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There’s something about those summits that brings out the worst in politicians, not that it’s ever deep beneath the surface.

First, Trump had a long talk with Vlad, half of which was devoted to the delicate subject of Russian hacking. Vlad assured his friend Donald that no attempt had been made to affect US elections by that expedient. That’s all right then, nodded Trump. A KGB officer would never lie.

He then proposed to join forces with Vlad to create a cyber security zone, which is like putting a pathological arsonist in charge of the fire brigade. The idea was so palpably asinine that Donald promptly abandoned it the next day, with his fellow Republicans screaming abuse and screwing their index fingers into their temples.

Then Brigitte’s foster son took the stage. When Manny was elected president of France, I desperately looked for something decent hiding behind his veneer of self-important, jumped-up nonentity.

At first, the search was rewarded: unlike Fillon, who respected Putin’s leadership qualities, and Le Pen, who was kept by Putin like a two-bit whore, Manny was mildly critical of the KGB gangster.

But then they met at the G20 in Hamburg and sparks flew. One of them ignited Manny’s hitherto pent-up desire for an open dialogue with Putin. For Manny’s eagle eye discerned kinship and commonality of interests.

In a subsequent interview he first warmed up by reiterating his commitment to stopping both terrorism and global warming. There’s no point fighting one without fighting the other, Manny said, clearly implying a causal relationship.

He didn’t explain which caused which, but then there was no need: Prince Charles once traced the roots of Muslim terrorism to global warming. One would think that as a republican Manny wouldn’t feel duty-bound to repeat all the drivel uttered by our royals, but perhaps he’s a vicarious monarchist at heart.

Or else he misunderstood what Brigitte had told him to say. Pay attention in class, Manny, or you’ll be marked down.

Having thus spun two seemingly unrelated issues, Manny continued on the subject of terrorism. The thrust of his oration was the same as in every speech by Trump: without Putin’s help the West is helpless. This premise is false on more levels than one can find in Trump Tower.

First, if the combined military might of the West is insufficient for exterminating terrorists and punishing their supporters, we might as well all pack up and go home: the West is no more.

Second, Putin’s kleptofascist junta itself presents the greatest terrorist threat to the world. Its rabid attack on the Ukraine alone has produced more victims, by an order of magnitude, than all the recent Muslim shenanigans in Europe combined.

But it wasn’t the Ukraine alone. True to its KGB roots (85 per cent of Russia’s ruling elite come from that background, according to official sources), the junta pounces on everything and everyone vulnerable, be it Chechnya or Georgia, Syria or any meaningful political opposition, whose members are routinely murdered not only in Russia but also abroad.

Most critical, Putin’s junta is indulging in the kind of brinkmanship all over the world, most spectacularly in the Middle East and the Baltics, that has made nuclear holocaust more likely than at any time since the Cuban crisis.

Therefore seeking Putin’s help in fighting terrorism is like asking Kim Jong-un to support nuclear non-proliferation, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to promote religious tolerance or Dr Shipman to advise on care for the elderly.

But Manny doesn’t realise this. Neither does he realise that every word he uttered in that interview blithely repeated Putin’s own propaganda:

“What inspires Putin to act? The desire to revive the image of a strong leader capable of holding his country in his hands.”

To bring Stalin back as a role model, in other words. Here Manny isn’t far wrong: rather than the murderer of 61 million of his own subjects and enslaver of the rest, Stalin is being extolled in Russia as an effective, if at times stern, manager, the father of his people and the victor in the great war (which he himself started as Hitler’s ally, but that part of it isn’t emphasised). Plaques to the memory of one of history’s most evil men are being restored all over Russia, his portraits adorn hundreds of rallies, panegyrics to him are heard on every Russian TV channel.

One would think that the president of a country that has liberty inscribed on its escutcheon would respond to this development with something other than affectionate understanding. But do let’s proceed to the next couple of sentences.

“Russia herself is a victim of terrorism. He [Putin] also has on his borders rebels and brutal religious groups threatening the country. That is his main concern, in Syria included.”

The first sentence is absolutely right. Russia is indeed a victim of terrorism, and has been since 1917. It’s the terrorism perpetrated by its ‘strong leaders’, whose fine legacy Putin is seeking to develop.

As to the rebels, Manny was presumably referring to the victims of two centuries of Russian brutality in North Caucasus, with the most recent, and some of the worst, crimes committed by Putin’s own troops. And it takes some dialectical chicanery to link those few remaining resistance fighters to Syria, where Putin is clearly fighting not terrorists but the West.

“Putin’s task,” continued Manny in the same vein, “is to revive Great Russia, which to him is essential to his country’s survival. Is he seeking to weaken or destroy us? I don’t think so.”

Great Russia means Stalin’s Russia, which inexorably follows from every word coming out of the mouths of Putin’s propagandists and his own. How this is essential to the country’s survival isn’t instantly obvious. It’s easier to imagine how rabid attacks on the whole civilised world may put Russia in existential danger.

Also, unlike the economy, geopolitical power is a zero-sum game. If en route to becoming great again Russia gains more of it, the West will have less. The West will thereby be weakened vis-à-vis its deadliest current enemy. But I do agree that Vlad doesn’t wish to destroy the West: he and his fellow gangsters need a secure laundry for their purloined billions.

And the upshot of it, Manny? “Vladimir Putin has his own take on the world.” [That’s for damn sure.] “He thinks that to him Syria is a vitally important neighbour.” [The last time I looked at the map, Russia and Syria aren’t exactly neighbours, but perhaps Manny, being a socialist, uses the word dialectically].

“What can we do? Cooperate on Syria to fight terrorism and find a true way out of the present crisis. I believe this is possible.”

Gee, Manny, a few more performances like this, and Brigitte will send you to bed without supper. Use your head, lad, concentrate – and do your homework.

Sir Vince Cable, who’s likely to become the next leader of the oxymoronic Liberal Democratic Party, thinks Brexit may never happen because Parliament isn’t unanimous on the issue:

“I think the problems are so enormous, the divisions within the two major parties are so enormous… I can see a scenario in which this doesn’t happen.”

Allow me to translate. Sir Vince and his fanatically pro-EU party don’t want Brexit to happen and will do everything in their power to make sure it doesn’t.

Fair enough. That’s why we have political parties, to put forth an argument and defend it by political means.

Political no longer means reasonable of course: modern politics originally inaugurated in the name of reason has perhaps contributed more than any other field of endeavour to debauching reason to a point where it has become a whore to short-term expediency.

Sir Vince, miraculously regarded as the pulsating intellect of the left, proves this observation with room to spare.

If he used his brain, or indeed had one in any other than the purely physiological sense, he would have asked himself to think of a single issue in the history of Parliament on which the two major parties weren’t divided both between each other and within themselves.

He’d further inquire inwardly where in our constitution, unwritten and so much more effective for it, it says that issues of national import must be decided by unanimous vote. Had he asked those questions, Sir Vince would have exhausted his vaunted brain power so much he wouldn’t have been able to proceed to the really serious issues.

Such as, what is the nature of our constitution? How does democracy by plebiscite fit into it? After all, the nature of parliamentary democracy is such that people elect their representatives to make serious decisions on their behalf.

It’s understood that, even before the advent of comprehensive non-education, our masses weren’t able to figure out the pluses and minuses of, say, deficit versus surplus budgets. That’s why they relied on their betters to do it for them.

And of course now, when the masses can’t figure out the change after handing out a quid for a 74p item, the arguments against direct democracy (or indeed any other, but let’s leave that aside for now) become not just compelling but self-evident.

That’s why I was always opposed to a Brexit referendum: I have principled objections to that form of government. Given the wrong confluence of economic indicators and force majeur events, people would be perfectly capable of voting to sell themselves into slavery or to slaughter every first-born boy.

Yet my opposition doesn’t matter one iota. The powers that be, those that had been put into their posts by the electorate, decided that a referendum was just the ticket to decide whether we were going to keep our ancient constitution or surrender it to become a province in Greater Germany, otherwise known as the EU.

The powers that be didn’t make that decision because they desperately wanted people to have their say. They have a most refreshing contempt for the people this side of Notting Hill and Islington, a sentiment that was extremely rare before the triumph of modernity.

Both major parties, with notable exceptions within each, wanted the referendum because they were desperate to stay in the EU and were smugly confident the people would vote that way. Well, they didn’t.

Now what? Either we accept this method of government or we don’t. Since we demonstrably do, we therefore accept the result of a referendum whether we like it or not. “Tu l’as voulu, George Dandin”, as Molière said, meaning put up and shut up.

However, having lost the fair fight, spivs like Sir Vince want to steal victory in an unfair way. The possible tricks range from filibustering to coming up with quasi-legal snags, from using our predominantly pro-EU media to deliberately and mendaciously perverting the very concept of Brexit.

The concept is simple. It boils down to one word: sovereignty. Do we wish to retain it or vest it with the good offices of heirs to the post-war fusion between Nazi and Vichy bureaucracies?

There’s really no compromise possible: either our sovereignty lives or it dies. I think it should live, and I’ve presented endless arguments to that effect. Sir Vince and his jolly friends think it should die – but they don’t come out and say it honestly, much less put forth any arguments in defence of this proposition.

They just try to subvert the issue by sidetracking it into unrelated incidentals. Thus Sir Vince says: “People will realise that we didn’t vote to be poorer, and I think the whole question of continued membership will once again arise.”

First, Parliament has voted to turn Article 50 into law, which means we’re obligated to leave the EU within two years. At issue now isn’t just the debatable plebiscite democracy but the iron-clad parliamentary sovereignty, the cornerstone of our constitution.

Second, since the issue is sovereignty, it’s for richer or for poorer. Any decent person would rather be poor but free than rich but enslaved. Of course, as a socialist, Sir Vince is conditioned to think of life in purely materialist terms, and more power to him. But this line of thought is at odds not only with our constitution but indeed with the very essence of Western civilisation.

I sincerely doubt that the average voter, or even Sir Vince who reportedly needs two chairs to contain his giant intellect, is capable of analysing economic ups and downs with sufficient precision to figure out what causes what.

Our economy may well thrive post-Brexit, or it may take a dive. In either case, both sides will resort to the post hoc, ergo propter hoc post-rationalisation, and both will probably be wrong.

Because our economy is fundamentally unsound, Brexit or no Brexit, the phoney prosperity of the last couple of years will come to an end soon. Yet it’s emetically dishonest to tie this possibility, or indeed reality, to Brexit.

Britain could have conceivably kept her empire and much of its riches had she let the Germans have their way in their previous attempt to unite Europe. Yet Churchill didn’t suggest that option. Instead he said: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

Then the British thought that was a good offer. These days they listen to cardsharping nincompoops like Sir Vincent, who look for loopholes to undermine what the country fought so valiantly for 77 years ago: her sovereignty.

This “twinned” sign should welcome every visitor to our capital, at least today. And there I was, thinking that London Pride was only a brand of beer.

A million noisy and ill-dressed folk are paralysing London streets to take part in the annual Pride parade that champions the cause of the special rights desired by the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT+) ‘community’.

Now I think that the people who go by initials resembling those of the secret police in a totalitarian state deserve their rights. All subjects of Her Majesty do, the rights of Englishmen and all that.

Nor can one object to some people doing an Oliver Twist and asking for more rights than their fair share. That’s a tad greedy, but only an inveterate Rousseauan would object to this display of human frailty.

But the word pride does baffle me, and to some extent this is the fault of Biblical translators who otherwise did such a sterling job. In ancient Greek there were two words designating this concept, one positive, one negative.

The negative one has come down to us as hubris; the positive one as pride proper. But Lancelot Andrewes and his colleagues also used the word ‘pride’ in its negative sense, to denote the deadliest of the seven sins.

(With a sense of pride in my native land, something I generally manage to suppress, I’m pleased to tell you the Russians appropriately use two different cognates, gordost’ and gordynia, to denote pride and hubris, respectively.)

That sin is responsible for the two most catastrophic Old Testament events. It drove Archangel Lucifer (whose name most appropriately means Enlightener, as in Diderot and Voltaire) to rebel against God and become Satan, the devil, the evil seducer.

And it’s because of their pride that Adam and Eve branded man with original sin. They thought they knew better than God and therefore didn’t have to obey his injunctions, specifically one involving the forbidden fruit that Lucifer was pushing with the intrusiveness of a greengrocer at a Soho market.

As a result, man was stuck in a fallen state, where he stayed until Rousseau cancelled original sin by declaring man both perfect and tautologically perfectible. By way of a virtuous reaction, the French made a good go of trying to murder everyone who disagreed with Rousseau, running up a seven-figure score and hinting at the possibility of self-refutation.

Now original sin had something tangentially to do with sex, as did the word hubris in ancient Greece. It described actions that humiliated the victim for the gratification of the abuser, thereby shaming both.

Now if those LGBT+ revellers used the word pride in that meaning, they’d find no argument in these quarters. But they don’t. They use it in its positive sense, as humble delight in one’s achievements.

That’s where my problems start. The dictionary defines achievement as “a thing done successfully with effort, skill, or courage.” Now it takes no mean legerdemain to attach that word to the act of one gentleman shoving his clenched fist up the rectum of another.

This, even though this procedure doubtless requires, in addition to suspended squeamishness, some effort and skill on the part of the active participant and some courage from the one on the receiving end of the fist.

Similarly, though it probably takes some courage to decide to have certain anatomical parts removed or, conversely, attached, the effort and skill are those of the doctor performing the operation, not of the patient.

Then again, the humble aspect of this emotion isn’t much in evidence when mobs rampage through the streets screaming obscene slogans, waving rainbow flags and in general making a rather tasteless nuisance of themselves.

On balance, no matter how much casuistry we indulge in, one finds it hard to understand what pride has to do with aberrant sexual practices. The word degeneracy springs to mind more readily, but of course when it does it must be expunged immediately on pain of ostracism and, these days, possibly criminal prosecution.

To prove that the end is really nigh, a rainbow flag has been projected on the Mother of All Parliaments, and on this evidence it’s indeed a mother, in the elegant American sense of the word.

Hundreds of police officers, more than 100 of them armed, are patrolling the streets, to make sure no harm comes to the revellers or, more probably, to those who look at them askance. Moreover, some 150 similarly inclined police officers are marching with the braying mob, thereby combining the roles of protectors and protectees.

A number of Central London streets have been blocked, including that amusing aptronym Cockspur Street. Let me tell you, if I were stuck in traffic as a result, I wouldn’t be feeling especially gay.

Theresa May laudably took time off trying to safeguard Britain’s future to commend the deviants for sending out a “proud and positive message to the world”. That’s our Christian Prime Minister, ladies and gentlemen, in case you’ve forgivably forgotten.

“We need to do all we can to build a country which works for everyone,” added Mrs May, “where people of all backgrounds are free to be themselves and fulfil their full potential.” Fulfilling the full potential of fisting might cause rupture in addition to rapture, so caution must be exercised. But the PM left that part out.

Secretary of State for Education Justine Greening, who herself is the L part of the popular acronym, wrote in The Telegraph that: “Often it’s all of us, and our own stories, that can have the biggest impact in the push for equality.” Excellent locution for an Education Minister.

“I am proud to live in a country where we are free to be who we are,” added Miss Greening. Those chaps in Sodom must have felt the same way. But it didn’t quite pan out to their satisfaction, did it?

The other day I wrote: “Democratic modernity believes its corrupt notion of equality and tries to enforce it at all cost.”

This provoked an interesting question from a reader: “And who enforces it? Are the enforcers way above governments nowadays?”

The answer is yes, the enforcers do tower above governments. They are our societies, the depositories of our civilisation. And society can impose its will more effectively than even a totalitarian government.

The blueprint for this observable fact was drawn by Matthew: “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”

Having grown up under a totalitarian regime, I can testify that it failed as spectacularly in killing the soul as it succeeded in killing the body, 61 million bodies to be exact.

The bodily destruction was perpetrated in the name of equality, yet the Moscow of my youth was culturally the most hierarchical society I’ve ever known (and I’ve known a few).

We feared our potential killers, but we never fell in love with them. In the rarefied atmosphere of Moscow’s cultural elite I don’t recall meeting a single person who felt anything other than contempt for the regime, noticeable even among those who collaborated with it.

Our society is different. In addition to demanding passive acquiescence it seeks to inspire love, and largely succeeds. Rather than relying on violence, modern egalitarian society enforces its standards by seduction, making sure the soul follows the body into captivity.

Over the last 500 years, we’ve gradually lost the great Western civilisation of Christendom based on a social, cultural and intellectual hierarchy underpinned by equality before God.

This has been replaced by its perverse simulacrum: striving for earthly equality (in effect stultifying sameness), with religion relegated to the status of quaint personal idiosyncrasy.

Christendom was gently pushed over the edge by the Renaissance, but the ever-accelerating slide really began with the Reformation, which Belloc correctly listed among history’s greatest heresies.

Luther’s declaration that every man was his own priest effectively meant that every man was his own God. The other God could be worshipped in any way a person chose, which eventually got to mean in no way.

Calvin drove another nail in by doing a nice job of reductio ad absurdum on the Augustinian doctrine of predestination. Man’s perdition or salvation was predestined, and nothing he did in this life could change that one way or the other. But God hinted at salvation by making a man rich.

That was the first time in history that divine grace found a monetary equivalent. That’s why, as Max Weber explained, the Protestant work ethic lay at the foundation of capitalism.

Witness the fact that even now Protestant countries boast a per capita GDP 1.5 times higher than in Catholic countries, three times higher than in Orthodox ones, and five times higher than in Muslim lands – this despite an ocean of petrodollars sloshing underfoot in the largest Orthodox country and quite a few Muslim ones.

But Protestantism promotes a thirst not only for money but also for equality. It’s essentially a middle class religion, and the middle class has always sought to be the only class. If you look at the first three great revolutions of modernity, English, American and French, they were all reflections of the egalitarian bourgeois impulse.

France was a predominantly Catholic country, but the principal revolutionary animus came from the largely agnostic bourgeoisie and also from protestant Germany and Switzerland (not only Luther and Calvin but, even worse, Rousseau – a nexus of Württemberg and Geneva).

The predominantly Protestant USA is a prime illustration of modern egalitarianism, with Americans proudly declaring that they’re all middle class. So they are: it’s as if a vertical stencil has been imposed on the nation, with everyone above it pulled down and everyone below pushed up.

Versions of the same are noticeable everywhere, certainly including England.

Our public schools, supposedly the bastions of class privilege, illustrate this. They typically stress collective over personal, trying to clone a uniform human product. Brilliance and academic excellence are routinely despised, with those venerable halls alive with reverberating phrases like ‘too clever by half’, ‘swot’ or ‘clever boy’. Only in England is ‘clever’ a pejorative term.

The nature of modern manufacturing is also egalitarian, with the assembly line replacing individual craftsmanship to produce uniform people cranking out uniform and uniformly available products for the uniform masses.

Illustrations of how effectively modern societies enforce uniformity are staring us in the face everywhere we look. Even our speech has become standardised, with all regional and class accents converging in the middle slowly but surely.

People rely more and more on swapping clichéd expressions, with formulas ousting original expression. For example, I’d be a rich man if I could get $10 for every time I heard this exchange on a hot day in New York: “Hot enough for you?” “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity”. Or, in Texas, “It’s so hoat you could frah an egg.”

Man’s apparel provides another striking example. Look at any eighteenth century painting of a formal aristocratic occasion. Though all the men’s clothing would display a certain similarity of general line, in every other aspect, such as colour, fabric, decoration, their suits would be strikingly individual.

At an equivalent do today, all those public school alumni will be wearing identical clothes: black tie, white tie or morning dress, depending on the occasion. I remember the furore caused at Cambridge’s Peterhouse College when a chap wore tails to a black tie dinner. He dared to be different, breaking the code of uniformity.

I’ve written a few books on this subject, but in short format this is the best I can do. I hope the inquisitive reader will find the reply satisfactory.

The cull of oldies in Holland continues. But the pace of progress is much too slow for that pioneer of modernity.

But not to worry. Reaching Holland’s legislature soon will be a “Completed Life Bill”, legalising killing healthy people who’ve lost some of their erstwhile joie de vivre.

As a lifelong champion of progress, and hence opponent of any kind of discrimination, I agree wholeheartedly. Why should anyone wait, as the current law demands, until he develops a terminal illness or dementia to claim sovereignty over his life?

The bill proposes that anyone over 75 will be able to make the request in the title above. Dutch doctors will doubtless oblige. Overworked as they are, they’ll welcome this reduction in their workload. And being civic-minded, they’ll be happy to reduce pressure on public services and finances.

If the new bill reaches parliament, it’s guaranteed to pass, enjoying as it does a cross-party support spearheaded by Prime Minister Mark Rutte. Still, for my taste the bill doesn’t go far enough. It’s still residually discriminatory.

What’s this reverse agism, favouring old fogies over younger persons who are simply fed up with life? Where’s the progress in that?

Fortunately I’m not the only one who feels that way. Supporters of the new bill don’t bother to deny that it’s but a stepping stone on the path to euthanasia on demand for anybody, regardless of age or health.

A 57-year-old man, appearing on a chat show in March, pointed out how discriminatory even the proposed law is: “I don’t feel like waiting 18 years. I want it now.” What, right in the studio?

Alexander Pechhold, the leader of the party proposing the bill, applauded. He then explained the philosophy behind the initiative: “In our civilisation dying is an individual consideration. You didn’t ask to be brought into the world.”

Who can possibly find fault with this thought? Nobody. Well, except perhaps a few incorrigible fossils who cling to the discredited belief that man descends from God rather than from King Kong via Darwin.

They might object that Mr Pechhold’s statement is self-refuting. That precisely because one didn’t ask to be brought into the world, one should be in no position to ask to be taken out of it. Those sticks in the mud may even invoke the obsolete notion of the sanctity of human life.

Though accusing the Dutch of playing materialistic games with life and death, it’s they who are really materialistic. They refuse to acknowledge the metaphysical anguish of a chap whose wife is bonking her psychoanalyst, or who can’t qualify for a mortgage to buy that flat in Keizersgracht.

Such a chap may well wish he were dead, and here’s the Dutch government with doctors in tow, responding on cue: “Your wish is our command. Here’s your syringe, mate.” Supply-demand at work, and isn’t that the essence of modernity?

The patient’s age or physical health shouldn’t even come into it. It’s his metaphysical agony that matters.

Even with the lamentable present constraints, Dutch doctors happily killed 6,091 people in 2016. Though still shockingly small, this number shows a steady increase year on year. That’s reassuring.

But it’s not reassuring enough. That’s why I think the Dutch should consider the initiative I’m hereby proposing: the euthanasia answer to Meals on Wheels.

Rather than waiting for desperate people to come to them, doctors should go out into the streets looking for euthanasia custom. To that end I propose a sort of ambulance service provisionally called The Josef Mengele Mobile Unit. The logo on the side of its vehicles could be based on the Hindu symbol favoured by the paymasters of the original Dr Mengele.

After dark the streets of Dutch cities are heaving with desperate people who feel like life is no longer worth living. The thought of euthanasia may not have crossed their minds yet, but then it should be up to the doctors to decide what’s best for the patients.

When spotting such a desperate individual in, say, Keizersgracht, burly male nurses can jump out of the Mengele Unit van and drag the patient inside. There are only two hard and fast rules for this medical procedure: hard and fast. If done properly, it’s guaranteed to overcome the patient’s resistance.

Inside the van he’ll be greeted by a doctor armed with a cyanide-loaded syringe. A quick jab, and the patient will be for ever cured of his earthly pain. His last thought will be gratitude to the people who took him out of this vale of tears, and to the government that had enabled them to do so.

This could be augmented by a parallel initiative, making euthanasia not just legal but compulsory for anyone reaching the age of 75. In due course, this cut-off point may be lowered in parallel with the voting age, but for the time being it’ll do.

Just think how much human misery will thereby be alleviated. And alleviating human misery is all that progress, of which I’m a lifelong champion, is about.

Having already founded the Charles Martel Society for Multiculturalism, I’m now incorporating the Joseph Mengele Society for Euthanasia. I hope I can count on my Dutch friends as members.

Dystopic, moi?

 

 

 

There are 382 of them. That’s the number of people killed in Britain between 2012 and 2016 by criminals on probation.

Those people could still be alive if the death penalty were still an option. However it hasn’t been since its abolition in 1965. By sheer coincidence of course, the murder rate has more than doubled since then.

In 1965, the British experienced an epiphany. What had been seen as a perfectly valid punishment for murder since time immemorial instantly became inhuman and unimaginable. Those who remembered Saul becoming Paul by falling off his horse on the road to Damascus may have had a sense of déjà vu.

Quoting statistics in the face of such a revelatory experience sounds crass. But still, out of interest, how many criminals had been executed in the preceding five years, between 1960 and 1964, to give the British their Damascene experience?

Twenty-one. One-eighteenth of those murdered in the past five years by those who should have been executed, but weren’t. Interesting arithmetic, wouldn’t you say?

The deterrent value of the death penalty is often doubted, but one thing is beyond dispute. It definitely deters the executed criminal.

He isn’t going to go out on probation and kill again, not in this life at any rate. This is no mean achievement, considering the numbers cited above.

Even arguments against broader deterrence strike me as counterintuitive. It’s psychologically implausible that a potential murderer would be deterred by a prison sentence with a generous tariff as effectively as by the prospect of a hangman’s noose.

However, deterrence isn’t the only argument for the death penalty, nor even the best one. There are many others, which is why the death penalty was never regarded as cruel and unusual punishment in the founding legal code of the West, the Scripture.

When society and community were more than just figures of speech, it was understood that murder sent shock waves throughout the community. The amplitude of those destructive waves could be attenuated only by a punishment commensurate with the crime. Without it, the agitated community would run the risk of never recovering its eirenic order.

Having said that, even a dyed-in-the-wool conservative may argue against the death penalty, citing, for example, the corrupting effect it has on the executioner, or else doubting the right of fallible men to pass irreversible judgement.

Such arguments are noble, but they aren’t modern arguments. For it’s not just the death penalty that today’s lot are uncomfortable with, but the very idea of punishment.

More and more, they betray their Rousseauan genealogy by insisting that people are all innately good and, if some behave badly, they must be victims of correctable social injustice. More and more, one detects a belief that justice is an antiquated notion, and law is only an aspect of the social services.

Last year I was exposed to that view on the BBC Sunday Morning Live show, when debating the issue of imprisonment with a ‘human rights development worker’, whatever that means. Propping up her corner was a gentleman who had once served time and had since developed an understandable interest in the penitentiary system.

It turned out that they and I differed on the very definition of prison. Rather than an instrument of justice, they saw it as an educational and therapeutic facility for the socioeconomically disadvantaged. It logically followed that we have too many people in prison: other institutions would serve the educational purposes better.

My contention was that protecting us from criminals is among the state’s few raisons d’être. Otherwise it’s not immediately clear whence the state would derive its legitimacy. Therefore the number of prisoners is a moot point. We should have as many as it takes for the state to protect us.

Prison’s principal role is to serve justice by punishing crimes. Rehabilitation, a notion dear to my opponents’ hearts, would be welcome, but it comes far down on the list of desiderata, if at all.

The ex-convict was aghast. Didn’t I know that most released prisoners reoffend within a few months? The human rights person nodded vigorously and looked at me in a way that suggested that in my case she could reassess her staunch opposition to the death penalty.

Logic never being a strong point on the political left, they obviously didn’t realise that everything they were saying supported my argument. After all, the commitment to mythical rehabilitation has been practised for at least two generations. Surely the growing recidivism rates prove it isn’t working? And if most released prisoners reoffend, shouldn’t they stay in prison longer?

Rehabilitation isn’t what prisons are for, and not everyone can be rehabilitated anyway. Evil is an integral part of human nature, and some people have so much of it that they are irredeemable this side of heaven.

Practising what Rousseau preached is a strong factor in making Britain crime-ridden, with the murder rate climbing. If we practised what Jesus Christ preached instead, we wouldn’t gasp at the very thought of the death penalty.

We’d know that executing a murderer doesn’t contradict Christ’s commandment to love him. “Love thy enemy” means asking God to save him from hell in the next life. Executing him saves us from him in this life. First things first.

 

 

 

That Muslim refugees contribute to European crime rates is no secret. Or rather it is. Or, more precisely, governments try to keep it secret.

However, as my favourite doctor once wrote, “For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest…” To vindicate Luke, the Dutch broadsheet De Telegraaf has finally managed to wrench from the police some data on refugee crime.

Holland, of course, is in the forefront of liberal progressivism, which is the modern for illiberal obscurantism. That’s why, whenever a Muslim commits a crime, he tends to be identified not by race, religion or name, but by his initial and place of residence. Thus a woman was raped not by, say, a Moroccan refugee Selim, but by an S. from Amsterdam.

Now the Dutch may be progressive but they aren’t dumb. Whenever a criminal is identified in such a cryptic fashion, they realise this isn’t an alias for a Jan De Jong and smile knowingly.

However, the police, government and the press guard their non-secret with the dedication of a tricephalous Cerberus. The non-secret is supposed to protect the social non-balance.

De Telegraaf bucked the trend by continuing to pester the National Police until a trickle of information seeped out. And what do you know, Muslim refugees do commit crimes out of proportion to their numbers.

The released information covered only refugees from ‘safe’ countries, meaning, say, not Iraq, Iran or Syria, but Morocco, Tunisia or Albania. Yet even those safe refugees are proving rather unsafe.

De Telegraaf reports that 663 migrants were arrested in the first nine months of 2016 for theft. Another 302 were arrested for “crimes against personal integrity”. This euphemism denotes things like murder and rape – not, as you might think, attempts to compromise uprightness and veracity.

Other countries can’t help drip-feeding similar data either. Thus we learn that refugees commit 250,000 crimes a year in Germany. In Oslo, immigrants, mainly Muslims, are involved in two out of three rapes. In Copenhagen, this figure is three out of four. In Sweden, 85 per cent. And Malmö, a city of 350,000 souls of whom 40 per cent are Muslims, boasts more murders than the rest of Scandinavia combined.

Even our own dear BBC has had to cough up some interesting stuff. Their harrowing series Three Girls shows how Pakistani gangs in Rochdale and other heavily Muslim areas rape white girls and turn them into prostitutes, with the authorities turning a blind eye for the sake of maintaining friendly multi-culti relations.

We could all cite numerous examples of what’s going on. Yet the really interesting question starts not with ‘what’ but with ‘why’.

Many pundits have put forth reasonable analyses, some even at book length. However, most of the answers provided fail to delve into the issue at sufficient depth.

I suggest we backtrack to the founding slogan of democratic modernity, liberté, égalité, fraternité, proudly adorning every public building in France. This triad is perhaps the most mendacious oxymoron ever concocted.

For the central element is at odds with the other two. Equality, other than before God in whom the originators of the phrase didn’t believe, isn’t a natural state of man. That’s why it can only be enforced by unnatural, coercive means.

This precludes either fraternité or especially liberté, leaving people to choose between liberty and equality. The choice has been made, and equality has become the impelling animus of modernity – not just democratic but also totalitarian.

Both demand uniformity über alles, and in this sense all modern regimes overlap. The Nazis seek uniformity of race; the communists, that of class; the democrats go further than either by seeking a convergence of all individuals at their arithmetic average.

The driving impulse of democratic modernity is philistine materialism, and a philistine invariably believes that everybody is, or at least is desperate to be, just like him. Equality means sameness to him – not as an already existing condition, but as a goal towards which to strive.

As a result, modern democracy meddles with the natural order of humanity as much as totalitarianism does, and more successfully. The imperative for everyone to overlap on the arithmetic average drives our politics, commerce, laws, social and racial relations.

This is accompanied by sustained brainwashing that puts to shame all those crude communist and Nazi propagandists. The aim is to dumb people down enough for them to believe in the sterling virtue and sagacity of Average Man.

In practice this means a more secure perpetuation of the elite’s power than anything ever encountered before the advent of modernity. Democratic masses are successfully conditioned to believe that they govern themselves by going to the polling stations every few years – this though individual votes are so atomised as to be meaningless. What matters isn’t an individual but a herd, a faceless bloc of millions.

The same goes for our mass-production industry aiming at averaging out quality to suit Average Man. The obsolete notion of craftsmanship has been ousted by the urge to “pile’em high, sell’em cheap”.

Those inhabiting the infra range below Average Man have to be pulled up, those residing in the ultra range above must be yanked down. Democratic modernity believes its corrupt notion of equality and tries to enforce it at all cost.

Empirical proof of this melancholy observation can be found anywhere one looks. Our comprehensive education and nationalised medicine, for example, both sacrifice excellence for equality to the loud cheers of our averaged-out masses, who aren’t just brainwashed but brain-scoured.

Therein lies the underlying reason for such egregious perversions of modernity as socialism, political correctness and multiculturalism. They all reflect the urge to pluck the nonexistent and indigestible pie of equality out of the sky, and then choke on it.

Therein also lies the explanation for the ongoing outrage of mass Muslim immigration. The democratic philistine is physically unable to acknowledge that it’s impossible to shake alien cultures and religions together to produce a palatable homogeneous cocktail.

Egalitarian ideology has penetrated the viscera of modernity, its DNA. No amount of evidence, such as that produced by De Telegraaf or the BBC, can change this newly acquired genetic makeup. The democratic philistine simply won’t accept that some nations and religions are incompatible with ours existentially, ontologically and irredeemably.

A cosmic catastrophe, with “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”, might change this mindset, but by then it’ll be too late.

A week ago the British Medical Association voted to treat abortion like any other medical procedure, say an appendectomy.

Effectively this removes even the modest restrictions imposed by the 1967 Abortion Act, those based on foetal abnormalities and risks to mother’s health.

The Act opened the door ajar and then modernity kicked it wide-open. Eight million abortions have been performed since, close to 200,000 last year alone.

Even such apocalyptic numbers are too low for the BMA. If its vote is transferred to Parliament, as it almost certainly will be, there will exist no limits to abortion for any reason or at any point, possibly up to the moment the water breaks.

I could present the obvious Christian argument against this monstrosity, but won’t. Let’s keep God out of it, shall we? Let’s discuss abortion in secular terms, but without violating the rules of logic and rhetoric established a few centuries before the Incarnation.

Fans of prenatal infanticide (FPI) always reduce the argument to its extreme, say terminating a pregnancy resulting from rape, incestuous or otherwise, or one where the doctor has to choose between saving the mother or the baby.

Now, of the 190,000-odd abortions performed last year, only about two per cent involved strictly medical reasons. I don’t know how many resulted from rape, incestuous or otherwise, but I’m guessing that this subset is small enough to be safely discounted.

Being in a secular mood today, I’m prepared to let FPIs have that one: if the impregnating chap is a dad, granddad and rapist all at the same time, let’s get rid of his spawn.

This still leaves us with close to 200,000 abortions performed each year mainly because the parents, or more usually the single mother, would rather not have their lifestyle cramped.

Now I’m the last man to want to cramp anyone’s lifestyle. However, the same argument may extend to a demented grandmother who stubbornly refuses to die, blowing her bequeathable wad on care. Why not press a pillow to her face until she stops kicking?

You got it in one: that would be murder. This practice is rather frowned upon in all societies, including those that don’t accept the validity of the Decalogue.

A BMA member would protest that this is a false analogy. A foetus isn’t a human being. It’s part of the woman’s body, like the appendix.

That’s where a logical problem starts. For the venerable BMA member is committing a rhetorical fallacy known formally as petitio principii and colloquially as begging the question.

Although this phrase is commonly misused to mean raising the question, it actually means using a conclusion yet to be proved as the premise. That’s like saying that, because Mrs May is a great statesman, she’s right to mollify the howling leftie mob.

For the premise that the foetus is no different from the appendix is wrong and will remain so until it has been proved. And if an FPI can’t prove it, killing a foetus becomes morally no different from knocking off the aforementioned grandmother.

Now, save in exceptional cases, the current law bans abortion past 24 weeks. Implicitly this suggests that at precisely 24 weeks a secular miracle occurs. What until then has been merely a part of someone else’s body instantly becomes a sovereign human being.

I for one marvel at our legislators’ ability to determine that exact moment with such pinpoint accuracy. What about 24 weeks minus one day? No? Still an appendix? One would like to see the scientific data on the basis of which this precise assessment is made.

Actually, no such data exist. The 24-week cutoff point (as it were) is purely arbitrary, a sop to those fossils who persist in insisting on the sanctity of human life. You know, for old times’ sake.

If the BMA were to defend this 24-week nonsense, they’d leave themselves open to the argument above. How about 24 minus one day? Two? Three?

If they retain a modicum of integrity, they’ll have to admit that there’s no physiological difference between a foetus at 24 weeks and one at merely 23 weeks and six days.

If they refuse to admit that, they’ll have to postulate that neither is there a valid difference between 24 weeks and 36. If we accept that false premise, then the BMA’s vote is logically sound.

According to extensive medical data, 20 to 35 per cent of babies born at 23 weeks of gestation survive. Now if a third of all babies born as prematurely as that are viable, then surely at least a third of all abortions at that time constitute infanticide? Since we don’t know which third, isn’t that a sufficient reason to ban them all?

About 95 per cent of babies born at seven months rather than nine live happily thereafter. Should they too be aborted before they crawl out of the womb?

These arguments point at a logical conclusion. The only indisputable moment at which human life begins is that of conception. Since any other moment is open to doubt, I for one fail to see any logical difference between aborting a baby three months before birth and three months after.

Hence the only logical argument in favour of abortion would be amoral: there’s nothing sacred about human life. It only has a purely utilitarian value – or not. If the mother decides the utilitarian value is nonexistent, doctors are justified in aborting the foetus at any time.

Do you like this argument? The BMA does.

To both Plato and Aristotle democracy meant mob rule. If you doubt that they’ve been amply vindicated, just look at Britain now.

Actually, not just Britain and not just now. Look at any Western country and try to find one in which democracy hasn’t degenerated into mobocracy.

Closer to our time, the founders of the United States, supposedly the cradle of modern democracy, detested the very concept almost to a man.

Even the most democratically minded among them, Thomas Jefferson, believed in the rule of what he called ‘natural aristocracy’: “May we not even say that that form of government is the best which provides most efficiently for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government?”

Last time I looked, I discerned no such ‘natural aristoi’ anywhere in any ‘democratic’ government, including American or our own. Over the last 200 years Americans have let Jefferson down, wouldn’t you say? And not only him.

Alexander Hamilton and James Madison both detested majority rule and attacked it passionately every chance they got. And in 1806 Adams wrote, “I once thought our Constitution was a quasi or mixed government, but they had made it… a democracy.”

Hence when the neocons and other cardsharps at our post-truth, post-reason table invoke those sainted names as a justification for their democracy worship, they commit an act of historical, intellectual and moral larceny.

Precious few people are able or willing to call them to task, to point out the fundamental difference between democracy and republicanism. The former is majority rule, with 50 per cent plus one able to impose their dictatorial will on the remaining 50 per cent minus one. In the latter, people elect the best person among them to govern according to their interests but not necessarily their wishes.

Edmund Burke went to great lengths explaining that MPs are their constituents’ representatives, not delegates. Once elected, they govern according to their own conscience and understanding of the peoples’ interests.

Today’s lot solve the problem of representatives vs. delegates by being neither. They seek power for its own sake, not to advance public good. And that’s where the prescience of those wise Anglophone thinkers failed them.

They didn’t realise that any constitution, written or unwritten, is fluid. They all develop, and one form of government can easily morph into another – possibly something better, more usually something worse.

A successful republic can only be sustained over centuries given an uninterrupted supply of brilliant, selfless, courageous statesmen. That supply has been dwindling – steadily and predictably. In proclaiming new virtues those thinkers didn’t account for original sin. Hence they didn’t realise that a republic is bound to degenerate into a democracy, and the latter into mob rule.

Modern, which is to say post-1688, Britain was constituted as a republican monarchy, with a heavy accent on the modifier. However, our government has become neither republican nor monarchical. It’s a toxic cocktail of spivocracy and mobocracy.

Witness the weathervane job being performed by the panic-stricken Tory government. Only those who don’t understand political taxonomy can describe it as either democratic or republican (forget about monarchical – that adjective has fallen into disuse since 1688).

If HMG were democratic, it would clearly communicate its political credo, how it’s to be implemented and what the expected effect will be.

Since the ruling party calls itself Conservative, one would expect such a credo to include conservative policies: an accent on individual responsibility rather than collective security, fiscal frugality, commitment to defending the people against internal and external threats, low taxation and public spending, social justice in the sense of everyone getting his just deserts, respect for hierarchies, upholding traditional morality.

A democratic government would then say to the people: “This is what we believe will serve your interests much better than the opposite policies advocated by the other party. If you agree, support us. If you disagree, support them. The choice is yours.”

A republican government would deliver a different message: “You’ve elected us to act in your best interests, as we understand them. You’ve had your say, and you won’t have another until the next general election. By all means, let us know, in a civilised and orderly fashion, what you think, and we’ll give your concerns proper consideration. But we shan’t be obligated to do what you want – that’s not what you elected us for.”

It doesn’t take an eagle eye to see that Mrs May’s government adheres to neither model. In the run-up to the election it didn’t give the electorate a choice between conservatism and socialism. The choice was between Labour Lite and Labour Full-strength.

Labour Lite won a pathetically narrow victory, but Labour Full-strength wouldn’t take it lying down. Led by a revolting hybrid of Trotsky and Hitler, it has set to vindicate my belief that democracy’s rich potential for degenerating into mobocracy has been realised.

Pre-pubescent cretins have come out screaming seditious, mendacious, communist slogans to the effect that they want Labour Full-strength in power, election or no election. They demand an end to austerity, meaning that HMG should spend more than the 10 per cent over its income that it currently spends.

But what their specific demands are doesn’t matter. They are anomic, which is to say destructive. If putting the revolting hybrid of Trotsky and Hitler into power demanded a call for the slaughter of every first-born child, that’s what they’d be screaming.

And the government’s response to mob action? Effectively it’s saying: “Please keep us in power, and we’ll do what you say. You don’t need to oust us to get Labour Full-strength. We can be it – or anything else you desire.”

No tuition fees? Done. No cap on public sector pay? Splendid. No grammar schools? But of course. More social spending? Sorted. More spending on the NHS? Agreed. Abortion up until delivery? Wonderful idea.

Lowering the voting age to 16? You only need to ask. Didn’t Comrade Trotsky explain that “the youth is the barometer of the whole nation”? Of course he did. So the more youthful our electorate, the better. Just look how well those young Red Guards performed in China and Cambodia. If that’s what you want, you only need to ask.

A government that can stay in power only by pandering to the mob is neither a republic nor a democracy nor, God forbid, a monarchy. It’s a mobocracy. It’s the government we have – the only government we’ll ever have until we have none or, more likely, an outright despotism.

Plato and Aristotle warned us. We didn’t listen.

 

 

It’s one of life’s little mysteries that Ollie Kamm has got to be regarded as an authority on the English language. That he regards himself as such is no mystery at all: ignorant effrontery is almost an ironclad job requirement for today’s hacks.

Ollie’s usual output preaches a relativistic vox populi approach to language: if people say it, it must be right. Today’s offering has some of that: “he don’t know nothing is ungrammatical in standard English, but grammatical in some other dialects”.

What he means is that this ungrammatical solecism is used in some other dialects, or rather in the most widespread one: illiterate English. That doesn’t make it grammatical, which concept presupposes adherence to a certain universal standard. But then our language guru is deaf to such subtleties.

The main thrust of his piece today is a vituperative attack on Geoffrey Wheatcroft, “a political commentator with absolutely no qualifications in language”.

It’s true that Mr Wheatcroft read history rather than English at Oxford. However, one could argue that an author of countless articles and half a dozen books written over the better part of 40 years has at least some qualifications. Then again, when Ollie gets on his high horse, there’s no dismounting him.

What made Ollie saddle his trusted steed this time is Mr Wheatcroft’s innocent remark that English is “ideally suited to be the global lingua franca” partly because of its “rudimentary grammar”.

When Ollie’s in the saddle, no remark is innocent. If English grammar were rudimentary, Ollie shrieks, “the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language” wouldn’t comprise “1,800 closely typed pages”.

Actually, the definite article before Cambridge Grammar should be capitalised, but let’s not be too harsh on our self-styled pedant. What’s amusing here is that his argument is a non sequitur, reminding one of a Chekhov character arguing that, “if Pushkin hadn’t been a great psychologist, he wouldn’t have merited a statue in Moscow.”

English grammar is nuanced and subtle, sufficiently so to justify writing many more than 1,800 pages of an academic study. However, it’s indeed rudimentary and relatively easy to learn for everyday use, which is one of the reasons English is “ideally suited to be the global lingua franca”.

Ollie is ignorant in such matters, but he suspects his readers are even more ignorant than he is. That explains his next argument: “A clause like Geoffrey Wheatcroft is an idiot demonstrates the importance of fixed word order in English.”

First, the cited group of words isn’t a clause but a stand-alone sentence. Second, because it’s a citation, however hypothetical, it should be in quotation marks. And third, people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw the word ‘idiot’ about so gratuitously.

Words have specific meanings, Ollie, if you’ll forgive a truism. Hence rudimentary grammar means just that – it doesn’t mean no grammar at all. English does have some rules, of which a fixed word order is one. Sometimes it’s ignored for stylistic purposes, which is called inversion.

By way of illustrating this stylistic device, it’s used in the clause of the sentence “Ignorant though Ollie is, he pontificates on the fine points of English with an air of ill-deserved authority”.

That Ollie is neither excessively bright nor averse to truisms follows from his next statement: “It’s absurd to say that English has less grammar than an inflected language like Latin. Rather, different languages make similar grammatical distinctions using different sorts of grammatical devices.”

By contrast to synthetic languages like Latin, Russian, Hungarian and so forth, English is analytic, meaning it largely conveys grammatical relationships not morphologically but lexically and stylistically.

Rather than inflecting words with morphemes, English achieves the same purpose by using lexical units, such as prepositions, particles, modifiers, possessives etc. It also heavily relies on stylistic devices, such as word order, context and idioms.

The example Ollie proffers with the smugness of someone who has just blazed a new trail illustrates just that: “attributive adjectives of size precede those of colour. In English… the girl has long blond hair, not blond long hair…”

Well done, Ollie, even though in the country where English originated a girl’s hair tends to be blonde, not blond. But in either case this is an example of achieving a grammatical objective by stylistic means.

English eschews whole grammatical categories that make synthetic languages so difficult to learn, such as gender, conjugation and case. I don’t know how many foreign languages Ollie knows (not many, would be my guess). But my wife, who’s fluent in two Romance languages and competent in two more has trouble with Russian because learning its grammar requires more time than she’s willing to spend.

Russian has six cases, and words in a sentence must agree not only in case, but also in gender and number, which indeed makes learning Russian grammar a time-consuming proposition. But that’s nothing compared to synthetic Finno-Ugric languages, such as Hungarian that boasts 18 cases.

The upshot of it is that Mr Wheatcroft is right, and Ollie is wrong, yet again. English grammar is indeed rudimentary, making it easy for a foreigner to learn well enough to communicate basic thoughts even if he gets something wrong.

By contrast, synthetic languages, such as Russian or Hungarian, are devilishly hard to learn because, until a learner comes to grips with the interrelationships among all those cases, genders and numbers, he won’t be able to communicate at all, understandably at any rate.

However, once he has mastered the grammar rules, he’ll be able to speak the synthetic language reasonably well. Not so with English: learning the grammar rules is but a start.

Because English grammar relies so heavily on stylistic and idiomatic nuances, it may be easy to learn adequately but extremely hard to learn really well. That’s why even university-educated Englishmen (to say nothing of Americans) routinely utter ungrammatical sentences, which is extremely rare for a similarly educated Russian.

Ollie concludes with a sentence impossible to take issue with: “In grammar… it seems that unqualified commentators can always get away with assertions that haven’t been checked and make no sense.” Quite. He’s one such unqualified commentator.