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I’ve always thought that Peter Hitchens is only bonkers on the subject of Russia, while his other commentary is usually sound.

But his analysis of the root cause of Islamic terrorism shows he isn’t willing to content himself with just one mania. Now his other hobby horse, marijuana, has bucked violently and thrown him off.

“First,” he writes, “we have absolutely no evidence that the Westminster murders originated with Islamic State.” True. However, Islamic terrorism doesn’t have to originate with Islamic State to be Islamic. It may simply be inspired by Islam. Nor is ISIS the only Muslim terrorist group.

Islamic State didn’t exist in 2001, which didn’t prevent Muslims from flying large planes into tall buildings, nor in 2005, when Muslims blew up London buses and underground trains. In effect, Hitchens is repeating, if not in so many words, the inane statements uttered by Blair, Bush, Cameron and now May, who all deny any link between terrorism and Islam.

Then comes a contortionist pat on his own back: “As I have pointed out so many times before, many of these actions are committed by criminal misfits with long histories of theft, petty violence and drug abuse.”

We should thank Hitchens for this oft-repeated penetrating insight. Here we were, thinking that chaps who strap explosive belts to their bodies are all law-abiding, non-violent gentlemen who limit their intake of intoxicants to the odd sherry before supper.

Now we stand corrected: they’re misfits. However, why is it that it’s specifically Muslim misfits who do all those nasty things? A close friend of mine, a prison doctor, spent years working with criminal misfits who all abused drugs. However, according to him, they didn’t necessarily seek short-term employment as suicide bombers.

Hitchens doesn’t restrict himself to just one insight. He goes on to inform us that “cannabis is linked to long-term, lingering mental illness.” Yet authorities obsessed with the Islamic link to terrorism “are almost totally uninterested in the amazingly strong correlation between mind-altering drugs and crazed violence.”

This negligence is the fault of “sympathisers with drug legalisation” or “dogmatic neoconservatives” whose livelihood depends on “exaggerating the genuine but limited Islamist threat”. (Islamist, as opposed to Islamic, threat is indeed limited.)

Now I belong to neither of those pernicious groups. Yet one doesn’t have to be a neocon to observe that just about all current terrorist acts are committed by people who scream ‘Allahu akbar!’, not ‘Legalise weed!’. Some of those acts, such as 9/11, require the kind of meticulous planning that would be beyond drugged up zombies.

I happen to agree with Hitchens on the subject of drug legalisation, but not because the odd spliff makes a chap blow himself up on a crowded bus. The argument has to be more nuanced than he seems to be able to put together.

Mind-altering drugs aren’t immoral in se. Drug use in Britain was unrestricted until the 1868 Pharmacy Act and uncriminalised until the 1920 Dangerous Drugs Act, and one can’t seriously believe that what was moral in 1919 suddenly became a sin in 1920. The outer edge of the moral argument reaches only as far as malum prohibitum, which puts dropping acid into the same category as dropping a seat belt.

One is on equally shaky grounds with a utilitarian argument. Taken in moderation, drugs are no more objectionable than alcohol. Taken in excess, some drugs can indeed have undesirable social consequences, but anyone who has ever been attacked by a drunk will agree that weed isn’t unique in that respect.

Hitchens has the causality all wrong. People don’t blow themselves up because they smoke pot. They’re more likely to smoke pot to overcome the fear of blowing themselves up. Cannabis is the Muslim version of Dutch courage.

This isn’t the first time in history that drugs have been used that way. For example, the Viking berserks gave rise to a good English word by munching magic mushrooms before battle, the Saracens went on cannabis-fuelled suicide missions behind the Crusaders’ lines, and Soviet soldiers charged tanks with bayonets under the influence of ethanol.

Drugs have some bad effects, but one can’t build a rational argument on such a shaky foundation. There’s no proof that moderate use of drugs is harmful – and immoderate use of anything, from tap water to tofu, can kill you.

To sum up, the rational case against legalising drugs is weak, and bits of anecdotal evidence won’t make it stronger. A case does exist, but it’s cultural and existential.

Drug taking, whether it’s a joint passed around by youths sitting on the floor or a line of coke cut with a razor blade on a marble top, is a ritual. And any ritual is a semiotic system – not a philosophy but a way of communicating one.

So what do these rituals, as distinct from drugs qua drugs, communicate? Why, they transmit the signals of sex-drugs-and-rock‘n roll modernity, a disease even more communicative than bad taste. And in doing so, they reflect many other dynamics involved in the collapse of our civilisation.

A relativist, empiricist society preaches that absolute truth isn’t only unknowable but nonexistent, and one can discover puny half-truths by experimentation – so why not addle one’s brain with drugs?

A youth is taught that his own self is uniquely important – so why not give it a boost?

A self-indulgent girl grows up never having encountered real beauty, be that art or religion – so why not create a surrogate?

As their senses rival their minds for hopeless ignorance, the modern lot feel not happy but high, not sad but depressed – so why not use drugs? Unskilled in semantics, they have to use semiotics to scream defiance, to spit in the face of the moribund beauty they despise.

Drugs have not always had this hidden semiotic agenda. But semiotics change with age, and what was meat for Messrs Coleridge or Conan Doyle is poison for us.

Thus Hitchens’s campaign against legalisation is commendable. But his crazy attempts to link the unlinkable – cannabis and Islamic terrorism – make one wonder what he himself is on. I wouldn’t mind having some of it.

Putin’s former ally, MP Denis Voronenkov, asked for it.

Throughout Vlad’s tenure, Denis has remained loyal, proving with his every vote that the Communist Party he represented was opposition in name only. He supported Vlad’s every bright idea, including aggression against Georgia, the theft of the Crimea and the de facto annexation of East Ukraine.

A good egg all around in other words, and appropriately rewarded: properties, fleets of luxury cars, a fair chunk of beautifully laundered Panamanian assets.

That means Voronenkov personified Russia’s indigenous government blend of organised crime and secret police. The first ingredient is demonstrated by Panamanian millions, the second by… well, Panamanian millions. Voronenkov wasn’t a full-time officer like Vlad, but no one could have jumped on that bandwagon without being hand in glove with the KGB/FSB.

And then things went wrong: Denis was charged with fraud. It’s important to realise that this charge could be justifiably levelled at every member of Russia’s government, her every billionaire and most millionaires. (The first group overlaps with the other two in its entirety.)

However, it’s never brought up for as long as the chap stays on Vlad’s right side. The fraud charge thus matters not so much in itself as in what it signifies: the loss of Vlad’s favour. And that crime trumps any other, including murder.

Punishment comes swiftly, ranging from judicial imprisonment to extrajudicial killing. There’s no mercy, no appeal, no tariff – Vlad is as likely to forgive disloyalty as a Mafia don would be to spare an associate about to testify.

I don’t know what the beef was between the two men, but it must have been something major. Voronenkov knew the score and didn’t sit around waiting to be ‘whacked’, in his former friend’s jargon.

Last October he and his wife upped sticks and slipped across the border to the Ukraine. There Voronenkov was immediately granted citizenship, promising in return to testify against the former president Yanukovych.

Seemingly out of Vlad’s reach, Voronenkov relaxed and began to taunt his former chieftain from afar. “What’s he going to do?” he tweeted. “Whack me in the middle of Kiev?” Well, yes, was Vlad’s answer and, as a competitive man myself, I know how hard it is not to take a direct challenge.

On Thursday Voronenkov was shot dead at the location specified, the middle of Kiev. His assassin was killed on the spot, so it was a nice, clean hit in the best traditions of Vlad’s alma mater.

I must give Vlad this: he’s a man of his word. He once said: “There’s enemies and there’s traitors. Enemies I can reason with; traitors I wipe out.” Even easier done than said.

This ‘wet job’ came in the wake of another one just two days earlier, when the lawyer Nikolai Gorokhov was defenestrated in Moscow.

The unfortunate jurist dared to represent the family of Sergei Magnitsky, Bill Browder’s lawyer beaten to death in prison, and Browder himself. Yet that transgression alone didn’t call for a mandatory death penalty – a cautionary beating would have sufficed.

But Gorokhov went further than that by agreeing to testify at a US trial of Russian money laundering. Now that’s a capital crime for sure, and the lawyer is fortunate to end up in a coma rather than a coffin.

Every window in Russia can be a window of opportunity: defenestration is a popular method of settling political and commercial disagreements.

Kommersant reporter Ivan Safronov was defenestrated in 2007 for exposing Russia’s secret supplies of arms to Iran and Syria. Financier Sergei Korobeinikov, who had first-hand knowledge of the Russian laundromat, suffered the same fate a year later. (He actually was tossed off his balcony, but let’s not quibble about details).

Yet Vlad can’t be accused of being stuck in the rut of the same old technique. Nor does he always draw a fine line between enemies and traitors – both are high-risk groups, and the methods of dispatching them are as varied as life itself.

Speaking of only the past few years, opposition politician Nemtsov was ‘whacked’ a few feet from the Kremlin, where Vlad could enjoy the spectacle from his window.

Opposition Mafioso Berezovsky was garrotted in Berkshire.

Ex-KGB colleague Litvinenko was poisoned with a radioactive isotope in Mayfair – the first known case of nuclear terrorism.

Another opposition Mafioso Perepelichny, who was singing to the Swiss authorities about Russian money laundering, was poisoned in Surrey with gelsemium, a toxic plant only found in China and widely used there for the same purpose.

Yet another opposition Mafioso Gorbuntsov was shot six times in Canary Warf but miraculously survived.

But never mind talkative Mafiosi – it’s journalists and political opponents who are the usual target. At least 200 of them have been murdered on Putin’s watch and – as anyone familiar with Russia will know – on his direct orders. Hundreds more dissidents have been imprisoned on trumped-up charges, mutilated, savagely beaten up or threatened into silence.

This is how the KGB operates, and Putin once proudly said that “There’s no such thing as ex-KGB. This is for life.”

Not only Vlad himself but also 85 per cent of his government are career KGB officers and agents. The second group also comprises the entire hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church including its patriarch, which may explain the recently developed piety of Putin and his jolly friends.

It would be counterintuitive to expect these old dogs to learn new tricks. Tradecraft has penetrated their DNA and, if you know what the tradecraft is, you won’t be surprised at Russia’s actions.

Look at how the KGB did business and juxtapose it with Vlad’s MO. Assassination – tick. Recruitment through money – tick, as any number of Western politicians demonstrate, from Marine Le Pen to the ex-Chancellor of Germany Schroeder to various members of Trump’s inner circle. Provocation – tick, a technique widely used in the Ukraine and the Baltics. False flag operations – tick. Money laundering – tick, an activity in which the KGB began to indulge when it was still called OGPU.

What I find amazing is that the same people who say all the right things about Islamic terrorism extol the virtues of Putin’s frankly terroristic regime. There’s an important difference between ISIS and Putin: the former can only kill a few hundred people here and there; the latter could ‘whack’ whole countries – something of which Vlad and his mouthpieces never tire of reminding us.

Come to your senses, ladies and gentlemen, and readjust your moral scales before it’s too late. That appliance has gone haywire.

Responding to the carnage at Westminster, Theresa May first did a fair imitation of Churchill by telling the Commons that “we will never waver”.

However, she then went on to prove that neither is she immune to influences of other, considerably inferior, politicians, such as George W. Bush, Tony Blair and Dave Cameron. It’s “wrong”, she said, to describe the attack as “Islamic terrorism”.

This came in an exchange that would rank fairly high on the list of craven, intellectually puny dialogues ever conducted in Parliament. It started with the question by Conservative MP Michael Tomlinson:

“Will the Prime Minister agree with me that what happened was not Islamic, just as the murder of Airey Neave was not Christian, and that in fact both are perversions of religion?” (He was referring to the Tory MP murdered in 1979 by Irish terrorists.)

“I absolutely agree,” said Mrs May. “It is ‘Islamist terrorism’, it is a perversion of a great faith.”

Both the question and the answer reveal a whole set of qualities that ought to disqualify the two interlocutors from government jobs: ignorance, stupidity, cowardice, conformism with any popular fad, contempt for truth.

Implied in the question was an exact parallel between IRA and Islamic terrorism, in that neither of them was motivated by their respective religions. This is offensive, ignorant nonsense.

There isn’t a single verse in the New Testament that demands, or even implies, that infidels should be killed or in any way molested. There are 300-odd verses in the Koran that demand it in so many words. Just off the top:

“Slay them [unbelievers] wherever ye find them…” (2:91) “We shall cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve.” (3:151) “Take them [unbelievers] and kill them wherever ye find them. Against such We have given you clear warrant.” (4:91) “The unbelievers are an open enemy to you.” (4:101) “Take not the Jews and the Christians for friends…” (5:51) “Slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them captive, and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush” (9:5) “Whoso fighteth in the way of Allah, be he slain or be he victorious, on him We shall bestow a vast reward.” (4:74) “…If they turn renegades, seize them and slay them wherever ye find them…” (4:89).

In other words, while it’s impossible to be a murderer for Jesus, it’s not only possible but indeed mandatory to be a murderer for Mohammed. Thus, though the attack on Neave could under no circumstances be described as ‘Christian terrorism’, whatever religion the attackers espoused privately, the attack at Westminster faithfully reflected, and was motivated by, Muslim piety.

This was how Mrs May should have answered Tomlinson’s question, adding that he ought either to learn something about the subject before speaking or, for preference, shut up. The way she did answer it screams all those failings I enumerated above: ignorance, stupidity, cowardice, conformism with any popular fad, disregard for truth.

There’s no difference between Islamic and Islamist. In fact, the second adjective isn’t a valid term at all. Islamic terrorism isn’t “a perversion of a great faith”. It’s a logical reflection of a system of belief that masquerades as some sort of religion but is in fact a heavily politicised death cult with global aspirations.

Theologically, Islam is a patchwork quilt of scraps ripped out of Nestorian Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism and whatever else Mohammed could pick up with the ease of an illiterate autodidact.

The founder of Islam wasn’t a crucified martyr who taught to turn the other cheek. He was a brigand and a military leader, adept at raiding caravans and sacking towns.

His creed proved to be the catalyst to violent conquest whose pace was unprecedented in history. Unlike Christianity, which was first spread by peaceful and usually self-sacrificial sermon, Islam was propagated by exactly the methods currently on display in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Here’s an excerpt from the earliest Muslim biography of Mohammed, showing that in addition to inspiring murder the illustrious Prophet wasn’t averse to committing it with his own hand:

“Then [the Jewish Qurayza tribe] surrendered, and the apostle [Mohammed] confined them in Medina… Then he sent for them and struck off their heads… as they were brought out to him in batches… There were 600 or 700 in all, though some put the figure as high as 800 or 900… This went on until the apostle made an end of them.”

The Muslims began as they meant to go on. The subsequent 1,400 years provide a detailed catalogue of violence, both of the geopolitical and common-or-garden variety. Those who died at Westminster on Wednesday are just the latest additions to the list of Islam’s victims, numbering the better part of 300 million over history.

Is Mrs May unaware of such elementary facts? The scary thing is that it doesn’t matter whether she is or isn’t. She could in her spare time be an avid student of Muslim violence and its direct link with Islam, she could have all the relevant facts at her fingertips – it wouldn’t have made the slightest bit of difference.

As a modern politician, she’d still feel duty-bound to mouth inane PC twaddle about Islamic and Islamist. We no longer have statesmen shaping the intellectual trends of the time. We have self-serving, mentally and morally deficient spivs acting as autopilot automata steering our whole civilisation to extinction.

And you know what the sobering thought is? Mrs May is far from being the worst of the lot.

 

 

PC stands for ‘police constable’, as in the officer murdered in yesterday’s terrorist attack on Westminster. It also stands for ‘politically correct’, as in the coverage of that crime in its immediate aftermath.

By far the greatest amount of reported detail concerned the car used in the crime. The grateful public learned its make, registration number, body style, price, where it was registered and hired, how long it took it to accelerate from 0 to 62mph. It all sounded more like an ad for Hyundai than a report on a heinous multiple murder.

But, though the self-driving revolution is upon us, the murder weapon on wheels didn’t drive itself. It was driven by a man, who then proceeded to enter the grounds of the mother of all parliaments and stab an unarmed policeman to death. (When are we going to abandon the insane idea that our policemen don’t need to be armed? Had PC Palmer carried a gun, he might have survived.)

This man decided to kill and be killed – he knew he wouldn’t survive the attack. Discarding the possibility that he was suffering from an incurable disease and chose suicide by cop to end his life (and a few other people’s while at it), this man must have been inspired by an idea he considered worth dying for.

What was that idea? Who was that man? The immediate report said only that he was ‘Asian’.

Now Asia is a rather large continent. Hence to say that someone is Asian means saying nothing at all. An Iraqi is more different from a Japanese than a Norwegian from a Kosovar, a Buddhist from a Muslim, or a Shintoist from a Copt.

Thus the very same reporters who described the car in intricate detail, stopping just short of mentioning its compression ratio and McPherson struts, neglected to provide any information about the murderer.

That left a blank to be filled by conjecture. What was your first guess of the terrorist’s identity? Sorry, I’m jumping the gun, as it were.

We were informed that, until further information, the police were treating the incident as an act of terrorism. Contextually, the availability of further information could change that assessment for… what exactly? That it was a charitable act?

So let’s display responsible restraint and refer to the driver-stabber as only the alleged terrorist. Now what was he? A Buddhist? Hinduist? Syrian Copt? Shintoist?

Are those Zen, Tibetan and Tantric Buddhists on the warpath again? Possible. But not exactly likely. Certainly not as likely as the first thought that sprang to my mind and I’m sure yours.

The attacker was a Muslim. I realise that jumping to this conclusion before we’ve even been told that a terrorist, as opposed to charitable, act was committed, betokens racism, Islamophobia, fascism, xenophobia, propensity for discrimination and, most damning of all, rebellion against the PC Zeitgeist.

But even at the risk of being accused of all those deadly sins, it’s hard to disconnect one’s analytical faculty altogether. You know, that part of the cognitive process that relies on known facts and historical information, all suggesting that nowadays any such act can only be perpetrated by a Muslim.

It’s sickening that at that tragic moment reporters were wary of coming across as transgressors against PC pseudo-morality. At least they had an excuse, however lame: initial shock at the sight of the carnage.

By contrast, David Aaronovitch of The Times had 24 hours to ponder the event. His conclusion? “…yesterday’s attack should not once again trigger a wholesale tarring of Muslim communities in Britain with the terrorist brush.”

Heaven forbid. We can’t possibly think of tarring the whole community wholesale or even retail. In fact, we can’t possibly think, full stop – not if Aaronovitch’s musings are an example of thought.

How does he imagine tarring the whole Muslim community with such a brush? Insisting that every Muslim is a suicide bombing waiting to happen? But no one in his right mind would think that.

Of course not every Muslim is a terrorist. By the same token, in 1940 only seven per cent of Germans were Nazis, and communists in Russia never exceeded 10 per cent of the population. Applying Aaronovitch’s logic, we shouldn’t say nasty things about either Nazis or communists or, God forbid, Germans and Russians as a group.

Yet in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, 27 per cent of British Muslims expressed sympathy with the murderers. That’s over a million potential jihadists, in impressive absolute numbers.

Instead of mouthing all this nauseating PC waffle, we must think clearly and act decisively. Otherwise terrorism will indeed become ‘part and parcel’ of living in London, which our Muslim mayor nonchalantly suggests it already is.

Just like the British who didn’t insist on fine distinctions between good and bad Germans in 1940, we have to realise there’s a war on. And wartime inevitably weakens commitment to civil liberties and abstract liberal philosophising.

I’m not suggesting that any British Muslim must be treated as an enemy alien, but certain measures suggest themselves.

All Muslim immigration must be summarily stopped until the present jihad madness becomes less febrile. Every mosque in which a single jihadist word has been uttered or a single murderer recruited must be shut down and preferably razed. Sharia law must be declared illegal. Anyone implicated in the perpetration or propaganda of terrorism must be deported, regardless of whether or not he holds a British passport. When terrorists’ provenance can be traced to a foreign country, that country must be held culpable and punished on an apocalyptic scale.

And so forth – all the time keeping the tar brush safely locked away. And oh yes, we must secure for Mr Aaronovitch an employment more suitable to his talents. Social worker perhaps, or community organiser, provided it’s not a Muslim community, where his name would be a major turn-off.

Since my hastily written piece yesterday, our conservative press has mercifully counterbalanced the emetic encomiums of McGuinness coming from the likes of the BBC, Blair and Corbyn.

The IRA chieftain has been correctly described as a cold-blooded mass murderer, and heartfelt wishes have been expressed that he rot in hell for all eternity. Photographs of his blood-soaked victims have covered newspaper spreads. His admirers have been appropriately flogged in public.

But alas even our conservative press isn’t all that clever. It too falls victim to modern cults. It too fails to delve into such matters at sufficient depth.

Hence, having said all the right things about the dead butcher, The Mail attacked the BBC’s John Simpson for daring to compare McGuinness to the canonised hero Nelson Mandela. “I really do despair,” wrote The Mail’s Steven Glover.

Comparing the two, Simpson said in his inimitable style that they should be seen “on that kind of side of the ledger”. Now I had my own issues with Simpson as far back as the early ‘90s, when he was covering all those glasnosts and perestroikas with schoolgirlish gasps of delight.

But here I must spring to his defence. McGuinness and Mandela do belong on the same ‘side of the ledger’, although not in the sense in which Simpson meant. Mutatis mutandis, the two are typologically close in that both were terrorists, murderers and torturers.

The gist of Glover’s despair is that, while blacks “were denied basic human rights” in South Africa, McGuinness operated against “the United Kingdom… where there were free elections and a democratically elected government”.

This belief in the redemptive value of a particular political method is deeply moving if not particularly intelligent.

Hitler’s government was democratically elected – would Glover have objected to a sniper’s bullet nipping it in the bud in 1933? Russia’s tsarist government wasn’t democratically elected – would Mr Glover have hailed the revolutionary terror that set the stage for the subsequent Bolshevik takeover? With the foreknowledge of the consequences in both cases?

Perhaps. After all, Mark Twain, Glover’s more talented predecessor in the useful idiocy business, showed the way. At the height of the anti-tsarist terror campaign, he wrote: “If such a government cannot be overthrown otherwise than by dynamite, then thank God for dynamite!” One wonders if, had he lived long enough to see it, Twain would have thanked God for the ensuing slaughter of millions.

One can infer that Glover welcomes not only Mandela’s murderous activities but also the hell unleashed in South Africa as a direct result. Blacks, whose human rights were so egregiously denied by apartheid, are now suffering from the kind of violence they never experienced under that, admittedly unsavoury, rule.

The country hatched out of Mandela’s version of freedom has one of the world’s highest crime rates, including murders, assaults and rapes (adult, child, infant and elderly).

Around 50 people are murdered every day, which is more by an order of magnitude than under apartheid. Over 40 per cent of South African women have been raped in their lifetime, while over 25 per cent of South African men admit to rape, half of them to more than one.

The cult of Mandela is as unfortunate as it’s understandable. Having lost God, modernity seeks idols, and Mandela was cast in this role while still doing time for terrorism. But all idols are false by definition, and Mandela is no exception.

The African National Congress, led by Mandela until his 1963 trial and after his 1990 release, was a Marxist terrorist organisation committed to the violent overthrow of the government. In that undertaking the ANC was assisted by the Soviets and their satellites, mainly Cuban and East German.

And it wasn’t just with arms: East German Stasi helped the ANC set up ‘Quatro’, the detention centre across the border in Angola. There dozens of anti-Marxists were tortured and murdered.

Mandela’s ANC thus received assistance from the same quarters as McGuinness’s IRA. In that spirit of international cooperation, the IRA sent its bomb-making experts to train aspiring ANC murderers, which greatly improved their efficiency.

However, the ANC didn’t just adopt foreign techniques. Some indigenous touches were added, such as the widespread practice of ‘necklacing’, whereby an old tyre was filled with petrol, put around a dissident’s neck and set alight.

All that was going on at the height of the Cold War, when direct association with the Soviets still carried some stigma in the West. That’s why any evidence of the ANC’s – and IRA’s – Marxist nature was routinely hushed up in the West’s predominantly liberal press.

Also kept under wraps was Mandela’s handwritten essay How to Be a Good Communist, in which he promised that “South Africa will be a land of milk and honey under a Communist government.”

But good communists know that war can be waged not only by violence but also by what Lenin called ‘legalism’ and what today would be called ‘peace process’. An intelligent man, Mandela grasped the situation. Guns not being the realistic long-term option, he had to become the prophet of peace. Parallels with McGuinness are screaming – is anyone listening?

Regardless of his personal participation in mass murder or lack thereof, Mandela is responsible for anything perpetrated on his watch by the organisation he led. Similarly, McGuinness, who was more hands-on, is responsible for every bomb, shooting and torture perpetrated by his ghastly gang.

So, like Glover, I really do despair too – at a world that has replaced faith with credulity, worship with idolatry and sound analysis with facile sentimentality.

“We shall never surrender,” thundered Churchill as Luftwaffe bombs, most of them incidentally made in the USSR, were raining down on London. And he was telling the truth: Britain stood firm.

However, having resisted those bombs with steadfast courage, 58 years later Britain meekly surrendered to other, smaller bombs planted by Irish gangsters in residential buildings, school buses and public transport.

Most of those bombs (or their components) were also made in the USSR or its satellites, as were the small arms with which those same gangsters murdered or kneecapped anyone they didn’t like. Admittedly, the electric drills used to torture victims were made by Western firms, Black & Decker being the preferred mark.

The gang was financed, armed and trained by various Marxist dictatorships, Muslim terrorists and of course directly by Russia. Some financing came from the traditional pursuits of organised crime: gun running, drugs, prostitution, gambling. Yet this was worse than any criminal activity pursued purely for fiscal gains.

For the whole monstrosity was couched in the faddish bien pensant language of national liberation, freedom and sovereignty. Mass murder was thereby justified and sanctified. Dupes around the world, in places like Boston, Mass., didn’t realise that the only real purpose of mass murder is to murder masses. All else is PR, including allusions to religious strife, pathetic when coming from a predominantly Marxist group.

It’s to this lot that Britain surrendered on Good Friday, 1998. It’s appropriate that the submission to this revolting gang was brokered by the most revolting character ever to disgrace 10 Downing Street, Tony Blair.

To be fair, successive US administrations had a role to play too, that of applying pressure on British governments to yield to the gangsters’ blackmail for the sake of ‘peace’. Sentimentally, which is to say stupidly, the Clintons of this world identified the IRA with their own Continental Congress. Politically, which is to say cynically, they were desperate to mollify the Irish vote.

The Good Friday ignominy was, and still is, hailed as a great success of British diplomacy. None dare call it surrender, none dare call it defeat.

Yet that’s exactly what it was. The butchers of Omagh formed the government of Northern Ireland, which entitled them to seats in Westminster Parliament. To their credit they turned the honour down.

Terrorism proceeded apace, if on a smaller scale. The Provos continued to kill and mutilate supposed informers, using the false flag of Real IRA. Their fanatical supporters were still refusing to cooperate with police. Even people who weren’t fanatical supporters also refused to cooperate, attached as they were to their kneecaps, lives and families.

Murderers serving time in prison received early releases. Those on the run and escaped prisoners were amnestied. The few not amnestied were still finding safe havens with IRA supporters. Their caches of weapons and explosives, supposed to have been ‘put beyond use’, still fired and blew up – no one was serious about verifying the terms of the agreement.

The gang won, and now the second-in-command victor, Martin McGuinness has died, to the deafening din of obituary panegyrics. The BBC obit mentions that “he was working as a butcher’s assistant when Northern Ireland’s Troubles erupted in the late 1960s” – without mentioning in so many words that he then graduated to full-fledged butcher in the IRA.

Yes, “…when soldiers from the Parachute Regiment killed 14 people in his hometown,… McGuinness was second in command of the IRA in the city.” However, “The Saville Inquiry concluded he had probably been armed with a sub-machine-gun on the day, but had not done anything that would have justified the soldiers opening fire.”

For fairness sake, the obituary mentions that McGuinness organised “one of the IRA’s most high-profile attacks… the attempt to kill Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984”. But then it smoothly segues into praising McGuinness’s role in graciously agreeing to accept Britain’s surrender and shake Her Majesty’s hand (how she must have cringed inside).

“My war is over,” he famously declared then. Of course it was. He had won. And now his awful life is over too.

“Where they make a desert, they call it peace,” wrote Tacitus. He didn’t add that sometimes surrender is called peace too. The great historian wasn’t that prescient.

Much has been made in the press about President Trump’s relations with Putin, and with good reason.

Several men in his administration, not to mention Trump himself, have been compromised by their links with Russia’s government, history’s unique fusion of secret police and organised crime.

Even if the links are unimpeachable from the legal standpoint, they’re certainly questionable morally – any personal, especially remunerative, relations with an evil regime have to be highly suspect.

Contrary to the Zeitgeist, immoral isn’t a full synonym of illegal, as many British newspapers keep telling us. However, to cite an unfashionable source, “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”

This brings us to The Evening Standard’s new editor, former Chancellor George Osborne, who since his sacking has further strengthened his already impressive credentials as a spiv to rival Tony-Dave.

In the good, if relatively recent, tradition of our public (self-) service, George has used the intervening months to earn millions in various jobs, most of them sinecures. Nothing new about this: we’re used to politicians using government as a springboard to self-aggrandisement, and only as that.

But even against that rotten background George’s editorial appointment has taken many a breath away. The papers are full of indignant accounts, with the phrase ‘conflict of interest’ ever-present.

True enough, it’s odd to allow a man who so recently occupied the second-biggest HMG post and is still an MP to take charge of an influential newspaper. Surely this gives Osborne an unfair jump on the competition, what with his being privy to most government secrets?

It’s unclear how free press can hold government to account if a major editor is servant to both masters. For a minister or MP to toss off the odd column explaining government policy is one thing; quite another for him to assume a role that presupposes “throwing bricks through windows”, in the phrase of a prominent journalist.

Anyway, every possible legal angle of Osborne’s appointment has already been explored under the electron microscope. Bereft as I am of such fine optical instruments, I have nothing to add to that scrutiny.

However, none of the commentators on this dodgy deal has mentioned the Russian connection involved, or more precisely the direct link to the aforementioned fusion of secret police and organised crime. Yet this is more interesting than the legalistic casuistry.

The Standard is owned (through the proxy of his son Evgeny) by the Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev, who carries that fusion in his own person. He has parlayed his KGB career into a fortune.

Exactly what Lebedev did in the KGB isn’t known. Officially he, like Putin, served in the First Chief Directorate (foreign intelligence). However, again like Putin, he must have first made his bones in domestic oppression. At the start of his business career he did like to threaten his competitors with KGB ‘torture chambers’, boasting of his experience in their use.

In 1995, having been in business for only two years, Lebedev bought a moribund National Reserve Bank. Government-owned Gazprom, the world’s biggest gas producer, instantly transferred $300 million into its accounts, even though the bank seemed to be on its last legs.

That started Lebedev’s empire, which now includes a large media portfolio spearheaded by our own Standard and Independent. The true purpose of those acquisitions was revealed by hacked Kremlin e-mails, showing how Lebedev used the papers to orchestrate a press campaign securing Western approval for the theft of the Crimea.

His son, the papers’ nominal owner, commented on this with characteristic effrontery: “My father has spent his life trying to promote freedom of expression and justice in his fight against corruption in Russia.” Of course he has. Shame on you for thinking KGB officers cum billionaires may devote their lives to anything other than promoting human liberties.

Why did this de facto KGB operation decide to hire Osborne? It certainly wasn’t for his journalistic experience, of which he hasn’t had a single day. Would it be wild conjecture to suggest that the Lebedevs want to explore Osborne’s government connections for their own nefarious purposes?

One wonders how professional journalists on The Standard will like working for an amateur spiv. Probably they’ll like it well enough, having bought into the paper’s implicit editorial policy. One of them once tried to explain to me over drinks why Putin is a force of good in the world.

He stopped just short of repeating the line uttered yesterday by Dmitri Kisilev, Putin’s chief TV propagandist. Commenting on the 1917 October revolution, the man the Russians affectionately call ‘Putin’s Goebbels’ said: “The amount of freedom in the world grew as a result.”

The Standard, operating as it does in London, can’t yet be quite so forthright, but perhaps George will sort it out. After all, he has form in dealing with Russian Mafiosi.

As a rising mock-Tory star, Osborne once had several meetings with Oleg Deripaska, the Russian ‘aluminium king’, whose Mafia links have made him persona non grata in the US.

Since in Russia organised crime is inseparable from the KGB/FSB, it’s useful to remember that this organisation never offers something for nothing. If, as was established at the time, Deripaska used Osborne as a conduit for donations to the Tory party, he didn’t just pursue his own business interests.

Osborne acted, and still does, on the principle first enunciated by Emperor Vespasian: pecunia non olet. To him money, whether flowing into his own coffers or his party’s, indeed doesn’t smell. To some of us the Lebedevs’ shilling stinks to high heaven.

Then again, if we let KGB Mafiosi buy our newspapers, how can we object to our politicians working for them?

After decades of compulsory and comprehensive secondary education, the people have become putty in demagogues’ hands.

No limits exist any longer on the ignorant idiocy of political falsehoods uttered by politicians and swallowed by their flock. By far the greatest falsehoods involve democracy, raised to the status of pagan demiurge.

People everywhere, especially in the US, react to various word combinations featuring ‘democracy’ with Pavlovian alacrity. Some such combinations have attained idiomatic stability. For example, no one sees anything wrong with intellectually unsound phrases like ‘liberal democracy’.

Democracy refers to a political method used to decide who governs the country. Liberty, with its various cognates, refers to a desired effect of government, no matter who forms it and by what method.

Democracy is a physical technicality; liberty mainly has metaphysical connotations. It describes the amount of latitude the individual enjoys, his autonomy in the face of pressures exerted both vertically (by the state) and horizontally (by society).

Accepting the two components of ‘liberal democracy’ as mutually indispensable betokens an inert mind. The underlying assumption is that liberty is an integral property of democracy and vice versa.

But this assumption doesn’t stand up even to cursory examination, never mind scrutiny – either in theory or in practice.

In theory, 50.1 per cent of the electorate may well vote for selling the nation into slavery, provided the price is good. The remaining 49.9 could scream themselves hoarse about the monstrosity of it all. Their protests would go unheeded: democracy has been served.

Nor is it justified to believe that democracy precludes tyranny. This is simply not the case, as the democratically elected Messrs Hitler, Perón, Mugabe, Putin, Lukashenko, Ahmadinejad, Yanukovych and Macîas Nguema (who gratefully murdered a third of the population of Equatorial Guinea that had voted him in) demonstrate so vividly.

In fact, no serious political thinker, from Plato and Aristotle to Machiavelli and Montesquieu, from Burke to Lecky, from Jefferson, Madison and Adams to de Maistre, Tocqueville and even Mill (the last two both talked about ‘the tyranny of the majority’), was unaware of the despotic potential of democracy. They all had misgivings about democracy; most of them were downright hostile to it.

The subjects of King George (choose any numeral) or King Louis (ditto) enjoyed the kind of individual freedom that isn’t even approached by the citizens of any ‘liberal democracy’ of today. To use one, far from the most important, example, no Western monarch would have dreamed of extorting over half of his subjects’ earnings – something that’s accepted as a fair privilege of any ‘liberal democracy’.

No Western monarch could have conceived intruding on the people’s private lives to the same extent as modern ‘liberal democracies’ routinely do for ‘the common good’. (Michael Gove, supposedly the intellectual giant among the Tories, has foolishly praised Mrs May for using those words at every turn. He doesn’t seem to realise that ‘common good’ is the self-vindicating buzz phrase of every modern tyranny.)

It wouldn’t have occurred to, say, Charles I to dictate what the good yeomen of Suffolk or Yorkshire should eat or drink, how they should raise and educate their children or what kind of help they should employ.

Not only do modern democracies exert an intolerable (if often unnoticed) vertical pressure, they also corrupt or coerce societies into applying the even worse horizontal kind. For example, no lords or magistrates of the past imposed such tyrannical diktats on language as do today’s enforcers of political correctness. No government censorship of the past was as despotic as today’s self-censorship demanded by society.

The state throws its weight behind such demands, with any ‘liberal democracy’ prepared to punish people not for what they do but increasingly for what they say. This blurs the distinction between state and society, yet not many see this as a factor of tyranny.

Having destroyed the content of Western civilisation, modernity has become obsessed with its form. Hence people are brainwashed into worshipping the democratic method without fully understanding what it is. Ask your average American what the difference is between democracy and republicanism and he’ll think you’re talking about the two political parties (an Englishman would fail the same test with ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’).

Actually, there exist two types of democracy: direct and indirect. The former is people voting for policies by plebiscite, without mediation by institutions. The latter is people electing their representatives and trusting them to govern.

Representative democracy also has two types: democracy proper and republicanism. Burke dreaded the first type: parliamentarians being not people’s representatives but their delegates, committed to act not just according to people’s interests but also their wishes. The second type, republicanism, involves representatives governing according to their own conscience.

Direct democracy, as the dominant method of government, clearly can’t function in communities larger than a few thousand inhabitants. If it tried to do so, complete anarchy would ensue.

As to the two forms of indirect democracy, the much touted checks and balances of modern politics involve a combination of them. After all, as Machiavelli argued in his Discourses, taking his cue from Aristotle, no political arrangement can exist in its pure form without degenerating into something unsavoury.

The republican element is historically aristocratic, going back to the erstwhile councils of elders, such as our own Witenagemot. In the crypto-republic of our constitutional monarchy this is the role played by the House of Lords. Thus accusing it of being undemocratic, as ignoramuses do all the time, is like accusing the courts of being judgemental.

But ours isn’t the only undemocratic constitution. The republican (a simulacrum of aristocratic) element in the US political mix comes from the Senate. Those who think it’s a representative democratic body ought to consider the fact that California (p. 38,332,521) and Wyoming (p. 582,658) each have two senators.

The modern tendency, which both Plato and Aristotle predicted with uncanny prescience, is to eliminate or at least emasculate the republican elements, letting democracy run riot. Hence our modern government by focus groups: spivs elected by manipulating blocs of voters expect to be re-elected by pandering to voters’ whims.

It’s critical to realise that therein lies the structural flaw of democracy. This is what turns democracy into a lie and those in government into liars. If you wish to contest this comment, simply compare today’s politicians with yesterday’s statesmen.

Where are the Pitts, Burkes, Washingtons, Madisons and Disraelis of yesteryear? Water under Westminster Bridge. May and Trump are the best we can do these days, and we’re happy to have them rather than Tony-Dave-Hillary-Barack.

Hilaire Belloc wrote about such joy with his customary brilliance: “We are tickled by [the Barbarian’s] irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond; and on these faces there is no smile.”

The London School of Economics was founded by the Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who hated the English class system but loved Lenin.

That established a certain intellectual capital, and the LSE has been living off the interest every since. I remember many years ago, when Margaret Thatcher was PM, my son studied at the LSE for a semester, and I took him there on his first day.

A poster in the lobby advertised a scholarly debate on the subject of “Resolved: this house will assassinate Thatcher”. I was appalled at such a cavalier omission of the honorific. Surely it should be ‘Mrs Thatcher’, I thought.

I also thought a few other things, too robust to cite here. Suffice it to say that the faculty and students were evidently attached to the notion of upholding the university’s fine Marxist tradition.

Having said that, for all its gauche (or is it sinister?) leftward bias, which these days isn’t that different from most major universities, the LSE has also enjoyed a sound academic reputation. Why, it has even boasted some prominent conservative scholars, such as Michael Oakeshott and my dear late friend Ken Minogue.

That reputation, whatever little is left of it, lies in tatters. For, now that Oakeshott and Ken are no longer with us, the LSE has filled the gap by appointing the heavily tattooed Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie as visiting professor on Women, Peace and Security.

It’s good to see that Angelina has been able to retrain for a new career. Having undergone a prophylactic double mastectomy, she has lost the two most salient aspects of her talent and had to reinvent herself. Ideally, she ought to have chosen Bristol University though (if you aren’t English, you won’t understand the allusion; if you are, I apologise).

I don’t know how diligently Angelina has kept abreast of the current academic trends, but then her professorship has to be mostly titular. Then again, perhaps it isn’t, for there can’t be too many other scholars around to answer the LSE’s urgent need for academic exegesis on Women, Peace and Security.

In fact, I can’t think offhand of any great thinkers of the past who distinguished themselves in this subject, but this may be ignorance speaking. I’m sure there must have been whole groves densely populated by scholars doing extensive research and coming to the conclusion that, when there’s peace, women enjoy greater security.

The actress admitted “feeling butterflies” before the first lecture, which isn’t surprising in such an unfamiliar setting. To get rid of the stage fright, she should have imagined she was shooting a nude scene and dressed accordingly, but that was no longer an option for purely surgical reasons.

As it was, she was wearing “a simple yet sophisticated longline coat” highlighted in all the newspaper accounts of Angelina’s foray into the academe. This must be a new trend in academic critique.

I mean, I don’t recall anyone mentioning Ken Minogue’s “sober yet well-cut charcoal-grey suit”. Reviewers tended to focus on what he was saying more than on what he was wearing.

But, as the latest Nobel Prize winner for literature has discovered, “the times, they are a-changing.” Anyway, to be fair, some accounts did mention things other than the new professor’s sartorial excellence.

To quote one such account, “The course helps scholars, practitioners, activists, policy-makers and students to develop strategies to promote justice, human rights and participation for women in conflict-affected situations around the world.”

Also mentioned was “the aim of promoting gender equality and enhancing women’s economic, social and political participation and security.” My, admittedly non-academic, advice to women finding themselves in such situations would be to get the hell out before they get raped or killed, and never mind ‘social and political participation’.

But that’s because I haven’t studied this academic discipline as deeply as Angelina has. And sure enough, her scholarly exploits drove the students to paroxysms of delight the professor hasn’t enjoyed since doing those nude sex scenes (film references available on request).

‘Wonderful’ was the adjective most widely used, and one post-graduate student enthused: “She’ll make an amazing visiting professor. So honoured to hear her inaugural lecture at LSE on sexual violence, rape, working with refugees”.

It’s a safe bet that Angelina’s advice on rape didn’t include that tired ‘relax and enjoy’ cliché, and nor could she have possibly drawn the students’ attention to the well-documented fact that, in Europe at least, it’s refugees who commit most sexual violence.

Actually, this unmitigated tosh is itself an act of violence, raping as it does not just a formerly reputable university but indeed the very concept of academic life. Any boob could see that.

Fooled you, didn’t I? Actually, this photograph depicts not the handsome actor but me. It was taken this morning off the terrace of the Acropolis Museum, and that’s where Mr Clooney comes in.

But first things first. The museum is the most amazing structure of this kind I’ve ever seen, and certainly the newest. No major Athenian museum predates the 1970s, but the Acropolis museum is barely 10 years old.

Its 25,000 square metres are used with little regard for economy of space: only three floors are taken up by exhibits and, since there aren’t many of them, they’re hardly crowded. The third floor is entirely given to a full-size replica of the Parthenon frieze, as it was before most of its marble bas reliefs were removed by Lord Elgin.

The frieze features the few remaining originals, mostly depicting Greek chaps fighting centaurs, and quite a bit more blanks filled in by the poorly done plaster casts of the marbles now adorning the British Museum. The plaster casts are accompanied by write-ups stopping just short of diatribes accusing Lord Elgin of theft.

There’s a movement under way to return the Elgin marbles where they once belonged, or rather to the museum next door. The movement is spearheaded by Amal Clooney, George’s heavily pregnant wife, whose restless conscience easily embraces any cause, worthy or otherwise. George himself is adding the weight of his celebrity status to the undertaking, and one can only guess his motives.

Solidarity with his wife must figure most prominently for, had he remained single, George probably wouldn’t know the Elgin marbles from the ones children play with. Just a couple of years ago he spoke with well-rehearsed passion about the urgent need to return the marbles to “the Pantheon”. Pantheon, Parthenon, what the hell does it matter as long as the cause is just and offers good photo ops?

Then again, George may sense inner kinship with centaurs, himself fitting the technical definition of one: half man, half horse’s arse. Mercifully, however, he limits himself to broad strokes only, leaving it for Amal to sweat out the legalities, which are far from straightforward.

I’m not going to argue the intricacies of the international law involved, simply because, not being a celebrity, I only ever try to talk about things I know at least something about.

However, I’m willing to accept that the Greeks may have a valid legal claim to get their marbles back. Then again, they may not. What is absolutely undeniable is that, in view of their history, our moral right to the sculptures is unimpeachable.

The Earl of Elgin first got involved with them in 1799, when he was appointed His Majesty’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, of which Greece was then part.

Upon his arrival he went into the archives and noticed that many of the sculptures listed were no longer extant. An utterly civilised man, Lord Elgin decided to finance the salvation effort, starting with cataloguing the sculptures in the Parthenon and elsewhere in the Acropolis.

He then discovered that the Turks, whose reverence for such things wasn’t the same as Lord Elgin’s, were burning the marble sculptures to obtain lime for construction purposes. Aghast, Lord Elgin began to have the sculptures removed in 1801, completing the project in 1812.

This cost him £70,000 (almost £70 million in today’s inflated cash), a huge outlay partly offset when Lord Elgin sold the sculptures to the British Museum. That he was driven not only by aesthetic appreciation but also by patriotism is evident from the fact that he rejected much higher offers from Napoleon and others.

It’s a fair bet that, had the marbles remained in Greece, which is to say in the Ottoman Empire, they wouldn’t have survived. As it is, they delight six million people every year, all of whom ought to be grateful to Lord Elgin.

Since viewing the exhibits didn’t take long, I had plenty of time on my hands to ponder the fate of the marbles before going on one last walk in Athens. Striking out west, we walked along a pleasant residential street lined with orange trees bending under the weight of fruit. I nicked an orange out of curiosity, wondering how come I was the only one with such larcenous inclinations.

When we passed a street market, where the very same oranges were selling at 40p a kilo, I stopped wondering. As we walked, the centre of Athens was overflown by some 20 fighter-bombers flying nap-of-the-earth at supersonic speeds, complete with deafening booms.

Back in the First World, city centres are spared such entertainment, but Athenians didn’t bat an eye. In their long history they’ve seen worse.