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Whenever massacres like the one in Las Vegas happen, hacks respond by venting their ideological prejudices.

Those on the Left want to ban all guns wherever they haven’t yet been banned. Those on the Right want to legalise all guns wherever they haven’t yet been legalised. And there’s also the middle ground, exemplified by our own Max Hastings, where the prevailing sentiment is close to the title above.

In his article, Mr Hastings first highlights his credentials by mentioning his marksmanship exploits in the army and his rich collection of sporting guns. He then proceeds to make a case against all guns “designed to kill people”, and hails the British ban on handguns – which, by the way, tend to be a lot less deadly than Mr Hastings’s shotguns.

He also claims that no evidence exists that private ownership of guns reduces crime, this because Mr Hastings has never read an article about a hero who foiled a mugging by whipping out his trusted S&W.

Such cavalier treatment of data is typical of hacks in general, but especially those on, or leaning towards, the Left, such as Mr Hastings. If he’s really interested in the truth of the matter, which he probably isn’t, I suggest he read John Lott’s comprehensive study, whose conclusion is also its title: More Guns, Less Crime (University of Chicago Press, 1998).

Dr Lott presents heaps of statistical analysis of crime data for every US city, county and state, measuring the effect of 13 different types of gun control on crime rates.

Those who are motivated by facts rather than ideological bias will learn that, since the time most states allowed citizens to carry concealed weapons, the levels of all violent crimes have gone down significantly.

What has this effect isn’t Mr Hastings’s imaginary vigilante saving a fair maiden by shooting her assailant dead, but the simple knowledge that this could happen. It’s not exactly counterintuitive to suggest that an aspiring criminal is more likely to be deterred by a possible bullet than by a non-custodial sentence complete with counselling.

The experience of other countries bears this out. In Switzerland, every able-bodied man has an assault rifle at home. This is complemented by handguns to be found in practically every home. However, the murder rate in Switzerland is so close to nonexistent that the Swiss don’t even bother keeping the relevant statistics.

Another example I like to quote is that of Japan, where gun laws are among the world’s strictest. Sure enough, the murder rate in Japan is low. However, it’s even lower within the Japanese community in California, where gun laws are among the world’s loosest.

The tendency to shoot people just for the hell of it has as little to do with the availability of guns as the tendency to drive vans through crowds has to do with the availability of vans.

This format doesn’t allow extensive speculation on the reasons for such crimes. Suffice it to say that they cover just about everything that goes into the making of society: religion, culture, education, law, psychiatric care, social and demographic make-up.

Denying law-abiding citizens the right to defend their life and property would only make sense if the state could be relied upon to do this job by itself. However, the growing crime statistics throughout the West show this isn’t the case.

Having thus put forth the case for legalising guns, we can then move into a different but related territory: the kind of guns that ought to be legal.

One suspects that even fully paid-up NRA members would agree that some weapons don’t really belong in private hands. Missile launchers would fall into that category, along with cannon, howitzers and – dare one say it – heavy machine guns.

NRA chaps regard the Second Amendment to the US Constitution with the reverence that used to be reserved for the Gospels. That amendment says: “A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.”

Fair enough. But what kind of guns are we talking here? When that document was drafted, the only firearms in existence were single-shot flintlock muskets and pistols, delivering a fire rate of two shots a minute at best.

These were the weapons available to ‘a well-regulated militia’ should the need to protect ‘the security of a free state’ have arisen. Such a need was real at the time: neither the Constitution of the United States nor its society had been sufficiently bedded down to guarantee freedom and security.

In case of real threat, internal or external, an armed populace was indeed useful. Wielding the same type of weapons as those used by the army, and with a similar skill, people could be instantly massed together to form a formidable fighting force (as, alas, they were in the Civil War).

However, life has moved on, and not even the most fanatical NRA members claim that untrained chaps armed with M16 rifles could take to the streets in defence of ‘the security of a free state’.

A threat to national security could conceivably come only from rather more sophisticated weapons: ICBMs, nuclear bombs, tanks, artillery, AA systems, mobile missile launchers. I’d suggest that a tax-payer wielding an assault rifle, even one with a full-auto capability, would offer an inadequate line of defence.

That’s why even the aforementioned NRA types no longer offer such lofty claims. Instead they talk about personal protection, and here I’m with them a hundred per cent.

It logically follows that law-abiding citizens should have access to guns used, and useful, for that purpose. Yet here a full-auto rifle capable of firing 900 rounds a minute is a bit of an overkill, as it were.

Such weapons are designed to put so much lead per square foot, which is helpful when dealing with a frontal assault. However, the probability of Mr Billy-Joe Jones finding himself in such a situation at his Houston bungalow is low enough to be dismissed.

Any expert will tell you that a 12-bore shotgun, like one of those Mr Hastings uses for sporting purposes, is ideal for home defence. A shotgun is a simple mechanism that doesn’t require much maintenance, nor much skill to operate. Just point it in the general direction of the intruder, pull the trigger, and – as they say in Houston – he’s wallpaper.

A shotgun is too unwieldy to carry around, say on one’s way to a supermarket or a business meeting. There a handgun should do nicely, though its effective use does require much training. I used to go to shooting ranges regularly, but it took me a long time to learn how to hit the proverbial barn door with my .357.

These two types of weapons are sufficient for self-defence, and forget about the need for ‘a well-regulated militia’. That’s why they should be legal.

So, to expand on the title above, I’m not anti-gun, but having millions of army weapons in civilian hands is sheer madness. Insisting on it undermines the otherwise open and shut case in favour of private gun ownership.

Society won’t be purged of Original Sin, and therefore crime, by banning things, be it guns, vans, knives, pop concerts or that towering monument to vulgarity, Las Vegas. But good people must be allowed to protect themselves against bad ones – and have the tools to do that job.

The root ‘paed’ (or ‘ped’) derives from the Greek for boy or, more generally, child. It appears in many words, mostly compounds. These range from the laudable pedagogue and paediatrician to the eccentric pedant to the naughty pederast and nasty paedophile.

Greek no longer being taught in British schools, our comprehensively educated thugs place too much emphasis on the first root of some compounds and not enough on the second. As a result, they sometimes attack paediatricians, mistaking them for paedophiles.

Yet, whatever we feel about pederasty and paedophilia, neither presents a greater danger than another ‘paedo’ word: paedocracy, rule by children.

You don’t even have to read Lord of the Flies to validate this point of view. Just look at Britain, a country soon to suffer untold misery brought about partly by her ideological commitment to paedocracy.

Taking his cue from the French statesman Guizot, Churchill once said that “Any man who is not a socialist at age 20 has no heart. Any man who is still a socialist at age 40 has no head.”

Some doubt the attribution of this quote, but few doubt its veracity. Actually, real, visceral conservatives are unlikely to be socialists at any age, which doesn’t mean they have no heart. But the statement rings true as an indicator of a general trend.

It’s vindicated by modern democracies, where youngsters tend to vote for Left-wing politicians and causes, whereas older and wiser heads are more likely to vote the right way.

The two latest polls follow this trend: but for the youth, the Leave vote would have been a landslide, rather than merely a convincing majority; and Corbyn would have lost the general election by a crushing margin.

One has to admire Nick Clegg’s unapologetic cynicism manifest in his insistence that we need a second referendum because the Leave voters are dying out. They are indeed, if perhaps not quite at a rate Nick would welcome.

Of course our putative champions of democracy only like it when the ballot goes their way. No one who takes democracy seriously would have a legitimate reason to complain about the referendum. The turnout was the highest of any election since 1992, and Leave got more votes than Yes to Common Market in 1975, Major in 1992, Blair in 1997 and Cameron in either 2010 or 2015.

But Clegg’s reference to voting demographics is unimpeachable, as is the implied strategy of paedocratic subversion. For, to quote that other great advocate of democracy, Leon Trotsky, the youth are indeed “the barometer of the nation”.

Ever since government by divine right was replaced with government by manipulation, politicians have depended on a silly electorate easy enough to manipulate.

The quickest way of achieving this devious goal is to lower the voting age. The young, so beloved of Trotsky and other tyrants, are attractive specifically because their gonads are at their most active, while their brains aren’t yet even wired properly.

This is an ideal combination for expert manipulators, and they’ve always taken advantage of it. Every modern revolution featured mature gentlemen inciting subversion, but the young actually perpetrating it.

Today’s 18-year-olds, ripe as they are physiologically, are children psychologically and, typically, infants intellectually. Easy to organise into a rioting mob, they’re incapable of passing mature judgement on even trivial matters.

Would you trust an 18-year-old to run a university department? Coach a football team? Manage a large company? Of course not.

Yet somehow we feel that children ought to have an equal say in how the country is run, even though compared to this activity those mentioned above are indeed child’s play. This doesn’t make sense.

Nor is it supposed to. For aspiring Left-wing tyrants aren’t after mature statesmanship. They want their wicked ideology to prevail at any cost, which history shows is guaranteed to be exorbitant.

And, regardless of whether or not socialists hold political power, they invariably manage to usurp intellectual power, imposing their own seditious ideas on public discourse.

Through their control of mass media, Left-wing ideologues hypnotise the electorate into cerebral inertia. People have been brainwashed into responding to ‘liberal’ slogans not with reason, like sapient humans, but with instincts, like Pavlov’s dogs.

That’s why so few stop to wonder what sort of catharsis occurred in 1970, when the voting age in Britain was lowered from 21 to 18. Was it felt that the rapidly declining standards of public education had overnight made children wiser?

And now a movement is afoot to lower the voting age even further, to 16. Apparently even Dominic Raab, MP, a good conservative egg, is in favour of this abomination, proving yet again that even good political eggs can only ever be of the curate’s variety.

Would he trust a scrofulous adolescent to handle his personal finances? Somehow one doubts that. Yet this supposedly conservative politician feels that the same youth is qualified to pass judgement on public finances (among other vital issues) – and enforce it with his vote.

It’s predictable that advocates of silly ideas will offer silly arguments in support. And “the young will live with the consequences of our policies, so they should have their say” is as silly as they get.

By the same token, babies will live with such consequences even longer, so should they have the vote too? That’s probably where the country is heading.

If the maxim attributed to Churchill is right, and history shows it is, then many of those scrofulous youths will shed their silly ideas in parallel with losing their acne. Then they’ll find out the hard way that doing things is easier than undoing them.

Just look at the hoops we have to jump through to get out of the EU, that corrupt, tyrannical, anti-historical contrivance. Yet all it took to get in was one flurry of John Major’s pen.

Should Corbyn’s stormtroopers succeed in manipulating the youth vote to win the next election, they’ll plunge the country into an economic, social, and moral abyss – much deeper than one even Mrs May can manage, and she’s trying her best.

Then we’ll realise that paedocracy is indeed the deadliest ‘paedo-’ word in English, and that ‘young people’ is indeed an oxymoron. But even if we ever manage to climb out of the abyss, it’ll take decades to do so.

Raise the voting age to at least to 25, I say. This of course isn’t politically expedient, a concept that modernity has turned into an antonym of right, intelligent and moral.

A scan of the papers shows a staggering increase in their coverage of sex crimes, compared to even a few years ago.

It’s as if, when even kissing a woman on the lips instead of the proffered cheek could land the offender in prison, men, with reckless disregard for their own liberty, are forcing themselves into chaste females on an unprecedented scale.

Some rape cases make the papers ask the question I regard as rhetorical: “Why did this case ever reach the jury?” More and more such cases follow an identical pattern.

Two young friends (classmates, colleagues) end up in bed (against a tree, on a park bench) after a drunken night out. The morning after they may or may not remember what happened the night before.

That encounter is never repeated, and one would think both parties would put it down to experience and move on. Yet months or sometimes even years later the woman decides upon mature deliberation that she never did consent to sex.

The likelihood of such a miraculous recovery from amnesia is directly proportionate to the possibility that in the interim the man has become rich, famous or both. However, sometimes this happens even in the absence of marked improvement in the chap’s fortunes.

One way or the other, the woman contacts the police, the police arrest the man, the CPO decides to pursue the matter, and months later the case goes before the jury.

Meanwhile the defendant’s name is pasted all over the papers since, unlike the alleged victim, he’s denied anonymity. His life is put on hold, his reputation is ruined by that old saw about smoke and fire, his career suffers.

When the case is dismissed for lack of evidence, or when the jury passes a not guilty verdict in less than an hour, the young man punches the air and weeps with joy. The rest of us wonder why this case was tried in the first place.

After all, court proceedings are laborious and costly. That’s why the CPO routinely refuses to prosecute when there’s no ‘realistic prospect of conviction’, in their parlance. In other words, when there isn’t enough evidence to sustain a case.

Rape cases are notoriously difficult to prosecute even under the best of circumstances. Such offences tend to be committed without witnesses, and forensic evidence is often ambiguous or absent. Typically it boils down to her word against his, which isn’t the most reliable method of deciding a man’s fate.

However, one would think that, when the complaint is brought up a year after the event, the prosecution’s case isn’t just difficult but impossible. This irrespective of whether or not a crime actually was committed.

The man claims the sex never happened or was consensual, the woman says it did and it wasn’t. She may be telling the truth. But a guilty verdict depends not on the truth but on what the prosecution can prove beyond reasonable doubt.

I’d suggest that under such circumstances this standard of proof can never be met. Therefore, such cases should never come to court. Yet they do, and their number is growing fast.

Why? Given this kind of evidence, or rather lack thereof, the CPO would never prosecute any other assault.

Let’s say a woman complains to the police that her then boyfriend viciously beat her up a year ago. Witnesses? None. Any demonstrable damage? No. Anything that would stick in court? Afraid not.

Now regardless of whether or not the unfortunate event occurred, the police would never even submit the case to the CPO or, if they did, the CPO wouldn’t even think of prosecuting. Now why does sexual assault require less evidence than, say, battery?

Because the latter is merely a crime against a person, while the former is also a crime against the state. Or rather against the ethos the state uses as a mechanism of power.

The modern Western state imposes its power by attacking tradition woven out of ancient presumptions, certitudes and beliefs. It strives to create a new civilisation on the wreckage of the old one. But first the old one has to be wrecked.

An attack on the family, the traditional arena of sexual activity, is in the vanguard of this offensive. Having taken sex out of the naturally egalitarian context of the family, modernity has placed it into the virtual reality of trumped-up equality, where men and women have to be regarded as not just equal but identical. Rather than bringing the sexes together, this predictably alienates them even further.

The idea is to produce a sexual mechanism of state power by creating an environment in which the sexes look upon each other as rivals or even enemies. Thus alienated, they can never present a united front in the face of state tyranny, as the traditional family always did.

Hence testosteronal male aggressiveness has to be portrayed as specifically directed against women, and even consensual sex is often likened to rape. ‘Sex equals rape’ isn’t designed as a statement of fact or even of faith. It’s a battle plan of modernity.

That’s why our press is saturated with lurid descriptions of rape and sexual abuse, creating a climate where the words ‘rape’ and ‘sex’ are intermingled in people’s minds. That’s why women are conditioned to regard rape as the worst thing that can happen to them. (Worse than death? Disfigurement? Paralysis? Losing an eye? Don’t you dare ask such tactless questions.) And that’s why women are encouraged to report dubious or downright false rapes even months after the fact.

The purpose isn’t to protect vulnerable people but to make all people vulnerable to state power. Divide et impera is the underlying principle.

Before you report me to whichever authorities such things are supposed to be reported to, the title above isn’t a statement of my innermost feelings.

This is a sign prominently adorning the shop windows in a growing Russian chain of organic food outlets, sort of a miniature version of Whole Foods. The shops boast of selling, among other things, the best bread in Russia.

The chain, whose outlets appear in central thoroughfares of Moscow, Petersburg and other cities, belongs to the billionaire Gherman Sterligov, who professes Christian piety.

In that spirit, his expensive bread (up to £3 a loaf) is offered for free to poor people. But a slightly expanded version of the same proviso applies, as another sign makes clear: “No free bread for smoking, drinking, made-up and poof-looking people”.

The shorter sign, carved in wood, is for sale, costing an equivalent of £30. You must agree this is a small price to pay for such a concise encapsulation of one’s life philosophy.

To be fair to Russians, some of them have complained about the signs to the local councils. The protests were rejected, with the authorities invoking freedom of speech and the proprietor’s right to display whatever sign he wishes on his property. One wonders if they’d be as committed to civil liberties if a sign said “Down with Putin”, but that’s a separate issue.

The issue that interests me today is fascism, especially since some readers have taken exception to my describing as fascist such anti-immigration parties as the German AfD and the French National Front. What makes them fascist? asks a reader who, like me, identifies mass uncontrolled immigration as a serious problem.

I dare say it’s the same thing that makes Sterligov fascist, and indeed the government that allows such signs to be displayed for public consumption. The problem lies not so much with the underlying sentiment but with emphasis and style, and only a fool dismisses those as insignificant.

Fascism combines elements of both socialist and conservative heresies, and overstressing one aspect at the expense of the whole is the essence of heresy.

Most people assume that a heresy puts forth a wrong proposition, or at least one that contradicts the orthodoxy altogether. That’s not always true. In fact, many heresies aren’t necessarily wrong in their main tenet. Where they err is in trying to assign an undue significance to that one idea, passing a part for the whole.

This tends to compromise the whole, especially since heresies are usually expressed hysterically and intrusively. “The style is the man himself” (Le style c’est l’homme même), said Georges Buffon, and the same could apply to beliefs.

Sterligov is a heretic because he misses a key, overriding point about the religion he supposedly professes: hate the sin; love the sinner. His heresy takes him out of the territory he may share with conservatives and into the lot signposted by fascism.

A true conservative or, for that matter, Christian will oppose homomarriage, the mandated treatment of homosexuality as an equally valid “lifestyle”, propaganda of homosexuality and the Walpurgisnacht of Gay Pride parades. But only a fascist will display “no poofs” signs or, as Sterligov also allegedly does, pay thugs to attack homosexuals in the streets.

In the same vein, a true conservative will be appalled by an influx of cultural aliens distorting the demographic balance of a country, debauching its culture and social cohesion. But only a fascist will turn such feelings into the hub around which his whole life revolves.

In general, I tend to be wary of single issue politics even when I happen to agree with the single issue. For example, I know quite a few people who have allowed their perfectly legitimate abhorrence of the European Union to take over their whole outlook on life.

This is another example of fanaticism compromising a sound idea, for such tunnel vision leads those people into numerous blind alleys and intellectual traps. One such is their affection not only for European neo-fascist parties but even for the frankly fascist regime of Putin’s Russia, where “no poofs” signs are not only allowed but actively encouraged.

Their logic is lamentably primitive. We hate the EU. Putin hates the EU. Ergo, Putin is our friend. Single-issue politics has put blinkers on those poor souls, making them overlook blindingly obvious evil.

For Putin doesn’t just hate the EU; he loathes the West and demonstrates in practice his contempt for everything that makes the West Western.

His political opponents are harassed, beaten up, imprisoned or killed. His courts rubberstamp predetermined verdicts. Free speech is nonexistent, with the mainstream media spewing nothing but emetic propaganda and all opposition websites blocked. Putin bolsters every enemy of the West, including North Korea. He commits aggression against Russia’s neighbours. Hardly a day passes without Putin or his mouthpieces issuing nuclear threats against the West.

Our EU-haters ignore all that. They describe Putin’s regime as conservative because it’s anti-EU. That’s all that matters – and the profusion of “No poofs” signs further reinforces Putin’s conservative credentials in their minds.

Yet neither Christianity nor conservatism can be defined by what we hate – only by what we love. The thesis of love may dialectically presuppose the antithesis of hate but, when the balance is skewed towards the latter, the emerging synthesis won’t be conservative. It’ll be fascist.

One has to admire Corbyn’s understanding of politics and economics. His ascent to power, he forecasts dispassionately and accurately, will produce an immediate run on the pound and a collapse of business investment. An economic catastrophe, in other words.

Since Britain’s imports exceed her exports, the predicted devastation of the already devalued pound will drive the cost of living sky high. This will be exacerbated by an inevitable hike in unemployment and inflation, with the financial system showing all the stability of a feather in a hurricane.

Financiers like that sort of thing as much as a cyanide sandwich. Even British investors will look for greener pastures elsewhere, while their foreign colleagues will be falling over their own feet in an outward stampede. (No doubt this will be blamed on Brexit, but then everything will be.)

Yet in spite of displaying such impressive analytical acumen, Corby is seeking power with nothing short of maniacal persistence. Obviously he feels that the correctly forecast consequences are worth taking – especially since he won’t be the one taking them.

Such insouciance in the face of the disaster likely to hit common folk (uncommon folk have ways of protecting themselves) would be incomprehensible in a party supposedly committed to looking after the working man – but only if we confused its slogans with reality. In reality, they see people, working or otherwise, only as so many building blocks in the edifice of socialist tyranny.

Much is being made of Labour anti-Semitism, and true enough: 61 per cent of all anti-Semitic harangues by public officials come from Labour. And one can confidently predict that the on-going party conference is bound to drive that proportion even higher.

But Corby’s frankness on the impending economic collapse provides even starker evidence for what has to be clear to any student of history: socialism is wicked, and the more socialist a party, the more evil it is.

Corby’s Labour is as socialist as it’s possible to be this side of concentration camps filled with what Lenin described as ‘noxious insects’ (anybody Lenin didn’t like). And if this lot get their way, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of their stepping over into that territory too.

The Labour conference isn’t just one continuous incitement to riot – it is a riot. Actually, street riots are what one speaker after another is calling for, if that’s the only way to get Corby into a position where he could collapse the economy.

None of them sees anything wrong with confiscation of private property, something that hasn’t been tried in Britain on a large scale since Henry VIII looted the monasteries. And Henry’s way of solving marital difficulties appeals to many delegates as a legitimate political expedient.

Every time the royal family was mentioned yesterday, invariably in pejorative terms, the delegates roared “Guillotine!!!” – and our royals aren’t even Jewish. In some quarters this sort of thing may be described as treason, but that word is no longer used in polite, and especially rude, society.

Here our socialist friends show that their understanding of history is less reliable than their grasp of economics. For those who scream for the guillotine the loudest eventually put their own heads on the block – to that law of history there are no known exceptions.

The typological precursors of Labour, all those Jacobins, Bolsheviks and SA, got their comeuppance after first spilling most satisfying oceans of blood. The regicides Robespierre and Saint-Just perished in Thermidor; Trotsky, Bukharin and Zinoviev were killed by Stalin; Röhm and Strasser were massacred by Hitler.

The very fact that such names can be mentioned as relevant to British politics is a calamity in itself. It’s hard to contain one’s heart-felt wish that Corbyn and his jolly friends get their own Thermidor prophylactically. But alas, the only Thermidor these champions of the proletariat are likely to get is of the lobster variety.

Delegates to the Labour conference provide musical accompaniment to incendiary speeches by singing Internationale and Bandiera Rossa, with blood dripping from every word. I just wish more people pricked up their ears and listened: this lot mean what they sing.

As it is, the British are likely to get a Corbyn government next time around, vindicating de Maistre’s maxim that every nation gets the kind of government it deserves. But I still hope we don’t deserve Corbyn – no nation’s sins are as grave as that.

P.S. I tend to eschew the trick so beloved of many pundits, saying “I told you so” when their predictions come true. However, without uttering that sacramental phrase, here’s what I wrote about Corbyn before he even got to lead Labour: http://www.alexanderboot.com/none-dare-call-it-conspiracy/

This word is hardly ever applied to socialists in general or the Labour party in particular. In fact, most people, even many of those who aren’t themselves socialists, wince whenever this word is used.

However, it’s not only appropriate but sufficiently explanatory. The word is evil.

Once you realise that both the philosophy of socialism and, more important, its psychological inspiration, are evil, everything falls into place. The trouble is that most people refuse to acknowledge this simple and amply demonstrable fact.

Socialism has somehow acquired a warm glow, whose spectrum includes shades of fairness, equality, love, caring, sharing – all those things people used to associate with Christianity, but don’t any longer.

In fact, the shifting of such commendable things into the domain of socialism represents the greatest larceny of modernity. For, stripped of its phony sloganeering, socialism emerges as what it really is: a secular religion of envy, hate, state tyranny and general enslavement, both physical and spiritual.

However, the image that socialism projects isn’t like that, is it? That’s why even its opponents express dismay at the never-ending string of anti-Semitic scandals within the ranks of the Labour party. And so many are amazed at the open manifestations of this sentiment at the on-going Labour conference.

The list of such manifestations is long.

Following a deluge of disgusting threats, the BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg had to be given a full-time bodyguard.

Andrew Percy, a former government minister, has been targeted for anti-Semitic abuse.

Vile anti-Semitic rants ex cathedra have been wildly applauded, including a comparison of Israelis with Nazis and an invitation to a debate on whether or not the Holocaust happened.

Ken Livingstone, who equated Zionism with Nazism, has been defended.

A leaflet has been circulated quoting (approvingly) Reinhard Heidrich as saying that “National Socialists had no intention of attacking Jewish people”. The leaflet doesn’t specify whether Heidrich said this before or after he chaired the ‘Final Solution’ Wannsee Conference.

Numerous calls to kick Jewish and pro-Israel groups out of the party have been made.

I must say I’m surprised – that so many people are surprised. For example, why shouldn’t socialists insist that the Holocaust never happened when they were the ones who perpetrated it?

Oops, sorry, I forgot: we aren’t allowed to associate Nazism with socialism. Nazism is evil sui generis, while socialists are, as Chris Williamson explained at the conference, “caring individuals”.

However, Hitler disagreed. He readily acknowledged his indebtedness to Marxism in private, even as he attacked it in public. In his memoir Hitler Speaks Hermann Rauschning quotes the führer as saying that “the whole of National Socialism” was based on Marx. “I have learned a great deal from Marx,” conceded Hitler, “as I do not hesitate to admit.”

One thing he could have learned from Marx – not that he needed any tuition – was virulent anti-Semitism, going hand in hand with anti-capitalism. “What is the secular basis of Judaism?” asks Marx in his anti-Semitic pamphlet Zur Judenfrage. “Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.”

Since Marx himself was a secular Jew, one detects an element of self-refutation in that statement, but we aren’t going to demand logical rigour from socialists, are we?

This founding sentiment of socialism explains why its international branch was no different in that respect from the national variety. State anti-Semitism was rife in the Soviet Union and, when Stalin died, he was weeks away from implementing his own Final Solution by deporting all Jews to the Far East.

Since Judaism is doctrinally associated in the socialist mind with capitalism, rather than, say, with classical music or nuclear physics, where Jews are represented more widely than among the capitalists, anti-Semitism is as germane to socialism as anti-capitalism is.

The Labour conference reminds us of this symbiosis by declaring that its aim when in government is to create a command economy by nationalising, well, just about everything they can lay their hands on.

Economists, along with everyone blessed with basic literacy and knowledge of history, are screaming bloody murder. Command economy, they say, has been proved disastrous everywhere it has been tried. Its cost is measured not only in the billions of pounds it’ll wipe out instantly, but also in several generations of unremitting human misery.

That’s like telling a murderer that his victim’s mother will be upset. He doesn’t care – if he did, he wouldn’t be a murderer.

Because it’s a factor of freedom, money in private hands is an affront to socialism, which is all about state power. An independently wealthy person doesn’t depend on the state as much as a welfare recipient does. Hence the socialist ideal is putting the whole population on the welfare rolls, the way it was in effect done in the Soviet Union.

That ideal may not be fully attainable in a country like England, where the memory of civil liberties and secure property is still alive. But any reasonable approximation would be welcome, which is exactly the message Labour are flogging.

It takes malignant myopia not to discern the animus behind such desiderata: envy, hatred, powerlust – everything that collectively can be covered by a single word, evil. The same word that explains Labour’s toxic anti-Semitism.

This isn’t an aberration. It’s the nature of the beast, and I wish more people realised this before putting Jeremy Corbyn into 10 Downing Street.

Angela Merkel likes to be known by her nickname ‘Mother’ (Mutti). Almost 70 per cent of the Germans evidently feel this is only half a word.

That’s how many of them voted against Merkel in yesterday’s elections. And 22.5 per cent – almost a quarter of the electorate! – voted for two extreme parties, the neo-Nazi AfD (13.5 per cent) and the communists (9 per cent).

The widely used nomenclature describes the former as right-wing and the latter as left-wing, which goes to prove yet again the gross inadequacy of today’s political vocabulary. That, in turn, proves the gross inadequacy of today’s political thought.

Before the war, the Nazi party was universally accepted as living up to its name: National Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany. Indeed, the Nazis’ Four-Year Plan was indistinguishable from the other two great socialist projects of the time: Stalin’s Five-Year Plan and Roosevelt’s New Deal.

(The similarity between FDR’s New Deal and Hitler’s New Order was neither just philosophical nor coincidental: they had some of the same authors, such as Gerard Swopes, Paul Warburg and Walter Teagle. So, when Herbert Hoover referred to the New Deal as a “fascist measure”, he meant it literally.)

The Nazis were national socialists, the communists were international socialists, and they overlapped on the common element. When the Hitler-Stalin pact was signed in 1939, both parties hailed it as a socialist alliance against the capitalist West.

That stressed the positive, while Hitler’s attack on Stalin in 1941 swung towards the negative, thereby proving that none so hostile as divergent exponents of the same creed. It was only then that Hitler acquired the ‘right-wing’ soubriquet in the Western press: Stalin was undeniably left-wing, Hitler had become Stalin’s enemy, ergo…

Yet the Soviets had been systematically cultivating the Nazis since before their party got its name. That followed Lenin’s dogma that Germany was “the icebreaker of the revolution”, a disruptive catalyst that could make the West ripe for a Soviet takeover.

The Weimar Republic couldn’t act in that capacity: it was too sullied by the West. On the other hand, the Nazis were the West’s sworn enemies, which made them the Soviets’ friends.

Actually, but for the Soviets, Hitler wouldn’t have won his 1933 election. He could have been kept out of power by a bloc between the Social Democrats and the communists, which collectively had more votes. Yet Stalin forbade his German stooges to enter such an alliance: he needed the icebreaker to set sail.

Putin is self-admittedly out to reverse “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century”, the break-up of the Soviet Union. What kind of warped mind would regard as catastrophic the collapse of a regime that murdered 60 million of its own subjects is beside the point. What’s important is that Vlad sees Stalin’s empire as a model worth emulating.

That being the strategic aim, the tactics suggest themselves. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel: Lenin and Stalin showed the way. All Putin has to do is create troubled Western waters in which Russia can then fish.

Give credit to Vlad: his KGB training helps him cut through the waffle so beloved of our hacks. He doesn’t care about the fine, and usually nonexistent, differences between extreme right and extreme left.

Vlad doesn’t give a buck about the silly slogans they inscribe on their banners. But he’s prepared to pay billions of bucks for the disruption such extremists cause to the West, seen by Vlad as Russia’s historical enemy.

That’s why Putin’s lucre freely flows into the coffers of all marginal European parties, regardless of whether The Guardian describes them as left or right. The communists under different guises certainly, but especially various fascist parties, such as France’s National Front, Belgium’s Vlaams Belang, Greece’s Golden Dawn, Hungary’s Jobbik, Italy’s Forza Italia, Austria’s Freedom Party and so forth are all Putin’s wards.

This group emphatically includes both the German communists (The Left) and especially the AfD. As a result, over 150 pro-Putin extremists, openly drawing on Russia’s financial and propaganda support, are going to sit in the Bundestag, exerting a considerable influence on Germany’s policy.

In the run-up to the elections, German counterintelligence, aware of the intimate links between Putin and the neo-Nazis, feared Russia’s hacking attacks, a technique used to great effect elsewhere. But Vlad didn’t have to rely on such pinpricks when he had at his disposal the battering ram of 3,000,000 German Russians, as predominantly pro-Putin as the Sudeten Germans of yesteryear were pro-Hitler.

Dozens of Russia-financed, Russian-language newspapers, websites, TV and radio stations flooded that group with murky torrents of nauseating propaganda aimed at whipping up its already febrile adoration of the AfD. For example, it was through such media that the bogus story of the Russian-German girl Lisa, 13, gained such prominence.

Unsatisfied with the already plentiful true stories of Muslims’ crimes, Putin’s Goebbelses planted the story of this poor creature, the personification of the pristine chastity of Russian womanhood, allegedly abducted and raped by Muslim migrants.

Before the story was proved false, thousands of Russians had demonstrated all over Germany, screaming their support for the AfD. Well, at least they didn’t scream Sieg Heil!

Now two pro-Putin parties in the Bundestag will be pushing for a pro-Moscow foreign policy and the repeal of all sanctions. The already small likelihood of Germany acting with NATO in case of a Russian attack on the Baltics is dwindling away to zero.

No doubt our so-called conservatives, whose whole Weltanschauung is circumscribed by hatred of the EU, will rejoice. So many of the AdF’s policies sound appealing, such as transfer of power to national governments, curtailing immigration, opposition to homomarriage, limiting construction of mosques etc.

But even those who support such good causes ought to deplore the AdF’s championship of them. After all, Hitler wasn’t an enthusiastic supporter of same-sex unions either, and nor was he an avowed internationalist. That, however, didn’t make him our friend.

The German elections illustrate the demise of Western conservatism, its manifest inability to lead the brewing revolt against the dominant political elites.

Contrary to the widespread superstition, this revolt has nothing to do with the economy. In fact, the German economy is doing better than most, boasting a balanced budget and sustained, if small, growth. What people are revolting against isn’t a void in finances but a void in ethos.

That revolt is bound to gain momentum, highlighting further the paucity of any conservative opposition. This could only come from a sound understanding of – and commitment to – our civilisation, its religious, philosophical, social and political essence.

Such understanding is manifestly absent, rendering the few remaining real conservatives impotent to influence proceedings in any appreciable way. That leaves the field wide-open for fascists to claim leadership of the popular movement, tricking their way to respectability by pilfering some conservative policies.

And casting a dark shadow over this turmoil is the giant figure of Russia, again turned by Putin into a pariah state after a brief and largely illusory interlude in the 1990s. The choice is stark: either conservatives wake up and steer the public revolt into good channels or Putin will steer it into bad ones – with consequences too awful to fathom.

The English call it French leave. The French call it English leave. But the idea is the same: leaving without saying good-bye.

Theresa May and her jolly friends took the concept on and refined it: their version of Brexit is saying good-bye without leaving.

The mainstream reaction to Mrs May’s Florence speech ranges from mild approval to mild disapproval, with ‘mild’ being the operative word in either case. If you loved Cameron’s oratory, you’ll like May’s.

Those who mildly approve heave a cautious sigh of relief: it could have been a lot worse. For example, Mrs May could have suggested incorporating Britain into federal Germany as one of her provinces, possibly under the name of Anglo-Saxony.

Those who mildly disapprove share the sentiment: it could have been worse. But then it could have been better too. For example, Mrs May could have bargained them down to £15 billion. Or else she could have stood a bit firmer on the transition terms.

Outside that middle-of-road puddle of the mainstream, one hears splashing all sorts of invective aimed at Mrs May. She’s accused of a whole raft of sins, from shilly-shallying to cowardice, from crypto-socialism to downright treason.

Yet both the mainstream and the brooks flowing on either side miss the salient point about Mrs May and her jolly friends, the group I collectively call the apparat. Let me spell it out for you: THEY WANT TO REMAIN.

This regardless of their party allegiance and even – critically – of how they campaigned in the referendum. If they campaigned to leave, it was mostly for reasons of personal political advancement. Some of them might have seen rational arguments in favour of Brexit, but the inner voice of such arguments was muffled by the shriek of their viscera: I WANT TO REMAIN!

Accusing Mrs May of treason is pointless: her primary loyalty is pledged to the apparat that begat her, and to this collective entity she’s unwaveringly true.

All its members realise, rationally or intuitively, that the EU represents a logical, ineluctable extension of the very essence of modern ‘democratic’ politics, which, in turn, represents a logical, ineluctable extension of modernity.

This truly dark age of the West was adumbrated by a mass revolt against Western civilisation, aka Christendom. Incongruously named the Enlightenment, that revolt set out to do what all revolts do: overturn every certitude, assumption, presumption, prejudice, axiom – and replace them with something new-fangled. This is observable in every walk of life, including politics.

The essence of traditional politics was subsidiarity: devolving power to the lowest sensible level, from centre to periphery. Yet the vector of modern politics points in exactly the opposite direction, from periphery to centre.

This separates the ‘leaders’ from the people, thus reversing a truly (as opposed to virtually) democratic process. Rather than choosing a village mayor from a list of candidates everybody knows personally, people are supposed to choose their ‘leaders’ among those they don’t know from Adam.

Effectively this means they vote not for the better of two candidates but for the cheesier of two waffles, especially if it’s accompanied by a photogenic appearance. This is guaranteed to elevate to government those unfit to govern, nonentities seeking self-aggrandisement.

They seek to remove every remaining bit of power from the local, truly democratic bodies that stay close to the voters, and transfer it to the centralised apparat, claiming all the time that the people are governing themselves.

This is a gift that keeps on giving: modern unchecked democracy leads to ever-increasing centralisation, and for that reason it’s wrong to complain, as today’s conservatives do, that growing centralisation undermines democracy. That’s like saying that pregnancy undermines sex.

Yet at some point the distance between the apparat and its subjects can’t grow any greater. The apparat has acquired its own inner imperative to expand, but its growth is constricted by the physical dimensions of the country.

Logic then dictates that, to increase and perpetuate its power, the apparat has to cross national boundaries, becoming not only stronger than the people but also bigger and more detached. This explains the European Union, a corrupt setup designed to absolve the apparat of even vestigial accountability.

The EU is the ultimate expression of the very essence of modern ‘democratic’ politics. Or rather the penultimate one: it’s the anteroom to world government.

Only the cleverer members of the apparat understand this rationally, but they all feel it in their bone marrow. That’s why, whatever they claim in public, privately they all want to torpedo Brexit – not because they feel this would serve public interest, but because Brexit is a challenge to the power of the apparat, indeed an existential threat to its very survival.

That’s why the apparatchiks have closed ranks to resist this threat, and whatever squabbles they’re reported to be having are either purely tactical or simply window dressing.

Obviously no one will come out and say that, referendum or no referendum, we should stay in the EU because the people have made a mistake. That would shatter the make-believe of self-government, thereby breaking the rules by which the virtual reality game is played.

Hence even those who, like May, campaigned against Brexit have to claim that the will of the people is sacrosanct. After all, 17.4 million of us voted for Brexit, more than have ever voted for anything else.

Yet a game shouldn’t be allowed to impinge on real life. And in real life they want to procrastinate as much as possible in the hope that Brexit will lose momentum. Make no mistake about it: popular will is fickle.

Given enough time, any number of mines could derail Brexit, turning the people against it. For example, if, or rather when, a severe economic downturn occurs, it could be blamed on Brexit – even before Brexit is a reality.

In fact, everything could be blamed on Brexit, including bad weather, traffic jams and the stale beer at the King’s Head. Various Jacks will pop out of the box, probably led by the emetic Tony Blair. “We told you so,” they’ll hiss, Iago whispering into Othello’s ear. “But not to worry: you have every right to change your opinion, the way so many others have.”

Every passing day makes such a development possible. Every passing year makes it likely, especially since the referendum has effectively destroyed any organised, institutional resistance by making Ukip ostensibly redundant and plunging it into chaos.

None dare call it conspiracy, and in fact none should. A conspiracy involves conscious action, a meeting of minds, a banging of heads together. Nothing like that is necessary here: the apparat is like a pack of wolves who don’t depend on collusion to stick together. The need to do so is encoded into their DNA – as the need to stay in the EU is encoded into the DNA of the apparat.

This is the salient point to be taken out of Mrs May’s speech, serendipitously delivered in Florence, that cradle of political perfidy. The affection she professed for the EU wasn’t a diplomatic manoeuvre; everything else was.

Brexit may or may not happen. But if you think it has already happened, you may be in for a let-down. I for one don’t hold my breath.

“Words, words, words,” shrugged Hamlet. But words do matter, for they may change the perception of the concepts they denote.

The utterly objectionable and therefore funny comedian Jimmy Carr, for example, offers ‘struggle snuggle’ as an alternative to ‘rape’, claiming that thereby people would change their mind about the underlying reality.

This is an obvious joke that wouldn’t work in the real world. Yet when it comes to Brexit, similar verbal chicanery works a treat.

Brexit is a linguistic disaster, made possible by a thoroughly ignorant dumbed-down public brainwashed to ignore the real meaning of words. This leaves the field wide-open for political liars, which term these days is more or less synonymous with politicians.

Take the words ‘divorce negotiations’, for example. As a veteran of several of those, I feel qualified to assure you that Brexit has nothing in common with any such things.

A divorce is an (ideally) equitable bilateral agreement, wherein the two parties decide to cancel their marriage contract and sit down, in person or through their attorneys, to agree mutually acceptable terms.

Yet Brexit is by definition unilateral. One country in what is in effect a federation has decided to secede, a right stipulated in the articles of most federations, including this one. Historically, the rump federation can  only stop this act by violent means, as the American Civil War shows.

However, by the looks of it, the EU isn’t planning a modern-day version of Operation Sea Lion, although the state of the British military, especially the Royal Navy, is such that this time around an invasion just might succeed. But that option is off the table.

What’s there to negotiate then? One doesn’t negotiate leaving a party once it has turned unpleasant. One thanks the hosts, gets up and leaves.

Another meaningless word is ‘owe’, as in “we’ll pay the EU what we owe and not a penny more.” I keep asking the same question and shall continue to do so until someone provides a sensible answer: Why on earth do we owe anything at all?

Continuing the party analogy, when we bid good night to the hosts, we aren’t usually asked to pay for the food and drink we’ve consumed – much less invited to negotiate the exact sum. We just go.

In this case we’ve prepaid for our now consumed and egested repast in annual instalments, making any demand for further payments even more ludicrous and shooting the party analogy down in flames. But ‘divorce’ doesn’t work any better, for its financial aspects include a division of not only liabilities but also assets.

I don’t know the exact amount of EU assets, nor our fair share of them. However, since the word ‘assets’ hasn’t even been mentioned, neither should we insist on using the misnomer ‘divorce’.

We can’t be expected to pay alimony to the EU, nor child support for its junior members, but what about paying for privileged access to the European market? Fine, I’m prepared to accept that for the sake of argument.

The principle has thus been established; now let’s haggle about the price. What price such access?

Like any market price, this should be established by market forces. So what’s the going rate for our access to other major markets, such as the US, China and Japan? The answer is zero, which is exactly the fair price.

Or rather it’s zero in terms of cash on the nail. We do pay for free access to those markets in kind, by opening our market to the countries in question. That, and only that, payment should be offered to the EU from the bottom of our hearts.

The EU’s demand for €50 billion and Mrs May’s counteroffer of €20 billion have absolutely nothing to do with either divorce settlements or trade negotiations. They’re talks between two parties in a shakedown.

The EU is the blackmailer essentially sending Britain a message along the lines of “if you ever want to see your country free again…”. Rather than refusing to negotiate with the blackmailer, Britain is the sweaty victim weeping into the phone receiver: “We’ll pay, we’ll pay! Please don’t hurt us! But will you please take 20 instead of 50? Please, we’re begging you… and the police won’t hear a word about it.”

This is exactly what’s going on. The EU may want our money, but what this wicked contrivance wants most of all is to punish Britain so severely that other members would think twice before trying their own exit.

The purpose of this extortion isn’t so much economic as political because so is the true purpose of the EU. The objective isn’t to create a single superstate for the benefit of its members. It’s to create a single superstate, full stop.

I was touched to see that even Nigel ‘Black Wednesday’ Lawson has come to realise this self-evident fact, albeit 25 years too late. As Chancellor, Mr Lawson (as he then was) thought it would be a jolly good idea not only to be in the EU but actually to join the ERM as a prelude to joining the euro.

That little misapprehension cost Britain £3.4 billion, but the other day Lord Lawson (as he now is) graciously agreed to acknowledge what has been blindingly obvious for decades to any averagely intelligent person with a modicum of knowledge about the EU. Better never late, I say.

Mrs May’s upcoming speech on her Brexit ‘proposal’ has been pre-billed as ‘bold’. Having been trained to realise that words in today’s political lexicon are used to mean something exactly opposite to their dictionary definition, I know what to expect.