s blessed with integrity and strong moral character. Yet in the absence of those no machine throwing up a perfectly intelligent solution will help.

However, even as it’s pointless trying to explain to the electorate that not any alternative to a bad government will be better, and many can be worse, it’s no use suggesting that advances in science and technology are replete not only with positives but also with negatives.

The same chemical that boosted agricultural yields also murdered millions of people; the same energy that can heat your house can also incinerate it; the same poison that kills toothache can also kill the whole body.

The difference boils down to moral choice, and the ability to make it freely is God’s greatest gift to man. An attempt to override this ability by computerised perfection can only guarantee that most choices will be bad and some evil.

All in all, I’m looking forward to 2019 with trepidation. Which, however, in no way diminishes my heartfelt hope that your personal new year be happy, successful and healthy.

Donald Trump is neither the best nor the worst president in US history. Neither an angel nor the devil incarnate. Neither an intellectual pygmy nor a giant. Neither an unqualified reprobate nor the paragon of morality. Neither a saviour of the West nor its nemesis.

Any reasonable, dispassionate analysis will probably place him somewhere between any of those extremes. In each case, his exact placement would call for serious discussion.

However, when following the media coverage of the president, especially in the US, one notices that he hardly ever gets the benefit of reasonable, dispassionate analysis, nor indeed of serious discussion.

He’s denied his rightful place somewhere – anywhere – in the middle ground, even if closer to one extreme or the other. All he’s getting is either hysterical attacks or equally hysterical adulation.

When Trump comes into a conversation, reason leaves in a huff. Wings are flapped, voices are raised, spittle is sputtered – and I’m talking about otherwise intelligent people, if usually without much excess intelligence to spare.

This calls for an explanation, especially since Trump himself sounds fairly rational. This isn’t to say that one always agrees with his thinking, but think he does.

The president has a clear view of the world and America’s place in it. Again, my view of America and especially the world is rather different from his, but I can still discern a reasonable pattern to his thoughts and actions.

Reasonable doesn’t necessarily mean correct, and, for example, Trump should suppress or at least moderate his isolationist instincts. His demands that America’s allies take more responsibility for their own defence are perfectly justifiable, but perhaps he should ponder not only the minuses of global paternalism, but also the pluses.

Ever since the US set out to supplant the British Empire as the West’s father figure, the country has been cultivating numerous quasi-vassalages around the world. Since time immemorial, such a quest has involved trading protection for allegiance, and providing protection costs money.

But the allegiance attracted thereby makes the exercise worthwhile. Being the military Leader of the Free World makes it so much easier to be the economic leader as well.

I’d say that simply having the dollar as the world’s reserve currency (in which, incidentally, the US debt is denominated, taking some of the sting out) greatly offsets whatever defence costs the US has to incur – and we haven’t yet even touched on the trade benefits.

There has of course always been a strain of thought in the US that opposes the country’s global role and resents having to pay the cost, both in money and the blood of American soldiers.

In theory, I’m broadly sympathetic with this view and those who espouse it, such as Pat Buchanan and any number of prominent Republicans before him.

However, abandoning world leadership runs against the grain not only of the country’s foreign policy but of her whole history over the past century at least.

And America’s refusal to provide much of the the West’s military muscle is tantamount to forfeiting leadership. Moreover, such an about-face, especially if done quickly, would make the West, including the US, geopolitically vulnerable.

I’m not sure that Trump’s thinking, trained by a life-long veneration of the bottom line, goes quite so far. He seems to want the best of both worlds: America enjoying her disproportionately prominent position while refusing to pay the disproportionately high cost.

Best of luck to him, but I don’t think this is either doable or, given the global situation as it is, rather than as we may like it to be, advisable. However, coming down on either side of this argument shouldn’t be accompanied by, nor met with, hysterical rants and wild personal invective or, for that matter, encomiums.

‘On either side’ are the operative words: Trump admirers are as frenzied as his detractors. Yesterday’s fervent globalists become isolationists overnight and scream about it loudly enough to compete with the opposing din.

This is happening not only with Trump’s foreign policy but with everything he says or does. None of it is cause for rational analysis; all of it is cause for irrational frenzy.

If Trump moves the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, he’s accused of pro-Israeli Islamophobia, a charge made even more frenetic by his stated intent to reduce Muslim immigration.

The same people, mostly those of the neocon persuasion, who 15 years ago preached a virtual crusade against much of the Islamic world, during which perhaps a million Muslims died, now insist, against all scriptural, historical or current evidence, that Islam is a religion of peace.

One gets the impression that, should Trump adopt that line, they’d again agitate for carrying democracy to the Middle East on the sharp end of American bayonets.

If Trump withdraws the tripwire force of 2,000 US soldiers from the Middle East, he instantly becomes an enemy of Israel, the West and everything that’s good in the world.

If Trump cuts taxes, the same people who used to describe themselves as conservatives (usually with little justification) now accuse him of sacrificing the poor to please the rich.

Many of them now claim to be ‘fiscal conservatives but social liberals’, which presumably means they love the indigent, but hate to give them any money.

The poor souls don’t even seem to realise that social liberalism, aka welfarism, and fiscal conservatism are mutually exclusive. But it wouldn’t matter even if they did: they’d call themselves anything as long Trump calls himself something else.

There have been divisive presidents before, but in my, alas rather long, memory I can’t remember anything like this. Nor do I recall any political figure, other than perhaps Nixon c. 1974, whose personality draws more attacks than his policies.

Trump is revolting, scream the haters – and, though I am not one, I tend to agree. But is he more disgusting than, say, Bill Clinton, of the cigar fame?

He’s playing lickspittle to Putin, others blurt, and they have a point. Yet those same people voted for Hillary Clinton with her subversively idiotic ‘reset button’. (If the Mueller investigation produces prima facie evidence of collusion, I’ll repeat my usual proviso: Trump in that case should be not just impeached but tried for treason.)

He’s ignorant and illiterate, the haters insist, has never read a book, his degrees were bought with Daddy’s money. Fair enough, a president who can’t string a grammatical sentence together and manifestly has no sense of style doesn’t add lustre to America’s reputation.

But which of the post-war US presidents was an elegant, erudite stylist? Eisenhower? Ford? Carter? Or even the sainted Reagan?

I don’t know how many serious books Reagan read and how deeply he could delve into the ills of the world. He was an infinitely nicer and more sensible man than Trump, readier to listen to good advice (one of his advisers, William F. Buckley, even applied in jest for the job of ventriloquist), but a major intellect he wasn’t.

Granted, Reagan’s Daddy didn’t buy his degree, but then there was no need: Eureka College isn’t Wharton. Reagan’s presentation was much smoother than Trump’s, but then he was an actor, not a property-developing chancer.

Though Reagan was disliked by many and liked by more, neither emotion ever reached the fervour pitch one observes with Trump. He’s unique in that respect.

The reason may be that, though Trump is neither the best nor the worst president the US has ever had, he’s certainly the most unusual one. Because he’s the first rank outsider to move into the White House, he takes most commentators out of their comfort zone.

Not only is he not a member of the cross-party apparat that has governed America for ever, but he’s openly contemptuous of it. Alas, most commentators hate to be yanked out of the warm confines of their intellectual households.

For too long they haven’t had to think for themselves. A couple of trusted stencils were always close at hand – apply them to any issue, cut away whatever little sticks out, and the job’s done. With Trump, however, the stencils are useless, and so are their nimble but limited intellects.

Passion has to take in the slack thus formed, and in such matters that’s a poor substitute for reason. Trump is in a way the litmus test of political commentators, and most are demonstrably failing it.

P.S. Newspapers often enrage me too. Yet my experience this morning was truly shocking even by comparison to most news items.

One of the clues in the general knowledge crossword of today’s Times was ‘Be (5)’, to which the answer was ‘Exist’. If the crossword compilers are unaware of the basic difference between being and existence, they should read up on their Aristotle or, better still, Aquinas. Don’t those people know anything? Or are they deliberately trying to mislead me?

No? Then you have a lot to learn from Peter Hitchens, who clearly prefers Russia’s “masculine society” to our effeminate one.

For years now Mr Hitchens has been one of Putin’s most faithful and courageous trolls.

The courageous part is evident from the pundit’s mournful admission that there’s a price tag attached to his shilling for Russian kleptofascism: “I have made many enemies by refusing to join in the anti-Russian frenzy.”

Sorry, I stand corrected. “Refusing to join in the anti-Russian frenzy” is obviously the right way to describe what I unkindly call ‘trolling’ or ‘shilling’. Anyway, whatever you call Mr Hitchens’s stance, I’m sorry many people have become his enemies as a result.

I’m certainly not one of them, in the same sense in which I’m not an enemy to the neighbourhood dog who yesterday relieved himself on my newly washed car. I simply recognise that some of God’s creatures are programmed to act in a certain way, and this setting may override, in humans, such things as free will, reason and moral sense.

It’s in that spirit of compassionate understanding and genuine concern for his mental health that I read Mr Hitchens’s Yuletide offering, in which he compares favourably the Russian aviation business to ours.

Building on his vast personal knowledge of the country, he writes: “On ferociously freezing days when any Western airline would have given up, Russian internal flights took off without hesitation, and arrived on time.”

‘Took off without hesitation’, definitely. ‘Arrived on time’ or indeed at all, well, not always.

Once I’ve finished applauding my former countrymen’s intrepid disdain for the elements, I can’t help juxtaposing Mr Hitchens’s statement with another one, in WorldAtlas:

“In 2011, Russia was considered the most dangerous country to fly from. In that year, the country experienced nine commercial airline accidents, a number so high that it required an investigation into its air-safety practices. The investigation found that the commercial flights were being flown by insufficiently trained pilots who were following inefficient and outdated safety regulations and procedures.”

It’s not just 2011. Historically, only the US has had marginally more airline deaths than Russia, but from a vastly greater volume of traffic. So let’s just say that ‘masculine’ disdain for safety isn’t without its downside.

In fact, some may confuse such masculinity with contempt for human life in general, and not just in the area of civil aviation. But Mr Hitchens forges on undeterred: “Russia… is still a… society, in which the influence of lawyers and social workers is minimal.”

That is undeniably true. Lawyers, and law in general, have next to no influence in Putin’s Russia. Their principal activity is to pass on the sentences pre-determined either in the Kremlin or at a lower governmental level.

That’s why detainees are routinely beaten up, tortured or even killed in Russian police stations and prisons. Anyone who follows Russia in good faith could cite a long list of such outrages, from the highly publicised Magnitsky case to the more obscure ones, such as a man raped to death with a champagne bottle.

In fact, the influence of lawyers – or rather laws – is so minimal that the whole Russian economy is criminalised from top to bottom, with protection rackets and money laundering its principal industry. Nor can laws prevent a spate of gangland and political murders Putin’s lads commit both at home and abroad.

It’s also true that Russian social workers indeed aren’t overburdened with work. That may be partly why at least 20 million Russians starve – that is, live below the poverty line of £200 a month. That’s quite impressive in a country whose population is 140 million, or, if one believes some sociologists, even lower.

“I rather think,” continues Mr Hitchens, “that if anyone was fool enough to fly a drone over one of Moscow’s major airports today, two things would happen within about half an hour. The drone would be shot out of the sky, and the person involved would be in the slammer, contemplating a lengthy spell in Siberia. If the airport ever had closed (which I doubt), it would soon be opened again.”

He’s as right in his guess as he’s wrong in his moral judgement. “The person involved” would indeed be in the slammer, having been beaten, tortured and then sentenced by a kangaroo court. And yes, the airport would stay open throughout – it’s that understated respect for human life again.

Mr Hitchens is full of contempt, this time fully justified, for our “ludicrous MI5”, “MI6” and “the so-called ‘British FBI’, the National Crime Agency”, which he groups together under the rubric of “our own burgeoning KGB-type organisations”.

What isn’t justified is the unspoken but clearly audible refrain of the original KGB being much preferable to those insufficiently masculine outfits. This goes beyond simple ignorance and idiocy, penetrating instead the domain of psychiatry.

True, all those British organisations are ineffectual and frequently incompetent. But, the last time I checked my facts, none of them is responsible for murdering millions of their countrymen and enslaving the rest – activities that are still continuing in Russia, if so far on a smaller scale.

I’d suggest that any man capable of referring to any Western security service as a “KGB-style organisation” should be sectioned or at least have his mental health carefully investigated. And then he ought to be passed on to the care of the social services, busy as they lamentably are in Britain.

I and my friends are getting some Christmas cards from the US, except that they aren’t really Christmas cards.

They all wish me Happy Holidays, making me wonder exactly what holidays we’re celebrating.

Ramadan? Hanukah? Schweinfest? Winter solstice? All of them? None of them? Is Christmas allowed to figure only as the modifier of ‘shopping’?

Even some who do celebrate the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ still send out cards leaving room for such guesswork.

I haven’t lived in America for 31 years, so I don’t know if any actual Christmas cards can be bought there. I suspect they still can be, but not easily.

This in a country that prides herself on her Constitution, complete with its First Amendment guaranteeing every conceivable freedom, including one of religious expression.

In the country where I grew up, the USSR, Christmas was celebrated clandestinely if at all.

In my parents’ generation, wishing someone a Happy Christmas could earn a one-way ticket to the GULAG, if not a bullet in the nape of the neck. In my own generation, the consequences would have been less drastic, but there would have been consequences, mostly career-related.

And I along with other Russian children took delight in decorating a New Year tree, which was how the Christmas tree had been known since the advent of universal social justice.

That was par for the course, for we lived under the worst tyranny the world has ever known. Here, however, I’m talking about “the land of the free and the home of the brave”. It appears that the bravery required to exercise freedom just may be in short supply.

The US Constitution is a written document, but demonstrably competing against it is the set of unwritten laws I call glossocratic. These laws aren’t yet enforced by the courts, at least not widely. They are banged into the people’s heads by extra-legal means, and no appeals are allowed.

The logic of shunning Christmas escapes me. After all, Americans don’t mind celebrating Thanksgiving, and pilgrims offered those original thanks to Jesus Christ, not Zeus, Allah or Zarathustra.

Granted, not all Americans are Christians – not all of anyone are these days. Yet it takes rank cretinism to claim that non-Christians have nothing to celebrate on 25 December.

For we owe our whole civilisation to the birth of Jesus Christ, regardless of whether or not it actually took place on that day. Even those Americans who deny the divinity of Jesus or indeed his historicity dine every day on the fruits of Christendom, which is how Western civilisation was called for the best part of two millennia.

Even their much-vaunted Constitution, compiled as it was mostly by agnostics, has clear Christian antecedents, as do most fundamental Western laws.

Those same celebrators of androgynous Happy Holidays look at paintings on Christian subjects, listen to music either coming from or inspired by liturgy, enjoy the scientific discoveries that couldn’t have been made in any other than Christian civilisation.

One has to come to the melancholy conclusion that, when Christ no longer matters, neither does Christendom. In the absence of clay, no ceramic vessel can be made.

Taking the place of faith-inspired culture is the glossocracy-inspired fear of giving offence. But the fear itself isn’t real but glossocratic.

I’ve been friends with a few Muslims in my life, more Jews, agnostics and atheists. Yet I’ve never met a single member of those groups who’d be genuinely offended when wished a Happy Christmas.

One has to be not just impious but downright barbaric to be insulted by an expression of that wish and, though some of my friends are impious, none is barbaric. Neither, one suspects, are many of those Happy Holidays Americans.

They’ve just lost the very modicum of courage required to buck glossocratic laws, to refuse to accept that Christmas offends anybody. It doesn’t really take that much mettle to do that.

Perhaps it would take a bit more to throw those glossocratic laws back into the faces of their propagandists, those who insist on various groups’ mandatory sense of constant offence. Yet their glossocratic tyranny is as oppressive as communism or fascism, perhaps more so.

Those same people who can resist intellectual rape often find themselves helpless when exposed to intellectual seduction. If those Happy Holidays cards are any indication, there were more anti-communists in the Russia of my youth than there are anti-glossocrats in America today .

Still, God loves us all, and it’s a small gesture of gratitude to wish his son a happy birthday.

So Happy Christmas to all of you! May God, in whom you may or may not believe, prove that he believes in you by making your year successful and unsullied by any serious problems.

Martina Navratilova isn’t the first name that springs to mind when one hails champions of traditional values. One would have to go through the whole list of New Age causes before finding one she doesn’t support.

Martina is particularly vociferous when sticking up for animals’ right not to be eaten and for lesbians’ right to be… I almost wrote ‘to be just that’ but then decided against it, this being the Christmas season. ‘Married’, is what I really mean.

To her credit, Martina has the power of her convictions. She doesn’t eat meat and does eat… please Lord, give me strength to refrain from another lewd double entendre.

What I mean is that, ever since she defected from her native Czechoslovakia in 1975, and even before she came out in 1981, Martina has been known as a lesbian. There’s nothing uncommon about that.

I wouldn’t be divulging any secrets if I observed that this little quirk is hardly unusual among female tennis professionals.

Tennis is an aggressive sport, and, as well-publicised experiments on mice have shown, aggression is a masculine trait attributable to testosterone levels. Yet high testosterone levels also tend to make people want to have sex with women, and I hope I’m not making it sound too simplistic.

Hence many women who dedicate their lives to tennis have certain tendencies, and the peripatetic life of a tennis pro travelling the world in the company of other women gives an easy outlet to such proclivities.

(I could give you a long list of Sapphic players, but you can easily do your own Googling. To be fair, some of them don’t look at all masculine and some, such as Gigi Fernández in her prime, are downright gorgeous. What a loss.)

However, not all tennis lesbians are as open about their sex lives as Martina is. And certainly not all of them marry their girlfriends, which she did in 2014.

Martina wasn’t exactly reticent about that happy event. She proposed to her girlfriend Julia Lemigova in a crowded restaurant, with a battalion of paparazzi in attendance.

In the good tradition of matrimony, Martina, clad in a white man’s (or at least manly) suit went down on one knee, making everyone who really respects the good tradition of matrimony rush towards the exit holding his hand to his mouth.

I’m lingering on these salacious details only to enhance the effect of the forthcoming shock. For Martina has got on the wrong side of the ‘transgender community’ after laudably insisting that ‘women’ born men shouldn’t be allowed to compete in women’s events.

“Clearly that can’t be right,” wrote Martina, born again as a traditionalist. “You can’t just proclaim yourself a female and be able to compete against women. There must be some standards, and having a penis and competing as a woman would not fit that standard. For me it’s all about fairness. Which means taking every case individually… there is no cookie cutter way of doing things.”

Martina is dodging the issue ever so slightly. Because there is indeed a cookie cutter way of allaying her objections. It’s called an operation, whereby the anatomical feature Martina sees as disqualifying is removed.

But, keeping as she does her finger on the pulse of modernity, she clearly accepts that anyone is entitled to self-identify his/her/its sex regardless of biochemistry, physiology or anatomy. She’s only objecting to seeing too much of a bulge in the front of a woman player’s knickers.

However, even her understated remarks caused such an outburst of attacks on her ‘transphobia’ that Martina was forced to delete the offensive comments from her website.

Leading the attacks was Dr Rachel McKinnon, a male-born ‘transgender’ activist and competitive cyclist who wins women’s events on the circuit.

“Genitals do not play sports,” explained Dr McKinnon, displaying a keen mind and deep medical knowledge. “What part of a penis is related to tennis?”

I can’t answer that question, certainly not to satisfy the exacting medical criteria evidently applied by Dr McKinnon. I do however acknowledge that genitals don’t play sports, although many ***** do (I’m slapping my own wrist even as we speak – this subject makes me want to use unprintable words).

However, talent and application being equal, a player born with XY chromosomes will wipe the court with one cursed with XX initials. Coming into play here isn’t just testosteronal aggression, but also the manifest male superiority in strength, speed and height.

That’s why the best female players would struggle to break into the men’s top 1,000. And that’s why back in 1973 Bobby Riggs, at a venerable age of 55, was able to beat Margaret Court, women’s Number 1 at the time.

Even more illustrative is the case of Renée Richards, neé Richard Raskind. Dr Raskind was a good amateur player who set out to show that it was possible to play tennis without balls. After undergoing the whole hog of trans-sex procedures, the freshly minted Renée launched a series of legal challenges to be able to compete in women’s events.

He/she finally won the legal battle and began his/her professional career at age 44, when most players have been off the circuit for at least a decade. However, this middle-aged male amateur broke into the top 20 of the women’s professional ranks.

He/she then went on to become a coach, working, among others, with Martina Navratilova. She’s then in an ideal position to know that, though “genitals don’t play sports”, men do, and they have some in-built advantages over women.

However, ever the conciliator, I’m prepared to side with Dr McKinnon. Furthermore, I can develop her argument to its logical conclusion.

The only way to rid tennis of such unseemly squabbles is for men and women to compete together in the same tournaments. The issue of who is and who isn’t a woman will become moot, and tennis jousts will be held not among penises and vaginas, but among fellow professionals.

There’s always the danger that women, unable to make a living under such circumstances, won’t remain fellow professionals for long. But hey, fair’s fair. At least such an arrangement will put an end to any possibility of sex discrimination.