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The other day I mocked the unspeakably vulgar way many women dress these days, which admittedly was an unsportingly large target to aim at.

However, the questions I strive to answer begin not only with ‘What’, but also with ‘Why’. The target then becomes harder to hit.

But it’s worth a try for, as Plato postulated, the small things we can see give a clue to the big things we can’t see. And, in our thoroughly politicised world, nothing is bigger than politics.

Hence it’s appropriate to remark that political democracy fosters majority rule in everything except politics.

This isn’t as paradoxical as it sounds. For politics in democracies, including Britain, isn’t about the demos ruling. It’s about the demos tricked into believing it rules.

The actual power resides with the apparat, no matter how many or few parties it comprises. And the apparat always places self-perpetuation at the top of its priorities.

Therefore it jealously guards its bailiwick against alien trespassing. An outsider has little chance of slipping through the vetting net cast by party selection committees. And, as Trump is finding out in the US, if one does get through, the apparat joins forces against him irrespective of his party affiliation.

In Britain, the Tory machine is geared to filter out any parliamentary candidate who could be described as a conservative in any real, as opposed to virtual, sense. While a Labour victory is regarded with relative equanimity as only a temporary setback, a real conservative may well endanger the apparat itself.

Conservatism is consequently ostracised, and the demos, in whose name the apparat supposedly governs, is denied a choice of political philosophies. At best it can choose among various shades of apparatchik socialism, from the scarlet red (destroy Britain completely – today’s Labour) to the light pink (okay, preserve some of it for the time being – today’s Tories).

Such is the real situation, but our comprehensively ‘educated’ masses settle for make-belief and swell with pride over being politically equal to anybody. In fact, they’re only equal to one another, not to the demiurge apparat looking down on them from its Olympian height.

However, though denied real political power, in every other area the majority rules  with relentless despotism. The sham equality of political democracy steadily gains in reality the farther away it veers from politics.

Politically, the apparat has replaced an organic hierarchy with a contrived one. As collateral damage to that process, organic hierarchies have collapsed in every other walk of life.

Deprived of real political equality, the demos makes up for it by enforcing equality in areas hitherto governed by hierarchies of taste, learning and intellect. Decisions in all such areas have been implicitly put to a vote, with the majority carrying the day.

Voting is a show of hands, each holding a wad of cash. The 12,000 prepared to pay for Wembley Arena tickets to a concert featuring tattooed, drug-addled plankton easily outvote the 500 attending a chamber concert at Wigmore Hall.

This isn’t to say that at some point in the past there existed a golden age of refined tastes and high thoughts. In this world we aren’t blessed with earthly perfection.

However, until relatively recent times, refined tastes and high thoughts set the tone. The tasteless and thoughtless majority was welcome to indulge itself, but it was prevented from imposing its will on society at large.

These days, though the majority’s political power is illusory, its power to impose its crude tastes is absolute. This is exerted either directly or indirectly.

For example, the anti-musical cretin howling nihilistic lyrics all the way to the bank before courageously dying of AIDS or drug overdose has spun a whole industry around himself. That industry has become a giant dwarfing real music and imposing its own mentality on it.

If in the past tastes were formed by sublime musicians, perceptive critics, music-loving impresarios, patrons who were often musicians themselves, and an aesthetically educated public, today’s classical scene is shaped by the same crass, tasteless commercialism that’s part and parcel of pop.

As a result, classical music has collapsed as a serious art, one that perhaps better than any other expresses the spirit of our civilisation. There’s no point striving for excellence if the paying public can’t appreciate it and could easily be offended by it.

Serious music demands a serious effort from the listener, not just the performer. And the modern public doesn’t want to make such an effort – it’s after easily digestible entertainment. Today it may get this from a Beethoven symphony, tomorrow from rap. There’s little fundamental, as distinct from technical, difference any longer.

Thus it’s almost impossible to hear a proper classical performance, a state of affairs of which I was reminded at Christmas when attending a production of The Magic Flute at Vienna’s Staatsoper, one of the world’s premier opera houses.

Neither the orchestra nor the singers produced a subtle musical phrase in the whole evening. None of the singers had a voice that would have been regarded acceptable 50 years ago – and this is the norm, not an unfortunate exception.

If a drugged, vaguely satanic AIDS sufferer has become the paragon of today’s music, the hooker is now the paragon of women’s fashion. “What the hell happened to allure? The accentuated, but hidden?” asked a reader in response to my piece the other day.

Accentuating by hiding? Next thing you know he’ll demand subtlety and taste, and then we’re all in trouble.

Even little girls, never mind their mothers and elder sisters, today dress with the sartorial elegance hitherto only found among ladies plying their trade in London’s Soho, Paris’s Rue Saint-Denis or Amsterdam’s red-light district.

My problem with that sort of thing isn’t so much moral as aesthetic. Never mind allure: the sight of bluish, goose-pimpled slabs of cellulite spilling, top to bottom, out of hooker dresses can turn one off not only sex but even food.

There’s nothing wrong with women sporting décolleté dresses on formal occasions, and I for one happily steal stealthy looks. But the hooker ideal creates a gravitational pull attracting even women reading TV morning news.

There isn’t much wrong with their flesh – in fact, they’re evidently selected mainly if not solely on that basis. But neither they nor their paymasters realise that the same openness and transparency that are appropriate at eight in the evening come across as gross at eight in the morning.

As ladies in the aforementioned urban areas can attest to, money can buy you love, if the term is used in a narrow sense. But money can’t buy taste – vulgarity is the merchandise it’s really after in today’s world.

From our fashion correspondent Giza Shagg: The world of fashion gasped with delight and awe this New Year’s Eve, when celebrated designer Ima Slagg introduced her 2018 collection.

Following the resounding triumph of her travelling show Dress for Excess, the consensus in the industry is that never before has Britain been treated to such a radical reassessment of the very notion of taste and probity.

Slagg clothes are designed for women as they are, not for the anorexic waifs some other designers wish them to be. The epitome of chic modernity, a Slagg woman is comfortable in her skin – so comfortable in fact that she hardly needs any other garments.

The understated elegance of Miss Slagg’s creations happily coexists with a subtle sensual appeal and daring disdain for inclement weather. “This winter we’re all Slaggs at heart,” commented Vogue fashion columnist Maxima Logorrhoea.

“And Slaggs we’ll remain. After this, it’s impossible to go out without Slagg’s clothes. If you drink too much, you should wear too little – the industry owes Ima for this insight.”

“I’d feel naked without my Slagg dress,” echoed Maxima’s Cosmo counterpart Chlamydia Case. “Come to think of it, I feel naked in it,” she added with a seductive smile. “But that’s fine. We must always remember the first commandment of refined taste: If you’ve got it, flaunt it.”

“Too sensual? What a load of tosh,” added Harper’s Bazaar fashion editor Candida Albicans. “Women have repressed their true selves for too long. It’s time we let our femininity hang out, time we took pride in what we are, what we do – and also where and to whom we do it.”

Our photographers have captured the triumphant march of Slagg’s clothes through the country, especially its northern part.

 

Ima Slagg is a designer for our time, a sartorial comment on modernity. Ima refuses to see progress strictly in scientific and technological terms. To her, aesthetics progress as rapidly as material innovations, and in her able hands the former may even outpace the latter.

Fashion makes a statement, it’s a woman’s way of screaming defiance at the male-dominated world. And a Slagg woman will never hide her femininity. “I’m a modern woman – and proud of it,” she announces thunderously. “Take me or leave me, and make bloody sure it’s the former.”

Vlad Putin is the strong leader we so desperately lack, according to some of my Right-thinking readers. Strength is a quality they admire more than anything else in a leader, brushing aside snide remarks coming from cynical naysayers.

Those usually feature a rota of strong leaders who nonetheless failed to earn universal admiration. Depending on the naysayer’s frame of reference, he may start with such undeniably strong leaders as Alaric, Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan, or simply limit himself to more up-to-date figures, such as Stalin, Hitler and Mao.

Those animadversions typically cut no ice because true love can’t be affected by incidentals. We like for something; we love in spite of everything. And those Right-thinking chaps love Vlad with all their hearts.

Therefore, I hold no hope that, by mentioning a few current achievements of Vlad’s reign, I’m going to change anyone’s lovelorn mind. What follows is merely to keep the record straight.

Let’s start with one of those innocent details where the devil resides. Russia is gearing up for this summer’s World Cup, and Samara is one of the cities where football will be played. Since Samara’s existing stadium isn’t up to scratch, a new one had to be built.

Funds were allocated and, in the good Russian tradition, equably divided among the offshore accounts of everyone involved in the project. That being par for the course, there were no repercussions, and a new batch of cash arrived.

This was properly used to buy the requisite construction materials – which too were instantly pilfered. Eventually, however, the construction did start, way behind schedule. There was every danger that the stadium wouldn’t be ready for the summer kick-off.

That’s where the strong leader rode in and saved the day. Vlad rang the contractor and, after impugning his mother’s sexual morality, told him in his Stalinesque manner: “If you blow the deadline, I’ll slap you in pokey.”

Stalin would have said “I’ll have you shot”, but Vlad is trying to get in touch with his feminine side. Now imagine, if you can, any Western leader credibly making the same threat to a general contractor.

May? Macron? Merkel? No way. Even Vlad’s strong friend Donald would fall short. You see, those countries anachronistically cling to the notion of due process. No matter how strong their leader is, he can’t imprison people on his say-so. So draw your own conclusion about Russia while I move on.

A few days ago, an explosive device went off in a Petersburg supermarket. Though no one was killed or badly hurt, an investigation was in order.

But strong leaders won’t be held back by such time-wasting formalities. Practically before the police arrived on the scene, Vlad declared the explosion an act of terrorism and ordered his special forces not to take any prisoners. “Liquidate the bandits on the spot,” barked the strong leader.

This was an equivalent of Vlad’s earlier promise to “whack’em in the shithouse”. However, even forgetting due process, there are a couple of problems with issuing such orders.

First, a terrorist ‘whacked’ in public facilities or elsewhere will fall not only dead but also silent and therefore unable to lead investigators to his accomplices. And then, of course, special forces encouraged to shoot suspects without trial may just expand their remit a wee bit and whack a few people whose only crime is disliking the strong leader.

The interesting thing is that many Russians are sure that Vlad himself ordered the explosion, the better to rally the populace.

Vlad has form in that sort of thing, having consolidated his position in 2001 by having several apartment blocks blown up. (For details, I recommend the book Blowing Up Russia, co-authored by Alexander Litvinenko, whose literary exploits won the Polonium Award from a grateful Vlad.)

Now I have no idea whether Vlad was involved this time. Actually, I suspect not. But let’s just note that the aforementioned weak leaders May, Manny and Angela were never subjected to such ugly suspicions after terrorist acts in their own countries. Ever wonder why?

Moving right along, an open season on Russians who fail to admire the strong leader as much as Peter Hitchens does is continuing in full swing. Quite a few anti-Putin activists have been bagged in the run-up to Christmas.

One such, Vladimir Ivanyutenko, was attacked outside his house in Petersburg. The attackers first Tasered him, then stabbed him several times. Before losing consciousness, the victim whispered “NOD” (a pro-Kremlin gang). He’s now fighting for his life in intensive care.

In Krasnodar, another activist, Andrey Rudomakha, was beaten up with a knuckleduster. He’s now in hospital with a serious concussion and broken nose. His crime was photographing seaside palaces belonging to Putin’s billionaire cronies.

The journalist Vyacheslav Prudnikov was shot several times near Rostov. The attacker specified that the punishment was inflicted for Mr Prudnikov’s anti-Vlad articles.

Alexei Stroganov, member of the democratic opposition, was hit on the head with a steel pipe. He died recently, having spent two months in a coma.

A steel pipe saw the light of day again, when Nikolai Liaskin, head of staff to the opposition leader Alexei Navalnyi, was hit on the head twice. He’s in hospital with a bad concussion and cranial trauma.

The journalist Vladimir Shchipitzyn was attacked in his own doorway. An unknown man first blinded him with a pepper spray, then hit him with a knuckleduster several times and put the boot in when the victim was writhing on the ground. “Don’t write any more f***ing s*** about good people,” advised the attacker, “or next time it’ll be worse.”

Ivan Skripnichenko was keeping vigil next to the Kremlin, on the spot where the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov had been murdered. Ivan was beaten up by a man shouting: “So you don’t like Putin?” A week later Skripnichenko died from his injuries.

And so it goes, on and on, strong leadership at work. You know what? I’d rather stay in a country where leadership is weak. Those who feel differently should move to Vlad’s bailiwick. I’d be curious to know how they’ll feel about strong leadership a month or two later.

Even paranoiacs, the saying goes, have real enemies. By the same token, some scaremongering fears may well be justified.

I’ll tell you mine, and you can see how, or whether, they tally with yours:

Nuclear war. There used to be only one potential flashpoint: the USSR with its global ambitions and NATO with its commitment to keep those ambitions in check. Now, frighteningly, there are several.

North Korea is rattling her nuclear sabre forged in Russia. Our papers, with their usual coyness, talk about some mysterious rogue scientists finding themselves unemployed in Russia and offering their talents to Kim.

This is rubbish, and ignorant rubbish at that. No Russian scientists, rogue or otherwise, would be able to ply their trade in N. Korea without encouragement or, more likely, assignment from Putin’s government.

Whether or not Kim is crazy enough to swing his newly acquired sabre is anyone’s guess. But we can legitimately fear he may.

Then there’s the Middle East, with the distinct possibility of Iran acquiring a nuclear bomb and dropping it on you-know-whom.

Also, Putin’s aggressive designs in that region come in conflict with America’s interests, with US and Russian armed forces confronting each other there. Even in the absence of intent, one trigger-happy pilot can set the nuclear ball rolling.

Putin sees Eastern Europe, especially the former parts of the USSR, as potential prey. If you doubt that, read Russian papers or watch Russian television. And if you can’t, just take my word for it: the situation there is fraught.

The steady disarmament of Western Europe, often portrayed as a sign of peaceful intentions, in fact increases the nuclear risk no end. Should Russia attack her neighbours, especially those that are NATO members, a nuclear response may be the only option, what with valid conventional means practically non-existent.

All things considered, we have every reason to be afraid: I for one would rather not have nuclear winter as a cure for global warming.

Constitutional crisis in the US. Such a crisis in any A-list country, and especially in the self-appointed leader of the free world, could spell disaster for all of us.

This could easily be brought on by the Mueller investigation into Trump’s links with Putin’s KGB junta. The investigation has lost some news appeal lately, but it is going on, and some key witnesses are cooperating.

Should the investigation show collusion between Trump and Putin, the fallout would make Watergate look like a minor glitch. Nixon, after all, acted on his own behalf, not on that of a hostile foreign power.

Worst case, Trump could be charged with treason, which would leave America in a state of political chaos. All of us in what little is left of the free world pray to God that this cloud will blow over, but it’s out of our hands, and possibly even out of God’s.

Labour victory in Britain. Compared to the previous fear, this disaster would register somewhat lower on the Richter scale. But there would be global shock waves nonetheless.

Corbyn confidently predicts there will be an election in 2018 and he’ll win it. That revolting creature may well be right if the polls are any indication. Should 50 per cent of MPs plus one pass a no confidence vote, a disaster beckons.

Lord Heseltine, who by some oversight is described as a Tory, doesn’t think Corbyn’s tenure would be so bad – Brexit is an immeasurably greater disaster, according to His Lordship. “We’ve survived Labour governments before,” he said, displaying that ontological stupidity of the Left.

First, Britain has also survived two world wars, which, however, doesn’t make the prospect of a third one any less awful.

Second, Britain has never had a hard-Left Labour government before, one that’s explicitly committed to sabotaging everything that makes Britain British in any other than the ethnic sense.

Third, using Heseltine’s own asinine logic, Britain has had Labour governments for a total of 26 years in her history. On the other hand, the country has been a sovereign nation for at least 1,500 years and arguably longer – yet Heseltine doesn’t think we can now survive without being run by the Germans… sorry, I meant the EU.

Fourth, it’s debatable whether any country ever really survives socialism, soft, hard or half-baked. That a commonwealth doesn’t collapse doesn’t mean it remains intact. A country may bleed to death through multiple pinpricks over time, with her constitution, indeed her essence, slowly exsanguinating.

Since 1924, when Britain was first blessed with a Labour government, the country has been bled white. Not only is the Empire gone, but so is much of the country’s constitution – much of Britain’s political lifeblood. As a result, a self-serving nonentity like Lord Heseltine can become an important politician – a tree lost in the forest of other self-serving nonentities.

I’m not attributing all Britain’s ills to Labour governments – for example, all the major steps on the road to the EU have been taken by Tory administrations. At fault there is the socialist corruption of our political culture that makes Labour governments and Lord Heseltine possible.

It’s not only power that corrupts – it’s also socialism. And, with apologies to Lord Acton, absolute socialism corrupts absolutely.

Global economic meltdown. Remember the 2008 crisis? It was caused by profligate governments, irresponsible banks and hedonistic people demanding their material happiness – now. Things have changed since then: governments have become even more profligate, banks even more irresponsible, and people even more hedonistic.

All major Western economies are fundamentally unsound, overburdened by public and personal indebtedness, on-going deficit spending and eroding industrial base. Another crisis, existential more than just economic, is brewing, and who’s to say it won’t happen in 2018?

Such are my major fears, and I won’t burden you with the minor ones, such as more Muslim terrorism (this isn’t so much a fear as a certainty), more alien immigration (ditto) or Western governments legalising more perversions, sexual or other. (May I suggest interspecies marriage? Those Welsh sheep deserve happiness.) At least we don’t have to fear the hoax of anthropogenic global warming, and you can see me wiping my brow even as we speak.

I do hope my fears, and yours, turn out to be ill-founded, and every good wish comes true. A Happy New Year to all.

Finally the truth has sunk in: Freud was a charlatan who produced not a single verifiable story of clinical success.

All his pet theories, starting with the curative properties of cocaine (which he himself snorted like a suction pump), have been debunked. That includes sex abuse in childhood as the cause of all psychoses and hysteria – a demonstrable falsehood Freud later abandoned for the equally larcenous Oedipus complex.

Over a lifetime, I’ve met many people with psychological problems – in fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever met anyone without at least some quirks. Why, some naysayers have suggested that even I may have a few.

Yet neither I nor anyone I’ve ever met has ever traced such problems back to the urgent desire to kill his Dad, mount his Mum and gouge his eyes out. Since my lifetime has been rather long, the sample is large enough to suggest that Freud’s pet theory belongs only in puerile jokes. (Such as the one about that Jewish woman saying: “Oedipus, Schmoedipus, as long as he loves his Mum…”)

What Marx was in economics and Darwin in biology, Freud was in psychiatry. Like them, he cheated his way to the status of a modern prophet.

Fraud falsified clinical evidence, lied about case studies, drove some patients to premature death or suicide with his quackery, smeared his opponents, published fake clinical papers – and squeezed every penny out of gullible rich patients, mostly women.

Those interested in the details of this scam should read Frederick Crews’s book Freud: The Making of an Illusion. No reader of that volume will ever again take Freud seriously.

However, while telling us all we need to know about Freud, and possibly even more than that, Mr Crews writes next to nothing about Freudianism as a social phenomenon. He obviously saw that as falling outside his remit, which is fair enough: a book must be judged on what’s in it, not what isn’t, and his is excellent.

However, though every age produces false prophets, only a few ever gain a massive following. What was it about Freud (or, for that matter, Marx and Darwin) that turned a megalomaniac, unscrupulous quack into a ‘climate of opinion’?

Here it’s important to point out the difference between real and false prophets. The former see the future; the latter cling to the present.

Old Testament seers prophesied the coming of Jesus Christ over 300 times, and those prophesies were counterintuitive: most had no link to contemporaneous events and beliefs. The prophets saw something no one else could see  because that something didn’t yet exist.

False prophets are different: they’re nothing but astute salesmen with an uncanny knack for telling the customer what he wants to hear. They fill a hole in the market by enunciating the zeitgeist.

When Freud expertly let the zeitgeist speak through him, the hole was gaping. The West had lost the notion of absolute truth residing outside man – it had lost an objective frame of reference within which a person’s worth could be measured.

Man had moved from the periphery of God’s universe to the centre of his own. The Reformation had taught him that he could find his own way to God; the Enlightenment said he could definitely find his own way, but not necessarily to God because there was no such thing; Darwin had postulated that he was but another ape, although cleverer than most.

Man was now chained to the ground like Prometheus to his rock. Modern Man had lost infinity, both spatial and temporal – and he was told it was good riddance.

That’s what he wanted to hear, but the whole thing still made him slightly uncomfortable. He was proud of having ousted God, but something was missing. He was undeniably an ape, but such a clever one that he couldn’t reduce his whole life to scoffing bananas – his cleverness demanded a transcendent dimension.

That obviously could no longer be found outside himself; nothing could, for nothing outside himself, other than matter, could have possibly existed. The conclusion was natural, and as vulgar as modernity itself. Man could only find the transcendent in the transient: himself.

Hence Modern Man embarked on a never-ending exploration of himself: rather than soaring to eternal heights, he became a spelunker endlessly delving into the dark recesses of his own psyche. That produced a let-down: hoping to find an ersatz God inside himself, man found only himself there.

Left one on one with his own vulgarity and wickedness, he went off the rails. He wanted someone to tell him what on earth was going on, but there was no one to ask but himself, and he didn’t know.

That’s where Freud came in. Man, he explained, had nothing transcendent, but he had the next best thing: something inexplicable. But not to worry: old Sigmund will sort out all those little mysteries. Happiness all around.

Overnight the West was inundated with mountebanks encouraging spiritually deracinated dupes to embark on a lifelong spelunking expedition into their own petty selves. The charlatans were collectively charging billions for their chicanery, but then the penny dropped.

Psychoanalysis has turned out to be nothing but a gift that keeps on giving. Since it answered no real medical need, it could cure nothing. It could only use people as marks in a fixed game of cards in which the dealer had all the aces.

People began to realise that, while they were getting poorer, they weren’t getting better. Their constitutional right to happiness remained unclaimed and unclaimable. They couldn’t avoid sadness, pain or lousy moods. Above all, they couldn’t fill that emptiness inside.

But they knew that emptiness existed. If it couldn’t be filled psychiatrically, it had to be filled chemically. Out went the charlatans and, of all A-list countries, only France still takes psychoanalysis seriously.

Pushers, posing as doctors, stepped in and started flogging feel-good pills in volumes that could make Smarties manufacturers turn green with envy. Antidepressants began to do the job previously done by Freudian and other quacks.

Pills are the cobbles on the road leading from hedonism to decadence and from decadence to degeneracy. They don’t even pretend to create real transcendence – they’re happy faking it with naked cynicism.

One in 10 people in so-called developed countries are now taking antidepressants, and in Britain this obscenity is accelerating faster than anywhere else.

I’m not talking about people with genuine diseases, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder – they must get all the help they need. But most pill poppers suffer from existential and spiritual problems, not medical ones.

They demand their fix, exerting a downward pressure on our overworked GPs and effectively turning them into pushers. People see doctors not to be treated but to score – without breaking the law.

True, by demanding and getting their Prozac or whatever they don’t break any earthly laws. Those they do break are much more vital and less forgiving: no plea bargaining is allowed, and the verdict is always the same: life – meaningless, empty, addled life.

Before this Christmas I had been to Vienna a few times, the last one some 20 years ago. The city had changed in the interim, explained the taxi driver who had been a year old at the time of my previous visit.

One conspicuous change was that his insight was offered in understandable English, a language these days spoken by, well, everyone in Vienna.

Yet twenty years ago, it was next to impossible to get around without speaking some German. Mine was rather limited, coming as it did from war films in which SS men clad in well-cut Hugo Boss uniforms said things like “Halt!”, “Hende hoch!”, “Jawohl, Herr Gruppenführer!” and “Ve’ve got vays to make you talk.”

That sort of lexicon put me at a linguistic disadvantage when ordering any food other than the ubiquitously cosmopolitan Wiener schnitzel. (A note to the Viennese: try frying your veal escalopes the way the Milanese do, in breadcrumbs – not in two inches of batter encasing a gossamer sliver of meat.)

No such problems this time: English has made confident strides over Europe, and even street vendors can sell one a glass of punch – quite a few glasses, actually – in the new lingua franca.

Why, the fastidiously law-abiding Viennese even use English to express their misgivings about law enforcement, thereby paying a glowing tribute to the global appeal of our culture.

Yet English isn’t the dominant language in the city centre and – though this probably only seems that way – neither is German. All one hears in the several square miles around St Stephan’s is Russian, spoken by large and small groups of tourists, families, couples and other picture snappers.

Unlike the Japanese, the Russians mostly take photos with their phones, not expensive Nikons, which must adversely affect the quality of the images. But the quantity doesn’t suffer.

One Russian woman, for example, walked around the Leopold Museum, meticulously photographing every painting on offer, and there are hundreds. Her husband trailed behind, ignoring the art but stealing furtive glances at other women.

Sooner or later they all take their phones to Schwarzenbergplatz, a large square adorned at the entrance with an equestrian statue of Prince Schwarzenberg. That great general omnivorously fought against Turks, with Russians against Napoleon and with Napoleon against Russians, acquitting himself well much of the time.

One suspects that most Russian tourists have only a vague idea of the feats performed by the prince, but he’s not the reason they tote their phones to the square. For sitting in the middle of it is a huge, and hugely tasteless, memorial commemorating the 17,000 Red Army soldiers killed in the Vienna offensive.

The memorial cites the purpose of said offensive as “liberating Austria from German fascist invaders”, and supports this claim with copious quotations from Stalin. One of them says: “Fluttering over Europe henceforth will be the great banner of freedom of the peoples and friendship among the peoples.”

The Russians bow their heads reverentially and whip their phones out. My reaction was somewhat different, skewed as it was by some knowledge of history.

Any nation has the right, indeed duty, to commemorate its fallen soldiers. Yet the tone of the commemoration should reflect the justness of the cause that demanded such sacrifices, the historical background and the local sensibilities. One doesn’t see, for example, similar monuments to American and British casualties: all one sees is crosses at war cemeteries and the odd plaque here and there.

One observation first: every inscription on the memorial is in Russian only, with nary a word of German translation. This identifies the target readership: the text was supposed to be read by the Soviet liberators only, not by the grateful populace they had liberated. The liberators clearly didn’t plan on leaving, for otherwise they would have left behind something the locals could read.

Vienna was at the time divided into four occupation sectors, like Berlin. I don’t know how grateful the populations of the three Western sectors were for their liberation, but the Viennese who found themselves under the Soviets definitely weren’t.

For, just like the murderous Einsatzgruppen riding the coattails of a victorious Wehrmacht, the Soviet liberators were followed in by swarms of NKVD troops, doing what they always did: kidnapping, torturing and murdering all the same groups they pursued everywhere, including in their own country: priests, administrators, professors, doctors, lawyers, aristocrats (there were some Nazis too, but they were a minority).

When I was a youngster in Russia, I was friends with an old woman, the widow of a prominent general. She had done eight years in a labour camp for having been friendly with Stalin’s in-laws, with whom he obviously didn’t get on.

Dying in the barrack next to her was an Austrian woman, wife of a musicologist. On their way to Vienna’s Staatsoper, and dressed in their evening finery, the couple veered into the Soviet sector. There they were kidnapped off the street, never to see each other again. The woman was interrogated by an NKVD colonel who, by way of introduction, ripped her diamond earrings out without undoing them first.

The Viennese were tortured, raped and robbed – more than 90 per cent of the crimes recorded in Vienna at the time were committed by Soviet soldiers (US GIs accounted for about five per cent). It’s only due to the Allies’ fancy political footwork and resolute resistance that the ‘liberation’ lasted only 10 years, not 46, as in Germany.

The liberators finally left, on the promise of Austria’s neutrality. Few locals are still alive who remember the delights of Soviet occupation. But historical memory outlives the people, and not many Viennese are retrospectively grateful to Soviet killers and rapists.

Few, I’m sure, regard the Schwarzenbergplatz memorial as anything but an offensive eyesore. They, along with the Eastern Europeans doubtless see the ‘liberation’ as merely a replacement of brown with red fascism. Though the chromatic difference is clear enough, a substantive one is somewhat lacking.

Similar cynical, mocking cenotaphs have been erected throughout Eastern Europe. In many places they’re being pulled down, but the Viennese show more forbearance. Apart from the odd pot of paint thrown at this obscenity, it still stands unmolested.

Those picture-snapping Russians don’t really know any better, what with the stupefying Putin propaganda glorifying Stalin and everything he represented. But one hopes that someday the Viennese will no longer stand for this affront to their beautiful city.

If you want to escape turkey and mince pies, or simply have no extended family to share such delights with, Vienna provides a perfect haven at Christmas.

In the hundred years that Vienna has been a republican capital, it hasn’t lost many traces of arguably one of the greatest empires – and definitely the most musical. If you agree that music is the quintessence of Western culture, then Vienna is the most Western capital.

From Haydn and Mozart to Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms, from Bruckner and Mahler to Schönberg, Berg and Webern, Vienna is only bettered by one musical city, Leipzig, and only because of one man, Bach.

A city is made great by the inspiration behind it, and this came from the Habsburgs, Europe’s most magnificent dynasty. Since for several centuries the Habsburgs were not only Austro-Hungarian but also Holy Roman emperors, their capital was perhaps the most significant city of continental Europe.

To this day it exudes the quiet grandeur, restrained taste and understated self-confidence of the great empire that once was. Though Vienna, like most other European capitals, still coasts on its past, its present is less objectionable than most.

Contrary to Voltaire’s typically lightweight quip, the Empire was indeed Holy and Roman, which is why Viennese Christmas is still Christmas, not a shopping binge with jingle bells on. Church bells were ringing all over the city, and there were Christmas markets at every corner, with names like Baby Jesus or Christ the Child.

Can you imagine such markets in Paris, London or New York? It’s easier to imagine, or rather anticipate, a summary fine or perhaps even imprisonment for wishing someone a merry Christmas.

The markets sold sweets, roasted chestnuts and above all punch and mulled wine. An hourly stop at one of those kiosks was guaranteed to maintain one’s blood alcohol level between two undesirable extremes, too high or too low.

Everyone was drinking steadily, yet there were no incidents of drunken or rowdy behaviour. Call me anti-British, but I didn’t feel any pangs of nostalgia for half-naked slags publicly relieving themselves through every available orifice, their boyfriends calling me “sunshine” and asking “What you lookin’ at?” – why, I didn’t even see one pavement pizza, nor a single street brawl.

Having said that, Vienna is full of things I normally dislike – but somehow it can get away with most of them.

For example, Baroque architecture – in fact, Baroque anything, other than music – leaves me cold or, more often, appalled. Yet, though Vienna is predominantly a Baroque city, it pulls it off with epic élan.

We celebrated midnight Mass at a fourteenth-century Augustinian church featuring a Baroque altar. My normal reaction to such aesthetic desecration is to turn around and walk out. Thus I physically couldn’t spend more than five minutes inside one of Christendom’s premier churches, Rome’s St John the Lateran, such was the eye-gouging Baroque vandalism of its interior.

But our Vienna church looked as if it had the foresight to provide for the aesthetics of three centuries later. Its altar didn’t necessarily attract; but then neither did it distract.

The German liturgy was something else again. Somehow Vater unser doesn’t quite have the same ring as Our Father, never mind Pater noster. The priest also cracked a few jokes, which I didn’t understand, but the rest of the congregation laughed on cue.

I’m sure the wisecracks didn’t have the lavatorial slant favoured by Germans, which reminded me that, though Vienna is Germanic, it isn’t German. That’s hardly surprising, considering that it was largely shaped by such cosmopolitan Habsburgs as the Empress Maria Theresa, who freely used the term ‘German swinishness’, even in reference to Mozart’s Singspiel operas.

Also, I prefer cities that develop organically and somewhat chaotically throughout history. However, not much of Vienna is organic and none of it chaotic – the city shows every sign of large-scale urban planning.

Yet the same things I find off-putting in much of Paris and all of Petersburg somehow work in Vienna. Whoever did the planning there had an unerring eye for the interrelation of elements in space. Music too is about arranging elements, in time, and in that sense Vienna’s stones are largely musical.

The stone music is full of pomp. Everything is on a lofty scale: Piccadilly is the width of a Vienna side street. Yet boundless squares fed by impossibly wide streets somehow manage to cut down to size vast apartments blocks that look as if they could withstand a direct hit from a low-yield nuclear bomb.

Vienna is a city of impeccable proportions – so impeccable, in fact, that after a while it may appear staid. But that effect would take longer than a few days to start getting on one’s nerves. Having walked 50 miles over four days in the city, I never felt bored or irritated.

Even massive institutional buildings that would look smug anywhere else come across as modest, almost diffident. They’re overwhelmed and humbled by the vast spaces they fill so sparsely.

And speaking of institutional buildings, the Viennese refer to their House of Parliament as Rathaus. Personally, I wouldn’t push the rodent parallel too far, but the Viennese have clearly grasped the nature of modern parliamentarism.

The clickety-clack of hooves is everywhere, with scores of horse-driven carriages whisking tourists from one place to the next. Normally I despise such pseudo-retro pretensions, but what looks ludicrous in Manhattan or even London somehow doesn’t irritate in Vienna. Perhaps, though London lost its erstwhile imperial status later than Vienna, its vestiges have been more thoroughly expunged.

The Viennese look and act utterly civilised, and one sees many people my snobbish friends call PLUs (People Like Us) even in the very centre. Many women wear fur coats, and they don’t seem to fear violence.

Years ago, I recall, we were in Amsterdam, where a friend commended my wife for her courage in wearing a fur. “You may be attacked,” she said. “The attacker would end up in the canal,” I replied.

Now, a quarter-century later, my flesh is no longer strong enough to inspire such self-confidence, but the spirit is still willing to espy any signs of opprobrium at my wife’s sartorial preferences. Didn’t see any in Vienna – in fact, didn’t see any deviations from civilised behaviour.

No eyesores then? Well, that would be too much to ask. But I’ll save the unpleasant stuff for tomorrow.

Merry Christmas to all Christians among my readers, celebrating the day Our Lord was incarnate in the Virgin Mary and came to earth for the propitiation of our sins. You will be saved, definitely.

Merry Christmas also to all cultured non-Christians out there, those who espouse any other religion or none, agnostic or atheist, who don’t believe all that nonsense but do know that the culture they love is Christian. Hence they too have something to celebrate for, even if Our Lord wasn’t born on this day, our culture definitely was. You too will be saved, probably.

Merry Christmas also to all those who don’t believe in Christ or God in general, don’t know much about Christian or any other culture and see Christmas mainly as a retail opportunity. You probably don’t care one way or the other whether or not you’ll be saved, but, what with all the Christmas sales, I’m sure you’ve done enough saving of your own.

Merry Christmas also to those who don’t believe in Christ but hate him anyway, who loathe the culture and civilisation that owe their existence to Christ, and who seek to destroy them as fervently as they have done so consistently for 1,400 years. I only wish you a merry Christmas to see that look on your face, to be honest. And I doubt you’ll be saved, but, lucky for you, it’s not up to me to decide.

And a happy, peaceful new year to all!

The actor has committed the worst sin known to modernity: discrimination. Not against anyone of different race, mental and physical faculties, sex, religion or amorous proclivities – God forbid.

Had he been guilty of that, he’d be dangling off the metaphorical gallows even as we speak. As it is, he’s merely having his wrists beaten to raw meat with a metaphorical ruler. For Mr Damon discriminated between crude flirtation and rape.

Speaking on the current sex abuse hysteria in the time-honoured idiom of his profession, Mr Damon dared to aver that “there are a whole shitload of guys – the preponderance of men I’ve worked with – who don’t do this kind of thing.”

What, not every man is a latent abuser and rapist? Call this nuanced thinking, Matt? I call it a slap in the face of modernity. And modernity can slap back, with interest.

He should have left it at that, but no. Damon pressed on, wearing his nuanced thinking on his sleeve, just above his wrist to be slapped: “I do believe that there’s a spectrum of behaviour, right? And we’re going to have to figure – you know, there’s a difference between, you know, patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation.”

A difference, Matt? Are you discriminating again? Patting the ‘butt’ of an actress whose nude shots and videos adorn thousands of onanistic websites is no different from raping a 9-year-old girl, especially if the perpetrator then marries her?… Sorry, now I’m the one indulging in discrimination, of a worse, religious kind.

It fell upon the actresses Minnie Driver (Matt’s ex) and Alyssa Milano to wield the aforementioned ruler.

Thus Minnie: “Good God, Matt, seriously? You don’t get to be hierarchical with abuse. And you don’t get to tell women that because some guy only showed them their penis their pain isn’t as great as a woman who was raped.”

Let’s see. According to the modern ethos, ventriloquist to Minnie’s dummy, a woman flashed on a bus suffers as much pain as one viciously raped in a dark alley. What if it’s gang rape, Minnie? Accompanied by severe beating? Still no hierarchical discrimination allowed?

Miss Milano added her own contribution to the art of English prose: “Dear Matt Damon, it’s the micro that makes the macro. We are in a ‘culture of outrage’ because the magnitude of rage is, in fact, overtly outrageous. And it is righteous. We are not outraged because someone grabbed our asses in a picture. We are outraged because we were made to feel this was normal. We are outraged because we have been gaslighted. We are outraged because we were silenced for so long.”

I don’t know what ‘gaslighted’ means, but then English is only my second language. For Miss Milano it’s her first, and she uses it with native mastery.

She’s outraged because, according to the culture of outrage, one is supposed to be equally outraged at all outrageous things, regardless of the degree of outrageousness. Therefore having her ‘ass’ outrageously grabbed in a picture (presumably off-screen) is as much of an outrage as the outrage of outrageously raping a 9-year-old girl. Equality rules in outrage, as it does in everything else.

It goes without saying that nothing Minnie or Alyssa does on screen is any cause for outrage whatsoever. If Minnie and Alyssa star in soft-porn scenes, that’s not outrageous at all. (I could provide the links, but won’t: do your own search, you pervert.)

Now ‘asses’ have been fondled, and sex exchanged for roles or credits, since Hollywood came into existence more than a century ago. Anybody who has ever been involved in show business, even as tangentially as my own stint in advertising, knows that there’s hardly a Hollywood actress who hasn’t slept her way to her present status. (‘Hardly’ doesn’t mean they all did it, I hasten to disclaim for fear of lawsuits.)

And everybody in Hollywood has felt “it was normal” until a few months ago. For example, stuck in the middle of a difficult, never-ending shoot on location, Marilyn Monroe famously asked her agent: “Who do I have to f*** to get off this picture?” Doing that to get on rather than off was the norm.

That sort of thing has always been sleazy and sordid, so why have actresses and their bien pensant fans been silent for so long? Why this sudden outburst of outrageously outraged rage?

Simple. It’s the rattling bandwagon of modernity, inviting everyone to jump on. Once the wheels have been set in motion, the modern lot turn into a herd, which is their natural tendency anyway.

They hear the clarion call of modernity in every tonal detail and respond with soldierly obedience. This time the call is accompanied with enticing words: “Now you can! You no longer have to pay PR flacks to do your publicity! You can get it for free – by jumping on that bandwagon! As long as you’re in tune with modernity, you’ll sweep all before you! No one will dare resist!”

The ladies somersaulting on that vehicle don’t even care how ridiculous they sound, even if it’s considerably more so than Minnie and Alyssa, which takes some doing.

One starlet, for example, claimed that Harvey Weinstein raped her against her own coat rack – after which she continued to have consensual sex with him for 10 years. Another said that Dustin Hoffman abused her by public fondling, after which she went up to his room and had sex with him for $20.

Such little incongruities don’t seem to upset anyone. And if yet another psychotic idiocy does bother someone like Matt Damon, off with his head.

It seems like every time a Muslim engages in a bit of mass murder, the media describe him as either alienated or a loner or addicted to drugs or having A history of mental problems.

When mass murder is attempted by driving a large vehicle into a crowd, as it was the other day in Melbourne, no one suggests that the chap was simply a poor driver. That’s still to come.

No one identifies the real motivation either, or, if some intrepid paper does so, it’s always days after the fact. In this case, Australian media did mention in passing, after listing all the requisite mental problems, that the murderer was an Australian citizen, albeit of Afghan descent.

This glosses over the real reason for Islamic terrorism. It’s Islam. No other exists.

That doesn’t mean that a murderer may not also be alienated, on drugs or recently abandoned by his wife. But that’s not why he kills. He kills because he’s a Muslim and, as such, doctrinally committed to killing infidels. Drugs or, Allah forbid, booze, if used at all, are there to make suicide easier. But they don’t cause the homicide.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull so far hasn’t explained to the outraged multitudes that it’s wrong to blame Islam for this road mishap. Why, so far he hasn’t followed the example of his American and British counterparts to declare that Islam is a religion of peace.

He hasn’t even done what his future head of state, Prince Charles, did a few years ago. HRH explained that, though all religions start from different points, they all end up in the same place because at base they’re all the same.

As proof of this uncanny similarity, HRH drew a parallel between Jesus and Mohammed, who both had to flee their native land for fear of religious persecution. He didn’t expand his point further, by stating that Jesus and Mohammed also had the same internal organs and the same number of limbs.

More to the point, HRH didn’t mention that the first thing Mohammed did after moving from Mecca to Medina was behead several hundred Jews, many with his own sabre.

Jesus, if the Gospels are to be believed, never did anything quite so adventurous as that. Nor did he rob caravans, launch bandit raids on neighbours or start wars of conquest.

Jesus taught his flock to love not only friends but even enemies. Mohammed taught Muslims to kill not only their enemies, which is to say all non-Muslims, but even their friends, if the latter were wavering in their faith.

Other than those minor details, yes, Islam is a religion of peace that, though it starts from a different point, converges with Christianity at some point. It manifestly hasn’t quite converged yet, but, given the Royal reassurance, it will someday, soon.

Meanwhile, we all brace ourselves for more terrorist acts, which are, as London’s Muslim mayor suggested rather flippantly, to be expected in a big city. Quite. In a big city with a large Muslim population, but the mayor left that detail out.

Now, the facts show that a) close to 100 per cent of terrorist acts in the West are committed by Muslims, b) the number of terrorist acts, anti-Semitic peccadillos and the amount of violent crime in general are directly proportional to the number of resident Muslims so c) what do you think of a) and b)?

If you’re like US presidents before Trump or British prime ministers after Thatcher or the EU brass or Mrs Merkel, you must think that the only logical answer to the problem is to import even more Muslims, ideally millions of them.

Since millions of Muslims are guaranteed to include tens of thousands of potential mass murderers, that conclusion seems rather counterintuitive. But our leaders function according to a higher logic beyond our ken. Treat like with like, they preach, like having a hair of the dog the morning after the night before.

Except that this particular pick-me-up is bound to induce reflux, nausea and massive internal bleeding. Alas, one has to question the wisdom of our problem solvers at the helm.

To paraphrase Henry II, will anyone rid us of that troublesome Muslim beastliness? No one will, although some fascisoid groups may try, more in word than in deed.

In a recent survey, German Jews were asked which group they’d prefer as the country’s rulers, their home-grown neo-Nazis or the Muslims. After much soul searching they settled on the neo-Nazis. Given that Nazis and Jews have a bit of previous, the choice tells us more than all the claims about the peaceful nature of Islam.

Please join me in the prayer that we won’t have to make a similar choice. If we do, may I suggest a coin toss?