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PC stands for ‘police constable’, as in the officer murdered in yesterday’s terrorist attack on Westminster. It also stands for ‘politically correct’, as in the coverage of that crime in its immediate aftermath.

By far the greatest amount of reported detail concerned the car used in the crime. The grateful public learned its make, registration number, body style, price, where it was registered and hired, how long it took it to accelerate from 0 to 62mph. It all sounded more like an ad for Hyundai than a report on a heinous multiple murder.

But, though the self-driving revolution is upon us, the murder weapon on wheels didn’t drive itself. It was driven by a man, who then proceeded to enter the grounds of the mother of all parliaments and stab an unarmed policeman to death. (When are we going to abandon the insane idea that our policemen don’t need to be armed? Had PC Palmer carried a gun, he might have survived.)

This man decided to kill and be killed – he knew he wouldn’t survive the attack. Discarding the possibility that he was suffering from an incurable disease and chose suicide by cop to end his life (and a few other people’s while at it), this man must have been inspired by an idea he considered worth dying for.

What was that idea? Who was that man? The immediate report said only that he was ‘Asian’.

Now Asia is a rather large continent. Hence to say that someone is Asian means saying nothing at all. An Iraqi is more different from a Japanese than a Norwegian from a Kosovar, a Buddhist from a Muslim, or a Shintoist from a Copt.

Thus the very same reporters who described the car in intricate detail, stopping just short of mentioning its compression ratio and McPherson struts, neglected to provide any information about the murderer.

That left a blank to be filled by conjecture. What was your first guess of the terrorist’s identity? Sorry, I’m jumping the gun, as it were.

We were informed that, until further information, the police were treating the incident as an act of terrorism. Contextually, the availability of further information could change that assessment for… what exactly? That it was a charitable act?

So let’s display responsible restraint and refer to the driver-stabber as only the alleged terrorist. Now what was he? A Buddhist? Hinduist? Syrian Copt? Shintoist?

Are those Zen, Tibetan and Tantric Buddhists on the warpath again? Possible. But not exactly likely. Certainly not as likely as the first thought that sprang to my mind and I’m sure yours.

The attacker was a Muslim. I realise that jumping to this conclusion before we’ve even been told that a terrorist, as opposed to charitable, act was committed, betokens racism, Islamophobia, fascism, xenophobia, propensity for discrimination and, most damning of all, rebellion against the PC Zeitgeist.

But even at the risk of being accused of all those deadly sins, it’s hard to disconnect one’s analytical faculty altogether. You know, that part of the cognitive process that relies on known facts and historical information, all suggesting that nowadays any such act can only be perpetrated by a Muslim.

It’s sickening that at that tragic moment reporters were wary of coming across as transgressors against PC pseudo-morality. At least they had an excuse, however lame: initial shock at the sight of the carnage.

By contrast, David Aaronovitch of The Times had 24 hours to ponder the event. His conclusion? “…yesterday’s attack should not once again trigger a wholesale tarring of Muslim communities in Britain with the terrorist brush.”

Heaven forbid. We can’t possibly think of tarring the whole community wholesale or even retail. In fact, we can’t possibly think, full stop – not if Aaronovitch’s musings are an example of thought.

How does he imagine tarring the whole Muslim community with such a brush? Insisting that every Muslim is a suicide bombing waiting to happen? But no one in his right mind would think that.

Of course not every Muslim is a terrorist. By the same token, in 1940 only seven per cent of Germans were Nazis, and communists in Russia never exceeded 10 per cent of the population. Applying Aaronovitch’s logic, we shouldn’t say nasty things about either Nazis or communists or, God forbid, Germans and Russians as a group.

Yet in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, 27 per cent of British Muslims expressed sympathy with the murderers. That’s over a million potential jihadists, in impressive absolute numbers.

Instead of mouthing all this nauseating PC waffle, we must think clearly and act decisively. Otherwise terrorism will indeed become ‘part and parcel’ of living in London, which our Muslim mayor nonchalantly suggests it already is.

Just like the British who didn’t insist on fine distinctions between good and bad Germans in 1940, we have to realise there’s a war on. And wartime inevitably weakens commitment to civil liberties and abstract liberal philosophising.

I’m not suggesting that any British Muslim must be treated as an enemy alien, but certain measures suggest themselves.

All Muslim immigration must be summarily stopped until the present jihad madness becomes less febrile. Every mosque in which a single jihadist word has been uttered or a single murderer recruited must be shut down and preferably razed. Sharia law must be declared illegal. Anyone implicated in the perpetration or propaganda of terrorism must be deported, regardless of whether or not he holds a British passport. When terrorists’ provenance can be traced to a foreign country, that country must be held culpable and punished on an apocalyptic scale.

And so forth – all the time keeping the tar brush safely locked away. And oh yes, we must secure for Mr Aaronovitch an employment more suitable to his talents. Social worker perhaps, or community organiser, provided it’s not a Muslim community, where his name would be a major turn-off.

Since my hastily written piece yesterday, our conservative press has mercifully counterbalanced the emetic encomiums of McGuinness coming from the likes of the BBC, Blair and Corbyn.

The IRA chieftain has been correctly described as a cold-blooded mass murderer, and heartfelt wishes have been expressed that he rot in hell for all eternity. Photographs of his blood-soaked victims have covered newspaper spreads. His admirers have been appropriately flogged in public.

But alas even our conservative press isn’t all that clever. It too falls victim to modern cults. It too fails to delve into such matters at sufficient depth.

Hence, having said all the right things about the dead butcher, The Mail attacked the BBC’s John Simpson for daring to compare McGuinness to the canonised hero Nelson Mandela. “I really do despair,” wrote The Mail’s Steven Glover.

Comparing the two, Simpson said in his inimitable style that they should be seen “on that kind of side of the ledger”. Now I had my own issues with Simpson as far back as the early ‘90s, when he was covering all those glasnosts and perestroikas with schoolgirlish gasps of delight.

But here I must spring to his defence. McGuinness and Mandela do belong on the same ‘side of the ledger’, although not in the sense in which Simpson meant. Mutatis mutandis, the two are typologically close in that both were terrorists, murderers and torturers.

The gist of Glover’s despair is that, while blacks “were denied basic human rights” in South Africa, McGuinness operated against “the United Kingdom… where there were free elections and a democratically elected government”.

This belief in the redemptive value of a particular political method is deeply moving if not particularly intelligent.

Hitler’s government was democratically elected – would Glover have objected to a sniper’s bullet nipping it in the bud in 1933? Russia’s tsarist government wasn’t democratically elected – would Mr Glover have hailed the revolutionary terror that set the stage for the subsequent Bolshevik takeover? With the foreknowledge of the consequences in both cases?

Perhaps. After all, Mark Twain, Glover’s more talented predecessor in the useful idiocy business, showed the way. At the height of the anti-tsarist terror campaign, he wrote: “If such a government cannot be overthrown otherwise than by dynamite, then thank God for dynamite!” One wonders if, had he lived long enough to see it, Twain would have thanked God for the ensuing slaughter of millions.

One can infer that Glover welcomes not only Mandela’s murderous activities but also the hell unleashed in South Africa as a direct result. Blacks, whose human rights were so egregiously denied by apartheid, are now suffering from the kind of violence they never experienced under that, admittedly unsavoury, rule.

The country hatched out of Mandela’s version of freedom has one of the world’s highest crime rates, including murders, assaults and rapes (adult, child, infant and elderly).

Around 50 people are murdered every day, which is more by an order of magnitude than under apartheid. Over 40 per cent of South African women have been raped in their lifetime, while over 25 per cent of South African men admit to rape, half of them to more than one.

The cult of Mandela is as unfortunate as it’s understandable. Having lost God, modernity seeks idols, and Mandela was cast in this role while still doing time for terrorism. But all idols are false by definition, and Mandela is no exception.

The African National Congress, led by Mandela until his 1963 trial and after his 1990 release, was a Marxist terrorist organisation committed to the violent overthrow of the government. In that undertaking the ANC was assisted by the Soviets and their satellites, mainly Cuban and East German.

And it wasn’t just with arms: East German Stasi helped the ANC set up ‘Quatro’, the detention centre across the border in Angola. There dozens of anti-Marxists were tortured and murdered.

Mandela’s ANC thus received assistance from the same quarters as McGuinness’s IRA. In that spirit of international cooperation, the IRA sent its bomb-making experts to train aspiring ANC murderers, which greatly improved their efficiency.

However, the ANC didn’t just adopt foreign techniques. Some indigenous touches were added, such as the widespread practice of ‘necklacing’, whereby an old tyre was filled with petrol, put around a dissident’s neck and set alight.

All that was going on at the height of the Cold War, when direct association with the Soviets still carried some stigma in the West. That’s why any evidence of the ANC’s – and IRA’s – Marxist nature was routinely hushed up in the West’s predominantly liberal press.

Also kept under wraps was Mandela’s handwritten essay How to Be a Good Communist, in which he promised that “South Africa will be a land of milk and honey under a Communist government.”

But good communists know that war can be waged not only by violence but also by what Lenin called ‘legalism’ and what today would be called ‘peace process’. An intelligent man, Mandela grasped the situation. Guns not being the realistic long-term option, he had to become the prophet of peace. Parallels with McGuinness are screaming – is anyone listening?

Regardless of his personal participation in mass murder or lack thereof, Mandela is responsible for anything perpetrated on his watch by the organisation he led. Similarly, McGuinness, who was more hands-on, is responsible for every bomb, shooting and torture perpetrated by his ghastly gang.

So, like Glover, I really do despair too – at a world that has replaced faith with credulity, worship with idolatry and sound analysis with facile sentimentality.

“We shall never surrender,” thundered Churchill as Luftwaffe bombs, most of them incidentally made in the USSR, were raining down on London. And he was telling the truth: Britain stood firm.

However, having resisted those bombs with steadfast courage, 58 years later Britain meekly surrendered to other, smaller bombs planted by Irish gangsters in residential buildings, school buses and public transport.

Most of those bombs (or their components) were also made in the USSR or its satellites, as were the small arms with which those same gangsters murdered or kneecapped anyone they didn’t like. Admittedly, the electric drills used to torture victims were made by Western firms, Black & Decker being the preferred mark.

The gang was financed, armed and trained by various Marxist dictatorships, Muslim terrorists and of course directly by Russia. Some financing came from the traditional pursuits of organised crime: gun running, drugs, prostitution, gambling. Yet this was worse than any criminal activity pursued purely for fiscal gains.

For the whole monstrosity was couched in the faddish bien pensant language of national liberation, freedom and sovereignty. Mass murder was thereby justified and sanctified. Dupes around the world, in places like Boston, Mass., didn’t realise that the only real purpose of mass murder is to murder masses. All else is PR, including allusions to religious strife, pathetic when coming from a predominantly Marxist group.

It’s to this lot that Britain surrendered on Good Friday, 1998. It’s appropriate that the submission to this revolting gang was brokered by the most revolting character ever to disgrace 10 Downing Street, Tony Blair.

To be fair, successive US administrations had a role to play too, that of applying pressure on British governments to yield to the gangsters’ blackmail for the sake of ‘peace’. Sentimentally, which is to say stupidly, the Clintons of this world identified the IRA with their own Continental Congress. Politically, which is to say cynically, they were desperate to mollify the Irish vote.

The Good Friday ignominy was, and still is, hailed as a great success of British diplomacy. None dare call it surrender, none dare call it defeat.

Yet that’s exactly what it was. The butchers of Omagh formed the government of Northern Ireland, which entitled them to seats in Westminster Parliament. To their credit they turned the honour down.

Terrorism proceeded apace, if on a smaller scale. The Provos continued to kill and mutilate supposed informers, using the false flag of Real IRA. Their fanatical supporters were still refusing to cooperate with police. Even people who weren’t fanatical supporters also refused to cooperate, attached as they were to their kneecaps, lives and families.

Murderers serving time in prison received early releases. Those on the run and escaped prisoners were amnestied. The few not amnestied were still finding safe havens with IRA supporters. Their caches of weapons and explosives, supposed to have been ‘put beyond use’, still fired and blew up – no one was serious about verifying the terms of the agreement.

The gang won, and now the second-in-command victor, Martin McGuinness has died, to the deafening din of obituary panegyrics. The BBC obit mentions that “he was working as a butcher’s assistant when Northern Ireland’s Troubles erupted in the late 1960s” – without mentioning in so many words that he then graduated to full-fledged butcher in the IRA.

Yes, “…when soldiers from the Parachute Regiment killed 14 people in his hometown,… McGuinness was second in command of the IRA in the city.” However, “The Saville Inquiry concluded he had probably been armed with a sub-machine-gun on the day, but had not done anything that would have justified the soldiers opening fire.”

For fairness sake, the obituary mentions that McGuinness organised “one of the IRA’s most high-profile attacks… the attempt to kill Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984”. But then it smoothly segues into praising McGuinness’s role in graciously agreeing to accept Britain’s surrender and shake Her Majesty’s hand (how she must have cringed inside).

“My war is over,” he famously declared then. Of course it was. He had won. And now his awful life is over too.

“Where they make a desert, they call it peace,” wrote Tacitus. He didn’t add that sometimes surrender is called peace too. The great historian wasn’t that prescient.

Much has been made in the press about President Trump’s relations with Putin, and with good reason.

Several men in his administration, not to mention Trump himself, have been compromised by their links with Russia’s government, history’s unique fusion of secret police and organised crime.

Even if the links are unimpeachable from the legal standpoint, they’re certainly questionable morally – any personal, especially remunerative, relations with an evil regime have to be highly suspect.

Contrary to the Zeitgeist, immoral isn’t a full synonym of illegal, as many British newspapers keep telling us. However, to cite an unfashionable source, “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”

This brings us to The Evening Standard’s new editor, former Chancellor George Osborne, who since his sacking has further strengthened his already impressive credentials as a spiv to rival Tony-Dave.

In the good, if relatively recent, tradition of our public (self-) service, George has used the intervening months to earn millions in various jobs, most of them sinecures. Nothing new about this: we’re used to politicians using government as a springboard to self-aggrandisement, and only as that.

But even against that rotten background George’s editorial appointment has taken many a breath away. The papers are full of indignant accounts, with the phrase ‘conflict of interest’ ever-present.

True enough, it’s odd to allow a man who so recently occupied the second-biggest HMG post and is still an MP to take charge of an influential newspaper. Surely this gives Osborne an unfair jump on the competition, what with his being privy to most government secrets?

It’s unclear how free press can hold government to account if a major editor is servant to both masters. For a minister or MP to toss off the odd column explaining government policy is one thing; quite another for him to assume a role that presupposes “throwing bricks through windows”, in the phrase of a prominent journalist.

Anyway, every possible legal angle of Osborne’s appointment has already been explored under the electron microscope. Bereft as I am of such fine optical instruments, I have nothing to add to that scrutiny.

However, none of the commentators on this dodgy deal has mentioned the Russian connection involved, or more precisely the direct link to the aforementioned fusion of secret police and organised crime. Yet this is more interesting than the legalistic casuistry.

The Standard is owned (through the proxy of his son Evgeny) by the Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev, who carries that fusion in his own person. He has parlayed his KGB career into a fortune.

Exactly what Lebedev did in the KGB isn’t known. Officially he, like Putin, served in the First Chief Directorate (foreign intelligence). However, again like Putin, he must have first made his bones in domestic oppression. At the start of his business career he did like to threaten his competitors with KGB ‘torture chambers’, boasting of his experience in their use.

In 1995, having been in business for only two years, Lebedev bought a moribund National Reserve Bank. Government-owned Gazprom, the world’s biggest gas producer, instantly transferred $300 million into its accounts, even though the bank seemed to be on its last legs.

That started Lebedev’s empire, which now includes a large media portfolio spearheaded by our own Standard and Independent. The true purpose of those acquisitions was revealed by hacked Kremlin e-mails, showing how Lebedev used the papers to orchestrate a press campaign securing Western approval for the theft of the Crimea.

His son, the papers’ nominal owner, commented on this with characteristic effrontery: “My father has spent his life trying to promote freedom of expression and justice in his fight against corruption in Russia.” Of course he has. Shame on you for thinking KGB officers cum billionaires may devote their lives to anything other than promoting human liberties.

Why did this de facto KGB operation decide to hire Osborne? It certainly wasn’t for his journalistic experience, of which he hasn’t had a single day. Would it be wild conjecture to suggest that the Lebedevs want to explore Osborne’s government connections for their own nefarious purposes?

One wonders how professional journalists on The Standard will like working for an amateur spiv. Probably they’ll like it well enough, having bought into the paper’s implicit editorial policy. One of them once tried to explain to me over drinks why Putin is a force of good in the world.

He stopped just short of repeating the line uttered yesterday by Dmitri Kisilev, Putin’s chief TV propagandist. Commenting on the 1917 October revolution, the man the Russians affectionately call ‘Putin’s Goebbels’ said: “The amount of freedom in the world grew as a result.”

The Standard, operating as it does in London, can’t yet be quite so forthright, but perhaps George will sort it out. After all, he has form in dealing with Russian Mafiosi.

As a rising mock-Tory star, Osborne once had several meetings with Oleg Deripaska, the Russian ‘aluminium king’, whose Mafia links have made him persona non grata in the US.

Since in Russia organised crime is inseparable from the KGB/FSB, it’s useful to remember that this organisation never offers something for nothing. If, as was established at the time, Deripaska used Osborne as a conduit for donations to the Tory party, he didn’t just pursue his own business interests.

Osborne acted, and still does, on the principle first enunciated by Emperor Vespasian: pecunia non olet. To him money, whether flowing into his own coffers or his party’s, indeed doesn’t smell. To some of us the Lebedevs’ shilling stinks to high heaven.

Then again, if we let KGB Mafiosi buy our newspapers, how can we object to our politicians working for them?

After decades of compulsory and comprehensive secondary education, the people have become putty in demagogues’ hands.

No limits exist any longer on the ignorant idiocy of political falsehoods uttered by politicians and swallowed by their flock. By far the greatest falsehoods involve democracy, raised to the status of pagan demiurge.

People everywhere, especially in the US, react to various word combinations featuring ‘democracy’ with Pavlovian alacrity. Some such combinations have attained idiomatic stability. For example, no one sees anything wrong with intellectually unsound phrases like ‘liberal democracy’.

Democracy refers to a political method used to decide who governs the country. Liberty, with its various cognates, refers to a desired effect of government, no matter who forms it and by what method.

Democracy is a physical technicality; liberty mainly has metaphysical connotations. It describes the amount of latitude the individual enjoys, his autonomy in the face of pressures exerted both vertically (by the state) and horizontally (by society).

Accepting the two components of ‘liberal democracy’ as mutually indispensable betokens an inert mind. The underlying assumption is that liberty is an integral property of democracy and vice versa.

But this assumption doesn’t stand up even to cursory examination, never mind scrutiny – either in theory or in practice.

In theory, 50.1 per cent of the electorate may well vote for selling the nation into slavery, provided the price is good. The remaining 49.9 could scream themselves hoarse about the monstrosity of it all. Their protests would go unheeded: democracy has been served.

Nor is it justified to believe that democracy precludes tyranny. This is simply not the case, as the democratically elected Messrs Hitler, Perón, Mugabe, Putin, Lukashenko, Ahmadinejad, Yanukovych and Macîas Nguema (who gratefully murdered a third of the population of Equatorial Guinea that had voted him in) demonstrate so vividly.

In fact, no serious political thinker, from Plato and Aristotle to Machiavelli and Montesquieu, from Burke to Lecky, from Jefferson, Madison and Adams to de Maistre, Tocqueville and even Mill (the last two both talked about ‘the tyranny of the majority’), was unaware of the despotic potential of democracy. They all had misgivings about democracy; most of them were downright hostile to it.

The subjects of King George (choose any numeral) or King Louis (ditto) enjoyed the kind of individual freedom that isn’t even approached by the citizens of any ‘liberal democracy’ of today. To use one, far from the most important, example, no Western monarch would have dreamed of extorting over half of his subjects’ earnings – something that’s accepted as a fair privilege of any ‘liberal democracy’.

No Western monarch could have conceived intruding on the people’s private lives to the same extent as modern ‘liberal democracies’ routinely do for ‘the common good’. (Michael Gove, supposedly the intellectual giant among the Tories, has foolishly praised Mrs May for using those words at every turn. He doesn’t seem to realise that ‘common good’ is the self-vindicating buzz phrase of every modern tyranny.)

It wouldn’t have occurred to, say, Charles I to dictate what the good yeomen of Suffolk or Yorkshire should eat or drink, how they should raise and educate their children or what kind of help they should employ.

Not only do modern democracies exert an intolerable (if often unnoticed) vertical pressure, they also corrupt or coerce societies into applying the even worse horizontal kind. For example, no lords or magistrates of the past imposed such tyrannical diktats on language as do today’s enforcers of political correctness. No government censorship of the past was as despotic as today’s self-censorship demanded by society.

The state throws its weight behind such demands, with any ‘liberal democracy’ prepared to punish people not for what they do but increasingly for what they say. This blurs the distinction between state and society, yet not many see this as a factor of tyranny.

Having destroyed the content of Western civilisation, modernity has become obsessed with its form. Hence people are brainwashed into worshipping the democratic method without fully understanding what it is. Ask your average American what the difference is between democracy and republicanism and he’ll think you’re talking about the two political parties (an Englishman would fail the same test with ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’).

Actually, there exist two types of democracy: direct and indirect. The former is people voting for policies by plebiscite, without mediation by institutions. The latter is people electing their representatives and trusting them to govern.

Representative democracy also has two types: democracy proper and republicanism. Burke dreaded the first type: parliamentarians being not people’s representatives but their delegates, committed to act not just according to people’s interests but also their wishes. The second type, republicanism, involves representatives governing according to their own conscience.

Direct democracy, as the dominant method of government, clearly can’t function in communities larger than a few thousand inhabitants. If it tried to do so, complete anarchy would ensue.

As to the two forms of indirect democracy, the much touted checks and balances of modern politics involve a combination of them. After all, as Machiavelli argued in his Discourses, taking his cue from Aristotle, no political arrangement can exist in its pure form without degenerating into something unsavoury.

The republican element is historically aristocratic, going back to the erstwhile councils of elders, such as our own Witenagemot. In the crypto-republic of our constitutional monarchy this is the role played by the House of Lords. Thus accusing it of being undemocratic, as ignoramuses do all the time, is like accusing the courts of being judgemental.

But ours isn’t the only undemocratic constitution. The republican (a simulacrum of aristocratic) element in the US political mix comes from the Senate. Those who think it’s a representative democratic body ought to consider the fact that California (p. 38,332,521) and Wyoming (p. 582,658) each have two senators.

The modern tendency, which both Plato and Aristotle predicted with uncanny prescience, is to eliminate or at least emasculate the republican elements, letting democracy run riot. Hence our modern government by focus groups: spivs elected by manipulating blocs of voters expect to be re-elected by pandering to voters’ whims.

It’s critical to realise that therein lies the structural flaw of democracy. This is what turns democracy into a lie and those in government into liars. If you wish to contest this comment, simply compare today’s politicians with yesterday’s statesmen.

Where are the Pitts, Burkes, Washingtons, Madisons and Disraelis of yesteryear? Water under Westminster Bridge. May and Trump are the best we can do these days, and we’re happy to have them rather than Tony-Dave-Hillary-Barack.

Hilaire Belloc wrote about such joy with his customary brilliance: “We are tickled by [the Barbarian’s] irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond; and on these faces there is no smile.”

The London School of Economics was founded by the Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who hated the English class system but loved Lenin.

That established a certain intellectual capital, and the LSE has been living off the interest every since. I remember many years ago, when Margaret Thatcher was PM, my son studied at the LSE for a semester, and I took him there on his first day.

A poster in the lobby advertised a scholarly debate on the subject of “Resolved: this house will assassinate Thatcher”. I was appalled at such a cavalier omission of the honorific. Surely it should be ‘Mrs Thatcher’, I thought.

I also thought a few other things, too robust to cite here. Suffice it to say that the faculty and students were evidently attached to the notion of upholding the university’s fine Marxist tradition.

Having said that, for all its gauche (or is it sinister?) leftward bias, which these days isn’t that different from most major universities, the LSE has also enjoyed a sound academic reputation. Why, it has even boasted some prominent conservative scholars, such as Michael Oakeshott and my dear late friend Ken Minogue.

That reputation, whatever little is left of it, lies in tatters. For, now that Oakeshott and Ken are no longer with us, the LSE has filled the gap by appointing the heavily tattooed Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie as visiting professor on Women, Peace and Security.

It’s good to see that Angelina has been able to retrain for a new career. Having undergone a prophylactic double mastectomy, she has lost the two most salient aspects of her talent and had to reinvent herself. Ideally, she ought to have chosen Bristol University though (if you aren’t English, you won’t understand the allusion; if you are, I apologise).

I don’t know how diligently Angelina has kept abreast of the current academic trends, but then her professorship has to be mostly titular. Then again, perhaps it isn’t, for there can’t be too many other scholars around to answer the LSE’s urgent need for academic exegesis on Women, Peace and Security.

In fact, I can’t think offhand of any great thinkers of the past who distinguished themselves in this subject, but this may be ignorance speaking. I’m sure there must have been whole groves densely populated by scholars doing extensive research and coming to the conclusion that, when there’s peace, women enjoy greater security.

The actress admitted “feeling butterflies” before the first lecture, which isn’t surprising in such an unfamiliar setting. To get rid of the stage fright, she should have imagined she was shooting a nude scene and dressed accordingly, but that was no longer an option for purely surgical reasons.

As it was, she was wearing “a simple yet sophisticated longline coat” highlighted in all the newspaper accounts of Angelina’s foray into the academe. This must be a new trend in academic critique.

I mean, I don’t recall anyone mentioning Ken Minogue’s “sober yet well-cut charcoal-grey suit”. Reviewers tended to focus on what he was saying more than on what he was wearing.

But, as the latest Nobel Prize winner for literature has discovered, “the times, they are a-changing.” Anyway, to be fair, some accounts did mention things other than the new professor’s sartorial excellence.

To quote one such account, “The course helps scholars, practitioners, activists, policy-makers and students to develop strategies to promote justice, human rights and participation for women in conflict-affected situations around the world.”

Also mentioned was “the aim of promoting gender equality and enhancing women’s economic, social and political participation and security.” My, admittedly non-academic, advice to women finding themselves in such situations would be to get the hell out before they get raped or killed, and never mind ‘social and political participation’.

But that’s because I haven’t studied this academic discipline as deeply as Angelina has. And sure enough, her scholarly exploits drove the students to paroxysms of delight the professor hasn’t enjoyed since doing those nude sex scenes (film references available on request).

‘Wonderful’ was the adjective most widely used, and one post-graduate student enthused: “She’ll make an amazing visiting professor. So honoured to hear her inaugural lecture at LSE on sexual violence, rape, working with refugees”.

It’s a safe bet that Angelina’s advice on rape didn’t include that tired ‘relax and enjoy’ cliché, and nor could she have possibly drawn the students’ attention to the well-documented fact that, in Europe at least, it’s refugees who commit most sexual violence.

Actually, this unmitigated tosh is itself an act of violence, raping as it does not just a formerly reputable university but indeed the very concept of academic life. Any boob could see that.

Fooled you, didn’t I? Actually, this photograph depicts not the handsome actor but me. It was taken this morning off the terrace of the Acropolis Museum, and that’s where Mr Clooney comes in.

But first things first. The museum is the most amazing structure of this kind I’ve ever seen, and certainly the newest. No major Athenian museum predates the 1970s, but the Acropolis museum is barely 10 years old.

Its 25,000 square metres are used with little regard for economy of space: only three floors are taken up by exhibits and, since there aren’t many of them, they’re hardly crowded. The third floor is entirely given to a full-size replica of the Parthenon frieze, as it was before most of its marble bas reliefs were removed by Lord Elgin.

The frieze features the few remaining originals, mostly depicting Greek chaps fighting centaurs, and quite a bit more blanks filled in by the poorly done plaster casts of the marbles now adorning the British Museum. The plaster casts are accompanied by write-ups stopping just short of diatribes accusing Lord Elgin of theft.

There’s a movement under way to return the Elgin marbles where they once belonged, or rather to the museum next door. The movement is spearheaded by Amal Clooney, George’s heavily pregnant wife, whose restless conscience easily embraces any cause, worthy or otherwise. George himself is adding the weight of his celebrity status to the undertaking, and one can only guess his motives.

Solidarity with his wife must figure most prominently for, had he remained single, George probably wouldn’t know the Elgin marbles from the ones children play with. Just a couple of years ago he spoke with well-rehearsed passion about the urgent need to return the marbles to “the Pantheon”. Pantheon, Parthenon, what the hell does it matter as long as the cause is just and offers good photo ops?

Then again, George may sense inner kinship with centaurs, himself fitting the technical definition of one: half man, half horse’s arse. Mercifully, however, he limits himself to broad strokes only, leaving it for Amal to sweat out the legalities, which are far from straightforward.

I’m not going to argue the intricacies of the international law involved, simply because, not being a celebrity, I only ever try to talk about things I know at least something about.

However, I’m willing to accept that the Greeks may have a valid legal claim to get their marbles back. Then again, they may not. What is absolutely undeniable is that, in view of their history, our moral right to the sculptures is unimpeachable.

The Earl of Elgin first got involved with them in 1799, when he was appointed His Majesty’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, of which Greece was then part.

Upon his arrival he went into the archives and noticed that many of the sculptures listed were no longer extant. An utterly civilised man, Lord Elgin decided to finance the salvation effort, starting with cataloguing the sculptures in the Parthenon and elsewhere in the Acropolis.

He then discovered that the Turks, whose reverence for such things wasn’t the same as Lord Elgin’s, were burning the marble sculptures to obtain lime for construction purposes. Aghast, Lord Elgin began to have the sculptures removed in 1801, completing the project in 1812.

This cost him £70,000 (almost £70 million in today’s inflated cash), a huge outlay partly offset when Lord Elgin sold the sculptures to the British Museum. That he was driven not only by aesthetic appreciation but also by patriotism is evident from the fact that he rejected much higher offers from Napoleon and others.

It’s a fair bet that, had the marbles remained in Greece, which is to say in the Ottoman Empire, they wouldn’t have survived. As it is, they delight six million people every year, all of whom ought to be grateful to Lord Elgin.

Since viewing the exhibits didn’t take long, I had plenty of time on my hands to ponder the fate of the marbles before going on one last walk in Athens. Striking out west, we walked along a pleasant residential street lined with orange trees bending under the weight of fruit. I nicked an orange out of curiosity, wondering how come I was the only one with such larcenous inclinations.

When we passed a street market, where the very same oranges were selling at 40p a kilo, I stopped wondering. As we walked, the centre of Athens was overflown by some 20 fighter-bombers flying nap-of-the-earth at supersonic speeds, complete with deafening booms.

Back in the First World, city centres are spared such entertainment, but Athenians didn’t bat an eye. In their long history they’ve seen worse.

People often talk about one glance being all it took. In my own modest experience a second glance was usually necessary, this one at the girl’s face.

No such dawdling with Athens: I instantly loved what I saw. And instantly regretted I had been reluctant to come here all these years.

Too many people told me Athens was dirty, chaotic, smelly and rather Third World. Actually it’s no dirtier or smellier than any major city, although chaotic it undeniably is. As to being Third World, perhaps. So much the better.

The First World has been neutered by modernity, dragged into uniformity, denatured and deodorised into vapid commercialised mediocrity, its formerly great cities turned into lifeless pictures drawn by numbers for the delectation of tourists.

Athens must depend on tourists for its sustenance, but it’s refreshingly contemptuous of them, as if saying, “Fine, I’ll take your money. But don’t expect special privileges in return.”

Now I don’t suffer from the journalistic hubris of claiming gnostic insights on the basis of a flying visit. Hence I can only offer one smitten man’s fleeting, dishevelled observations.

The first thing I loved about Athens is its palette. None of the dark, heavy grimness of some northern cities: Athens never moves too far from white, and then only in the direction of either pink or custard.

Endearing signs of third-worldliness are everywhere. One immediately realises that no evaluation of Athens can be squeezed into the framework built on the experience of other Mediterranean cities. It’s unlike any of them.

For one thing, one would look in vain for the demarcation between the right and wrong sides of the track: it doesn’t exist. Compared to, say, Barcelona or Genoa, all of Athens is the wrong side of the tracks.

Oh, to be sure, one finds the odd pocket of carefully combed gentility here and there – but invariably in the vicinity of government buildings, such as the President’s residence or immediately to the southeast of the Acropolis.

The rest of it is densely covered in graffiti, resembling in style and spread those adorning the N train on the New York subway of my youth. Some convey cogent messages, usually those of sexual intercourse with either police or the EU; most are purely decorative.

Crossing the street in Athens is all one’s life is worth. Pedestrians are given no more than 10 seconds to cross even the widest avenues and, if you lose a precious second to indecision, it’s your hard luck. Cars will rush in at twice the posted speed limit, and woe betide the ditherer.

This is another reminder that one is in the Third World: drivers assume social ascendancy over walkers, for until recently only the very few could afford cars. However, provided one survives the first encounter with a pedestrian crossing, survival skills don’t take long to develop.

One detects that feminism hasn’t quite reached Athens, which is another appealing sign of third-worldliness. Cafés are full of men well below pensionable age playing cards or backgammon, with no women any nearer than the old lady bringing them another litre of house red (typically €5).

Some of these chaps must be married, so what are their wives doing while they deal the next hand? Well, the usual things: working, looking after the house and children, carrying heavy bags. I mean, if women don’t do those things, they won’t get done, will they?

Wine and food are functionally different in Athens, compared to, say, France or Italy. The French build their meals around great wines. Italians cook great food and find wines to match. Both strive for perfection, while Athenians are just out to have a good time and shout ‘opa!’ to the sound of ubiquitous Sirtaki music.

On the first night, I ordered a pricey bottle and then, old hand that I am, a glass of house red for comparison. Tasting no appreciable difference, I’ve since stuck to the cheap stuff.

And the food? Well, I’ll give you a hint: they don’t call the country Greece for nothing. Combined with the rotgut, Greek fare is instant heartburn for a neophyte and, one suspects, even for those who consume it every day. But no one minds: Athenian men, ideally stag, are out to enjoy one another’s company: the food and drink are just there to oil the wheels.

Yes, Athens is chaotic, but so is life. The city used to be considerably less chaotic than life, a long time ago. Some 2,500 years ago rigorous intellectual discipline came to Greece, but has since left.

That it was there is evident not just from their philosophy but also the surviving architecture. No extemporising, no deviation from strictly enforced norms: straight lines, right angles, all capitals on every column in the same building exactly identical. Not for the ancient Greeks the playful licence afforded Gothic builders: just look at the capitals in any French cathedral and see if you find two identical ones.

The discipline of ancient Greece didn’t outlive ancient Greece. First the Christians took over with their accent on the individual, alien to the public-spirited Hellenes. Then the Muslims bossed the country for 400 years. Then modernity smashed its way in, now fronted by the EU (whose sick mind decided that Athens and Berlin belong in the same state?).

As a result, the Greeks have lost a sense of direction. They no longer know what the purpose of life is, but so much more are they determined to enjoy its process. The architecture of Athens says all this loud and clear.

By the looks of it, no construction happened in the city between 200 BC and the nineteenth century AD. When it resumed, chaos prevailed, but it’s a delightful chaos.

No two houses are the same, but somehow they all look similar. The joyous palette pulls them together, and little variation of height. The streets convey the message of modern free-for-all, but not without hinting at classicist uniformity, long since gone.

Life is bustling everywhere, with women hurrying about their business without seeming to mind being shunned by the men. Actually, looking at Athenian womankind, one can’t really blame the men for their androcentricity.

One doesn’t see too many graces about, and today’s Helens mostly have faces that could sink a thousand ships. But the sexes must come together at some point, for one sees a lot of prams pushed along by women whose husbands attend to the serious business of backgammon.

Another form of life that’s in abundance is stray cats, millions of them – those toms definitely don’t shun their females. Now I’ve seen stray cats before, but never in such numbers, nor so well-fed. These creatures are all the size of overfed cocker spaniels, which spells bad news for the pigeon population.

Somehow the contrast between the old and the new isn’t as annoying as it is in other places. Possibly that’s because the old and the new are in Athens separated by so many centuries, indeed so many civilisations, that they don’t really clash. Or else the gushing life of Athens is so appealing that one is reluctant to judge.

A few yards from the Agora, still majestic in its ruinous state, there’s a shop called JIMMYS TATTOOS. I was appalled: the people who invented the word apostrophe have forgotten how to use it. But then the sign wasn’t in their mother tongue.

There are mercifully few signs in English anywhere, some quite comic. For example, a rip-off restaurant in the main square strikes a blow for truth in advertising by calling itself TRAP, while a bar next door to my hotel honestly refers to itself as DIVE.

Whenever I return from my travels, my friend Tony asks a lapidary question: Could you live there? Anticipating the same enquiry about Athens, the answer is, probably not. But I wish I could.

 

 

 

The stones of cities talk. They tell stories – of great men who trod their pavements; their prophets, saints and villains; the blood that flowed into their drains; civilisations born, dead or forever alive; the trees of great cultures growing to luxuriant splendour only then to shed their leaves one by one.

The stones of Athens talk louder than just about anywhere in Europe. And they aren’t the only ones who do the talking.

This I discovered the other day when asking the concierge at our hotel what, apart from the Acropolis, he’d recommend we see. This led to a quarter-hour’s discussion of the relative merits of Plato and Aristotle, something one seldom expects to have with hotel staff.

The young man strongly advised us to steer clear of Aristotle’s Lyceum in favour of the groves of Plato’s Academy – even though the proverbial groves are all that remains of it. This because Aristotle was the much inferior philosopher to begin with, even before he was eternally compromised by his subsequent, if unwitting, incorporation into Christianity by Aquinas and other scholastic subversives.

Christianity, he explained, took the great Hellenic civilisation, squeezed it dry, drank up the juices and then discarded it like used-up lemon halves. Yes, but… I objected meekly and with an ingratiating smile. Can’t one say that by incorporating first Plato and then Aristotle into its own philosophy, Christianity gave them a new life? Take Neo-Platonism, for example…

My interlocutor refused to take Neo-Platonism even as an example. The less said about that profanation, that sacrilege, that vulgarisation, the better. His own smile was pleasant but far from ingratiating.

I must say that in all my travels I’ve never before encountered a Platonist concierge, nor one who could direct me towards the ruins of one particular philosophical school in preference to another. One more readily expects directions to a restaurant that gives the concierge a kick-back (“Just tell them Mario sent you”), a shopping district or, if one is so inclined, a brothel.

Thus inspired by the realisation that Athens is different, we did what every tourist does first: climb Acropolis Hill, all the way up to the Parthenon, followed by a descent to the Agora and then another, shorter, climb to Pnyx Hill.

Few stones in the world talk as eloquently, but they do need an interpreter or perhaps a language teacher, for not many people these days understand stone. Looking at the throng of tourists attacking the Hill, most of them young and showing few signs of a cultured family background, one could see that the language of those stones was, well, Greek to them.

True enough, each highlight along the way is accompanied by a board with a short write-up about the place. But the information provided is exclusively archaeological, structural and architectural. Talking to cultural innocents, the boards leave their virginity intact.

Who cares when and how the Theatre of Dionysus was dug up? Who cares whether the columns of the Parthenon are Doric, Ionic or Corinthian? Oh some people do, as they should. But, given the little space available, wouldn’t it be better to tell them that the theatre is where Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles and Aristophanes premiered their plays? Or, at the risk of incurring the concierge’s wrath, that St Paul spoke on the Hill?

It’s nice to know the exact dimensions of the dais on Pnyx Hill, but wouldn’t it be more useful to tell the visiting children (chronological or cultural) that Pericles and Demosthenes delivered their orations from there?

In the Agora every little stone is accompanied by recondite information about technical matters, with nary a word about what happened there. Chaps, this was every Athenian’s real home, with his house merely, and not invariably, his bedroom.

This is where they all rushed every morning to discuss, and determine, the future of the city. This is where Socrates, old and looking half-mad, would accost strangers with silly and irrelevant questions – you know, the kind that lay the foundation of Western thought.

Unfortunately, the contemporaneous powers-that-be realised that the questions weren’t silly and irrelevant, that they indeed were laying the foundation of the kind of thought that was at odds with Athenian democracy.

Democracy, Athenian, modern or any other, has no place for sages mouthing nasty things about it. So the democrats locked Socrates up in prison – and there it is, a caged hole cut into the rock of Pnyx Hill. It’s mercifully identified as Socrates’s dungeon, though no information is provided of why he was put there – or subsequently killed.

I would have been tempted to include the words ‘first great victim of democratic tyranny’, or, as a minimum, to say that Socrates’s friends offered to spring him on the eve of his enforced suicide, but he refused as a matter of honour, and not to give his prosecutors the satisfaction of such an implicit admission of guilt. Wouldn’t it have made a more interesting story than structural information?

Perhaps it wouldn’t. As the concierge told me mournfully, even Greek children are nowadays only told that their heritage is great, without explaining what makes it so. Socrates was charged with perverting the minds of the young; his accusers’ typological descendants succeed in keeping those minds perpetually empty.

So the stones keep silent. The Acropolis and its environs are merely tourist attractions, a sort of vaguely historical Disneyland, minus the rides. An opportunity missed, yet another generation lost.

(Tomorrow I’ll tell you of my impressions of the city itself, which I love.)

 

 

 

Between 1965 and now British education slid downhill from being the envy of the world to becoming its laughingstock.

The pre-1965 11-plus exams would confound most of today’s 18-year-olds, including many entering university. Even basic literacy is nowadays seen as an achievement, with some 80 per cent of school leavers having reading problems. Subtracting 1/3 from 1/2 is seen as a pie in the sky, and being able to figure out change in a shop as a sign of uncanny talent.

Why? In a word, democracy.

Or rather modern democracy of one-man-one-vote raised to an absolute and transferred into all areas, including those that in a sane society should have nothing to do with politics. Such as education.

Our crypto-republic is confirming an ineluctable law of nature: all modern republics gravitate towards democracy, all democracies gravitate towards ideological egalitarianism. And, Midas in reverse, egalitarianism turns to shambles everything it touches.

Those 11-plus exams separated academically promising children from those who were better suited to more practical careers. The former went to grammar schools (superior to most of today’s universities), the latter to secondary moderns (superior to most of today’s comprehensives). Thus 25 per cent of the pupils were well-educated, and the rest sufficiently competent to handle themselves in the rough-and-tumble of adult life.

Then, in 1965, in rode the Labour egalitarian brigade led by Education Secretary Anthony Crosland on his high horse. He took an oath, hand on Das Kapital: “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every f***ing grammar school…”

So he did. The downhill slide began, proving yet again that it’s only ever possible to equalise things at the lowest common denominator. Comprehensive education means comprehensive ignorance, rendering millions of people unfit to function in modern life.

Mrs May, herself a grammar school girl, has vowed to bring grammars back, which is laudable. Yet the genie of egalitarianism has acquired a life all its own. It won’t be pushed back into the bottle whence it came.

Egalitarian education has over three generations mostly spawned egalitarian teachers, those who see nothing wrong with the system, realising they wouldn’t do well in any other. Many of them are products of comprehensives themselves.

Over time they’ve formed a whole alphabet soup of unions, organisations, associations and what have you. These are committed to cutting the cables on any lift capable of carrying our education back to the top.

When Education Secretary Justine Greening tried to defend the expansion of grammar schools to a gathering of head masters, she was mercilessly heckled. Educators who don’t educate screamed “Rubbish”, “Shame” and “No” in voices doubtless built up at party rallies and CND marches.

Such strident opposition reminded the government of the aforementioned ineluctable law: egalitarianism has to triumph over sanity; ideology has to trump reason. Hanging its head down in shame, HMG has set out to expiate its mortal sin of elitism.

Plans are being hatched to lower entry marks for children from poorer backgrounds. If such children fail at age 11, they’ll be given other chances with 12-plus and 13-plus exams. That way everyone will be able to benefit from grammar school education.

These ideologised creatures don’t realise that trying to enable everyone to benefit from grammar school education is tantamount to making sure no one will. Making grammars egalitarian will effectively turn them into comprehensives by another name.

That’s just fine for today’s lot, as it was for Crosland and his fellow wreckers. Ideology creates a virtual world, as divorced from reality as the manic delirium of a schizophrenic.

Yet reality does exist, and it’s unsentimental. Contrary to the silly pronouncement adumbrating modernity, all men aren’t created equal. Some are taller than others, some are stronger, some are more aggressive, some are braver, some are kinder. More to the point, some are cleverer than others and better able to absorb academic disciplines.

Such people tend to do better in practical life, and they usually marry within the same group. Their children, on average, are better equipped genetically and culturally for academic pursuits than children from less successful households.

Trained by Marx to ascribe everything to social demarcations, today’s Britons talk about such things in terms of middle class or working class, even though it’s the ‘middle classes’ who these days do most of the work. The same toxic egalitarianism transferred to economic activity has enabled the ‘working classes’ not to work, turning them into déclassé pariahs.

Whatever you call these groups, for all the efforts of our fully paid-up egalitarians, children growing up in households full of books will be better educated than those whose, typically single-parent, households are full of crushed beer cans and discarded syringes. And even those who grow up in families closer to the working classes of old will be at an educational disadvantage.

Free grammar schools are designed to help the brighter of those children overcome such disadvantages. The design doesn’t always work out – perfect systems don’t exist. However, it succeeds often enough, while turning grammar schools into misnomers never will. But that doesn’t matter to our ‘progressives’.

The march of progress is inexorable, as Mrs May with all her good intentions is finding out. Ideologised ignorance will prevail.