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“Why does the left love tyrannical regimes?” asks Edward Lucas, one of the few journalists who begin to understand international politics.

Yet this question is phrased incorrectly. It’s not just the left that suffers from such perverse affections. It’s also the right. It’s also the middle ground. It’s modernity in general.

Mr Lucas specifically talks about the West bending over backwards to do trade with China, which he correctly describes as another “evil empire”. Much of Mr Lucas’s article is about showing that China is indeed both evil and an empire.

The case he makes is unassailable, with many cited facts leading to the ineluctable conclusion: “The rule of law in China is a farce. Torture and other abuses are endemic. The justice system is a tool of the Communist Party.”

However, replace ‘China’ with ‘Russia’ and ‘the Communist Party’ with ‘the KGB junta’, and the conclusion will be just as true. However, while China’s useful idiots generally reside on the left, Russia’s sub-species mostly roam on the right.

To be sure, following the rape of the Ukraine, Western governments imposed some mild sanctions on Russia. But pressure is growing throughout the West to repeal or at least soften them. This pressure is exerted by the right, and it’s every bit as shrill and pervasive as anything the left screams about China.

The arguments for trade with China are mostly economic, as opposed to being only partly so in relation to Russia. That’s why the China-loving left has a broader appeal than the Putinista right.

If support for China is, say, 20 per cent ideological and 80 per cent economic, with Russia it’s roughly the other way around. But what I call Western ‘totalitarian economism’ is a factor in both cases. Both totalitarian politics and totalitarian economism are children of the Enlightenment, even if the latter was born on the wrong side of the blanket.

Because the Enlightenment severed the metaphysical roots of our civilisation, the tree withered and its fallen fruits rotted on the ground. Supposedly perpetrated in the name of reason, the Enlightenment destroyed reason by replacing spiritual ratio with materialistic rationalism. Falling by the wayside was the essential sustenance of our civilisation: faith, charity, honour, spiritual and intellectual pursuits.

All such realities were perverted, destroyed and replaced with virtual caricatures. As an almost immediate result, the West lost its founding raison d’être, forming a vacuum that nature abhors and people try to fill.

If Western reason had seen search for truth as the aim of life, the materialistic rationalism of the Enlightenment threw up money to act in that capacity. For the first time in history the economy assumed a starring role in life’s drama, a new development that was ushered in and then post-rationalised by new thinkers.

In that sense, there isn’t much difference among the benign Adam Smith, the evil Karl Marx, the matter-of-fact Max Weber and their retinues of followers and acolytes. When it came to replacing Western truth with totalitarian economism, they were all culpable. (Thus Weber: “Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life.”)

Economy in general and trade in particular became deified or at least idealised. The British led the way, touting, along with material gain, the civilising and redemptive effect foreign trade can have on tyrannies.

Since then Western trillions, packaged as either trade or aid, have poured into the coffers of every diabolical tyrant of modernity, from Lenin to Hitler, from Stalin to Mao, from Putin to Xi Jinping – with utterly predictable results.

Not much civilising effect is in evidence. What is in evidence, amply documented in the past and rapidly piling up at present, is unbearable oppression, suppression of every known liberty, torture, assassination, unprecedented levels of corruption, millions murdered in the recent past and thousands being murdered at present, a world torn apart by two world wars and teetering at the edge of a third one.

But all that is happening in either the geographical or temporal elsewhere, while the profits brought in by trade with monsters are here and now. That’s the vindication of our vulgar post-Enlightenment modernity, and what better vindication than money can anyone want?

Add to this the gravitational pull of Chinese communism keenly felt by the left and the ideological attraction of Putinesque fascism giving the more ignorant parts of the right a tingling penile sensation, and one can understand why tyrannical regimes are thriving.

One could argue – in fact, I do argue in just about all my books – that all modernity, regardless of its professed ideological hue, gravitates toward tyranny definitely and totalitarianism probably. This isn’t a transient symptom but a systemic defect.

If the West’s traditional political and economic power was vectored from centre to periphery, devolving to the lowest sensible level, post-Enlightenment modernity has reversed that direction. Political power is now concentrated within central government, while its typological economic equivalent, the giant corporation, has usurped economic power.

China, Russia and similar regimes are merely extreme, rather than sole, manifestations of this tendency. They spread the kind of poison for which the West no longer secretes an effective antidote – its endocrine glands have atrophied and totalitarian poison is coursing through it veins.

 

Aristotle observed that political subversiveness will inevitably follow the cultural kind: “Any musical innovation is full of danger to the whole state, and ought to be prohibited…”

The idea is debatable, but it does contain a kernel of truth.

The columnist David Aaronovich has written two articles in The Times proving unwittingly that 1) Aristotle’s message may apply to culture at large and 2) the reverse is also true: political subversiveness in its turn produces cultural mayhem.

First, he wrote that his former membership in the Communist Party is entirely innocent, and so is the re-emergence of Labour Trotskyism. Second, he welcomed Glenda Jackson’s forthcoming appearance as King Lear in the West End.

Both messages are animated by subcutaneous resentment of our civilisation, which sentiment has become the hallmark of Western journalism. Both poisonous fruits dangle off the same branch of one tree.

The question to ask about the support of both communism and women playing male roles is Why? Pose it, and you’ll be amazed how close the two answers will be.

When a grownup (as opposed to an immature youngster) becomes a communist, he accepts that man isn’t an aim in itself but merely a material with which to build the edifice of universal happiness. A logical corollary is that, if said material is defective, it must be dumped into “the rubbish bin of history”, in Trotsky’s phrase.

Since most people fall short of the shining ideal, communism presupposes mass murder, a theoretical postulate that has been empirically proved in every communist country. A communist has to believe that an abstract political aim justifies the concrete massacre of millions.

Therefore a communist isn’t just intellectually misguided. He’s driven by a destructive animus, which is to say he’s evil.

This can’t be changed by merely abandoning communist phraseology or indeed convictions. The energumen resides not in the mind, nor in the vocal cords, but in the viscera, and that area is almost impossible to reach.

That’s why the wide spread of ex-communists among our opinion-formers is worrying. In most cases the ‘ex’ part is hard to believe. A man can’t become an ex-dwarf and, without a religious Damascene experience, he can’t become an ex-communist either.

Vindicating Aristotle, Mr Aaronovich shifts his innate subversiveness into culture. Why not, he asks, have a woman play Lear? Why not have two homosexuals play Romeo and Juliet, “as an exploration of transgressive love”? Why not have a black play Hamlet?

Because that’s “an insult to the playwright”, says the dramatist Sir Ronald Harwood. “But on this issue he’s completely wrong,” responds Mr Aaronovich, displaying the know-all effrontery so typical of communists.

The question to ask here isn’t Why not? but Why yes? It’s not that, as the playwright Sir Ronald says, the part “demands huge energy and masculine strength”. A woman is capable of possessing such qualities, although I doubt that the grossly overrated Miss Jackson does.

But why resort to this gimmick? Have we developed a shortage of male Shakespearean actors? Why have we decided that a prince of medieval Denmark could be black? What’s to be gained by portraying Juliet as a male pervert?

Apart from an expectation of commercial appeal, the Lear director is animated by the same impulse as a vandal who wants to relieve himself in a cathedral or spray-paint a moustache on the Mona Lisa. Just as man is but material to a communist, so is our sublime theatrical tradition but grist to the mill of any director’s hubris.

Even cleverer men than David Aaronovich sound ignorant and stupid when trying to defend a corrupt idea. He doesn’t disappoint either, by offering this argument in defence of thespian transsexualism: “Whatever gender Shakespeare intended in his writing, all Lear’s daughters were originally played by boys. Somehow the playgoers of the time managed to cope with this.”

The playgoers of the time didn’t have a choice because women were banned from acting in Elizabethan times. Given the opportunity, a Globe director would have jumped at the chance of casting a Maggie Smith as Cordelia or a Sarah Bernhardt as Goneril. But he would have muttered “Vade retro” if told to cast either woman as Lear.

“If you are black or Muslim or Jewish or white or male or female or gay or straight, these single qualities are held to define you in every way. But it’s a lie,” pontificates Mr Aaronovich, resorting to the communist trick of making an opponent utter nonsense the easier to ridicule it.

Such characteristics don’t define one in every way, but they certainly define one in some way. Hence having a conspicuously homosexual black man play Ophelia turns suspension of disbelief into suspension of sanity, as does casting an actress as Lear.

“King Lear is a play about the tragedies of ingratitude, ageing, madness and death,” Mr Aaronovich explains helpfully. “Shakespeare is not insulted by Glenda Jackson playing the part of his tragic king but rather, four centuries on, is honoured by it.”

Not blessed with his direct access to the playwright, I’d suggest that it’s not just Shakespeare who’s insulted by this cultural communism but elementary good taste – which is to say our whole civilisation.

St Augustine must have had a premonition of modernity when he wrote, “If you believe what you like in the Gospel and reject what you do not like, it is not the Gospel you believe in but yourself.”

Today every man isn’t just what Luther described as “his own priest” but his own God. Hence the tendency either to ignore Scripture altogether or to treat it as an à la carte menu from which one picks a few items and ignores the rest.

An article in The Times by Tim Montgomerie provides an illustration to this observation. The subject is the growing Anglican acceptance of homosexually co-habiting clergy, which Mr Montgomerie welcomes.

Alas, when Mr Montgomerie tries to justify his position, he demonstrates in one fell swoop what’s wrong with a) modernity, b) Protestantism, c) his mind.

To wit: “In America, Christian acceptance of homosexuality rose from 44 to 54 per cent in seven years. Personally, I no longer see this as an abandonment of biblical faithfulness but as a potential rediscovery of the authentic Jesus Christ who, according to the four gospels, did not once condemn same-sex relationships.”

One could write volumes debunking every fallacy these 51 words contain, starting with logical lapses and going on to Mr Montgomerie’s ignorance of the very religion he claims to espouse.

The first sentence contains two rhetorical fallacies: argumentum ad populum and non sequitur. The first underlying assumption is that the more people support an idea, the truer it is. The second is that, if Americans feel something, it must be right. Since this argumentum ad populum is false, it’s also a non sequitur, providing no logical bridge to the next statement.

Mr Montgomerie’s deficit of intellectual rigour is only matched by his ignorance of the subject, as his second sentence proves. Yes, “the authentic Jesus Christ” (as opposed to the inauthentic one?) “according to the four gospels, did not once condemn same-sex relationships.”

From this one is supposed to infer that Jesus’s omission of homosexuality implies tacit acceptance. By the same token one could infer that Jesus saw nothing wrong in necrophilia, bestiality, coprophilia and all those other perversions he somehow forgot to mention in the Sermon on the Mount or any of his parables.

Apart from being logically unsound, this misapprehension evinces obtuse biblical literalism, so characteristic of sectarian Protestantism. In Mr Montgomerie’s case, this curiously coexists with the kind of selective approach to Scripture that’s closer to atheism or deism at best.

In addition to the Gospels, the Christian canon also comprises the rest of the New Testament and most of the Old. Both include numerous condemnations of homosexuality.

Citing the Gospels as the only valid source is therefore either pernicious or ignorant, take your pick. Then again, if Mark, Matthew and John contained injunctions against homosexuality, Mr Montgomerie would probably support his view by pointing out that Luke didn’t say a word about it.

Oddly, while ignoring most of the Christian canon, he seems to reduce all of Christian doctrine to Scripture. This is another typical Protestant failing, except that in Mr Mongomerie’s case it’s tinged with cavalier dismissal of the parts of the Bible that contradict his point.

Yet Christianity isn’t only the teaching by Christ but also – one is tempted to say mainly – the teaching about Christ. This has always been conveyed by and through the Church.

If one wrote out everything Jesus is quoted as saying in the Gospels, it would amount to about two hours of normal speech. Yet his ministry lasted at least a year. Surely he spoke for longer than two hours during all that time?

It has been the task of the apostolic Church to absorb not only written but also oral accounts of Christ, compiling them, with necessary interpretations, into coherent doctrine. The original oral accounts came from eyewitnesses, of whom there were thousands besides the apostles themselves.

This mission had started decades before the first Gospel was written down, with Christianity rapidly spreading on the strength of doctrine transmitted either orally or in short epistles, such as those by Paul, in which he condemns homosexuality (Romans 1:26-27, 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 and 1 Timothy 1:9-10).

Not recognising the Church as a depository and teacher of Christianity is therefore rank ignorance – even if one disagrees with Hilaire Belloc’s staunchly Catholic view that there’s no such thing as Christianity; there’s only the teaching of the Church.

What made Mr Montgomerie step on the path he doesn’t know how to navigate is his fashionably open-minded view not just on homosexuality in general but specifically on Anglican bishops openly living in homosexual unions, including marriage.

Here his co-opting the Gospels is particularly disingenuous. For in Matthew 19:4-6 and Mark 10:6-9 Jesus explicitly states that marriage is a union of a man and a woman, not any other combination thereof or any other mammals.

Mr Mongomerie’s unsound musings wouldn’t be worth talking about if they weren’t so typical and widespread. They’re another chapter in the civilisational suicide pact called modernity. And it’s our intellectually and morally unsound opinion-formers who’ll end up pulling the trigger.

Do you think it’s wrong to play computer games on your mobile during a church service? I certainly do.

Even a non-believer must realise that doing so is a sign of disrespect both to the liturgy and to those parishioners who take it seriously. If you don’t think either is owed any respect, don’t attend mass. If you do decide to attend, you’ve joined a game played to certain rules that must be obeyed.

Do you think the culprit should be rebuked? Good, we’re in agreement on that.

A footballer who trips an opponent must be whistled for a foul. A tennis player who steps over the line when serving must be faulted. And a boor who plays computer games during mass must be…

This is where the fun starts. Such a man could be dealt with in any number of ways. He could be told to stop or get out. He could be summarily evicted. He could be told never to show his face at that church again. In any civilised society, that is.

If you still think that Russia is one such, think again. For Ruslan Sokolovsky of Yekaterinburg has just been arrested for exactly that transgression. He has been charged with two crimes: insulting the feelings of believers and inciting hatred. The first one carries a prison sentence of up to three years. The second, up to five.

Either punishment would be too soft, according to the Interior Ministry spokesman. Not even five years in the slammer would be commensurate with the crime.

One would think that a supposedly Christian country acting like a Muslim theocracy should give Putin junkies in the West second thoughts. But it won’t. Nothing will.

No doubt they’ll hail this theocratic fascism as a laudable display of the KGB junta’s conservatism. They’d feel the same way even if Sokolovsky were immolated or torn in half by two horses, which was how religious issues were settled under the early Romanovs. That’s what conservatism is all about, isn’t it?

I wonder what excuse they’ll find for the next case, that of the Perm blogger Vladimir Luzgin. There the judges who sentenced Luzgin are clearly liberals getting in touch with their feminine side.

The maximum sentence for Luzgin’s crime was three years in a labour camp, and yet he got away with a mere fine of 200,000 roubles. That’s about £2,300 in our money, roughly what a teacher gets in a year or a pensioner in 18 months.

What was the blogger’s crime? I shan’t keep you in suspense any longer. Luzgin was charged with publishing a piece that violated the tersely worded Article 354.1 of the Russian Criminal Code (“Vindication of Nazism by the public denial of facts established by the Nuremberg Trials’ verdict and by the dissemination of knowingly false information about the USSR’s activities during the Second World War”).

The blogger had the audacity to write that not only Germany but also Russia committed aggression against Poland, thereby starting the war. Admittedly, the information Mr Luzgin disseminated indeed denied the ‘facts’ established at Nuremberg.

Except that the trials where Stalin’s Russia sat in judgement along with the Western allies were both a travesty of justice and a giant cover-up. Apart from punishing Hitler’s crimes, the trial set out to exonerate Stalin’s, which were equally heinous.

There’s nothing false about the information that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a criminal pact dividing Europe between them. That happened on 23 August, 1939. A week later, on 1 September, the Second World War started with Germany’s attack on Poland.

Contrary to the popular misapprehension, the war wasn’t exactly a cakewalk for the Nazis. Though initially stunned by the blitzkrieg, the Poles regrouped to the east of the Vistula, and their resistance was growing stronger by the day. Meanwhile the Germans were running out of essential supplies, especially aircraft bombs.

Their new Soviet allies helped, restocking the Nazis’ arsenal, as they later did during the Battle of Britain. But the Nazis demanded more tangible action, and the Soviets obliged. On 17 September they knifed Poland in the back by attacking her from the east. That put paid to the resistance, and the two predators divided the spoils stipulated in the pact.

The SS Einsatzgruppen came in the Wehrmacht’s wake and began to exterminate Jews in the western part of Poland. Similarly, the Soviet army in the east was followed by the NKVD, which had by then gathered vast experience in mass murder.

Several hundred thousand Poles were immediately deported, to the accompaniment of pistol shots fired through the heads of the usual suspects: aristocrats, priests, teachers, writers, scientists, administrators – and POW officers. The widely publicised massacre of 22,000 such people at Katyn and elsewhere was the culmination of that process, far from its entirety.

Such is the historical truth declared criminally false in Putin’s Russia. Now what do you call a regime that, on pain of punishment, forces its people to accept lies as truth? I call it fascist. Putin’s useful idiots call it conservative.

I’ll spare your delicate sensibilities by not telling you what I call Putin’s useful idiots. Let’s just say that my understanding of conservatism is at odds with theirs.

 

 

Joseph Stiglitz has won the Nobel Prize for economics, which these days more or less presupposes that he’s a champion of spend-and-tax. And that he’s an economist at all presupposes that he’s lost outside the narrow confines of his discipline.

Even within those confines he at times resembles an arsonist put in charge of a fire department. In fact, he was in the past put in charge of other things. Prof. Stiglitz has served as the World Bank’s chief economist and, more recently, economic adviser to Jeremy Corbyn. Being left-wing is an ironclad requirement for both jobs, and Prof. Stiglitz amply qualifies.

Some things he does get right, as suggested by the title of his book The Euro And Its Threat To The Future Of Europe. “The euro is just a 17-year old experiment, poorly designed and engineered not to work,” he writes.

Alas, he then contradicts himself by suggesting that, however poorly designed, the euro could still work if only European leaders listened to Prof. Stiglitz’s ideas, mostly involving raising taxes in parallel with spending.

But the euro part is true, or rather a truism, like saying that a chap’s hope will be frustrated if he believes that drinking a bottle of whisky every day for 17 years will improve his health. The more challenging task would be to explain why he became a dipsomaniac and how he can stop being one.

To extend the simile, if Prof. Stiglitz applied his economic views to the problem, his answer would be that the man began to drink because it seemed like a good idea, and his only way out is to start drinking more.

No doubt shoving the same currency down the throats of vastly different countries is economic madness. But, and here Prof. Stiglitz is correct, the purpose of the euro was political, not economic. It’s wrong, he writes, “to let economic integration outpace political integration.”

Yes, unless economic integration is merely a tool designed to bring about the political kind. This was done successfully by Prussia, which started out by uniting German principalities in the Zollverein customs union, only then to unite them politically under its own aegis in 1871.

Economic integration can disguise the underlying political purpose, and here I can’t stop repeating Jean Monnet’s 1952 quotation, I love it so much: “Europe’s nations should be guided towards the superstate without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose but which will irreversibly lead to federation.”

Because Prof. Stiglitz misunderstands the nature of the European Union, he blames the euro fiasco on his customary whipping boys the “neoliberals”, which is to say all economists to the right of Prof. Stiglitz. It’s their “market fundamentalism” that’s to blame.

This line is popular among socialists. For example, Emmanuel Macron, France’s former Economics Minister, declared with relish that Brexit would spell “the end of an ultraliberal Europe that the British themselves have pushed for, the end of a Europe without a political plan, centred on its domestic market.”

Actually, centring on the domestic market, and protecting it with punitive tariffs, is the exact opposite of liberal economics. Adam Smith, the founder of this genre, specifically wrote that “To give the monopoly of the home-market to the produce of domestic industry… must, in almost all cases, be either a useless or a hurtful regulation.”

Yet it’s pointless to expect socialist ideologues to know what they’re talking about. Macron certainly doesn’t and – for all his commendable attack on the euro – neither does Prof. Stiglitz, not really, especially when he mounts his hobby horse and rides it into battle against nonexistent EU ‘neoliberalism’.

Prof. Stiglitz proves his ideologically induced ignorance with a single sentence: “Europe, the source of the Enlightenment… is in crisis.” Contextually, he seems to be claiming that somehow the whole euro debacle contradicts the sterling virtues proclaimed by French philosophes and reasserted by German philosophers.

This is another case of putting the problem on its head. The EU, and the euro as its logical and inevitable extension, happened not in spite of the Enlightenment but because of it.

Rampant internationalism, wrapped together with such fallacies as egalitarianism, was part and parcel of the Enlightenment. As Christendom collapsed, philosophers from Grotius to Kant, and all the Frenchmen in between, came round to the idea that an international system should supersede national allegiances.

For example, Kant, a fanatic of republicanism, whose “heart was overfilled with joy” by the French revolution, argued that, as more European countries became republics, they could guarantee peace by coming together in some sort of supranational arrangement. One can hear echoes of the same notion in the frankly idiotic pronouncements by today’s federalists who ascribe the 70-year absence of a major European war to the EU rather than NATO’s nuclear umbrella.

One wishes economists chatted about their cherished paradigms and models among themselves and left us alone. They seem to be wholly wrong even when they’re partly right. If we listen to them, before long we’ll all march to soup kitchens, singing the Economists’ Anthem Brother, Can You Paradigm?.

 

 

 

 

 

It saddens me no end to see that His Holiness’s injunctions against sins towards the environment have been reported loosely rather than verbatim.

 The key messages have been reported accurately enough: the need for carpooling and no need for lights in the house, the environmental debt that rich nations owe to poor ones, the sins we all commit against the environment.

 But, while conveying the Pope’s message, the papers have neglected to convey his language, thereby displaying a cavalier attitude towards the form within which the content resides.

 By a stroke of luck, however, I’ve managed to lay my hands on the original text, which, in the spirit of Christian generosity, I shall share with you:

Seeing the multitudes, Francis went up into the Vatican: and when he was set, his Cardinals and the multitudes came upon him:

And Francis opened his mouth and taught them, saying,

Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; but I say unto you that whosoever driveth his own chariot shall be in danger of hell fire.

Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill: But verily I say unto you that whosoever looketh at a late-model chariot with lust hath killed the environment already in his heart; his is hell fire.

And if the State will sue thee at law for committing global warming, and take away thy money, let it take thy chariot also.

Therefore when the State doest thou out of thine alms to pay for wind farms, verily I say unto you, Give it its reward.

I speak after the manner of men because of the infirmity of your flesh: for as ye have yielded your members servants to unclean air and the iniquity of global warming; even so now yield your members servants to chariotpooling and darkness in your abode.

And God said, let there not be light in thine abode: and there was no light.

And God saw the darkness, that it was good: and God divided darkness from light.

And God called the darkness in thine house virtue, and the light he called sin.

What fruit had ye then in the ecological debt whereof ye are now ashamed? for the end of aerosols and lights in your house is death.

But now being made free from lights in your house and your own chariot also, ye have your fruit unto ecological holiness, and the end of everlasting life on this planet rid of carbon monoxide and other ravenings also.

For the wages of global warming is death; but the gift of God is eternal life in dark houses through responsible environmentalism.

Blessed are the poor nations for they shall inherit our planet.

Blessed too are the poor nations for they shall inherit also our alms to battle climate change.

Blessed are the poor in spirit and feeble in mind: for theirs is the message of global warming.

Blessed are the poor in money: for they have not their own chariots nor lights in their abodes also.

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst: for they have not sinful fuels to cook food and they have no food also.

Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? Say, what can I do to prevent global warming.

Behold the fowls of the air; for they drive not, neither do they have houses with lights and electric ovens; yet nature feedeth them.

Take therefore no thought for the morrow; take thought for climate change for then all things will take care of themselves.

Rejoice, and be exceedingly glad: for great is thy reward for darkened abodes and no private chariots.

Ecology is the light of the world. A mountain of environmental debt cannot be hid.

Let the ecology’s light so shine before men that they may need no electricity, and glorify Him which is in the Vatican.

For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle of carbon monoxide shall in no wise remain in thy air, till all are poor.

It hath been said, Whosoever shall put away his wife shall be smitten for murder, but I say unto you that Whosoever driveth his own chariot shall be smitten before.

Whosoever punisheth the Environment cannot be my servant.

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Though shalt love thy neighbour. But I say unto you, Love thy Environment, bless them that ruin you, be good to them that take thy chariot away, and pray for them that make you live in darkness and cold also.

That ye may be the children of Environment Ministry, for it decideth what is good for you and samewise what is bad.

For your Minister knoweth what things ye have need of, and what ye have no need of.

Be ye therefore environmentally perfect, even as wind farms and solar panels are perfect.

Blessed are the pure in air: for they shall see new taxes.

Blessed are the merciful to the Environment: for they shall obtain mercy.

For where your private chariot is, there will your heart be also.

Ye cannot serve the Environment and mammon.

I am the Environment, thy God.

The sight of young women throwing up their nightly intake of booze, passing out in the street or fighting in pubs is now commonplace – and not just in the downmarket parts of town.

Nor is it just downmarket girls who do that, as a feature in the Mail shows. On the contrary, the ladies mentioned are all middle class. One such girl has “a string of As and A*s in her GCSEs and A-levels” and “a degree in contemporary art”.

Yet come Saturday night this academic overachiever drinks two bottles of wine, followed by 10 shots of tequila and “a nightcap of Bailey’s or two”. In spite of being a 5-foot wisp of a girl, she gets into fights and staggers home all covered in “scars, bruises and cuts”.

The paper states that drinking toxic amounts of alcohol once or twice a week is pandemic among such girls. It also provides helpful statistics: over the last 20 years the number of alcohol-related deaths among women has increased by 80 per cent, and by 130 per cent among young women.

The article helpfully explains that women can’t drink as much as men. Their body mass is lower as are their levels of water, while their fat content is higher. Also their livers produce less of the enzyme called alcohol dehydrogenase that breaks alcohol down.

However, the piece begins to falter when trying to explain why women do this sort of thing. And an explanation is needed because pandemic drunkenness among women is a recent phenomenon.

British men have always consumed more than the European average. Young men in particular have traditionally acted the way women act now. Hence male boozing has no novelty appeal, nor much of any other. It just is.

A rite of passage is probably involved, a visible assertion of masculinity. Real men, which the boys aren’t yet but seek to become and, more important, seem, are supposed to hold their own when drinking, fighting, driving and whatnot.

Call it silly, infantile or puerile by all means, but please don’t call it unnatural. This is how things are, always were and always will be.

Perhaps one may argue that today’s young lads, including those upmarket ones like Cameron, Gove or Johnson, who belong to drinking clubs like Oxford’s Bullingdon, may be drinking more than their fathers did at their age. Yet this is only a difference of degree.

Conversely, young women wallowing in their own vomit every weekend represent a qualitative shift, something rarely seen in their mothers’ generation and never in their grandmothers’. When things change so drastically from one generation to the next, serious analysis is called for, and the Mail’s attempts don’t qualify as such:

“Young middle-class women are more likely to go to university than ever before where… there is an institutional acceptance of binge drinking”. But the absolute number of women at university doesn’t matter. What matters is how many of that number wake up on park benches covered in vomit.

“Bad habits then become ingrained as aspirational women pursue careers, delay children, become stressed and overworked…” But surely a woman of, say, 50 years ago wasn’t exactly stress-free. She had to run a household full of children and old people, working her fingers to the bone trying to make both ends meet.

For example my mother, along with millions of other university-educated Russian women, had a full-time job, yet every evening she’d queue up for hours to buy some food, carry heavy bags on overcrowded transport, then cook in a communal kitchen and do a backbreaking amount of housework.

Yet, though Russia can hardly be described as a teetotal culture, I don’t recall knowing, or indeed seeing, many women like my mother who associated a good time with drunken stupor and public fisticuffs.

What else? “Another contributing factor… is the seductive marketing employed by the drinks industry…” Now it’s getting silly. Even after 30 years of writing ads, I don’t have such boundless faith in the power of advertising. An ad may inspire a girl to choose WKD over Smirnoff Ice, but not to drink 30 units of either in one sitting.

The real reason is that the girls described in the article as “intelligent and educated” are in fact neither. For real intelligence and education aren’t synonymous with A-levels and degrees in contemporary art. They are what happens as a result – or doesn’t, as the case usually is these days.

These girls drink not because they’ve been to university or seen a clever TV ad, but because they have no inner spiritual resources on which they can rely. Barren spiritually, intellectually and morally, they’re like ships cast adrift with no navigation devices.

This is what modern progress is all about: material enrichment going hand in hand with spiritual impoverishment. Because these girls’ lives lack purpose, the process of living becomes its own purpose. This wastes the advantage of being human, for – all the A-levels notwithstanding – purely material lives differ from those of animals only in insignificant details.

Their schools taught them to look for the truth only inside themselves. So they do – and find only themselves there. That’s a shattering discovery, and many are indeed shattered.

As I wrote in my book The Crisis Behind Our Crisis, “We have replaced religion with (at best) religionism, freedom with liberty, wisdom with cleverness, sentiment with sentimentality, justice with legalism, art with pickled animals, music with amplified noise, statecraft with politicking, love with sex, communication with sound bytes, self-confidence with effrontery, equality before God with levelling, respect for others with political correctness – in short, everything real with virtual caricatures.”

And, I might have added, pleasure with drunken oblivion. The girls’ will remains free, of course, and it’s not all society’s fault. But much of it is. Many young women have nowhere else to go but into a puddle of vomit on a grimy pavement.

 

 

 

 

Reading newspapers these days makes me think that life has passed me by. Just one issue of a popular daily proves that, while I busy myself with two of the three Rs (no ‘rithmetic), other people are having all the fun.

For example, Dr Cyprian Okoro has opened my eyes to certain amorous possibilities that I didn’t know even existed. The good doctor is on trial at the Old Bailey for filling his phone with objectionable images of unconventional sexuality.

One shows a woman with a dog, proving that it’s not just a man that a dog is the best friend of. The report didn’t specify the type of dog, but the lady’s best friend must have been bigger than a Yorkie.

Speaking of big, another image showed a woman corrupting the morals of a horse, which must have been a traumatic experience for both. The story that Catherine the Great died in flagrante delicto with a stallion is probably apocryphal, but the danger is very real.

Though I’ve never engaged in such activities, nor indeed watched them, I knew they existed. Where the good doctor took me into new territory is with another image he enjoyed, that of a man having sex with a snake.

As a medic, Dr Okoro must be aware of anatomical possibilities that would never occur to those bereft of his training. Hence, hard though I strain my imagination, I can’t picture the mechanics involved. Was the man the active or passive participant? The public has a right to know.

Watching such entertainment betokens a man of underdeveloped moral and aesthetic sense. That shortcoming, however, isn’t yet criminalised, for otherwise every pop star would be doing porridge. Though uploading such material is undeniably criminal, downloading it is more ambiguous.

Provided the doctor enjoyed himself in private, the tiny libertarian portion of my worldview rebels. Can a viewer of such material be seen as an accomplice? The law evidently feels so, but as Mr Bumble said, “the law is a ass”, or can be.

Still, it’s reassuring to know that HMG looks after the moral health of snakes, reasserting thereby the unity of all living things. Those poor creatures need to be protected from libidinous men of adventurous tastes – unless of course the reptile gives consent by some semiotic expedient.

Is prosecuting Dr Okoro just? I’ll sit on the fence here, because the conservative portion of my worldview is bigger than the libertarian one, and there’s a conflict. No such equivocation about the next news item that caught my eye.

A woman who sleeps naked with her 16-year-old son asked the Internet if such nocturnal arrangements were wrong. She didn’t ask what a degenerate was, so presumably she already knows.

Dr Freud would dine on this story, though a New York woman once dismissed his pet theory by saying “Oedipus, schmedipus, as long he loves his Mum…” They do say that incest is best, although here again I have no personal experience in the matter.

It’s unclear whether the woman in question was wondering about the advisability of incest or if sleeping naked with a teenager full of bubbling testosterone was indeed incestuous. The answer to the second question is obviously yes (in that situation congress can occur even if it’s not intended, as an accidental result of tossing and turning at night), but the first one is more involved.

The state condones, nay promotes, unorthodox sex. My moral antennae aren’t finely enough tuned to detect a valid difference between incest and two men getting married with official blessing. In fact, the egalitarian in me resents such discrimination among perversions.

The same objection could be raised to the first story. If Dr Okoro would be within his right to marry another man, why can’t he watch his fiancé getting his amorous warm-up with other species? Oulaw speciesism and human supremacism, I say.

The third story is tragic, even though I haven’t read it in its entirety. All I saw was a rather long headline with uncertain antecedents: “Naked British woman in her 20s dies while walking home following a night out in Ibiza after being hit by a female driver who was high on cocaine.”

For once I can claim partial personal experience. I have to admit with retrospective repentance that in the past I too used to have wild nights out, though never in Ibiza (pronounced Ibiffa, for the benefit of my foreign readers). However, I can’t recall ever walking through the streets in the buff thereafter.

Must have been quite a party, though marred by such a heart-rending finale. However, one must feel proud about British culture being carried around the world. I saw another proof of this welcome development this morning, when walking through my French village.

There’s a new shop there called Stylish Tattoo and Piercing. That the sign is in English fills my heart with nationalistic pride, even though deep down I doubt tattoos and piercing can ever be stylish.

Aren’t you happy to be alive in such exciting times? And let’s banish any history-based fear that such exciting civilisations don’t stay alive for long.

Richard Taruskin’s review of The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes’s novel about Shostakovich, is awful – but not from my selfish viewpoint.

I have a weakness for writing that provokes thought, even by negative association. One such thought is about the pitfalls awaiting experts in one field venturing into other pastures.

Taruskin is an excellent musicologist, and his books contain interesting insights. One such is his analysis of Beethoven symphonies as performed by great conductors, from Furtwängler to Mravinsky. Taruskin debunks today’s obsession with maintaining the same tempo from beginning to end, which should make the book required reading for modern performers.

Yet this expertise doesn’t automatically qualify Taruskin to enlarge on novels about Shostakovich, which he goes on to prove.

Taruskin describes Barnes’s book as “a beautifully written botch”, and that’s a possible view, though I quite liked the novel. But then he gets terribly lost delving into such issues as historical versus artistic truth, Shostakovich’s interplay with Stalin’s regime and Tolstoy’s treatment of history in War and Peace.

Holding Tolstoy up as an exemplar of historical veracity, Taruskin objects to Barnes’s portrayal of Shostakovich as a martyr. He approvingly quotes Tolstoy’s view that reliance on facts would “force me to be governed by historical documents rather than the truth.”

Indeed a historical novel is different from a historical treatise. Historians start with historiography and often end there. Great historians, however, turn history into philosophy, finding kernels of eternal truths in the yellowing documents.

A novelist turns history into art, which is seldom possible to do without taking liberties with documents. But the example Taruskin uses to criticise Barnes doesn’t work.

For Tolstoy’s version of 1812 is animated by ideology, not a search for truth. He extols the demiurgic powers residing in every Russian breast, which supposedly makes the Russian commander Kutuzov a military giant to Napoleon’s pygmy.

Yet the historical Kutuzov fought a do-nothing campaign that could easily have ended in disaster. He lost the only major battle of the war and as a result surrendered Moscow. However, Tolstoy argues that Borodino was a Russian victory because Napoleon ended up losing the war. That’s like claiming that the French defeated the Nazis in 1940 because de Gaulle triumphantly entered Paris in 1944.

Tolstoy’s jingoism found a receptive audience with every subsequent Russian government, making the 1812 war the only historical subject taught in school on the basis of a fictional account, rather than historical truth.

While allowing Tolstoy a tonne of licence, Taruskin denies Barnes even an ounce of it. Without suggesting that Barnes even approaches Tolstoy’s artistic genius, one still has to demur – especially since Barnes doesn’t deviate from history as much as Taruskin thinks.

To be sure, Barnes bends the odd fact, though never to Tolstoy’s customary breaking point. But his portrayal of Shostakovich’s mental tortures at Stalin’s hands rings true both historically and psychologically. By contrast, Taruskin’s view of Shostakovich as an unprincipled conformist who “behaved not like a saint but like a politician” is inane.

Taruskin understands what great composers do, but evidently not why they do it. He misses the main point: for such men music is their life and, for most, their God. That life must be lived, and that God worshipped, above everything else.

How they go about it is often at odds with bourgeois notions. But genius has to survive in a world hostile to genius, which has never been easy.

Bach wrote fawning letters to assorted margraves, Haydn was a liveried servant to a nobleman, Mozart played lickspittle to patrons, Beethoven – for all his reputation for rebelliousness – ditto. Yet none of them lived in the hell surrounding Shostakovich.

Those gentlemen had to make a living. Shostakovich had to stay alive, and Taruskin obviously doesn’t realise what incessant fear for his life can do to a man of Shostakovich’s sensitivity.

Each Pravda article attacking his work wasn’t musical criticism. It was a sentence of death, suspended at the last moment.

The first such sentence came in the 1936 article Muddle Instead of Music, assailing Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. The composer was accused of “left deviationism in opera” and threatened that “it might end very badly”. Such harangues were at the time usually followed by a midnight knock on the door.

The second death sentence came in 1948, when Stalin’s bloodhound Zhdanov attacked Shostakovich’s ‘formalism’. People were then shot for less, and only a miracle saved the composer yet again.

Taruskin can’t imagine the torments of a man pursuing his destiny while squinting at the sword of Damocles above his head. The sword didn’t come down, but Shostakovich was a martyr nonetheless.

Of course he had to compromise, of course he did a few dubious things. Shostakovich had to work, and therefore he had to stay alive. Yet by contemporaneous standards he did nothing particularly immoral. For example, unlike many of his lesser colleagues, Shostakovich didn’t write denunciations.

Shostakovich’s music reflects his torments. His every note is a condemnation of the Soviet regime: not because of any literal subtexts but because work of that magnitude denies evil by its very existence.

Shostakovich ends many of his great pieces by almost cutting them off in mid-phrase, uncertain which way life would go, fearful it could only get worse. For all his seeming conformism, he was more profoundly anti-Soviet than most dissidents – and, though he didn’t get killed, he suffered horrible tortures as a result.

As a fellow artist, Barnes elucidates Shostakovich’s essence more perceptively than do Taruskin’s turgid musings. Stick to musical analysis, would be my advice.

If the devil is in the detail, here’s one such, to be found at any Russian tobacconist: Belomorkanal cigarettes.

The cigarettes are so devilishly strong that one can feel cancerous cells multiplying with every puff. But it’s not what’s in the packet that makes Belomorkanal diabolical. It’s what’s on the packet.

First produced in 1932, the design commemorates the construction of the White Sea Canal. While Belomorkanal reflects the Soviet mania for abbreviations (Belomor = Beloye Morye, the White Sea), the project itself reflects the Soviet mania for democide.

The canal was built by slave labour under the supervision of the OGPU, as Putin’s KGB then was. In the process at least 100,000 starving prisoners keeled over their wheelbarrows and died.

Not only lives were lost at Belomorkanal but also the conscience of Russia’s pride, her literature. For every writer of note was taken to the site and subsequently wrote a panegyric, “glorifying slave labour for the first time in the history of Russian literature”, in Solzhenitsyn’s phrase. Some, like Pilniak and Mandelstam, did so in the vain attempt to save their own lives. Most, however, followed Gorky’s suit by displaying genuine enthusiasm.

To be fair, the Russian tradition of using human bones for foundations didn’t start with Stalin.

The eminent historian Vasiliy Klyuchevsky (d. 1911) wrote that more people died building Petersburg than had ever been killed in any war. Modern historians cite a death toll closer to 300,000, which is still impressive by the demographic standards of the time. Nor was it a one-off tragedy: at least another 60,000 perished erecting Petersburg’s hideous St Isaac’s Cathedral in the mid-nineteenth century.

However, never before in Russian or any other history had slave labour been practised on Stalin’s massive scale and with such murderous results. Millions died in the same pits that are now used by Putin’s KGB junta to pad their offshore accounts. Millions more perished logging in the taiga’s Arctic temperatures or building whole new cities, such as Magnitogorsk and Komsomolsk-on-Amur.

One would think that any half-decent government would repent such crimes and unreservedly disclaim any continuity with the regime that perpetrated them. Yet the reverse is true: Putin is holding up Stalin’s slave empire as a shining peak from which the country has then lamentably descended.

And Belomorkanal still adorns tobacconists’ shelves with nary a demur from anyone. How do you suppose today’s Germans would react to the sight of Auschwitz cigarettes in shop windows?

Stalin is portrayed in Putin’s history books as a leader and administrator of genius, who was occasionally harsh but always fair. Statues of him are popping up here and there, and there are even Stalin icons worshipped by parishioners to illustrate the great Christian revival touted at home and abroad for PR purposes.

The latest touch in the on-going re-Stalinisation is the appointment of Olga Vasilyeva as Minister for Education and Science. This repugnant woman is a walking Stalin icon herself, for her philosophy represents the newly popular hybrid of Stalinism and Russian Orthodoxy.

According to her, Stalin’s purges were both “necessary at the time” and “exaggerated” in history books. Hence Vasilyeva is scathing in her attacks on those who show residual revulsion at the unprecedented and unequalled carnage:

“What these people mostly want is to delete the Soviet period, to blacken the past, to expunge from collective conscience any loyalty to traditions, any pride for the country’s greatness… This is what they’ve thought up – that there were two totalitarian regimes and, while one had its Nuremberg Trial, the other one didn’t… Our foundation is… respect for our history, traditions and spiritual values. Remember 1934, when Stalin said that we now have a motherland, now we have a history.”

For the sake of the reclaimed history, I’d have been tempted to mention that the moustachioed ghoul uttered those words at the Seventeenth Congress of the Communist Party, called the Congress of the Victors.

However, that pageant should have been more appropriately called the Congress of the Walking Dead: of the 1,996 party members present, 1,108 were arrested three years later, and about two thirds of those executed. Of the 139 members elected to the Central Committee, 98 would be shot in the purges.

Such facts are never emphasised and seldom mentioned, certainly not by the creature now in charge of educating Russia’s young. Vasilyeva stresses continuity and conservatism, which would be a good thing if there were anything in Stalin’s Russia worth continuing and conserving.

I’m sure that education, Vasilyeva-style, will take continuity even further back, to 1836, when Count Benckendorff, chief of Nicholas I’s secret police and Putin’s typological precursor, explained in what spirit Russian children ought to be raised: “Russia’s past was amazing, her present is more than splendid and, as to her future, it soars above anything even the most daring imagination can fathom.”

This was written as criticism of Russia’s first philosopher Pyotr Chaadayev, whose book Philosophical Letters was scathing of Russia’s role in history. To start another fine tradition since then amply developed, Chaadayev was declared insane and confined to home arrest.

Yes, Russia’s past was indeed amazing, especially its part so lovingly commemorated on Belomorkanal packets. The conservative in me rejoices.