Blog

The cull of oldies in Holland continues. But the pace of progress is much too slow for that pioneer of modernity.

But not to worry. Reaching Holland’s legislature soon will be a “Completed Life Bill”, legalising killing healthy people who’ve lost some of their erstwhile joie de vivre.

As a lifelong champion of progress, and hence opponent of any kind of discrimination, I agree wholeheartedly. Why should anyone wait, as the current law demands, until he develops a terminal illness or dementia to claim sovereignty over his life?

The bill proposes that anyone over 75 will be able to make the request in the title above. Dutch doctors will doubtless oblige. Overworked as they are, they’ll welcome this reduction in their workload. And being civic-minded, they’ll be happy to reduce pressure on public services and finances.

If the new bill reaches parliament, it’s guaranteed to pass, enjoying as it does a cross-party support spearheaded by Prime Minister Mark Rutte. Still, for my taste the bill doesn’t go far enough. It’s still residually discriminatory.

What’s this reverse agism, favouring old fogies over younger persons who are simply fed up with life? Where’s the progress in that?

Fortunately I’m not the only one who feels that way. Supporters of the new bill don’t bother to deny that it’s but a stepping stone on the path to euthanasia on demand for anybody, regardless of age or health.

A 57-year-old man, appearing on a chat show in March, pointed out how discriminatory even the proposed law is: “I don’t feel like waiting 18 years. I want it now.” What, right in the studio?

Alexander Pechhold, the leader of the party proposing the bill, applauded. He then explained the philosophy behind the initiative: “In our civilisation dying is an individual consideration. You didn’t ask to be brought into the world.”

Who can possibly find fault with this thought? Nobody. Well, except perhaps a few incorrigible fossils who cling to the discredited belief that man descends from God rather than from King Kong via Darwin.

They might object that Mr Pechhold’s statement is self-refuting. That precisely because one didn’t ask to be brought into the world, one should be in no position to ask to be taken out of it. Those sticks in the mud may even invoke the obsolete notion of the sanctity of human life.

Though accusing the Dutch of playing materialistic games with life and death, it’s they who are really materialistic. They refuse to acknowledge the metaphysical anguish of a chap whose wife is bonking her psychoanalyst, or who can’t qualify for a mortgage to buy that flat in Keizersgracht.

Such a chap may well wish he were dead, and here’s the Dutch government with doctors in tow, responding on cue: “Your wish is our command. Here’s your syringe, mate.” Supply-demand at work, and isn’t that the essence of modernity?

The patient’s age or physical health shouldn’t even come into it. It’s his metaphysical agony that matters.

Even with the lamentable present constraints, Dutch doctors happily killed 6,091 people in 2016. Though still shockingly small, this number shows a steady increase year on year. That’s reassuring.

But it’s not reassuring enough. That’s why I think the Dutch should consider the initiative I’m hereby proposing: the euthanasia answer to Meals on Wheels.

Rather than waiting for desperate people to come to them, doctors should go out into the streets looking for euthanasia custom. To that end I propose a sort of ambulance service provisionally called The Josef Mengele Mobile Unit. The logo on the side of its vehicles could be based on the Hindu symbol favoured by the paymasters of the original Dr Mengele.

After dark the streets of Dutch cities are heaving with desperate people who feel like life is no longer worth living. The thought of euthanasia may not have crossed their minds yet, but then it should be up to the doctors to decide what’s best for the patients.

When spotting such a desperate individual in, say, Keizersgracht, burly male nurses can jump out of the Mengele Unit van and drag the patient inside. There are only two hard and fast rules for this medical procedure: hard and fast. If done properly, it’s guaranteed to overcome the patient’s resistance.

Inside the van he’ll be greeted by a doctor armed with a cyanide-loaded syringe. A quick jab, and the patient will be for ever cured of his earthly pain. His last thought will be gratitude to the people who took him out of this vale of tears, and to the government that had enabled them to do so.

This could be augmented by a parallel initiative, making euthanasia not just legal but compulsory for anyone reaching the age of 75. In due course, this cut-off point may be lowered in parallel with the voting age, but for the time being it’ll do.

Just think how much human misery will thereby be alleviated. And alleviating human misery is all that progress, of which I’m a lifelong champion, is about.

Having already founded the Charles Martel Society for Multiculturalism, I’m now incorporating the Joseph Mengele Society for Euthanasia. I hope I can count on my Dutch friends as members.

Dystopic, moi?

 

 

 

There are 382 of them. That’s the number of people killed in Britain between 2012 and 2016 by criminals on probation.

Those people could still be alive if the death penalty were still an option. However it hasn’t been since its abolition in 1965. By sheer coincidence of course, the murder rate has more than doubled since then.

In 1965, the British experienced an epiphany. What had been seen as a perfectly valid punishment for murder since time immemorial instantly became inhuman and unimaginable. Those who remembered Saul becoming Paul by falling off his horse on the road to Damascus may have had a sense of déjà vu.

Quoting statistics in the face of such a revelatory experience sounds crass. But still, out of interest, how many criminals had been executed in the preceding five years, between 1960 and 1964, to give the British their Damascene experience?

Twenty-one. One-eighteenth of those murdered in the past five years by those who should have been executed, but weren’t. Interesting arithmetic, wouldn’t you say?

The deterrent value of the death penalty is often doubted, but one thing is beyond dispute. It definitely deters the executed criminal.

He isn’t going to go out on probation and kill again, not in this life at any rate. This is no mean achievement, considering the numbers cited above.

Even arguments against broader deterrence strike me as counterintuitive. It’s psychologically implausible that a potential murderer would be deterred by a prison sentence with a generous tariff as effectively as by the prospect of a hangman’s noose.

However, deterrence isn’t the only argument for the death penalty, nor even the best one. There are many others, which is why the death penalty was never regarded as cruel and unusual punishment in the founding legal code of the West, the Scripture.

When society and community were more than just figures of speech, it was understood that murder sent shock waves throughout the community. The amplitude of those destructive waves could be attenuated only by a punishment commensurate with the crime. Without it, the agitated community would run the risk of never recovering its eirenic order.

Having said that, even a dyed-in-the-wool conservative may argue against the death penalty, citing, for example, the corrupting effect it has on the executioner, or else doubting the right of fallible men to pass irreversible judgement.

Such arguments are noble, but they aren’t modern arguments. For it’s not just the death penalty that today’s lot are uncomfortable with, but the very idea of punishment.

More and more, they betray their Rousseauan genealogy by insisting that people are all innately good and, if some behave badly, they must be victims of correctable social injustice. More and more, one detects a belief that justice is an antiquated notion, and law is only an aspect of the social services.

Last year I was exposed to that view on the BBC Sunday Morning Live show, when debating the issue of imprisonment with a ‘human rights development worker’, whatever that means. Propping up her corner was a gentleman who had once served time and had since developed an understandable interest in the penitentiary system.

It turned out that they and I differed on the very definition of prison. Rather than an instrument of justice, they saw it as an educational and therapeutic facility for the socioeconomically disadvantaged. It logically followed that we have too many people in prison: other institutions would serve the educational purposes better.

My contention was that protecting us from criminals is among the state’s few raisons d’être. Otherwise it’s not immediately clear whence the state would derive its legitimacy. Therefore the number of prisoners is a moot point. We should have as many as it takes for the state to protect us.

Prison’s principal role is to serve justice by punishing crimes. Rehabilitation, a notion dear to my opponents’ hearts, would be welcome, but it comes far down on the list of desiderata, if at all.

The ex-convict was aghast. Didn’t I know that most released prisoners reoffend within a few months? The human rights person nodded vigorously and looked at me in a way that suggested that in my case she could reassess her staunch opposition to the death penalty.

Logic never being a strong point on the political left, they obviously didn’t realise that everything they were saying supported my argument. After all, the commitment to mythical rehabilitation has been practised for at least two generations. Surely the growing recidivism rates prove it isn’t working? And if most released prisoners reoffend, shouldn’t they stay in prison longer?

Rehabilitation isn’t what prisons are for, and not everyone can be rehabilitated anyway. Evil is an integral part of human nature, and some people have so much of it that they are irredeemable this side of heaven.

Practising what Rousseau preached is a strong factor in making Britain crime-ridden, with the murder rate climbing. If we practised what Jesus Christ preached instead, we wouldn’t gasp at the very thought of the death penalty.

We’d know that executing a murderer doesn’t contradict Christ’s commandment to love him. “Love thy enemy” means asking God to save him from hell in the next life. Executing him saves us from him in this life. First things first.

 

 

 

That Muslim refugees contribute to European crime rates is no secret. Or rather it is. Or, more precisely, governments try to keep it secret.

However, as my favourite doctor once wrote, “For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest…” To vindicate Luke, the Dutch broadsheet De Telegraaf has finally managed to wrench from the police some data on refugee crime.

Holland, of course, is in the forefront of liberal progressivism, which is the modern for illiberal obscurantism. That’s why, whenever a Muslim commits a crime, he tends to be identified not by race, religion or name, but by his initial and place of residence. Thus a woman was raped not by, say, a Moroccan refugee Selim, but by an S. from Amsterdam.

Now the Dutch may be progressive but they aren’t dumb. Whenever a criminal is identified in such a cryptic fashion, they realise this isn’t an alias for a Jan De Jong and smile knowingly.

However, the police, government and the press guard their non-secret with the dedication of a tricephalous Cerberus. The non-secret is supposed to protect the social non-balance.

De Telegraaf bucked the trend by continuing to pester the National Police until a trickle of information seeped out. And what do you know, Muslim refugees do commit crimes out of proportion to their numbers.

The released information covered only refugees from ‘safe’ countries, meaning, say, not Iraq, Iran or Syria, but Morocco, Tunisia or Albania. Yet even those safe refugees are proving rather unsafe.

De Telegraaf reports that 663 migrants were arrested in the first nine months of 2016 for theft. Another 302 were arrested for “crimes against personal integrity”. This euphemism denotes things like murder and rape – not, as you might think, attempts to compromise uprightness and veracity.

Other countries can’t help drip-feeding similar data either. Thus we learn that refugees commit 250,000 crimes a year in Germany. In Oslo, immigrants, mainly Muslims, are involved in two out of three rapes. In Copenhagen, this figure is three out of four. In Sweden, 85 per cent. And Malmö, a city of 350,000 souls of whom 40 per cent are Muslims, boasts more murders than the rest of Scandinavia combined.

Even our own dear BBC has had to cough up some interesting stuff. Their harrowing series Three Girls shows how Pakistani gangs in Rochdale and other heavily Muslim areas rape white girls and turn them into prostitutes, with the authorities turning a blind eye for the sake of maintaining friendly multi-culti relations.

We could all cite numerous examples of what’s going on. Yet the really interesting question starts not with ‘what’ but with ‘why’.

Many pundits have put forth reasonable analyses, some even at book length. However, most of the answers provided fail to delve into the issue at sufficient depth.

I suggest we backtrack to the founding slogan of democratic modernity, liberté, égalité, fraternité, proudly adorning every public building in France. This triad is perhaps the most mendacious oxymoron ever concocted.

For the central element is at odds with the other two. Equality, other than before God in whom the originators of the phrase didn’t believe, isn’t a natural state of man. That’s why it can only be enforced by unnatural, coercive means.

This precludes either fraternité or especially liberté, leaving people to choose between liberty and equality. The choice has been made, and equality has become the impelling animus of modernity – not just democratic but also totalitarian.

Both demand uniformity über alles, and in this sense all modern regimes overlap. The Nazis seek uniformity of race; the communists, that of class; the democrats go further than either by seeking a convergence of all individuals at their arithmetic average.

The driving impulse of democratic modernity is philistine materialism, and a philistine invariably believes that everybody is, or at least is desperate to be, just like him. Equality means sameness to him – not as an already existing condition, but as a goal towards which to strive.

As a result, modern democracy meddles with the natural order of humanity as much as totalitarianism does, and more successfully. The imperative for everyone to overlap on the arithmetic average drives our politics, commerce, laws, social and racial relations.

This is accompanied by sustained brainwashing that puts to shame all those crude communist and Nazi propagandists. The aim is to dumb people down enough for them to believe in the sterling virtue and sagacity of Average Man.

In practice this means a more secure perpetuation of the elite’s power than anything ever encountered before the advent of modernity. Democratic masses are successfully conditioned to believe that they govern themselves by going to the polling stations every few years – this though individual votes are so atomised as to be meaningless. What matters isn’t an individual but a herd, a faceless bloc of millions.

The same goes for our mass-production industry aiming at averaging out quality to suit Average Man. The obsolete notion of craftsmanship has been ousted by the urge to “pile’em high, sell’em cheap”.

Those inhabiting the infra range below Average Man have to be pulled up, those residing in the ultra range above must be yanked down. Democratic modernity believes its corrupt notion of equality and tries to enforce it at all cost.

Empirical proof of this melancholy observation can be found anywhere one looks. Our comprehensive education and nationalised medicine, for example, both sacrifice excellence for equality to the loud cheers of our averaged-out masses, who aren’t just brainwashed but brain-scoured.

Therein lies the underlying reason for such egregious perversions of modernity as socialism, political correctness and multiculturalism. They all reflect the urge to pluck the nonexistent and indigestible pie of equality out of the sky, and then choke on it.

Therein also lies the explanation for the ongoing outrage of mass Muslim immigration. The democratic philistine is physically unable to acknowledge that it’s impossible to shake alien cultures and religions together to produce a palatable homogeneous cocktail.

Egalitarian ideology has penetrated the viscera of modernity, its DNA. No amount of evidence, such as that produced by De Telegraaf or the BBC, can change this newly acquired genetic makeup. The democratic philistine simply won’t accept that some nations and religions are incompatible with ours existentially, ontologically and irredeemably.

A cosmic catastrophe, with “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”, might change this mindset, but by then it’ll be too late.

A week ago the British Medical Association voted to treat abortion like any other medical procedure, say an appendectomy.

Effectively this removes even the modest restrictions imposed by the 1967 Abortion Act, those based on foetal abnormalities and risks to mother’s health.

The Act opened the door ajar and then modernity kicked it wide-open. Eight million abortions have been performed since, close to 200,000 last year alone.

Even such apocalyptic numbers are too low for the BMA. If its vote is transferred to Parliament, as it almost certainly will be, there will exist no limits to abortion for any reason or at any point, possibly up to the moment the water breaks.

I could present the obvious Christian argument against this monstrosity, but won’t. Let’s keep God out of it, shall we? Let’s discuss abortion in secular terms, but without violating the rules of logic and rhetoric established a few centuries before the Incarnation.

Fans of prenatal infanticide (FPI) always reduce the argument to its extreme, say terminating a pregnancy resulting from rape, incestuous or otherwise, or one where the doctor has to choose between saving the mother or the baby.

Now, of the 190,000-odd abortions performed last year, only about two per cent involved strictly medical reasons. I don’t know how many resulted from rape, incestuous or otherwise, but I’m guessing that this subset is small enough to be safely discounted.

Being in a secular mood today, I’m prepared to let FPIs have that one: if the impregnating chap is a dad, granddad and rapist all at the same time, let’s get rid of his spawn.

This still leaves us with close to 200,000 abortions performed each year mainly because the parents, or more usually the single mother, would rather not have their lifestyle cramped.

Now I’m the last man to want to cramp anyone’s lifestyle. However, the same argument may extend to a demented grandmother who stubbornly refuses to die, blowing her bequeathable wad on care. Why not press a pillow to her face until she stops kicking?

You got it in one: that would be murder. This practice is rather frowned upon in all societies, including those that don’t accept the validity of the Decalogue.

A BMA member would protest that this is a false analogy. A foetus isn’t a human being. It’s part of the woman’s body, like the appendix.

That’s where a logical problem starts. For the venerable BMA member is committing a rhetorical fallacy known formally as petitio principii and colloquially as begging the question.

Although this phrase is commonly misused to mean raising the question, it actually means using a conclusion yet to be proved as the premise. That’s like saying that, because Mrs May is a great statesman, she’s right to mollify the howling leftie mob.

For the premise that the foetus is no different from the appendix is wrong and will remain so until it has been proved. And if an FPI can’t prove it, killing a foetus becomes morally no different from knocking off the aforementioned grandmother.

Now, save in exceptional cases, the current law bans abortion past 24 weeks. Implicitly this suggests that at precisely 24 weeks a secular miracle occurs. What until then has been merely a part of someone else’s body instantly becomes a sovereign human being.

I for one marvel at our legislators’ ability to determine that exact moment with such pinpoint accuracy. What about 24 weeks minus one day? No? Still an appendix? One would like to see the scientific data on the basis of which this precise assessment is made.

Actually, no such data exist. The 24-week cutoff point (as it were) is purely arbitrary, a sop to those fossils who persist in insisting on the sanctity of human life. You know, for old times’ sake.

If the BMA were to defend this 24-week nonsense, they’d leave themselves open to the argument above. How about 24 minus one day? Two? Three?

If they retain a modicum of integrity, they’ll have to admit that there’s no physiological difference between a foetus at 24 weeks and one at merely 23 weeks and six days.

If they refuse to admit that, they’ll have to postulate that neither is there a valid difference between 24 weeks and 36. If we accept that false premise, then the BMA’s vote is logically sound.

According to extensive medical data, 20 to 35 per cent of babies born at 23 weeks of gestation survive. Now if a third of all babies born as prematurely as that are viable, then surely at least a third of all abortions at that time constitute infanticide? Since we don’t know which third, isn’t that a sufficient reason to ban them all?

About 95 per cent of babies born at seven months rather than nine live happily thereafter. Should they too be aborted before they crawl out of the womb?

These arguments point at a logical conclusion. The only indisputable moment at which human life begins is that of conception. Since any other moment is open to doubt, I for one fail to see any logical difference between aborting a baby three months before birth and three months after.

Hence the only logical argument in favour of abortion would be amoral: there’s nothing sacred about human life. It only has a purely utilitarian value – or not. If the mother decides the utilitarian value is nonexistent, doctors are justified in aborting the foetus at any time.

Do you like this argument? The BMA does.

To both Plato and Aristotle democracy meant mob rule. If you doubt that they’ve been amply vindicated, just look at Britain now.

Actually, not just Britain and not just now. Look at any Western country and try to find one in which democracy hasn’t degenerated into mobocracy.

Closer to our time, the founders of the United States, supposedly the cradle of modern democracy, detested the very concept almost to a man.

Even the most democratically minded among them, Thomas Jefferson, believed in the rule of what he called ‘natural aristocracy’: “May we not even say that that form of government is the best which provides most efficiently for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government?”

Last time I looked, I discerned no such ‘natural aristoi’ anywhere in any ‘democratic’ government, including American or our own. Over the last 200 years Americans have let Jefferson down, wouldn’t you say? And not only him.

Alexander Hamilton and James Madison both detested majority rule and attacked it passionately every chance they got. And in 1806 Adams wrote, “I once thought our Constitution was a quasi or mixed government, but they had made it… a democracy.”

Hence when the neocons and other cardsharps at our post-truth, post-reason table invoke those sainted names as a justification for their democracy worship, they commit an act of historical, intellectual and moral larceny.

Precious few people are able or willing to call them to task, to point out the fundamental difference between democracy and republicanism. The former is majority rule, with 50 per cent plus one able to impose their dictatorial will on the remaining 50 per cent minus one. In the latter, people elect the best person among them to govern according to their interests but not necessarily their wishes.

Edmund Burke went to great lengths explaining that MPs are their constituents’ representatives, not delegates. Once elected, they govern according to their own conscience and understanding of the peoples’ interests.

Today’s lot solve the problem of representatives vs. delegates by being neither. They seek power for its own sake, not to advance public good. And that’s where the prescience of those wise Anglophone thinkers failed them.

They didn’t realise that any constitution, written or unwritten, is fluid. They all develop, and one form of government can easily morph into another – possibly something better, more usually something worse.

A successful republic can only be sustained over centuries given an uninterrupted supply of brilliant, selfless, courageous statesmen. That supply has been dwindling – steadily and predictably. In proclaiming new virtues those thinkers didn’t account for original sin. Hence they didn’t realise that a republic is bound to degenerate into a democracy, and the latter into mob rule.

Modern, which is to say post-1688, Britain was constituted as a republican monarchy, with a heavy accent on the modifier. However, our government has become neither republican nor monarchical. It’s a toxic cocktail of spivocracy and mobocracy.

Witness the weathervane job being performed by the panic-stricken Tory government. Only those who don’t understand political taxonomy can describe it as either democratic or republican (forget about monarchical – that adjective has fallen into disuse since 1688).

If HMG were democratic, it would clearly communicate its political credo, how it’s to be implemented and what the expected effect will be.

Since the ruling party calls itself Conservative, one would expect such a credo to include conservative policies: an accent on individual responsibility rather than collective security, fiscal frugality, commitment to defending the people against internal and external threats, low taxation and public spending, social justice in the sense of everyone getting his just deserts, respect for hierarchies, upholding traditional morality.

A democratic government would then say to the people: “This is what we believe will serve your interests much better than the opposite policies advocated by the other party. If you agree, support us. If you disagree, support them. The choice is yours.”

A republican government would deliver a different message: “You’ve elected us to act in your best interests, as we understand them. You’ve had your say, and you won’t have another until the next general election. By all means, let us know, in a civilised and orderly fashion, what you think, and we’ll give your concerns proper consideration. But we shan’t be obligated to do what you want – that’s not what you elected us for.”

It doesn’t take an eagle eye to see that Mrs May’s government adheres to neither model. In the run-up to the election it didn’t give the electorate a choice between conservatism and socialism. The choice was between Labour Lite and Labour Full-strength.

Labour Lite won a pathetically narrow victory, but Labour Full-strength wouldn’t take it lying down. Led by a revolting hybrid of Trotsky and Hitler, it has set to vindicate my belief that democracy’s rich potential for degenerating into mobocracy has been realised.

Pre-pubescent cretins have come out screaming seditious, mendacious, communist slogans to the effect that they want Labour Full-strength in power, election or no election. They demand an end to austerity, meaning that HMG should spend more than the 10 per cent over its income that it currently spends.

But what their specific demands are doesn’t matter. They are anomic, which is to say destructive. If putting the revolting hybrid of Trotsky and Hitler into power demanded a call for the slaughter of every first-born child, that’s what they’d be screaming.

And the government’s response to mob action? Effectively it’s saying: “Please keep us in power, and we’ll do what you say. You don’t need to oust us to get Labour Full-strength. We can be it – or anything else you desire.”

No tuition fees? Done. No cap on public sector pay? Splendid. No grammar schools? But of course. More social spending? Sorted. More spending on the NHS? Agreed. Abortion up until delivery? Wonderful idea.

Lowering the voting age to 16? You only need to ask. Didn’t Comrade Trotsky explain that “the youth is the barometer of the whole nation”? Of course he did. So the more youthful our electorate, the better. Just look how well those young Red Guards performed in China and Cambodia. If that’s what you want, you only need to ask.

A government that can stay in power only by pandering to the mob is neither a republic nor a democracy nor, God forbid, a monarchy. It’s a mobocracy. It’s the government we have – the only government we’ll ever have until we have none or, more likely, an outright despotism.

Plato and Aristotle warned us. We didn’t listen.

 

 

It’s one of life’s little mysteries that Ollie Kamm has got to be regarded as an authority on the English language. That he regards himself as such is no mystery at all: ignorant effrontery is almost an ironclad job requirement for today’s hacks.

Ollie’s usual output preaches a relativistic vox populi approach to language: if people say it, it must be right. Today’s offering has some of that: “he don’t know nothing is ungrammatical in standard English, but grammatical in some other dialects”.

What he means is that this ungrammatical solecism is used in some other dialects, or rather in the most widespread one: illiterate English. That doesn’t make it grammatical, which concept presupposes adherence to a certain universal standard. But then our language guru is deaf to such subtleties.

The main thrust of his piece today is a vituperative attack on Geoffrey Wheatcroft, “a political commentator with absolutely no qualifications in language”.

It’s true that Mr Wheatcroft read history rather than English at Oxford. However, one could argue that an author of countless articles and half a dozen books written over the better part of 40 years has at least some qualifications. Then again, when Ollie gets on his high horse, there’s no dismounting him.

What made Ollie saddle his trusted steed this time is Mr Wheatcroft’s innocent remark that English is “ideally suited to be the global lingua franca” partly because of its “rudimentary grammar”.

When Ollie’s in the saddle, no remark is innocent. If English grammar were rudimentary, Ollie shrieks, “the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language” wouldn’t comprise “1,800 closely typed pages”.

Actually, the definite article before Cambridge Grammar should be capitalised, but let’s not be too harsh on our self-styled pedant. What’s amusing here is that his argument is a non sequitur, reminding one of a Chekhov character arguing that, “if Pushkin hadn’t been a great psychologist, he wouldn’t have merited a statue in Moscow.”

English grammar is nuanced and subtle, sufficiently so to justify writing many more than 1,800 pages of an academic study. However, it’s indeed rudimentary and relatively easy to learn for everyday use, which is one of the reasons English is “ideally suited to be the global lingua franca”.

Ollie is ignorant in such matters, but he suspects his readers are even more ignorant than he is. That explains his next argument: “A clause like Geoffrey Wheatcroft is an idiot demonstrates the importance of fixed word order in English.”

First, the cited group of words isn’t a clause but a stand-alone sentence. Second, because it’s a citation, however hypothetical, it should be in quotation marks. And third, people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw the word ‘idiot’ about so gratuitously.

Words have specific meanings, Ollie, if you’ll forgive a truism. Hence rudimentary grammar means just that – it doesn’t mean no grammar at all. English does have some rules, of which a fixed word order is one. Sometimes it’s ignored for stylistic purposes, which is called inversion.

By way of illustrating this stylistic device, it’s used in the clause of the sentence “Ignorant though Ollie is, he pontificates on the fine points of English with an air of ill-deserved authority”.

That Ollie is neither excessively bright nor averse to truisms follows from his next statement: “It’s absurd to say that English has less grammar than an inflected language like Latin. Rather, different languages make similar grammatical distinctions using different sorts of grammatical devices.”

By contrast to synthetic languages like Latin, Russian, Hungarian and so forth, English is analytic, meaning it largely conveys grammatical relationships not morphologically but lexically and stylistically.

Rather than inflecting words with morphemes, English achieves the same purpose by using lexical units, such as prepositions, particles, modifiers, possessives etc. It also heavily relies on stylistic devices, such as word order, context and idioms.

The example Ollie proffers with the smugness of someone who has just blazed a new trail illustrates just that: “attributive adjectives of size precede those of colour. In English… the girl has long blond hair, not blond long hair…”

Well done, Ollie, even though in the country where English originated a girl’s hair tends to be blonde, not blond. But in either case this is an example of achieving a grammatical objective by stylistic means.

English eschews whole grammatical categories that make synthetic languages so difficult to learn, such as gender, conjugation and case. I don’t know how many foreign languages Ollie knows (not many, would be my guess). But my wife, who’s fluent in two Romance languages and competent in two more has trouble with Russian because learning its grammar requires more time than she’s willing to spend.

Russian has six cases, and words in a sentence must agree not only in case, but also in gender and number, which indeed makes learning Russian grammar a time-consuming proposition. But that’s nothing compared to synthetic Finno-Ugric languages, such as Hungarian that boasts 18 cases.

The upshot of it is that Mr Wheatcroft is right, and Ollie is wrong, yet again. English grammar is indeed rudimentary, making it easy for a foreigner to learn well enough to communicate basic thoughts even if he gets something wrong.

By contrast, synthetic languages, such as Russian or Hungarian, are devilishly hard to learn because, until a learner comes to grips with the interrelationships among all those cases, genders and numbers, he won’t be able to communicate at all, understandably at any rate.

However, once he has mastered the grammar rules, he’ll be able to speak the synthetic language reasonably well. Not so with English: learning the grammar rules is but a start.

Because English grammar relies so heavily on stylistic and idiomatic nuances, it may be easy to learn adequately but extremely hard to learn really well. That’s why even university-educated Englishmen (to say nothing of Americans) routinely utter ungrammatical sentences, which is extremely rare for a similarly educated Russian.

Ollie concludes with a sentence impossible to take issue with: “In grammar… it seems that unqualified commentators can always get away with assertions that haven’t been checked and make no sense.” Quite. He’s one such unqualified commentator.

Facts may speak for themselves or through an interpreter. However, these days no one listens either way – ours is an age of ideology, not truth.

Having discarded the only truth that can be seen as absolute, people have settled for a raft of relativistic simulacra. Yet the passion with which they used to worship the truth has morphed into the fervour with which they cling to their ideological falsehoods.

The nature of an ideology doesn’t matter: they’re all false by definition. None of them can stand up even to cursory examination, never mind scrutiny. Regarded in the cold light of intellectual rigour, they all show faults and fissures.

At best, ideologists’ thinking is a curate’s egg. They may sound coherent on some subjects, yet talk gibberish on others. That’s how one knows they proceed from an ideology, not a sound moral and philosophical system.

Therefore I’m often scathing about the so-called Western conservatives who admire Putin’s Russia. This ipso facto means that their conservatism is but an ill-considered gonadal ideology, not the upshot of a lifelong contemplation of God, man and the world the former created and the latter inhabits.

An ideology is immune to facts. Facts might have been stubborn things to John Adams, but Stalin, propagator of the most evil ideology the devil has ever disgorged, put him right: “If facts are stubborn things,” he said, “then so much the worse for facts”.

For all that, when writing about Putin, Stalin’s able disciple, I continue to cite facts – this in the full knowledge that the armour of ideology is impervious to chinks.

But for those who aren’t fully paid-up members of the Putin fan club, the small fact I’m about to cite may trigger an inductive process at the end of which truth will emerge.

The Levada Centre, Russia’s sole half-credible polling organisation, has conducted an extensive survey asking respondents to identify the 20 most outstanding figures in world history, as distinct from just Russian history.

Yet just three outlanders made it to the list, and then only close to the bottom: Napoleon (fourteenth place), Einstein (sixteenth) and Newton (nineteenth). That by itself is telling: according to the Russians, their country has practically monopolised human greatness, with no close seconds.

This is rather parochial, not to say deeply provincial. But then Russia is provincial, hugging the outskirts of both European and Asian civilisations, not really belonging to either and, according to her first philosopher Pyotr Chaadayev (d. 1856), combining the worst traits of both.

Hence such ethnocentricity is to be expected, as it would be expected from the US, another land stuck at the margins of Western culture. However, should Americans be asked to compile a similar list, it may include mostly Americans but, at a guess, no evil Americans. George Washington would make it, but the Boston Strangler wouldn’t.

The Russians are different. Their top five choices include four mass murderers. First place, Stalin, chosen by 38 per cent. Tied for second and third, Putin and Pushkin, 34 per cent each. Fourth, Lenin, 32 per cent. Fifth, Peter I, 29 per cent.

Pushkin found himself in this company for the same reason Shakespeare would make the English list: he has been canonised as Russia’s greatest poet and co-creator of her literary language. Hence he dominates school curricula and is the first, sometimes the only, name coming to mind when a Russian is asked to name a great cultural figure.

Peter was another mass murderer who used traditional Russian methods to “chop a window into Europe”, succeeding mostly in chopping off a pile of heads, many, including his own son’s, with his own axe. Still, it’s possible to argue about Peter’s merits and demerits.

No such arguments are, or should be, possible about the other three frontrunners. Lenin and Stalin created the most satanic regime in history and waged war not just on the West but above all on their own people, murdering 60 million and enslaving the rest.

Where inductive reasoning would come in handy is in imagining the volume of nauseatingly cloying, non-stop totalitarian propaganda required to corrupt people’s minds so deeply that they come up with a list like this.

Dr Goebbels, the acknowledged master of the genre, is a rank amateur compared to Putin’s Goebbelses, all those Kisilevs, Soloviovs and Surkovs. Any meaningful opposition to their effluvia destroyed or at least marginalised, they run unopposed in their concerted effort to warp Russian minds.

Just like Soviet Goebbelses in the 1930s, who screamed themselves hoarse that “Stalin is today’s Lenin”, Putin’s Goebbelses communicate loud and clear that Putin is today’s Stalin.

Stalin? Murderer of millions? Enslaver of the whole population? Creator of deadly artificial famines? Builder of a vast system of concentration camps, who effectively turned the whole country and half the world into one giant concentration camp?

No, the Stalin reincarnated in Putin isn’t as he was but as he’s portrayed in Russian history books: effective, if at times stern, manager; vanquisher of Hitler; loving, if at times wrathful, demiurge; father of his people.

The Russian Goebbelses are right: Putin is indeed today’s Stalin. True, he hasn’t yet achieved the same level of violent repression, although that may yet come.

But typologically he’s a similar figure: an evil tyrant who viscerally hates the West and uses rabble-rousing to shove down the people’s throats a peculiar combination of Russian chauvinism, fascism, militarisation and kleptocracy – all wrapped up in a tissue of lies about democracy, free enterprise and the unmatched spirituality of Holy Russia.

Wholly Russia indeed, ever susceptible to Putin types, never having really known anything much better. It’s baffling, though, how some Westerners swallow the same canards, cheering the vertically challenged KGB Lt. Col., not realising that this nonentity isn’t a leader of his country but its reflection, puppet and puppet master rolled into one.

Apparently, the Tories failed to get an overall majority because they’re committed to austerity and the electorate wants to end it.

Surveys bear this out: 48 per cent say the government should raise taxes and spend more, while 44 per cent are happy for things to stay as they are. That leaves a meagre eight per cent for the undecided and those who’d like to see taxes and spending cut.

Here I have to disagree with those who claim that polls are worthless. This one provides two invaluable insights into the state of Britain, one primary, the other secondary.

The primary insight is that 92 per cent of the electorate are economically illiterate morons unfit to vote. The secondary one is that universal suffrage no longer works in a country where 92 per cent of the electorate are economically illiterate morons unfit to vote.

Allow me to elaborate in simple words even those 92 per cent have a sporting chance of understanding: It’s impossible to end austerity for the simple reason that IT NEVER BEGAN.

Austerity means spending less than you earn. This earth-shattering economic discovery was tersely expressed by Dickens’s Mr Micawber: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen, nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”

Now let’s start small and then extrapolate to a larger scale. What are the annual spending options of someone who nets £30,000 a year?

Spending less than £30,000 would spell austerity. And the further he goes below that sum, the more austere he gets.

Spending £40,000 a year would be madness. He’d have to borrow £10,000 every year to cover the difference. Add to this compounded interest, and before long bailiffs will come banging on his door.

But what about spending £33,000? Ten per cent more than he earns? Would that get him into the area of austerity? Of course not. It would still be madness, if slightly less severe than in the previous hypothetical case.

Now according to Adam Smith this homespun economics applies to the state: “What is prudence in the conduct of every private family, can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.”

So how austere is our great kingdom? The answer is: exactly as ‘austere’ as my last hypothetical man who spends 10 per cent more than he earns. Our government does just that and, like him, it has to borrow the difference.

True, the government won’t receive a visit from a bailiff, but that doesn’t mean it can’t go bankrupt. It will, when it can no longer service the national debt. Ours currently stands at close to two trillion pounds, and it’s rushing towards that new threshold of misery at a rate of £5,170 per second.

Our hypothetical spendthrift would borrow from the bank or credit card companies, and he’d have to pay interest. A government borrows from the money markets, which too charge for that privilege. At the moment it takes HMG 10 per cent of its tax revenues to service its debt.

So where does austerity come in? If you have to ask that question, you aren’t in the 92 per cent. Moreover, you obtusely insist on using words in their real meaning, rather than the one assigned to them in the pernicious jargon of modern politics.

The way all political parties use the word, it doesn’t mean spending less than the government earns. It means continuing to spend more than the government earns, but at a slightly lower rate than before.

We’re now slightly less economically insane than under previous administrations, and the moronic 92 per cent want us to stay at least as insane as we are now, or preferably become more so.

As a result of tax-and-spend insanity, Britain is teetering on the edge of economic calamity, for all the bogus forecasts the government releases, with the words ‘smoke and mirrors’ springing to mind. We’re staying afloat, just, only because our current policies are marginally less insane than before.

A drastic increase in taxation and public spending can easily kick us into an abyss compared to which the 2008 crisis will seem like halcyon days. Our moronic 92 per cent don’t realise that. They think they’ll enjoy the spending while someone else will suffer the taxation.

In fact, extortionate taxes will ruin everybody: those in the high marginal rates directly; others indirectly – by destroying the economy.

In my book The Crisis Behind Our Crisis I describe the destructive mechanisms in quite some detail. Suffice it to say here that the ruinous effect of profligate tax-and-spend policies has been empirically proved in every country they were tried, including Britain.

The pattern recurred over and over again: a Tory government would leave the economy in decent shape by trying to reign in the insanity. Then a Labour government would come in and wreak havoc in a few months or at most years.

Now the situation is much worse. If you look at their economic policies, the Tories are effectively Labour, and Corbyn’s Labour are effectively communist. That means the Tories are running the economy into the ground, while Labour are digging the grave in which they’ll bury it.

Already under Brown the Exchequer went further than even leftwing orthodoxy demanded. Having inherited a reasonably healthy economy from the Tories, they remained almost sane for the first three years.

An economic boom ensued (how real is a different story), but then the Labour economy gurus Brown, Balls and Miliband confounded even the Keynesian rule that a government needs to run a surplus at boom time. Instead those subversive chaps started borrowing at three per cent of GDP, the maximum allowed under EU rules.

That had nothing to do with economics – modern politics only pretends to be about that. Modern politics is solely about politics, which is to say staying in power by any means, no matter how criminally destructive.

Given an electorate utterly corrupted by the culture of something for nothing (otherwise known as the welfare state), that means issuing any promises politicians can’t keep, nor even intend to.

The most calamitous effect of such politics isn’t economic, bad as it is. It’s moral and intellectual: that’s how 92 per cent of the electorate have got to be illiterate morons.

All it took was for a sinister figure like Corbyn to appear on the scene for them to rise in revolt against what’s mendaciously called austerity. They want the state to extort even more money from those who earned it and transfer it to those who didn’t.

Bizarrely the desired recipients of government largesse don’t even include pensioners, those who worked for decades hoping to provide for their old age. They can starve for all the 92 per cent care. The extra money must instead be pumped into the pockets of parasites who haven’t done a day’s work in their lives.

Oh yes, we must also spend more on the NHS, education and just about everything else, you name it. None of this has anything to do with reality; none of it is sane. It’s wicked politicians exploiting the mass idiocy they themselves have fostered for their own nefarious ends.

Mr Micawber, where are you when we need you?

Manny Macron tried to prepare properly for his meeting with Ukrainian president Poroshenko. I suppose he must have taken seriously Brigitte’s threat to send him to bed without supper if he didn’t.

But then Manny made the mistake of taking extracurricular history lessons from Poroshenko as he went along. That got the poor lad terribly confused.

Both the preparation and confusion were reflected in his concluding statement. Speaking of Putin’s theft of Crimea, Manny said he understood that Russia is the aggressor in that conflict. That rated an A.

As Brigitte was smiling with maternal pride in the background, Manny rephrased the same thought by saying that Ukraine isn’t an aggressor. France doesn’t recognise the illegal Crimea annexation and knows who started this war between the Ukraine and Russia.

Since he was saying the same thing over and over again, a maximum of a B was merited. However, Brigitte had taught Manny that repetition is the mother of learning.

But then she winced and made a mental note to mark Manny’s performance down. She realised that, against her explicit instructions, Manny had picked up some history from Poroshenko on the hop. That’s where things went awry.

“I must tell you,” Manny said to Poroshenko, “that our two countries have relations of very long standing, going deep into history. You’ve devoted some time today to paying tribute to Anne of Kiev. You’ve shown how important this very old eleventh-century history is, how deeply rooted our ancient relations are.”

In other words, Poroshenko taught Manny that Princess Anne of Kiev was a Ukrainian lass who married the French king Henri I and thereby cemented the budding friendship between the Ukraine and France.

Here Manny showed a bit of confusion and much inconsistency. For, meeting Vlad Putin a few days earlier, he had accepted with alacrity the latter’s assurance that friendship between France and Russia also goes back to that versatile (polyvalente) Kievan girl.

Manny must decide whether Anne was Ukrainian or Russian to avoid future confusion. Perhaps a few more history lessons wouldn’t go amiss. Above all, he should learn neither to play politics with history himself nor to let others get away with doing so.

It has to be said that the French themselves aren’t above a little sleight of hand when it comes to relating events of yore. Thus France won every battle she ever fought. Some victories were military but, when that couldn’t be claimed, they were moral. One way or the other, there were no defeats.

If the victory was merely moral, the absence of a military triumph has to be ascribed to treason. Thus the French never say “We were beaten”. They say “We were betrayed” (Nous sommes trahis).

In that spirit, the French won resounding moral victories against the English in such landmark battles as Crécy, Agincourt and Waterloo.

In the first two, merely half a century apart, perfide Albion employed treacherous, unsporting tactics of putting archers armed with longbows on high ground. As aristocratic, heavily armoured French cavalry trundled uphill, getting stuck in the mud, those perfidious English yeomen picked them off one by one, cutting down what French history books describe as the “fine flower of French nobility” (la fine fleur de la noblesse française).

And at Waterloo the French, led by that genius sans pareil Napoleon, won a resounding military victory over the English, only to have to settle for the moral kind when the Prussians arrived. A victory by any other name, in other words.

However, even though the French may play fast and loose with history, they don’t use such academic shenanigans to score political points. No doubt Manny thinks that, likewise, there’s no harm in the Russians and Ukrainians both claiming Anne for their own. So it’s back to school for him – and perhaps Brigitte ought to give him six of the best (actually, he might like that).

As I’ve written in the past, it’s easy to settle the argument about whether Anne was Ukrainian or Russian. She was neither.

Anne was a Scandinavian princess of the Rurik dynasty that founded and ruled Kievan Rus. The historical roots of both the Ukraine and Russia can be traced back to that principality, but to refer to it as either Ukrainian or Russian is like referring to Saxony as English.

In due course Kievan Rus was wiped out and the centre of eastern Slavic lands shifted to a newly founded Moscow. In 1240 Muscovy was conquered by the Golden Horde, while the territory west of it fell under the sway of Lithuania and eventually the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Following the Cossack Rebellion (1648–1657) led by Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky, that territory was incorporated into the Russian Empire. In the process, Khmelnytsky’s men murdered 300,000 Jews, establishing a record of anti-Semitic atrocities that stood until Hitler.

The word ‘Ukraine’, meaning ‘outskirts’ in Slavic languages, was unknown until the seventeenth century, while the word ‘Russia’ in the geopolitical sense is only about a century older. Elizabethan maps identify the place as either Muscovy or even Tartary, and what is now the Ukraine was in English known as Ruthenia until 1804.

I hope next time Manny has to follow either Poroshenko or Putin on their forays into history, he’ll be able to catch them out in bastardising history for political purposes.

At least Poroshenko doesn’t use this ploy for aggressive purposes. Putin does, as he did when justifying the theft of Crimea by claiming it was originally Russian. That’s like saying that Bolivia was originally Spanish.

Crimea was traditionally the frontier between the civilised classical world and the savage steppe. As such, it was colonised by the Greeks, the Persians, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Goths, the Genoese and the Ottoman Empire.

It was from the latter that Russia claimed Crimea roughly at the same time as Britain conquered India. As a result of Khrushchev’s gerrymandering, Crimea was transferred to the Ukraine in 1954, again but a few years after India gained her independence.

Crimea is thus Russian in the same sense in which India is British, and Putin was no more justified in his geopolitical larceny than Britain would be in trying to occupy, say, Bengal. Hence what in the hands of the French is an innocent, if slightly silly, game of historical chicanery, in the hands of the Russians becomes an offensive weapon claiming human lives.

Bad boy, Manny. But not to worry, you’re still young enough to learn. Brigitte will see to that.

 

The common misapprehension is that madmen show signs of their condition at all times. Clinical practice and Peter Hitchens prove this isn’t so.

Most deluded people sound normal when discussing subjects that don’t trigger their delusion. Usually only one topic sets them off, although, Hitchens can evidently afford two.

He tends to make sense on most other subjects. But when a sore subject is mentioned, he’s away with the fairies. Since he controls the content of his Sunday column, one of those topics comes up regularly, but yesterday Mr Hitchens regaled us with both.

With the obtuseness of a certifiable maniac, he prefaces the first one with a veiled suggestion that it’s not he who’s mad but just about everyone else: “Plenty of people hate me for daring to point it out. Tough. I’ll say it once again…”

Well, I for one don’t hate Mr Hitchens. I’m genuinely concerned about his mental health, and also about the sanity of the publications that allow him to indulge his delusions.

The one reason plenty of people are supposed to hate him for concerns a startling discovery for which he takes credit without false modesty. Apparently psychotic people may commit violent acts, and psychotropic drugs may make people psychotic.

If that’s where Mr Hitchens left it, everyone would agree and some would say he’s stating the bleeding obvious. But he doesn’t leave it at that. Scanning the past 1,400 years and especially the last few, Mr Hitchens tends to suggest that Islamic violence has nothing to do with Islam and everything to do with cannabis.

This tends to provoke comments about his sanity, or shortage thereof. I myself have written about this worrying situation a few times and, to obviate a need to repeat myself, you can easily look up those pieces (for example, 26 March, 2017).

Hitchens’s column yesterday is mostly a reaction to the reaction. He indignantly denies any charges of trying to vindicate Muslim terrorism. He has never done it and would never do it.

However, and that’s where the mania kicks in, he goes on to demonstrate that some murders, namely the one of Jo Cox, were indeed perpetrated by deranged chaps with a history of drug abuse.

By itself this illustration is a meaningless truism. It’s like saying that earthquakes sometimes happen. However, the statement becomes crazy if it’s augmented by a hint that earthquakes sometimes happen because there are too many black cats about.

On this occasion Mr Hitchens spares us his usual, somewhat illogical, extrapolation to the effect that, because some acts of terrorism are perpetrated by dopeheads, Islam has nothing to do with any of them. But this conclusion follows from the whole corpus of his writing on this subject.

Suddenly we leave the realm of rhetoric to enter one of psychiatry, especially since Mr Hitchens then segues into his parallel, unrelated mania. This has to do with his almost erotic adulation of Col. Putin, who wages a noble single-handed war against Nato’s attempts to blow up the world.

As proof of this dastardly intent Hitchens cites some facts. But then all madmen do that – it’s only in the spin they put on the facts that their disease reveals itself.

In this case, Mr Hitchens observes correctly that: “American nuclear bombers flew to the Baltic. Nato heavy artillery let rip close to the Russian city of Kaliningrad. A Nato jet buzzed the Russian Defence Minister’s plane.”

He then asks a presumably rhetorical question: “Who is actually turning up the heat here?”

Why, certainly not the KGB-run regime that pounces like a rabid dog on its neighbours, annexes their territory, murders tens of thousands, starts three wars in the last decade, amasses hundreds of thousands of troops on its western border, spends half its budget on the military, directly threatens at least three Nato members thereby creating a threat of nuclear war, constantly violates the airspace of Nato countries, foments trouble around the world, launches cyber attacks on Western institutions, conducts hysterical non-stop anti-Western propaganda in all media.

Of course not. It’s Nato, silly. You know, the organisation that has protected our freedom for the past 68 years.

This infernal organisation has a charter whose Article 5 says that an attack on one member is an attack on all. Since Putin’s regime has an overwhelming superiority in conventional capabilities over Nato in Europe, the latter would have only two options should the former pounce on the Baltics the way it has already pounced on Chechnya, Georgia and the Ukraine.

One, not to respond at all. Two, to respond with nuclear weapons.

The first option would neuter Nato out of existence, leaving Putin in control of Europe. The second one could spell nuclear holocaust. That’s why the most realistic option isn’t to respond to Putin’s aggression, but to try to prevent it.

To that end, following the decision taken at the 2014 Nato summit, in the immediate aftermath of Putin’s theft of the Crimea, the Western alliance has put a 5,000-strong contingent into the three Baltic members of Nato. They’re there to act as a tripwire in case of a Russian attack, and their presence is designed to discourage such an attack by demonstrating Nato’s commitment to Article 5.

Even such a tiny force, however, needs to be in a state of readiness. That’s why Nato has conducted the training exercises that our clinical case equates with “turning up the heat”.

Now hardly a day goes by that Russian planes don’t buzz Nato planes or installations. Yet Hitchens regards as an act of unprovoked aggression one of the few such incidents initiated by Nato.

Nato commanders are understandably tense every time Russian fighter-bombers appear in close proximity to the Baltics. In the case that pushed Mr Hitchens over the edge, two such warplanes materialised in the region, escorting an airliner that happened to carry Putin’s defence minister Shoigu.

This is how Nato explains the incident, first pointing out that the two fighter-bombers didn’t respond to air traffic control or requests to identify themselves:

“As is standard practice whenever unknown aircraft approach Nato air space, Nato and national air forces took to the sky to monitor these flights. When Nato aircraft intercept a plane they identify it visually, maintaining a safe distance at all times. Once complete, Nato jets break away.”

Moreover, Nato stated it had no information about who was aboard the passenger plane. All in all, it takes an advanced case of derangement to interpret the incident as Nato “turning up the heat”.

Actually, I’m paying Mr Hitchens a compliment by suggesting he’s unwell. Otherwise I’d have to wonder why a sane British hack feels called upon to repeat Putin’s propaganda verbatim.