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The originator of this deep insight used it as a justification for murdering millions and turning millions more into what he so robustly called ‘camp dust’.

HMG hasn’t quite graduated to such measures but, to borrow an aphorism from their other apparent inspiration Mao, “a journey of a thousand miles starts with a small step.”

The small step our Conservative (!) government is about to take is vetting applicants for government jobs to make sure they don’t come from the upper classes. Rather than fighting class war with bullets, torture and barbed wire, HMG has come up with a questionnaire designed to bar what the Bolsheviks called ‘socially alien elements’ from senior positions in the civil service.

Over 4,000 people already holding such posts will have to take the test first, to give HMG an accurate demographic picture of Whitehall. No indication has so far been given whether those testing at above the common-as-muck level will be summarily sacked, but that would be the logical inference. HMG did indicate they’d recommend that the same standards be applied to senior jobs in the private sector too.

Now I don’t hold a senior public job and nor do I intend to apply for one. However, supposing that I did, would I qualify? Here are their questions and my answers:

Did you spend time in care? No.

Have you ever held refugee or asylum status? Yes.

Were you a carer as a child? Occasionally.

What type of secondary school did you go to? The type where most boys carry knives and try to rape most girls.

What was the name of that school? Moscow Secondary School No 123.

Did your parent or guardian complete a degree? Yes.

What are your parents’ highest qualifications? MS and MA.

What was your postcode when you were 14? None.

Were you eligible for free school meals? No.

What was your parents’ occupation? Father, engineer; mother, librarian.

What kind of home did you live in – owner occupied or rented? Neither. Social housing, seven of us in one room, five other families sharing kitchen, bathroom and lavatory.

How would you assess your own socio-economic background? Indefinite.

Well, I don’t know. The schooling and residence answers are right up (or rather down) there, but some others are iffy. Touch and go, I dare say.

However, I don’t think the questionnaire probes deeply enough. Hence I’d like to offer 20 additional questions of my own, to wit:

1) Does your Mum ever charge for sex? 2) If yes, how much? 3) How many tattoos, if any, does she have? 4) Were your parents a) married? b) shacked up, c) so pissed they didn’t know how they ended up shagging? 5) Actually, do you know who your Dad was? 6) Does your Mum? 7) How many criminal convictions and/or ASBOs do your Mum and Dad (if known) have? 8) Do your Mum and Dad (if known) drink more than 15 units of alcohol a day? 9) Do they do drugs? 10) How many cigarettes do they smoke a day? 11) Do your Mum and Dad (if known) move their lips when reading? 12) Can they read at all? 13) How many books, if any, do you have at your place? 14) Do your Mum and Dad buy lottery tickets? 15) What did you call your main meal a) dinner, b) lunch, c) tea, d) nonexistent? 16) What kind of car, if any, did your family have a) owned, b) leased, c) stolen? 17) Are you a) male, b) female, c) other? 18) Are you a) white, b) black, c) other, d) Don’t have a clue, mate? 19) Are you a) Christian, b) Jewish, c) Muslim, d) other, e) You f***ing what, mate? 20) Are you a) straight, b) gay, c) other, d) bit of everything?

Correct answers: 1) yes, 2) a fiver or 10 Bensons, 3) too many to count, 4) b or c, 5) no, 6) no or the bitch won’t tell, 7) who’s counting?, 8) yes, 9) yes, 10) as many as they could nick, 11) yes, 12) not really, 13) none, 14) every week, 15) c or d, 16) c or none, 17) a, b or c, 18) b, c or d, 19) b, c, d or e, 20) b, c or d)

This questionnaire may be expanded or condensed, but in either case those providing correct answers must be hired on the spot – regardless of any other qualifications. This will guarantee we’ll have the best possible standards in our civil service or, in any case, the kind of civil service we deserve.

Actually, there are a few serious questions I’d like to ask. Do our governing spivs think the civil service is the right battlefield for class war? Do they think those giving the right answers to their real or my imaginary questions will be better qualified than those giving wrong answers? Do they realise, or indeed care, that they’re destroying the last vestiges of sanity in government?

Above all, do they realise they are but a small step removed from the kind of thinking that animated Messrs Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot?

 

 

 

 

Former Education Secretary Kenneth Baker didn’t say that in so many words. But he said it nonetheless.

Lord Baker observed correctly that a degree in useless humanities is no longer a ticket to “a nice house in a nice area”, which, as we all know, is the only conceivable purpose of higher education.

“I haven’t seen the passing up of a Russell Group university yet but we will eventually see it,” predicted Lord Baker with clairvoyant certainty. In other words, Britain’s top universities will become extinct like dinosaurs and other species jettisoned by evolution.

At £9,250 a year, a degree in history or philosophy isn’t worth the money, explained Lord Baker. It makes more sense to join an apprenticeship programme at an IT company, where a youngster can be paid up to £15,000 a year to learn how to push buttons with greater dexterity.

Such a youngster would be £24,250 better off than a drudge burying himself in useless Plato or Thucydides. Simple arithmetic, really. Open and shut case.

Now I often write vituperatively about our soulless, materialistic modernity. Yet nothing I’ve ever written at my most jaundiced condemns modernity more devastatingly than Lord Baker’s affable comments.

He said, effectively and possibly unwittingly, that Western civilisation is dead, a view I share. However, Lord Baker sounds as if he sees nothing wrong in this demise. Just the way the cookie crumbles, old boy. Yes, but this one has crumbled so much that there’s no cookie left.

Ever since the first university was founded 928 years ago in Bologna, everyone has understood that its function is to point students, and through them society, towards the path approaching eternal truths. Such truths weren’t to be found in crafts, useful as they might be.

It was subjects like theology, philosophy, logic, rhetoric, history and so forth that led to absolute truth. Because any civilisation is defined by its understanding of absolutes, they were by far the most important academic disciplines.

In those backward days no one doubted that absolute truth was transcendent, residing higher than man and ultimately beyond his reach. However, it was a university’s task to lead man up to the closest possible approximation of truth, thereby lifting society to new moral, spiritual and intellectual heights.

Modernity tossed transcendence overboard like so much ballast preventing progress from staying afloat. Truth was yanked off its absolute perch and internalised within each man. Since all men are self-evidently created equal, all are therefore deemed equally able to perceive truth.

Truth was no longer one and absolute; it became fractured and relative. In other words, it effectively ceased to exist. Our civilisation lost its soul, and consequently its intellect.

Intellect was no longer needed as a recipient and processor of verity. Modernity declared that truth is whatever is perceived by the senses, not by the mind or, God forbid, intuitive inspiration.

Since the senses perceive mostly material things, our society became grossly materialistic. It no longer needed to ponder the intellectual threads of which the fabric of our civilisation was woven in the first place. It needed training in acquiring material things as expeditiously as possible.

Few people noticed that the resultant intellectual catastrophe spelled social disaster as well. Every Western country has become an aggregate of atomised individuals, each either a depository of his own version of truth or, more typically, not bothering about anything other than pursuing happiness, as defined with the greatest possible vulgarity.

The calamitous consequences of this ‘progress’ are too numerous to mention. The most immediately obvious one is politics. It’s also one with the greatest potential for destroying the world not just spiritually but also physically.

Abolition of truth has produced a society of moral and intellectual idiots, unable to wield the most basic mental tools and incapable of distinguishing among emotions, opinions, judgements and arguments. Such men, observed Chesterton, “do not believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

They have no intellectual training to realise that almost everything they hear from politicians is meaningless waffle replete with non sequiturs, demagoguery and every rhetorical fallacy in the book (the kind of book no one reads any longer).

Whenever by some quirk of nature a politician appears who talks sense, he’s either drummed out of politics or forced to toe the line. In fact, it’s becoming exceedingly unlikely that such a politician can appear: an electorate of moral and intellectual idiots will unfailingly choose similarly inferior leaders. In a cannibal tribe only a cannibal can be chief.

Except that our cannibals wield not spears but weapons capable of wiping out the world. The weapons aren’t just of the explosive variety: some of them are economic, likely to destroy the very material happiness in whose name they were deployed.

Lord Baker is therefore right. The very concept of university has already been debauched, and even in this diminished form universities are no longer needed. They’ll either disappear or transmogrify into trade schools.

Those who will know the difference won’t think it matters one way or the other. Few will ever realise that the ensuing catastrophe isn’t just academic but also existential.

Before I get irate letters from Swedish women and all those who abhor generalisation, this isn’t an attempt to impugn the morals of Nordic womankind. It’s merely a quote.

The belief quoted is almost universally shared among the Muslim population of Sweden, a nation more hospitable to aliens than any other in Northern Europe.

Five per cent of the country’s population is Muslim (or more, if we include second-generation immigrants, as we must) and, coincidentally, Swedish women also suffer the greatest number of rapes and sexual assaults.

Or rather I’d want this to be coincidental. After all, I am, as I keep mentioning in the hope of attracting a greater following, the founder, president and so far the only member of the Charles Martel Society for Multiculturalism.

Therefore I’d never point an accusing finger at any downtrodden group that has suffered for so long from Western colonialism, imperialism and all sorts of other isms. Nor will I dare suggest that the sentiment in the title has anything to do with this inexplicable situation.

Actually, Sweden is relatively free of blame, since I can’t recall any instances of Swedes venting their colonialist urges on Muslims. Then again, Swedes must share in the collective guilt of all white people, especially since they look whiter than most.

However, even though I refuse to accuse Muslims, statistics do that for me. And these say that Muslims dominate the group of rape suspects. According to these statistics, most perpetrators are immigrants, and most immigrants are Muslims.

This is the case not only in Sweden but in the rest of Scandinavia too. In Oslo, immigrants, mainly Muslims, are involved in two out of three rapes. In Copenhagen, this figure is three out of four.

But Sweden takes pride of place both in absolute and relative numbers. The absolute numbers are easy enough to explain: the country has by far the greatest population in Scandinavia and therefore the greatest number of targets.

The relative numbers aren’t exactly mysterious either, owed as they are to the nation’s aforementioned hospitality. Of all convicted rapists there, 85 per cent were born abroad, and an overwhelming majority are Muslims.

Yet those who demand that decisive action be taken clearly don’t understand the concept of cultural diversity. The Swedish police do, as shown by their attempt to throw light on the macabre situation in their report “The Current Situation of Sexual Molestation and Proposals for Action.”

Sweden’s finest grudgingly admit that the majority of attacks are against girls under 15, and most are committed by Muslims. However, this has nothing to do with… well, anything it isn’t supposed to have anything to do with.

It’s all simply a case of cultural differences. Islamic culture, which is self-evidently at least equal to ours, dictates that any woman wearing revealing clothes (that is, not draped head to toe in a black Halloween costume) is a whore.

Now, even supposing that every female Swede is indeed a lady of easy virtue, it still doesn’t follow that she should be fair game for rape. Whores are still entitled to offer or refuse consent, and Swedish policemen agree.

That is, they agree for appearances’ sake. One still detects their general feeling that any raped woman who wears short skirts (or, given the tender age of most victims, pinafores) has only herself to blame.

She also has something else to blame, her “Nordic alcohol culture and non-traditional gender roles”. Now, according to those downtrodden Muslim migrants, the traditional ‘gender role’ for a woman is solely to act as a spittoon for a man’s discharge, in which capacity she may even be allowed to divest herself of the Halloween costume.

When a blonde Valkyrie is espied not acting in that role, she must be forced to conform. “Control is exercised over women through violence,” explains the report, “thus shaping her according to the man’s idealised vision of femininity.”

Those Muslim idealists also suffer from traditional Nordic intemperance. They “can’t handle the alcohol” and as a result “feel horny”. In other words, it’s the victims’ own fault for belonging to a degenerate culture that, unlike the highly moral Islam, countenances the consumption of booze.

Now I grew up in Russia, a country that easily rivals Scandinavia in ‘alcohol culture’. When I and my friends were young and filled to the brim with bubbling hormones, we drank a lot, and most of us couldn’t handle alcohol either. And yes, we too ‘felt horny’ as a result. Yet we always asked the girl’s permission before having sex – it was just something one did.

Those Russian rapists who didn’t ask permission were savages, and so are those Muslims who make Swedish women scared to walk the streets. If a culture predisposes men to sexual violence, then it’s not so much culture as condoned savagery.

No doubt those Swedish Valkyries are ecstatic about the news that 190,000 more Muslims will have arrived in Sweden by the end of the year. I can think of only one solution: they should all convert to Islam and don Halloween costumes.

And if you can think of any other solution, don’t bother to apply for my Charles Martel Society for Multiculturalism. You’ll be blackballed.

The EU is like the intimate portion of canine anatomy: it locks a member in and holds on tight.

Tempting though it may be to expand this simile, I’ll just repeat what I’ve said before. The main problem with the EU isn’t that it’s undemocratic but that it’s evil.

A political structure doesn’t have to murder millions to justify such a description. It’s enough that it should be built on wicked principles and propped up by wicked practices.

Vindicating this observation, the EU, abetted by quislings in the national governments, has so far been able to reverse every referendum that has gone against it. Each time it acted like a stern teacher telling a hapless pupil to think again: “You got it wrong, Johnny. Keep doing it until you get it right.”

As far as the EU is concerned, British voters got it wrong when voting to leave. They must be made to think again, and federasts are banging their heads together to find the best way.

The simplest way would be to repeat for the umpteenth time that referendum results aren’t legally binding. So thank you, Mr Voter. We’ll take your concerns into account when working out an improved arrangement with the EU.

Alas, such a straightforward approach would be politically suicidal, and the idea of killing their own careers is repugnant to our ‘leaders’. More subtlety is required.

Thus we’ve always been told that leaving the EU takes a lot of planning, negotiations, renegotiations, horse trading and whatnot. Those things take time; one can’t rush into decisions headlong.

Fair enough. But how much time? How long before we activate Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty? What are the reasons for not doing so immediately?

Here one is reminded to one’s chagrin that the top two positions in HMG are occupied by Mrs May and Mr Hammond who both supported remaining. It’s not therefore inconceivable that they may be assisting the EU’s efforts to keep Britain locked in its womb.

The noises they’re making add weight to such suspicions. Specifically, we’re told that we must wait until the French and German elections to invoke Article 50. “You can’t negotiate when you don’t know who you’re negotiating with” is the party line.

But this is nonsense. First, since we’re leaving the EU and not France or Germany, their electoral shenanigans shouldn’t make any difference. We’ll be negotiating with EU institutions, mainly the Commission, which isn’t subject to electoral vagaries for the simple reason that it’s unelected in the first place.

Second, invoking Article 50 doesn’t mean a summary exit or immediate negotiations. It only means that HMG is formally notifying the EU of its decision to leave. Negotiations start after that, to be concluded within two years. Since bureaucratic procedures always extend to the outer limit of the time available, should we invoke Article 50 now, we won’t actually leave until autumn, 2018.

This seems to be sufficient time to negotiate the details – and to staff the Whitehall departments set up for this purpose. Such departments don’t have to be at full strength to extend the notification. However, if they’re as desperately understaffed as they claim, I’m hereby offering my pro bono services in drafting the appropriate text:

“Her Majesty’s Government wishes to invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, thereby notifying the European Union of the United Kingdom’s intention to withdraw from membership in that organisation.”

Job done. However, a proverbial highly placed source is claiming that: “Ministers are now thinking the [Article 50] trigger could be delayed to autumn 2017. They don’t have the infrastructure for the people they need to hire. They say they don’t even know the right questions to ask when they finally begin bargaining with Europe.”

That makes our ministers even dafter than one would expect. So allow me to offer my unsolicited services yet again. Don’t ask them any questions, chaps, not at first. Just tell them we’re definitely leaving. The Q&A can wait until the nitty-gritty has to be sorted out, and even that should be done from a position of strength, not supplication.

Otherwise people might think that HMG is trying to soft-pedal Brexit until it topples into the ditch. For three years is a longer time in politics than even Harold Wilson’s infamous week. A lot can happen.

Here’s one plausible scenario. It’s probable, nay guaranteed, that we’ll have a recession during that period. This will have nothing to do with Brexit but everything to do with the nature of our economy, which is an Origami arrangement spun out of the printing press.

When this comes about, economically literate people may scream themselves hoarse proving that the recession has happened not because of Brexit but in spite of it. They’ll be easily outshouted by the we-told-you-so chorus of Remainers.

Brexit, they’ll say, shouldn’t be a millstone around our necks. The people are allowed to change their mind. After all, Brexit is human, Breversal divine.

The only way to avoid this likely development is to compress the time our governing spivs have at their disposal. So let’s take to the streets and march (peacefully!) through Whitehall, shouting “Invoke Article 50 now!” Or, better still, “Let my people go!”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://europe.newsweek.com/what-west-should-next-ukraine-453066?rm=eu

A few days ago I wrote about Donald Trump’s questionable links with Putin. Here’s a longer and better-researched piece from Edward Lucas, who writes for The Economist and The Mail. The lucky chap has ready access to those papers’ data services, which has enabled him to put some flesh on the bones of my article.

To sum up, I don’t think Americans have ever faced such a dismal choice as they do in the upcoming election. Can’t both candidates lose? No, I don’t suppose so. The only people who’ll end up losing will be Americans and the rest of us, maimed by the shock waves.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3738302/Is-Trump-Russian-agent-Kremlinologist-presents-tantalising-disturbing-dossier-presidential-hopeful-closer-links-Kremlin-appear.html

The law can only be effective when it’s both feared and respected. Respect is essential, for experience shows that fear alone isn’t a sufficient deterrent.

Yet even in a residually law-abiding country like Britain, the law must earn respect – and keep earning it. Failure to do so will deliver pinpricks to the law, and respect will escape through the holes.

The first requirement is that the law be just and seen to be just. Hence every time a burglar gets off with a slap on the wrist (and on average it takes more than a hundred burglaries and several convictions for the criminal to do any time), a bit more respect bleeds off.

Every time a violent mugger gets a lighter sentence than a tax-avoiding chap, ditto. Every time a man like the footballer Evans gets unjustly convicted for rape, ditto. Every time a man gets a hefty fine for going a few miles over the limit on an empty motorway, ditto. As those dittos multiply, the law diminishes and consequently crime increases.

Yet it’s not all about just sentences commensurate with the crime. It’s also about the dignity, solemnity and, if you will, ritual of the judicial process. Pomp and circumstance do matter.

That’s why our judges and barristers wear robes and wigs in court. This is seen as necessary decorum conferring gravity on the proceedings, much like clerical dress does in church, royal garments on state occasions or dress uniforms on army parades.

This brings us to the bit of dialogue that took place the other day at Chelmsford Crown Court, when Judge Patricia Lynch QC was sentencing a piece of particularly feral plankton to 18 months for his ninth ASBO breach in 11 years.

The plankton doesn’t seem to have much time for racial and ethnic minorities, which feelings he tends to vent as vile public abuse. Without claiming any judiciary rigour, personally I’d send him down just for the way he looks, but that’s beside the point.

When Judge Lynch, Queen’s Counsel (for the benefit of my foreign readers, that’s a special status conferred by the crown upon eminent lawyers,) announced her verdict, the plankton reacted the way human plankton does. He screamed abuse at the Judge, calling her “a bit of a c***.”

However, Her Honour didn’t respond in the way judges normally do. She screamed right back: “You’re a bit of a c*** yourself!” Having thus received his licence to proceed in the same vein, the plankton shouted: “Go f*** yourself!” to which Her Honour replied in the same barroom style: “You too!”

The plankton then performed a Nazi salute and demonstrated his command of foreign languages by twice shouting “Sieg Heil!”. Then, for the delectation of those present, he delivered a rousing rendition of the popular song “Jews, gas them all…”

At this point I’d do two things: first, I’d disbar Judge Lynch, QC, for bringing our whole legal system into disrepute; second, I’d tag 18 years onto the 18 months that the plankton received.

My second proposal has been neither seconded nor aired by the public, but hundreds of people have communicated their admiration for Judge Lynch through social media, calling her a ‘hero’, a ‘legend’ an ‘idol’ and many other words of praise to the same effect.

This only goes to show the extent to which our public has been brutalised. The plankton in question still leads the pack, but apparently not by that wide a margin, and Judge Lynch is right in the pack.

Now I have an admission to make: my own language doesn’t always conform to the standards set by the original Debrett’s Etiquette for Young Ladies. My wife thinks I swear more than is seemly in all my languages, and my priest friend once mentioned in passing that he had never met anyone who swears as much as I do (he obviously hadn’t met many other London ex-admen, especially those who grew up in Russia).

Mea culpa, although expletives do add spice and colour to language, when used in appropriate settings. However, when used in a courtroom by a Queen’s Counsel, whose mission in life isn’t just to execute the law but also to bolster respect for it, such words don’t just offend – they destroy.

They implicitly countenance illegality and explicitly endorse our prevalent disintegration of civility. When a crusty old chap like me effs and blinds into his whisky, it’s only a sign of irascibility and abrasiveness. When five-year-olds routinely talk to their parents and strangers in the idiom suggesting familiarity with intimate anatomy and most sexual variants, it’s a sign of social collapse.

And when a QC uses such language in court, whatever the provocation, it’s a sign of a legal system rapidly losing justification to claim respect. A legal system, in other words, that’s failing all over the place.

Hugh Grosvenor has just become the seventh Duke of Westminster, after his father, the sixth Duke, died the other day. The title comes with an estate worth over £9 billion, for the family owns more or less the whole centre of London.

Predictably there’s an outcry in the press, shrill in The Guardian, slightly muted in The Mail, about the unfairness of it all. Isn’t it awful that young Hugh gets the whole thing, while his two elder sisters will have to live off miserable trust funds. The papers don’t specify the numerical expression of this misery, but something tells me the two women are unlikely to be found at the end of the breadline in any near future.

But that’s not the point that excites our progressive pundits. They can’t get their heads around the ancient law of primogeniture, with its feudal roots. Anything ancient has by definition been superseded and therefore must be dumped into the dustbin of history, to use a phrase originated by Trotsky and favoured by our Labour politicians.

One would be tempted to wonder how they feel about Magna Carta, which was as feudal as they come, but that temptation must be avoided. Watching grown-ups sound like retarded children isn’t a good sight.

Primogeniture is based on Salic Law that’s old and therefore ipso facto reprehensible to our progress touts. It goes back to 500 AD, when it was introduced by the Frankish king Clovis. That same chap had a few years earlier baptised France under the influence of his wife Clothilde, who must have regarded her exclusion from succession under Salic Law as rank ingratitude.

In 1066 the Normans brought primogeniture to England at the end of their lances. That makes it almost 1,000 years old, which is enough to give our progressive hacks’ faces the puce colour that foretells apoplexy.

When progressive French revolutionaries began to exterminate the titled and propertied classes, Salic Law caused heated debates, typically settled by the guillotine. “Where is it written?!?” screamed the revolutionaries. “It’s written,” replied Joseph de Maistre, one of history’s greatest constitutional minds, “in the hearts of Frenchmen.”

(I shamelessly purloin this phrase when arguing that a written constitution, unless it’s written in the hearts, is like a prenuptial agreement stipulating the frequency of sex: if you have to write it down, you might as well not bother. My American and French friends are aghast.)

The basic principle of all types of primogeniture is the same: the eldest son inherits the lot. Like most ancient laws surviving to this day, it’s wise. In fact, ancient laws survive to this day specifically because they’re wise.

It’s obvious that inheritance through all siblings regardless of sex will eventually reduce the family to powerless penury. With no primogeniture existing, as it didn’t exist, for example, in Russia, big estates were fractured to a point where they could no longer generate a living.

Thus in Leo Tolstoy’s will his estate was equally divided among his wife and nine surviving children. That was about four hundred acres each – another generation, and there would not have been enough left to feed a family. Mercifully, the Bolsheviks preempted that problem by confiscating the lot in 1918.

This isn’t just a facetious remark but a comment on a causal relationship. For the absence of primogeniture was one of the factors contributing to the Bolshevik mayhem. It shifted power away from the aristocracy and landed gentry and to the nascent, loud-mouthed middle classes weaned on the egalitarian ideas of the Enlightenment. When they began acting up, no other class had enough power left to stop them.

That property, especially landed property, confers power is indisputable. When power passes away from those who have a vested interest in the country’s physical plant to those who are mainly interested in expressing themselves and venting their resentments, a disaster befalls. This may or may not be sanguinary, but it’ll always be calamitous.

Primogeniture isn’t only about royal or aristocratic succession. It’s also vitally important to the group living off the land and feeding us all: farmers.

One doesn’t have to be an agriculturalist to realise that large plots are more viable than small ones. A farmer tilling hundreds of acres will achieve economies of scale, which is essential in an enterprise with traditionally minuscule profit margins. Small farms are beautifully pastoral, but they can’t feed the billions inhabiting the Earth.

None of this matters to our progressives. They hate primogeniture not because it doesn’t make sense but because it provides a link with the past, the traditional object of loathing for modern progress junkies.

Hatred of the past is a defining feature of modern anomie. As far as today’s lot is concerned, the dial is zeroed in every generation, and nothing achieved by those who created our civilisation is of any value. Neither indeed is the civilisation itself.

Instead of looking with reverence and filial piety at laws that have been around for millennia, they sputter venom at anything that created rather than destroyed. They’re like a snake eating its own tail, except that this lot will end up devouring the whole body.

 

That obscene show called the Rio Olympics is upon us, marred even further by the travesty of athletes representing their countries.

Instead they ought to represent, and be sponsored by, major pharmaceutical companies. One can see, say, the Pfizer eight, their eyes driven out of orbits by their sponsor’s fine products, outpacing Glaxo, whose research team didn’t get the cocktail just right.

But everyone has got tired of the drugs issue and, if truth be told, of the Games in general. Fatigue had set in before the first steroid junkie crossed the finish line.

There are more serious issues to concentrate on, such as did she or didn’t she? Did the BBC presenter Helen Skelton wear knickers under her skimpy dress, or did she not? Certain camera angles suggested she didn’t, and I won’t try to scandalise you with a description of what the lens espied.

Nothing, not even Michael Phelps winning Olympic golds, has generated as much excitement as Helen’s knickers or the absence thereof. Did she or didn’t she? The columnist Katie Hopkins, whose heart is generally in the right place and whose writing is usually entertaining, doesn’t think it matters:

“Who cares if she’s wearing knickers, no knickers, or her knickers on her head? She’s doing a brilliant job and making Rio vaguely watchable.” One wonders why stage such tasteless extravaganzas if the only thing that makes them even vaguely watchable is a pretty girl who disdains underwear.

Miss Hopkins seems to believe that the only possible alternative to the knickerless wonder is the tall, masculine lesbian Clare Balding, who used to present Olympics in the past. As a hypothetical possibility, she also suggests that few of us would prefer watching a burqa-clad Muslim woman who, for all we know, might very well be a man.

However, I’d suggest that there’s something in between a knickerless girl and a Muslim wearing a burqa or Clare Balding, who looks like she might be wearing a jockstrap. That intermediate stage would include good-looking women (my favourite kind) wearing clothes that offend neither the occasion nor decency.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not waxing prudish, and some of the best moments of my life have been spent in the company of knickerless women. I’m simply satisfied that my lifelong observation has been vindicated yet again: all perverse modern campaigns, especially those countenanced by the state, produce the opposite results to those intended.

A war on drugs increases drug use. A war on poverty makes more people poor. An attempt to redistribute wealth destroys it. An overhaul of education promotes ignorance. And the feminists’ frantic efforts to masculinise women only lead to social disasters and, what’s worse, aesthetic catastrophes.

Women have always flaunted their bodies, much to the delight of those of us who have an eye for certain feminine attractions. Just read the descriptions of ballroom dresses at, say, the court of Louis XIV of France or Alexander I of Russia and you’ll find they left little to the imagination.

Even in Victorian England women didn’t cover themselves head to toe at parties, balls or wherever semi-nudity was appropriate. Their secondary, though not yet primary, sexual characteristics were there for all to admire when the occasion allowed it.

During the first half of the twentieth century, with the male population drastically reduced, women were massively drawn into the workforce, with mixed results. Juggling a job and children, for example, was hard, and one of those balls often hit the floor. When that was children, they often grew up brutalised and ignorant, with dire social consequences.

But, this side of Hollywood, women were typically still trying to get ahead on the basis of their competence, not bountiful exposed flesh. As a rule, their colleagues had to wait until the Christmas party to catch sight of the sales manager’s shoulders and upper breasts.

However, feminism reaching hysterical pitch turned out to be the kind of action that produces an equal and opposite reaction. Women, who were supposed to be men’s equals in every respect, started to rely more on their primordial wiles to advance their careers.

Party clothes began to be worn to work, and women started popping every which way out of their work dresses, often worn with no other garments underneath. I remember, for example, working with a pretty girl who was an ardent, vociferous feminist.

In spite of her heartfelt convictions, whenever she needed a special favour she’d bend over my desk, advertising the absence of a bra under her low-cut blouse. “Please, Alex,” she’d pout, “do it for me”. (I’m man enough to admit I always did.)

Whenever I’m abroad, I watch morning news on Sky. Amazingly, all female guests there whose locomotion isn’t assisted by a Zimmer frame inevitably wear décolleté dresses or blouses – at eight in the morning.

Ladies, this was evening dress in the days when you didn’t claim being equal, or even identical, to men. Don’t you realise that every square inch of flesh you expose vindicates the prejudices of antediluvian fossils like me?

There’s a time and place for everything, especially bad taste and vulgarity. These, I’d suggest, are defining characteristics of our time. And few things are more vulgar than feminism dialectically coexisting with exhibitionism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Until now I’ve always maintained that Westerners extolling the virtues of KGB kleptofascism, otherwise known as Putin’s Russia, are either fools or knaves.

However, Putinistas’ recent offerings have made me realise that a third possibility exists: many are deluded or, in the medical parlance, bonkers. This clinical condition has its own aetiology and symptoms.

First compare these two contradictory, indeed mutually exclusive, statements.

Statement 1: “I have no illusions about Mr Putin’s Russia. It is a sinister tyranny where those who challenge the president’s power or expose his wrongdoing suffer very nasty fates.”

Statement 2: “Mr Putin’s Russia [is] now astonishingly the most conservative, patriotic and Christian country left in Europe.”

It’s clear that these sentences couldn’t have come from the same sane person. “A sinister tyranny” can’t be “the most conservative and Christian country”, although it could be patriotic – especially if the term is used broadly, also to include jingoism.

It could conceivably be the same person if the two sentences were years apart. One could imagine that the author first had one opinion of Putin’s Russia, but then, upon mature deliberation, changed it later.

Yet we’re discussing not a man’s intellectual development but a patient’s clinical symptoms. For the two statements were indeed uttered by the same man, Peter Hitchens. And rather than being years apart, they came in the same short article.

Having diagnosed a delusional disorder, let’s consider its aetiology. One observes that, like many such sufferers, nutters in the medical parlance, the patient makes sense on most other subjects.

In fact, this clinical picture is widespread among conservatives: they’re driven mad by modernity with its totalitarian glossocratic urge to punish anyone going against the PC grain.

My book How the West Was Lost shows that I too have been exposed to the same triggers that produce delusions in so many others. In fact, I argue that all modern governments are at least latently totalitarian – with the latency disappearing fast.

But at least I don’t maniacally search for virtue in a kleptofascist regime resulting from history’s unique blend of secret police and organised crime, one the patient himself describes as “a sinister tyranny”.

One can sympathise with this condition. Conservative people are so called because they wish to preserve everything lovable in the West. One can understand how we can be driven to despair (round the bend, in the medical parlance) watching everything we love being wantonly destroyed.

It’s also understandable that some should seek a model the West could follow to get back to normality. Alas, many are deluded into believing that such a model can be found in a regime that has murdered, among many others, hundreds of journalists.

The clinical picture becomes complete when the patient adds delirium to delusions by trying to explain his mania:

“You have no need to guard your tongue as you did in the communist days, when a poem could get you executed and a joke could send you to an Arctic labour camp for 20 years. I saw all that filth end, in person, and rejoiced to see it go…”

Unlike Hitchens, I grew up “in the communist days” of the 1960s. Though my friends and I constantly swapped anti-Soviet jokes, no one was sent “to an Arctic labour camp for 20 years”. Actually, the maximum prison term in the USSR at the time was 15 years. The one up from that was execution, and no one suffered it at the time for telling jokes or indeed writing a poem.

A situation he describes did exist under Stalin, but, for chronological reasons, the patient couldn’t have seen it “in person”. He worryingly seems to think he did, but then we’ve already diagnosed a delusional disorder.

This is not to vindicate Brezhnev’s Russia – it was indeed filth, a softened version of the worst tyranny ever. But, while some writers and dissidents were imprisoned then, they weren’t murdered en masse as they are in Putin’s Russia.

And Christian? It’s as true as it’s upsetting that the West is no longer Christian. But it’s sheer madness to think Russia is.

Putin has whipped up a chauvinistic imperial psychosis, to replace the discarded communist ideology. Russian imperialism has traditionally had a Third Rome theocratic dimension, and this has been incorporated into Putinism, next to money laundering.

The church, whose whole hierarchy, including the patriarch (‘Agent Mikhailov’ in KGB reports), is made up of lifelong KGB agents, plays along. Under its indoctrination, many people are using Christian noises to fill the deafening vacuum of their lives.

But church attendance in Russia is lower even than in England. And many of those church-goers espouse heretical creeds like Seventh Day Adventism or Pentecostalism, which sane persons wouldn’t readily describe as exactly Christian.

Russian conservatism the patient blabbers about is only found among a few intellectuals whose websites Putin has blocked. Among the governing elite (85 per cent of which are KGB officers) it survives only as conservative estimates of their purloined wealth laundered through tax havens. Putin’s personal wealth is thus conservatively estimated at $40 billion, whereas the more liberal, and probably truer, estimates are three times as high.

There we have it: the symptoms and the aetiology, but alas no cure. I’d suggest the patient should avoid this subject altogether, lest he might harm himself as much as his deranged musings are harming others.