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The Polish village of Jedwabne was almost all Jewish. It isn’t any longer. On 10 July, 1941, almost its entire Jewish population, 1,600 souls in all, were murdered.

After the war a cenotaph was erected to the victims, with an inscription blaming the SS for the crime. But for once the SS wasn’t the culprit. The Jews were murdered by their Polish neighbours wielding knives, axes and clubs. The survivors were locked up in a barn and burned alive.

Such crimes were committed all over Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, the Ukraine, Byelorussia and Russia. The local populations rivalled, sometimes outdid, the Germans’ anti-Semitic atrocities.

Where the local support for the Holocaust was lower, so was the percentage of the Jews murdered. In France, regarded as Western Europe’s most anti-Semitic country, the survival rate was 75 per cent. In Poland it was 10 per cent, but then Poland isn’t in Western Europe.

It was no wonder that the Nazis sent Jews from all over Europe to the death camps built in Poland: Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek. They knew the Poles were more likely than even the Germans to ignore the smoke billowing out of the chimneys, to shut their eyes on the crime.

Speaking of crimes, as far as the Polish government is concerned, the Princeton professor Jan Gross has committed one punishable by three years in prison.

Prof. Gross, who is himself of Polish descent, will stand trial in Katowice for writing that during the Nazi occupation the Poles inflicted heavier losses on Jews than on Germans. That, according to the prosecution, is tantamount to “publicly insulting the nation”.

Leaving aside the understated commitment to free speech, so lamentable in our EU partner, one would still like to get to the bottom of Prof. Gross’s allegations. Are they true?

The honest answer is, I don’t know. That is, I don’t know how many Germans the Polish underground, Armia Krajowa, killed. I do know Poland had 2.5 million Jews in the 1930s, while now there are only 10,000.

Given such a low number in a country of almost 40 million, it’s no wonder that 90 per cent of Poles say they’ve never seen a Jew. But absence doesn’t always make the heart grow fonder: 63 per cent believe that a global Jewish conspiracy exists, while 23 per cent believe that Jews use Christian blood in their rituals.

That would suggest that the Poles were less horrified than the Germans when the Holocaust made them look deep into their own hearts after the war. The Germans tried to atone for their sin as best they could; the Poles didn’t even acknowledge they had sinned.

This raises many interesting questions, among them that of collective guilt. Interestingly, those Poles who deny such a thing exists, don’t mind emphasising their nation’s collective heroism in confronting Nazism. Come on chaps, you can’t have it both ways. If you feel no collective guilt, you aren’t entitled to collective pride.

Yet there’s much to be proud about. Poland fought against the German aggression more heroically than any other European nation until the winter of 1941, when the Russians stopped surrendering in their millions and began to fight back.

In fact, once the Polish army got entrenched on the eastern side of the Vistula, the German juggernaut began to run out of steam, and the Poles only succumbed when knifed in the back by the Russians on 17 September, 1939.

During the war, Armia Krajowa mounted a real resistance from the first days of the occupation, as opposed to, say, France, where serious resistance only began when the outcome of the war was no longer in doubt.

Armia Krajowa, however, offered only a limited support to the uprising in the Warsaw Jewish ghetto in April-May, 1943. When Armia Krajowa staged its own Warsaw uprising in August, 1944, the Soviet army didn’t lift a finger to help – tempting one to think about poetic justice.

However, we shouldn’t forget that many pilots who won the Battle of Britain were Polish – or that, unlike Norway, Poland didn’t have a Quisling government and, unlike France, Holland, Belgium and the Ukraine, she didn’t form national SS divisions.

However, denying any possibility of collective guilt doesn’t come naturally to someone who, like me, believes in original sin. Of course, there were many Poles who, risking their own lives, saved Jews. Such heroes are of course exempt from any collective responsibility.

But that, however, doesn’t mean that no collective responsibility exists. God was willing to spare Sodom if he could find 10 righteous men there and only destroyed the city when the required number wasn’t reached. But he did spare the righteous man Lot and his daughters.

I’m not suggesting that Poland should be destroyed or that she deserved the suffering she received at the hands of the Germans and Russians during the war, or the Russians and her own communists after it.

However, our joy at having all those Polish plumbers should be tempered by the awareness of the cultural differences between Britain and Poland, or Eastern Europe in general. Although we’re all residually Christian, I’d suggest the differences outweigh the similarities.

A single European state, anyone?

Jeremy Corbyn kicked off his belated speech in favour of staying in the EU by claiming that the party he leads backs it “overwhelmingly”.

He didn’t cite any statistics to support this claim, expecting us to take it on faith.

Being a credulous sort, I’m prepared to do just that – even though this assertion somewhat bucks the historical trend.

For example, Hugh Gaitskell, the last sensible Labour leader (1955-1963) argued against Britain joining the EEC (as it then was) by correctly stating that this would mean “the end of a thousand years of history”.

He then died under mysterious circumstances, with both the ex-MI6 man Peter Wright and the Soviet defector Anatoly Golitsyn claiming foul play on the part of the KGB, eager to replace Gaitskell with its putative agent Harold Wilson.

More recently, in the 1970s and early 1980s, Labour was more Eurosceptic than the Tories, with more anti-EEC MPs and a more coherent European policy. And Labour’s patron saint Tony Benn made strong arguments against European federalism, as strong as anything Nigel Farage has come up with so far, which is saying a lot.

Incidentally it was then that the cub MP Jeremy Corbyn showed the good judgement of voting against joining the Common Market – an impression of solidity he then spoiled by having a fling with Diane Abbott, whose physique was never any more attractive than her personality or indeed her politics.

Those who foolishly expect consistent views from politicians on any subject other than their unquenchable power-lust will notice that old Jeremy had been opposed, if somewhat tepidly, to EU membership up until the moment his arm was twisted into making today’s speech. This he acknowledged, possibly without realising he was acknowledging it (Jeremy, in case you’re wondering, isn’t particularly bright).

After all, he explained, the Labour party and its paymasters, the trade unions, have decided to back EU membership “and that’s the party I lead and that’s the position I am putting forward.”

In other words, Jeremy’s personal principles and beliefs don’t really come into it. What comes into it is his determination to hang on to power at all costs, something that would be in peril if the union bosses got upset.

Fair enough, serious people would never expect anything different from a career politician, whatever the colour of the rosette he pins to his lapel. I mean, you don’t really think that Dave has a carefully thought-through political philosophy he is prepared to uphold at any cost to his political career, do you?

Jeremy made another unwitting admission one has to welcome – or applaud if it wasn’t really unwitting: “There is,” he said, “a strong socialist case for staying in the European Union.”

This is absolutely true, and it would be God’s own truth had he modified ‘a strong socialist case’ with the intensifier ‘only’. For European federalism has always been nothing but the nightmarish socialist dream of a single European, ideally world, government.

This is how this thought was expressed in The Communist Manifesto, the founding document that inspired both international and national socialism:

“The working men have no country… Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national… National differences and antagonisms between peoples are vanishing gradually from day to day, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto. The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster.”

Actually, working men tend to be more patriotic than chattering idlers. But never mind, European federalism flows as naturally out of this passage as Krug champagne out of the bottle at a Labour fund raiser. Since ‘supremacy of the proletariat’ is insane rubbish bearing no resemblance to any conceivable reality, it has always been interpreted as the supremacy of a supranational elite towering above national cultures, traditions and politics.

That is how the concept was understood both by the Bolsheviks and the Nazis. And this is how it was understood by the German and French bureaucrats who in the days of the Nazi occupation and Vichy discovered affinity for one another.

The Third Reich was committed to pan-Europeanism, and in fact the Nazis organised a conference on united Europe chaired by that great European Alfred Rosenberg. When it became clear after El Alamein and Stalingrad that the Third Reich would last rather less time than the promised thousand years, Nazi and Vichy bureaucrats banged their heads together and came up with a plan for post-war cooperation now going by the name of the EU.

I do hope the Leave campaign will make its case clear, explaining to hoi polloi the pernicious provenance of the EU and its profoundly anti-British, anti-historical and indeed anti-European aims.

But if I were a door-to-door Brexit campaigner, I’d reduce the whole argument to a simple message: Jeremy Corbyn wants us to stay in the EU. What better reason do you need for voting to leave?

Now that a Caravaggio painting worth zillions has been discovered in a Toulouse attic with a leaky roof, the painter is in the news again.

To be fair, he has never left the news, or at least art appreciation classes, for at least a century. So high is his status that it’s easy to forget that for roughly 400 years after his death art lovers hardly knew who Caravaggio was.

Until the 20 century, in which more people were killed than in all previous centuries combined, the world hadn’t been quite ready for Caravaggio because it hadn’t been quite ready for modernity.

Artists forgotten for four centuries seldom make a comeback – unless their old art tickles our new sensibilities. So what sensibilities are tickled by Caravaggio’s soulless, violent and perverse art?

The answer lies in the adjectives modifying the word ‘art’ in the previous sentence. This is what modernity sees when looking at itself in the mirror of Caravaggio’s paintings. This is what modernity likes.

A few years ago an Amsterdam museum made a terrible mistake. It put together a joint exhibition of Rembrandt and Caravaggio, two painters the curators thought were umbilically linked.

The link was purely formal, but then pure formalism is all that matters nowadays. Caravaggio turned chiaroscuro, widely used by others, into tenebrism. That’s essentially more of the same thing, with little transition between an exaggerated shadow and an equally exaggerated light.

Several 17^th-century giants, such as Zurbarán and Rembrandt, also used the technique, which is supposed to make them Caravaggio’s disciples.

The write-up on the sublime Zurbarán’s painting of St Francis at the National Gallery says so in as many words: Zurbarán was influenced by Caravaggio. I’d be tempted to say that Zurbarán was influenced by St Francis or, to be more exact, by Jesus Christ.

When looking at a work of art, I first ask the hopelessly outdated question ‘what?’, rather than the fashionably upbeat ‘how?’ Technique is important only inasmuch as it’s adequate to the artist’s treatment of his subject.

Yet by the time the 20^th century arrived, the soul of our civilisation had been ripped out. Hence paintings were no longer seen as vehicles carrying a divine, or any deep, meaning. They had become merely combinations of colours and shapes, with painting not stepping outside itself in search of meaning. Art became endogenous rather than exogenous.

As that process gathered speed, the combinations of colours and shapes became too esoteric for anyone to understand without help from critics. Art again became exogenous, stepping outside itself – except that this time it looked for inspiration not in God or any of His creations but in literature, specifically the genre of art criticism.

Tom Wolfe wrote a brilliant essay about this, The Painted Word, but that was long before those Amsterdam curators decided it would be instructive to juxtapose Rembrandt and Caravaggio.

Actually, instructive it was, but not the way they meant it. They were hoping to show that the two painters were so closely related that they were practically twins. Instead the exhibition showed they weren’t even the same species.

Rembrandt loved human nature, understood it, and was able to convey it better than most artists in history. He didn’t portray his sitters’ features. He portrayed their souls.

That was an alien concept to Caravaggio. What functioned as his own soul was a combination of various perversions, social, sexual and psychological.

This is exactly what appeals to a modernity trained to appreciate form more than content, and the artist more than his art. Everything about Caravaggio fits.

His formal innovativeness trumps his empty soullessness. His sanguinary naturalism excites the public weaned on horror movies. And let’s not forget his life, so reminiscent, mutatis mutandis, of the lives of today’s pop celebrities.

When not busy painting or pursuing nubile boys, Caravaggio wandered around Rome drunk, his hand on the hilt of his sword, looking for someone to kill. Eventually he did murder a young man and had to flee Rome under a sentence of death – what’s there not to love for our desensitised, voyeuristic public?

Blood flows liberally in Caravaggio’s paintings, and he was obsessed with decapitation, both tendencies clearly springing from his own murderous past and the likely punishment for it.

The newly found painting, Judith Beheading Holofernes, is another such revelling in beheading. The expert who authenticated the work commented that “this isn’t the kind of painting you’d want to hang in your living room”.

True. I don’t see how anyone, other than the chaps who teach art appreciation, would even want to look at it in a museum. Most of us are never satisfied by technical mastery alone.

No doubt Caravaggio was technically proficient. But a walk through any major museum will be rewarded by demonstrations of technical mastery galore. I doubt one would find any incompetent works of art there.

But great artists offer so much more than just that. They have the ability to move us by reminding us of the sublime heights to which the human spirit can soar.

Caravaggio uses his skill to remind us, unwittingly, of the putrid depths to which the human spirit can sink. That does make him the ideal artist for modernity, rejoicing in the lower depths of the human spirit.

 

Conservatives are intuitively opposed to big central government. After all, the bigger and more centralised the government, the more it’ll confer the kind of absolute power that, according to Lord Acton, corrupts absolutely.

That’s as true, if not to the same extent, of our so-called democracies as of openly totalitarian regimes. Hence conservatives favour transferring as much power as possible to small local government.

Such is the theory, and by and large it holds true. But then someone like Aysegul Gurbuz turns up, and a huge hole is punched right through the middle of the seemingly irrefutable theory.

Miss Gurbuz is a Labour councillor in Luton, which makes her a member of local government and supposedly an embodiment of a conservative ideal. However, she’s also a Muslim and merely 20 years old, with neither characteristic likely to appeal either to conservatives or to generally intelligent people.

Luton’s population being about 25 per cent Muslim, there can be no valid demographic objection to its council members espousing Islam. There are however, valid cultural and historical objections to any British city being 25 per cent Muslim.

After all, it’s far from certain that a devout Muslim can be trusted to uphold the founding principles of the realm, such as pluralism. Of course many Muslims are Muslim in name only, but, as you’ll see, Miss Gurbuz is a pious Muslim devoted to every tenet of her creed, including the less appealing ones.

Her age is another problem. It should be clear to anyone that a 20-year-old is too young to qualify for a government post. I’d also go so far as to suggest that 20-year-olds shouldn’t even vote, for the simple physiological reason that the human brain isn’t even wired properly until age 25 or so.

As a man who loves to see his prejudices confirmed, I’m grateful to Miss Gurbuz for validating both of my reservations about her suitability to be a councillor, even a Labour one, even in Luton.

As a pious Muslim, she’s a virulent, visceral anti-Semite who’s pining for another Holocaust. As a 20-year-old, she’s too stupid to conceal this.

On the contrary, she proudly tweets hatred urbi et orbi. “The Jews,” says one tweet, “are so powerful in the US, it’s disgusting.”

Miss Gurbuz is active in every pro-Palestinian cause under the sun, and her analysis of the situation in that volatile region reflects her slight partiality and a keen sense of history: “If it wasn’t for my man Hitler these Jews would’ve wiped Palestine years ago. Sorry but it’s a fact. Not hating on Jews btw.”

‘Not hating Jews’ would have made the last sentence more grammatical, if no more credible. It should also have been ‘wiped out’, not ‘wiped’, for surely the dastardly Jews want to destroy ‘Palestine’, not keep it clean (from what I’ve heard of the state of hygiene there, the former task would be easier to achieve).

Some punctuation would have helped too, if only to dispel the impression that Miss Gurbuz isn’t a native speaker of English or, if she is, a functionally illiterate one.

Anyway, since Muslims owe such a debt to ‘my man Hitler’, it stands to reason that in another tweet Miss Gurbuz describes her idol as “the greatest man in history”.

Labour is so sick of one anti-Semitic scandal after another, starting with the cordial friendship the party leader shares with Hamaz chieftains, that it reacted with unusual alacrity, suspending the precocious youngster from the party.

One can sympathise with Labour. First Oxford University Labour Club’s co-chairman had to resign because “a large proportion” of its members had “some kind of problem with Jews”.

Then the party twice had to suspend another functionary, Vicky Byrne, for tweeting anti-Semitic rants. Then Khadim Hussain, former Lord Mayor of Bradford, was suspended for lamenting the undue emphasis our education places on “Anne Frank and the six million Zionists that were killed by Hitler.” (For this lot ‘Zionist’ is synonymous with ‘Jew’.

And now this, a Muslim Nazi. Really, before long one could begin to doubt the socialists’ dedication to racial equality. Then one recalls that Hitler was a socialist too, and doubts become a certainty.

 

 

Almost four years ago I wrote The Gospel According to Dave, in which I mocked Cameron’s sanctimonious pronouncements on tax avoidance:

“And Dave opened his mouth and taught them, saying, Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit tax evasion: But I say unto you that whosoever committeth avoidance hath committed evasion already in his heart; his is hell fire.”

This became a recurrent theme in Dave’s orations. Yes, tax evasion is illegal, while tax avoidance isn’t. But let’s not be sticklers for casuistry. At issue here is morality, not legal technicalities.

Now, when chaps who’d prostitute their underage daughters for better poll ratings start talking morality, warning bells should sound.

For it’s not the government’s job to preach morality. Its job is to protect the realm and uphold its constitutional principles. Whenever government officials start mouthing moral platitudes, we can be certain they’re remiss in their legitimate duties.

According to their gospel truths, our money isn’t really ours. By right it belongs to the state – even if the state can’t yet claim it all because of property rights and other archaic iniquities built into the law.

People get angry when deprived of their rightful property, and our spivs are no exception. Yes, the state extorts half of what the middle classes earn. But it’s the other half that’s so irksome to the spivs that they can’t contain their rage.

They sputter spittle whenever some money bypasses their coffers, ending up in the pockets of those who actually earn it. Offshore tax shelters stick in the craw, irrespective of their legality. Parents’ money gifts to children, ditto: there’s a chance the youngsters will thereby pay less inheritance tax.

It never occurs to the spivs, or to the people brainwashed by them, to question the morality of the inheritance tax in the first place. After all, the money bequeathed has already been taxed every which way. It’s unjust to tax it again, but justice doesn’t come into it.

That family money should stay in the family is a bugbear of socialists, regardless of what they call themselves. As far as they’re concerned, the state should confiscate all the money the deceased made during a lifetime of toil, and if that impoverishes his family, not to worry. The state will step in and look after the newly indigent, thereby gaining control over them.

The 40 per cent inheritance tax is a step in that direction. Hence the gift loophole is seen as a backward step on the road to the bright socialist future.

I like the gift rule. When an ageing British parent gives some money to a child, the gift only becomes tax-free if the parent lives another seven years. Hence this loophole indirectly fosters the good side of human nature: it stops greedy children from hoping the parent will die soon.

In general, it’s the moral duty of every person to avoid giving money to the state as much as legally possible. After all, most of the tax revenue will be wasted or, worse still, used for nefarious purposes, such as corrupting society by creating a vast class of dependent freeloaders, many of them coming from hostile cultures.

Hence Dave’s sermons are mendacious. Now it turns out they’re also hypocritical.

For Dave’s father had an offshore fund, from which Dave profited to the tune of £30,000. Cameron père also gave the apple of his eye £300,000 as a gift, and Mrs Cameron aggravated matters by giving him another £200,000.

Now, these amounts are trivial compared to those earned by Russian cellists or indeed to the value of just about any London flat, never mind a house, bequeathed to the grateful offspring. But numbers don’t affect the principle, and Dave seems to be saying to his flock “Don’t do as I do, do as I say”.

What has followed is clamour for Dave’s resignation as a minimum. As a maximum, Ken Livingston, the hard-left thug whose links with the Soviet Union were never properly investigated, has called for Dave to be imprisoned.

Ken forgets that Britain is still different from the socialist paradise of his dreams in that one has to break the law to be sent down, and Dave hasn’t done that.

I’m sympathetic to the idea of the likes of Dave being kicked out of government, but not for this non-reason. And I do think he belongs in jail, for his treasonous efforts to undermine Britain’s constitution by dissolving her sovereignty. But this a different matter.

Any honest man would state publicly that he has done nothing illegal, meaning that his financial affairs are none of anyone else’s business. Either produce evidence of illegality or shut up, would be the message.

But, forgetting that he lives in a glass house, Dave has been throwing stones for the last four years at least. Now he has had to go through the pathetically humiliating and grovelling exercise of revealing his tax returns for public scrutiny.

This has intensified the class war in which there’s never any truce. To our public, corrupted by socialist propaganda, being wealthy is borderline criminal in itself. One wishes this were the only crime our spivs commit.

 

 

This statement by Bruce Springsteen, explaining why he cancelled a gig in North Carolina, shook me to the core.

There I was, thinking that nothing in life could possibly be more important than watching several superannuated, tattooed, booze-sodden, drug-addled morons performing an anti-musical pagan rite that goes by the misnomer of music.

What could be more important than thousands of culturally challenged infants of all ages responding to the shamanistic ritual with the coordinated enthusiasm of a Nuremberg rally and the erotic passion of an orgy?

It has to be something of cosmic significance to be more important than incoherent shrieks of the audience to muffle the incoherent, electronically enhanced shrieks of the morons on stage, accompanied by a jungle drum beat and the same three chords repeated ad nauseam.

Music as an extension of pharmacology, a psychedelic symbiosis between an audience yearning to abandon whatever little humanity it had in the first place and cynical operators who know how to scream anti-capitalist invective all the way to the capitalist bank – what could possibly be more important than that?

Turns out some things are. Such as Bruce Springsteen’s flaming social conscience, born in the USA. (That’s one of his greatest hits, in case you don’t know, which I sincerely hope you don’t.)

And Bruce’s conscience says that North Carolina has forfeited the privilege of being regaled with such delectations as Born in the USA, Murder Incorporated and My Hometown.

This backward state has passed a law that, according to Springsteen, “is an attempt by people who cannot stand the progress our country has made in recognising the human rights of all our citizens to overturn that progress.”

Excuse me? I realise that eloquence beyond the fluent use of four-letter words isn’t a job requirement in Mr Springsteen’s profession, but still. It took me a while to realise that he doesn’t actually wish to strike a blow for the rights of all citizens to overturn the progress the country has made in attempting to recognise the progress of the people who cannot stand progress.

No, old Bruce is actually registering a protest against a law passed by people who cannot stand progress. The law doesn’t call for the slaughter of every firstborn boy, although I for one would give such a bill serious consideration if it could prevent the propagation of Bruce Springsteens.

No, the law that riled Mr Springsteen so is one his official statement describes as “the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act, [which] dictates which bathrooms transgender people are permitted to use.”

‘Bathrooms’, in Americans usage, include public lavatories, changing rooms and dressing rooms. And the offensive North Carolina law simply states that transsexuals must use such facilities according to the sex specified in their birth certificates, rather than the one they have chosen for themselves.

Mr Springsteen, born as he is in the USA, is entitled to play or not to play wherever he wishes. What he’s not entitled to – or wouldn’t be in a sane world – is having an understanding audience for his ignorant and idiotic views.

Here’s a touch of sanity, to establish the proper framework for assessing Mr Springsteen’s protest.

First, a man who wants to refashion himself as a woman has, in the technical medical parlance, a screw loose.

Second, scientists have demonstrated beyond any shadow of doubt that a man cannot become a woman. He can only become a man shot full of oestrogen and with his bits cut off. His chromosomes remain XY, which makes him male in any other than a psychiatric sense.

Third, jurisprudence scholars raise serious doubts about the legal legitimacy of such a conversion. A man may fancy himself as a woman, a dog or a tree, but for all legal purposes he must still be regarded as a man.

Conversely, a woman, which is a Homo Sapiens born with XX chromosomes, may shoot herself full of testosterones and attach a dildo to her nether regions, but she’ll become a man no more than she can become, say, a pony (which some women no doubt fancy themselves to be).

In that context, protesting against the law that says men mustn’t be forced to share urinals with women, and crazy women at that, doesn’t strike me as one that ‘overturns progress’. What it does overturn is collective insanity that these days goes by the name of progress.

As part of this insanity, show business or pop celebrities are routinely accepted as authorities in areas outside their immediate expertise, such as it is. For example, as part of a day of special live programming, the BBC has invited the actress Angelina Jolie to act as keynote speaker on the global refugee crisis.

“Above all,” says Miss Jolie, “we need to address the conflict and insecurity that are the root causes of the mass movement of refugees.” Yes, but only in our virtual world is it possible to believe that a movie star, best known for her pouting lips, is ideally suited to ‘address’ such issues.

Perhaps Miss Jolie should get together with Mr Springsteen and see whose inanities are more inane. Who knows, a romance may blossom and they’ll concentrate on each other so much that they’ll spare us their profundities.

His detractors may claim that my friend Vlad lacks any morality. Shame on them!

Vlad has morality coming out of his… well, ears. And he has the courage of his convictions. To wit: he attended a live TV forum, knowing in advance that Panama would come up.

Sure enough, he was asked to comment on “the so-called Panama dossier, featuring the musician Roldugin, who’s your friend”.

A lesser man would have dismissed the implicit ugly rumours as a lie. Vlad’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov chose that very tack when asked whether his Olympic skater wife indeed had vast offshore accounts.

Absolutely not, said Dmitry, pulling his shirt cuff over the £400,000 watch his wife is supposed to have given him as a wedding present. Alas, The Guardian published facsimiles of the documents verifying the skater’s ownership of offshore laundries, making a red-faced Dmitry ask questions like “Oh, you mean those accounts?”

Vlad is too big a man to demean himself by lying. Instead he attacked the insinuations head on.

Well, perhaps ‘head on’ isn’t exactly accurate. Actually, after saying “I’ll try to be brief”, Vlad took six minutes before getting to the actual question.

That was time well spent. For Vlad explained how Russia’s enemies have always tried to push her down to her knees.

He touched upon, in a non sequitur kind of way, the ‘90s “when everyone liked to supply us with potatoes and use Russia in their interests”. From there it was an easy transition to the West’s disapproval of Yeltsin over his policy on Yugoslavia, the current Western invective over the Ukraine and the Crimea, and Putin’s refusal to extradite Snowden.

Russia’s enemies, explained Vlad, are envious of her economic success – even though there seems to be little to envy. In fact, the size of Russia’s economy has doubled since the ‘90s, and Russia’s armed forces are ready to challenge the global monopoly America takes for granted.

“Events in Syria,” said Vlad, “have demonstrated Russia’s ability to solve problems… far from our own borders”. True, Russia has achieved the improbable feat of both withdrawing her army from Syria and launching a massive build-up there.

Vlad, however, was too modest to point this out. Instead, after four minutes of meandering through recent history, he took tentative steps towards answering the question about Russia’s heir to Pablo Casals.

‘Tentative’ is the operative word, for Vlad approached the issue from the angle of geopolitical psychology: “Our opponents are mostly worried about the unity of the Russian nation. In that connection, attempts are made to rock us from inside… to undermine society’s trust in the organs of power…”

Contextually the Panama scandal represented one such attempt, but Vlad didn’t say the Panama papers were forged. His KGB training told him it’s impossible to falsify 11 million documents. Instead, referring to himself as ‘yours truly’, he highlighted the absence of his own name from any of them.

“So there’s nothing to talk about,” concluded Vlad. Not quite. That’s like saying that, since the defendant wasn’t caught with a smoking gun, no amount of circumstantial evidence would suffice to convict. In fact, people have been hanged on one tenth the evidence against Vlad.

His close friends and family have been busily laundering bribery money, raising the question of which public official in Russia could command bribes in the billions.

The bribes are mostly indirect: buying equities and then selling them the next day at a huge profit; signing an equity contract, then immediately breaking it and paying a $750,000 penalty; getting $600 million credits with no collateral or repayment; buying shares worth $25 million for $100,000. Yet crypto-bribes all these are, and only Putin handles enough funds to justify such palm-greasing.

After this six-minute preamble, Vlad finally got around to Roldugin whom he’s “proud to call a friend”.

This was my favourite part, for Vlad not only offered a highly plausible, nay irrefutable, explanation but also showed a subtle understanding of artistic creativity.

Roldugin, explained Vlad, “is a creative person”. That judgement is hard to fault, assuming that the cellist came up with the Panamanian trickery all on his own.

But Vlad meant something else. “Many creative people… try their hand at business.”

Now I’ve lived my life surrounded by creative people, and in my experience most of them are rubbish at business, or certainly not good enough to make $2 billion.

But then, according to Vlad, Roldugin isn’t so much a businessman as a benefactor. “He has spent almost every penny he made on buying musical instruments abroad and bringing them to Russia. Expensive things… He donates them to various state institutions.”

Those ‘things’ have to be jolly expensive to cost $2 billion, which is the documented amount of funds passing through the creative cellist’s hands. Irreverent Russians are already quipping about Stradivarius drums and Guarneri drumsticks, which just goes to show that Vlad hasn’t yet succeeded in curing his countrymen of cynicism.

I for one accept Vlad’s explanation. As a sort of creative person myself, I understand the urge to donate $2 billion’s worth of musical instruments to the KGB.

One wonders how many of the other 2,000 of Putin’s known launderers boast the cellist’s creativity. Why oh why didn’t I take cello lessons when a child in Moscow?

 

 

Apart from their spitting sibilants (or shpitting shibilants, as they are known locally) the Dutch are defined by their compulsion to produce and consume mountains of mediocre cheese.

So how is it possible to penalise an activity so seminal to nationhood?

Here I must own up to playing a trick to catch your attention. The Dutch haven’t penalised buying cheese. I made this up to highlight the ridiculousness of something that did happen.

For, in an act of similar iconoclasm, the French parliament yesterday passed a law imposing fines on men paying for sex.

I don’t know what else the French are going to cut off to spite their national tradition, but this is ridiculous. Edward VII, a great patron of Paris bordellos, must be spinning in his grave.

Actually brothels were outlawed in France as far back as in 1946, doubtless to punish the owners for having done brisk business during the occupation. But never mind the ban on brothels. Yesterday’s legislation is much more pernicious than that, for it reverses the 2003 law penalising solicitation.

Or, to be more exact, that law banned ‘passive’ solicitation, that is wearing revealing clothes in a public place of ill repute. (If we had a similar law in England, the entire female population under 30 would be fined every weekend.)

However, blaming prostitutes for what they do isn’t consonant with the modern understanding of man. People are no longer seen as free agents, responsible for their actions. They’re pawns moved around by the invisible hand of circumstance.

If the hand moves them towards objectionable acts, they aren’t the wrongdoers. They are the victims.

Hence those young ladies hustling passers-by in Rue Saint-Denis and Place Pigalle are neither immoral nor greedy. They are victims of factors beyond their control, and the chap buying their services is one such factor.

In other words, a prostitute hired in Paris is deemed to be involved in the transaction the same way as a slab of Gouda bought in Amsterdam.

Nothing that an estimated 40,000 French prostitutes can do will ever come close to this act of degradation, reducing human beings to automata, rather than recognising them as God’s creatures endowed with free will.

A technically different but philosophically identical development is under way in Sweden. There men who report paedophilic fantasies are seen as patients requiring treatment.

About five per cent of all men are estimated to have paedophilic thoughts. Assuming that only a small proportion of such dreamers act on their fantasies, those who do must be working overtime: 10 per cent of girls are supposed to have been sexually abused.

My advice to men who dream of children in those terms would be to shut up about it and sort themselves out. My advice to courts dealing with paedophilic acts would be to punish them with deterrent severity, possibly including castration.

But such a cut and dried approach doesn’t agree with the progressive ethos, of which Sweden is the greatest champion. The progressive ethos says that every aberration must be medicalised.

Thus having impure thoughts about children is seen as a problem for doctors to treat, rather than an urge for the man himself to control. This again denies man’s free will, in this case his power not to turn silly fantasies into criminal acts.

Let’s face it, we all have fantasies acting on which would land us in prison. For example, I used to daydream about killing my first mother-in-law, who nonetheless died a natural death.

Part of the modern ethos is for the authorities to act as thought police. Fair enough, if we’re denied any responsibility for our own actions, then a criminal thought is practically indistinguishable from a criminal deed. No restraining mechanism exists: today I dream of killing my mother-in-law, tomorrow the hatchet sees the light of day.

Hence Swedes who love children the wrong way are brainwashed to seek treatment, regardless of whether or not they’ve actually abused anyone. And they do – even though the treatment on offer is the same chemical castration proposed as punishment in some quarters.

A drug that achieves such an effect by stopping the production of testosterone is currently on trial. Dr Christoffer Rham, the leading researcher claims that “a substantial number of patients with paedophilic disorder actually want help”.

They want to be castrated not to act on their fantasies? That’s as if I had sought jail for my fantasies about my mother-in-law.

What’s happening is a programme aimed at penalising thought as if it were deed, and a programme for which, in another modern perversion, huge state funds are being demanded.

Instead of offering castration as treatment for fantasies, it should be threatened as punishment for acts. On the assumption that most paedophiles wouldn’t seek castration voluntarily, this would reduce the incidence of child abuse more effectively.

But that’s not the purpose of the exercise. The purpose of what’s going on in France and Sweden and everywhere else is for modernity to put its leaden foot down, to impose its view of life. And what a puny view it is.

Andrew J. Bacevich’s well-written article on US foreign policy as articulated by Sen. Cruz (Ted Cruz Embodies the Degeneration of Foreign-Policy Conservatism) has caught my eye for several reasons.

The most immediate one is that I agree with most of Prof. Bacevich’s premises, while taking exception to his conclusion.

Prof. Bacevich correctly identifies “prudence and even circumspection” as the essence of conservatism, an understanding that was tersely encapsulated in 1641 by Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland: “If it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.” Yet prudence of action shouldn’t mean relativism of principle.

Prof. Bacevich tacitly disapproves of the “pronounced ideological edge” that conservative thinking on foreign policy acquired after the defeat in Vietnam. As an example he cites Ronald Reagan’s denouncing the Evil Empire, and Reagan’s “willingness to condemn adversaries as unabashedly wicked.” He then describes this as a manifestation of Manichaeism.

At this point Prof. Bacevich and I begin to diverge. For the Soviet Union, which Reagan condemned as unabashedly wicked was just that. Nor is recognition that good and evil exist ipso facto Manichaean.

While one struggles to identify a modern country that’s unequivocally good, compiling a list of those unequivocally wicked is easy, with ‘the Evil Empire’ taking pride of place.

Prof. Bacevich seems to confuse political action with political thought. The former can’t always account for moral considerations; the latter must. This confusion will become more evident later, but meanwhile Prof. Bacevich laudably makes mincemeat of the neocon obsession with “forcing large chunks of the Islamic world into compliance with [George W. Bush’s] Freedom Agenda.”

“The defining features of American conservatism now became hubris and vainglory,” he writes, and the statement would be unassailable had he added the prefix ‘neo-’ to ‘conservative’.

Prof. Bacevich correctly sees the 2003 attack on Iraq, inspired by the neocons, as an unmitigated disaster whose “mournful consequences continue to mount even today”. He doesn’t list the mournful consequences, but prime among them would be a huge dose of militant passion injected into Islam, a creed to which militant passion is essential sustenance.

Mass migration of Muslims to Europe, for which the term ‘colonisation’ appears more and more appropriate, would also appear high on the list, sharing that position with creating a tangible danger of a world war.

Prof. Bacevich is absolutely right when describing that 2003 act of ideological folly as a “perversion in what passes for an ostensibly conservative approach to foreign policy.”

Where he then begins to go wrong is in lumping Ted Cruz together with the neocons whom the Texas senator has always mocked mercilessly. Yes, the neocons were criminally wrong in pushing the US into that foolhardy effort to instil democracy in a region where no conditions for it have ever existed.

But from that it doesn’t follow that Sen. Cruz’s current advocacy of doing “everything necessary” to stamp out Islamic militancy is wrong.

Prof Bacevich sees no difference between ideological neocon madness and Sen. Cruz’s ‘raw pugnacity’. True enough, the good Texan is much given to rhetorical flourishes that might prevent some from taking him seriously, such as “I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out!”

The implication is that, if elected, Sen. Cruz would seriously consider unleashing a nuclear holocaust on much of the Middle East, and even his enthusiastic supporters may wince at the suggestion and deplore the possible consequences as much as Prof. Bacevich does.

Yet there’s a seminal difference between the neocons and Cruz. They identify the problem as ‘Islamism’. He clearly sees it as Islam in general, and proposes to act accordingly.

The other difference is that it’s not 2003 any longer. It’s 2016, and the safety valve on the boiler in which Islamic passions bubble has failed. They’ve splashed out, threatening to scorch us all.

In 2003 the valve was still doing its job, just, which made prudence and circumspection the only reasonable basis for action. Now the time for circumspection has regrettably passed.

The problem that didn’t exist then exists now, and I find it hard to think of a solution drastically different from that proposed by Sen. Cruz, though I perhaps would propose it with more verbal restraint.

Nor do I find it easy to find anything wrong with Sen. Cruz’s fierce opposition to the nuclear deal with Iran, which he describes as “allowing homicidal maniacs to acquire weapons of mass murder”. That’s exactly what it is.

“His implied willingness to use guns to stop the bad guys in Tehran is unmistakable,” laments Prof. Bacevich, stopping short of offering any other method of stopping ‘the bad guys’ or indeed of suggesting that stopping them is advisable.

One presumes Prof. Bacevich’s solutions to the problem threatening us all wouldn’t include a military option, which makes one think with trepidation that the past stupidity of the neocons has made any robust military action unfeasible.

If so, one wishes Prof. Bacevich had used his obvious expertise to make a strong moral case against Munich-style defeatism – even if taking issue with Sen. Cruz’s stridency. There’s always the danger that opposition to one extreme turns into the advocacy of another.

P.S. I touch upon some of these issues in my book Democracy as a Neocon Trick, available on Amazon.

And the Chinese know them all – in addition to having accumulated similar expertise in skinning and jointing dogs.

Both animals are widely used in China not for companionship but for their gastronomic value. Nor are Tabby and Fido seen in purely utilitarian terms as a cheap source of protein. No, the Chinese actually have discerning palates and appreciate the pets for their nuanced taste.

So, when a visiting Chinese businessman responds to your profession of love for your Siamese by identifying himself as more of a dog man, you may be talking at cross purposes. In fact, in China as many as 20 million dogs are slaughtered for food every year, and a similar number of cats, so your interlocutor may well be a connoisseur.

This predilection for canine delicacies is normally associated with Koreans. In fact, a few years ago, when there was a South Korean playing for Manchester United, every time he touched the ball the fans chanted “He will run and he will score, he will eat your Labrador!”

Yet in this area the Chinese won’t easily cede the position of top dog, as it were. Witness the annual dog meat festival, currently under way in Yulin, where 10,000 barbecued dogs and cats will be enjoyed in just a few days.

The animals are typically bludgeoned to death with steel rods, not a slaughtering method likely to win an RSPCA approval or a ringing endorsement from animal rights groups. And even cynical old me can’t help wincing.

To add piquancy to the situation, apparently the demand is so voracious that neither stray animals nor those specifically raised for this purpose can satisfy it fully. Hence some of the carcasses still bear collars with name tags, suggesting they had been pets before becoming the main course.

While any decent person will object to brutality and theft, the matter of canine or feline repasts isn’t as clear-cut as one may be tempted to think. How would we feel about eating, say, a Yorkie if we were sure he was slaughtered humanely?

One suspects that even the inveterate meat eaters among us would turn up their noses at a Yorkie steak. Moreover, such fussy eaters may feel superior to the Chinese for this reason – and that’s before we’ve talked about another Chinese delight: eating a live monkey’s brains right out of the opened-up cranium.

It has to be said that the British, while having lost much of their conservatism in areas that matter, still retain it in gastronomy. Even my multi-lingual wife, who spent her formative years in Paris, winces every time I tuck into such French delicacies as andouillette (chitterling sausage) or tête de veau (calf’s head).

Yet for all my catholic tastes in food I’d draw the line at eating dog or cat, regardless of how humanely they were slaughtered or how delectably cooked.

This admission didn’t come easily for several reasons. The main one is that I’m owning up to a feeling for which there is no rational justification, something I deride in others and hate in myself.

Why not eat dog or cat? Because we are what we eat? Muslims claim that ‘if you eat pig, you become one’, yet they eat beef without growing horns (unless, of course, an interloper slips into their harem).

Because the Bible says so? But its says nothing of the sort. On the contrary, Genesis doesn’t exempt dogs and cats when stating “Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you.”

Because dogs and cats are more intelligent than other animals? There’s no evidence for that. In fact, pigs are considerably cleverer than either, yet we don’t seem to mind having a couple of rashers with our morning eggs.

Partly because of their relative intelligence, pigs are supposed to be better pets than either dogs or cats, though they are seldom used for that purpose. And here, I suspect, we touch upon the real reason for our fussiness.

Dogs and cats serve as pets, and many of their owners anthropomorphise them to a point where they’re seen not as animals, typologically indistinguishable from goats, but as family members, typologically indistinguishable from humans and in fact preferable to some.

This is an extension of the general modern tendency to replace sentiment with sentimentality, typical of a godless world. By implicitly raising Fido to a human level, we implicitly lower ourselves to Fido’s taxonomic tier, relinquishing the unique status humanity was granted by God.

Thus I loudly protest every time I visit my friends, whose Yorkie is always happy to see me. Yet his owner – a man, may I add, of supreme intelligence – always says “Say hello to your uncle Alex”, unfailingly eliciting my impassioned response: “I’m not his bloody uncle! He’s a ******* dog!”

Having said all that, and having constructed what to me seems to be an unimpeachable argument replete with theological and philosophical implications, what would I say if offered a rack of Beagle ribs?

“No, thanks, Li. I’m not hungry.” I’m ashamed at myself for being so illogical.