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A good friend of mine insists that ‘young people’ is an oxymoron. Well, since he is a priest in the Church Militant, he is entitled to extreme paradoxes.

Being by nature a moderate chap myself, I’d be more magnanimous. My answer to the question in the title is: “Technically yes, but…”.

Even my friend wouldn’t insist that youngsters are less than human anatomically, physiologically and, yes, theologically. Made in the image and likeness, and all that. Moreover, whatever they happen to be now, they have what Aristotle called ‘potentiality’, meaning they may eventually acquire some more indigenous human characteristics than having the same internal organs as a chimpanzee.

After all, if it’s true that humans and chimps share 99 percent of their active genetic material, then the truly distinguishing features of our species are those of mind and spirit. For all the gigantic strides made by comprehensive education, we are still ahead of gorillas in those areas, just.

However, potentiality must be realised to amount to anything tangible. Otherwise, there is always the danger that the coming generations may prove that the ape isn’t so much our evolutionary past as our macabre future.

There is no secret about the ways in which a child’s mind and spirit may be developed in such a way that he grows up qualitatively different from a chimp. I’m not going to detain you with offering a complete or even long list, other than saying that books have always had a salient role to play in that process.

So much more dismayed I was the other day when reading this passage in a well-researched article by Alice Thomson: “The first [finding] is that 28 per cent of children arriving at primary school in 2025 didn’t know how to open a book. Many just jabbed at the cover with a finger. The second is that 67 per cent of 15-year-olds see no reason to leave their homes at weekends, preferring to stay in their bedrooms, online. Between these five and 15-year-olds lies a cohort addicted to smartphones, tablets and social media.”

This addiction to flickering screens is a very serious matter indeed. Miss Thomson doesn’t make this obvious point: it’s not just that the children don’t know how to open a book, but neither have they ever seen their parents do so. If they had, they would be able to imitate the action, what with humans sharing a knack for mimicry with, well, apes.

That means that at least two generations or, at a guess, more (comprehensive education was introduced in 1965) have been taken out of civilisation. You notice that, for all my Luddite tendencies, I blame education, not computers. Computers can be used to good or bad ends, and which it is depends on the person using them.

A computer is a tool like a hammer, which Johnny can use to help Granny hang a picture on the wall or to bludgeon Granny to death. As a very minimum Johnny must be raised to know that the former use of that tool is commendable while the latter isn’t.

Hence the problem isn’t computers qua computers, but the whole educational ethos at home and school. It encourages children to cauterise their minds, eschew any active and productive uses of their brains, and spend their whole days communicating with their similarly backward friends in what doesn’t even resemble human speech.

Listening to children of different ages talking to one another on public transport, I never, and I do mean never, hear them speak in complete, well-parsed sentences. Whole lengthy exchanges are conducted entirely in fragments and interjections.

In God’s eyes, erecting “a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven” with the subsequent disintegration of language was severe punishment: “Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”

It would never have occurred to the Old Testament writers that a time would come when inflicting a Babel on the world would be done not by God as a way of unleashing his wrath, but by some men as a way of keeping the young for ever feral.

Generally speaking, I ascribe this situation to human folly, not to the availability of certain devices. But one has to admit that the arrival of computers and especially AI widens the opportunities for human folly and malevolence to express themselves.

The other day, I stumbled on several YouTube videos featuring the American columnist George Will as the talking head. When I lived in the US back in the 70s and 80s, I regularly read Mr Will’s articles. I didn’t always agree with him, but I always admired his style, verve and a talent for an epigrammatic phrase.

(When OJ Simpson was in 1994 acquitted of the murder he clearly had committed, Will wrote: “This goes to prove that a black man can’t get a fair trial in America.” That gave him a lot of credit in my bank.)

Anyway, I watched a couple of those videos, in which Mr Will was doing a thorough demolition job on Donald Trump, citing facts I hadn’t seen anywhere else. What made me smell a rat though wasn’t so much his content as his delivery.

Will spoke in a monotone drone, sounding as if he was reading from a teleprompter. But he wasn’t doing it well: the intonation was odd, and his sentence breaks came in places where no educated man would have put them. I investigated and sure enough: the videos were deep fakes generated by AI.

Then I thought about minds younger and less cynical than mine being exposed to torrents of false, sometimes dangerous nonsense and having no counterweight of serious books, real music and education worthy of the name. They run the risk of losing their marbles and eventually their humanity.

P.S. Speaking of language, apparently Gen Z, which I assume means youngsters born in this century, have changed the terms in which they describe sexual activity.

Their favourite words are ‘smash’ and the Americanism ‘hook-up’, which lack the light-hearted panache of older slang. Most of them never use, indeed don’t understand, such old phrases as ‘how’s your father’, ‘getting a leg over’, ‘a seeing-to’ and ‘hanky-panky’. And the relatively recent expression ‘discussing Uganda’ didn’t even make the list at all.

That by itself isn’t a sign of cultural decline: the very nature of slang is that it’s transient. But here’s something more serious: most of the respondents never use ‘making love’ either, and it’s not even slang. Apparently, frivolous love is no longer allowed to interfere with the serious business of ‘smashing’.  

Regular visitors to this space know how unwavering I am in my support for any rights claimed by anyone at any time.

Sacred among them is a person’s right to identify as anything the person wishes, even if the newly claimed identity isn’t that of a person.

For example, I identify, for the time being at any rate, as a human male. That’s why I use binary male pronouns and don’t mind being addressed as Alex, Alexander, mate or, for old times’ sake, Mr Boot.

However, if tomorrow I decide to identify as, say, a dachshund, I’ll insist on non-binary, non-human pronouns and also on being addressed as ‘good boy’. Or ‘good girl’, if my new identity is that of a bitch, rather than a son of one. And if you defy my wishes, I’ll see to it that you get a visit from men in blue.

All this is axiomatic and hardly requires reiteration. In any healthy society, sacral creeds ought to go without saying. And of these, the most hallowed is the belief that, when nature mistakenly issues wrong identity papers, such errors must be corrected, surgically or otherwise.

Are you with me so far? Good. I knew you would be. However, judging by your comments over the years, I have to reach the lamentable conclusion that some of you distrust any development that’s unadorned with the patina of time.

I can’t excuse such discrimination, but I understand it. The cockles of our hearts are warmed by the knowledge that something we cherish has passed the test of time; such is a normal human impulse.

Alas, some people succumb to it so thoroughly and shamefully that they begin to harbour doubts about the sacred right to choose one’s identity. Though obviously sympathetic (who isn’t?) to the idea of, say, sex change, they have residual misgivings based on the relatively recent time that this commendable concept reached wide acceptance.

To such doubting Thomases I say, fret not. Things are much better than you think, and, as Donald Trump likes to say without really meaning it, help is on the way. The person to provide such help is the original doubting Thomas, one of the twelve apostles, the incredulous chap who liked to poke his fingers where they didn’t belong.

In 1945 scholars found a Coptic copy of the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of 114 sayings attributed to Jesus. You might say that’s not an especially old provenance, but what’s important isn’t when the scroll was found but when it was written.

And the existence of this gospel, later called apocryphal, was already known in the 2^nd century AD, which is probably when it was composed. Since a century had elapsed since the events of the New Testament, critics, at that time and later, reasonably denied that the original doubting Thomas could have lived that long.

All the fathers of the church declared the gospel to be a Gnostic forgery, some outsiders disagreed, and arguments have raged on ever since. Not being a biblical scholar myself, I don’t feel qualified to wade into such debates. So I’ll just rely on a time-honoured trick and claim agnosticism in this matter.

However, while the fathers of the church denied Thomas’s authorship and indeed the authenticity of the sayings cited in his gospel, no one has ever denied that the text is very old. The dating of it varies from one scholar to another, but, as I’ve mentioned, most place its composition in the 2^nd century AD.

Therefore, every word in the Gospel of Thomas is densely covered with the aforementioned patina that for some constitutes the necessary validation of wisdom and veracity. This brings us back to the subject of spontaneous changes in identity, specifically ‘transitioning’ from female to male.

So here’s the good news: such ‘transitioning’ was already declared not just possible but desirable 19 centuries ago – and at least some contemporaries believed sex change had a divine blessing.

As I mentioned, the Gospel of Thomas contained 114 sayings attributed to Jesus Christ. In all such compendia, it’s the first and the last ones that carry the greatest weight. With that in mind, the last entry, Number 114, sums up this remarkable document by saying:

“Simon Peter said to them, ‘Mary should leave us, for females are not worthy of life.’ Jesus said, ‘Behold, I shall guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter heaven’s kingdom’.”

Now, I urge you to make allowances for times much less sophisticated than ours. In those days they still hadn’t learned that misogyny, aka sexism, is a crime as heinous as transphobia and homophobia, and more heinous than murder.

Hence the implication that a woman shouldn’t enjoy full equality in heaven’s kingdom. In our own earthly kingdom that sort of statement would put the culprit in the dock possibly, before an employment tribunal definitely.

Yet with that proviso, we must all welcome this ringing endorsement of female-to-male transitioning.

Yes, going the opposite way didn’t receive a similar blessing, but we can infer it from the context. Let’s just say that whoever wrote the Gospel of Thomas was galloping ahead of his time and all the way towards ours.

P.S. A friend who follows the US scene more assiduously than I do has pointed out an interesting paradox involving the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

Apparently, since a loaded pistol was found in Pretti’s possession, a complete role reversal is under way. Those who have insisted for years that not only all firearms but, ideally, even penknives be banned, are now saying the poor man was only exercising his constitutional Second Amendment rights.

At the same time, those who under normal circumstances see nothing wrong with carrying a regimental bazooka into a supermarket are saying that the man had no business toting a handgun. Go figure, as they say in those parts.

Mutinies are a reaction to a particular injustice, real or perceived. Once a mutiny breaks out, only two outcomes are possible. Either the revolt is put down or it gains the concession it seeks. Apart from that, nothing else changes.

Rebellions cast their nets wider. They are out to create a new government or even a new form of governance. Again, two possible outcomes are on offer: either failure, with the old government meting out chastisement; or success, with the new government issuing its own diktats.

Same people, different nameplates on the doors of government offices. Once things have settled down, butchers will continue to butcher, bakers to bake, candlestick-makers to make candlesticks. Life goes back to normal; nothing much has changed.

One up from a rebellion is a revolution. It explodes in city squares, with the shock waves sweeping away palaces, parliaments, institutions – a revolution is a rebellion on both speed and steroids. But it’s also more than that.

A revolution sets its sights higher than any other public outburst. It’s not just out to create a new government or a new political system or a new social structure. It’s after more than that. It wants to create a new man.

Such is the lofty aim that every revolution in history set itself. And all but one failed, some to a large extent, most totally.

The American Revolution, to name one, didn’t produce a new concept of humanity. It created the American variant of a European man, speaking the American variant of a European language and putting an American slant on European culture. One could perhaps argue that over two centuries a distinct, if peculiarly hodgepodge, ethnic type appeared. But a new man is nowhere in evidence.

The French Revolution achieved even less. Never mind producing a new man – it didn’t even succeed in creating a new Frenchman. Tricolour flags went up, culottes went down, heads rolled, France took on the world and lost. The French heaved a sigh of relief and went back to their gros rouge, fromage and cinq à sept. What else can one expect from the people who still refer to the oldest bridge in their capital as Pont Neuf?

The Bolshevik Revolution aimed much higher than that. It set out to destroy everything destructible and even a few things that seemed eternally secure. Then, out of the rubble of the old world a new Superman was to emerge, the Soviet Man.

He’d be new in every respect: he’d replace the old morality based on God with a new one based on class. He’d acquire every Nietzschean characteristic: all-conquering cruelty to enemies, positive emotions reserved only for the parteigenossen, the demeanour of the master of the universe towering over all lesser types.

Like a snake shedding its old skin, he’d leave behind all outdated notions of ethnicity. He wouldn’t be Russian, Ukrainian or Latvian. He’d be Soviet, a nationality defined not by blood but by class and ideology – until such time that class and ideology have seeped into Soviet Man’s bloodstream to create a new, superior human subspecies.

Some 80 million would-be new men had to die in wars, purges, famines and concentration camps to show that project for the monstrous failure it was. And that score is still running up, at one remove.

Only one revolution in history produced a new man, one who changed drastically something infinitely more than just his politics, country, beliefs, deities, morality, even family. He changed his understanding of what it meant to be human – and thus New Man indeed emerged, Phoenix soaring out of the ashes of old humanity towards the endless horizons of eternity.

That revolution exploded not in public squares but in people’s minds, and that is a sine qua non of any revolution worthy of the name, one seeking to create a new man.

God, the wrathful God of the Hebrews who created the world in six days and remained in and above it as both an immanent and transcendent force, never seen but always sensed, miraculously appeared as a man of flesh and blood. He lived as a man, died as a man – and not any ordinary man, but as a tortured, despised, executed criminal – but then came back to life as God.

Unlike the gods of the Greeks and the God of the Hebrews, he didn’t demand men to make sacrifices to himself. Quite the contrary: he sacrificed himself for them. And in doing so he made them understand what it really meant to be created in the image and likeness of God.

If for Plato man was essentially his soul that sometimes regrettably had to use the attached body as a necessary tool, the emerging New Man began to perceive body and soul as a unity, reflecting one between God and man, and achieving the same life everlasting. The ideal to seek was now salvation of the world, not from the world.

New Man learned to think in categories that would have been unintelligible to the Greeks, in categories they wouldn’t have recognised as valid expressions of the human essence. They couldn’t have got their heads around the notion that, since all human beings had the same father, they were all brothers and sisters – regardless of their origin, class, status or wealth.

That equality before God trumped any earthly inequality, making every human being equally valuable in the eyes of God and man. They all deserved love because love was the essence of God and hence of life. That wasn’t just a matter of doctrine – it was a call to action.

Over the next couple of centuries another miracle occurred. Thousands – many thousands! – of public hospitals, leper hospices, orphanages, houses caring for the old, the infirm and widows, shelters and canteens caring for the poor popped up all over the Mediterranean world.

Nothing remotely like that had existed in the Hellenic world. There were a few hostels for travellers, on some days alms were doled out. But the first public hospital appeared only in the 2^nd century AD – and then charitable institutions spread like a brushfire all over the Mediterranean landscape.

Even Julian the Apostate, the emperor who reverted to paganism because he detested Christianity, had to praise the ‘Galileans’ grudgingly for the way they cared for those in need, “not only their own, but also ours”.

Intellectually, Christianity proved to be a successful asset-stripping religion. It absorbed Hellenic philosophy into its own, taking what it found useful and discarding the rest. Over the subsequent centuries, Christian philosophy and theology scaled heights never even approached by any other civilisation.

Moreover, one byproduct of Christian philosophy and theology was the belief that the physical world had to function according to rational and universal laws because it was made by a rational and universal creator. Therefore, the world was rationally knowable, ready to reveal its secrets to human reason and experiment.

This and only this made science, in our sense of the word, possible. No other civilisation has ever achieved anything even remotely close to the same level of scientific mastery attained by Christendom – and today’s godless world is still clipping the same coupons, rapaciously and ungratefully.

The Christian revolution started with a miracle and its success is just as miraculous. Driven from Palestinian slums into Roman catacombs and Byzantine insulae, a handful of believers started a revolution that within three-four centuries conquered the mighty Roman Empire – not by fire and sword but by a sermon of love.

The only revolution that has ever changed man and his understanding of himself. The only revolution that has ever succeeded in that aim. The only revolution worthy of the name.

So repeat after me: “Credo in unum Deum…” Just kidding. You won’t, will you? Not unless you’ve already been saying these words, in whatever language, without my prompting.

Yet even those to whom these words are alien or even abhorrent must be honest enough to acknowledge that this revolution is still with us. Even those who reject it out of hand still unwittingly cling to its beliefs.

Our woke mob elevating every appetite to a reclaimable human right don’t even realise that they are but parasites on the Body Christian. Had a time machine transported them to the Athens of Plato and Aristotle, I’d pay serious money to watch our time travellers trying to explain to the Greeks that all people are endowed with human rights simply because they are human.

They’d be run out of the agora faster than you could say paráfronas (madman). Such concepts are intelligible only in our post-Christian world — and only because it’s indeed post-Christian.

According to Enlightenment mythology, the 20^th century had everything it took to prosper.

Science and technology were booming, with reason finally released from the shackles of religious superstition – hooray!. In 1905, France, a staunchly Catholic country in the distant past, made laïcité (secularism) her official state policy. Things were looking up all over the Continent.

The 20^th century was to become an age of mass happiness. Instead it became an age of mass murder. Two world wars, and history’s two most satanic regimes appearing in between, killed more people in that progressive century than in all other centuries of recorded history.

The fabric of a civilisation lovingly built over millennia lay in tatters. The West suffered irreversible damage, social, cultural, political, demographic, economic – all of it accompanied by an upsurge in hatred, ethnic strife, a loss of faith in traditional institutions, extremism moving from the margins of political discourse into the mainstream.

If the Enlightenment was a game, then the blood-drenched 20^th century was its scoresheet.

The four principal catastrophes I’ve mentioned are too different to be lumped together. Yet they all had something in common, both philosophically and practically.

Philosophically, only an Enlightenment zealot would refuse to acknowledge the abject failure of that exercise in civilisational sabotage. The so-called Age of Reason was in fact an age of dim-witted voluntarism. The Enlightenment should be properly called the Entenebriment – it threw darkness over a brightly shining light. And secularism removed any constraints that in the past had put some brakes on human cruelty. The tethers on the allowable were stretched so far they snapped.

All that created the premises from which wholesale slaughter could proceed. But we are none of us determinists, are we now? We don’t believe that, because things happen, they were bound to happen.

Yes, each of the four principal calamities I’ve mentioned was precipitated by a crisis. But that’s nothing new in history: crises do happen. Some of them have dire consequences, but none has ever wreaked so much devastation within one century.

RG Collingwood explained why we were so unfortunate with his usual succinct insight: “Civilisations sometimes perish because they are forcibly broken up by the armed attack of enemies without or revolutionaries within; but never from this cause alone. Such attacks never succeed unless the thing that is attacked is weakened by doubt as to whether the end which it sets before itself, the form of life which it tries to realise, is worth achieving.”

All the countries involved in turning the 20^th century into a nightmare were beset by such doubts. And, perhaps as a result, the political leadership in all the countries involved at each juncture was weak either morally or intellectually or both.

That was the case in England, France, Germany and Russia before the First World War, in Russia before the Revolution, in the Weimar Republic before the rise of Nazism, in England and France before the Second World War – and I’m only sketching the situation with the main players.

However, all those countries, individually or in alliances, had had weak political leaders before and lived to tell about it. How did the 20^th century manage to dispatch hundreds of millions of people, many of them noncombatants? (For example, the Soviets lost 27 million in the Second World War, but only about 15 million of them were military casualties.)

The answer has to lie not just in weak political leaders, nor merely in the gravity of the crises confronting them. It’s the confluence of the two that turned the crises into catastrophes. Faced with critical situations, the nonentities who happened to find themselves in power at the time had no minds, resolve, courage or moral fortitude to avert the worst.

See what I’m driving at? Apart from the sheer pleasure of it, studying the past – studying anything, as a matter of fact – only makes sense if useful knowledge and understanding emerge as a result. Knowledge and understanding enable one to analyse history, extract useful lessons from it, accept or discard parallels with the present.

I’d suggest that anyone is blind or stupid who doesn’t see that we in the West are currently facing exactly the same confluence of a tottering civilisation, weak (or, even worse, corrupt) leadership and the kind of crisis that could easily turn into a global catastrophe.

The crisis, the most immediate one that is, is unfolding in the Ukraine, a budding European country being devastated by barbaric aggression from the east. Putin’s Russia, a worthy heir to the Soviet Union, follows the same approach to life. It can successfully produce nothing but death.

Historically, the Russians have seen national greatness in terms of territorial expansion. When the targeted territories were inhabited, the local populations had to be enslaved, Russified or, those two aims failing, exterminated.

That process has never had a clearly defined end. The state escutcheon of the Soviet Union featured hammer and sickle superimposed on the whole globe, and that was a statement of intent. When in 1920 Red hordes attacked Poland, the order issued by their commander Tukhachevsky contained the words “On to Berlin, Paris, London! March!”

Poland wasn’t thus the final destination but only a stop along the way. Fast-forwarding a century, the Ukraine is today’s Poland and Putin’s Russia today’s Red hordes.

The Russians have announced their intention to build up a 3-million army this year – this while they continue to lose up to 30,000 a month on the battlefront. This means a total transfer of the whole country into a war mode, after which there is no backtracking. “Mobilisation is war,” said Helmuth von Moltke, and he was right.

 When a military juggernaut powered by evil starts rolling, it can only move in one direction: forward. When its gears go into reverse, it self-destructs.

Thus, Putin’s war on the Ukraine isn’t just Putin’s war on the Ukraine. It’s Russia’s war on Europe, its independence, its security, its whole civilisation, whatever is left of it.

Remember that Hitler didn’t attack all European countries at once: he picked them off one by one. Putin will clearly follow the same pattern: a bite out of Estonia, a nibble out of Latvia, a chunk of Moldova, chew, digest and wait for the West’s reaction. If none comes, proceed as planned.

If this isn’t a crisis, I don’t know what is. That’s one half of a potential catastrophe in place – and so is the other: weak, vacillating, craven, inane political leadership.

The way the West has handled the Russian aggression since it began in 2014 and escalated in 2022 spells a death wish. At first, Western leaders pretended they didn’t understand Putin’s objectives. Later they began to pretend they did.

As a result, they’ve created a Fata Morgana picture of the war in their own minds and those of the public. The war is raging in the real world, while the Western perception of it is lodged in virtual reality.

If it weren’t the case, Western leaders would realise that they need the Ukraine as much as the Ukraine needs them. The Ukrainian army, 800,000-strong, is the only battle-hardened military force in Europe that has the experience, know-how and unbreakable will to stop the barbarian onslaught. All that’s needed from the West is material support, with military and non-military aid, and also moral support that goes beyond empty words of solidarity.

Early in 1918, Sidney Reilly pleaded from Moscow that his superiors in London shift the emphasis of their policy to the Bolshevik revolution:

“This hideous cancer [is] striking at the very root of civilisation,” he wrote. ‘Gracious heavens, will the people in England never understand?… Here in Moscow there is growing to maturity the arch enemy of the human race… At any price this foul obscenity which has been born in Russia must be crushed out of existence… Mankind must unite in a holy alliance against this midnight terror.”

No such entreaties are sounding anywhere in the West, and if they are, no one is listening. Instead, staggeringly incompetent non-diplomats like Witkoff and Kushner dupe the world with encouraging reports of peace negotiations.

As the latest round was unfolding, Putin didn’t release bevies of peace doves over the Ukraine. Instead, he launched unprecedentedly heavy attacks on the energy infrastructure around Kiev. That left almost a million people without light and heat in the midst of -20C frosts.

Meanwhile, Western negotiators pretend they believe that all Putin wants is a piece of Donbass. Enveloping themselves in the smokescreen of such lies, they try to push the Ukraine closer to capitulation.

Any sensible governments would abandon pretence, assess the situation soberly and without keeping both eyes on the nearest elections, and decide what needs to be done to thwart the brewing barbarian conquest. As a minimum, the Ukraine should be given the kind of missiles that can do to Moscow what Russian missiles are doing to Kiev.

It’s also well within our means to police a no-fly zone over the Ukraine and introduce limited troop contingents into parts of the country, the western ones to begin with. Instead, we hear cowardly gasps about the danger of provoking Putin.

Chaps, the only thing that ever provokes evil aggressors is a show of weakness. The only thing that ever deters them is a show of strength. As Golda Meir once said, “You can’t negotiate with people who want to murder you.”

If strong leaders were in charge today, Putin’s murderers would be licking their wounds back in Russia. The people we do have in charge seem to be hellbent on turning the crisis into a catastrophe. In this, if no other, undertaking they are succeeding famously.  

First, a confession: I don’t like opera, especially the 19^th century kind. I find it more emotive than emotional, mawkish rather than moving, musically trivial rather than sublime, and vulgar rather than refined.

Opera in general, and Italian opera in particular, is closer to operetta than to serious music. It’s more in the nature of music’s PR department than of music itself. Music already possesses enough drama of its own not to have to rely on the verbal, typically phony, drama of a libretto. The dramatic potential of the spirit is better revealed in the slow movement of Mozart’s K488 than in all his operas combined.

Even though I may want to exempt bits and pieces of Mozart’s and Wagner’s operas from this observation (and also later works by Berg, Poulenc and Shostakovich), deep down it’s hard to argue either with Gould, who believed that Mozart’s affection for opera was a millstone around his musical neck, or with the wit who described Wagner as “the Puccini of music”. That hits two composers with one stone, not an easy thing to do.

Rossini, who was a better raconteur than he was a composer, came up with another wonderful, but unfortunately untranslatable, aphorism. “Wagner’s operas,” he said, “have some fine moments but many rotten quarter-hours.”

Alas, this translation has to lose the pun. The French expression passer un mauvais quart d’heure, besides its literal meaning, stands for having a generally rotten time over usually a longer period than 15 minutes.

And this is my principal gripe against this genre: I find it a crushing bore. Rarely have I been able to sit through the whole performance, which increases my admiration for the brave souls who can not only tolerate 4.5 hours of Die Meistersinger but actually claim to enjoy it.

Going from the general to the particular, opera becomes tolerable when performed by great artists. Maria Callas, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Fyodor Chaliapin, Elisabeth Schwartzkopf could have reconciled me to opera – but I’ve never heard them perform.

The only three great singers I’ve ever heard live were Renata Scotto, Mario del Monaco and Christa Ludwig, but even Ludwig couldn’t make me take Der Rosenkavalier for a full four hours plus.

Then how does one account for the statement in the title? Simple. One reads Tchaikovsky’s account of the performance of Glinka’s opera A Life for the Tsar (later known as Ivan Susanin).

The, probably apocryphal, story of Ivan Susanin is an essential part of Russian patriotic lore, and as such is known to every child. According to the story, in 1613, during the Time of Troubles, Polish troops seeking to kill the first Romanov tsar, Mikhail, hired Susanin to guide them to Moscow.

Instead, the hero led the Poles into an impassable thicket where they all soon froze to death, but not before killing Ivan for his trouble.

This tragic story has caused numerous comic variants, favoured by irreverent Muscovites who see a joke in everything, and everything as a joke. The most recent one involves Susanin poking his head into Putin’s study and saying, “Fancy a walk, Vladimir Vladimirovich?”

All this is just the background to the story Tchaikovsky tells in his 1866 letter. Here’s the relevant excerpt:

“You will be able to read in the Moscow News what happened at the Bolshoi Theatre, the day before yesterday (during A Life for the Tsar), and I was there. In my opinion the Moscow public has lost all sense of proportion and reason. The opera did not actually take place for, as soon as the Poles appeared everybody started shouting “Down with the Poles” and so on [Only a Russian would know what the ‘so on’ was – AB] In the scene where the Poles are supposed to kill Susanin, the actor who sang the part started fighting with the choristers – Poles – and as he is very strong he knocked several down; the rest, seeing that the audience was delighted about this mockery of art, truth and decency, fell down too and the triumphant Susanin left, waving his arms, followed by terrific applause from the Muscovites. You must agree that this was the limit.”

I must do nothing of the sort. Instead, I believe that most operatic performances could benefit from little diversions of that sort if they were to provide full entertainment value for the exorbitant ticket prices.

Speaking of which, I can’t understand those who shell out £430 to hear Rigoletto at Covent Garden informing us for the umpteenth time that la Donna è mobile. Let me tell you, a donna who pays that kind of money for that musical trash has to be a) mad or b) tasteless or c) an inveterate social climber. In any case, this donna has to be very upwardly mobile indeed.

By writing this, I know I risk incurring the wrath of those among my readers who happen to be opera lovers, if not opera-goers, at least not at those prices. I’ve noticed that people can tolerate implicit or even explicit attacks on their politics, philosophies or ideas better than they can stomach real or presumed slights of their tastes.

Let me assure you just in case that no such slight is meant, and none should be taken. Our tastes come from our aesthetic experience, innate sensibility and general direction of our spiritual life. These vary from person to person, and everyone is entitled to his tastes – ridiculous as I may find some.

Loving opera doesn’t fall under this rubric: it’s more regrettable than ridiculous. Unlike some genres one could think of (pop, rap, that sort of thing), it’s not totally devoid of some musical content, and even a committed hater like me finds some beautiful moments here and there.

Even though, to quote Rossini again, rotten quarts d’heure are easier to find for being more plentiful.

Lately, I’ve kept you overdosed on Trump. Never before have I written so many consecutive pieces on the same subject, and I’m sorry about this.

However, who else has as much entertainment value in today’s world? Who else makes you gasp every time he opens his mouth? Which other public figure is so thoroughly sui generis? Not a single one.

Our own vapid Marxists are yawn-inducing, destroying the country in an effective but utterly boring way. European politicians, with the possible exception of the aptronymic Meloni (if you get the sexist reference, good; if not, never mind), are as dull as ditch water, and just about as smart. Their ‘far-right’ opponents try to be sinister, but only succeed at being gauche.

Trump is bearing the comic burden all on his own, and he hardly ever takes a day off. Various, and variously crazy, statements pop out of his mouth at a kaleidoscopic speed, only to be repudiated just as fast.

This isn’t an excuse for my current fixation, but it’s an explanation. I open the papers every day only to find that the Trump travelling circus has delivered yet another reason-defying stunt.

This morning, for example, one finds out that Trump has deemed Canada unworthy of joining his much-touted Board of Peace. This is a new development because Canada was previously invited in. But now Trump has withdrawn his invitation because Mark Carney, Canada’s PM, dared to talk back.

I’ve never been a great fan of Mr Carney, not even when he was Governor of the Bank of England. But he said something sensible at Davos: he urged “middle powers” to form a bloc the better to resist economic aggression by “greater powers”.

Neither Trump nor the US was mentioned by name, but the implication was clear. Yet another reprobate spoke out of turn, and no one takes a shot at the Donald and gets away with it.

Instead of offering profuse compliments and thanks to the US and especially Trump personally (doesn’t matter what for), Carney didn’t respond to verbal lashings with the lapidary “Thank you, sir, may I have another”. He didn’t realise that administering punishment to America’s allies hurt Trump more than it hurt them, and he was only doing it out of the goodness of his heart.

Such ingratitude had to be singled out for individual punishment. Canada, explained Trump, only “lives because of the United States. Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.”

Carney must be wondering what exactly Trump meant. Canada, for all her faults, is a successful Western country, a member of NATO, and her head of state is the same King Charles III for whom Trump has declared his undying love.

The only meaning I can find in Trump’s statement is that Canada exists as an independent state only because the US has so far magnanimously refrained from invading her and turning her into a 51^st state. Trump has threatened to do so in the future but, fair enough, hasn’t done it yet. Other American leaders weren’t so accommodating in the past, more than once.

The  two major interventions occurred in 1775, during the American Revolutionary War, and in the 1812 war. The aim was to grab Quebec and other Canadian territories, yet both invasions failed, as did numerous smaller raids in 1837-1838 and 1866-1871.

If Trump means that Canada lives only because he doesn’t follow the example of the Founders and decides for the time being to let Canada carry on, then there is some logic to it. Canada wouldn’t be able to repel the full military might of her southern neighbour as successfully as she did in the past.

But then exactly the same can be said about practically all other countries of the world, except two or three. Since America has the physical wherewithal to conquer them but doesn’t do so, they can be said to survive only courtesy of Trump’s munificence.

Let’s await further developments of this theme, but meanwhile let’s take Trump’s point: Carney’s lack of rispetto disqualifies Canada from membership in that august organisation founded by Trump personally. This is how he expressed that thought in one of his inimitable posts:

“Please let this letter serve to represent that the Board of Peace is withdrawing its invitation to you regarding Canada’s joining, what will be, the most prestigious Board of Leaders ever assembled, at any time.”

Delegates to the 1814-1815 Congress of Vienna, all those comparative pygmies like Metternich, Castlereagh and Talleyrand, might have taken exception to the superlative statement at the end. But they are all dead, so they don’t count.

So fine, Canada isn’t worthy of that honour, not while she’s led by that ingrate Carney. Clearly, Canada doesn’t possess the moral qualifications for joining the Most Prestigious Board of Leaders Ever In History. But who does? We must establish this to understand better the criteria applied.

Thus we find out that the list of honourable invitees includes Putin and his Belorussian poodle Lukashenko, along with representatives of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kosovo, Qatar – and of course no such group honouring Putin and Lukashenko would be complete without the presence of their staunchest European ally Victor Orban.

The Executive Board is naturally headed by Trump, and its other members include that great champion of peace Tony Blair, who dragged Britain into the Iraq war on false pretences, Steve Witkoff, whose sole diplomatic success is once having bought Trump a ham sandwich late at night, and Jared ‘Nepo Baby’ Kushner, a small-time wheeler-dealer raised to a billionaire by his father-in-law’s shenanigans.

So far Starmer, Macron and even that aptronymic Meloni have refused to join this rogues’ gallery, to their credit. They ascribe their reticence to the presence of Messrs Putin and Lukashenko, forgetting that the former is Trump’s friend and the latter a friend of a friend.

That has incurred Trump’s displeasure: those countries too have forgotten they only live because he allows them to. And he had often complimented Meloni without ever grabbing them, yet that gesture of goodwill seems to have been wasted.

Other than overseeing the ceasefire in Gaza and presumably peppering its landscape with the sorely missing rows of Trump Towers, it’s unclear what the Board’s remit will be. The immediate benefit to Trump is more transparent: a positive RSVP must come with a $1 billion cheque attached. I doubt the cheques will be made out to him personally, but, as chairman, he’ll have control of the funds.

The Trump sideshow rolls on, flattening under it all known standards of decency, diplomacy, reason, even sanity. But I can again compliment Trump for his sole good quality: boring he isn’t. Still, I’ll try to get off this subject lest Trump too may lose his ability to entertain.

P.S. Speaking of sideshows, last autumn’s production of Hamlet at the National (Britain’s premier stage) featured Francesca Mills as Ophelia. Now, I thought that, unlike Trump, our theatre had exhausted its capacity for astounding us with perverse developments.

We’ve seen black women playing the roles of white men (but not vice versa – that would be cultural appropriation). I especially remember a woman wearing stiletto heels who played the fearless warrior Agrippa. But that, I thought, was the outer limit of woke perversity. I was wrong though.

You see, Miss Mills is a dwarf, which lack of stature, as you can see in this clip https://search.app/pjpyy, isn’t compensated by any singular dramatic talent. The way she hams up that monologue would be ridiculous even if it came from a 5’10” actress.

“What next?” asks a good friend of mine who sent me this clip. “A quadriplegic Hamlet?” Well, perhaps. As long as it’s a quadriplegic black woman Hamlet.

Speaking, or rather ranting, at Davos, Trump actually said this to the European leaders: “If it wasn’t for us you’d all be speaking German and a little Japanese.”

I heard this phrase many times in American bars, usually in disreputable parts of town and close to chucking out time. This cliché favoured by drunken yobs has been satirised by many American comedians and film makers. For example, in A Fish Called Wanda, it was uttered by a character portrayed as a walking caricature of a moron.

Trump follows interesting role models, in other words. But he was still only warming up. America, or rather he personally, could “financially destroy” Switzerland, said Trump, showing exactly how guests in a foreign country should behave.

Denmark is ungrateful to America for having saved its bacon in the big war, was the way Trump put on his historian’s cap. “Europe has been screwing us for 30 years,” he continued, and NATO “gave us nothing”. Actually, European, including Danish, soldiers died side by side with Americans in Afghanistan, which is the only time Article 5 of the NATO charter  has been invoked.

NATO’s Secretary General Rutte later spoke to the man he had once deferentially called ‘Daddy’ and enlightened him on that subject. That was like trying to convince a lunatic that he isn’t really Jesus Christ.

Actually, Europeans could say with equal justification that the US has been screwing them. Since the dollar is the world’s reserve currency, US bonds have acted as default purchases in the financial markets for decades. This has allowed the US to run up her staggering sovereign debt of $36 trillion, which has largely enabled Americans to enjoy unprecedented prosperity.

During his campaign for a second term, Trump bemoaned the national debt and promised to do something about it. He kept that promise by adding another £2.25 trillion to the debt. Apparently, the markets are uneasy about this, which means the US cost of borrowing is going up. This means, inter alia, that Americans will pay a higher interest for all their loans, cars, mortgages, holidays, whatever they borrow for.

Yet the question of who exactly has been screwing whom never came up as a possible retort. That allowed Trump to ratchet up the level of insults.

Europeans are “stupid people” for buying Chinese-made windmills. The Chinese, on the other hand, are savvy for selling those abominations but never using them themselves. Actually, China produces 44 per cent of the world’s wind power, but what are facts among friends.

The subject of Russia never came up, but when it had in the past Trump often repeated the lie that the US provided $350 billion’s worth of aid to the Ukraine. Once again, what’s an order of magnitude among friends. In fact, the numeral he cites refers to the amount appropriated by Congress. The actual aid delivered was under $40 billion, but no one can pull the bit out of Trump’s clenched teeth.

His mode of delivery makes one want to disagree with Trump even when he is right. Such as, for example, when he ranted about Europe’s spending too much in general and too little on defence, uncontrolled immigration and commitment to the “green new scam”. Actually, a native speaker who has been to school would have said “new green scam”, but Trump isn’t into mellifluous elocution.

If someone – anyone – spoke to me in that hectoring, insulting tone, I’d tell him to perform a ballistically unlikely act on himself and walk out. This regardless of what he was saying, true or false. Yet leaders of great – fine, formerly great – countries sat there like naughty schoolchildren reprimanded by a stern headmaster.

No one even responded with the phrase in the title above, which would have sucked some electricity out of the air. Perhaps the Europeans sensed that Trump was blowing off some steam before performing one of his usual about-faces.

Sure enough, he did allow that he wasn’t after all going to send the 82^nd Airborne into Greenland, or rather Iceland, as he kept calling it. A Freudian slip perhaps? Is Iceland going to be declared another essential link in America’s defence chain, making her ripe for occupation? If I were a member of Iceland’s government, I’d give serious consideration to beefing up the coastal defences. Just in case.

For the time being, Trump has come up with a solution for Greenland/Iceland that every sensible commentator, including this immodest one, has been offering for yonks. The US doesn’t need to occupy Greenland to use it for Arctic defences. The Danish government, and NATO in general, would be happy to let Americans build as many bases on the island as they desire.

Trump’s insistence that the land under the bases should be sovereign US territory is a moot point. This is the self-evident case with all US bases anywhere in the world, and no special dispensation is required.

Of course sovereignty over the area of US bases doesn’t imply one over the rare earth minerals that are as plentiful in Greenland as they are hard to mine. This may still prove to be the sticking point for Trump, who never forgets to look after number one, which doesn’t always mean his country.

And oh yes, Trump has withdrawn his threat to slap additional tariffs on those European countries that oppose a US occupation of Greenland. I’m not surprised: it has been two days since he first issued that threat, plenty of time not just for a 180 but even for a 540.

In general, the whole atmosphere of Davos evoked conferences of the past where implacable enemies tried to find some accommodation making a military clash unnecessary. If Trump continues in this vein, it won’t be long before Europeans chalk the US up in the rubric of foe rather than friend.

I’d take that as a personal tragedy and, more important, a catastrophic development for the West at large. As for inviting Putin to join the Gaza ‘peace board’, I’ve already commented on that surreal outrage, so I shan’t repeat myself.

Actually, since that sham board is Trump’s personal project, no European country can block Putin’s appointment. Checks and balances are disappearing from Western politics, and the US isn’t doing brilliantly in that respect either.

P.S. While we are on the subject of English usages, I continue to absorb the intricacies of my learned language.

Thus a football commentator the other day described a tackle as ‘vociferous’, even though neither party had uttered a sound. Did he mean full-blooded? Crunching? Bone-crushing? My pet idea of fining the misuse of big words has been vindicated yet again.

Football commentators don’t know better, but Will Self, the writer who grew up in a professor’s family should. Yet here’s a passage from a Times review of the new Dictionary of Biography, specifically Self’s entry on JG Ballard’s novel Crush:

Self talks about Ballard’s fascination with the fact that the “dysfunctional relationship between humans and technology reached a sort of orgasmic crescendo in a paean to the delirious psychosexuality of celebrity car crashes” – “a sentence,” comments the reviewer, “that could only exist in a dictionary confident of its readers”.

Yes, confident that his readers are as ignorant as he is. A crescendo, Will, isn’t to be confused with a climax, orgasmic or otherwise. It’s a way of getting to the climax by gradually increasing tempo and volume. It’s a staircase one climbs to get to an Islington flat, not the flat itself. Glad to be of help.

The solecism apart, that whole sentence is a pseud straining every tendon to show he’s posher than thou. This is a pseud version of the ditty: “The working class can kiss my arse, I’ve got the foreman’s job at last.”

When a man says something others don’t understand, he may be a bad communicator or else a genius. However, when he himself doesn’t realise what he is saying, concerns about his mental health are valid.

The other day, incensed that European countries seem to disagree that Trump can help himself to any piece of land he desires, he sent a message to Norway’s prime minister.

I hope he knows what he meant to say, but what he actually did say makes no sense this side of a lunatic asylum. But judge for yourself:

“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the US.”

Others have scrutinised those claims of eight wars miraculously stopped, and discarded them. Some of those wars lasted only a few hours; some involved no fighting at all; some weren’t really stopped.

And Trump not only hasn’t stopped the most important war, one raging in the heart of Europe, but has consistently taken the aggressor’s side. Just the other day he repeated his stock idiocy that it’s Zelensky who is at fault in continuing hostilities. Why can’t the Ukraine just capitulate and adopt Putin’s ‘peace’ plan Trump has claimed for his own?

However, none of this is a sign of clinical disengagement from reality. Playing fast and loose with facts, especially for the purpose of self-aggrandisement is Trump’s stock in trade after all.

Neither does his atrocious syntax betoken psychiatric problems. All it says is that the money Trump’s Daddy paid for his expensive education was sorely squandered. But read on.

Why did Trump try to stop all those wars he never quite stopped? Was it to stop woeful bloodshed? No. Was it to pursue America’s geopolitical interests? No. Was it because Jesus said peacemakers are blessed? No.

The only way his first sentence can be read by any textual analyst is that Trump became a peacemaker solely because he wanted to win the Nobel Peace Prize. That failing, he has lost interest in peace, other than saying it’s of course still important, in general terms.

But coming to the fore now is “what is good and proper for the US”. Contextually, this means that peace is neither good nor proper for Trump’s country. Implicitly, he also bears a grudge against Norway (“your Country”), although it wasn’t the country’s government that slighted Trump so egregiously, but the Nobel Committee, established and endowed by the legacy of Alfred Nobel.

It’s true that the Peace Prize is the only one for which Norway’s government appoints judges, but they are in no way obligated to do as they are told. But this is a minor point compared to the delirious rant of Trump’s first sentence.

Yet that wasn’t all. Because of the perfidious Norwegians and generally obstreperous Europeans, Trump is ready to press his claims for Greenland. Since he is no longer committed to the cause of peace, he can grab the island the hard way, see if he cares.

Hence he is prepared further to indulge his affection for initial caps: “The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland.”

This is arrant nonsense, although one appreciates Trump’s abandoning strictly parochial concerns for the sake of global ones. It’s true that the Arctic is becoming a major arena of great-power confrontation, and it’s also true that Greenland, equidistant as it is from Russia and America, is a vital strategic hub.

But Trump doesn’t need “Complete and Total Control of Greenland” to beef up NATO’s defences in the region. Treaties that have been around for almost as long as I have allow the US to open and operate any number of bases on the island, in addition to those already there.

At the height of the Cold War, the US kept up to 15,000 soldiers on the island; now that number is 200. I’m sure Greenland, Denmark, that perfidious Norway and the rest of NATO would be perfectly happy to cooperate with the US every step of the way.

Hence my forensic investigation suggests that either Trump’s loss of touch with reality reflects a true pathology or, more sinister and more likely, he actually wants to destroy NATO. This will be an inevitable outcome of any American invasion, the end of the alliance that has kept the West safe for 80 years.

Even Trump isn’t so insane as to think America can fend for herself in this world without any help from anybody. Hence he must be looking for new alliances to replace the one he finds useless.

You aren’t winning any prizes for guessing exactly where he is looking. It was announced yesterday that Trump has invited Putin to join his Gaza ‘board of peace’. Since we already know that, because of those Norse ingrates, the Donald has lost all interest in peace, he must feel that Putin will offer some welcome counterbalance.

Now, Putin is an indicted war criminal wanted by The Hague for the atrocities his troops have committed — are continuing to commit — in the Ukraine. He is a tyrant who unleashed the only serious war in Europe since 1945, and he shows no signs of planning to end it soon, if ever.

Inviting Putin to join that ‘board of peace’, in fact using the words ‘Putin’ and ‘peace’ in the same sentence, is either a sign of mental instability or part of a general strategy. I hope it’s only the former, but fear it must be the latter.

Trump has always sensed typological proximity to Putin, something he emphatically doesn’t feel about any Western leader. Now Trump’s new step closer to Russian fascism shows he wants to drag Putin back to the top table of world politics.

Of course, there’s the little matter of the outstanding warrant for Putin’s arrest issued by the International Court of Justice. This means he could have his collar felt if he visits any country recognising the court’s authority.

I have a solution for Donald: invade The Hague and force them to revoke the warrant at gunpoint. And oh Donald, The Hague is in Holland, in case you’re wondering.

The Twenty-Fifth Amendment, anyone?

Talking to an American friend the other day, I said Trump is a savage, which overshadows anything he does or doesn’t do.

In response, I was treated to a litany of Trump’s achievements, most of them in domestic policy, most of them real. I acknowledged as much, adding, however, that such things are transient and instantly reversible. Unlike, unfortunately, the damage Trump’s savagery does to our civilisation.

This isn’t to say I was right and my friend was wrong, or vice versa. We were simply talking about different things and looking at the issue from different vantage points. His view is possible, but then so is mine.

I’d answer the question in the title by saying: exactly the same things that are wrong with modernity. Trump is a quintessentially modern man, which I don’t use as a term of praise.

Because of his high station and larger than life personality, Trump amplifies modernity’s vices, the way a funhouse mirror exaggerates facial features into a grotesque caricature. Or else he takes onto himself modernity’s vices: if modernity is Dorian Gray, Trump is the picture in its attic.

The sickness of modernity takes on its most virulent form in Trump: he is a walking symptom of that malaise and also its contagion. The aetiology of this disease is a neo-pagan reaction against Western civilisation, otherwise known as Christendom – not just its founding religion but its core understanding of what it is to be fully human.

One doesn’t have to be a believing Christian to see what kind of world that reaction has produced, although some powers of dispassionate observation would come in handy.

Cogent critical inquiry into first causes has given way to the obtuse superstition of materialism, with a logical fallacy at its base. Freedom, which thinkers from Plato to Aquinas understood as liberation from all constraints, including inner ones, preventing one from living a life of rational virtue, got to be seen as liberation from all constraints, full stop. Reason and morality were severed from their divine source and replaced with voluntarism, the primacy of one’s own will with all its fickle vagaries.

As a result, we see a world sinking into an unremitting banality of tastes, ubiquitous vulgarity of philistine consumerism, widespread idiocy elevated to an egalitarian virtue, collapse of unifying morality, increasing monstrosity of persecution and warfare. Add to this the worship of science as a deified panacea, and conditions are in place for mankind to annihilate itself, not just what little is left of our civilisation.

If in Christendom’s past, freedom to choose was seen to be liberating only if one chose well, these days choice itself has become the be all and end all. We have before us an endless menu of moral values, consumer goods, cultural trends, consumer goods, intellectual attitudes, consumer goods, political philosophies – and above all consumer goods.

We are free to choose any or none, knowing that no objective criteria exist to judge the quality of our choices other than our own will. The fallacy of materialism is the logical impossibility of nature creating itself; the fallacy of modern morality is the logical impossibility of living only by one’s own rules.

Can you see whose portrait I am sketching? Just remember who said the other day that he is guided by his own morality and nothing else.

All such seeming abstractions have a direct bearing on how a civilisation of disparate peoples arranges itself politically. As ever, new words appearing or old words acquiring a new meaning act as weathervanes showing which way the civilisational winds are blowing.

A year or so ago, I appeared on a New York podcast whose host never takes his MAGA cap off. “What’s wrong with nationalism?” he asked, knocking me off my stride.

I looked at that imaginary weathervane and saw where it was pointing. You see, I’ve never used ‘nationalism’ (as distinct from patriotism) as anything other than a pejorative term. The question posed by my host could, to me, be paraphrased, without changing its meaning, as “What’s wrong with a primitive, dogmatic, narrow-minded ideology?”

One thing wrong with nationalism is that it’s a denial of Christian politics. That by itself presented little problem to my host who isn’t a Christian. But my other friend is, and yet he presumably doesn’t see anything wrong with nationalism either, because doing so would be tantamount to seeing something wrong with Trump, and that option doesn’t seem to be on the menu.

Nationalism became a force in European politics when the secular state could no longer tolerate the autonomy of the church within its borders.

Before Christendom became just a figure of speech, Europe had been united in its faith and the view of life it entailed. Dynastic squabbles did happen, but they reflected differences among princes, not among nations.

Christian universalism held sway. A Christian from Augsburg had more in common with a Christian from Naples than either had with a Muslim, a Zoroastrian or a pagan – or indeed his compatriot from Augsburg or Naples who wasn’t a Christian. Divisive clefts only appeared when princes began to revolt against the political authority of the Hapsburg Empire and hence the spiritual authority of the papacy.

It was then that nationalism became a battle cry, and it was in the fire of that battle that the Reformation, that anteroom to atheism, was annealed. That adumbrated an era of ‘religious wars’, a glaring misnomer.

An innocent outsider might believe that those wars were fought over recondite matters of dogma and doctrine. In fact, princes didn’t rebel against the Empire because they were Protestants. They became Protestants the better to rebel against the Empire.

That’s how the West’s unity was destroyed – partly in the name of nationalism. And this is how Trump’s nationalism is destroying the last vestiges of that unity, enfeebling the West and strengthening its enemies. Considering that socialist internationalism is working towards the same goal, the West doesn’t seem to have much of a chance.

The politics of Christendom also featured power relationships, but some philosophical and moral constraints were applied to mitigate the fallout. Modernity, on the other hand, has reduced power relationships to sheer arithmetic: whoever has more brawn will dictate. But in Trump this modern vice appears in its crystallised form – and, as all his other vices, it’s presented as a virtue by his fans.

Both the grammar and vocabulary of modern politics are changing before our very eyes. For example, MAGA enthusiasts are extolling their idol’s ‘common sense’ and ‘pragmatism’, both on closer examination revealed as merely synonyms for amorality.

Princes of Christendom were sometimes – often – immoral, but they were never amoral. For that reason, though they could be violent and cruel, sometimes very violent and cruel, their violence and cruelty never acquired the modern casual, industrialised callousness free of prior or posterior pangs of conscience.

Depriving politics of any moral content and reducing it to ad hoc nationalist expediencies ought to appal conservatives, and especially Christian conservatives. Yet no such revulsion is in evidence among MAGA fans, which raises the question of what exactly they wish to conserve. Protectionist tariffs? A West of every nation for itself with the devil taking the hindmost?

Anomie is a ubiquitous feature of our deracinated modernity, which destroys all links between action and any guiding principles, those of a higher variety, that is. Conservative commentators on Trump, such as George Will, single out his impulsiveness, his tendency to respond to his own whims and hardly anything else.

But they don’t trace such qualities and practices back to what Leni Riefenstahl called, in a different context, a triumph of will. A triumph, that is, over reason, faith, morality, custom, culture, tradition – everything that goes into the making of a civilisation.

As I say, Trump is the crystallised quintessence of modernity. One’s evaluation of his presidency is therefore contingent on one’s feelings about this epoch, and you know what mine are.

He’ll be gone in three years, leaving behind a West hopelessly fractured, its enemies perking up, an America universally reviled from without and torn apart from within – and a few achievements in domestic affairs, which are as likely as not to be undone by his successors. But that’s modernity for you.

If you take exception to this observation, it ought to take just three words to bring you around: María Corina Machado.

Just think of other statesmen who have tried to ingratiate themselves to Donald Trump and failed miserably. Zelensky, for example, dared to express a mild disagreement with Trump and his wolfhound, Vance, and had to be shouted down the way Edvard Beneš was at Munich in 1938.

Hitler told him something to the effect of ‘shut up when grow-ups are talking’, and the way Trump treated Zelensky was eerily similar. (I hope my MAGA friends don’t think I’m suggesting that Hitler has come back as Trump, in anything other than manners at any rate.)

And what did Zelensky’s audacity, albeit respectfully expressed, get him and his country? The hole from a bagel, as the Russians put it. US military aid to the Ukraine was cut off, or as near as damn, and even the funds already appropriated by Congress continue to sit in American banks – that is, if Trump doesn’t favour Omani ones.

That’s what male pride and testosterone aggression get a supplicant talking to Trump. Only extravagant praise, lick-spittle sycophancy and some spectacular offering are tantamount to respect, as Don Trump (and Don Corleone before him) define the concept.

In common with most intelligent women, Miss Machado can see through men with X-ray accuracy. So she put her feminine wiles to good use and found a path to Trump’s heart.

The starting point of that meandering journey was her presenting to the president her Nobel Peace Prize medal, that Trump has always said should be his as of right anyway, or would be if there were any justice in the world.

In the process, Machado called Trump “the heir of Washington” (note the definite article – there have never been any other heirs). After all, the president had made a “unique commitment with our freedom”. I do hope she meant “to our freedom”, for otherwise the praise sounds ambiguous.

Both the donor and the recipient seemed to think that what Trump now possessed wasn’t just the medal, but the prize itself. If so, then a question arises about the $1.2 million in legal tender that accompanies the prize. That sum may be pocket change to Trump, but it’s the thought that counts. Did Machado enclose a cheque for the full amount?

One way or the other, Trump’s note of thanks to Machado did suggest that he regarded himself as a full-fledged laureate of the prize: “María presented me with her Nobel Peace Prize for the work I have done. Such a wonderful gesture of mutual respect. Thank you María!”

I know that the president doesn’t always appreciate semantic nuances, but to those who do there exists a valid difference between the Nobel Prize and the Nobel Prize medal. The former is a great accolade; the latter, just a bauble.

A misunderstanding was brewing, but the Nobel Committee nipped it in the bud. Its prizes, it said, “cannot be revoked, shared or transferred to others… a medal can change owners, but the title of a Nobel Peace Prize laureate cannot.”

So that’s it then. Machado gets to keep her prize (and presumably the $1.2 million). Trump, on the other hand, will have to satisfy himself with merely a gold disk, and we know how much he loves that metal, especially as part of interior decoration.

If Machado hoped that her gesture of rispetto would soften Trump up to a point where he’d install her as Venezuela’s democratic leader, she has so far come a cropper. Maduro’s thugs continue to oppress the country without Maduro, although God only knows how long that will last – and even Our Lord God Almighty may find it hard to second-guess Trump.

Meanwhile what’s happening in Iran isn’t without gruesome parallels in US history. In 1956, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty and other American CIA-run stations encouraged Hungarian patriots to rise against their communist oppressors.

Though no formal promise to support the Revolution with military aid was given, those broadcasts created a widespread impression that help was on its way. The Revolution started, no US help arrived, Soviet tanks rolled in and thousands of people were butchered.

Am I the only one who detects a parallel? When Iranian protesters started their revolt, the regime responded with a violent crackdown, murdering thousands (estimates vary, but by all accounts more Iranians died than Hungarians in 1956).

Radio Free Europe is no longer in business, but there is no shortage of other media outlets. It was through those that Trump promised to protesters that “Help is on its way!”. Everyone took it as an imminent US invasion, but so far that hasn’t materialised.

Instead, Trump helpfully informed Iranians that the ayatollahs had promised to stop executions. And their word is their bond, we all know that.

One can be forgiven for forming the impression that sometimes it’s more dangerous to be America’s friend than her enemy. Let’s wait and see what happens, but at the moment things aren’t looking good.