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That was the slogan under which hundreds of thousands of protesters staged peaceful demonstrations in 21 Russian cities.

Is he not? The occasion was yet another inauguration of Col. Putin, and those sport-spoiling Russians refused to accept it as a coronation. Yet, in Russia, that’s a distinction without a difference, which point was hammered home by police truncheons.

History is screaming parallels – is anyone listening? When the coronation of a Russian tsar is accompanied by deliberate or even accidental violence, it’s a bad omen. For even if it’s accidental, deliberate violence will certainly follow, eventually claiming the tsar himself as its victim.

The last Russian emperor, Nicholas II, was crowned on 30 May, 1896. Half a million people rushed to Moscow’s Khodynka Field, attracted by the promise of free food and drink at the festivities.

Those were indeed on offer, but the rumour of gold coins also to be doled out was false. One way or the other, a stampede occurred, and 1,389 people were trampled to death.

That was an auspicious start, and many superstitious Russians (which is to say almost all Russians) believed the reign was cursed. So it proved, even though the violence was a tragic accident.

What happened on Sunday, 9 January, 1905, was also tragic – but it wasn’t accidental. Thousands of unarmed workers marched to Petersburg’s Winter Palace to deliver a petition to the tsar.

Many theories of what happened on that day have been put forth, but one fact is indisputable: the Imperial Guard opened fire on the crowd, killing about 1,000 people and contributing the expression Bloody Sunday to most languages.

Thirteen years later the tsar and his whole family were butchered in a damp basement. Superstitious Russians, even those who grieved, were muttering the Russian equivalent of ‘what goes around comes around’.

What happened in Russia yesterday isn’t an exact parallel of Khodynka. The 1896 crowd were celebrating the coronation; yesterday’s crowd were protesting against it (fine, against the inauguration, if you’re a stickler for trivial detail).

The ensuing violence was accidental in 1896, but deliberate and pre-planned yesterday. And, so far, no one has died – though not for any lack of ardour on the part of the police.

Actually, not just the police. Developing the fine tradition of Nazi stormtroopers and Soviet druzhinniki the cops were backed up by paramilitary gangs, including fancy-dress mock-Cossacks beating the demonstrators to bloody welts with horsewhips.

The police were using less flexible truncheons and, as you can see on this video link, were doing a good job: https://graniru.org/Politics/Russia/activism/m.269723.html

Reports of casualties, although not yet fatalities, are streaming in, with many of the victims being journalists, mostly Russian but also some Western. (This last detail is another difference between yesterday and 1896: no correspondents were abused then.) Altogether there were some 1,600 arrests, and God only knows how many casualties:

Journalist Alexander Skrylnikov’s lung was lacerated by a truncheon blow. Dmitry Karasev was hospitalised with two broken ribs and liver damage. TV journalist Oksana Gandziuk was arrested. So was radio journalist Arseniy Vesnin. So were Daily Star journalists Ilia Gorshkiv and Alexander Antiufeev. So was journalist Alexei Alexandrov.

Flashnord’s woman correspondent was beaten up while being arrested. The same publication’s correspondent Tatiana Ysipushtanova was also arrested. The mock Cossacks attacked a France-Presse correspondent who tried to interview a demonstrator. A Telegram journalist had his video camera smashed and his arm damaged by a police truncheon.

And so forth, ad nauseum. It has to be said that this kind of take on freedom of assembly and of the press lacks novelty appeal. But the KGB training of most Russian high officials stood them in good stead: they were able to provide a fine creative touch, and I hope the patent office has been contacted.

When demonstrators gathered in Moscow’s Pushkin Square, a helicopter arrived and assumed a hovering position just above their heads. The roar of the engine and the airstream produced by the rotor completely muffled not only potential speeches but even normal conversation.

Yes, no Gatling guns were fired and no one was killed. But escalation of protests will lead to escalation of violence. Sooner or later Putin will order firing at protesting crowds, following in the footsteps of all Soviet chieftains from Lenin to Gorbachev.

Make no mistake about it: this lot will do anything it takes to hold on to power. Truncheons and horsewhips do the job for the time being; when they no longer do, machineguns will see the light of day.

When, I don’t know, and neither do I know if a Bloody Sunday Mark II would culminate in the same sanguinary finale for its instigator. But one thing I do know for sure: no matter how many people Putin maims, beats up, imprisons or kills, our useful idiots will still worship him.

Those on the right proceed from the kind of syllogism that used to land people in Bedlam. Thesis: We want Brexit – now. Antithesis: Our government isn’t delivering it. Synthesis: We love Putin.

These useless idiots think Putin is a fellow conservative. The Corbynistas are smarter: they know Putin hates our civilisation as much as they do, which is why they too join the fan club.

Opposites attract? I don’t think so. When they attract, they aren’t really opposites.

“As anyone who opens Das Kapital will know, his was an intellect of formidable power,” writes Dominic Sandbrook to commemorate Marx’s anniversary.

For Marx was a jolly bright fellow, and nobody can “deny him a place, alongside other Victorian figures such as Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud, as one of the genuinely titanic intellectual influences on the modern world.”

Well, I can deny just that. Influences, yes. ‘Genuinely titanic intellectual influences’, no. The three manifest frauds didn’t appeal to the intellect, nor even to emotions. They appealed to the putrid modern swamp of viscera where evil resides.

But of course young Dominic can’t think in terms of good and evil because they are outside his ken. His upward intellectual journey stops several tiers below the system of thought where such concepts live.

That’s why he writes things like “And although [Marx’s] ideas – the importance of class struggle, the urgency of revolution, the dream of a socialist society – remain hugely controversial, there is simply no escaping them. Indeed, you could even argue that, to some degree, we are all Marxists today.”

Speak for yourself, Dominic… Actually he has.

Marx’s ideas aren’t ‘hugely controversial’. No controversy exists. They’ve been proved not just wrong but fraudulent – empirically, philosophically and historically.

Hence only a small mind will allow his thinking to be influenced by the Marxist methodology, whatever conclusions pro or contra he draws. The wide spread of Marxist ideas only validates the fact that most people’s minds are indeed small.

“…Thanks to the sheer force of Marx’s intellect,” continues Sandbrook, “[his teaching] has attracted some very clever people.” Such as “the British historian Eric Hobsbawm.”

No one who can’t see through ‘the sheer force of Marx’s intellect’ can be genuinely clever. He’s more likely to be genuinely evil, and Hobsbawm is a prime example.

The three iconic figures Sandbrook mentioned had no real intellect – if they had, they would have been seeking the truth, not just universal influence. What they, emphatically including Marx, actually had was some intellectual charisma and a highly sensitive nose to the needs of Zeitgeist.

Using such traits, Marx gave modernity something it had been sorely missing: an eschatology to fit its instincts. These were informed by the Enlightenment, which misnomer is applied to a mass revolt against Christendom – not just its founding faith, but everything it had produced: its morality, politics, aesthetics and system of thought.

This removed the intellectual and moral anchor, and society was cast adrift. Sensing that, people craved a new system of thought and morality to provide some self-justification and some sort of haven. Marx with his animal cunning sensed that need and responded to it.

Thanks to him the extermination of Christendom could now be put on a pseudo-intellectual footing. While the kingdom in heaven had been debunked, the kingdom in earth was at last described in detail.

Marx went the likes of More, Companella, Fourier and Owen one better by creating a utopia that didn’t look utopian. His ideal society appeared to be there for the taking, however long that took to achieve. It was a utopia nonetheless, but one put together with more evil sleight of hand than any of his predecessors had been able to master.

Had modern barbarians actually read Marx, instead of relying on politicised mouthpieces, they’d know that the central doctrines of Marxism were false even at the time of writing.

Marx wrote for political, not intellectual, ends. So he showed the way for many a modern politician by suppressing the data that contradicted his theories.

For example, the first edition of Das Kapital gives most statistics up to 1865 or 1866, except those for the changes in wages that stop in 1850. The second edition brings all other statistics up to date, but the movement of wages again stops in 1850 – it was essential to emphasise the workers’ plight.

Any serious study will demonstrate that Marx based his theories on the industrial conditions that either were already obsolete at the time or had never existed in the first place. That’s no wonder, for Marx never saw the inside of a factory, farm or manufactory.

The point about Marx’s selective treatment of facts is only worth making because of all the numerous claims to scientific truth made by, and for, him. Whatever else he was, Marx wasn’t a scientist, nor, God forbid, a philosopher. He wasn’t after truth, and all his writings were designed for one purpose: to stab a venomous sting into Christendom’s heart.

Sandbrook doesn’t realise how fraudulent and intellectually puny Marxism is. But he is aware of its awful consequences: “Well, the death toll speaks for itself. In the Soviet Union alone, his disciple Stalin killed perhaps 12 million people.”

Sandbrook is right in principle, but slipshod in his facts. ‘In the Soviet Union alone’, even Marx’s disciple Lenin killed more people than the number Sandbrook cites.

Marx’s disciple Stalin ran the score up to about 61 million, but then, since ‘we’re all Marxists now’, there’s an instinctive need to downplay Marxist monstrosities even when acknowledging them.

The monstrous acts are directly linked to Marx’s monstrous ideas, which, to his credit, Sandbrook knows – and supports with a few quotations (I did the same thing in my piece of 28 April). But, because the concept of evil is alien to him, he misunderstands the nature of the link.

“The Soviet dictator was not a monster who happened to be a Marxist,” Sandbrook writes, “He was a monster because he was a Marxist.” Yes, but why was he a Marxist?

Evil theories are always concocted by evil men. And, as I wrote above, Marx provided modernity with an eschatological justification for its evil instincts. But, for their possessor to accept that justification and act accordingly, those evil instincts have to be there to begin with.

Stalin was a monster not because he was a Marxist but because he was a monster. But no man likes to think of himself as such. Enter Marxism, or any of its eschatological derivatives, such as socialism, communism, fascism or Nazism.

Suddenly the monster isn’t a monster any longer. He’s a man who regretfully has to be cruel in pursuit of a supposedly noble, in fact wicked, idea. But the need for such an idea comes from the evil nature of his personality.

That’s why I’m always sceptical about ex-communists (in other words, justifiers of mass murder) who claim to have converted to conservative goodness. Acceptance of ideological democide may or may not involve some rational process. But it always answers a deep emotional need, an innate personality defect.

And I doubt that, barring a Damascene epiphany, anyone can change his personality any more than he can change the colour of his eyes. To put it in clichéd terms, you can take a boy out of Marxism, but you can’t take Marxism out of a boy.

Understanding evil is essential to understanding Marx and Marxism. Anyone capable of such understanding will know that celebrating the birthday boy’s anniversary is tantamount to celebrating evil by taking part in a satanic rite.

Intellect, even as low-grade as Marx’s, has no role to play there. But this kind of thinking is beyond Sandbrook and his ilk.

In his 1840 novel A Hero of Our Time, Lermontov depicted as his Byronic antihero a disaffected aristocrat of the type later to be called ‘the superfluous man’. According to Lermontov, Grigory Pechorin represented the dominant type in Russia of the mid-nineteenth century.

(To be pedantic about it, he had in mind only a minute fraction of the Russian population. Most were illiterate peasants who were so busy trying to survive that they had no time to be disaffected.)

Fast-forward 178 years, move the narrative to Byron’s native land, and our time also has its hero: Henry Vincent. Vincent’s lineage was different from Pechorin’s, although equally homogeneous.

Pechorin’s relations were aristocrats; Vincent’s relations are criminals. In fact, they are more of a gang than a family, yet similarly close-knit.

Vindicating the adage ‘a family that robs together, stays together’, the Vincent clan including Henry himself, his father and five uncles specialised in expanding the number of ways in which vulnerable pensioners could be robbed, defrauded or burgled.

They cast their net wide in search of appropriate marks, all above a certain age. Their favourite trick was to provide some routine building services and then overcharge the customers grotesquely.

If a victim refused to pay, he was frogmarched to his bank and forced to make a cash withdrawal. Sometimes the ploy worked and sometimes it didn’t.

Henry, for example, spent 10 of his 37 years in prison. His last 6-year sentence was in 2009, when he charged an old man £72,000 to replace a single roof tile. And in 2003 several members of his family were sentenced to a total of 29 years for duping pensioners out of £448,180.

Henry’s father eventually decided to settle down and bought a £1.7m farm from another pensioner. The old chap accepted a £300,000 offer for the property, probably deciding that what was left of his life was worth more than £1.4 million.

But Henry himself was too young to stop working. His industry finally led him to arming himself with a sharpened screwdriver and breaking into the house where a 78-year-old pensioner lived with his wife crippled by arthritis.

At that point Henry’s luck ran out. For the plucky wrinkly Richard Osborn-Brooks resisted. In the ensuing scuffle Henry was fatally stabbed with his own screwdriver.

So far so good, or rather so bad. The police immediately arrested Mr Osborn-Brooks and charged him with murder, thereby acting according to their new job description.

That used to be protecting society from criminals; now it’s reshaping society according to the latest demands of our deranged modernity. The relevant demand in this case is that a victim of burglary has no right to harm the burglar when the poor youth is quietly going about his job.

For that’s what burglary is according to the modern ethos, a job. I remember the shock of my colleague shortly after I had moved to Britain from the US. We were chatting about burglary, and I casually mentioned that, if I caught a burglar in flagrante, I would try to harm him as much as I could. And if that involved killing him, it’s his hard luck.

My colleague’s reaction suggested he wouldn’t mind doing to me what I’d do to a burglar. “He’s just doing his job!” Since he was not only my colleague but also my boss, I restricted myself to muttering that a burglar isn’t a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker, and burglary isn’t a respectable job but a vicious crime.

To myself I thought of the tectonic shift in mores that had had to occur between the time burglary was a hanging offence and the time when it became a job like any other.

In the intervening 30 years the situation has got even worse, but not yet so bad that charging an old man with murder for protecting his family against a potentially murderous thug wouldn’t cause a public outcry. Mr Osborn-Brooks was released, all charges dismissed.

Yet things had got bad enough for another section of the public to feel outraged at that miscarriage of justice. Burglar or not, the thug was under the protection of the laws of political correctness.

A shrine was jerry-built outside the scene of the incident, with flowers and wreaths expressing the bereavement of the thug’s spiritual family: thugs like him and their champions, who see burglary as a sort of redistribution scheme similar to that done by Customs & Excise.

The neighbours, some of whom had themselves been burgled, displayed their retrograde scepticism of social justice by tearing the shrine down – only for it to reappear the next day. That charade continued until yesterday, when the thug’s funeral was held.

The funeral procession befitted one for a national hero about to be laid to rest at Westminster Abbey. The family’s ill-gotten £100,000 bought a silver Mercedes hearse and eight other Mercedes limousines. A caravan and a flatbed truck followed, bearing numerous floral tributes, one of them in the shape of a vodka bottle.

The mourners in the cortège provided the appropriately solemn accompaniment by rolling the windows down, sticking two fingers out and screaming obscenities. The bereaved crowd of onlookers responded with a barrage of rocks.

After the service, 100 of the thug’s family and friends, most of them sporting hoods and balaclavas, used similar projectiles on the crowd of journalists and photographers preserving the event for posterity. A full-blown riot ensued, the police ignored their social responsibilities and charged the poor socio-economically disadvantaged youths, yet only one arrest followed.

Had I witnessed the fun, I would have been scared – not so much of the riot (I’ve seen a few) as of what it said about our society. Growing segments of it feel sympathy for the victim of the crime, and I mean Vincent, not Osborn-Brook and his ill wife.

For them it’s the burglar, not his victim, who must be protected. And if a burglar is killed committing his crime – sorry, doing his job – he becomes a martyr at the altar of modernity. Before long scum like that will indeed be buried at Westminster Abbey.

It’s this kind of moral catastrophe that has made London more crime-ridden than New York. Johannesburg must be our next target.

In the spirit of fashionable humanism, I’d propose some immediate action. First, law-abiding subjects of Her Majesty must be told that, rather than being punished, they’ll be rewarded for killing a burglar. The new law should be communicated to the populace on television, to make sure the news reaches potential house-breakers, most of them less than avid newspaper readers.

And, should a thug be killed while burgling a house, no funeral procession should be allowed. The criminal should be buried in a nameless place at an unknown location to avoid any possible pilgrimage of mourners and their champions.

Meanwhile, the Osborn-Brooks will probably have to move: they’ve received numerous death threats, and the police aren’t going to protect them. They’re too busy doing their day job of social engineering.

I’m specifically referring to one of his Dirty Harry films, in which Clint’s trigger-happy hero offers an excellent piece of advice: “A man must be aware of his limitations.”

Being aware of one’s limitations means being able not to let them show. And the best way of conducting such a concealment programme is to steer clear of the areas beyond one’s competence.

This is what otherwise intelligent atheists fail to do when proffering arguments about (and especially against) God, religion, theodicy or some such. Taken out of their customary intellectual habitat, they resemble a beached fish no matter how brilliant they may be otherwise.

Now, I regard atheism as an intellectual failing. Intelligent atheists would disagree with this blanket statement, but, smart as they are, they know how to practise intellectual self-defence by bypassing the subject altogether.

Sooner or later they’ll be found out anyway: the cat will eventually scratch its way out of the bag. But ‘eventually’ is the operative word. By sticking to purely secular subjects, such as politics, social commentary or stock market quotations, they’ll be able to avoid immediate detection.

However, the moment they trespass into the forbidden area, they fall headlong into the holes in their own logic, a tool they may wield with virtuoso dexterity when discussing unrelated topics.

Such holes are easy to point out, and many have done so. One of the most brilliant expositions of atheism’s inanity I’ve read in recent years is David Bentley Hart’s book Atheist Delusions.

However, I do have an axe to grind with Bentley Hart: he is an unsporting man. After all, he chose as the focus of his offensive Richard Dawkins who presents too easy a target.

Dawkins, not to cut too much of a point about it, is staggeringly ignorant and not very bright. He knows nothing at all about either religion or philosophy, and is incapable of spotting self-refuting lapses in his own narrative. In one of his books, for example, he uses mathematics to prove that we all descend from a single female ancestor – only then to deny any validity at all to the story of Eve.

This brings me to the book Seven Types of Atheism by John Gray, in which he, a devout atheist himself, scourges every celebrated atheist thinker with a mercilessly swung whip. Equally lacerating strokes land on the back of religion, especially Western teleological creeds.

There’s nothing unsporting about taking Prof. Gray on. Unlike Richard Dawkins, he’s a manifestly clever and learned man, which makes him a worthy opponent. Yet worthy doesn’t mean hard to beat.

For, despite his towering intelligence and erudition, Prof. Gray provides an excellent demonstration of the dire cerebral failings he shares with all other atheists, including such intellectual nonentities as Dawkins.

This starts with the word ‘religion’, which he consistently uses as a full synonym of ideology. This is a solecism on many levels.

First, no such thing as religion in general exists, unless Prof. Gray uses it to illustrate the validity of Dostoyevsky’s maxim that “the thought expressed is a lie”, meaning that language is inherently too imprecise to contain thought.

The umbrella word ‘religion’ is well-nigh meaningless even when describing creeds to which it’s normally attached. Polytheism, Christianity, animism and, say, Buddhism have so little in common that they simply refuse to be squeezed into the same rubric.

That rubric can’t contain both the creed whose founder taught the profound and subtle concept of transubstantiation (“He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him”) and, say, the Aztec cult actually calling for eating human beings, or perhaps the Carthaginian one involving human sacrifice.

Given the will and a certain amount of mental agility, it’s possible to find indisputable similarities everywhere. For example, the tricycle and the airliner may be grouped together because they’re each made of metal, have three wheels and can transport people. Yet neither the ultimate truth nor the proposed rubric can be stretched far enough to accommodate both those objects: for all the trivial similarities, they’re too different in essence.

Prof. Gray stretches the rubric of religion to bursting point by also jamming into it just about every secular creed, from Enlightenment humanism to Bolshevik or Nazi monstrosity to modern adoration of science. When a word is supposed to mean just about everything, it ends up meaning just about nothing.

Prof. Gray applies the term to any system of belief that starts from a fideistic premise, especially one with a teleological dimension. For example, he correctly spots a fideistic aspect in the modern worship of science as a potentially redemptive creed.

However, any mental activity aimed at uncovering truth has to start from some act of faith. For example, all major scientific discoveries, even those that aren’t supposed to have redemptive value, start from a fideistic premise, in that context called a hypothesis.

A scientist doesn’t use a scatter gun approach. He sets out to prove that what he believes is true, and then holds it to the test of experiment and analysis. So is science qua science, not just the worship of it, a religion too?

It’s equally unsound to describe as a religion every ideology or philosophy that puts forth a teleological proposition. An ideology, even though it starts from an act of faith, is more nearly anti-religious than religious.

Ideology is a mock faith without God, mock rationalism without reason and mock morality without morals. As such, it can’t touch even the outer edges of truth: virtual reality is at best a parody of the actual kind, at worst its perversion.

The similarities between a religion and an ideology are of the tricycle-airliner variety: irrelevant if true. And any philosophy attaching itself to an ideology is merely an attempt to prove to infidels that a lie is truth and truth is a lie.

Prof. Gray, while laudably castigating such ideologies as socialism and its communist or fascist derivatives, is clearly attracted to solipsistic metaphysical creeds like Buddhism, which are philosophies and practices that don’t require an act of faith, have no concept of Creator God and don’t aim to explain the origin of man or his world.

This he sees as their clear advantage over Christianity, which according to him, is “liable to falsification by historical fact”. Freddy Ayer would suggest that this makes Christianity true: liability to falsification was to him a sine qua non of verification.

Ayer was of course a proponent of logical positivism, which Prof. Gray spares the soubriquet of religion, probably by oversight. At the risk of sounding like an illogical negativist, I see no value in that philosophy. As a Christian, however, I’d point out that countless attempts to debunk Christianity by appealing to historical fact have failed.

Christianity, however, can be falsified, and Prof. Gray makes a good fist of it. Jesus, he writes, never meant for his teaching to become a universal religion. That was all Paul’s doing.

By preaching to gentiles, Paul wilfully distorted Jesus’s intention, who only meant to convert the Jews. The inference makes one wonder why our religion is called Christianity and not Paulism.

Now, even discounting Paul’s revelation, which made him an equiapostolic saint, he did know all the apostles personally, and so perhaps knew what Jesus really meant even better than Prof. Gray does.

He probably heard John refer to the same quotation of Christ that was later recorded in the Gospel: “And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and they shall be one fold, and one shepherd.” (John 10:16)

To paraphrase Euripides ever so slightly, whom God would destroy he first makes him sound ignorant. And illogical, come to that.

For, as Prof. Gray points out with his sterling erudition, the Middle East in the first century abounded in various prophets and seers, such as John the Baptist. Only one of them, however, created a universal religion that then produced by far the greatest civilisation the world has ever known.

How come? Not being blessed with Prof. Gay’s agile mind, I’d pick up Occam’s razor and carve out the simplest of answers: because Christianity is true. But that’s too simple for Prof. Gray to understand.

His explanation is more complex, so much so that it requires not just the suspension of disbelief but its eternal obliteration. Christianity’s assent was down to an endless list of coincidences.

“As we know it today, the Christian religion is a creation of chance,” he writes. “If Paul had not been converted… If the emperor Constantine had not adopted Christianity, and Theodosius had not made it the official state religion…,” presumably we’d all be Buddhists or Mithraists.

That’s another lesson he should have learned from Dirty Harry. As an expert investigator, Harry knew that, if coincidences number more than two, they aren’t coincidences.

Prof. Gray is absolutely right when sneering at the notion of progress. He correctly remarks that science and technology are the only areas in which any progress can be observed.

In fact, I’d go even further and suggest that developments in science and technology on the one side and those in morality, intellect and social organisation on the other are vectored in the opposite directions.

Progress in one side is accompanied with a clear regress in the other – unless one is prepared to argue that a modern professor of philosophy is an improvement over Aristotle or a modern poet over Shakespeare.

Yet Prof. Gray’s inference from this irrefutable observation is wrong. Because mankind clearly isn’t progressing in any area that matters, he suggests that history has no meaning and human life no purpose. This, he believes, debunks Christianity that preaches a steady moral improvement in this world.

That’s another example of falsification, two kinds of it, one major, the other minor but still telling.

First, Christ never taught that human perfection could be attained before the end of the world. In fact, he taught something exactly opposite: “My kingdom is not of this world”. But from that it doesn’t follow that human life (or history) has no purpose.

Saying so means mixing two unrelated systems of thought, thereby creating an unsavoury mongrel. There is indeed no noticeable moral progress in history, quite the opposite. This makes perfect sense within the secular system of thought.

But this doesn’t preclude the possibility (to a Christian, the certainty) that mankind will achieve ultimate perfection at the end of history, when Christ comes again to judge the quick and the dead. That makes history a ladder to perfection, even though each step may be caked in blood.

Of course, it’s possible to deny, as Prof. Gray does, the validity – or indeed existence – of this system of thought a priori. But committing logical errors along the way isn’t the right way to go about it.

The minor falsification is Prof. Gray’s assertion that Darwin never said that evolution presupposes any incremental improvements. Evolution is as haphazard as history, another game of chance expressible in the subjunctive mood.

I wonder when was the last time Prof. Gray opened The Origin of Species or The Descent of Man. The whole theory of evolution is about a steady progress from some cell of uncertain provenance all the way to a man as brilliant as Prof. Gray.

Surely he doesn’t believe he isn’t an improvement on a chimpanzee? Darwin certainly didn’t.

While I quite enjoy, in the Schadenfreude sense, watching a nincompoop like Dawkins tie himself up in intellectual knots, watching an unquestionably intelligent man like Prof. Gray do the same upsets me. His book is actually informative, and I for one learned quite a few new facts.

However, he and other atheists could do worse than follow Clint’s advice and stick to something they know. In Dawkins’s case, it’s very little; in Prof Gray’s an awful lot. But when they venture into this area, the differences between them fade away.

If any doubts still persist about the inspiration behind the EU, Junk (as Jean-Claude Juncker is known to his friends) has helpfully set out to dispel them.

Junk has announced that he’ll add the weight of his illustrious personality to the celebration of Marx’s bicentenary in Karl’s home town of Trier. There will be a statue unveiled, to the accompaniment of Junk’s address.

Now, and I don’t know how to put this tactfully, Junk isn’t always in command of his faculties. After all, in the true spirit of pan-European solidarity, he keeps several Scottish distilleries afloat almost singlehandedly.

Hence my first thought on hearing the news was that Junk must have been in his cups when he agreed to participate in the ceremony. That being the case, he might have thought the festivities were to be held in honour of the Marx brothers, or perhaps the British chain of department stores.

However, a stone-sober spokesman for the European Commission contemptuously tossed away the straw I was desperately clutching at. The very same Karl Marx, he clarified. The founder of communism. And quite right too:

“Whatever people’s views on Karl Marx are, nobody can deny that he is a figure that shaped history.”

I’m the last man to deny it; shape history Marx most definitely did. But he isn’t the only one.

Old Karl’s fellow history-shapers include, inter alia, Alaric, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao – the first three Marx’s typological precursors, the last four his grateful disciples.

(The direct link between Hitler and Marx isn’t widely publicised, but it was self-acknowledged. In his memoir Hitler Speaks Hermann Rauschning quotes the führer as saying that “the whole of National Socialism” was based on Marx. “I have learned a great deal from Marx,” conceded Hitler, “as I do not hesitate to admit.”)

My point is, and I’m amazed it needs to be made, that not everyone who has shaped history deserves honouring. Evil shapers certainly don’t merit accolades and, if they do get them, those honouring them are themselves evil.

Unlike Putin’s Russia, where Stalin statues are going up like mushrooms after a rain, Germany has so far observed some basic propriety. Thus I don’t think Hitler’s birthday (20 April) is widely celebrated, and I’m fairly certain no statues to Hitler are being put up in either Germany or Austria.

If they were, would Junk attend the unveiling? I suspect not, even though the original idea for a post-war united Europe was born out of a brainstorm between Nazi and Vichy bureaucrats.

However, even if Junk’s honouring Hitler would be logical, it would run against the consensus in the group that nurtured (shaped?) Junk and the organisation he leads: socialist quasi-intelligentsia. That consensus exculpates Marx, even though his ideas directly inspired the massacre of at least 150 million people around the world.

The standard excuse is that communism as practised by the Soviets perverted communism as postulated by Marx. If the apologists aren’t only rabid but also idiotic, they’ll offer an analogy with Jesus Christ, who, they say, can’t be held responsible for atrocities committed in his name.

The only thing that analogy proves is that they’re indeed not only rabid but also idiotic. Jesus would definitely and rightly be held responsible had he taught to hate one’s neighbour and exterminate one’s enemies, wipe out whole races one doesn’t like, keep millions in concentration camps, enslave individuals to the state and expropriate them en masse.

If the Gospels preached hate rather than love, Jesus should be not worshipped but cursed. But they didn’t, quite the opposite. However, Marx and his acolytes called for all those outrages in so many words.

They did bring to fruition most of the Marxist dictates, such as those on concentration camps (Engels called them “special guarded places”), slavery (Marx: “Slavery is… an economic category of paramount importance”), mass murder (Marx: “the victorious party must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries”), anti-Semitism (Marx: “…the Polish Jews… this dirtiest of all races… Thus we find every tyrant backed by a Jew”), genocide (Engels: “All the other large and small nationalities and peoples are destined to perish before long in the revolutionary holocaust”).

In fact, if anything, practising communists softened Marx’s legacy. For example, Marx preached total confiscation of private property, a goal of which even Stalin’s Soviet Union fell short. As it did in making all children wards of the state, as Marx preached.

The 2.5 tonne statue has been made possible by communist China’s generous gift, which stands to reason: it is after all a communist state that owes to Marx its claim to legitimacy. What’s harder to explain is the German government’s – and the EU’s – eagerness to accept the poisoned gift.

But we ought to thank Junk for removing that difficulty. His presence at that foul obscenity should leave one in no doubt about the inspiration behind the EU: fulfilling, if only through the back door, Marx’s dream of a socialist pan-European state.

So here’s to you, Junk, for being honest about it. After all, honesty doesn’t come naturally to EU functionaries.

This sounds like a paradox, doesn’t? It does, but only to those who take modern democracy at face value.

Such people are baffled. They simply can’t understand why so many MPs seem hell-bent on defying the democratically expressed will of the people.

Parliament voted to have a Brexit referendum, didn’t it? That asserted the parliamentary part of parliamentary democracy. The second part was served by the resulting vote itself, yielding a solid majority in favour of leaving.

So what’s the problem? Democracy has spoken. So why are so many democratically elected representatives of the people trying to subvert the very method of government that got them into Westminster?

In fact, those Remainers, while contemptuous of democracy’s form, are true to its essence. Unlike the Leavers they realise that, as it’s used nowadays, the word ‘democracy’ belies its etymology. It’s not the rule of the demos; it’s the rule of a small elite over the demos.

There are many problems with the modern democracy of one vote for every man, woman and increasingly child. Yet again I may selfishly refer you to my book Democracy as a Neocon Trick, where I delve into those problems in detail.

The book is polemical, leaving room for argument. But there’s no arguing about one demonstrable problem: modern democracy clearly doesn’t elevate to government those fit to govern.

Moreover, those who want a job in politics most deserve it least. For serving in Parliament is no longer a vocation – it’s a career like any other. Hence, like in any other career, service has largely become self-service.

A young man embarks on it early, typically right out of university. He then elbows his way through the crowd of equally unqualified career-seekers, gets through the jungle of party selection committees and eventually ends up in Parliament.

If he plays his cards right, in due course he’ll get to sit on the front bench  and heave a sigh of relief. He has arrived. Anything above that, such as a top cabinet post or perhaps even premiership is a bonus.

Job done. He has now gained entry into the governing elite, and he’s there to stay. One way or the other, the chap has parlayed his perseverance into lucrative post-government speaking engagements, perhaps even a book provisionally entitled How I Changed the World.

This is a rough outline of a career producing today’s dominant political type: the important nonentity. Statesmanship, what statesmanship? The politician is not only incapable of it, but he wouldn’t even recognise it if it came up and bit him on the part of his anatomy through which he delivers his speeches.

What matters is getting into the elite and staying in it long enough to secure a life membership. There’s only one annoying barrier to achieving this goal: accountability.

Should he indeed be held accountable to the people, they’d see that the mantle of importance he wears is emperor’s clothes. There’s nothing underneath it but a nonentity in all its nakedness.

Hence the governing elite in a modern democracy seeks to establish and keep widening the distance between itself and the electorate. The latter is there for one purpose only: to pinch its nostrils and choose which nonentity will rise to membership in the elite.

Once that’s out of the way, the electorate is to fall silent and submit to whatever outrage the governing nonentity will commit in its name. Effectively, what Lincoln called “the government of the people, by the people, for the people” becomes government over the people, against the people and increasingly up the people’s.

Since constant widening of the distance between the government and the governed is an ineluctable sine qua non, sooner or later the distance has to grow beyond the country’s borders. To expunge the last vestiges of accountability, a national government has to become international.

This would change the nature of the governing elite, but our governing nonentities don’t mind provided they remain in the elite. They realise that staying within the confines of their own country is bound to make them accountable, if only to a small degree. That would jeopardise their membership in the elite, thereby rendering their whole lives meaningless.

Thus it’s the Remainers and not the Leavers who understand, if only viscerally, the logic of modern democracy – and act accordingly. The Leavers want to upset the apple cart, while the Remainers want it to roll on (after they’ve eaten all the apples).

If there’s another explanation of why our democratically elected representatives are undermining democracy, I’d like to hear it. My explanation is that they’re prepared to chuck away some formal accoutrements of modern democracy, while upholding its true, modern essence.

It’s like a chess player who sacrifices a piece to win the game. This isn’t against the rules, which anyone will realise who knows how the game is played.

The only way to prevent defeat in this game is for the other player, the people in this case, to sweep the pieces off the board and declare the game invalid. If the inner logic of the game is perverse, we should play something else.

But I’d better shut up before I’m accused of inciting civil disobedience or, God forbid, a revolt (if only metaphorically). I’m not inciting anything. I’m just trying to get my head around what others describe as a conflict between the people and Parliament.

The term in quotation marks comes from an article entitled Struggle for Gay Equality Is Far From Over by Alice Thomson, a living argument against women equality among columnists.

Miss Thomson seems certain that the present generation has scaled moral heights that were beyond the meagre resources, or indeed dreams, of the previous 250 generations of recorded human history.

She clearly suffers from the presumption of progress, that clinically provable symptom of mental retardation. Hers isn’t an isolated case, for the underlying disease is pandemic, similar to the Black Death in spread and arguably outstripping it in destructive potential.

Moderns, even some cleverer ones than Miss Thomson, believe that the demonstrable progress in science and technology is part of the overall upward momentum of mankind. Yet an unbiased analyst will realise that those are the only areas in which progress exists.

It’s even easy to come to the conclusion that scientific progress is inversely proportionate to the development in morality, intellect and social fibre. Nor does scientific progress come free of charge.

Let’s not forget that the same technology that heats your house can also vaporise it; that the same car gadgets that help you find your destination also enable the state to spy on your every move; that the same insecticides that improve our crops can be used to murder millions of people.

There’s nothing as catastrophically dangerous as scientific progress married to moral decline. Empirical evidence of that is easy to find: after all, the most scientifically accomplished century yet, the twentieth, produced more violent deaths than the other 50 centuries of recorded history combined.

Miss Thomson would brush this observation aside even if it occurred to her, which it probably wouldn’t. To her, the giant strides made in equality testify to our steady ascent up the morality ladder.

If probed, she’d probably be confused about the true meaning of equality. Equality before God or the law is the right use of the word. But equality becomes a gross solecism when applied to good and bad, virtuous and sinful, beautiful and ugly. The right word for equalising those isn’t equality but anomie.

And anomie, if universally spread, spells a moral, social and intellectual collapse. The end of our civilisation, in other words.

Miss Thomson is upset that some troglodytes take exception to the announcement that the diver Tom Daley and his ‘husband’ are having a baby by a surrogate. One comment described the news as “both disturbing and disgusting”, while Miss Thomson’s less progressive colleague wrote “Please don’t pretend two dads is the new normal”.

Such views were mainstream a short while ago. In fact, Miss Thomson confirms as much: “The proportion of people who say they think same-sex partnerships are ‘not wrong at all’ has quadrupled from 17 per cent… in 1983 to 64 per cent in 2016, but that still leaves a third who feel ambivalent or hostile.”

It’s that Darwinist presumption of progress again: all change is for the better. Thus at some point within that 33-year period, two thirds of the British public underwent a Damascene moral catharsis, and Miss Thomson won’t have a moment’s rest until the remaining third follow suit.

I’m amazed that the proportion of holdouts still clinging to sanity is as high as that, what with people like Miss Thomson forming opinions and the state throwing its bulk behind them.

Modernity clearly didn’t heed Hilaire Belloc’s macabre prophesy: “We are tickled by [the Barbarian’s] irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond; and on these faces there is no smile.”

Inversion of our old certitudes indeed, and equalising normal sexuality with what for 5,000 years was known as a perversion (or ‘abomination’ in that homophobic book troglodytes regard as sacred) is only a small part of it. Yesterday, for example, a Lancashire court passed judgement on a 14-year-old robber who hit a middle-aged woman on the head with a nail-studded club and left her for dead.

At different times in history, before the old certitudes were inverted, the feral creature would have suffered different degrees of severe punishment, from being simply put down to being locked up for decades.

Our morally elevated time is different though, much to the delight of Miss Thompson and her ilk. Hence the little animal received a sentence of a 12-month probation and a £20 fine, only payable when he is 18.

No doubt Miss Thomson wouldn’t spot any link between that outrageous miscarriage of justice and Tom Daley’s predicament. Yet it’s clear-cut: the presumption of progress is tantamount to the presumption of equality where none should exist.

The wielder of the nail-studded club is presumed to be equal to his classmate who wields nothing deadlier than a PlayStation. He did commit a sin, but the distance between that and virtue is minuscule by the standards of inverted certitudes.

“Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad,” and what is madness if not losing touch with reality? According to Burke, social reality is formed by prejudice, which is intuitive knowledge; prescription, which is truth passed on by previous generations; and presumption, which is inference from the common experience of mankind.

All these are overridden by the pandemic madness of modernity.

Even 20 years ago, someone suggesting that it’s perfectly normal for two homosexuals to marry and have children would have been considered mad. Now he finds himself in a majority, and no one dares to suggest this is wrong.

We’ve simply lost the ability to discriminate between good and evil, intelligent and stupid, normal and perverse. No doubt Miss Thomson and others whose name is legion would welcome this. Any kind of discrimination is to them evil, and the word has universally fallen into disrepute.

Yet no moral, intellectual or aesthetic judgement is possible without discrimination. Nor, without an ability to discriminate between normal and perverse, is any judgement possible of two homosexuals father/mothering a child.

Homosexuals must have equal rights before the law, but homosexuality shouldn’t. (“Love the sinner, hate the sin” was Augustine’s way of expressing the underlying concept.) Hence no homosexual, or heterosexual for that matter, should be abused, prosecuted without due process or denied employment opportunities merely on the strength of his sexuality.

But equalising homosexuality with heterosexuality when it comes to marriage and parenting goes beyond decadence. It spells a moral and mental collapse – with civilisational collapse predictably just round the corner.

You know, the sort of calamity the likes of Miss Thomson equate with progress.

An alleged white van allegedly driven by Alek Minassian allegedly ploughed through a Toronto crowd, killing 10 and injuring 15.

There, I hope I’ve satisfied the criteria of responsible reporting, where everything is only alleged – except the corpses. Those are real and indisputable.

I might have exaggerated slightly. Reports of the crime described neither the white van nor the way it was used as ‘alleged’. Only the criminal rated such consideration, this although hundreds of people saw him jump out of the murder weapon.

It’s not as if the driver escaped, and the police conducted a thorough investigation eventually leading to an arrest, with the man denying it all. In that case, it would be legitimate to report that the alleged driver of the white van has been arrested. But hey, every field has its technical jargon.

Let’s drop this parasite qualifier and state unequivocally that the white van was definitely driven by Alek Minassian, 25, student of Seneca College in Toronto’s suburb of North York.

That’s all we know about him so far. The police doubtless know more, but won’t tell.

Such reticence encourages idle speculation, and this is what I propose to indulge in for a minute or two.

First, the crime distinctly lacks novelty appeal. Many identical crimes have been committed before, usually by alleged – no, scrap that – unquestionable Muslims, who both simplified forensic investigation and reconfirmed their inspiring faith by shouting “Allahu Akbar!”

This method of expressing piety has been recommended by Al Qaeda, in an article entitled “The Ultimate Mowing Machine” appearing on its website. A pick-up truck or a van, explained the article helpfully, can be used as “a mowing machine, not to mow grass but mow down the enemies of Allah.” Non-Muslims, in other words.

The article was both building on experience already amassed and looking into the future. For murder by vehicle has a long, if inglorious, history, with such incidents occurring recently in North Carolina (2006), Jerusalem (2014), Nice (2016), Ohio (2016), Berlin (2016), London (2017), Stockholm (2017), London again (2017), Barcelona (2017), Edmonton (2017), New York (2017).

All these incidents involved Muslims as active agents, against only one in which they found themselves on the receiving end. A chap called Darren Osborne drove his van through the crowd outside London’s Finsbury Park Mosque, by way of a retaliatory strike.

Obviously, whatever religion he espoused provided insufficient motivation, for he only managed to kill one worshipper. Followers of what our politicians describe as a ‘religion of peace’ invariably score in double digits.

So what about Minassian? Is he a Muslim? If Canadian police follow the same government guidelines as other Western police forces, they won’t say, not immediately at any rate.

Governments insist on such reticence not because this kind of information is irrelevant, but because it may incite anti-Muslim sentiments not yet incited by previous atrocities.

That’s the official explanation. The unofficial, true one is that we can’t sin against multi-culti probity. Yes, most such atrocities have been credited to Muslims. Yet this purely coincidental fact has nothing to do with Islam.

Nor should the past encourage any conjecture on the present and future. The statistical dial is reset after each atrocity. The next one could be committed by a Methodist just as easily as by a Muslim.

Our governments seem to have been informed by Bertrand Russell who argued, among his other fallacies, that one can’t assume the sun will rise tomorrow just because it rose yesterday.

Applying this misconception to ‘the mowing machines’ leaves simple mortals like me merely speculating on the religious identity of each new driver, in this case Minassian.

Although he unhelpfully neglected to shout “Allahu Akbar!”, on the balance of statistical probability Minassian has to be a Muslim. If the sun has been rising every day for millions of years, it’ll rise tomorrow, whatever Russell said.

On the other hand, Minassian is an Armenian name. And Armenians aren’t just non-Muslims but actively anti-Muslim.

Such unfashionable feelings mostly date back to the 1915 massacre of 1.5 million Armenians by the Turks, although there have been many others, both in the Ottoman Empire and in Azerbaijan (the latest one in 1990).

If Minassian isn’t Muslim, why did he choose the murder method to which Muslims can justifiably claim proprietary rights? That’s letting the side down, or rather both sides.

You see what kind of thorny paths one is forced to tread if denied proper information? Alas, these days reporters aren’t allowed to report, nor, in many cases, investigators to investigate. The rule of PC law won’t be compromised.

The title of Prof. Richard Tombs’s article, Liberals Are Undermining Western Civilisation, made me regret all the nasty things I wrote about our universities yesterday.

Here’s a Cambridge professor – of history! – speaking my language, I thought. Alas, repudiating my view of modern universities has turned out to be premature. For Prof. Tombs doesn’t really speak my language. He only knows a few words of it.

The words he knows defend the teaching of Western civilisation at universities and castigate those who believe this discipline “smacks of racism, imperialism and claims to ethnic or cultural superiority”.

Digging deep into his lexicon of ‘illiberal’ phrases, Prof. Tombs then insists that “there is an important thing called western civilisation, defined by history, not geography.” True, and spoken grammatically with perfect inflection.

But then Prof. Tombs undermines his polyglot credentials by slipping into his mother tongue, the language of a congenital liberal only different from the tongue spoken by his targets by its greater sanity, not greater understanding.

For this is how the good professor defines western civilisation: “It is the sum total of our laws, our values, our arts, our institutions, of the habits of mind and heart that enable us to live, fairly harmoniously, together: to trust each other (to some extent); to look out for each other (sometimes grudgingly); to understand each other (sometimes imperfectly); even to tell jokes about each other.”

I dare say, if that’s all there is to it, perhaps the subject shouldn’t claim pride of place in university curricula. For no academic discipline will teach anybody anything if its object of study is ill-defined.

For example, a medical student will end up confused and misguided if he’s made to study “Childhood sex abuse as the cause of hysteria”. That claim by Freud (along with all his other claims) has been thoroughly debunked by modern science. Hence the object of study is defined so poorly that a student would be better off studying something else.

Prof. Tombs’s definition of Western civilisation is meaningless to the point of being ignorant. It could have been made meaningful and enlightened by tagging on a four-word phrase at the end: “ – all animated by Christianity”. But that phrase went missing.

Defining Western civilisation without mentioning Christianity is a feat of which any card-carrying liberal would be proud – and only if he were an activist, not just a rank-and-file member.

Once Prof. Tombs tumbled on that slippery slope, the law of acceleration kicked in, and he slid towards the intellectual abyss at an ever-increasing speed. Deceiving by omission, rather than commission, Prof. Tombs denied Christianity any place at all among our civilisation’s formative influences:

“It is indebted to ancient Greece for the foundations of its philosophy, partly transmitted by Arabic scholars; to ancient Rome and medieval England for its two great legal systems; to the 17th-century scientific revolution and the 18th-century Enlightenment for much of its modernity – themselves stimulated by contacts with the rest of the world… Its diversity, eclecticism and capacity for evolution are defining characteristics.”

‘Partly’ is the operative word in the first item on the list, for both Plato and Aristotle were studied at medieval institutions of learning long before Arabic scholars had a role to play. Surely the learned professor has heard of Neoplatonism, an influential trend in both theology and philosophy that predated Islam by some 400 years.

It’s true that the philosophical apparatus of the West was largely designed in Athens. But an apparatus is only an instrument: it’s what you do with it that matters. A knife can save a life in the hands of a surgeon or take it in the hands of a murderer.

In the hands of the greatest minds in the history of the West, the instrument was fine-tuned to work within Christian doctrine. Aquinas adapted Aristotle to Christianity, not Christianity to Aristotle. Aquinas’s Aristotle is very different from Averroes’s.

It might have escaped Prof. Tombs’s attention that “Medieval England” credited with producing one of the West’s “two great legal systems” was Christian. This isn’t a case of post hoc, ergo propter hoc, for every item in English Common Law is derived from Judaeo-Christian morality.

It would be tedious to have to point out the Judaeo-Christian antecedents of our legality. Leaving the Decalogue aside, even the dry laws of adjudication are directly traceable to the Old Testament.

As to Roman law, it’s indeed the foundation of most legal systems on the Continent – but again not in its undiluted form. The concepts of jus commune were fitted into complex systems of civil law based on Judaeo-Christian moral premises.

Prof. Tombs doesn’t seem to see any link between “the 17th-century scientific revolution” and Christianity, which is obvious to serious thinkers.

Thus R. G. Collingwood explained why natural science in any modern sense could only have appeared within Christendom:

“Aristotle thought, and he was not the only Greek philosopher to think it, that by merely using our senses we learn a natural world exists. He did not realise that the use of our senses can never inform us that what we perceive by using them is a world of things that happen of themselves, and are not subject to control by our own art or anyone else’s… This metaphysical error was corrected by Christianity.”

As to the “18th-century Enlightenment” to which our civilisation is indebted “for much of its modernity”, that much is true. The problem is that the Enlightenment and the modernity it spawned aren’t so much the development of Western civilisation as its denial.

The Enlightenment itself was a violent and systematic rebellion against Christendom, targeting not just the religion but everything it had produced, including its ancient institutions. This space doesn’t allow going into this in detail – I may selfishly recommend a few of my books on this subject.

Suffice it to say here that Prof. Tombs’s eponymous liberalism was the Enlightenment’s first-born child, and the baby was from the start devoted to belying its nice-sounding name. Its rabid post-natal atheism was manifested not only intellectually, as a denial of Christianity, but also violently, as an orgy of destruction.

The great French medievalist Régine Pernoud estimates that in the hundred years following the revolution, 80 per cent of Gothic and Romanesque buildings in France were destroyed. Note that this outrage continued for a century after revolutionary ardour must have abated.

What we’re witnessing now, the sort of things that so upset Prof. Tombs, is the triumph of the Enlightenment, which is to say the wanton destruction of what according to him doesn’t even seem to exist: the Judaeo-Christian roots of history’s greatest civilisation. That’s why Western civilisation is at best treated as one of many in our university curricula, and not even as primus inter pares.

It always was what I call an asset-stripping civilisation: it gratefully accepted everything it found useful in other civilisations and discarded the rest. But “its diversity, eclecticism and capacity for evolution” aren’t, as Prof. Tombs claims, its defining characteristics.

They are strictly derivative from the religion whose essence is love. Diversity and eclecticism are only useful when they are hoops revolving around the immovable axis. Remove the axis, and the hoops spin out, becoming deadly projectiles.

But yes, liberals are indeed undermining Western civilisation. By the sound of him, Prof. Tombs is one of them, if saner than most.

A few days ago the same newspaper carried two articles on universities, one by Stephen Glover, the other by David Blunkett, former Education Secretary.

Mr Glover wondered whether or not universities were fit for purpose, while Lord Blunkett had no doubts on that score: they are, which is why we must keep the Open University going.

To answer the question posed in the first article, we must first agree on what the purpose of a university is. Considering that the first such institution, University of Bologna, was founded in 1088, we’ve had a long time to reach such an agreement, yet none exists.

Though perhaps this was never expressed in such terms, medieval universities set out to equip a student with the intellectual tools required for pursuing the truth. Coming to the fore were such subjects as theology, philosophy, history, law, mathematics, music, astronomy, logic, rhetoric, grammar.

The corpus of knowledge in some of those disciplines was considerably smaller than it is today, but there’s no doubt that those universities justified their name by giving students universal education. Essentially, the medieval university was thinkers and scholars training thinkers and scholars.

I don’t know how many graduates of, say, the University of Paris at the time of Albertus Magnus left academic fields for careers in inn management or timber trading, but I suspect not many.

Without passing any unfashionable quality judgment, one simply has to observe that the concept of university has changed somewhat since that budding young scholar from the village of Aquino travelled to Paris to study with Albertus.

How much richer young Thomas (and we along with him) would have been had he learned not Aristotle but, say, ‘The Art of Skinning a Bullock’ or ‘The Plight of Women in the Agora’. So I hope you’ll join me in rejoicing at the progress we’ve made since those uncivilised times.

For this is precisely the direction in which the situation has changed. Universities have systematically deemphasised general, universal education in favour of specialised professional learning in narrow – and often useless – fields. The purpose is no longer the pursuit of the truth. It’s the pursuit of a lucrative career.

England, boasting Europe’s third-oldest university, managed to uphold the old principles longer than the Continent. Until very recently, a boy or a girl from a decent family could study something like philosophy for three years only then to go to the City, get some on the job training and eventually graduate to seven-digit bonuses.

But even in England this is becoming rare, and, say, in France such a career path is well-nigh impossible. If a youngster’s degree is in history, he can teach the subject or work in the archives. No one will hire him as a trainee stockbroker. Specialisation verified by documentary evidence reigns supreme.

However, as Mr Glover reminds us, even the university in its modified form wasn’t universally, as it were, accessible in his generation, which is to say in the sixties. At that time only five to ten per cent of youngsters went to universities. The rest muddled through life without a framed degree certificate adorning their wall.

That was the tail end of sanity, when most people still accepted the demonstrable fact that not everyone is qualified to gain higher education. Some youngsters, most actually, have neither the requisite minds nor the academic inclinations.

This obvious observation is of course anathema to the ideologically egalitarian, which is to say modern, mind. Everyone is supposed to be equally able to succeed in any field, except football. Granted, not everyone has the talent to score 30 goals a season. But everyone can get a university degree. It’s just a matter of opening paths.

Both John Major, who’s intellectually deficient but not evil, and Tony Blair, who’s both, declared that at least half of the population should be blessed with university education. The implicit assumption was that the chunk of the five to ten per cent of the population deemed fit for university admission 50 years ago has grown at least five-fold.

This ignores the evidence of the legions of youngsters leaving secondary schools without being able to read and add up properly. British schoolchildren’s performance in all exams other than pregnancy tests is consistently at the bottom of European leagues.

Hence it’s clear that no five-fold increase in the number of qualified university entrants has occurred, quite the opposite. But, once announced, the numerical target had to be met.

That has been done by modernity’s favourite method: sleight of hand. Countless polytechnics have been rebranded as universities, while failing to provide even the level of professional training they had provided as polytechnics.

Moreover, universities now offer credit courses that have no academic value, nor indeed much practical one. As usual, the US leads the way with such courses as ‘The Lesbian Phallus’ (The Occidental College, LA), ‘Philosophy and Star Trek’ (Georgetown University) or ‘Maple Syrup Making’ (Alfred University, NYC).

But British universities manfully hold their own, with courses like ‘How to Train in the Jedi Way’ (Queen’s, Belfast), ‘Harry Potter Studies’ (Durham), ‘The History of Lace Knitting in Shetland’ (Glasgow, graduate course) or ‘The Life and Times of Robin Hood’ (type-cast Nottingham University).

And of course such invaluable courses as black studies, women’s studies and, presumably, Che Guevara studies are routinely offered by all universities, old and new.

In his article, Lord Blunkett defends the proliferation of so-called universities and so-called courses. In particular, he extols the Open University, which allegedly elevates young minds to academic excellence.

As proof of this allegation, Lord Blunkett cites the example of a woman he knows, a social worker who got a master’s degree in her chosen field and now feels qualified to tend to the poor.

One only wonders how all those nuns in the Middle Ages managed to look after the poor without the benefit of advanced degrees in ‘poverty management’ or ‘social studies’. Somehow they got by on little specialised training, mostly contained within the Gospels.

Mr Glover justifiably complains that such an inordinate proliferation of universities is bound to indoctrinate half the population in ideologies of the Left. On the basis of anecdotal but empirically demonstrable evidence, he estimates the proportion of left-wing dons at about 85 per cent.

My observation of Western universities over the past half a century suggests that, if anything, this figure is too low, especially in the humanities. And of course the social damage of half the population brainwashed in Marxism is greater than it would be if only five to ten per cent were exposed to it.

One can think of any number of reasons explaining the leftward bias in the university. One is the same as the reason for left-wing bias anywhere: envy.

If at the time of Albertus and his star student, theology and philosophy were the axis around which society revolved, today’s societies pursue happiness (i.e. material comfort), not the truth. Hence it’s not dons but fund managers who are the priests of this godless religion.

Seeing that a young man can make in a year what a professor makes in a lifetime, the professor often feels envious and resentful, correctly perceiving himself as marginalised. And socialism is the creed of the envious, resentful and marginalised.

I remember many years ago talking to a friend, who at that time was Head of Humanities at a major university. As a youngster he used to sell Firestone tyres, and I often heard him complain that, had he remained in that field, he could have become a wealthy Vice President of the company, rather than a measly professor.

One could detect genuine regret, of the kind that Albertus Magnus probably didn’t feel about his own career choice. Can you imagine his complaining, “Oh Thomas, if only I could have sold carriage wheels, I’d have lots more ducats…”

If it were up to me, 90 per cent of all universities would be shut down or reclassified as polytechnics. And those that remained would be obligated to teach only traditional academic disciplines.

Society would be a lot healthier, not to mention cleverer. And… well, no point overdosing on the indigestible pie in the sky.