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Modernity is all about levelling – not only of people and groups thereof, but also of tastes, morals and opinions.

Anybody, no matter how ignorant, feels entitled to air any opinion, no matter how inane – and to demand a respectful audience. Freedom of speech is being abused so badly that one begins to yearn for freedom from speech.

Now, though I may disagree with some opinions, I still recognise that they belong in the panoply of self-expression. But ‘some’ doesn’t mean ‘all’.

For example, a person is entitled to opine that the rich should all be taxed more, even though I consider this view economically ruinous and morally defunct. But a person isn’t entitled to opine – except privately and in jest – that the rich should all be flailed alive.

The band of acceptable self-expression can be wide, but it can’t be endless. If it is, society’s intellectual backbone, already showing many slipped discs, will collapse altogether. Society will then die.

It’s in this context that one should look at The Guardian article advocating the toppling of Nelson’s statue in Trafalgar Square. The author is Afua Hirsch, whom I had the displeasure of meeting when we were both guests on a BBC chat show discussing the purpose of imprisonment.

Miss Hirsch, her eyes glistening with fanatical zeal, saw prison as strictly an educational facility, whose sole purpose was saving the poor souls so betrayed by society that they had to resort to crime.

I countered that, though rehabilitation was desirable, it was secondary. Prison’s primary purpose surely was to serve justice by punishing wrongdoers. Miss Hirsch’s reaction was that of hysterical incredulity that someone could entertain such a monstrous idea. She clearly thought that, unlike thieves and murderers, I was beyond redemption.

Now she has ratcheted up her mindset, shifting it from the gear of lefty faddishness into that of deranged fanaticism. Thereby she has crossed the line of possible, if wrong, opinion into the territory where lunacy resides.

Her gripe is that Nelson lacked the foresight to realise that two centuries after his death there would exist a broad swathe of opinion that society should be dedicated to racial equality first and foremost.

Nelson, according to her, had many West Indian slave owners among his friends and – are you ready for this? – defended them in the House of Lords. “Nelson,” she writes, “was what you would now call, without hesitation, a white supremacist.”

That may be, but, as the Russian saying goes, it’s not the only thing we appreciate him for. The laws of political correctness, like any other, can’t be made retroactive. Nelson lived in his time, not ours, and he can’t be judged ex post facto on the basis of Miss Hirsch’s monomania.

Figures of his calibre can only be judged within history, and against that backdrop Nelson towers like the giant he was. Thanks largely to him Britain was spared for over a century the advent of bloodthirsty modernity. Also important is that he helped defer a time when the likes of Hirsch feel entitled to express their febrile idiocy in the mainstream press.

That Nelson was a flawed man was beyond doubt – show me one who isn’t. I’m sure Hirsch counts Martin Luther King, Mandela and Gandhi among her heroes. Yet the first used his wife for a punching bag and was serially unfaithful to her, the second had political opponents tortured and killed, and the third provoked a carnage.

Standards of heroism are different from those of sainthood, real or bogus. And even some saints weren’t exactly saintly before they saw the light. St Augustine and St Francis, for example, were both philanderers in their youth, while St Paul prosecuted Christians even in his mature years – although Hirsch would probably see that as a point in his favour.

I doubt she realises that the treatment of history she proposes would cut our civilisation off its past completely. For few historical figures would pass muster if held to the standards of our multi-culti modernity.

Unlike Nelson, George Washington, along with most Founding Fathers, was a slave owner. Charles Martel, El Cid, and Jan Sobieski were Islamophobes. Richard the Lionheart ditto, though he partly redeemed himself by being homosexual. Cromwell was a genocidal nationalist, certainly in the way he treated the Irish. Louis XIV gave his wife a black dwarf as a present, thereby displaying double insensitivity. Shakespeare, Dickens and Dostoyevsky had their anti-Semitic moments. Brahms was a German nationalist. Cecil Rhodes was a racist who expanded the British Empire Nelson gave his life to protect.

That empire, like its defenders, wasn’t without its fair share of wickedness. Yet on balance it was unquestionably a force for good, specifically in the area so dear to Miss Hirsch’s frenzied heart. For slavery had been deemed abhorrent in England at least since Elizabethan times.

A report of a case as far back as 1569 states that: “… one Cartwright brought a slave from Russia and would scourge him; for which he was questioned; and it was resolved, that England was too pure an air for a slave to breathe, and so everyone who breathes it becomes free. Everyone who comes to this island is entitled to the protection of English law, whatever oppression he may have suffered and whatever may be the colour of his skin.”

In 1772, ruling on the ‘Somersett’s case’ of a slave suing for his freedom when brought to Britain, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield declared that “no court could compel a slave to obey an order depriving him of his liberty.”

Such statements weren’t heard in many other places at that time. And it wasn’t just words. Though Britain officially banned the slave trade only in 1807 (66 years before Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation), unofficially the Royal Navy, in which Nelson served, had been harassing slave traffic for decades.

Given the balance of their record, shall we then forgive both Nelson and his employer a few currently unfashionable glitches? Not as far as Hirsch is concerned.

All decent people share her abhorrence of slavery. But if they look at all of history through the prism of today’s faddish obsession with ‘diversity’, they’re no longer decent. They’re mad at best, consciously subversive at worst.

In the past, such ranting fanatics could be found only in lunatic asylums. These days they adorn the pages of broadsheets. Then again, the two institutions are converging so much it’s hard to tell the difference.

Modernity has replaced sentiments with sentimentality and ideas with ideologies, all intellectually feeble and morally pernicious.

That stands to reason: if ideas reside in the head and sentiments a foot lower in the heart, ideologies creepy-crawl a foot below the heart.

Of the ideologies found in the American mainstream (and increasingly ours as well) neoconservatism is among the least appealing and most influential. I’ve written a whole book about it (Democracy as a Neocon Trick), where I develop this thesis:

“Neoconservatism is an eerie mishmash of Trotskyist temperament, infantile bellicosity, American chauvinism (not exclusively on the part of Americans), expansionism masked by pseudo-messianic verbiage on exporting democracy to every tribal society on earth, Keynesian economics, Fabian socialism, welfarism and statism run riot – all mixed together with a spoonful of vaguely conservative phrases purloined from the rightful owners to trick the neocons’ way to broader electoral support.”

American exceptionalism is the dominant religion in the US, and neoconservatism is its proselytising confession. None so hostile as divergent exponents of the same creed, and the neocons reserve their most vitriolic harangues for ‘isolationists’, practitioners of the hermetic confession of the same religion.

Since during his campaign Trump established himself as a committed anti-globalist, the volume of spittle sputtered at him by the neocons could have drowned the White House like the ocean engulfing Atlantis. In my lifetime I can’t remember any president since Nixon attracting as much bilious hatred.

I’m no great admirer of Trump, for reasons I’ve mentioned many times before. Moreover, if his links with Russia are proved to be as shady as they seem, I believe he should be not just impeached but tried for treason.

For the time being, the grand jury is still out on that issue. Yet the president already deserves criticism, and not only for his Russian shenanigans.

But rational criticism is different from rolling on the floor, frothing at the mouth and screaming hysterical hatred, which is the neocons’ chosen mode of self-expression when it comes to Trump. They rabidly attack the president even when he’s innocent – even when he’s right.

Some of them aren’t completely devoid of brains, but that organ is overridden by ideology. For example, had they given the matter some thought, they would have applauded Trump’s decision to leave the Paris Agreement, based as it is on another pet ideology and not on any rational thought or scientific evidence. Instead, they screamed deranged invective.

Then, when gangs of pro-Nazi and hard-left extremists clashed in Charlottesville, Trump made a perfectly reasonable statement that both sides were to blame. Not being the sharpest chisel in the toolbox, he then regrettably added that there were “fine people” in both groups, even though there clearly weren’t.

But that wasn’t the point. To an uninitiated observer, the neocons’ reaction to the basically correct statement could suggest that Trump had praised Hitler and called for the reinstatement of slavery. By ricochet, the neocon bullets fired at Trump hit the equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee.

The general, who wasn’t a slave owner, is being depicted as some kind of plantation overseer in the Simon Legree mould. The man of whom Churchill once wrote that “Lee was the noblest American who had ever lived and one of the greatest commanders known to the annals of war” is being routinely described in the neocon press as a traitor.

This because Lee felt honour-bound to take the side of his native Virginia, and the traditional localism it represented, against the tyrannical centralism championed by the North. I dare say Gen. Washington, who had sworn allegiance to King George and then led armies against him, was more of a traitor than Gen. Lee. He was just lucky to find himself on the winning side.

All things considered, one would be justified in supposing that the neocons hate Trump so much that, no matter what he does, he’ll remain the eternal bogeyman. However, in supposing so, one would be wrong.

Trump has found an ingenious way of currying the neocons’ favour, if at the cost of alienating his core support. He has announced that the US will be committing more troops to fighting in that notorious ‘Graveyard of Empires’, Afghanistan.

Suddenly shibboleths like ‘nation building’ reappear in the neocon press, eliciting the same response from them as ‘Allahu Akbar!’ does from the Muslims. Overnight Trump has stopped being just any old Trump. He has become ‘Mr Trump’ or ‘the president’. All is forgiven! Mr Trump has realised the folly of his isolationist ways! He has learned his lesson!

Yes, but the neocons haven’t. One lesson is general: it’s not the Americans’ business to build any nations other than their own, and that job is far from finished. The other lesson is specific: their attempt to build democratic nations in the Middle East has since 2003 plunged the West into the kind of misery unseen since 1945.

Apart from the millions of people, thousands of them Westerners, directly killed in the conflicts, that criminal folly impassioned Islam worldwide and removed the nasty but effective leaders who had managed to keep those passions more or less under a lid. As a result, Europe has become a cauldron of terrorism, with the worst still to come – and not only in Europe.

The nations the neocons set out to build have since collapsed, threatening to bury us all under the rubble. Yet now Trump, desperately running out of friends, has revived that folly by sending 4,000 extra troops to Afghanistan.

One doesn’t have to be a military strategist to know that this move is inspired by political, not military, considerations. A country where Americans and their allies have been dying for 16 years, without managing to build a Western-style democracy, will now dig more graves.

Trump has tried to cater to both sides by claiming that his aim is killing terrorists, not building nations. But the neocons know surrender when they smell it. They realise that the beleaguered president has weighed the odds and found he needs the neocons’ support to stay in office.

The Steve Bannon types are screaming ‘flip-flop’, but Trump must have done the sums. He knows that neocon invective has done its job, and the landscape of public opinion has changed. He’s hanging by a thread, and it’s the neocons who’re holding the scissors.

Mollifying them has become a matter of survival, and Trump is clearly learning his political lessons. Alas, he’s learning no other.

I realise that Putin’s useful idiots in the West are impervious to facts, arguments, statistics or observations. Affection for the KGB-run kleptofascist regime resides in the parts such things can’t reach.

The rest of you, however, may be amused by these assorted snippets from the chat shows on the Russian equivalent of the BBC and ITV. The shows in question are either daily or weekly, each lasting several hours.

The format is that of a panel discussion, featuring Russia’s top opinion formers: professors, university rectors, ministers, historians, politicians, philosophers, writers. This is what they’re saying, at random.

No comments are necessary, but some imagination on your part wouldn’t hurt. Just imagine what kind of opinions these opinion-formers form – and what kind of country would let them on air.

“The Soviet idea was universal and genius: the world must be just. Now, in order to defeat the US, we need an idea too. And it must resemble the Soviet one.”

“I admire the Soviet project. It made possible the modernisation of the country, victory in the war, post-war rebuilding. But it had two drawbacks. First, it demanded too much effort from the people… And then that project required a man like Stalin. Stalin died – and everything went to wrack and ruin.”

“Look at Hamlet. What does he do? Stabs his girlfriend’s father, provokes his stepfather, sends his classmates Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their death. I think there Shakespeare showed the essence of the Western man. And look what happens in the world after the Soviet Union self-destructed in 1991! NATO is already in the Baltics!”

“The Poles have gone so far as to claim that the Soviet Union attacked Poland in 1939 together with Germany, thereby starting the Second World War. Why this assault on history?… It’s our own fault too: we never told the truth about Poland, not to upset a fraternal socialist country. Now we’re paying for that.”

“We didn’t have to take responsibility for Katyn. All the documents were fake there.”

“Poland was planning to join Nazi Germany in obliterating the Soviet Union.”

“The Poles never loved us as much as when our tanks were there.”

“In 1955 a black woman was arrested in America for not having offered her seat to a white man! 1955 – that’s 10 years after the victory, after Hiroshima. That’s American morality for you! Just compare it with our parents’ morality in 1955.”

“We must continue to strengthen our armed forces, to develop new weapon systems for Russia to forge ahead. Then Americans will always be nice to us everywhere.”

“If under Stalin there had been the same low economic growth rate as today, people would have been shot. We must change things.”

“During the Second World War, we and our allies set the precedent of joint fight against Nazism. But that war is still going on, and one of those allies has already developed a plan to annihilate us.”

“Americans fire even at children without warning – and believe this is perfectly normal.”

“When Americans begin to shed crocodile tears about human lives, one feels like reminding them that their own history isn’t so unequivocal either.”

“We were wrong to have voted for sanctions against North Korea. We should have at least abstained, to show somehow that we reject the policy of sanctions. Its purpose is to destroy Russia. And when Trump signed the law about the sanctions, he simply capitulated to the establishment. He should have followed Lenin’s example, who used to go against everyone – and win.”

“Spies are everywhere. The whole world is spies, druggies and prostitutes.”

“Russia can’t exist without a huge universal idea – otherwise there’s no need for her. Under the tsars it was Holy Russia… And after the revolution of course. And in 1991 we were told: ‘You’re the same as everybody.’ That’s the root of all problems.”

“We showed photos of Putin fishing – the whole West had a heart attack.”

“Let Europe perish, let it be Islamised! At least it won’t be moving eastwards! We’ll burn everybody! Like at the Chinese border, when we burned two divisions with napalm!”

“Enter those immigrant ghettos with guns and shoot everyone who disobeys! And no social benefits!”

“Americans don’t let migrants from the Middle East in. They admit Mexicans. Because a Mexican will steal and rob, but he won’t blow you up.”

“It’s possible to fight terrorism. Was there any terrorism in the Soviet Union, in the 30s and 40s? No. And what about Europe now?”

“We need absolute monarchy and strong special services!”

“The economy collapsed under Gorbachev! Because the Party self-dispersed – they removed from the Constitution the article saying the Party is the state! And the civilisationally progressive Soviet project died!”

“Pulling down the Dzerzhinsky statue was unjust. He saved five million stray children.”

“Khrushchev replaced the great idealistic notion of constructing communism with the philistine idea of catching up with America in the production of milk and meat. That’s when the degradation of the elites began.”

“Yeltsyn dug the pit. And Putinism is about getting out of the pit and moving towards guaranteed flourishing! Pan-Putinism is an odd name, but it caresses my ear!”

“Why didn’t Gorbachev, instead of this idiocy called perestroika, get down to strengthening the state? It’s like in the army. If the division commander is weak-kneed scum, what’ll happen to that division? Our country is the same way.”

Take my word for it: this sort of stuff isn’t just typical of the brainwashing fare on which the Russians subsist: they get nothing else. But then they are fortunate to have a strong leader, the kind our useful idiots wish we had (Peter Hitchens, ring your office).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is a year of significant and tragic anniversaries: 100 years since Russia gave the world the most satanic regime in history; 80 years since that regime perpetrated its best-known (but neither the only nor even the worst) carnage; 70 years since the partition of India.

That last event being of particular interest to the British, the papers are full of articles and recollections, most focused on the attendant violence: after all, those who saw it may only be in the their 70s and 80s.

All of the accounts are moving, as such recollections always are. But that’s not the only thing they have in common: they all exonerate one man directly responsible for the massacre: Mohandas Gandhi.

Ghandi is beyond reproach, for he passes muster as a saint venerated by our post-truth, post-thought, post-Christian society. Having debunked the real saints, we fill the void thus formed with fake ones, idols who tickle the naughtiest bits of modernity.

The qualifications for this accolade are simple. To be sanctified in the modern canon, a man has to come from the Third World, espouse any faith other than Judaism or Christianity, hate the West, contribute to the West’s troubles, lead or inspire some kind of liberation movement against Western powers. Gandhi ticks all the boxes.

He’s routinely described as the ‘father of democratic India’, but ‘a father’ would be more appropriate. Defying biology but vindicating history, that child had many parents.

One was the British Empire that created most of the institutions that allow India to boast of being the world’s largest democracy. Hence, as India’s last Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten had a valid claim to begetting India’s democracy. Moreover, if rumours are to be believed, his wife even came close to begetting a few Indian democrats.

Hitler and Stalin are the other co-parents, responsible as they jointly were for the Second World War. That war knocked the remaining stuffing out of the already limp British Empire, depriving her of both the physical means and, more important, the will to protect her integrity.

Mohammed also has a valid claim to a share of parenthood, if only at many removes. It was his creed that put fire in the bellies of the millions of his adherents in India, making them seek power in every possible way, including violent ones.

Yet those paternity candidates can have only a limited and esoteric appeal in the West. Gandhi, on the other hand, with his Tolstoyan sermon of nonviolence, hatred of the West, quaint personal habits, fancy-dress folk garb and peculiar sexuality, satisfied every requirement for post-Christian canonisation.

Apart from the aforementioned Hitler, Stalin and also possibly FDR, Gandhi loathed the British Empire more than anyone. That animus had many components: racial, religious, cultural and political. It was hatred that added tongues of fire to Gandhi’s charisma, as is the case with most revolutionaries. And, like so many of them, he had to mask hatred by sanctimonious claims to love.

The claims weren’t invariably valid. Thus Gandhi busily agitated for the departure of the Raj during the Second World War. That would have left India at the mercy of Japan and led to an immediate massacre of thousands, possibly millions, of Indians. But such numbers mean nothing to fanatics.

This Gandhi went on to prove by continuing his agitation after the war, when India was already self-governed de facto if not yet de jure. All that was needed was some prudence and patience, but revolutionaries are never endowed with such qualities, especially when they’re old and running out of time.

Gandhi didn’t realise, or perhaps didn’t care, that it was the Raj that maintained a semblance of social order in India, keeping the Hindus and the Muslims off one another’s throats. With the British gone, the throats became exposed.

Gandhi, with the able political support of the ruling Congress Party, unleashed a torrent of sermons, quoting from Bhagvad Gita to justify Hindu exclusivity, as expressed in terms of caste, religion and race. That predictably radicalised the Muslims, not that they needed much stimulus. At the same time, Gandhi self-refutingly preached equality of all religions, which added impetus to the Muslim League’s quest for equal political power.

Effectively Gandhi, for all his otherworldly mysticism, politicised Hinduism, which had the inevitable effect of politicising Islam as well, more than it was already politicised doctrinally. A split along communal lines became inevitable.

Gandhi’s dream came true in 1947-1948, when the violent partition of India drove 14 million people out of their homes and killed the best part of a million.

Rather than being at odds with Gandhi’s pacifism, this tragedy was its direct result. That the result was unintended is neither here nor there.

It was entirely predictable, and people who can’t predict such results should refrain from revolutionary, indeed any political, activities. Otherwise they’re as culpable in the ensuing massacres as those who actually do the massacring. In other words, they’re criminals.

At the height of Gandhi’s agitation, Churchill summed him up neatly: “It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half-naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience…”

Such clarity of vision is now extinct in the West. Only idolatry remains, undiminished by the nuclear standoff between India and Pakistan, with itchy fingers on the buttons either side of the border. Gandhi’s pacifism has turned out to be very warlike indeed.

Writers often compare women’s breasts to various fruits. Depending on the author’s imagination, the fruity analogues may vary from a fragrant peach to a pendulous pear to a well-endowed melon to a pejoratively buxom watermelon.

Hence, anyone who can claim, in the words of a popular song, that mammaries haunt the corners of his mind, will suffer no shortage of visual associations when shopping at a French farmers’ market.

Moreover, a libidinous chap may even get so excited by this associative abundance that he’ll feel an irresistible urge to add tactile perception to visual. This could be done either surreptitiously, by rubbing, as if inadvertently, an elbow against a woman’s breast in the crowd or savagely, by openly fondling a strange woman without permission.

The first would be infantile, the second possibly illegal. So, being neither a child nor a criminal, I hasten to reassure you that the claim made in the title above refers not to a woman’s breasts but to their visual analogues: fruit.

Since the thought of feeling up a strange woman in public never crosses my mind, I haven’t investigated French laws proscribing such an indiscretion. However, on general principle, they must be rather strict – especially since even in France women bizarrely object to being regarded as merely sex objects.

But, no matter how draconian such laws may be, they can’t possibly be stricter than the rules protecting the inviolability of fruit and veg to any unauthorised fondling.

Some market traders exhibit written injunctions to the effect of DO NOT TOUCH FRUIT!!! Most don’t bother, just as no one puts up a sign saying “Don’t grab my wife’s breasts”. This is a rule of such long standing that it requires no explicit reiteration.

Now I have a real, as opposed to a facetious, confession to make: I’m a bit of a foodie. I like eating well and, since I’m married to an Englishwoman and can’t afford to eat out every day, I do all my own cooking.

Any serious cook will tell you that this means doing all my own buying: I can no more make a decent meal with someone else’s ingredients than I can play decent tennis with someone else’s racquet.

I further maintain than no serious cook can buy, say, a peach or tomato without touching it first. Appearances alone are deceptive, especially in these days of industrialised farming directed by government guidelines. Seasonality is a better indication, but even that doesn’t guarantee quality.

Peaches, for example, are in season now. Yet you may take two identical-looking fruit, and one will be harder than a rock or, to develop the earlier simile, any woman’s breast I’ve ever touched, while the other will be amorphously softer than either a rock or, well… you get the point.

If I buy tomatoes to make a sauce, I don’t mind them squirting juice at the slightest touch, the way a lactating breast squirts milk. However, I expect firm texture in a tomato destined for a salad.

So why don’t French farmers allow me to touch their produce? I can merely ask for a kilo of something, specifying the degree of desired firmness and hoping that the seller will comply.

The reason is fairly obvious. The trader doesn’t want me to skim all his best stuff off the top, leaving only scraps for other customers. His reputation may survive if a third of the firm peaches I requested turn out to be mushy, but not the next man in line being stuck with nothing but squishy fruit that disintegrates before he gets back to his 30-year-old Peugeot.

The tradesman’s motives are understandable, but that doesn’t make them any more forgivable. The French are wrong when saying that to understand all is to forgive all. Milking my simile for all it’s worth, and even a bit more, a woman may understand a ruffian feeling her up in a crowded place, but that doesn’t mean she’ll forgive him in a hurry.

Here it’s important to mention a difference between France and England. The English have fewer rules, but these tend to be rigorously enforced. The French, on the other hand, outscore the game of cricket in the number of rules governing the simplest of activities, such as the issuing of a planning permit to develop a loft.

However, any such rule can be trumped by a personal relationship based on friendship, mutual acquaintances or a bribe. I recall applying for such a permit, only to be told at the local council that the issue was so complex that it would take at least a year to resolve, probably longer. In fact, we got the permit the next day because our neighbour worked as secretary to the mayor.

The delicate issue of touching fruit can be resolved in the same manner. I’ve known many of our local traders for years, and after the first decade or so, they generously allowed me to find out what I was buying before I bought it. Even if the trader doesn’t know you, a polite request of “may I choose?” could work, although you must be prepared for a rude rebuke.

Come to think of it, this isn’t all that different from groping a woman. Ask politely – you never know your luck.

“Let’s not pretend ability is never in the genes,” writes Daniel Finkelstein in The Times.

He then recalls being branded ‘Dr Mengele’ when suggesting at a discussion of education policy that the differences in pupils’ natural ability must be taken into account.

I can’t think offhand of better proof that our civilisation won’t survive, nor deserves to. For the issue is far broader than simply the correlation between nature and nurture. The cosmic problem is that our society is not only post-truth, but also consequently post-thought.

That genes are always a predisposing, and often predetermining, factor of behaviour isn’t a theory, like Darwinism. It’s a scientific fact, like gravity. Even those who feel duty-bound to deny it know this perfectly well.

It’s illogical to accept that physical characteristics are inherited, but mental or behavioural ones aren’t. Yet those who claim this aren’t necessarily idiots, at least not in the clinical sense. They’re conformists who have been accepting the dominant ethos for so long that it has become part of their psychological and intellectual makeup.

How did that come about? How did ideologically inspired liars find themselves in a position to set the terms of every debate?

There are two immediate reasons, and some underlying historical ones. The immediate reasons are the Holocaust and IQ testing.

The Nazis were convinced that some people are genetically inferior, and they had the power of their convictions. After all, they slaughtered millions to uphold them.

But denying on this basis the genetic differences among individuals and groups is like denying nuclear fission because of Hiroshima.

The other immediate reason is that different ethnic groups have different median IQs. Southeast Asians, for example, score higher than whites, and whites higher than blacks. Yet scholars who mention this obvious fact are universally reviled and ostracised.

IQ, scream their detractors, doesn’t measure intelligence. True. But it does measure potential to develop intelligence. That’s why IQ is the single most reliable predictor of practical success in just about every walk of life. Denying its significance is like denying gravity.

Equally untenable, though, is denying the role of nurture and effort that go into the making of practical success. We’ve all seen brilliant ne’er-do-wells and successful mediocrities. In fact, both types, especially the second, dominate our world.

Some people have bags of innate potential, but fail to develop it for any number of reasons. Some others make the best of what little they have. For example, musicality is undeniably hereditary, but musicianship isn’t.

If it were, there would be at least one great musician among the million professional pianists produced by China. All of them are as blessed with musicality as they’re hampered by historical, psychological, religious and cultural factors holding their musicianship back. (But not, I hasten to add, their practical success. This no longer has anything to do with musicianship.)

Delving deeper, ideological denial of innate differences goes back to Rousseau, with his notion of all people being the same nobles sauvages, tabulae rasae on which civilisation, notably Christendom, then scribbles its corrupting message.

This falsehood was later enshrined in the founding document of the world’s first Enlightenment state, when Jefferson wrote that “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence.

Later, various apologists, including such brilliant ones as Kuehnelt-Leddihn, argued that the Founders were too intelligent to mean that literally; they only meant everyone was equal before the law and before God. Well, intelligent they were, but they were also ideological.

For even those statements are dubious. We’re only equal before God until we make our first moral choice. After that we’re arranged in a  hierarchical order, which gets more stratified with every choice we make.

Nor are we invariably equal before the law. For example, a naturalised American can’t become president even if he moved to America as a baby. And a Catholic can’t find himself in Britain’s line of royal succession.

But facts don’t matter. What matters is that modernity is congenitally egalitarian. Born out of the heresies of the Reformation and the Enlightenment, it reaches, tropistically and infinitely, for uniformity.

Since uniformity isn’t a natural human condition, it has to be enforced by coercion. And physical coercion won’t succeed without a metaphysical justification, which these days is called ideology. Hence modernity can no more survive without the lie of equality than Christendom could survive without the truth of God.

A civilisation can’t last unless it includes all, or at least most, members of society. Some may drive it, some may sleep in the back seat, but they all must be inside. Thus, without its unifying ideology of rampant egalitarianism, modernity will career off the road and crash.

Even those who, like Lord Finkelstein, discern the obvious falsehoods of levelling, have to meet modernity on its own battleground and cede to it some of their positions.

For example, he rejects the blindingly obvious observation that “women and men taken as groups, on average, have a natural tendency to think and behave differently…” The innate differences between the sexes are small, he writes, while the differences in “the social variables” are big.

This is simply untrue, and again it’s not reason, nor even empirical evidence, speaking here but the egalitarian ideology generally accepted even by those who argue against some particulars.

For example, I can think of many women described as philosophers, yet of only one, Elizabeth Anscombe, who was really worthy of that description. Also, in all communist countries boys and girls with a talent for chess received exactly the same training. Yet only one woman, Hungarian Judith Polgar, went on to compete with the best men on equal terms.

Going back to music, even though women may be equal to men in performing ability, there hasn’t been a serious woman composer since Hildegard of Bingen (d. 1179). Yet conservatories are full of women students, and no discrimination exists, as it might have existed in Hildegard’s time.

The same class of the Leningrad conservatory back in the early 1920s included Maria Yudina and Dmitri Shostakovich. I maintain it’s no accident that the former went on to become a great pianist and the latter a great composer: both were musicians of genius, but they thought differently.

Vive la différence has been replaced by vive l’uniformité as the slogan of modernity. And all our pundits shout it uniformly, if with varying gusto. That tendency, unlike so many others, is definitely acquired, not innate.

First, the obvious and – for those who wish to remain in gainful employment – undeniable facts: 1) the voice of the people is the voice of God and therefore 2) it’s God himself who elects our leaders.

It would be thus the epitome of blasphemy to disagree with the unanimous verdict issued by all Western leaders: Islam is a religion of peace.

Blair, Cameron, May, Corbyn, Bush, Obama, Merkel, Hollande, Macron have all issued statements to this effect. Trump hasn’t yet, but he has too many things on his plate, most of them put there by his other statements.

So that has to be true: since God speaks through voters and voters speak through politicians, Islam is peaceful. It can’t be blamed for acts of terrorism committed in its name by alienated loners, like those who in the early Middle Ages conquered half of Europe and in 1453 sacked Constantinople.

They may shout “Allahu Akbar!!!” when driving their vehicles into crowds or blowing themselves up on public transport, but they might as well shout “Long live the First Amendment to the US Constitution!!!” Neither that document nor Islam has anything to do with Muslims monopolising the business of terrorism, specifically its vehicular branch.

What does then? Here I must go out on a limb and offer an explanation that has so far been overlooked by all commentators – even, remarkably, by Blair, Cameron, May, Corbyn, Bush, Obama, Merkel, Hollande and Macron.

Because, due to the discriminatory practices in all Western countries, Muslims are socioeconomically disadvantaged, they can never afford to learn how to drive properly. That’s why, even those few who manage to obtain driving licences often lose control of their vehicles and consequently drive them not on the road but through crowds of innocent bystanders.

Hold on, I hear you say. How innocent are those bystanders anyway? By mostly being white (Christian or otherwise), they bear a share of blame for creating the appalling socioeconomic conditions in which peaceful Muslims can never learn how to keep a car on the road. As you sow so shall you reap, says that offensive compendium of Islamophobic propaganda.

Having already founded the Charles Martel Society for Multiculturalism (of which I’m president and so far the only member), I’m hereby proposing we join our efforts to create a global network of remedial driving courses for peaceful Muslims. The name of the network is open to discussion, but I propose SCUM (Socially responsible Courses for Upgrading Muslims’ driving).

SCUM students will be taught how to drive and not shout Allahu Akbar!!! at the same time; how to keep the car on the road even when the temptation to send body parts flying may be strong; how to purchase or hire a vehicle in one’s own name; how never to run away from the scene of an accident should it inadvertently occur; how to tell the difference between the brake and accelerator pedals; how to change direction without flooring the accelerator pedal and using the handbrake – in short, all those skills peaceful, law-abiding, socioeconomically disadvantaged Muslims were never able to learn.

They’ll also be taught that carpooling must come from a natural charitable impulse, not from pointing a gun at a driver and screaming “Get out of the car, you infidel shite!”. One can understand their desire to address socioeconomic inequality, but they must be encouraged to do so non-violently if at all possible.

Unlike all other driving schools, SCUM will require no accreditation on the part of the instructors. As long as you own a car, you can buy an L sticker and put it on. You can then drive along slowly, looking for a conspicuous SCUM candidate.

Those can be recognised by their wild-eyed expressions and certain sartorial accoutrements, such as keffiah, aghal, thagritah and suicide vest. When you espy such a man, stop and ask him whether he already is, or is willing to become, a SCUM graduate.

If you survive the experience, explain to the peaceful Muslim what SCUM is and how he could benefit from it. Then put him in the driving seat and teach him Lesson One: Ahmed, a car is for transporting people, not killing them.

By the end of SCUM, many peaceful Muslims will learn how not to besmirch the sterling reputation of their religion by driving on human flesh. So let me know if you’re willing to participate – and worry not, you can even get paid for doing your civic duty.

I haven’t yet sorted out the financing, but I’m sure Blair, Cameron, May, Corbyn, Bush, Obama, Merkel, Hollande and Macron will be happy to chip in. How else can they prove that terrorism has nothing to do with Islam?

No sooner had my friend Tessa come back from her holiday than she and I met at a quiet Westminster pub. It was an intimate affair: just Tessa and I, her press secretary, make-up artist and six bodyguards.

Ever the traditionalist, Tessa took a sip of that classic English drink Dubonnet and asked me how I thought Brexit was going. There was a mischievous sparkle in her eyes that suggested she knew something I didn’t.

“Well, Tessa,” I said, gulping my Wife Beater down, “it isn’t going, actually. There’s a lot of bickering between the parties and various factions within each. And externally, it has all ground to a stop. I can see some unsolvable conflicts developing. The whole bloody thing is dragging on and on.”

“Alex, you imbecile,” smiled Tessa, using the offensive epithet to conceal the admiration and, well, affection she feels for me. “Don’t you worry your ugly little head about that. I’ve got it all sussed out.”

“You’ve got what sussed out, darl…,” I stopped myself just in time, for Tessa’s retinue were all ears. Using an intimate word like ‘darling’ would reveal that Tessa and I haven’t always been just friends… But a gentleman doesn’t talk about such things.

“Alex, you reactionary swine, I know what you think about democracy, but me, I could scratch anyone’s eyes out who says one word against one man, one vote. I am a servant to Average Man, the voter.

“Remember how you wrote, you bastard, that any man randomly picked out of the phone directory could do a better job of government than my cabinet? Well, I happen to agree. Average Man knows best, that’s what democracy is all about. He commands, we obey. And he commanded we leave the EU. So leave we will. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

“Don’t die yet, Tessa,” I pleaded with mock sincerity. “We need you to drive Brexit through, to take control over our borders and territorial waters, to stop paying money to the EU, to leave the single market…”

“Alex,” smiled Tessa with loving indulgence, “you’re even more cretinous than you look. What did the people vote for?”

“To leave the EU.”

“Right, you got that in one. But they didn’t vote for leaving the single market and the customs union, did they?”

“Well, no, they didn’t, not explicitly at any rate,” I admitted begrudgingly.

“Explicitly is what I’m talking about, you half-witted nincompoop. Right, so we’ll stay,” said Tessa, holding one finger up. “And neither did they vote to keep Spanish fishing boats out of our waters, did they now? So that’ll continue.” Another finger went up.

By then my mind was spinning like a top, so all I could manage was a mumbled question “So what about immigration?”

“What about it?” Tessa signalled the landlord for another bottle of Dubonnet.

“Show me where anybody voted for shutting our borders to European wogs… oops, I mean neighbours. Nowhere. So they’ll be able to come, if with a little detour to Dublin. What old tossers like you don’t understand is that all those Romanians enrich our culture. We’ve only had Shakespeare, Donne and Dickens, while Romanians have had… well, you know what I mean.”

“I do,” I said, though I didn’t. “But money? Are we going to keep paying the EU after we leave it?”

“Alex, let me put it in simple words even a moron like you can understand. People. Voted. To. Leave. The EU. They. Didn’t. Vote. To. Stop. Payments. So. We. Shall. Go. On. Think you get this or shall I paint you a picture?”

“Well, now that you put it this way…”

“And that’s not all,” added Tessa with that triumphant look I remembered from the times when we… well, never mind. “We’ll also join the euro during this parliament.”

“But Tessa, doesn’t Brexit mean we reclaim our sovereignty and therefore keep our own currency for ever?”

“Don’t you know anything? Since when does using someone’s else’s currency mean losing sovereignty? Ever heard of British Virgin Islands, Caribbean Netherlands. East Timor, Ecuador, El Salvador and Marshall Islands?”

“What do they have to do with anything?”

“Trust a retard like you to ask such an idiotic question. They’re none of them part of the US and they still all use the US dollar. No problem with sovereignty, is there? And are we any different from El Salvador?”

“Less and less so, I dare say.  I assume we’ll still continue to obey all EU laws?” I asked with what I thought was devastating sarcasm.

“But of course we will,” nodded Tessa, which movement made her belch quite loudly. “We’ll just call them British laws, that’s all. I get it. We’ll call them common law – common with the EU, that is.”

“Tessa,” I said, helping her up. “What a brilliant plan. That way you can have the Brexit apfelstrudel…”

“And throw it up too,” giggled Tessa in that girlish way of hers. “That’s my kind of Brexit.”

“Or rather May kind of Brexit,” I said, hoping that by then Tessa was too far gone not to mock the feeble pun.

Even many Republicans, especially the neocons, hate Donald Trump because, unlike them, he intuitively opposes tyrannical PC orthodoxy.

I suspect the feeling is indeed intuitive rather than cerebral, for the president doesn’t strike me as a man capable of thinking things through, especially before he talks. Hence, even when his heart is in the right place, his head often goes its own way, trailing in the wake of his tongue. That often gets him in trouble, even when he doesn’t deserve it.

The current outburst of vitriol has been caused by Trump’s supposed ambivalence about the events in Charlottesville, Virginia. The outburst of violence there was ostensibly caused by a protest against plans to remove the statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee from the city centre. The protesters clashed with counterprotesters, and mayhem ensued.

‘Ostensibly’ is the operative word here, for political thuggery is always an aim in itself, with the face value of the argument only ever acting as a pretext. But let’s consider the face issue first.

Lee, the commander of the Confederate Army during the Civil War, was the most brilliant general on either side, winning numerous battles despite being grossly outnumbered and outgunned.

Before that he had served in the US Army for 32 years, distinguishing himself as a talented officer. In fact, Lincoln offered Lee the command of the Union forces, but the latter felt honour-bound to lead the army of his native Virginia and later of the whole Confederacy.

However, Lee’s side lost the war, and the victors wrote its history. According to them, the North attacked the South for the sole noble purpose of liberating the slaves. That’s simply not so.

The issue of slavery was more complex than simply splitting the country along the Mason-Dixon Line. The Southern states, being mostly agricultural, used slaves more than the industrial North, but both sides were tarred with the same brush, as it were.

Most signatories to the Declaration of Independence were slave owners, and one of the most radical egalitarians among them, Thomas Jefferson, not only owned slaves but also increased their number by avidly copulating with some of them.

In his Monticello estate he bred slaves using the same agricultural principles as those applied to breeding farm animals – and had them whipped to raw meat when they tried to escape.  “All men are created equal,” Jefferson wrote – but presumably only if they’re white. Dr Johnson was right when quipping: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

Many Northern commanders, such as Grant and McClellan, were themselves slave owners, while many Southern generals weren’t. And Lee had actually freed his slaves two years before the war. This emphasises what has to be obvious to any unbiased observer: the war was not just about slavery.

True enough, the Southern states seceded largely because the federal government had put obstacles in the way of spreading slavery into the newly acquired territories. However, Lincoln and his colleagues explicitly stated on numerous occasions that they had no quarrel with slavery in the original Southern states.

Their bellicose reaction to the secession was caused not by slavery but by their in-built imperative to expand the power of central government over state rights.

“If that would preserve the Union, I’d agree not to liberate a single slave,” Lincoln once said. Note also that his Gettysburg Address includes not a single anti-slavery word – and in fact Lincoln dreaded the possibility that he himself might be portrayed as an abolitionist.

In other words, either Lee deserves a statue in his native state or practically none of his illustrious contemporaries does. Slavery is a widely shared blot on American history, and few historical figures were left unsullied.

Therefore the protest against the removal of Lee’s statue was legitimate in general, and it was legal since the state authorities had issued the requisite permit. However, life is lived not in general but in particular. And the particularity in question was such that the marchers were mainly assorted scum: Klansmen, neo-Nazis, white supremacists et al.

I once lived in the South for 10 years and, if I still did, and didn’t detest gangbangs, I might have joined in. It’s possible that some perfectly decent Virginians joined in too, out of respect for their history. But they would have gone home having taken one look at the human refuse who marched with them – or for that matter against them.

For the counterprotesters were as fanatical as the other lot, and their action wasn’t officially endorsed. But it had to be organised: such outbursts are never haphazard. Hard-left ‘community organisers’ did their job, and a crowd of leftie scum looking for trouble turned up on cue, brandishing baseball bats.

The febrile atmosphere was charged with violence and it duly arrived. The two gangs, one mainly Nazi-brown, the other mainly leftie-red, clashed – as their typological ancestors did in the streets of Berlin, Rome and even London. While aware of the chromatic difference, I can discern no other.

Neither could Trump, who offended the PC neo-fascists by saying correctly that both sides were to blame. “What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right?” he asked reporters. “Do they have any semblance of guilt?”

But then Trump pulled off the contortionist trick of putting his foot in his mouth. There were “fine people” on both sides, he said. Moral equivalence was indeed called for, but that was the wrong kind. There were no fine people on either side. They were all scum.

All hell broke loose: Trump violated one of the seminal laws of political correctness, according to which brown scum are the embodiment of evil, whereas red scum are merely impetuous youngsters who may commit regrettable acts, but at least they do so in a good cause.

Political correctness has become a surrogate god, and it’s a wrathful deity devoid, unlike real God, of mercy. Hence the neocon senator McCain tweeted: “There’s no moral equivalency between racists and Americans standing up to defy hate and bigotry.” Even those who favour their own brand of hate, was the unspoken refrain.

McCain’s parteigenosse Marc Rubio chimed in with “White supremacy groups… are adherents of an evil ideology which argues certain people are inferior because of race, ethnicity or nation of origin.” Presumably, as opposed to adherents of another evil ideology whose offshoots claimed tens of millions of lives in the previous century.

Then the former community organiser Obama broke the world record of tweet readership. Yet his contribution is unparalleled in its mind-numbing banality: “No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin or his background or his religion… People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love.”

Yes, they can be taught to love neo-fascist political correctness and hate its neo-fascist bogeymen. Hence the enslavement of transplanted Africans by racists continues to rankle much more than the enslavement of half the world by communists.

The latter only committed unprecedented crimes against humanity, while the former wicked lot did something worse: they defied political correctness two centuries before the term even came into being.

The retrospective indulgence issued to communists also covers every other hue of reddish fascism. Bad boy, Trump. He went against the grain of the new cult and got hurt in the process.

Some 20 years ago I found myself at a Salisbury Review party, talking to the prominent anti-communist writer Brian Crozier.

The conversation veered towards converts from communism to conservatism, and I casually mentioned that, if they remained communists as adults, I have misgivings about such people.

Brian, who was himself a communist well into his thirties, objected to such scepticism. People can change their mind at any age, he said.

“Brian,” I said, “I have a confession to make. Until my thirties I could only derive sexual satisfaction from killing boys. But then I changed my mind and realised it was wrong.”

“It’s a false analogy,” objected my interlocutor. “Quite,” I agreed. “A pervert like that can only claim a few victims. A communist, on the other hand, is ready to justify a massacre of millions in pursuit of a transparently wicked idea.”

Though facetiously made, the point was serious. Acceptance of ideological democide may or may not involve some rational process. But it always answers a deep emotional need, an innate defect of personality.

Yes, anyone can change his opinions. But I doubt that, barring a Damascene epiphany, anyone can change his personality any more than he can change the colour of his eyes. To put it in clichéd terms, you can take a boy out of communism, but you can’t take communism out of a boy.

This brings me to Tony Blair’s admission that he was a Trotskyist as a student – and Peter Hitchens’s reaction to it.

Blair’s reminiscences of his youthful past lacked any novelty appeal. Anyone who understands modern politics already knew the general picture, if not every sordid detail.

We already knew that throughout the eighties Blair was a member of the parliamentary section of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). That transparent Soviet front advocated Britain’s unilateral abandonment of nuclear weapons and elimination of all US bases.

Against that background, any sensible person would shrug indifferently at Blair’s recollection that, when he first read a biography of Trotsky, it was “like a light going on” and that for a while he was actually “a Trot”. What else is new? New Labour?

Blair is easily the most subversive character ever to disgrace 10 Downing Street. While there, to quote Hitchens, he “tried to abolish sterling, surrendered to the IRA, wrecked our economy, our constitution, our civil service, our defences and much of our education system, and wounded the monarchy, too.”

Blair is an energumen, animated by the same destructive force as that driving communists to murder tens of millions. That Blair wreaked his havoc by legal means and without much violence, at least internally, is an interesting but ultimately moot point.

Political evil can work in various ways, and we should all learn from the master, Lenin. That distillate of evil was a champion of ‘whatever works’ as a way of gaining and keeping power. Thus he advocated a judicious mix of legal, which is to say parliamentary, and illegal activities.

The dominant ingredient of the mix was to be determined by expediency only. If a civilised political order could be destroyed without bloodshed, fine. If that took democide, no problem either.

If Blair had felt that he could only gain power by Trotsky’s methods, and if the situation allowed their use, he would have happily done so. As it was, he didn’t have to. The horde of illiterate lemmings, otherwise known as the electorate, happily followed him towards the edge of a cliff.

Hitchens laudably detests “that Blair creature” with all the gusto of his passionate soul. It’s with the same passion that he responded to Blair’s non-admission.

“Now, years after it is too late to help us, we learn that Anthony Blair was a student Marxist, an admirer of the bloodthirsty advocate of Red Terror, Leon Trotsky. When did he stop thinking this? We don’t really know.”

The words teapot and kettle spring to mind. For, in his own non-admission, Hitchens writes: “I, too, was a Marxist at university and for some years afterwards, a fact I do not conceal and readily discuss…”

In the same spirit of honesty, Hitchens could have mentioned that he didn’t just harbour some vague communist sympathies. He was an active member of the International Socialists, a seditious Trotskyist gang that later became the Socialist Workers’ Party.

How is it any different from what Blair was in his youth? Hitchens seems to believe that his lack of duplicity about his subversive past somehow elevates him to a higher moral plateau.

But then he himself writes that Blair kept shtum about some colourful details of his past only because he didn’t want to hurt his political career: “Now that’s all over, so he can start to tell the truth.”

Using the same logic, one may suggest that Hitchens’s own commendable openness falls into the same category. He only sought political office once, half-heartedly and some 25 years ago. Hence he can afford to be honest about his own subversive past.

If you agree that susceptibility to communism is an incurable character flaw, then you’ll see Hitchens as an instructive case study. For the same fanaticism with which he used to beat Trotsky’s drum now animates his fervent affection for Putin’s Russia.

Following the First Law of Thermodynamics, the evil of Bolshevism hasn’t disappeared – it has merely transformed into the evil of Putinism. Yet Hitchens continues to shill for a regime under which one in four grown men in Russia have been behind bars at some point.

The man calling himself a conservative supports a regime with no concept of the rule of law. Only 0.34 per cent of trials in Russia result in acquittal, as compared to 17 per cent in Britain and, more appropriately, 10 per cent under Stalin.

Nowhere, North Korea apart, is political power concentrated so fully in the hands of a small clique fronted by one ‘strong leader’.

Secure property, that cornerstone of liberty, doesn’t exist under Putin. Any Russian citizen, including the most illustrious oligarchs, can be dispossessed at any moment – or imprisoned on any trumped-up charge, with the guilty verdict predetermined.

Any semblance of free press has been stamped into the dirt, with Russian media emanating practically nothing but the most revolting propaganda this side of Julius Streicher. Journalists who refuse to toe the line are either forced out of the country or imprisoned or ‘whacked’, in Putin’s jargon.

Hardly a day goes by that Hitchens’s panegyrics for that kleptofascist regime aren’t harmonised with the background roar of Russian guns in the Ukraine and Syria, accompanied by incessant threats of nuclear annihilation of the West.

There has to be something fundamentally wrong with a man who, knowing all that, continues to adore the muscular exhibitionist and his criminal junta. We know what that something is: Troskyist fanaticism seeking new forms. Mr Blair, meet Mr Hitchens.